The Life of St. Nino
The Georgian account of how a woman named Nino converted King Mirian and his kingdom, told in the first person by Nino and her disciples. It names people and places that the fifth-century Latin and Greek accounts leave unnamed, and it is centuries later than they are.
Read the text at archive.org ↗Translators’ preface on the manuscripts and the chronology ↗
The Life is made up of narratives placed in the mouths of Nino herself, of her disciple Sidonia, of the Jewish priest Abiathar and of others. The Wardrops translated the text printed by Gobron Sabinin in 1882 in his collection of the lives of Georgian saints, and gave in the notes the readings of an older form, the “New Variant” (marked A.V.), found in a manuscript from the monastery of Shatberdi. Their preface says that this manuscript appears to have been written in the ninth or tenth century and that they took it for the oldest surviving one. The same volume prints the Latin of Rufinus and passages from other writers for comparison.
The work is evidence for what the Georgian church told of its own beginning, not a record from the fourth century. Rufinus, who wrote about 402 and had the story from Bacurius, whom he calls king of the Iberians, names none of the others in it (Church History). The Life supplies Nino, King Mirian, Queen Nana, Bishop Ioane, Mtskheta and Mount Tkhoti, and adds much that Rufinus does not have. The translators themselves suggest in the preface that one episode, the healing of a sick boy, was taken into the Life from Rufinus. A shorter account from the same manuscript is recorded under the Conversion of Kartli (Moktsevay Kartlisay).
Cited in
- c. AD 326–337, estimated date