Two Versions of the Homily St. Raphael in Classical Ethiopic
Abstract
This article focuses on the significant textual variations based on the two versions of Géýéz manuscripts of the homily of Raphael manuscripts. Homily of Raphael is one of the religious books in EOTC tradition. This study aims to investigate the main variations of selected two versions of manuscripts in order to alleviate problems arising from the generalization of titles. The study hence relies on textual analysis of the two different versions of the homilies of Raphael manuscripts content and textual history differences. For this study, nineteen manuscripts were collected from the catalogue and eight of them were available for collation. These two different versions were selected based on the best codex or purposive sampling methods. The selected sample versions have the same title but had significant variations in their content and textual history. The first version encodes seven themes and the second holds four main themes. Though the two versions of manuscripts share similar headings, the study has found a significant variation in the contents as well as in their textual history. Moreover, the study reveals further investigation is mandatory for various manuscript themes which could have been hardly alike in the entire contents except the headings along with factors responsible for such variations. This study only looks into the two versions of homily of Raphael manuscripts.
Key Words: [Homilies of Raphael, Manuscripts, textual history, Codex, Purposive-sampling,]
