The Secret Supper

What it is

A Cathar bishop named Nazarius brought it from Bulgaria to Concorezzo at the end of the twelfth century. Confiscated. Copied to refute. Archived against its carriers. Two manuscripts survived, Vienna ÖNB Lat. 1137 and Dôle BM 109, and from those two witnesses the text returns whole. This is the critical edition the Interrogatio Iohannis has not received in English: Latin from V and D in parallel, a phonetic transliteration for the reader who wishes to voice it, an English translation, a critical apparatus tracking every variant, and a theological exposition movement by movement. Bozóky's French edition has been the standard since 1980; Hopkins's translation gave the text to academic readers. This is the first standalone English-language critical edition with full apparatus.

What is inside

1. The textLatin from both manuscripts in parallel, English translation, phonetic transliteration, and an apparatus that tracks every variant.
2. The expositionMovement by movement: what the dialogue says about the maker, the fall, the body and the sending, and where it sits in the lineage.
3. Eleven centuries of lineageChapters from Marcion through Apelles, the Sethian witness, the Armenian bridge, the Bulgarian Bogomils, the Bosnian preservation and Nazarius at Concorezzo.
4. The recordThe surviving iconography; the V codex marginalia catalogued; a contamination map; bibliography, glossary and concordance.
5. The returnThe closing chapter hands the diagnostic back to the reader, which is where the corpus always ends.

Who it is for

If you work on the Cathars or the Bogomils: The apparatus is built to be checked against Bozóky, and the lineage chapters say where they infer.

If you want to read it aloud: The transliteration exists for exactly that.

If you came from YHVH HA-SATAN: This is its companion: the same line, seen from the other end.

Where it sits in the corpus

The scholarly spine of the corpus. Companion to YHVH HA-SATAN; the lineage it documents is the one the Golden Thread page summarises, including the stretch from Apelles to the Paulicians that the account marks as inferred rather than attested.

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