Why So Syrian? A Quantitative Bayesian Approach to the Perturbations of the Textual Flow in the Slavonic Recensions of the Pauline Epistles

Our conclusions will be limited to the topics discussed above at length, thus avoiding going deeper into historical interpretation.
1. Some “Oriental” impact on a very early recension of the Slavonic translation of the five Pauline epistles is demonstrated.
2. The quantitative evaluation of this conclusion was, in fact, an evaluation of its logical strength. It was not a necessary mean to derive it from the collected evidences.
3. The most natural interpretation of the previous conclusion (1) is that the Greek originals used for the Slavonic translation were those widespread outside the borders of the Byzantine Empire as they were established to the late seventh century (cf. above, fn. 66).
4. There are some traces of additional editing of the translations from Greek against some Syriac version(s), in the same manner as in roughly contemporaneous Melkite translations of the New Testament from Greek into Arabic.
5. The “Oriental” tradition involved was one of the Syrian ones.
6. Both I (“Ancient”) and II (“Preslav”) recensions share the above features that, therefore, are to go back to their common archetype, that is, an even more “ancient” recension.
From time to time, I have permitted to myself occasional references to my earlier papers dedicated to the Syrian Melkite monothelete mission to the Slavs in the late seventh century to which I have attribute the beginning of the Slavic Christian writing, but such historical problems remained, in general, beyond the scope of the present paper.
The quantitative method proposed in this paper is dedicated to comparison of two competing hypotheses concerning the textual flow of a highly contaminated tradition.
The method has the following preconditions and limitations:
1. The total number of possible hypotheses must be previously reduced to two: that a specific source of contamination existed or not.
2. In the present (simplest) modification of the method, the hypothesis about the presence of a discussed source of contamination must additionally imply that this hypothetical source, if it actually existed, was the major source of contaminations of a specific kind (defined above as “perturbations”).