About the Author:
Born in the Bronx, Henry R. Cooper, Jr. attended the City College of New York and Columbia University and served in a military intelligence unit in the U.S. Army Europe. His first professorial position, at Northwestern University, and his second, at Indiana University, Bloomington, have involved teaching Slavic languages and literatures, including Russian, Old Russian, Polish, Serbian/Croatian, Slovene, and Bulgarian. Among his publications are The Igor Tale: An Annotated Bibliography (1978), Francè Prešeren (1981), "The Serbian New Testament of Vuk Karadžic" (1987), Judith (1991), and together with Tom M. S. Priestly, Francè Prešeren: Poems/Pesmi(1999). He is currently researching a volume on Slavic vernacular Bible translations.

Literally thousands of items have been written about Cyril, Methodius, and the Church Slavonic Bible. And the Bible itself exists in fragments from perhaps as far back as 1000 C.E. In approaching the mass of scholarly, semi-scholarly, pseudo-scholarly, and popularizing material that has accumulated over the past two hundred years, Slavic Scriptures attempts to analyze and synthesize the most cogent arguments of the best scholars, from the earliest studies of the Czech proto-Slavicist and biblicist Joseph Dobrovský to the contemporary works of Francis Thomson (Antwerp)and A. A. Alekseev (St. Petersburg). As for the manuscript evidence, it has been considered directly, in published editions, but in larger part indirectly, through the studies of those who have firsthand access to basic material (most notoriously the first full manuscript of the Church Slavonic Bible from 1499, but published only in the 1990s and still only in part). Every conscious effort has been made to avoid confessional bias in interpreting the historical and textual records, but it must be admitted that some of the best analyses consulted for Slavic Scriptures rest on strongly held beliefs that chafe at scholarly dispassion. By and large the methodology of the volume is inductive, in order to minimize the role of preconceived theses, but with the abiding understanding that the uncontestable facts are few and often far between. As Horace Lunt, one of the finest scholars in the field, put it, the appearance of even one new fact could easily lead to the complete revision of earlier conclusions.