Abstract
The paper deals with the history of the emergence and spread of summaries (arguments) of the Gospel chapters in the editions of the Church Slavonic liturgical Tetraevangelia and the New Testaments from 1657 to the beginning of the 19th century. The emergence of this element of the biblical paratext is associated with the conversion of Moscow scribes to the practice of European book publishing of the early modern period. The only manuscript containing gospel summaries identical to the printed ones is the translation of the New Testament by Epiphanius Slavinetsky and Euthymius Chudovsky of the 1670–1680s. Linguistic analysis of the summaries allowed us to attribute their authorship to Epiphanius Slavinetsky. Lexical and word-formation features inherent to Epiphanius, as well as textual coincidences of the summaries with the translation of the New Testament by Epiphanius and Euthymius, are revealed. It has been established that the Church Slavonic arguments of the chapters reveal an obvious orientation toward the Latin summaries of the printed Greek editions of the second half of the 16th century. Epiphanius' summaries are not a literal translation from Latin, but a transformation of the Latin model, which presupposes both freedom of translation and of structuring of the summaries, which takes into account the features of the Slavonic text and its division into pericopes. Epiphanius' summaries have syntactic and stylistic originality (the word order that is atypical for the Church Slavonic, the combination of predicative and nominal constructions in the headings, the use of continuous multi-component headings and single-component predicative ones), and also reflect some linguistic traces of the Latin original.