PREPARATION WORKS AND PRINTING OF THE FIRST ARMENIAN PUBLICATION OF THE BIBLE
The first publication of the Armenian Bible evokes admiration and amazement by its size, quality and art of printing, as well as the tremendous textual work undertaken. Every attempt to transmit a manuscript text or a collection into a printed book is connected not only with printing or technical difficulties, but also creates certain difficulties regarding the text itself, since the inner division of the text has also semantic significance that requires relevant approach in the process of transmitting it from the manuscript version into a printed book. the main textological difficulties surmounted by Voskan Yerevantsi were the following: the selection of the Armenian relevant manuscript or manuscripts of the Bible and their comparison with the Vulgate; the decision on the sequence of the books of the Bible by combining the Armenian canon and the Vulgate; determining the canonical, secondary and non-canonical books of the Bible. Consequently deciding which books should be included in the main text and which placed at the end of the book as appendices; making the chapter division of each book, dividing the chapters into verses and numbering them, taking into consideration the differences conditioned by the presence or absence of this or that passage in the Armenian or Latin texts, which confused the whole system of verse numbering of a given chapter; composing the concordances and placing them in the margins indicating in which book of the Bible the given line, paragraph or chapter has a thematic, semantic or symbolical parallel.
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