International congress of byzantine studies belgrade, 22 27 august 2016

Emanuela Timotin
Romanian Academy, Institute of Linguistics “Iorgu Iordan – Al. Rosetti”, Bucharest, Romania; 
[e-mail]
Codifying Sins for Catechetic Purposes. The Romanian Tradition of the 
Byzantine Apocryphal 
Letter of Christ on the Observance of Sunday
This paper focuses on the Byzantine apocryphal writing The Letter of Christ on the Observance 
of Sunday, which enumerates the so-called instructions, that Christ would have sent to the faithful 
Christians by means of a letter sent from the heavens. The text seems to have appeared in the 5
th
century 
Jerusalem, was translated into many languages and is still transmitted in certain parts of Europe. 
The Letter of Christ has enjoyed an extremely remarkable transmission in the Romanian 
literature. It is preserved in more than 100 manuscripts written between the beginning of the 17
th
century and the first half of the 19
th
century and it has been constantly printed since 1862 (Timotin 
2005). The present paper focuses on the most ancient Romanian versions of the text, analyses how 
Christ’s instructions become tools for identifying and codifying sins, and investigates how the 
transformation of the apocryphal text into a quasi-catechetic writing allows us connecting it both 
to contemporary juridical texts, and to apocalyptic writings describing the sinners’ penalties in 
the Other World (The Apocalypse of the Virgin, The Life of Saint Basil the Younger). The paper 
also inquires to what extent the codification of sins in the apocryphal writing was enhanced by the 
iconography of the Last Judgement and of female saints such as Kyriake and Paraskeve.ää
Anca Elisabeta Tatay
“1 Decembrie 1918”, Alba Iulia / Biblioteca Academiei, Cluj-Napoca, Romania; 
[e-mail]
Woodcuts of Byzantine Tradition in the Early Romanian Writings 
Printed in Bucharest (1678-1830)
Bucharest, the capital of Walachia, a cosmopolitan city, in which the flow of ideas came from 
various directions, caused a famous cultural center to be created here. Therefore, between 1573-
1830 in Bucharest functioned several typographies which printed more than 350 titles in Romanian, 
Greek, Slavonian, Arabian, Russian, Bulgarian, Turkish etc., most of them religious books, but also 
didactic, scientific and literary ones. As quantity is concerned, this number places Bucharest on 

---

295
the first position among all typographic centers which used to publish books for Romanians in the 
period of time 1508-1830. Particularly the religious books were decorated with fine woodcuts such 
as: title pages, illustrations, frontispieces, vignettes, etc. 
A good part of the about 200 illustrations, which have been found, represent iconographic 
themes specific to Byzantine-Balkan and Byzantine-Russian ambience. We’ll mention here the 
following images: