The Developed Hagiography: The Named Nino and the Georgian Life

The later Georgian layer that names the captive Nino and elaborates her into the apostle of the Life of St. Nino. This file sets out the texts — The Conversion of Kartli (Mokʻcʻevay Kʻartʻlisay), preserved in the Shatberdi Codex of 973 and the later Chelishi manuscript, and the recension reworked by Leonti Mroveli in the eleventh century for The Georgian Chronicles — their structure, recensions, and contested dating; the composite, multi-voice form of the Life (narrated, by its own conceit, from Nino’s deathbed at Bodbe); and the central addition, the vision of the Theotokos who commissions Nino and gives her the grapevine cross. It is the developed layer that the source-critical files of sections 01–02 hold apart from Rufinus.

Tradition: Georgian Orthodox / Pan-Orthodox

From the Captive to Nino

Everything Rufinus left anonymous, the Georgian tradition names and fills in. The captive becomes Nino (ნინო), of Cappadocia; the queen becomes Nana, the king Mirian III; the column miracle becomes the living pillar Svetitskhoveli over the buried Robe of Christ; and a vision of the Mother of God supplies the apostolic commission that Rufinus’s narrative had no need of. This is the developed layer of the tradition, and this file describes the texts that carry it — their form, their manuscripts, and their dates — so that the content elaborated from them in later files can always be referred back to its source. The two-layer frame within which this material sits is set out in Origins and the Sources.

The Conversion of Kartli (Mokʻcʻevay Kʻartʻlisay)

The oldest Georgian historical compilation bearing on Nino is The Conversion of Kartli — in Georgian Mokʻcʻevay Kʻartʻlisay (მოქცევაჲ ქართლისაჲ), literally “the conversion of Kartli (Iberia).” It is not a single Life but a small corpus: a brief chronicle of Kartli from its legendary origins, followed by the Life of St. Nino (S. H. Rapp Jr., Studies in Medieval Georgian Historiography, Peeters, 2003; C. B. Lerner, The Wellspring of Georgian Historiography, Bennett & Bloom, 2004).

Its textual transmission rests on two principal witnesses:

The Shatberdi Codex, copied in 973 at the Georgian monastery of Shatberdi (in the historic province of Tao-Klarjeti, in what is now northeastern Turkey), and first published by E. Taqaishvili in 1890 — the oldest surviving manuscript of the work.
The Chelishi manuscript (fourteenth–fifteenth century), which preserves a more elaborated text with a number of expanded passages, evidence that the Life continued to grow after the tenth century (Rapp, Studies, 2003).

Rapp has argued that the Conversion of Kartli draws on a seventh-century stratum — he reads its core as “a seventh-century declaration of autonomy,” composed within a few decades of the Persian-period crisis of 607 and shaped to assert a distinctly Kartvelian (Georgian) ecclesiastical identity, deliberately loosening the parallel Armenian and Albanian conversion links (Rapp, Studies, 2003). On this reading the Life of St. Nino proper is an enlarged recension produced in the ninth or early tenth century, with the oldest manuscripts (Shatberdi) copied in the tenth. The dating of the recensions, and the scholarship behind it, is treated in Modern Scholarship.

[Disputed: The dating of the Conversion of Kartli and the Life of St. Nino is debated. S. H. Rapp Jr. (Studies in Medieval Georgian Historiography, Peeters, 2003) argues for a seventh-century core to the Conversion of Kartli and a ninth/early-tenth-century recension of the Life of St. Nino, with the oldest manuscript (the Shatberdi Codex) copied in 973; the more elaborated Chelishi manuscript is later still (14th–15th c.). No autograph survives, and the relation of the strata is reconstructed, not documented.]

The Recension of Leonti Mroveli

The Conversion of Kartli was, in Rapp’s phrase, “exploited and reworked” by later Georgian historians. The most consequential reworking is that of Leonti Mroveli (Bishop of Ruisi), who in the eleventh century took up the Nino material into the great national history The Georgian Chronicles (Kartlis Tskhoveba, “the life of Kartli”) — and it was reworked again by the twelfth-century metaphrast Arsen (Rapp, Studies, 2003; Lerner, Wellspring, 2004). Most of the popular devotional Lives of St. Nino in circulation today — including the English account on the Orthodox Church in America’s calendar — descend from this later, fuller redaction rather than from the bare Shatberdi text. It is in Mroveli’s recension and its descendants that the richest biographical front-matter appears: the Cappadocian parentage, the kinship with St. George and Juvenal, and the explicit form of the Theotokos vision (see The Traditional Biography). For the collection’s purposes the practical rule is: the shape of the conversion (idol-destruction, Nana’s healing, Mirian’s hunt, the living pillar) is in the oldest stratum; the biographical elaboration is heaviest in the Mroveli-and-later layer.

The Composite Form of the Life

The Life of St. Nino is not a smooth third-person biography but a composite, multi-voice text, and its form matters for reading it. Its governing conceit is a deathbed narration: as Nino lay dying at Bodbe in Kakheti, the queens Salome of Ujarma (wife of Mirian’s son Rev) and Perozhavra of Sivnia are said to have begged her to tell her story, and “from the information St. Nino then related to them, Sts. Salome and Perozhavra wrote The Life of St. Nino” (Life of St. Nino, in Lerner, Wellspring, 2004). Within the text the narration also passes to other voices — most importantly the converted Jewish priest Abiatar and his daughter Sidonia, who narrate the Mtskheta Jewish-community and Robe-of-Christ material (see The Robe of Christ Tradition). Scholars treat Abiatar and Sidonia as the fictive “first Georgian writers” to whom the conversion-texts are pseudepigraphically attributed (Rapp, Studies, 2003). The deathbed frame is a literary and theological device — it presents the Life as Nino’s own testimony, gathered by her named women disciples — and it should be read as such, not as a documentary claim.

The Vision of the Theotokos and the Commission

The central addition of the developed Life — the element that converts a captive into an apostle — is the vision of the Mother of God. In the Georgian narrative, while Nino is being formed in Jerusalem (see The Traditional Biography), the Theotokos appears to her and commissions her: she is to go to Iberia, “the land allotted to me,” and preach the Gospel there, with the promise of the Virgin’s protection (Life of St. Nino, in Lerner, Wellspring, 2004; Wardrop, “Life of St. Nino,” Studia Biblica et Ecclesiastica V, 1900). The Theotokos gives Nino a cross made of grapevine wood, with words the tradition preserves — “Receive this cross as a shield against visible and invisible enemies” — and on waking Nino finds the cross in her hands and binds it with strands of her own hair. This vision does three things at once: it grounds the Iberian mission in the apostolic “casting of lots” tradition (Iberia as the Theotokos’s allotted land); it gives Nino, a laywoman, an apostolic authority direct from the Mother of God; and it originates the distinctive Georgian national cross. Each is taken up in its own place — the cross in The Cross of St. Nino, the apostolic standing in Equal-to-the-Apostles. Here it is enough to mark that the vision is wholly of the developed layer; Rufinus’s captive needed no commission but her captivity and her faith.

The Relation to Rufinus

A natural question is whether the Georgian Life depends on Rufinus or descends independently from the same Iberian tradition. The scholarship does not give a simple answer, and the collection does not assert one. On the one hand, the Life shares with Rufinus the unmistakable kernel — the captive Christian woman, the healings of child and queen, the king’s conversion by darkness in the hunt, the immovable column, the embassy for clergy — which argues a common origin in the Iberian conversion tradition that Bacurius also transmitted (see Rufinus and the Captive Woman). On the other hand, the Life is vastly fuller, supplying the name, the biography, the vision, the named idols, and the Robe complex, none of which is in Rufinus; and the Georgian tradition does not present itself as drawing on the Latin historian. The most economical reading is that the Georgian Life and Rufinus both descend, by different routes and at very different removes, from the early Iberian memory of the conversion — Rufinus close to it and spare, the Georgian Life far downstream and richly elaborated. What matters for the collection’s method is not the precise stemma but the demonstrable fact that the named, biographical, miracle-rich Nino is a feature of the late Georgian recensions and not of the early evidence (S. H. Rapp Jr., Studies in Medieval Georgian Historiography, Peeters, 2003).

Reading the Developed Life Rightly

The right posture toward the developed Life of St. Nino is neither credulity nor dismissal, and the repository’s methodology names it precisely (METHODOLOGY §3.5). The Life is not a documentary biography of a fourth-century missionary; it is the Georgian Church’s received and beloved account of its apostle, composed and elaborated over centuries and serving devotional, theological, and national ends. To read it as history is to misread it and to expose it, needlessly, to the easy objection that its Juvenal kinship is anachronistic and its Rhipsime synchronism strained. To dismiss it as mere legend is to miss that it preserves, within its elaboration, the genuine early kernel of the conversion and that it is the form in which a nation has venerated a real saint for over a millennium. The collection’s discipline — pin each element to its source, keep the early and the developed distinct, report miracle and legend as attested tradition with the source named — is what allows the Life to be honored for what it is. The content elaborated from these texts in the following sections always carries that frame.

References

The Conversion of Kʻartʻli (Mokʻcʻevay Kʻartʻlisay) and The Life of St. Nino. Trans. and study: Constantine B. Lerner, The Wellspring of Georgian Historiography. London: Bennett & Bloom, 2004.
Rapp, Stephen H., Jr. Studies in Medieval Georgian Historiography: Early Texts and Eurasian Contexts. CSCO 601, Subsidia 113. Louvain: Peeters, 2003. (Shatberdi/Chelishi witnesses; the Mroveli and Arsen reworkings; the seventh-century-core argument.)
Wardrop, Marjory. “Life of St. Nino.” Studia Biblica et Ecclesiastica V. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1900, pp. 3–88.
Lang, David Marshall. Lives and Legends of the Georgian Saints. London: George Allen & Unwin, 1956.