The Mughni Gospels

Reflection

The Mughni Gospels — Matenadaran MS 7736 — is among the great surviving Armenian Gospel books of the eleventh century, preserved at the Mesrop Mashtots Institute of Ancient Manuscripts in Yerevan. The codex carries the full four-Gospel text in Classical Armenian written in the formal erkat'agir, the iron-letter majuscule that dominated Armenian manuscript production from the invention of the alphabet by Mesrop Mashtots in the early fifth century until the gradual shift to minuscule cursive in the high medieval period. The manuscript opens with a complete Eusebian canon-table apparatus framed by Armenian architectural arcades and a prefatory cycle of nineteen full-page miniatures depicting the infancy, public ministry, Passion, and post-resurrection appearances of Christ. The Armenian text is itself a textual witness of importance — Joseph Molitor and Frédéric Macler showed that the Armenian New Testament descends through an Old Syriac intermediary from a Greek archetype, preserving readings that occasionally agree with the Old Syriac Sinaitic and Curetonian witnesses against the later Greek Byzantine tradition. The Mughni manuscript's miniatures show the characteristic Armenian palette of deep crimson and ultramarine alongside the gold leaf and interlaced borders that gave Armenian Gospel illumination its distinct visual idiom. The codex is one of the manuscripts that established the Armenian Apostolic Church's continuous Gospel tradition from the patristic age to the present.

Sources: Sirarpie Der Nersessian, Armenian Manuscripts in the Walters Art Gallery (Walters Art Gallery, 1973); Thomas F. Mathews, ed., Treasures in Heaven: Armenian Illuminated Manuscripts (Pierpont Morgan Library, 1994); Bruce M. Metzger, The Early Versions of the New Testament (Oxford, 1977).