Here is a link to an excellent article entitled, "The Orthodox Study Bible and Orthodox Identity in North America," by Matthew Francis, published in The Canadian Journal of Orthodox Christianity, Vol. II, No. 2, Summer 2007:
http://www.cjoc.ca/pdf/Vol%202%20S1%20Francis.PDF
Saturday, March 29, 2008
Wednesday, March 26, 2008
A CRITICAL LOOK
After so long a time, we now have, within the space of a year, two complete English translations of the Septuagint, the Old Testament of the early Church, and still the Old Testament for Orthodox Christians. One is a scholarly edition, the New English Translation of the Septuagint, published by Oxford University Press and typically referred to as NETS ($19.80 at Amazon; thanks Iyov!). I’ve written about this translation previously. Now there is also the St Athanasius Academy Septuagint, the trademarked (!) name of the Old Testament included in the new Orthodox Study Bible: Ancient Christianity Speaks to Today’s World published by Thomas Nelson Publishers (the New Testament translation included is the New King James Version, which was likewise the “boilerplate” used as a guide to the translation of the Septuagint, in a role analogous to that of the NRSV for NETS). The OSB is available in both a hardback and a “genuine leather” edition, and least expensively from Amazon (hardback only is available for pre-order; available now in hardback and “leather” from Conciliar Press). As I’ve already described the NETS, I’ll now briefly review the new Orthodox Study Bible (henceforth OSB) and proceed to a comparison of these two welcome translations.
First, as is patently indicated by its title, the OSB is a study Bible intended primarily for an English-reading Eastern Orthodox Christian audience and other English readers with an interest in Orthodoxy. At the bottom of each page are notes of varying lengths, though tending toward brevity, rather like those of the Oxford Annotated Bibles. There are various single-page study articles interspersed throughout both Testaments, covering subjects like Ancestral Sin, Sacrifice, The Tabernacle, Types of Mary in the Old Testament, and so on. There are likewise a number of different full-color pages including reproductions of various icons, which the Orthodox are well-known for. A number of different articles and helps are likewise included: Acknowledgments, Special Recognition, an introduction, a page listing the Orthodox, Roman Catholic and Protestant Old Testaments, a page of abbreviations of patristic authors and materials used in the notes, “Overview of the Books of the Bible” by Bishop Basil (Essey) of Wichita and Mid-America, “Introducing the Orthodox Church,” “The Bible: God’s Revelation to Man” by Bishop Joseph (al-Zehlaoui) of Los Angeles and the West, “How to Read the Bible” by Bishop Kallistos (Ware) of Diokleia, a “Lectionary” which is not precisely the actual liturgical lectionary of the Eastern Orthodox Church but is intended for a devotional reading schedule, a glossary of terms and phrases used in the notes, pages of morning and evening prayers, indices to the annotations and study articles, the traditional list of The Seventy Apostles (see Luke 10), and a set of full-color maps. Throughout the OSB, each book of the two Testaments is given an introductory section including Author, Date, Major Theme, Background, and Outline. All this indicates therefore a volume of satisfying heft, and of a great variety of resources typical of study Bible of our day and age.
I have not delved deeply into the OSB yet, but can give some initial impressions. First, there are various pearls of patristic wisdom strewn about in the notes, with attribution only by abbreviated name, not by work. There could have been more, which would rather have been appreciated, of course, but at the very least citations should have been included, whether for a quotation or for the more vague sorts of allusions worded by the annotators. Otherwise, the notes are fairly consistent in following a Christocentric interpretation in the Old Testament, the traditional Orthodox approach which makes for such rich hymnography. When, however, they drift into mere summary of the sections above, they are rather jejune and entirely unnecessary.
The icons are a mixed bag of quality. There are some beautiful ones: a the Three Holy Youths in the Furnace from a mural at Vatopaidi Monastery, Mount Athos dated 1312; The Transfiguration by Photi Kontoglu; and St John the Forerunner by Father Gregory (surname not given). The rest are of varying quality, some being quite sentimentalizing, some veering toward mere painting. A consistenly better collection of icons could have been presented, as our holy icons are treasures of the Church and there are hundreds of recognized works written in great sanctity and also recognized to be of great artistic value. This was also a complaint of the icons included in the first Orthodox Study Bible: New Testament and Psalms. Astonishingly, all of the icons presented in that earlier volume, several of which received complaints regarding their quality, were included in this volume, along with a few others.
My copy is the “genuine leather” edition, with gilt-edged pages. Apparently these days, “genuine leather” means what used to be called “bonded leather.” The cover of this one feels more like cardboard, of much lesser quality than even the first OSB, which wasn’t of great quality at all. And the binding is glued, not stitched, which is truly unfortunate (and cheap). In combination with this, the margins are miserly, so that the text veers into the gutter (where the pages meet in the middle of the open book). The print is, however, comfortably large, though the line spacing seems a bit cramped. Each page is two-columned, fully justified (that is, both sides of the text block meet the edges of the columns). I would have this OSB rebound with a better quality cover, but the glued binding and small margins would result in it being unusable, as the gutter problem would grow even worse once sewn. Nice. There is only one register (the bound-in ribbon bookmark) unlike the old OSB which included two. The page edge gilding is the spray-on kind that is already leaving little flecks of gold everywhere. So, as an example of bookbinding, I would not rate the OSB well.
The use of the New King James Version in the New Testament is still an issue. For the amount of time this translation was in process (roughly ten years since I first started following it), an entire New Testament translation based on Constantinople’s Ecclesiastical text could have been easily produced. Instead, we have this translation based on the hybrid Textus Receptus, and Byzantine readings noted in the translation as readings of the “M-Text” and readings from the Nestle-Aland/UBS text noted as the “NU-Text.” With all the effort put into producing the Septuagint translation, a little more to produce a translation of the Ecclesiastical text would have been appreciated. As it stands, therefore, this “Orthodox Study Bible” is only half Orthodox: in the Old Testament only. A few quotations of Church Fathers in the notes doesn’t fix the NT.
The order of the books follows the traditional Orthodox order, except in mysteriously placing the Prayer of Manasseh not after the Psalms, where the Odes would normally be, but as the last column on the last page of 2 Chronicles, where it appears to be a part of chapter 36. Then there is the confusion of the two Ezra books and Nehemiah. In the Septuagint, it is usually the case (as in NETS; also see here) that there is 1 Esdras, the alternate partial Chronicles/Ezra-Nehemiah book, and then the Hebrew Ezra and Nehemiah books are combined as 2 Esdras, with 23 chapters. The OSB inexplicably has 1 Ezra (the 1 Esdras above), 2 Ezra (Hebrew Ezra), and Nehemiah. Though I do recall this as an option among Greek treatments of the titles of these books, it’s not as common as the other. In Daniel there is a serious problem with the page headers. At the beginning of Daniel is, as is proper, the book of Susanna, and at the end, Bel and the Serpent. Unfortunately, the page headers take the verse of Susanna as the chapter of Daniel, so the header on page 1237, the second page of Susanna/Daniel, reads “Daniel 41″ and the next page “Daniel 42.” At the end of the book, page 1261 has the header “Daniel 21″ and the next page “Daniel 22.”
So, the OSB appears to be at the very least a step in the right direction, and I do expect myself to warm to it to a certain degree, but its shortcomings are real and inexcusable. I know quite a number of people worked on this Bible for a long time. It should have been better. It could have been better. Why is it not better?
Now I’d like to look at the two Septuagint translations in comparison. The NETS is, of course, a scholarly effort of great erudition, designed for use as an academic tool. The OSB is designed for use as devotional reading. For this reason, the OSB doesn’t include translations of the variant texts in Joshua, Judges, Esther, and Daniel, for instance, but rather opts for what is (more or less) the Ecclesiastical text. As I mentioned above, the OSB used the NKJV as a base for its translation, just as the NETS used the NRSV. In this first comparison, therefore, I’ve chosen Sirach 44.1-5, as something not contaminated by boilerplate usage of the NKJV.
OSB Sirach 4.1-5:Let us now praise honored men and our fathers. The Lord established His great glory And majesty from the beginning through them. There were those who ruled in their kingdoms And were men renowned for their power, Giving counsel through their understanding And proclaiming prophecies. There were leaders of the people by their counsels And understanding of learning for the people, Wise in their words of instruction.
NETS Sirach 44.1-5 Let us now praise famous men and our fathers by descent. The Lord created much glory, his majesty from eternity. When they ruled in their kingdoms, men also became noteworthy through power; when they counseled with their intelligence, when they announced through their prophecies, when they led the people by deliberations and with understanding of a people’s scribal art—wise words there are in their instruction.
Notice how the OSB simply does not flow, and only really makes sense after having read the NETS version. This is caused by relying too strictly on a very literal translation method. See how with very little change, the NETS flows so much better. What, for instance, is “understanding of learning for the people” in the OSB supposed to connote? The Greek is και συνεσει γραμματειας λαου, which is much better rendered by NETS as “understanding of a people’s scribal art.” The issue in the OSB appears to lie in the RSV being used as a base text in this instance (”understanding of learning for the people”) rather than the more clear NRSV (”knowledge of the people’s lore”), which is informed not merely by Greek Sirach, but the Hebrew fragments, the key phrase here being חכמי שיח בספרתם. NETS is the best of the set on this front.
Now we’ll go to an old favorite, Psalm 22 (23 in the Masoretic and English numbering tradition), and see what the OSB and NETS have done. I provide the Greek text first, so you can compare for yourselves.
Greek Psalm 22 (23) Κύριος ποιμαίνει με, καὶ οὐδέν με ὑστερήσει.εἰς τόπον χλόης, ἐκεῖ με κατεσκήνωσεν,ἐπὶ ὕδατος ἀναπαύσεωςἐξέθρεψέν με,τὴν ψυχήν μου ἐπέστρεψεν.ὡδήγησέν με ἐπὶ τρίβους δικαιοσύνηςἕνεκεν τοῦ ὀνόματος αὐτοῦ.ἐὰν γὰρ καὶ πορευθῶ ἐν μέσῳ σκιᾶς θανάτου,οὐ φοβηθήσομαι κακά,ὅτι σὺ μετ’ ἐμοῦ εἶ·ἡ ῥάβδος σου καὶ ἡ βακτηρία σου, αὐταί με παρεκάλεσαν.ἡτοίμασας ἐνώπιόν μου τράπεζαν ἐξ ἐναντίας τῶν θλιβόν των με·ἐλίπανας ἐν ἐλαίῳ τὴν κεφαλήν μου,καὶ τὸ ποτήριόν σου μεθύσκον ὡς κράτιστον.καὶ τὸ ἔλεός σου καταδιώξεταί με πάσας τὰς ἡμέρας τῆς ζωῆς μου,καὶ τὸ κατοικεῖν με ἐν οἴκῳ κυρίου εἰς μακρότητα ἡμερῶν.
OSB Psalm 22 (23) The Lord is my shepherd; I shall not want. He makes me to lie down in green pastures; He leads me beside the still waters. He restores my soul; He leads me in the paths of righteousness For His name’s sake. Yea, though I walk through the valley of the shadow of deathI will fear no evil, for You are with me; Your rod and Your staff, they comfort me. You prepare a table before me in the presence of my enemies; You anoint my head with oil; My cup runs over. Surely goodness and mercy shall follow me All the days of my life; And I will dwell in the house of the Lord to the end of my days.
NETS Psalm 22 (23) The Lord shepherds me, and I shall lack nothing. In a verdant place, there he made me encamp; by water of rest he reared me; my soul he restored. He led me into paths of righteousnessfor his name’s sake. For even if I walk in the midst of death’s shadow, I will not fear evil, because you are with me; your rod and your staff—they comforted me. You prepared a table before me over against those that afflict me; you anointed my head with oil, and your cup was supremely intoxicating. And your mercy shall pursue me all the days of my life, and my residing in the Lord’s house is for length of days.
First one notices, shockingly, that the OSB does not translate the Greek at all. It is, in fact, the precise text of the New King James Version for Psalm 23, a translation of the Hebrew psalm, of course. The only alteration toward the Septuagint is at the very end, and even there it is quite wrong: “to the end of my days.” εἰς μακρότητα ἡμερῶν does not mean “to the end of my days” but rather, as NETS rightly has it “for length of days,” a circumlocution for “forever.” The intention seems to be “not to rock the boat” by providing a translation that is too different from what people are accustomed to, even when the (supposedly!) underlying text of the Septuagint is quite different than the Hebrew. As some monarch somewhere has sometime undoubtedly said, “We are not pleased.”
So, for me, NETS will remain my English Septuagint of choice, and it will remain the English Septuagint that I recommend to others, without reservation and with whole-hearted, honest enthusiasm. I’m not particularly fond of “study Bibles” in any case. I am particularly not fond of those claiming to be something they aren’t (in this case a complete translation of the Septuagint), and with a supposedly sanctifying veneer of Orthodoxy about them. Don’t get me wrong: I love Orthodoxy, entirely and wholly; it is my life. But slapping the word Orthodox onto a Bible which is insufficiently representative of the richness and beauty of the tradition of the Eastern Orthodox Church, even at the level of its own language, does absolutely nothing for me, and in fact makes me rather angry. This Orthodox Study Bible could have been better and should have been better. Why was it not better?
- Kevin P. Edgecomb, posted at http://www.bombaxo.com/blog/?p=512
First, as is patently indicated by its title, the OSB is a study Bible intended primarily for an English-reading Eastern Orthodox Christian audience and other English readers with an interest in Orthodoxy. At the bottom of each page are notes of varying lengths, though tending toward brevity, rather like those of the Oxford Annotated Bibles. There are various single-page study articles interspersed throughout both Testaments, covering subjects like Ancestral Sin, Sacrifice, The Tabernacle, Types of Mary in the Old Testament, and so on. There are likewise a number of different full-color pages including reproductions of various icons, which the Orthodox are well-known for. A number of different articles and helps are likewise included: Acknowledgments, Special Recognition, an introduction, a page listing the Orthodox, Roman Catholic and Protestant Old Testaments, a page of abbreviations of patristic authors and materials used in the notes, “Overview of the Books of the Bible” by Bishop Basil (Essey) of Wichita and Mid-America, “Introducing the Orthodox Church,” “The Bible: God’s Revelation to Man” by Bishop Joseph (al-Zehlaoui) of Los Angeles and the West, “How to Read the Bible” by Bishop Kallistos (Ware) of Diokleia, a “Lectionary” which is not precisely the actual liturgical lectionary of the Eastern Orthodox Church but is intended for a devotional reading schedule, a glossary of terms and phrases used in the notes, pages of morning and evening prayers, indices to the annotations and study articles, the traditional list of The Seventy Apostles (see Luke 10), and a set of full-color maps. Throughout the OSB, each book of the two Testaments is given an introductory section including Author, Date, Major Theme, Background, and Outline. All this indicates therefore a volume of satisfying heft, and of a great variety of resources typical of study Bible of our day and age.
I have not delved deeply into the OSB yet, but can give some initial impressions. First, there are various pearls of patristic wisdom strewn about in the notes, with attribution only by abbreviated name, not by work. There could have been more, which would rather have been appreciated, of course, but at the very least citations should have been included, whether for a quotation or for the more vague sorts of allusions worded by the annotators. Otherwise, the notes are fairly consistent in following a Christocentric interpretation in the Old Testament, the traditional Orthodox approach which makes for such rich hymnography. When, however, they drift into mere summary of the sections above, they are rather jejune and entirely unnecessary.
The icons are a mixed bag of quality. There are some beautiful ones: a the Three Holy Youths in the Furnace from a mural at Vatopaidi Monastery, Mount Athos dated 1312; The Transfiguration by Photi Kontoglu; and St John the Forerunner by Father Gregory (surname not given). The rest are of varying quality, some being quite sentimentalizing, some veering toward mere painting. A consistenly better collection of icons could have been presented, as our holy icons are treasures of the Church and there are hundreds of recognized works written in great sanctity and also recognized to be of great artistic value. This was also a complaint of the icons included in the first Orthodox Study Bible: New Testament and Psalms. Astonishingly, all of the icons presented in that earlier volume, several of which received complaints regarding their quality, were included in this volume, along with a few others.
My copy is the “genuine leather” edition, with gilt-edged pages. Apparently these days, “genuine leather” means what used to be called “bonded leather.” The cover of this one feels more like cardboard, of much lesser quality than even the first OSB, which wasn’t of great quality at all. And the binding is glued, not stitched, which is truly unfortunate (and cheap). In combination with this, the margins are miserly, so that the text veers into the gutter (where the pages meet in the middle of the open book). The print is, however, comfortably large, though the line spacing seems a bit cramped. Each page is two-columned, fully justified (that is, both sides of the text block meet the edges of the columns). I would have this OSB rebound with a better quality cover, but the glued binding and small margins would result in it being unusable, as the gutter problem would grow even worse once sewn. Nice. There is only one register (the bound-in ribbon bookmark) unlike the old OSB which included two. The page edge gilding is the spray-on kind that is already leaving little flecks of gold everywhere. So, as an example of bookbinding, I would not rate the OSB well.
The use of the New King James Version in the New Testament is still an issue. For the amount of time this translation was in process (roughly ten years since I first started following it), an entire New Testament translation based on Constantinople’s Ecclesiastical text could have been easily produced. Instead, we have this translation based on the hybrid Textus Receptus, and Byzantine readings noted in the translation as readings of the “M-Text” and readings from the Nestle-Aland/UBS text noted as the “NU-Text.” With all the effort put into producing the Septuagint translation, a little more to produce a translation of the Ecclesiastical text would have been appreciated. As it stands, therefore, this “Orthodox Study Bible” is only half Orthodox: in the Old Testament only. A few quotations of Church Fathers in the notes doesn’t fix the NT.
The order of the books follows the traditional Orthodox order, except in mysteriously placing the Prayer of Manasseh not after the Psalms, where the Odes would normally be, but as the last column on the last page of 2 Chronicles, where it appears to be a part of chapter 36. Then there is the confusion of the two Ezra books and Nehemiah. In the Septuagint, it is usually the case (as in NETS; also see here) that there is 1 Esdras, the alternate partial Chronicles/Ezra-Nehemiah book, and then the Hebrew Ezra and Nehemiah books are combined as 2 Esdras, with 23 chapters. The OSB inexplicably has 1 Ezra (the 1 Esdras above), 2 Ezra (Hebrew Ezra), and Nehemiah. Though I do recall this as an option among Greek treatments of the titles of these books, it’s not as common as the other. In Daniel there is a serious problem with the page headers. At the beginning of Daniel is, as is proper, the book of Susanna, and at the end, Bel and the Serpent. Unfortunately, the page headers take the verse of Susanna as the chapter of Daniel, so the header on page 1237, the second page of Susanna/Daniel, reads “Daniel 41″ and the next page “Daniel 42.” At the end of the book, page 1261 has the header “Daniel 21″ and the next page “Daniel 22.”
So, the OSB appears to be at the very least a step in the right direction, and I do expect myself to warm to it to a certain degree, but its shortcomings are real and inexcusable. I know quite a number of people worked on this Bible for a long time. It should have been better. It could have been better. Why is it not better?
Now I’d like to look at the two Septuagint translations in comparison. The NETS is, of course, a scholarly effort of great erudition, designed for use as an academic tool. The OSB is designed for use as devotional reading. For this reason, the OSB doesn’t include translations of the variant texts in Joshua, Judges, Esther, and Daniel, for instance, but rather opts for what is (more or less) the Ecclesiastical text. As I mentioned above, the OSB used the NKJV as a base for its translation, just as the NETS used the NRSV. In this first comparison, therefore, I’ve chosen Sirach 44.1-5, as something not contaminated by boilerplate usage of the NKJV.
OSB Sirach 4.1-5:Let us now praise honored men and our fathers. The Lord established His great glory And majesty from the beginning through them. There were those who ruled in their kingdoms And were men renowned for their power, Giving counsel through their understanding And proclaiming prophecies. There were leaders of the people by their counsels And understanding of learning for the people, Wise in their words of instruction.
NETS Sirach 44.1-5 Let us now praise famous men and our fathers by descent. The Lord created much glory, his majesty from eternity. When they ruled in their kingdoms, men also became noteworthy through power; when they counseled with their intelligence, when they announced through their prophecies, when they led the people by deliberations and with understanding of a people’s scribal art—wise words there are in their instruction.
Notice how the OSB simply does not flow, and only really makes sense after having read the NETS version. This is caused by relying too strictly on a very literal translation method. See how with very little change, the NETS flows so much better. What, for instance, is “understanding of learning for the people” in the OSB supposed to connote? The Greek is και συνεσει γραμματειας λαου, which is much better rendered by NETS as “understanding of a people’s scribal art.” The issue in the OSB appears to lie in the RSV being used as a base text in this instance (”understanding of learning for the people”) rather than the more clear NRSV (”knowledge of the people’s lore”), which is informed not merely by Greek Sirach, but the Hebrew fragments, the key phrase here being חכמי שיח בספרתם. NETS is the best of the set on this front.
Now we’ll go to an old favorite, Psalm 22 (23 in the Masoretic and English numbering tradition), and see what the OSB and NETS have done. I provide the Greek text first, so you can compare for yourselves.
Greek Psalm 22 (23) Κύριος ποιμαίνει με, καὶ οὐδέν με ὑστερήσει.εἰς τόπον χλόης, ἐκεῖ με κατεσκήνωσεν,ἐπὶ ὕδατος ἀναπαύσεωςἐξέθρεψέν με,τὴν ψυχήν μου ἐπέστρεψεν.ὡδήγησέν με ἐπὶ τρίβους δικαιοσύνηςἕνεκεν τοῦ ὀνόματος αὐτοῦ.ἐὰν γὰρ καὶ πορευθῶ ἐν μέσῳ σκιᾶς θανάτου,οὐ φοβηθήσομαι κακά,ὅτι σὺ μετ’ ἐμοῦ εἶ·ἡ ῥάβδος σου καὶ ἡ βακτηρία σου, αὐταί με παρεκάλεσαν.ἡτοίμασας ἐνώπιόν μου τράπεζαν ἐξ ἐναντίας τῶν θλιβόν των με·ἐλίπανας ἐν ἐλαίῳ τὴν κεφαλήν μου,καὶ τὸ ποτήριόν σου μεθύσκον ὡς κράτιστον.καὶ τὸ ἔλεός σου καταδιώξεταί με πάσας τὰς ἡμέρας τῆς ζωῆς μου,καὶ τὸ κατοικεῖν με ἐν οἴκῳ κυρίου εἰς μακρότητα ἡμερῶν.
OSB Psalm 22 (23) The Lord is my shepherd; I shall not want. He makes me to lie down in green pastures; He leads me beside the still waters. He restores my soul; He leads me in the paths of righteousness For His name’s sake. Yea, though I walk through the valley of the shadow of deathI will fear no evil, for You are with me; Your rod and Your staff, they comfort me. You prepare a table before me in the presence of my enemies; You anoint my head with oil; My cup runs over. Surely goodness and mercy shall follow me All the days of my life; And I will dwell in the house of the Lord to the end of my days.
NETS Psalm 22 (23) The Lord shepherds me, and I shall lack nothing. In a verdant place, there he made me encamp; by water of rest he reared me; my soul he restored. He led me into paths of righteousnessfor his name’s sake. For even if I walk in the midst of death’s shadow, I will not fear evil, because you are with me; your rod and your staff—they comforted me. You prepared a table before me over against those that afflict me; you anointed my head with oil, and your cup was supremely intoxicating. And your mercy shall pursue me all the days of my life, and my residing in the Lord’s house is for length of days.
First one notices, shockingly, that the OSB does not translate the Greek at all. It is, in fact, the precise text of the New King James Version for Psalm 23, a translation of the Hebrew psalm, of course. The only alteration toward the Septuagint is at the very end, and even there it is quite wrong: “to the end of my days.” εἰς μακρότητα ἡμερῶν does not mean “to the end of my days” but rather, as NETS rightly has it “for length of days,” a circumlocution for “forever.” The intention seems to be “not to rock the boat” by providing a translation that is too different from what people are accustomed to, even when the (supposedly!) underlying text of the Septuagint is quite different than the Hebrew. As some monarch somewhere has sometime undoubtedly said, “We are not pleased.”
So, for me, NETS will remain my English Septuagint of choice, and it will remain the English Septuagint that I recommend to others, without reservation and with whole-hearted, honest enthusiasm. I’m not particularly fond of “study Bibles” in any case. I am particularly not fond of those claiming to be something they aren’t (in this case a complete translation of the Septuagint), and with a supposedly sanctifying veneer of Orthodoxy about them. Don’t get me wrong: I love Orthodoxy, entirely and wholly; it is my life. But slapping the word Orthodox onto a Bible which is insufficiently representative of the richness and beauty of the tradition of the Eastern Orthodox Church, even at the level of its own language, does absolutely nothing for me, and in fact makes me rather angry. This Orthodox Study Bible could have been better and should have been better. Why was it not better?
- Kevin P. Edgecomb, posted at http://www.bombaxo.com/blog/?p=512
Friday, March 14, 2008
REVIEW OF THE ORIGINAL OSB
The Orthodox Study Bible (Thomas Nelson Publishers, Nashville, 1993) makes a very good initial impression. The bindings are handsome, the Bible is nicely printed, and it is graced by a number of full-color icons scattered through the book. It uses the increasingly popular New King James Version (NKJV) for the text. On the whole this version is an acceptable modernization of the King James Version (KJV), while retaining some of the literary quality of the latter. An additional advantage of the NKJV is that it indicates the Majority Text readings, since these generally correspond even more fully to the Church's text than do the KJV readings. However, it is disappointing that the Study Bible reproduces the whole textual apparatus of the NKJV, including many of the doubtful decisions of modern non-Orthodox biblical scholarship; it would have been preferable for them to have corrected the text to agree with that of the Church and then to present only that text, since the whole matter of textual criticism is complex and primarily serves to cause doubts and questions in the minds of non-technical readers of the Scriptures. While the NKJV is a generally acceptable text for the New Testament, its use for the Psalter is completely unacceptable. It is very unfortunate that the Study Bible uses a Protestant version of the Psalter in what claims to be a Bible for Orthodox Christians, following even the Protestant numbering of the psalms, rather than that of the Church. Several translations of the psalms from the Orthodox Church's Septuagint version into English have appeared in the last 20 years, and it surely would have been possible for the publishers to have arranged to use one of these if they truly wanted to offer an Orthodox text of the Bible to their readers.
When one actually starts to read the comments and notes attached to the Study Bible one quickly becomes very disappointed to see that a major opportunity has been lost. The comments on the text are on the whole quite simplistic and shallow, often doing nothing more than paraphrasing the verse to which they refer. Only very rarely do they quote from the Fathers to draw out the fuller meaning of the text, although a good collection of such quotations would have been the best possible Orthodox commentary on the Scriptures.
The early Church understood that the doctrines of the faith (viewed as facts and rational propositions) could not really be grasped until a person had attained some degree of moral purity. This is the reason for the extended catechumenate, during which the candidate had to reform his life and bring it into line with the Church's demands. Only near the end of this period was the content of the Faith presented, when the candidate was sufficiently purified to be able to receive it and make sense of it. To have presented it earlier would have reduced it to only empty factual knowledge with no meaning for one's life. One of the most unfortunate features of the Study Bible is that it confines itself only to this factual knowledge and does not even use those passages of Scripture which have a moral content to inculcate such purity in its readers. It rarely draws any but the most trite moral conclusions from the texts, while the Fathers consistently apply them primarily in a moral way, rather than as historical or factual artifacts.
As one reads the notes to the text, a false, non-Orthodox tone becomes uncomfortably apparent. The editors constantly refer to the way things are done in the "Orthodox Church," the teaching of the "Orthodox Church," etc. By always qualifying "Church" in this way, they distance themselves and write as they are outsiders or as if they are writing for outsiders. When Orthodox people describe the services, readings, practices, and doctrines of the Church, they just call it the "Church." Similarly, if you look at a Roman Catholic Bible (e.g. the Jerusalem Bible), it refers to the "Church's teaching" or says that "the Church reads this passage..." and so on. The only reason to qualify "Church" all the time, as the Study Bible does, is to distinguish it from other religious bodies. But the result of this constant qualification is that the reader does not feel he is reading a Bible prepared by Orthodox Christians for Orthodox Christians. The feeling is rather that this Bible is designed to introduce the non-Orthodox to Orthodoxy, or else that non-Orthodox wrote the notes in it. There is not anything inherently wrong in the idea of writing notes on a Bible to help convince non-Orthodox of the truth of Orthodoxy (assuming the notes accurately reflect the true views and positions of Orthodoxy, which is by no means always the case in the Study Bible), but it would be better to advertise the Bible as such, perhaps calling it the Orthodox Evangelism Bible, rather than to present it as if it is designed to help Orthodox Christians grow deeper in their understanding and practice of the faith.
Another example of the non-Orthodox tone of much of the commentary in the Study Bible is the way the Savior and the Saints are referred to. While there are instances in which Orthodox refer to the Lord as simply "Jesus," they are rare. Especially in the early Church (cf. St. Ignatius of Antioch's letters), the Lord is almost always referred to by His name and one or more titles (e.g., "Jesus Christ," "our Lord Jesus Christ," etc.). Even St. Paul usually refers to Him in this way. The Gospels do not, since they are presenting history, rather than reflections drawn from that history. But Orthodox Christians do not speak of the Lord in this unadorned way, so it strikes a false note to find the Study Bible referring to Him as "Jesus" most of the time. Similarly, in English (although less so in Greek or Russian) it sounds very odd to Orthodox ears to refer to the saints without using their title. Thus, Orthodox Christians usually speak of "St. Paul," not of "Paul." The same may be said about the note concerning the Theotokos on page 135. The editors address her as "Mary." Again, this is a small point, but it does offend Orthodox ears and adds to the feeling the authors of the notes in the Study Bible are not writing from within the Orthodox community, but rather are outsiders trying to interpret an Orthodoxy they only understand theoretically, but which they have not yet learned really to live.
A further example of the editors' viewpoint being from outside the Church is their decision to abbreviate the Morning and Evening Prayers printed in the back of the Study Bible by leaving out any prayers to the Theotokos or the saints. It seems almost inconceivable that Orthodox Christians would not at least include the Prayer "O Theotokos and Virgin, rejoice" and a prayer to their patron saint as part of their daily prayers; but these prayers are missing. While this omission undoubtedly will make the Study Bible more congenial to Protestant readers, it seriously distorts the actual teaching and practice of the Orthodox Church.
Throughout the Study Bible there is a surprising emphasis on the concept of "justification," including a whole article devoted to this topic in Romans 5. A number of notes scattered throughout the Study Bible refer to "justification," usually specifying that it is "by faith" (e.g. Mark 10:28; Acts 10:35; Romans 3:20, 5: 1; Galatians 2:16-4:31, 2:17; etc.). The article and notes are not particularly offensive, but the concept and term "justification" play almost no role in Orthodox theology, where "justification" is commonly not even distinguished from "sanctification," but both are seen as a united and inseparable part of the Christian's process of spiritual development. Certainly, its role is minor compared to the major position it occupies in Protestant thinking. Thus, the index to Timothy [now Bishop Kallistos] Ware's The Orthodox Church does not include the term, nor is it found in a number of Orthodox theological dictionaries (e.g., Polny Pravoslavnyy Bogoslovskiy Entsiklopicheskiy Slovar [Complete Orthodox Theological Encyclopedic Dictionary], reprinted in Russia in 1992 from a pre-Revolutionary edition; Dictionary of Orthodox Theology, George H. Demetrakopoulos, New York, 1964). Once again, while the treatment is not "wrong" from an Orthodox standpoint, the very discussion and term sound strange to Orthodox ears.
There are other notes in which a non-Orthodox viewpoint comes across. Examples are:
a) The note on Acts 3:1 refers to "Advent," which is a term and period which does not exist in Orthodoxy. In the Western liturgical churches (Roman Catholic, Anglican, and Lutheran) "Advent" is the name given to the four Sundays preceding Christmas. Orthodoxy does not observe these Sundays, but it does have a six-week fast preceding the feast of the Nativity of Our Lord.
b) Mark 2:20. This note defends fasting, but from a rather Protestant viewpoint. It is written to persuade Protestant readers that fasting is acceptable for a Christian, not to encourage Orthodox to discover the spiritual benefits of fasting.
c) The note on "fasting" in the glossary (p. 798) mis-defines the Apostles Fast, incorrectly saying that it is the two weeks before June 29. This fast is actually of variable length, starting on the Monday after All Saints Sunday and continuing until the Feast of Sts. Peter and Paul. The fact that the author of the notes does not know how long the fast lasts can only raise doubts about the extent to which the Faith is being lived.
Finally, there are notes which are simply unacceptable to any true Orthodox Christian, since they are omissions or distortions of vital Orthodox teachings.
a) Matthew 14:14-2 1. In discussing the feeding of the five thousand, the editors somewhat grudgingly say that the feeding of the four thousand (reported in Matthew 15:32-39) "...is PROBABLY not a duplicate report of the first miracle." Thereby, the editors are challenging the authenticity and reliability of the Gospels, since the same Gospel reports the two miracles separately and since the Lord Himself refers to both of them as separate events (Matthew 16:9-
10). To raise even a question about whether these are separate events is to call into question the Lord's veracity and the reliability of the Gospels—surely not an Orthodox attitude toward either.
b) Mark 9:38-40. The note says, "Sectarianism and triumphalism (the attitude that one creed is superior to all others) are forbidden, for God's working transcends our limited perceptions. One is either for or against (v.40) Christ, but it is not always ours to know who is on which side." Does this mean that the creed of the First and Second Ecumenical Councils (the Symbol of Faith) is no better than any other creed (e.g., the Lutherans' Augsburg Confession)? Any Orthodox Christian who does not think that the Church's creed is superior to all others places himself outside the Church. Furthermore, while we may not always know where a person's heart is, we can see that those who willfully promulgate false creeds are working against our Lord and Savior Jesus Christ. The attitude in this note is simply foreign to any healthy Orthodox Christian.
c) Mark 10:30. The Lord promises that those who give up family and possessions will receive them back a hundredfold, but the note calls this into question, saying that this is "not an absolute promise: countless saints and martyrs were not so rewarded." Here the authors betray their carnal viewpoint. The Fathers apply this passage to the whole Christian community, saying that those who give up earthly family and possessions receive new fathers and mothers, brothers and sisters, homes and lands in the CHURCH, but not in the carnal sense of getting more personal possessions. It is bad enough that the authors' viewpoint is carnal, their error is compounded by the fact that they openly disagree with the Lord and question the accuracy of His promise.
d) Acts 13:3. The note supports multiple ordination. This practice has been forbidden in the Orthodox Church for many centuries, so there is no reason whatsoever to mention it, unless it is to justify the extreme irregularity of performing such ordinations when the so-called "Evangelical Orthodox" were received into the Antiochian Church.
e) I Timothy 2:12. By citing Romans 16:1 to suggest that women have been ordained as deacons and by stating that "women are not ordained to the offices of bishop and presbyter in the Orthodox Church," the note implies that women can be ordained deacons. This is not the case. The order of deaconesses is not currently in use in the Church, and in any case the Church does not treat the order of deaconesses as equivalent to that of deacons, since the former do not perform the deacon's liturgical functions.
f) II Timothy 1:9. The note says, "Our salvation and CALLING are based on His GRACE and love, not on anything we have done to merit God's favor." The Orthodox viewpoint is that our salvation does in fact depend on our response to God's grace and how we use it in our lives. We are co-workers with God in our salvation, as St. Paul says (I Cor. 3:9; II Cor. 6: 1; Phil. 2:12-13). Even our calling as Christians is based on our synergy in responding to God's grace in our lives, since we are all sustained by His grace in every breath we take. Those who respond to this grace receive a calling to participate more fully in it, a calling which is based on their earlier responses.
g) The note on I Peter 3:18 glosses over the Lord's descent into Hades. You may be able to find this doctrine in the note if you know it is supposed to be there, but it certainly is not presented in a clear and unambiguous way. And yet, this is the focus of the primary icons of the feast of the Resurrection, so how can it be skimmed over with no more than a hint in what claims to be an "Orthodox Bible?"
These comments are representative of the non-Orthodox viewpoint which permeates this Study Bible and which makes it unsuited for use by Orthodox Christians. It is truly sad to see so much effort, time, and expense put into producing this Bible with such meager results in the end. It would, however, be far safer for Orthodox Christians to avoid such inaccurate and misleading aids as are provided in this Bible, especially since several more reliable "Orthodox Study" Bible commentaries are available in English for Orthodox readers (e.g. Johanna Manley's "The Bible and the Holy Fathers" her "Grace for Grace: The Psalter and the Holy Fathers" (which has the added advantage of using the Orthodox Psalter as its basic text, rather than the Protestant one); and the ongoing translation of Blessed Theophylact's commentaries on the Gospels.
- Archpriest Seraphim Johnson of St. Cosmas of Aitolia Orthodox Church, Lanham, MD, posted at http://www.orthodoxinfo.com/phronema/review_osb2.aspx
When one actually starts to read the comments and notes attached to the Study Bible one quickly becomes very disappointed to see that a major opportunity has been lost. The comments on the text are on the whole quite simplistic and shallow, often doing nothing more than paraphrasing the verse to which they refer. Only very rarely do they quote from the Fathers to draw out the fuller meaning of the text, although a good collection of such quotations would have been the best possible Orthodox commentary on the Scriptures.
The early Church understood that the doctrines of the faith (viewed as facts and rational propositions) could not really be grasped until a person had attained some degree of moral purity. This is the reason for the extended catechumenate, during which the candidate had to reform his life and bring it into line with the Church's demands. Only near the end of this period was the content of the Faith presented, when the candidate was sufficiently purified to be able to receive it and make sense of it. To have presented it earlier would have reduced it to only empty factual knowledge with no meaning for one's life. One of the most unfortunate features of the Study Bible is that it confines itself only to this factual knowledge and does not even use those passages of Scripture which have a moral content to inculcate such purity in its readers. It rarely draws any but the most trite moral conclusions from the texts, while the Fathers consistently apply them primarily in a moral way, rather than as historical or factual artifacts.
As one reads the notes to the text, a false, non-Orthodox tone becomes uncomfortably apparent. The editors constantly refer to the way things are done in the "Orthodox Church," the teaching of the "Orthodox Church," etc. By always qualifying "Church" in this way, they distance themselves and write as they are outsiders or as if they are writing for outsiders. When Orthodox people describe the services, readings, practices, and doctrines of the Church, they just call it the "Church." Similarly, if you look at a Roman Catholic Bible (e.g. the Jerusalem Bible), it refers to the "Church's teaching" or says that "the Church reads this passage..." and so on. The only reason to qualify "Church" all the time, as the Study Bible does, is to distinguish it from other religious bodies. But the result of this constant qualification is that the reader does not feel he is reading a Bible prepared by Orthodox Christians for Orthodox Christians. The feeling is rather that this Bible is designed to introduce the non-Orthodox to Orthodoxy, or else that non-Orthodox wrote the notes in it. There is not anything inherently wrong in the idea of writing notes on a Bible to help convince non-Orthodox of the truth of Orthodoxy (assuming the notes accurately reflect the true views and positions of Orthodoxy, which is by no means always the case in the Study Bible), but it would be better to advertise the Bible as such, perhaps calling it the Orthodox Evangelism Bible, rather than to present it as if it is designed to help Orthodox Christians grow deeper in their understanding and practice of the faith.
Another example of the non-Orthodox tone of much of the commentary in the Study Bible is the way the Savior and the Saints are referred to. While there are instances in which Orthodox refer to the Lord as simply "Jesus," they are rare. Especially in the early Church (cf. St. Ignatius of Antioch's letters), the Lord is almost always referred to by His name and one or more titles (e.g., "Jesus Christ," "our Lord Jesus Christ," etc.). Even St. Paul usually refers to Him in this way. The Gospels do not, since they are presenting history, rather than reflections drawn from that history. But Orthodox Christians do not speak of the Lord in this unadorned way, so it strikes a false note to find the Study Bible referring to Him as "Jesus" most of the time. Similarly, in English (although less so in Greek or Russian) it sounds very odd to Orthodox ears to refer to the saints without using their title. Thus, Orthodox Christians usually speak of "St. Paul," not of "Paul." The same may be said about the note concerning the Theotokos on page 135. The editors address her as "Mary." Again, this is a small point, but it does offend Orthodox ears and adds to the feeling the authors of the notes in the Study Bible are not writing from within the Orthodox community, but rather are outsiders trying to interpret an Orthodoxy they only understand theoretically, but which they have not yet learned really to live.
A further example of the editors' viewpoint being from outside the Church is their decision to abbreviate the Morning and Evening Prayers printed in the back of the Study Bible by leaving out any prayers to the Theotokos or the saints. It seems almost inconceivable that Orthodox Christians would not at least include the Prayer "O Theotokos and Virgin, rejoice" and a prayer to their patron saint as part of their daily prayers; but these prayers are missing. While this omission undoubtedly will make the Study Bible more congenial to Protestant readers, it seriously distorts the actual teaching and practice of the Orthodox Church.
Throughout the Study Bible there is a surprising emphasis on the concept of "justification," including a whole article devoted to this topic in Romans 5. A number of notes scattered throughout the Study Bible refer to "justification," usually specifying that it is "by faith" (e.g. Mark 10:28; Acts 10:35; Romans 3:20, 5: 1; Galatians 2:16-4:31, 2:17; etc.). The article and notes are not particularly offensive, but the concept and term "justification" play almost no role in Orthodox theology, where "justification" is commonly not even distinguished from "sanctification," but both are seen as a united and inseparable part of the Christian's process of spiritual development. Certainly, its role is minor compared to the major position it occupies in Protestant thinking. Thus, the index to Timothy [now Bishop Kallistos] Ware's The Orthodox Church does not include the term, nor is it found in a number of Orthodox theological dictionaries (e.g., Polny Pravoslavnyy Bogoslovskiy Entsiklopicheskiy Slovar [Complete Orthodox Theological Encyclopedic Dictionary], reprinted in Russia in 1992 from a pre-Revolutionary edition; Dictionary of Orthodox Theology, George H. Demetrakopoulos, New York, 1964). Once again, while the treatment is not "wrong" from an Orthodox standpoint, the very discussion and term sound strange to Orthodox ears.
There are other notes in which a non-Orthodox viewpoint comes across. Examples are:
a) The note on Acts 3:1 refers to "Advent," which is a term and period which does not exist in Orthodoxy. In the Western liturgical churches (Roman Catholic, Anglican, and Lutheran) "Advent" is the name given to the four Sundays preceding Christmas. Orthodoxy does not observe these Sundays, but it does have a six-week fast preceding the feast of the Nativity of Our Lord.
b) Mark 2:20. This note defends fasting, but from a rather Protestant viewpoint. It is written to persuade Protestant readers that fasting is acceptable for a Christian, not to encourage Orthodox to discover the spiritual benefits of fasting.
c) The note on "fasting" in the glossary (p. 798) mis-defines the Apostles Fast, incorrectly saying that it is the two weeks before June 29. This fast is actually of variable length, starting on the Monday after All Saints Sunday and continuing until the Feast of Sts. Peter and Paul. The fact that the author of the notes does not know how long the fast lasts can only raise doubts about the extent to which the Faith is being lived.
Finally, there are notes which are simply unacceptable to any true Orthodox Christian, since they are omissions or distortions of vital Orthodox teachings.
a) Matthew 14:14-2 1. In discussing the feeding of the five thousand, the editors somewhat grudgingly say that the feeding of the four thousand (reported in Matthew 15:32-39) "...is PROBABLY not a duplicate report of the first miracle." Thereby, the editors are challenging the authenticity and reliability of the Gospels, since the same Gospel reports the two miracles separately and since the Lord Himself refers to both of them as separate events (Matthew 16:9-
10). To raise even a question about whether these are separate events is to call into question the Lord's veracity and the reliability of the Gospels—surely not an Orthodox attitude toward either.
b) Mark 9:38-40. The note says, "Sectarianism and triumphalism (the attitude that one creed is superior to all others) are forbidden, for God's working transcends our limited perceptions. One is either for or against (v.40) Christ, but it is not always ours to know who is on which side." Does this mean that the creed of the First and Second Ecumenical Councils (the Symbol of Faith) is no better than any other creed (e.g., the Lutherans' Augsburg Confession)? Any Orthodox Christian who does not think that the Church's creed is superior to all others places himself outside the Church. Furthermore, while we may not always know where a person's heart is, we can see that those who willfully promulgate false creeds are working against our Lord and Savior Jesus Christ. The attitude in this note is simply foreign to any healthy Orthodox Christian.
c) Mark 10:30. The Lord promises that those who give up family and possessions will receive them back a hundredfold, but the note calls this into question, saying that this is "not an absolute promise: countless saints and martyrs were not so rewarded." Here the authors betray their carnal viewpoint. The Fathers apply this passage to the whole Christian community, saying that those who give up earthly family and possessions receive new fathers and mothers, brothers and sisters, homes and lands in the CHURCH, but not in the carnal sense of getting more personal possessions. It is bad enough that the authors' viewpoint is carnal, their error is compounded by the fact that they openly disagree with the Lord and question the accuracy of His promise.
d) Acts 13:3. The note supports multiple ordination. This practice has been forbidden in the Orthodox Church for many centuries, so there is no reason whatsoever to mention it, unless it is to justify the extreme irregularity of performing such ordinations when the so-called "Evangelical Orthodox" were received into the Antiochian Church.
e) I Timothy 2:12. By citing Romans 16:1 to suggest that women have been ordained as deacons and by stating that "women are not ordained to the offices of bishop and presbyter in the Orthodox Church," the note implies that women can be ordained deacons. This is not the case. The order of deaconesses is not currently in use in the Church, and in any case the Church does not treat the order of deaconesses as equivalent to that of deacons, since the former do not perform the deacon's liturgical functions.
f) II Timothy 1:9. The note says, "Our salvation and CALLING are based on His GRACE and love, not on anything we have done to merit God's favor." The Orthodox viewpoint is that our salvation does in fact depend on our response to God's grace and how we use it in our lives. We are co-workers with God in our salvation, as St. Paul says (I Cor. 3:9; II Cor. 6: 1; Phil. 2:12-13). Even our calling as Christians is based on our synergy in responding to God's grace in our lives, since we are all sustained by His grace in every breath we take. Those who respond to this grace receive a calling to participate more fully in it, a calling which is based on their earlier responses.
g) The note on I Peter 3:18 glosses over the Lord's descent into Hades. You may be able to find this doctrine in the note if you know it is supposed to be there, but it certainly is not presented in a clear and unambiguous way. And yet, this is the focus of the primary icons of the feast of the Resurrection, so how can it be skimmed over with no more than a hint in what claims to be an "Orthodox Bible?"
These comments are representative of the non-Orthodox viewpoint which permeates this Study Bible and which makes it unsuited for use by Orthodox Christians. It is truly sad to see so much effort, time, and expense put into producing this Bible with such meager results in the end. It would, however, be far safer for Orthodox Christians to avoid such inaccurate and misleading aids as are provided in this Bible, especially since several more reliable "Orthodox Study" Bible commentaries are available in English for Orthodox readers (e.g. Johanna Manley's "The Bible and the Holy Fathers" her "Grace for Grace: The Psalter and the Holy Fathers" (which has the added advantage of using the Orthodox Psalter as its basic text, rather than the Protestant one); and the ongoing translation of Blessed Theophylact's commentaries on the Gospels.
- Archpriest Seraphim Johnson of St. Cosmas of Aitolia Orthodox Church, Lanham, MD, posted at http://www.orthodoxinfo.com/phronema/review_osb2.aspx
Sunday, February 24, 2008
INITIAL IMPRESSIONS
I received my copy Saturday.
IMO, it is very good the books of the OT were arranged in canonicalorder (as done by the Greeks). But I wish they had rearranged the NT inthe canonical order (as done by the Greeks) at the same time. Oh well.
I /really/ dislike the ugly font used in the running header -- zeroes are wider than the capital letter O; ones look like a capital I. Thefont used for the text has far too high an x-height: lower case lettersare about 3/4 the size of capital letters instead of 1/2. But I can live with ugly. The content is far more important.
I was checking to see if εκκλεσία was translated as 'church'. To mydelight, it was rendered 'church' in Psalm 21 (vv. 23, 26); Psalm 25(vv. 5, 12); Psalms 34:18; 39:10; 67:27; and 88:6. I wish they hadmaintained that rendering for the remainder of the psalms, but for somereason did not in Psalm 106:32 and Psalm 149:1.
The word εκκλεσία was also translated as 'church' in Job 30:28, Proverbs 5:14, and Lamentations 1:10. I really wish they had also used 'church'in the 23rd chapter of Deuteronomy (vv. 2, 3, 4, and 9) and Joel 2:16, but, alas, they did not.
When I was checking to see the rendering of εκκλεσία in the four booksof Kingdoms, I ran into a problem finding the verses. So I starteddigging into verse numbering.
What a mess!
The standard numbering of the books of the Old Testament are, like it ornot, based on the Masoretic text.
The ΖΩΗ (ZOE) text I have adapts to this by skipping verse numbers wherethe Church's text does not have the equivalent of the Masoretic. Thus,in 1 Kingdoms, the ΖΩΗ (ZOE) text numbers the first eleven verses ofchapter 17 which basically parallel the Masoretic text, then skipsnumbers 12 through 31, numbers verses 32 through 40 which parallel theMasoretic text, skips verse 41, numbers verses 42 through 49 whichparallel the Masoretic text, skips verse 50, numbers verses 51 through54, and omits numbers 55 through 58. (Note: the ΖΩΗ (ZOE) text includesthe omitted verses from the Masoretic text in footnotes rendered in adistinct font.)
When there are verses present in the Church's text that are not in the Masoretic text, the ΖΩΗ (ZOE) edition numbers verses with added letters.Thus, in Chapter 2 of 3 Kingdoms, it numbers the first 35 verses whichparallel the Masoretic text, and then numbers the following verses 35α,35β, 35γ, 35δ, ... 35μ, 35ν, 35ξ. The next verse is numbered 36 as isthe parallel verse in the Masoretic text.
The Brenton translation of the Septuagint basically uses the samenumbering system as the ΖΩΗ (ZOE) text, but instead of appending lettersit has no verse numbering (effectively making 3 Kingdoms 2:35 a great long verse!).
The Orthodox Study Bible doesn't follow either of these methods. Insteadit uses what is, IMO, the worst possible method. It numbers versessequentially regardless of the standard numbering of verses. Thus, wherethe Church's text does not have text which parallels the Masoretic text,the Orthodox Study Bible ends up with few verse numbers than othereditions. For instance, 1 Kingdoms 17:32 in the ΖΩΗ (ZOE) text and theBrenton translation and 1 Samuel 17:32 in the NASB, is rendered in theOSB as 17:12! The same thing is done where there are additional verses,only this results in more verse numbers than other editions. Forinstance, what the ΖΩΗ (ZOE) edition counts as 35, 35α, 35β, 35γ, 35δ,... 35μ, 35ν, 35ξ, 36 is counted in the OSB as verses 35 through 49. So3 Kingdoms 2:36 in the ΖΩΗ (ZOE) text and the Brenton translation and 1Kings 2:36 in the NASB becomes 3 Kingdoms 2:50.
Like I said, it is a mess. Worse, there is no 'conversion table' thatwill allow a reader to find the equivalent of a verse found in any othertranslation/edition. Perhaps some enterprising soul(s) will create a webpage with a conversion table.
====
In looking at 1 Kingdoms chapter 17 (the story of David and Goliath), Ifound two things which bothered me. The OSB has a verse 29 whichparallels 1 Samuel 17:50 in the same place as it appears in theMasoretic text, but that verse DOES NOT EXIST in the Church's text. Iwonder if someone, working from the NKJV Old Testament (which was usedas this project's boilerplate), inadvertently left that verse in.
The second thing was the OSB's note to 1 Kingdoms 17:4 -- 'Goliath isover nine feet tall.' This would be true if one is following theMasoretic text which gives Goliath's height as six cubits and a span (acubit being about 18 inches makes six cubits approximately equal to ninefeet), but the Church's text -- properly translated in the OSB -- gives Goliath's height as FOUR cubits and a span (which works out to about sixfeet plus a 'span', i.e. about 6'4" instead of 9'4")! It appears notesfrom the NKJV Old Testament may have been retained without checking.
The icons included in the OSB are quite good (and traditional). TheLectionary will be very useful. Of course, the patristic comments areimportant. The Index to Annotations looks like it will be helpful, but Ihaven't had much chance to look through it.
Back to looking at the OSB.
- T. R. Valentine, posted on the Indiana University Orthodox Listserv discussion list
( https://listserv.indiana.edu/cgi-bin/wa-iub.exe?A2=ind0802C&L=orthodox&T=0&F=&S=&P=774 )
IMO, it is very good the books of the OT were arranged in canonicalorder (as done by the Greeks). But I wish they had rearranged the NT inthe canonical order (as done by the Greeks) at the same time. Oh well.
I /really/ dislike the ugly font used in the running header -- zeroes are wider than the capital letter O; ones look like a capital I. Thefont used for the text has far too high an x-height: lower case lettersare about 3/4 the size of capital letters instead of 1/2. But I can live with ugly. The content is far more important.
I was checking to see if εκκλεσία was translated as 'church'. To mydelight, it was rendered 'church' in Psalm 21 (vv. 23, 26); Psalm 25(vv. 5, 12); Psalms 34:18; 39:10; 67:27; and 88:6. I wish they hadmaintained that rendering for the remainder of the psalms, but for somereason did not in Psalm 106:32 and Psalm 149:1.
The word εκκλεσία was also translated as 'church' in Job 30:28, Proverbs 5:14, and Lamentations 1:10. I really wish they had also used 'church'in the 23rd chapter of Deuteronomy (vv. 2, 3, 4, and 9) and Joel 2:16, but, alas, they did not.
When I was checking to see the rendering of εκκλεσία in the four booksof Kingdoms, I ran into a problem finding the verses. So I starteddigging into verse numbering.
What a mess!
The standard numbering of the books of the Old Testament are, like it ornot, based on the Masoretic text.
The ΖΩΗ (ZOE) text I have adapts to this by skipping verse numbers wherethe Church's text does not have the equivalent of the Masoretic. Thus,in 1 Kingdoms, the ΖΩΗ (ZOE) text numbers the first eleven verses ofchapter 17 which basically parallel the Masoretic text, then skipsnumbers 12 through 31, numbers verses 32 through 40 which parallel theMasoretic text, skips verse 41, numbers verses 42 through 49 whichparallel the Masoretic text, skips verse 50, numbers verses 51 through54, and omits numbers 55 through 58. (Note: the ΖΩΗ (ZOE) text includesthe omitted verses from the Masoretic text in footnotes rendered in adistinct font.)
When there are verses present in the Church's text that are not in the Masoretic text, the ΖΩΗ (ZOE) edition numbers verses with added letters.Thus, in Chapter 2 of 3 Kingdoms, it numbers the first 35 verses whichparallel the Masoretic text, and then numbers the following verses 35α,35β, 35γ, 35δ, ... 35μ, 35ν, 35ξ. The next verse is numbered 36 as isthe parallel verse in the Masoretic text.
The Brenton translation of the Septuagint basically uses the samenumbering system as the ΖΩΗ (ZOE) text, but instead of appending lettersit has no verse numbering (effectively making 3 Kingdoms 2:35 a great long verse!).
The Orthodox Study Bible doesn't follow either of these methods. Insteadit uses what is, IMO, the worst possible method. It numbers versessequentially regardless of the standard numbering of verses. Thus, wherethe Church's text does not have text which parallels the Masoretic text,the Orthodox Study Bible ends up with few verse numbers than othereditions. For instance, 1 Kingdoms 17:32 in the ΖΩΗ (ZOE) text and theBrenton translation and 1 Samuel 17:32 in the NASB, is rendered in theOSB as 17:12! The same thing is done where there are additional verses,only this results in more verse numbers than other editions. Forinstance, what the ΖΩΗ (ZOE) edition counts as 35, 35α, 35β, 35γ, 35δ,... 35μ, 35ν, 35ξ, 36 is counted in the OSB as verses 35 through 49. So3 Kingdoms 2:36 in the ΖΩΗ (ZOE) text and the Brenton translation and 1Kings 2:36 in the NASB becomes 3 Kingdoms 2:50.
Like I said, it is a mess. Worse, there is no 'conversion table' thatwill allow a reader to find the equivalent of a verse found in any othertranslation/edition. Perhaps some enterprising soul(s) will create a webpage with a conversion table.
====
In looking at 1 Kingdoms chapter 17 (the story of David and Goliath), Ifound two things which bothered me. The OSB has a verse 29 whichparallels 1 Samuel 17:50 in the same place as it appears in theMasoretic text, but that verse DOES NOT EXIST in the Church's text. Iwonder if someone, working from the NKJV Old Testament (which was usedas this project's boilerplate), inadvertently left that verse in.
The second thing was the OSB's note to 1 Kingdoms 17:4 -- 'Goliath isover nine feet tall.' This would be true if one is following theMasoretic text which gives Goliath's height as six cubits and a span (acubit being about 18 inches makes six cubits approximately equal to ninefeet), but the Church's text -- properly translated in the OSB -- gives Goliath's height as FOUR cubits and a span (which works out to about sixfeet plus a 'span', i.e. about 6'4" instead of 9'4")! It appears notesfrom the NKJV Old Testament may have been retained without checking.
The icons included in the OSB are quite good (and traditional). TheLectionary will be very useful. Of course, the patristic comments areimportant. The Index to Annotations looks like it will be helpful, but Ihaven't had much chance to look through it.
Back to looking at the OSB.
- T. R. Valentine, posted on the Indiana University Orthodox Listserv discussion list
( https://listserv.indiana.edu/cgi-bin/wa-iub.exe?A2=ind0802C&L=orthodox&T=0&F=&S=&P=774 )
REVIEW FROM HOLY TRANSFIGURATION MONASTERY
Known for their fine iconography and excellent translation of liturgical materials, Holy Transfiguration Monastery produced this in-depth critique of the original Orthodox Study Bible, published in the periodical, The True Vine. Hieromonk Haralampos' review runs 43 pages, so I have posted a link from the website of the Holy Orthodox Metropolis of Boston:
http://www.homb.org/Orthodox%20Study%20Bible%20Review.pdf
http://www.homb.org/Orthodox%20Study%20Bible%20Review.pdf
REVIEW FROM ENGLAND
The Orthodox Study Bible. New Testament and Psalms. Nelson. 1993. Pp.xii, 846 & 195. ISBN 0-8407-8391-4.
The focal point of an Orthodox church is the Holy Table at the centre of the Sanctuary. All the rest, the frescoes, the icons, the choir stalls, the icon screen, the Holy Doors themselves draw the worshipper’s attention to and culminate in the Holy Altar, or Throne, on which, at the Divine Liturgy, the Word of God is offered in the Sacrifice without shedding of blood. But the Holy Table stands apart in the Holy of Holies. It is not generally visible; during most of the ordinary services it is not used at all. Analogously, the daily round of offices and services, and the other Mysteries of the Church have their focal point, their culmination in the Divine Liturgy itself, the supreme Mystery. The same is true of the Bible. Its centre and focus is the Holy Gospel, which alone lies at the centre of the Altar. All the other books which make up the Holy Scripture lead to or flow from the Holy Gospel. The Bible is the pearl of great price, the treasure hidden in the field. It is not a weapon, even against heresy. We do not read the Holy Gospel ‘to discover Orthodox Christianity’, as the dust jacket of this book suggests, but to hear the Word of God leading us to repentance. Every time the Gospel is read we pray that ‘we may be counted worthy to listen to the Holy Gospel’. There is a profound sense in which the Bible for the Orthodox is not a public thing, any more than the Eucharist is a public thing, but one of the Mysteries of the Faith. Our Lord himself said something very like this: ‘To you has been given to know the mysteries of the Kingdom of heaven, but to the rest in parables.’ Against this background it must be clearly stated from the outset that the whole feel of this volume is wrong. It feels far too much like a piece of evangelical propaganda decked out in the trappings of Orthodoxy, like an eighteenth century New England chapel or meeting house with a golden onion dome stuck over the pediment of the porch.
First of all let us look at the translation used. This is not an Orthodox one at all. The editors have taken the New King James Version (NKJV), which is a slightly modernised (‘You’ not ‘Thou’) re-edition of the version of 1611. They defend this on the grounds that the underlying Greek text of the New Testament in the King James version is closer to the traditional Byzantine text than that of modern critical editions. This is for the most part true and all that they needed to say was that the Byzantine text is the text accepted by the Orthodox Church. Instead they defend their decision on supposedly scholarly grounds. This is irrelevant, except for conservative Evangelicals who wish to justify their conservatism by trying to make it ‘scientifically’ respectable. It also obscures the central point that for the Orthodox the Bible comes from the Church, exists in the Church, lives in the Church. The section of the opening chapter, pages x and xi, which discusses the choice of text, is in fact nothing more than a slightly revised version of the preface to the Revised Authorised Version, pages vi and vii. In adopting this approach the editors allow themselves to be drawn onto the ground chosen by their opponents, when they should have taken their stand on the Orthodox ground that the Church’s text is the Orthodox text, full stop.
Even if the text of the NKJV is on the whole that of the Church, it needs careful checking and revision before it can be called Orthodox. One small example will indicate what I mean. The NKJV, like its ancestor of 1611, which here follows the Latin Vulgate, reads at Luke 23:42, ‘Remember me when you come into your Kingdom.’ This prayer, we are told in a note, ‘is highlighted in the hymns and worship of the Orthodox Church’. It isn’t, because the Church’s Gospel and all the liturgical texts derived from it in both Greek and Slavonic have ‘in your Kingdom’, a reference to the Second Coming of Christ in his kingly power, as described in Matthew 25:31-46.
The marginal note on the story of the woman taken in adultery, John 7:53-8:11, is interesting. We are told that the modem critical editions bracket this is not in the original text, but that they are present in over 900 mss of [St] John. The latter remark shows that the editors have little idea of the basics of textual criticism. They should read A.E. Housman. The status of this passage is curious and it would have been worth pointing out both that St John Chrysostom did not have it in his text and that the Gospel for Pentecost makes exactly the same omission as St John Chrysostom and the modern scholars. The Johannine comma, I John 5:7b-8a, is printed as part of the text, though it occurs in no Greek ms. before the fourteenth century and, for the Fathers at least, it is not part of the Orthodox Bible.
On the difficult word in the Lord’s Prayer, which is traditionally rendered ‘daily’ we read: ‘Daily is a misleading translation of the Greek epiousios, which is literally "above the essence" or "supersubstantial".’ Not for St John Chrysostom it isn’t. He says very simply that it means ‘for the day’, ephemeron. He may be wrong, but his view is at least worth mentioning. Further, the idea that our Lord during his earthly incarnation was acquainted with the technical language of Greek philosophy has interesting implications for Christology. I am not sure it is quite what the Fathers of Chalcedon meant when they declared that Christ is homoousios with us, ‘sin alone excepted’. The corresponding note on Luke 11:3 is far better. This is only one of a number of places which display signs of sloppy editing. The note on Luke 11:2 is a give-away. We read that St Matthew’s version of the Our Father ‘has a slightly stronger liturgical flavor’ than St Luke’s. This is true if one compares the modern texts produced by modern scholars. In the traditional text, as given here, the two are virtually identical. The note presumably derives from a comment on some quite different translation.
Similar observations could be made on page after page of the translation. Finally I must protest most vigorously against the wholly unorthodox inverted Arianism of the typography whereby the words of Christ are printed in salmon pink, while his heavenly Father has to be content with mere black along with Caiaphas and Pontius Pilate. This use of colour is at times seriously misleading. Thus at John 3:16, which is badly translated, it is not clear whether this and the following verses are spoken by Jesus, or whether they are a comment by the Evangelist. They are probably the latter, but the salmon pink type adopted here compels one interpretation only. There are even more serious objections to this practice. What Our Lord did during his earthly life is as important, if not more important, than what he said. Both St John and St Luke make this point. St John ends his Gospel, ‘There are many other things that Jesus did’; nothing about ‘said’. St Luke begins Acts with a look back at the Gospel as the record of ‘all that Jesus began to do and teach’. It is Jesus himself who is the Word of God, and his actual words are only one aspect of the mystery. To highlight only the spoken words of Jesus is a reflection of a peculiarly Anglo-Saxon attitude which effectively reduces Jesus to a teacher of a system of ethics and a teller of picturesque inspirational stories. It is not for nothing that the traditional iconography of the Holy Doors includes not only the Four Evangelists but the Annunciation as well. The reason that the Gospel and the other readings from Holy Scripture are always chanted in the Church and never simply read is to make sure that the readers do not impose, by their inflections and emphases, their own interpretations on God’s word.
When we turn to the text of the Psalter we are in an even worse case. The Church’s Psalter is that of the Greek Septuagint [LXX], and has been since the days of the Apostles. It is the one used in all Orthodox services, and it forms the basis of innumerable liturgical hymns and prayers which are frequently little more than a mosaic of words and phrases from it. If one adds the fact, though the editorial introduction to the Psalter fails to point this out, that the Latin Psalter of the Western Church was itself a translation of the LXX until this century, one can say quite simply that the Christian Psalter is that of the LXX. The editors lamely protest that ‘no suitable translation of the Septuagint is currently available’. Considering the number of names that occupy most of the title page, not to mention the numerous others listed in the introduction, it should have been possible between them to produce a translation of the Psalms. If that was beyond the resources of the editors, they could at least have printed the Psalms with the correct numbering and divided them into the traditional kathismata and staseis of the Church Psalter. To do that does not even require a knowledge of Greek, only access to Miss Hapgood’s compendium of Orthodox services, or Mother Mary’s and Bishop Kallistos’s Festal Menaion. Moreover an Orthodox Psalter contains the text of the Odes used at Matins. There is no trace of them here, nor of Psalm 151. We are told that ‘some compensation is provided by giving the Septuagint text (author’s translation) in the notes for certain psalms’. A rapid run through the notes reveals that the author must be Ebenezer Scrooge. No attempt has been made to give the LXX titles to the psalm, though these are one of the areas in which the patristic commentaries are particularly rich. Where is the title of Psalm 5, ‘For her that shall inherit’, which the Fathers see as referring to the Church, the Bride of Christ? Where is the ‘Song for the Beloved’ in the title of Psalm 44, in which the Fathers see a reference to Christ? In Psalm 67:15 there is not so much as a hint that the words translated ‘curdled mountain’ form one of the most frequent images used in the Church’s poetry for the Mother of God, for reasons that I have set out in detail elsewhere. The NKJV’s ‘mountain of many peaks’ is pointless as an image of the motherhood of the Ever-Virgin. As one might have expected by now, the ‘doctors’ have disappeared from Psalm 97:10. One of St Basil’s favourite verses [Psalm 118:120], which he uses in many of his prayers that we still use in the Office, goes by unnoticed. The ‘author’ would have been well advised to spend a little time with the three volumes of St Nikodemos’s commentary before writing his notes, even if his own familiarity with the Church’s Psalter was such that these things and countless others like them did not spring to mind at once from his familiarity with the Church’s texts.
What then of the Study Guide itself? Some of it looks like unaltered evangelical material, like the chapter entitled ‘How to read the New Testament in a year’. Many of us prefer to follow the Church’s way of reading. The maps also betray their evangelical origins. The sites of Calvary and the Tomb of Christ, venerated since at least the fourth century by countless thousands of Orthodox believers, are marked with question marks to leave open the possibility, also on the map with question marks, that General Gordon’s improbable ‘Garden Tomb’ was the real one.
The main study material, apart from the notes on the text itself, begins on page 755 with Morning and Evening Prayers. These contain traditional material, but are distinctly unorthodox in feel; at least I would be surprised to find an Orthodox Christian whose regular morning and evening prayers made not a single reference to the Mother of God or the Saints. Both Greek and Slavonic books have traditional sets of Morning and Evening Prayers and it was surely not impossible to include one or other of them.
Next we have a long and helpful piece by Bishop Kallistos on ‘How to Read the Bible’. This is by far the best section of the book and in it the Bishop makes a number of important points. For example, ‘A book is not part of Holy Scripture because of any particular theory about its date and authorship, but because the Church treats it as canonical.’ It is a pity that the sort of approach recommended by the Bishop seems not to have been properly taken into account by the other contributors. ‘There is gold’, writes Bishop Kallistos, ‘in the patristic texts, if only we have the persistence and imagination to discover it.’ Sadly the editors on the whole lack that Klondyke spirit. An earlier version of this piece was originally published as a separate pamphlet and it is much to be hoped that this fuller version will also be made widely available in the West as its Russian translation already is in the Commonwealth of Independent States.
There follows a Lectionary for the whole year. This is a useful feature of the book, for those who do not have ready access to an annual calendar. For some reason the eleven Gospels for Sunday Matins are nowhere given, or even listed, though those for Matins of the major Feasts are. The lectionary does, however, contain a number of curiosities. Why, for example, are we informed that the 4th Sunday after Pentecost is the Sunday of the Holy Fathers of the First Six Ecumenical Councils and that it occurs between the 13th and 19th of July, when in most years it does not? The references given are indeed the ones for the 4th Sunday after Pentecost; they are not those for the Fathers. The same remarks apply to the Sunday of the Fathers of the Seventh Council in October. The Lectionary is basically the Slav one and no account is taken of that of the Great Church. The Sundays of Lent on which Saints are commemorated are not given their two sets of Readings, but only those for the Sunday. There is a small selection of Readings for the fixed Feasts, whose dates are given by both the old and new calendars, though this is not explained. Such a list is useful, but not adequate, since on numerous occasions the actual text of the readings does not correspond with the modern verse numbers and on occasion verses are given in a different position from the one in which they are found in the actual scriptural text. For example in the reading from Luke 8:5-15 verse 8b is displaced to the end of verse 15.
There follows a tendentious and wholly unnecessary chapter ‘Introducing the Orthodox Church’. The paragraphs on the so-called Nestorian and Monophysite Churches of the East are most misleading, and of no interest whatever to the Orthodox Christian seeking help in reading the Holy Scripture; nor for that matter are Henry VIII’s matrimonial problems, which are also discussed. There are some surprising statements, such as ‘spontaneity was never the practice in the ancient Church!’, when it is well known that in the early centuries the Eucharistic Prayer was improvised by the bishop. That Christian worship had ‘a basic structure or shape’ does not of itself exclude spontaneity. There is little or no evidence that ‘chrismation [was] there from the start’. The New Testament evidence is all for the apostolic laying on of hands. The section on the early history of the Christian ministry is likewise marked by quite inadequate scholarship. The exegesis of Acts 1:20 shows an extraordinary insensitivity to a sense of history. The remarks on the presbyterate show an equal insensitivity to language; but a sound knowledge of Greek is a not a noteworthy feature of this volume. On page 794 we are told that baptizo means ‘to be plunged’, which was news to me. Elsewhere we learn that the Greek for ‘anointing’ is chrismatis. We are told that the Seven of Acts 6:1-7 were ‘deacons’ though the word is not used of them and St John Chrysostom specifically says that they were not. At Romans 16:1, incidentally, we are not told that Phoebe of the church of Cencreae was a ‘deacon’, only that she was ‘a leading Christian woman’. This whole chapter has absolutely no place in a biblical study guide for the Orthodox; it is simply a piece of not very effective propaganda aimed at those outside the Church. Inquirers are advised, among other things, to attend a liturgy, when, if parts are not in English, ‘the Service Book in the pew will help.’ They will be disappointed when they find neither, and with good reason, in a traditional Orthodox church.
Next we are offered a Glossary. This is explained, but only on the dust jacket, as being ‘of Orthodox Christian terminology’. It starts with a howler. ‘Abba’, as used in first century Aramaic and in the New Testament, is not ‘somewhat equivalent to the English "Daddy".’ Try reading Mark 14:36 with that substitution. The Evangelist, quite correctly, glosses the Aramaic with the word ‘Father’. Many of the entries are however well done, though there is nothing particularly Orthodox about a large number of them. The Glossary is followed by an extremely useful ‘Index to Annotations’ and a list of the traditional Seventy Apostles with the scriptural passages in which their names occur and the dates of their feasts in the Church calendar. A detailed study of the references could be quite interesting. I do not know why there is a second Mark, listed without any scriptural reference under September 27th and October 30, since in both cases the entry in the Synaxarion makes it clear that he is the same as Mark the Evangelist.
This list is followed by a long chapter, reprinted from elsewhere, by the dean of St Athanasius Academy, Jack N. Sparks. This is a somewhat rambling and incoherent piece, but makes a number of useful points about the differences between allegory and typology. It would have been preferable, though, to have asked Fr John Breck of St Vladimir’s to write something, or even for his permission to reprint a chapter from his book on biblical interpretation. This would have been heavier going for the reader but would have packed a good deal more intellectual punch.
The volume ends with a ‘Harmony of the Gospels’, a sort of ‘Write your own Diatessaron’ or ‘Be your own Tatian’, the usefulness of which is obscure, Tables of Monies, Weights and Measures and a Concordance that includes phrases as well as individual words. This comes from some other book—it is paginated quite separately—and covers the whole Bible, not merely the New Testament and Psalter. It would have been better to have provided a fuller concordance for the actual book that the reader is using.
The notes that accompany the text are very full for the New Testament, scrappy to a degree for the Psalms. The notes to the New Testament are on the whole straightforward and some readers will find them a help in understanding many of the words and ideas in the text. Most of them though are dull and many of them jejune in the extreme. As a friend put it to me, they remind one of the notes to some school editions of Shakespeare. ‘King Lear plans to divide his kingdom between his daughters’, or ‘Hamlet wonders if it would be a good idea to commit suicide.’ In this book we find similar notes all too often, such as that on Luke 16:11: ‘True riches signify spiritual treasures’, or that on Luke 16:25 ‘This conversation is not between God and the rich man, but between Abraham and the rich man.’ The level is that of a not very bright Sunday School class. Critical questions are avoided by simply not being discussed at all. This is unsatisfactory, since many readers will be seeking help on just these questions. What should have been provided is an article setting out clearly how an Orthodox reader of the Bible should approach these problems. The solution adopted here is a further instance of what I call the attitude of the double-headed Byzantine ostrich.
Clearly it is not possible to discuss even a small part of this annotation in detail. It is a pity that more explicit reference to the Fathers was not provided. I have noted a number of curious remarks, to put it no more strongly. On Matthew 8:20, ‘Since Son of Man refers to the Messiah (Dan. 7:13), it expresses both His humanity and divinity.’ Since there is nothing divine about the figure in Daniel, doubtful if the figure is the Messiah and doubtful if the expected Messiah was thought to be divine I fail to follow the logic of the comment. The note on Luke 22:48 at least shows some evidence that the writer is aware of recent work on this difficult title. The note on Luke 23:44 tells us that Jesus died on the Cross at the sixth hour, despite the clear statement by St Matthew and St Mark and the clear implication in St Luke that he died at the ninth hour, a belief to which the texts of the Church’s offices make abundant reference. I find no clear evidence that the Greek ekpneo, used at Mark 15:37 of Jesus’ death, ‘connotes a voluntary death.’ This sounds like theologically wishful hermeneutics. The note on John 1:1 fails to notice, though Origen discusses the point at some length, that there is a difference in Greek between ho theos, ‘[the] God’, that is the Father, and theos, ‘God’, without the article, that is ‘God’, but not the Father. In general, what Orthodox readers need is to be helped to enter into the spiritual teaching of the Gospel, which is about theology, in the true sense, about the great mystery of the coming of God incarnate into human history, about the response of the sinner to the loving invitation of Christ. They will hardly be helped to any of this by being told that Luke 24:13-35 is ‘a delightful account of a resurrection appearance of Christ’, which sounds more like a description of the visit of the Bishop to the parish sale of work.
The notes on the Psalms are woefully inadequate. We are told that where a psalm is used in the ‘fixed’ parts of the daily round of offices this will be pointed out. We are not however told that Psalms 19 and 20 form the main part of the Royal Office which precedes the Six Psalms every day at Matins. Psalm 23 is used ‘quite sparingly in the services’, despite the frequent use of the phrase ‘the waters of repose’ in the liturgical texts. We are told that the LXX has ‘Lift up your gates, O Priests’ at Psalm 23.7. So far as I am aware it has ‘you rulers’, in Greek archontes, and I know no of no variant reading. We also learn that ‘verses 7- 10 are proclaimed as the priest knocks on the door of the church on Easter morning’. This is a ceremony unknown to the Triodion and, so far as I am aware, to either Greek or Russian tradition. It seems singularly inept, since the point of the procession in the dark and the entry into the church is to re-enact the coming of the Myrrh bearers to seek for Christ’s Body, only to find the tomb open and filled with light and sweet fragrance. Hence the rubric that while the procession is outside the sacristan is to light a brazier in the church and cast sweet-smelling incense onto it. Psalm 50 is used every day in the Office not ‘three’ times, but ‘four’, but perhaps the editors are unaware of the existence of the Midnight Office. It is the Psalm which begins the daily round and which ends it. Psalm 118 is used every day, except Saturday and Sunday, at the Midnight Office, and is used every Saturday and on most Sundays at Matins. It is thus said nearly every day of the year in the Church’s daily round of prayer. Likewise the Psalms of Ascents (119-133) are the regular Psalms at Vespers during about half the year. They are not, as suggested here, particularly Lenten. In neither Greek nor Russian use is Psalm 136 used ‘throughout Lent itself in the Matins services.’ Psalm 142 is also used daily at Small Compline. The whole of Psalm 144 forms part of the grace before the main meal in monasteries, not just two verses. Since the typikon that underlies this book is clearly most bizarre, it might have been helpful to have been told where it comes from.
In addition to the detailed annotation there are longer notes on major topics interspersed at appropriate places. Many of these are extremely valuable. Thus the one on the Transfiguration correctly notes that the ‘bright cloud’ is the Holy Spirit, and that the Transfiguration is thus a manifestation of the Most Holy Trinity. This point is made a number of times by St John of Damascus. Unfortunately the editor has nodded, because the note on the text of the Gospel suggests that the cloud is a sign of the Presence of God the Father. Another is entitled ‘Mary’. Surely in an Orthodox book she should be called by one of her familiar titles. No Orthodox would refer to her simply as ‘Mary’. ‘Godbearer’ is not a good translation of Theotokos, which is better rendered Mother of God, or She who gave birth to God. ‘God-bearer’ suggests rather theophoros, an epithet applied to numerous Saints, but more particularly to St Ignatios of Antioch. I wonder whether the note on Christology does not water down the Chalcedonian Definition, which states that Christ is ‘consubstantial’ [homoousios] with us in his humanity, rather than simply ‘like us’ as we read here. If this is so, then is he merely ‘like’ the Father? It is surely confusing to write that ‘[Ordination] is extended ... generally to all through Holy Baptism.’
Finally there are a number of icons. These are almost without exception bad. One of the few exceptions is the icon of the Transfiguration. When I came to this one I said to myself, ‘At last, a proper icon’, and I was not surprised, on reading the caption on the next page, to see the name Photios Kontoglou. The others all seem to stem from America. The colours are garish, particularly in those of the Descent into Hades, which is a very long way after the masterpiece in the church of the Saviour in Chora, and of the Baptism, where the Bodiless Powers have a distinctly well-fed, well-scrubbed, suburban look, like cheer leaders for the Washington Redskins. But best of all is the one of St John dictating the Apocalypse. The Apostle, who has been to an expensive Manhatten barber’s shop, is straining to hear the message being dictated from heaven. Either he or St Prochoros are having difficulties, however, since St Prochoros is carefully writing down the first verse of the Gospel!
Once again I have to report on yet another missed opportunity. There is much that some people may find useful in this book, but there is much that is wrong or misleading. It was not to be expected that the ROCOR would have co-operated in such a project, but it needs a good injection of traditional old-fashioned, even old-world, Orthodoxy. Orthodoxy in America, as represented by large parts of the OCA, the Greek Archdiocese and the Antiochene Diocese, has two great temptations, which are not unknown on this side of the Atlantic. On the one hand the former immigrants assert their assimilation by taking on things western, like pews and organs, without sufficient discrimination. I even have a book of church music that includes a transcription into traditional Byzantine neum notation of the Wedding March from Lohengrin, together with an appropriate Greek text. On the other hand the converts tend to bring with them far too much of the baggage of their previous allegiances, even to the introduction of so-called ‘western rites’. We converts to Orthodoxy must be ready to ‘leave all things and follow’ where our Fathers have led. We Orthodox must be prepared to say ‘Come and see.’ But we must strenuously resist every temptation to add, ‘And don’t worry, well try to make it palatable for you.’ Let us hope that those charged with preparing editions of this book for the traditionally Orthodox countries will insist on a thorough overhaul, though they would do better to start again from scratch. There is a profound sense in which it is true to say that Orthodoxy takes centuries to acquire. This book is the product of people who, with the very best of intentions, are going too fast too soon.
- Archimandrite Ephrem (Lash) of St. Andrew's Monastery, Manchester, UK,
posted at http://www.anastasis.org.uk/bible_review.htm
The focal point of an Orthodox church is the Holy Table at the centre of the Sanctuary. All the rest, the frescoes, the icons, the choir stalls, the icon screen, the Holy Doors themselves draw the worshipper’s attention to and culminate in the Holy Altar, or Throne, on which, at the Divine Liturgy, the Word of God is offered in the Sacrifice without shedding of blood. But the Holy Table stands apart in the Holy of Holies. It is not generally visible; during most of the ordinary services it is not used at all. Analogously, the daily round of offices and services, and the other Mysteries of the Church have their focal point, their culmination in the Divine Liturgy itself, the supreme Mystery. The same is true of the Bible. Its centre and focus is the Holy Gospel, which alone lies at the centre of the Altar. All the other books which make up the Holy Scripture lead to or flow from the Holy Gospel. The Bible is the pearl of great price, the treasure hidden in the field. It is not a weapon, even against heresy. We do not read the Holy Gospel ‘to discover Orthodox Christianity’, as the dust jacket of this book suggests, but to hear the Word of God leading us to repentance. Every time the Gospel is read we pray that ‘we may be counted worthy to listen to the Holy Gospel’. There is a profound sense in which the Bible for the Orthodox is not a public thing, any more than the Eucharist is a public thing, but one of the Mysteries of the Faith. Our Lord himself said something very like this: ‘To you has been given to know the mysteries of the Kingdom of heaven, but to the rest in parables.’ Against this background it must be clearly stated from the outset that the whole feel of this volume is wrong. It feels far too much like a piece of evangelical propaganda decked out in the trappings of Orthodoxy, like an eighteenth century New England chapel or meeting house with a golden onion dome stuck over the pediment of the porch.
First of all let us look at the translation used. This is not an Orthodox one at all. The editors have taken the New King James Version (NKJV), which is a slightly modernised (‘You’ not ‘Thou’) re-edition of the version of 1611. They defend this on the grounds that the underlying Greek text of the New Testament in the King James version is closer to the traditional Byzantine text than that of modern critical editions. This is for the most part true and all that they needed to say was that the Byzantine text is the text accepted by the Orthodox Church. Instead they defend their decision on supposedly scholarly grounds. This is irrelevant, except for conservative Evangelicals who wish to justify their conservatism by trying to make it ‘scientifically’ respectable. It also obscures the central point that for the Orthodox the Bible comes from the Church, exists in the Church, lives in the Church. The section of the opening chapter, pages x and xi, which discusses the choice of text, is in fact nothing more than a slightly revised version of the preface to the Revised Authorised Version, pages vi and vii. In adopting this approach the editors allow themselves to be drawn onto the ground chosen by their opponents, when they should have taken their stand on the Orthodox ground that the Church’s text is the Orthodox text, full stop.
Even if the text of the NKJV is on the whole that of the Church, it needs careful checking and revision before it can be called Orthodox. One small example will indicate what I mean. The NKJV, like its ancestor of 1611, which here follows the Latin Vulgate, reads at Luke 23:42, ‘Remember me when you come into your Kingdom.’ This prayer, we are told in a note, ‘is highlighted in the hymns and worship of the Orthodox Church’. It isn’t, because the Church’s Gospel and all the liturgical texts derived from it in both Greek and Slavonic have ‘in your Kingdom’, a reference to the Second Coming of Christ in his kingly power, as described in Matthew 25:31-46.
The marginal note on the story of the woman taken in adultery, John 7:53-8:11, is interesting. We are told that the modem critical editions bracket this is not in the original text, but that they are present in over 900 mss of [St] John. The latter remark shows that the editors have little idea of the basics of textual criticism. They should read A.E. Housman. The status of this passage is curious and it would have been worth pointing out both that St John Chrysostom did not have it in his text and that the Gospel for Pentecost makes exactly the same omission as St John Chrysostom and the modern scholars. The Johannine comma, I John 5:7b-8a, is printed as part of the text, though it occurs in no Greek ms. before the fourteenth century and, for the Fathers at least, it is not part of the Orthodox Bible.
On the difficult word in the Lord’s Prayer, which is traditionally rendered ‘daily’ we read: ‘Daily is a misleading translation of the Greek epiousios, which is literally "above the essence" or "supersubstantial".’ Not for St John Chrysostom it isn’t. He says very simply that it means ‘for the day’, ephemeron. He may be wrong, but his view is at least worth mentioning. Further, the idea that our Lord during his earthly incarnation was acquainted with the technical language of Greek philosophy has interesting implications for Christology. I am not sure it is quite what the Fathers of Chalcedon meant when they declared that Christ is homoousios with us, ‘sin alone excepted’. The corresponding note on Luke 11:3 is far better. This is only one of a number of places which display signs of sloppy editing. The note on Luke 11:2 is a give-away. We read that St Matthew’s version of the Our Father ‘has a slightly stronger liturgical flavor’ than St Luke’s. This is true if one compares the modern texts produced by modern scholars. In the traditional text, as given here, the two are virtually identical. The note presumably derives from a comment on some quite different translation.
Similar observations could be made on page after page of the translation. Finally I must protest most vigorously against the wholly unorthodox inverted Arianism of the typography whereby the words of Christ are printed in salmon pink, while his heavenly Father has to be content with mere black along with Caiaphas and Pontius Pilate. This use of colour is at times seriously misleading. Thus at John 3:16, which is badly translated, it is not clear whether this and the following verses are spoken by Jesus, or whether they are a comment by the Evangelist. They are probably the latter, but the salmon pink type adopted here compels one interpretation only. There are even more serious objections to this practice. What Our Lord did during his earthly life is as important, if not more important, than what he said. Both St John and St Luke make this point. St John ends his Gospel, ‘There are many other things that Jesus did’; nothing about ‘said’. St Luke begins Acts with a look back at the Gospel as the record of ‘all that Jesus began to do and teach’. It is Jesus himself who is the Word of God, and his actual words are only one aspect of the mystery. To highlight only the spoken words of Jesus is a reflection of a peculiarly Anglo-Saxon attitude which effectively reduces Jesus to a teacher of a system of ethics and a teller of picturesque inspirational stories. It is not for nothing that the traditional iconography of the Holy Doors includes not only the Four Evangelists but the Annunciation as well. The reason that the Gospel and the other readings from Holy Scripture are always chanted in the Church and never simply read is to make sure that the readers do not impose, by their inflections and emphases, their own interpretations on God’s word.
When we turn to the text of the Psalter we are in an even worse case. The Church’s Psalter is that of the Greek Septuagint [LXX], and has been since the days of the Apostles. It is the one used in all Orthodox services, and it forms the basis of innumerable liturgical hymns and prayers which are frequently little more than a mosaic of words and phrases from it. If one adds the fact, though the editorial introduction to the Psalter fails to point this out, that the Latin Psalter of the Western Church was itself a translation of the LXX until this century, one can say quite simply that the Christian Psalter is that of the LXX. The editors lamely protest that ‘no suitable translation of the Septuagint is currently available’. Considering the number of names that occupy most of the title page, not to mention the numerous others listed in the introduction, it should have been possible between them to produce a translation of the Psalms. If that was beyond the resources of the editors, they could at least have printed the Psalms with the correct numbering and divided them into the traditional kathismata and staseis of the Church Psalter. To do that does not even require a knowledge of Greek, only access to Miss Hapgood’s compendium of Orthodox services, or Mother Mary’s and Bishop Kallistos’s Festal Menaion. Moreover an Orthodox Psalter contains the text of the Odes used at Matins. There is no trace of them here, nor of Psalm 151. We are told that ‘some compensation is provided by giving the Septuagint text (author’s translation) in the notes for certain psalms’. A rapid run through the notes reveals that the author must be Ebenezer Scrooge. No attempt has been made to give the LXX titles to the psalm, though these are one of the areas in which the patristic commentaries are particularly rich. Where is the title of Psalm 5, ‘For her that shall inherit’, which the Fathers see as referring to the Church, the Bride of Christ? Where is the ‘Song for the Beloved’ in the title of Psalm 44, in which the Fathers see a reference to Christ? In Psalm 67:15 there is not so much as a hint that the words translated ‘curdled mountain’ form one of the most frequent images used in the Church’s poetry for the Mother of God, for reasons that I have set out in detail elsewhere. The NKJV’s ‘mountain of many peaks’ is pointless as an image of the motherhood of the Ever-Virgin. As one might have expected by now, the ‘doctors’ have disappeared from Psalm 97:10. One of St Basil’s favourite verses [Psalm 118:120], which he uses in many of his prayers that we still use in the Office, goes by unnoticed. The ‘author’ would have been well advised to spend a little time with the three volumes of St Nikodemos’s commentary before writing his notes, even if his own familiarity with the Church’s Psalter was such that these things and countless others like them did not spring to mind at once from his familiarity with the Church’s texts.
What then of the Study Guide itself? Some of it looks like unaltered evangelical material, like the chapter entitled ‘How to read the New Testament in a year’. Many of us prefer to follow the Church’s way of reading. The maps also betray their evangelical origins. The sites of Calvary and the Tomb of Christ, venerated since at least the fourth century by countless thousands of Orthodox believers, are marked with question marks to leave open the possibility, also on the map with question marks, that General Gordon’s improbable ‘Garden Tomb’ was the real one.
The main study material, apart from the notes on the text itself, begins on page 755 with Morning and Evening Prayers. These contain traditional material, but are distinctly unorthodox in feel; at least I would be surprised to find an Orthodox Christian whose regular morning and evening prayers made not a single reference to the Mother of God or the Saints. Both Greek and Slavonic books have traditional sets of Morning and Evening Prayers and it was surely not impossible to include one or other of them.
Next we have a long and helpful piece by Bishop Kallistos on ‘How to Read the Bible’. This is by far the best section of the book and in it the Bishop makes a number of important points. For example, ‘A book is not part of Holy Scripture because of any particular theory about its date and authorship, but because the Church treats it as canonical.’ It is a pity that the sort of approach recommended by the Bishop seems not to have been properly taken into account by the other contributors. ‘There is gold’, writes Bishop Kallistos, ‘in the patristic texts, if only we have the persistence and imagination to discover it.’ Sadly the editors on the whole lack that Klondyke spirit. An earlier version of this piece was originally published as a separate pamphlet and it is much to be hoped that this fuller version will also be made widely available in the West as its Russian translation already is in the Commonwealth of Independent States.
There follows a Lectionary for the whole year. This is a useful feature of the book, for those who do not have ready access to an annual calendar. For some reason the eleven Gospels for Sunday Matins are nowhere given, or even listed, though those for Matins of the major Feasts are. The lectionary does, however, contain a number of curiosities. Why, for example, are we informed that the 4th Sunday after Pentecost is the Sunday of the Holy Fathers of the First Six Ecumenical Councils and that it occurs between the 13th and 19th of July, when in most years it does not? The references given are indeed the ones for the 4th Sunday after Pentecost; they are not those for the Fathers. The same remarks apply to the Sunday of the Fathers of the Seventh Council in October. The Lectionary is basically the Slav one and no account is taken of that of the Great Church. The Sundays of Lent on which Saints are commemorated are not given their two sets of Readings, but only those for the Sunday. There is a small selection of Readings for the fixed Feasts, whose dates are given by both the old and new calendars, though this is not explained. Such a list is useful, but not adequate, since on numerous occasions the actual text of the readings does not correspond with the modern verse numbers and on occasion verses are given in a different position from the one in which they are found in the actual scriptural text. For example in the reading from Luke 8:5-15 verse 8b is displaced to the end of verse 15.
There follows a tendentious and wholly unnecessary chapter ‘Introducing the Orthodox Church’. The paragraphs on the so-called Nestorian and Monophysite Churches of the East are most misleading, and of no interest whatever to the Orthodox Christian seeking help in reading the Holy Scripture; nor for that matter are Henry VIII’s matrimonial problems, which are also discussed. There are some surprising statements, such as ‘spontaneity was never the practice in the ancient Church!’, when it is well known that in the early centuries the Eucharistic Prayer was improvised by the bishop. That Christian worship had ‘a basic structure or shape’ does not of itself exclude spontaneity. There is little or no evidence that ‘chrismation [was] there from the start’. The New Testament evidence is all for the apostolic laying on of hands. The section on the early history of the Christian ministry is likewise marked by quite inadequate scholarship. The exegesis of Acts 1:20 shows an extraordinary insensitivity to a sense of history. The remarks on the presbyterate show an equal insensitivity to language; but a sound knowledge of Greek is a not a noteworthy feature of this volume. On page 794 we are told that baptizo means ‘to be plunged’, which was news to me. Elsewhere we learn that the Greek for ‘anointing’ is chrismatis. We are told that the Seven of Acts 6:1-7 were ‘deacons’ though the word is not used of them and St John Chrysostom specifically says that they were not. At Romans 16:1, incidentally, we are not told that Phoebe of the church of Cencreae was a ‘deacon’, only that she was ‘a leading Christian woman’. This whole chapter has absolutely no place in a biblical study guide for the Orthodox; it is simply a piece of not very effective propaganda aimed at those outside the Church. Inquirers are advised, among other things, to attend a liturgy, when, if parts are not in English, ‘the Service Book in the pew will help.’ They will be disappointed when they find neither, and with good reason, in a traditional Orthodox church.
Next we are offered a Glossary. This is explained, but only on the dust jacket, as being ‘of Orthodox Christian terminology’. It starts with a howler. ‘Abba’, as used in first century Aramaic and in the New Testament, is not ‘somewhat equivalent to the English "Daddy".’ Try reading Mark 14:36 with that substitution. The Evangelist, quite correctly, glosses the Aramaic with the word ‘Father’. Many of the entries are however well done, though there is nothing particularly Orthodox about a large number of them. The Glossary is followed by an extremely useful ‘Index to Annotations’ and a list of the traditional Seventy Apostles with the scriptural passages in which their names occur and the dates of their feasts in the Church calendar. A detailed study of the references could be quite interesting. I do not know why there is a second Mark, listed without any scriptural reference under September 27th and October 30, since in both cases the entry in the Synaxarion makes it clear that he is the same as Mark the Evangelist.
This list is followed by a long chapter, reprinted from elsewhere, by the dean of St Athanasius Academy, Jack N. Sparks. This is a somewhat rambling and incoherent piece, but makes a number of useful points about the differences between allegory and typology. It would have been preferable, though, to have asked Fr John Breck of St Vladimir’s to write something, or even for his permission to reprint a chapter from his book on biblical interpretation. This would have been heavier going for the reader but would have packed a good deal more intellectual punch.
The volume ends with a ‘Harmony of the Gospels’, a sort of ‘Write your own Diatessaron’ or ‘Be your own Tatian’, the usefulness of which is obscure, Tables of Monies, Weights and Measures and a Concordance that includes phrases as well as individual words. This comes from some other book—it is paginated quite separately—and covers the whole Bible, not merely the New Testament and Psalter. It would have been better to have provided a fuller concordance for the actual book that the reader is using.
The notes that accompany the text are very full for the New Testament, scrappy to a degree for the Psalms. The notes to the New Testament are on the whole straightforward and some readers will find them a help in understanding many of the words and ideas in the text. Most of them though are dull and many of them jejune in the extreme. As a friend put it to me, they remind one of the notes to some school editions of Shakespeare. ‘King Lear plans to divide his kingdom between his daughters’, or ‘Hamlet wonders if it would be a good idea to commit suicide.’ In this book we find similar notes all too often, such as that on Luke 16:11: ‘True riches signify spiritual treasures’, or that on Luke 16:25 ‘This conversation is not between God and the rich man, but between Abraham and the rich man.’ The level is that of a not very bright Sunday School class. Critical questions are avoided by simply not being discussed at all. This is unsatisfactory, since many readers will be seeking help on just these questions. What should have been provided is an article setting out clearly how an Orthodox reader of the Bible should approach these problems. The solution adopted here is a further instance of what I call the attitude of the double-headed Byzantine ostrich.
Clearly it is not possible to discuss even a small part of this annotation in detail. It is a pity that more explicit reference to the Fathers was not provided. I have noted a number of curious remarks, to put it no more strongly. On Matthew 8:20, ‘Since Son of Man refers to the Messiah (Dan. 7:13), it expresses both His humanity and divinity.’ Since there is nothing divine about the figure in Daniel, doubtful if the figure is the Messiah and doubtful if the expected Messiah was thought to be divine I fail to follow the logic of the comment. The note on Luke 22:48 at least shows some evidence that the writer is aware of recent work on this difficult title. The note on Luke 23:44 tells us that Jesus died on the Cross at the sixth hour, despite the clear statement by St Matthew and St Mark and the clear implication in St Luke that he died at the ninth hour, a belief to which the texts of the Church’s offices make abundant reference. I find no clear evidence that the Greek ekpneo, used at Mark 15:37 of Jesus’ death, ‘connotes a voluntary death.’ This sounds like theologically wishful hermeneutics. The note on John 1:1 fails to notice, though Origen discusses the point at some length, that there is a difference in Greek between ho theos, ‘[the] God’, that is the Father, and theos, ‘God’, without the article, that is ‘God’, but not the Father. In general, what Orthodox readers need is to be helped to enter into the spiritual teaching of the Gospel, which is about theology, in the true sense, about the great mystery of the coming of God incarnate into human history, about the response of the sinner to the loving invitation of Christ. They will hardly be helped to any of this by being told that Luke 24:13-35 is ‘a delightful account of a resurrection appearance of Christ’, which sounds more like a description of the visit of the Bishop to the parish sale of work.
The notes on the Psalms are woefully inadequate. We are told that where a psalm is used in the ‘fixed’ parts of the daily round of offices this will be pointed out. We are not however told that Psalms 19 and 20 form the main part of the Royal Office which precedes the Six Psalms every day at Matins. Psalm 23 is used ‘quite sparingly in the services’, despite the frequent use of the phrase ‘the waters of repose’ in the liturgical texts. We are told that the LXX has ‘Lift up your gates, O Priests’ at Psalm 23.7. So far as I am aware it has ‘you rulers’, in Greek archontes, and I know no of no variant reading. We also learn that ‘verses 7- 10 are proclaimed as the priest knocks on the door of the church on Easter morning’. This is a ceremony unknown to the Triodion and, so far as I am aware, to either Greek or Russian tradition. It seems singularly inept, since the point of the procession in the dark and the entry into the church is to re-enact the coming of the Myrrh bearers to seek for Christ’s Body, only to find the tomb open and filled with light and sweet fragrance. Hence the rubric that while the procession is outside the sacristan is to light a brazier in the church and cast sweet-smelling incense onto it. Psalm 50 is used every day in the Office not ‘three’ times, but ‘four’, but perhaps the editors are unaware of the existence of the Midnight Office. It is the Psalm which begins the daily round and which ends it. Psalm 118 is used every day, except Saturday and Sunday, at the Midnight Office, and is used every Saturday and on most Sundays at Matins. It is thus said nearly every day of the year in the Church’s daily round of prayer. Likewise the Psalms of Ascents (119-133) are the regular Psalms at Vespers during about half the year. They are not, as suggested here, particularly Lenten. In neither Greek nor Russian use is Psalm 136 used ‘throughout Lent itself in the Matins services.’ Psalm 142 is also used daily at Small Compline. The whole of Psalm 144 forms part of the grace before the main meal in monasteries, not just two verses. Since the typikon that underlies this book is clearly most bizarre, it might have been helpful to have been told where it comes from.
In addition to the detailed annotation there are longer notes on major topics interspersed at appropriate places. Many of these are extremely valuable. Thus the one on the Transfiguration correctly notes that the ‘bright cloud’ is the Holy Spirit, and that the Transfiguration is thus a manifestation of the Most Holy Trinity. This point is made a number of times by St John of Damascus. Unfortunately the editor has nodded, because the note on the text of the Gospel suggests that the cloud is a sign of the Presence of God the Father. Another is entitled ‘Mary’. Surely in an Orthodox book she should be called by one of her familiar titles. No Orthodox would refer to her simply as ‘Mary’. ‘Godbearer’ is not a good translation of Theotokos, which is better rendered Mother of God, or She who gave birth to God. ‘God-bearer’ suggests rather theophoros, an epithet applied to numerous Saints, but more particularly to St Ignatios of Antioch. I wonder whether the note on Christology does not water down the Chalcedonian Definition, which states that Christ is ‘consubstantial’ [homoousios] with us in his humanity, rather than simply ‘like us’ as we read here. If this is so, then is he merely ‘like’ the Father? It is surely confusing to write that ‘[Ordination] is extended ... generally to all through Holy Baptism.’
Finally there are a number of icons. These are almost without exception bad. One of the few exceptions is the icon of the Transfiguration. When I came to this one I said to myself, ‘At last, a proper icon’, and I was not surprised, on reading the caption on the next page, to see the name Photios Kontoglou. The others all seem to stem from America. The colours are garish, particularly in those of the Descent into Hades, which is a very long way after the masterpiece in the church of the Saviour in Chora, and of the Baptism, where the Bodiless Powers have a distinctly well-fed, well-scrubbed, suburban look, like cheer leaders for the Washington Redskins. But best of all is the one of St John dictating the Apocalypse. The Apostle, who has been to an expensive Manhatten barber’s shop, is straining to hear the message being dictated from heaven. Either he or St Prochoros are having difficulties, however, since St Prochoros is carefully writing down the first verse of the Gospel!
Once again I have to report on yet another missed opportunity. There is much that some people may find useful in this book, but there is much that is wrong or misleading. It was not to be expected that the ROCOR would have co-operated in such a project, but it needs a good injection of traditional old-fashioned, even old-world, Orthodoxy. Orthodoxy in America, as represented by large parts of the OCA, the Greek Archdiocese and the Antiochene Diocese, has two great temptations, which are not unknown on this side of the Atlantic. On the one hand the former immigrants assert their assimilation by taking on things western, like pews and organs, without sufficient discrimination. I even have a book of church music that includes a transcription into traditional Byzantine neum notation of the Wedding March from Lohengrin, together with an appropriate Greek text. On the other hand the converts tend to bring with them far too much of the baggage of their previous allegiances, even to the introduction of so-called ‘western rites’. We converts to Orthodoxy must be ready to ‘leave all things and follow’ where our Fathers have led. We Orthodox must be prepared to say ‘Come and see.’ But we must strenuously resist every temptation to add, ‘And don’t worry, well try to make it palatable for you.’ Let us hope that those charged with preparing editions of this book for the traditionally Orthodox countries will insist on a thorough overhaul, though they would do better to start again from scratch. There is a profound sense in which it is true to say that Orthodoxy takes centuries to acquire. This book is the product of people who, with the very best of intentions, are going too fast too soon.
- Archimandrite Ephrem (Lash) of St. Andrew's Monastery, Manchester, UK,
posted at http://www.anastasis.org.uk/bible_review.htm
INTRODUCTION
This blog is designed as a gathering place for intelligent and constructive reviews of the Orthodox Study Bible. First published in a volume containing only the New Testament and Psalms in 1993, this year - 2008 - it was finally published with a new Old Testament translation from the Greek Septuagint, along with revised study notes. As of this writing, copies are being delivered to tens of thousands of people around the world.
Included for your consideration are three reviews from the original OSB, which contain some information that continues to be accurate and relevant with regard to the new edition. Hopefully in time, thorough reviews of the new edition will be produced.
Included for your consideration are three reviews from the original OSB, which contain some information that continues to be accurate and relevant with regard to the new edition. Hopefully in time, thorough reviews of the new edition will be produced.
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