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Исследование выполнено за счет гранта Российского научного фонда (проект № 17-78-10061) в Русской христианской гуманитарной академии (Санкт-Петербург).

The ‘great chasm’ mentioned in Luke 16:26 is a hapax legomenon in the New Testament. However, the same wording appears in the Theogony of Hesiod and in several later classical Greek writings, which connect the great chasm with the mythology of the underworld or some metaphysical conceptions. Byzantine exegetes of Luke could hardly avoid correlating Luke’s great chasm with its long history in the pagan culture. Thus, several exegetical paths were developed. Origen, with several followers, omit the great chasm at all. Comparing this fact with later anti-Origenian polemic writings, it is plausible that Luke 16:26 was used to argue the rejection of the doctrine of apokatastasis. Other writers, prone to apokatastatic position, such as Didymus the Blind and Gregory of Nyssa, introduced interpretations of the great chasm that unite ethical and metaphysical perspectives. Gregory of Nazianzus and Maximus the Confessor brought allegorical interpretations of the great chasm to the highest level of generalisation. The evolution of understanding the great chasm reveals the shift in the conceptions of a human soul’s destiny and afterlife, its fate and deliverance from it.

Many modern scholars consider the Old Testament book of Jonah being written in a boldly parodic manner. The narrative engages many details that sound humorous for a modern reader. However, from the standpoint of late Antique and early Medieval patristic exegesis, it is often unclear whether Byzantine interpreters perceived such passages laughable or at least inappropriate for a prophetic writing. This study presents a few examples of early Byzantine commentaries to the episode with Jonah and a gourd (Jonah 4:6–11). None of the commentaries expresses any explicit amusement caused by the discussed text. However, the style, method, or context of each commentary appears to be passing the traditional bounds of Bible interpretation. The earlier interpreters adhere to the most expected moral reading of Jonah 4, but they use epithets, metaphors, or omissions, which produce the effect of paradox comparable to the biblical wording itself. The later commentaries tend to involve unexpected and even provocative senses. In such interpretations, God can be thought of as being able to play with a human or even to fool and deceive. What seems us humorous in the Bible, Byzantine commentators take primarily as a paradox, which they did not explain or remove but elaborate further paradoxically. The later an interpreter is, the bolder his paradoxical approach appears. The results of the study provide some clues to understanding how the interpretation of humorous, parodic, or ironical passages were developing in the history of Byzantine intellectual culture.