THE OSTROG CIRCLE AND ITS BIBLE

THE OSTROG CIRCLE AND ITS BIBLE. The first full text of the Church Slavic Bible, after the earlier Gennadievskii Bible (q.v.), was published in 1580 and again with emendations in 1581. Known as the Ostrog Bible after its chief patron, Prince Constantine of Ostrog (Konstanin Ostrozhskii), the work appeared as part of a larger private publishing effort among the Orthodox in Lithuania and Poland, which included liturgical books (q.v.) and religious pamphlets. Although all the publications served apologetic (q.v.) purposes against non-Orthodox Christians, the inspiration for this serious translation project came from a traditional vision of Slavo-Hellenic culture, common to participants in the “Ostrog Circle.”

Trained in Greek, Latin, and Slavic, members of the Ostrog Circle such as Cyril Lukaris (q.v.) rooted their work in their own tradition, while participating in a trilingual “Greek school,” lasting only a few decades. The Prince’s school was a response to the Jesuit-sponsored College of St. Athanasius founded in Rome during the same period to educate Slavs and Greeks in the Unia (q.v.), and the Circle responded strongly to Uniatism. Members of the Circle were exceptional for their time and place and many went on to make history elsewhere.

In methodology of biblical translation the Circle employed classical Church Slavic, while attempting to follow the Greek textual tradition using every available critical resource. Starting first with Gennadius’s Bible, other Greek and Slavic manuscripts were obtained from Constantinople and monastic centers; but the manuscripts were poor. Next they used the (Masoretic) Hebrew text, the Vulgate, and recent Czech and Polish versions. Finally they checked their results against the Aldine Septuagint (Venice, 1518) and the Complutensian Polyglot (Spain, 1522), containing parallel columns of Hebrew, Aramaic, Greek, and Latin Old Testaments, as well as Greek and Latin New Testaments. Clear from this methodolgy is the fact that the Ostrog Slavic Bible cannot be equated with the Septuagint (q.v.), as most people suppose. It is a composite work and does not correspond in every respect to the Greek.

The quality of the Slavic text of the Ostrog Bible compared favorably to other contemporary translations, such as the Sixtus Clementine version of the Vulgate (1592). Georges Florovsky (q.v.) has evaluated the Circle’s translation as a landmark in Slavic biblical history and a monument of scholarship, literature, and theology. All subsequent editions of Church Slavic Bibles have been dependent on the Ostrog text.