Manuscripts, Recensions, Translations

The Martyrdom‘s textual history: a Georgian manuscript tradition headed by the tenth-century Parkhali Mravaltavi — six hundred years younger than the text, and incomplete; a parallel Armenian recension, longer and differently shaped; and a century of debate over the versions’ relationship, from Peeters’s Bollandist study (1935) and Abuladze’s double edition (1938) to Muradyan’s lost-archetype thesis. The file ends with the translations: Lang’s condensed English (1956/1976) and Maksoudian’s English of the Armenian version (1997).

Tradition: Georgian Orthodox (shared pre-division veneration with the Armenian Apostolic Church)

The Georgian Manuscript Tradition

Like almost all early Georgian literature, the Martyrdom survives in copies far younger than itself. The earliest witness is the Parkhali Mravaltavi — a great homiletic-hagiographic codex (mravaltavi, “many-headed,” the Georgian term for such collections) copied at the monastery of Parkhali in Tao-Klarjeti, and datable to the tenth century; it carries the Martyrdom but incompletely, preserving the first twelve chapters and losing roughly the final third of the text (the manuscript data are set out in the Georgian critical scholarship from Sabinin’s 1882 publication through Gorgadze 1917 and Khakhanashvili 1910 to Abuladze’s editions of 1938 and 1963; conveniently summarized in the standard reference treatments of the work). The gap between composition (c. 476–483) and earliest copy is thus about six centuries — “the earliest extant manuscript of this text is six hundred years younger than the events of the narrative,” as Loosley Leeming puts it, “but despite many later linguistic interpolations, the account is widely accepted as having substantial fifth-century content” (Loosley Leeming, “Creating an ‘Orthodox’ Past,” Medieval Worlds 10, 2019, 64, citing Rayfield, The Literature of Georgia, 42). Later Georgian manuscripts supply the ending and the fuller text on which the editions rest; the standard critical edition of the Georgian, with the Armenian en face, is Ilia Abuladze’s of 1938 (Iakob Tsurtaveli, Martvilobay Šušanikisi, ed. I. Abuladze, Tbilisi, 1938; revised in his 1963 corpus of old Georgian hagiographic monuments).

Per §3.5, the manuscript gap must be neither dramatized nor waved away. It is the normal condition of ancient literature — most classical texts survive on far worse terms — and the linguistic archaism of the text (its fifth-century grammatical and lexical layer, visible beneath the copyists’ modernizations) is the philological ground on which the early date stands independent of the narrative’s claims (Rayfield, The Literature of Georgia, 2010, 42; Rapp, Studies in Medieval Georgian Historiography, 2003, on the linguistic stratification of early Georgian texts). But it does mean that “the text of 480” is a scholarly reconstruction from medieval copies, with the usual margin for interpolation — a margin the disputes below inhabit.

The Armenian Recension

Beside the Georgian stands an Armenian Passion of Shushanik — not a mechanical translation but a distinct recension: longer, more formally hagiographic in structure, and carrying details absent from the Georgian, while omitting others (notably the author’s name: the Armenian acknowledges the confessor-author’s existence but does not name Jakob) (Maksoudian, trans., The Passion of Saint Shushanik, introduction, 1997, in Bedrosian’s collection at attalus.org: the Armenian version has “a more hagiographical structure and includes details absent from the” Georgian). The Armenian church’s menologia carry, additionally, a short synaxarial notice of her feast (the 1834 Constantinople menologion’s notice is translated with Maksoudian’s text, ibid.). The Armenian recension is the vehicle of her cult on the Armenian side of the seventh-century divide, exactly as the Georgian is on the Georgian side (see A Saint of the Undivided Caucasus).

The Priority Debate

Which version is original? The question has a century of scholarship and no consensus verdict; per §4.2 the positions are named and left standing.

[Disputed: the relationship between the Georgian and Armenian versions of the Martyrdom of Shushanik. (a) Georgian priority — the dominant position of Georgian philology from Kekelidze’s school through Abuladze’s double edition (1938), and the working assumption of the standard literary histories: the Georgian is the original, fifth-century text of the confessor Jakob; the Armenian is a later reworking/abridgment-cum-expansion for Armenian liturgical use (so Kekelidze’s history of old Georgian literature; Abuladze’s edition; Rayfield, The Literature of Georgia, 2010, 42–44, presenting the work as the original Georgian composition of Iakob Tsurtaveli; the identification of the author by name only in the Georgian is urged in support). (b) A lost common archetype — the position of the Armenologist Paruyr Muradyan, the modern specialist study of the two versions: “both the Armenian and the Georgian versions derive from a lost archetype,” neither extant text being simply the source of the other (Muradyan’s conclusion as reported in Maksoudian, trans., Passion, introduction, 1997). (c) The Bollandist scrutiny — Paul Peeters, whose “Sainte Sousanik, martyre en Arméno-Géorgie,” Analecta Bollandiana 53 (1935): 5–48, 245–307, remains the fundamental Western critical study (and includes his critical presentation of the dossier), subjected the Georgian tradition’s claims to sharp source-critical examination and gave the Armenian evidence independent weight; his study is the standard citation for the critical (non-Georgian-national) reading of the dossier (Loosley Leeming, Medieval Worlds 10, 2019, 64 n. 11, cites precisely Peeters for the critical edition and Lang for the translation). The linguistic argument that the Georgian text contains Armenisms — expected in bilingual Gugark on any hypothesis — is used by all sides. This collection reports the debate and does not adjudicate; it notes only that the debate concerns textual genealogy, not the fifth-century reality of the martyrdom or the cult, which the existence of both early traditions attests all the more strongly.]

The debate has never been confessionally innocent — Georgian national philology and Armenian scholarship each have a stake in the first monument of Caucasian hagiography — which is exactly why this repository flags it under §4.2 as a factual-critical question where the evidence, not the confession, must decide, and where it has not yet decided (cf. Loosley Leeming, Medieval Worlds 10, 2019, on the modern politics of Georgian hagiographic scholarship generally).

Translations and Access

Georgian text: Abuladze’s 1938 edition (with the Armenian) and his 1963 Monuments of Old Georgian Hagiographic Literature, vol. 1, remain standard; the text is a fixture of Georgian anthologies and school curricula (Rayfield, The Literature of Georgia, 2010, 42–44).

English: the accessible rendering is David Marshall Lang’s, in Lives and Legends of the Georgian Saints (London: George Allen & Unwin, 1956; 2nd revised edition, London: Mowbrays, 1976) — the chapter “The Passion of St. Shushanik.” Two cautions attach to it, per the repository’s citation discipline. First, Lang’s versions in that volume are avowedly condensed and popularizing — faithful to the narrative but abridged, not a critical translation; scholarly work quotes the editions, not Lang (Lang, Lives and Legends, 1956/1976, preface, on his method of presentation; the book’s genre is a Penguin-style anthology of the Georgian hagiographic corpus). Second, editions vary: the 1956 Allen & Unwin printing and the 1976 Mowbrays revision differ in pagination and detail, and citations in this collection name the edition where it matters (the sibling collections cite the 1976 Mowbrays). Within those limits, Lang remains the standard English point of entry and is the translation this collection cites for the Georgian narrative (Lang, Lives and Legends of the Georgian Saints, 1976).

The Armenian version in English: Fr. Krikor Maksoudian’s translation, a preliminary version of which was published in Sion (1997), is available online in Robert Bedrosian’s collection of Armenian sources (attalus.org/armenian), with an introduction covering the chronology and the Muradyan thesis (Maksoudian, trans., The Passion of Saint Shushanik, 1997). Its accessibility makes the recension comparison possible for the general reader — a rare luxury in this field.

Other languages — Russian, French, German, and the modern Georgian modernizations — have their own histories; the Russian tradition descends from Sabinin’s nineteenth-century publications (M. Sabinin, 1882, among the first printings of the dossier). This collection has worked from Lang, Maksoudian, and the scholarship named above, and cites nothing it has not been able to check against them.

What the Textual History Teaches

Three closing observations, feeding Section 08. First, two independent liturgical traditions preserved this text — a Chalcedonian and a non-Chalcedonian church, divided from c. 607–610, each carried her passion forward; their agreement on the story’s substance is itself a textual argument reaching back before the schism. Second, the manuscript gap is bridged by language, not faith: the fifth-century date rests on philology and the argument from silence about 482, checkable things, not on the tradition’s say-so. Third, the debates are debates about a real text — datings within a decade, recensions, archetypes — the luxuries of a documented case; compare the source-situation of St. Nina, where the earliest stratum names no Nino at all (see St. Nina of Georgia), and the difference in kind is plain (see Methodology).

References

Abuladze, Ilia, ed. Iakob Tsurtaveli, Martvilobay Šušanikisi [The Martyrdom of Shushanik], Georgian and Armenian texts. Tbilisi, 1938; revised in Dzveli kartuli agiograpiuli literaturis dzeglebi [Monuments of Old Georgian Hagiographic Literature], vol. 1. Tbilisi, 1963. (The critical editions.)
Peeters, Paul. “Sainte Sousanik, martyre en Arméno-Géorgie.” Analecta Bollandiana 53 (1935): 5–48, 245–307. (The fundamental Western critical study of the dossier and versions.)
Maksoudian, Krikor, trans. The Passion of Saint Shushanik (Armenian version), preliminary version in Sion (1997); online in Robert Bedrosian’s collection, attalus.org/armenian, with introduction. (The Armenian recension; Muradyan’s lost-archetype conclusion; the anonymous transmission of the author.)
Lang, David Marshall. Lives and Legends of the Georgian Saints. London: George Allen & Unwin, 1956; 2nd rev. ed. London: Mowbrays, 1976. (“The Passion of St. Shushanik” — the condensed standard English rendering.)
Rayfield, Donald. The Literature of Georgia: A History. 3rd ed. London: Garnett Press, 2010 (2013 printing, 42–44). (The Georgian text’s standing, language, and dating.)
Loosley Leeming, Emma. “Creating an ‘Orthodox’ Past.” Medieval Worlds 10 (2019): 61–71. (P. 64 and n. 11–12: the manuscript gap, the fifth-century content, Peeters and Lang as the access points.)
Rapp, Stephen H., Jr. Studies in Medieval Georgian Historiography: Early Texts and Eurasian Contexts. Louvain: Peeters, 2003. (Linguistic stratification; the mravaltavi collections.)
Sabinin, M. Sakartvelos samotkhe [The Paradise of Georgia]. St. Petersburg, 1882. (The nineteenth-century publication of the dossier; cited via the modern scholarship — original not consulted directly.)
METHODOLOGY.md §3.5, §4.2, this repository. (Attestation-pinning; both-sides treatment of the priority debate.)