SCRIPTURE

SCRIPTURE. The liturgical, including the homiletical, use of Scripture or the Word of God (q.v.) in the Orthodox Church occupies a preeminent place over the written word, used for personal devotion and study. To enjoy the fullness of Scripture and all it refers to, the average Orthodox Christian looks to the parish and monastic liturgical practice for living Holy Tradition (q.v.). What a Biblical text means today is controlled largely by church liturgical usage and homilies about the text rather than by pronouncement. For the Bible to be alive in Holy Tradition, it must be heard and experienced liturgically. Whether it exists in a particular printed form or occupies hierarchical attention in edicts is only relative to the Word living among all the people, hierarchy and laity, now and throughout the ages. To say it differently, the living Word of God is seen manifest in the Old Testament, in Jesus Christ and his words, in those who repeated Jesus’ words before they were written down, in the Church and her liturgical use of a written, “canonical” text, in the Fathers and Mothers of the Church, in contemporary congregations, etc.

The Bible and its interpretation in the Orthodox Church includes such topics as textual tradition, the commentaries of the Church Fathers (q.v.), the history of the canon, the use of the historical-critical method, as well as the liturgical use and interpretation of the text, etc. The Orthodox understand that Scripture originated orally as the liturgy (q.v.) of the people of God and then was written down. For the specialist, the Sitz im Leben of Scripture was the Temple liturgy of Jerusalem and the liturgy of the Church-along with their respective hierarchies. Still, the historical question-what the text meant within its own context-and historical facticity are important. The Orthodox agree with Paul that if Christ was not raised from the dead, then Christian faith is in vain. The Nicene-Constantinopolitan Creed (q.v.) also maintains a similar historical perspective.

The first historical indications of the written Biblical text are the famous episodes of the finding of a book in the Temple and of the dictation by the prophet Jeremiah to Baruch in the 6th c. B.C. The earliest scrolls and manuscripts of the Biblical text (Qumran) are from a much later time, closer to the birth of Jesus. The Bible in its own time was a product of and existed within oral culture(s). Even the written Torah or Pentateuch text, brought from Babylon by Ezra in the 5th c. B.C. was read aloud in its entirety and was accompanied by an oral translation and/or interpretation (Neh 8).

A consensus exists among scholars that the 6th c. B.C., and more especially the time and place of the Babylonian Exile, was the matrix from which the Hebrew Pentateuch and most of the prophetic books emerged in their final written form. Even after the return of the Judahites from Babylon in 538 B.C. and following, the work done there (Babylon) on what is now considered Scripture maintained a certain primacy. The Jewish colonies in Egypt appear to have an uninterrupted presence in that country from the time of the Exile (Jeremiah, Elephantine community, etc.) through the Roman suppression of the Jewish rebellion in the early 2nd c. A.D. It is here that the Greek or Septuagint translation of the Hebrew first appeared in the 2nd c. B.C. A commonly voiced opinion regarding the Hebrew and Greek Bibles, especially regarding the books of the First Covenant (i.e., Old Testament) was and is that the Hebrew Bible was the Jewish Bible, while the Greek was that of the Church. A better description might be that the Hebrew and Greek Scriptures were both legitimate synagogue traditions, and the Church adopted the tradition of the Greek-speaking synagogues.

Historical items that alert us to a parity claimed for the two contemporary traditions are the Letter of Aristeas (ca. 100 B.C.), referring to the Greek translation of the Hebrew, and Ben Sirach or Ecclesiasticus. At the same time as Ben Sirach translated writings from Hebrew to Greek (and possibly before), others translated Biblical books, including the Pentateuch, from Hebrew into Aramaic. The political unity of the ancient world achieved by Alexander the Great and again by the Romans gave Greek an unprecedented ecumenical status among languages, and the Greek language was claimed by the ancients to have superiority over the Hebrew on purely linguistic grounds.

Issues relating to Scripture existed at each of the Seven Ecumenical Councils (q.v.). The primary theological debate over Scripture at the First Council had to do with its use within a common creed, later called the Nicene Creed. Gnosticism and Arianism (q.v.) had created a crisis that only the Greek word “homoousios” or “consubstantial”-a non-Biblical word-could address. The Church Fathers (q.v.) maintained that the description of Jesus Christ as “homoousios” or “of one essence with the Father” was in fact “Biblical,” though the word itself does not appear in the Bible. Other canons from the Ecumenical Councils relate to Scripture: Apostolic Canon #85 is the earliest canonical reference to a list of the books of Scripture. The Orthodox Church’s list of books is the longest of all the churches, containing all the “apocryphal” (in Protestant terminology) books or deuterocanonical books found in the RSV or NRSV. The Metered Poems of St. Gregory the Theologian (mid-4th c.), the Iambics of Amphilocius, Bishop of Seleucus, and African Code, Canon #24 all give advice as to which are the “genuine books” of Scripture. Quinisext, Canon #2 (7th c.) gave blanket approval to all canons previously recognized in the Church. The Seventh Ecumenical Council (787) in its first canon accepted all the canons of the Sixth Ecumenical and the Quinisext, reinforcing the same view.

For contemporary questions regarding Hebrew and Greek Bibles, a few remarks are in order. Since both the Greek and Russian Churches use the Lucianic Septuagint liturgically, there is a tendency among the faithful to romanticize the unanimity of the liturgical witness and beauty of language, depicting the history of the Greek Scriptures as devoid of controversy and independent of the Hebrew. History reveals flaws in this attitude. For example, during the 4th c. there were three different Septuagints in use in the major Christian centers of the eastern Mediterranean: 1) the churches in Antioch and Constantinople (qq.v.) used the Lucianic recension; 2) Caesarea (q.v.) in Palestine utilized a translation by Origen (q.v.) that was updated by Pamphilus and Eusebius (q.v.); and 3) Alexandria (q.v.) had a third recension by a certain Hesychius about which little else is known. The Constantinopolitan practice, based on a translation done by the Presbyter Lucian (who preferred Attic forms), finally won out. (For the history of the Slavic and Russian Bible, see Constantine-Cyril; Gennadievskii Bible; Methodius; Ostrog Bible; Russian Bible.)

Today, the relationships between the various Hebrew and Greek textual traditions have to be taken very seriously. This was illustrated in the 19th c. by Patriarch Philaret of Moscow who oversaw the Russian Bible (q.v.) translation, now published and used in the Russian Church. Similarly, one of the greatest resources illuminating the relationship between the Hebrew and Greek textual traditions has been given us within this century by the discoveries at Qumran. Qumran has proved that both the Hebrew Masoretic text and the Greek Septuagint are faithful and credible witnesses to the ancient traditions and manuscripts. In many ways, certainly because of the discovery and availability of new information, we are currently in a position to do work with Scripture that was impossible even a half century ago.