Witnessing the Transition of the Georgian Church to the Constantinopolitan Rite through the Lens of the Jerusalem Community: Manuscript Tradition in Medieval Georgian Monastic Communities

In the early phases of their development, the national Churches of the Caucasus adopted the liturgical practices of Jerusalem. Accordingly, the Georgian, Armenian and Caucasian Albanian Churches show an expected convergence of liturgical practices. This typological unity is evident in the structural uniformity observed in the early lectionaries preserved in Georgian and Armenian manuscripts. The cessation of the Jerusalem Rite liturgy played a significant role in the establishment of the new Constantinopolitan Rite in both the central regions and the peripheries of the Byzantine Empire. This transition also facilitated the adaptation of this Rite to various national languages, including Georgian. In response to these changes, the Georgian monastic communities residing in various monasteries throughout the Byzantine Empire adopted the earliest elements of Constantinopolitan liturgical practices and began developing them further. Consequently, new types of liturgical books and new models became necessary to support the revised liturgy. This paper offers an analysis of the period of the transition from the Jerusalem Rite to the Constantinopolitan cycle, with a particular focus on the manuscript tradition of Georgian Gospel lectionaries. It first examines the pre-Constantinopolitan Georgian Gospel lectionaries in connection with fragmented Greek manuscripts, which have survived only in a very limited number. It then investigates the earliest developmental stages of the Georgian Gospel lectionaries in comparison with a special group of Greek Lectionary manuscripts, which themselves reflect an early phase in the evolution of the Constantinopolitan Rite. This study demonstrates that the Georgian Gospel lectionaries provide a valuable source for reconstructing earlier, pre-Constantinopolitan liturgical practices, as well as for identifying the earliest stages in the development of the Constantinopolitan tradition. The analysis is carried out using comparative codicological, palaeographical and liturgical methodologies.