On the Text and Tradition of the Prologue to the Gospels

This paper examines the Proglas, the Prologue to the Gospels, one of the earliest original works of Slavia Christiana literature. Although the text has received extensive scholarly attention from both textological and poetic perspectives, the present study approaches it through the lens of textual criticism. By analyzing a selected set of passages – including some whose interpretation remains controversial—the relationships among the witnesses constituting the manuscript tradition of the work are reconstructed. The analysis of variant readings supports the conclusion that the manuscript tradition of the Proglas is bipartite, comprising two variant carriers: one preserved in the East Slavonic witness, and the other reconstructed as the archetype of the Serbian branch, from which the Serbian witnesses independently derive.