The Ancient Church Reappears
[Written in 2011, for Protestants for the
Common Good.]
For many of us, the title of this Study Bible prompts the
question, Who exactly is “Orthodox?” and then, What’s their Bible like? Another quite separate group, however, is the
growing number of English-speaking Orthodox people world wide. Is this really their Bible?
Personal Note: This
project was a Trip! What has become a
chapter-length essay still omits byways, people glimpsed furtively, pastors still not traced, not to mention long
lists of blogs and websites barely touched.
I thought the New Jerusalem Bible review took us far into history behind
the Study Bible, but this one takes us far into the current religious
world—both behind and in the Study Bible!
It’s a long and complex story, but I invite you to stay with it; it is a
story of our time.
Outline
of the Review
The
Orthodox Churches
St.
Athanasius Academy of Orthodox Theology
From
Campus Crusade to Heavenly Liturgy
The
Orthodox Sponsors of the Study Bible
The
Editions of 1993 and 2008
The
Translation of the Septuagint (LXX)
The Remarkable Case of the Psalms
Adverse Reviews, from the Orthodox Side
The Orthodox Approach to Scripture
Reading the Bible with Obedience
Understanding the Bible through the Church
Christ, the Heart of the Bible
The Bible as Personal
Orthodox Interpretations:
The Notes
Orthodox Interpretations:
The Study Articles
Some Evaluative Comments
The Orthodox Churches
Orthodox churches are often
referred to as “Eastern” churches.
That’s because from a West-European viewpoint, all the non-Roman-Catholic
Orthodox churches appeared in the east.
From around 400 of the Christian Era, two great traditions were
gradually separating and shaping peoples and cultures for centuries to
come: The Latin-speaking tradition
(West) and the Greek-speaking tradition (East).
The West clung to the use of Latin in its worship and teaching until early-modern
times, when Protestants replaced Latin with local languages in worship,
teaching, and especially Bible translation.
Christians in the East, however,
gradually transmitted their tradition not only in Greek but also in Semitic
languages such as Syriac and Arabic and in other local languages such as
Coptic, Ethiopic, Armenian, and several Slavic languages. All of these other language groups, however,
translated their Bibles from the Greek scriptures. Thus, all the Greek-heritage churches
followed the Eastern “Orthodox” tradition in both liturgies and scriptures—with
certain exceptions in doctrine. (The
Coptic, Ethiopian, and Armenian churches, for example, were and are “monophysite”—or
more recently “Non-Chalcedonian”—and the old “Nestorian” churches of Persia have
survived as “Assyrian” churches in India and the USA.)
After the Muslim conquests from
638 to 1453 CE, the Greek churches were mostly “People of the Book” communities
in Muslim cultures. The Russian
Church, surviving in strength,
became the “Third Rome,” and was the major Orthodox Church until its own
suppression and diaspora began under the Soviet regimes. The result of these various dispersions,
mostly in the 20th century, was to transplant many Orthodox
communities to the Western world.
The fully Orthodox churches are
those that adhere to the Chalcedonian Creed (defined at the Fourth Ecumenical
Council at Chalcedon, 451 CE), from
which “monophysite” churches dissented.
Currently, “Orthodox Church” means,
a
fellowship of Christian churches that has developed historically from the
Church of the Byzantine Empire. There are
currently fifteen self-governing...churches, including the four ancient
patriarchates of Constantinople, Alexandria,
Antioch, and Jerusalem. The See of
Rome, which is the fifth Patriarchate in the system...established at the
Council of Chalcedon (451), separated from the Orthodox Church [in 1054
CE].
The
HarperCollins Dictionary of Religion, ed. Jonathan Z. Smith, 1995, p.
820.
Of those fifteen self-governing
churches, the major ones for present purposes are,
- The Greek Orthodox Church, headed by the Ecumenical
Patriarch of Constantinople (resident in Istanbul,
Turkey). In the USA,
this is the Greek Orthodox Archdiocese of America (www.GOArch.org).
- The Russian Orthodox Church (ROC), headed by the
Patriarch of Moscow. Currently
represented in the United States
by the Russian Orthodox Church in America
(ROCIA; https://En.Wikipedia.org/wiki/Russian_Orthodox_Church).
- The Antiochian Orthodox Church (Syrian), headed by a
Patriarch resident in Damascus, Syria.
The North American wing of this
Church is the Antiochian Orthodox Christian Archdiocese of North
America (www.Antiochian.org). The Orthodox Study Bible was produced by
a community in this Archdiocese.
- There are many others, national and local, which one
can now easily discover on the internet.
St. George’s Antiochian
Orthodox Church in Cicero, Illinois,
is about to host the 50th National Convention of the Antiochian
Archdiocese in North America (July 24, 2011).
Recent websites and audiotapes claim
300 million members for all the Orthodox churches, making them second only to
Roman Catholicism among Christian communions in the world.
(References: Besides
dictionaries, encyclopedias, and online searches, the following books are recommended: Timothy Ware (Bishop Kallistos of Diokleia), The Orthodox Church, new ed., Penguin
Books, 1997, a classic since its first publication in 1963; Jaroslav Pelikan, The Spirit of Eastern Christendom (600-1700),
“The Christian Tradition,” vol. 2, University of Chicago Press, 1974, a history
of the distinctive theological emphases; The
Blackwell Dictionary of Eastern Christianity, ed. Ken Parry et al.,
Blackwell, 1999, an excellent recent tool; Eastern
Orthodox Theology, a Contemporary Reader, ed. Daniel B. Clendenin, 2nd
ed., Baker Academic, 2003, with two added chapters about American Evangelicals
becoming Orthodox.)
St. Athanasius Academy of Orthodox
Theology
The Orthodox Study Bible was “prepared under the auspices of the
Academic Community of St. Athanasius Academy of Orthodox Theology, Elk
Grove, California. Fr. Jack Norman Sparks, Ph.D., Dean.” (Title
page.)
The Academy’s Website describes it
as follows:
St. Athanasius Academy of Orthodox Theology was founded in 1976
as an arm of the Evangelical Orthodox Church and entered canonical Orthodoxy
when that body was brought into the Antiochian Archdiocese. We offer a
Correspondence Study Program, operate a Prisoner Education Program, and carry
out various programs of research and study to prepare materials presenting the
Orthodox Christian faith to Americans.
... The Orthodox Study Bible: New Testament and Psalms [1993,
predecessor of the full Orthodox Study Bible] is an outstanding example of the
fruit of our literature programs.
The title “Evangelical Orthodox Church” is unusual. When one inquires further into the background
of St Athanasius, the “Evangelical Orthodox Church” leads to a remarkable
story.
From Campus Crusade to the Heavenly
Liturgy
“Even
though the Church on earth lives simultaneously in two dimensions, the heavenly
and the earthly, her worship is focused on the heavenly realm.”
“Heavenly
Worship,” Fr. Richard Ballew [www.protomartyr.org/heaven]. (Father Richard was one of the Evangelicals
who made the journey to Orthodoxy and stayed through the completion of the Old
Testament part of The Orthodox Study
Bible of 2008.)
The remarkable story behind the
making of the Orthodox Study Bible is that the people who created the St.
Athanasius Academy and found a place for their communities in the Antiochian
Orthodox Church evolved from a group of leaders of the Campus Crusade for
Christ in the late 1960s.
Here are two
of the figures who led many in this remarkable journey.
(On Campus Crusade and its history, see:
www.cru.org/us/en/about.html.
For a quite different story of an
Evangelical turned Orthodox, see Frank Schaeffer,
Dancing Alone: The Quest for
Orthodox Faith in the Age of False Religions, Brookline,
MA:
Holy Cross Orthodox Press, 1994.)
Jack Sparks, Dean of St. Athanasius (until his death in 2010), was
a fervent campus crusader at UCLA at the same time that Hal Lindsey was
rapturing students there with The Late
Great Planet Earth (the run-away best seller about the “rapture” of Christians and the imminent end of the world). Jack and his co-worker Paul Raudenbush had
their own evangelical thriller called Letters
to Street Christians, “Translated [from the New Testament Epistles] by Two
Brothers from Berkeley,” Zondervan,
1971. (The target language of the “translation”
was described as “American Slang of the 60s and 70s,” and the back cover says
it was colloquially called “the hippie Bible.”
Four online listings of a 2004 reprint of this book, used, range from
$124 to $712!)
 |
| Fr. Jack Sparks |
Sparks
had gotten a Ph.D. in the secular disciplines and taught statistics and
research design at the University of Colorado
and at Penn State
in the 1960s. Having been converted to
the Jesus Movement, he became a Campus Crusade worker at UCLA in early 1969 and
helped form a group called Christian World Liberation Front. After a few years he had joined other campus
and regional staff members of Campus Crusade for Christ to begin a search for a
more complete experience of Christian community. Several of them began house-church groups
across the country and merged these church groups into the New Covenant
Apostolic Order, 1973. A key leader in
the group—and eventually a key creator of the Orthodox Study Bible—was Peter E.
Gillquist, of whom more in a moment.
The New Covenant Apostolic Order
was dedicated to finding a form of Church life that was authentic—that is, that
was as close to the original Apostolic church as their study, research, and
prayer for guidance could lead them to.
The members of the leadership group were ministering to house churches
and they met several times a year to share their theological and churchly
progress in their common quest.
In their
study they progressed systematically, recapitulating, as it were, the history
of the early church.
They gradually accepted
the need for bishops (the letters of Ignatius of Antioch in the Apostolic
Fathers became decisive reading for them), and then St. Athanasius and the
creeds.
“If anyone could be credited
with our conversion to Orthodoxy, it would have to be St. Athanasius and St.
Ignatius” (Frs. Peter Gillquist and Gordon Thomas Walker, “Odyssey to Orthodoxy,”
see link below).
The whole story of the long
journey from the Evangelical campus radicals to the ordained priests in an
ancient apostolic succession is told by Peter Gillquist in his book,
Becoming Orthodox: A Journey to the Ancient Christian Faith,
Brentwood, TN:
Wolgemuth & Hyatt, 1989 [published two
years after their ordination into the Antiochian Orthodox Church].
An abbreviated version of the journey is on
the internet under the title Odyssey to Orthodoxy
(
http://journeytoorthodoxy.com/2010/05/02 ).
Both versions of the journey use the subtitle, “From Arrowhead Springs
to
Antioch.”
Arrowhead Springs in the
San
Bernardino mountains of
Southern California
was the location of the national headquarters of Campus Crusade for Christ from
1962 to 1991.
 |
| Fr. Peter Gillquist |
Peter Gillquist, main publicist for the group, had grown up a Lutheran in Minnesota, was born again through
Campus Crusade in 1959, got his theological education at Dallas Theological
Seminary (a leading fundamentalist, dispensationalist school) and Wheaton
Graduate School. He became a Campus
Crusade staff member based in Evanston, Illinois,
but worked variously at Notre Dame, UCLA, and the University
of Memphis. Eventually he spent eleven years on the staff
of Thomas Nelson Publishers in Nashville, where he served briefly on one of the
Overview committees on the New King James Version of the Bible (eventually
published in 1982, and then the version used for the NT of the Orthodox Study
Bible). Nelson eventually became the
publisher of the full version of the Study Bible. Throughout and beyond this work, Gillquist
took leadership in the search for the authentic early church.
When the New Covenant Apostolic
Order was fully ready, they cut the knot and declared themselves to be
Orthodox. Having discovered the
importance of bishops, they found a way to acquire some.
The six of us who originated the
movement...secured a liturgy for the consecration of Bishops, formed a circle
and consecrated one another. Then we
went to our first official council and consecrated thirteen other men. That day, February 15, 1979, the Evangelical Orthodox Church was
officially born. (Gillquist and Walker,
“Odyssey to Orthodoxy,” section titled “The E.O.C. is Born.”)
The story of how this new
Evangelical Orthodox Church eventually secured admission to a Church with
authentic apostolic succession—unbroken succession from bishop to bishop since
the days of Peter and Paul—is complicated, but after missing out with the Greek
Orthodox Patriarch in Istanbul, the Antiochian (Syrian) Patriarch happened to
be in the USA at the right time, and the former Campus Crusaders and their
later followers (all two thousand of them) were admitted to the communion of
the North American Archdiocese of the Antiochian Orthodox Church in 1987. At that time, Jack Sparks, Peter Gillquist,
and several others were ordained as deacons, and subsequently as priests of
their own congregations.
The St. Athanasius Academy had
been formed in 1976, while the Evangelical Orthodox Church was based at St.
Athanasius Orthodox Church in Goleta, California,
near Santa Barbara. The first publication of the Orthodox Study
Bible—New Testament and Psalms only—was published from that location. (The EOC established its own publishing house
around that time, the Conciliar Press, which now produces much of the Academy’s
literature, including the Orthodox Study Bible: NT and Psalms edition, which was originally
published by Thomas Nelson in 1993.)
In the published versions of the
Arrowhead Springs to Antioch story,
the narratives culminate in discussions aimed mainly at Evangelical Christians,
answering their objections or doubts about “becoming Orthodox.” That is to say, St. Athanasius Academy is a
strongly evangelistic body, seeking to “win America
for Orthodoxy.” Peter Gillquist has long
held the position of Chairman of the Department of Mission and Evangelism for
the entire Archdiocese of North America.
It is especially American Evangelicals who are appealed to both in the
writings and in the many online blogs maintained by the Orthodox
believers.
The Orthodox Sponsors of the Study Bible
The title page of the Study Bible
refers to some authorities who did not come to Orthodoxy from a Protestant
Evangelical background. One General
Editor of the Old Testament is Metropolitan
MAXIMOS, Th.D. (A Metropolitan is in
between a bishop and an archbishop.) In
the Greek Orthodox Church in America,
there are eight metropolises in the Archdiocese of America.
 |
| Metropolitan Maximos |
MAXIMOS was appointed
first Bishop of Pittsburg in the GOC in 1979, now under his Eminence Demetrius,
Archbishop of America. (Note: this is the Greek Orthodox Church, not the
Antiochian Orthodox Archdiocese.) MAXIMOS was elevated to Metropolitan in 1997,
still in Pittsburg, indicating
significant growth for Orthodoxy in that jurisdiction in eighteen years. According to its website, the Metropolis now contains
52 parishes in Pennsylvania, Ohio,
and West Virginia, and three
monastic communities.
Metropolitan MAXIMOS is listed as
a General Editor of the Study Bible, not simply a member of the Overview
Committee. There are only six General
Editors of the Bible, while there are 29 members of the Overview Committee
consisting of Archbishops, Metropolitans, Bishops, and Fathers, who are named
on the title page. While it is clear
that Metropolitan MAXIMOS was a busy administrator during the years the
Orthodox Study Bible was produced, he was also a substantial theologian by
training in the Greek and European worlds before assuming his administrative
roles in America.
He was born on the Greek island of
Chios in 1935, graduated from the Patriarchal Theological Seminary of Halki,
Greece, in 1957, was ordained priest on Chios in 1959, and received a D.Th.
from the University of Louvain (Belgium) in 1964. He was then transferred to America
and served as Professor of Systematic Theology at the Holy Cross School of
Theology (Greek Orthodox) in Brookline, Massachusetts,
from 1966 to 1979, where he also served as academic dean. When he was appointed first Bishop of
Pittsburg in 1979, he was also assigned to teach systematic theology at Christ
the Savior Theological Seminary in Johnstown, Pennsylvania,
where he taught until 1985. Meanwhile he
had been appointed Bishop of Diokleia (Turkey)
in 1978 as an ecclesiastical stepping stone to becoming Bishop and then
Metropolitan in the rapidly growing American upper Midwest.
It is surly safe to say that
Metropolitan MAXIMOS was made General Editor of the OSB to give the approval of
both his high office and his distinguished theological career to the enterprise
of that publication, not because he was available as a working editor and
translator on the project. His work must
have consisted in reviewing and approving the work of others.
In 2000, when the LXX project was
well under way, Metropolitan MAXIMOS, unable to attend a major meeting, had
written,
I wish to express to you my
undivided support and enthusiasm for this ongoing project. I look forward to
the opportunity when I can devote the necessary time to the project. This is an
important, indeed historical, work of scholarship.
 |
| Prof. Eugen Pentiuc |
Prof. Eugen Pentiuc. Also
listed as an Old Testament General Editor for the OSB is Eugen Pentiuc, Th.D.,
Ph.D.
(See
www.Pentiuc.com .)
Here, instead of a senior church leader, we
have a young scholarly teacher with both East-European background and
high-profile American training.
Pentiuc was born in Romania
in 1956, received a Licentiate in Theology from the Bucharest Orthodox
Institute of Theology in 1979, studied at the Ecole Biblique in Jerusalem
(Roman Catholic Dominican) in 1986, then at Harvard University Department of
Near Eastern Languages and Civilizations, where he received an M.A. in 1996 and
a Ph.D. in 1997. The Orthodox School of
Theology in Bucharest then granted
him a Th.D. in 1998. His Harvard
dissertation on West-Semitic Vocabulary was published in 2001. Since then he has published more popular
works, Jesus the Messiah in the Hebrew
Bible, Paulist Press, 2006, and Long-Suffering
Love: A Commentary on Hosea, Holy
Cross Orthodox Press, 2008.
From 2003, Pentiuc was a popular
teacher in Religious Studies at Hellenic
College in Brookline,
Massachusetts, where he was honored as
Teacher of the Year three years in succession (2005-2007). He then became Assistant Professor of Hebrew
and Old Testament at the sister institution, Holy Cross School of
Theology. There had been a brief return
to Romania as
Visiting Professor at the Orthodox School of Theology in Bucharest
in 2004.
Pentiuc obviously qualified as a
full-time scholar in Old Testament in the American academic world, however he
may have been actually used in the editorial work of the Orthodox Study
Bible.
(The translation of the Old
Testament for that work had begun in 1998 and was on-going until almost 2008;
more below.)
 |
| Fr. Michel Nijim |
Fr. Michel Najim. One other
Orthodox figure is listed as General Editor, for both Old Testament and New
Testament, a figure who played an unusual role in the longer-term
enterprise: Michel Najim. Father Michel was a native of Lebanon,
his first theological training coming at Balamand
University in Tripoli,
where he received an M.Div. in 1974. He
then studied in Greece,
receiving an M.Th. in 1976 and a D.Th. in 1985 from Aristotelian
University in Salonika. He then taught, and served as Dean, at St.
John of Damascus Theological School, Balamand, Lebanon
from 1979 to 1987.
At that point in his promising
career, Father Michel was selected by his ecclesiastical authorities to go to
the United States
for an unusual assignment. He was
appointed “Catechismal Instructor”
at St Athanasius Academy in Santa Barbara, California. The position is listed in his curriculum vita
as follows:
Catechismal Instructor, St Athanasius
Academy, CA (1987-1996). Transferred from Lebanon
and given the responsibility for catechismal instruction of several thousand
converts brought into the Antiochian Archdiocese in 1987.
The “several thousand converts” he
was assigned to instruct were, or included, the mass of former Evangelical
Protestants who had formed the Evangelical Orthodox Church and been accepted
into the Antiochian Orthodox Archdiocese.
The leaders of that group had already created St. Athanasius Academy (1976)
as the center of their Orthodox education, research, and publication. Father Michel was to guide these pilgrims
into the truly Apostolic way of being the Church—Tradition, liturgies, Septuagint
scriptures, icons, and the rest.
While on the faculty of St. Athanasius in Santa Barbara, Father Michel also assisted at the large St.
Nicholas Antiochian Orthodox Cathedral in downtown Los Angeles (2300 W. Third Street). By 1996, as
the catechismal work tapered off, he was appointed Dean and Pastor of St.
Nicholas, where he still serves. St.
Nicholas is a bilingual congregation,
Arabic-English, and Father Michel was involved in translation work on liturgies
and other literature from the beginning.
He was Co-Chair of the Department of Liturgies and Translation of the
Antiochian Archdiocese, 1988-1997, and a member of the Liturgical Translation
Committee of the Standing Conference of Orthodox Bishops in America (SCOBA) from
1993 to 1995. For English speakers in the Antiochian Tradition, the task was to
get the liturgies, rites, and lectionaries from both Greek and Arabic into
appropriate English. (Arabic is, of
course, the local language of the Antiochian Church in Syria, and websites for Antiochian Orthodox Churches are
presented in both Arabic and English.)
It is important to recall that the
first edition of the Orthodox Study Bible, the New Testament and Psalms of
1993, was being created during the years of Father Michel’s “catechismal”
work.
He would, then, have been working
closely with the other St. Athanasius scholars while that edition was being
shaped.
The New Testament was not
translated newly from the Greek, however, so Father Michel’s facility in Greek
would not have been important for the project in that respect.
(The OSB New Testament was simply Thomas
Nelson’s New King James Version taken over and given Orthodox
annotations.)
During the Old Testament
work of the OSB, done between 1998 and 2007, Father Michel would have been more
heavily engaged in the work of the Cathedral, even though the Study Bible
translators were primarily involved with the Greek of the Old Testament.
Father Michel was undoubtedly very
influential in the early stages of the Study Bible project at St.
Athanasius. In the final analysis,
however, he too was probably most useful to the advanced project as a
highly-respected Dean and Pastor of St. Nicholas Cathedral and a teacher whose
approval would carry much weight among Orthodox and Arabic-speaking people in California
and among Antiochian circles in Lebanon
and Greece.
The Editions of 1993 and 2008.
The leaders of the Evangelical Orthodox
Church (1979-1987) had had strong roots in Protestant Bible-focused worship and devotion. They had grown up with the Bible all around
them, several kinds of study Bibles included.
The Orthodox Churches, however, had no study Bibles at all! What the Orthodox Churches did have was Tradition. Peter Gillquist’s book Becoming Orthodox has a chapter entitled, “The ‘T’ Word.” The great leap for Evangelical Protestants
was the fact that Tradition gives the Church its Bible, rather than the
reverse. The challenge for the
Evangelical Orthodox folks was to find a way to have the Bible—and maybe an
Orthodox Study Bible—in ways that fit Orthodox Tradition.
The Study Bible of 1993 was the
first response to that challenge. It
contained only the New Testament and the Psalms, but it established the main
lines of the full Study Bible of 2008. The
components of that New Testament and Psalms edition that carried over, with
additions and revisions, to the full-Bible edition were:
- The NKJV text (New Testament and Psalms);
- The running
annotations, with numerous quotes from the Church fathers;
- An Essay: Introducing the Orthodox Church;
- Study
Articles: For example, “The Sermon
on the Mount,” “Parables,” etc.;
- A few
Icons (glossy prints of modern icons, in extravagant colors);
- An Essay: How to Read the Bible;
- Lectionary
readings for the Church Year;
- A Glossary;
- Morning
Prayer Service and Evening Prayer Service;
- Index
to Annotations;
- Index
to Study Articles;
- A list
of the Seventy (disciples sent out besides the twelve, Luke 10:1-24);
- Color
Maps.
Some items of the 1993 edition were
dropped in 2008: An Essay by Jack
Sparks, a Harmony of the Gospels, and a Concordance.
Without changing the original
format, the 2008 edition added more Study Articles (these are all one-page
essays), now addressing OT topics like “Creation” and “Covenants.” The whole Bible of 2008 has 47 Study
Articles, 20 of them in the Old Testament.
More Icons were also added; there are twelve in the 2008 Bible, only
three of which are Old Testament topics (as these are usually identified). However, the
major addition in the 2008 edition is the translation of the Old Testament
in Greek.
The Septuagint (LXX). Protestants
typically don’t realize that the Septuagint was the Christian Old Testament
until the Reformation, a modest exception being Jerome’s translation of much of
the fourth-century Hebrew text into the Vulgate. (However, Augustine preferred the Latin versions that
had been translated from the Greek, and Jerome’s new-fangled Psalms from the
Hebrew could never displace the Latin Psalms based on the Greek versions.) The Psalms and the Deuterocanonical books
even in the Vulgate were Latin renderings of the Greek Scriptures. And the New Testament writers virtually all
quote “the scriptures” from the Septuagint, a point that the Greek Fathers of
the Church did not miss. For them, the
Septuagint was the inspired Scriptures.
Thus, the Orthodox Churches have
always and only had the Greek Scriptures (or translations from the Greek) for
their Old Testaments. It was never a
decision; it just was the case. (No
Ecumenical Council ever fixed the canon or text of the Scriptures—until the
Council of Trent in 1563; the “Scriptures” were always “what the churches read
and received.”) “Tradition” determined
what was and was not Scripture—universally, that is “catholically.”
Naturally, the only Old Testament
for an Orthodox Study Bible would be the Septuagint, which must then be given
in English.
The Translation of the Septuagint (LXX)
While publishers are falling over
themselves with translations of the “Hebrew” scriptures—translations made from
the Jewish “Masoretic Text”—there are practically no translations of the
Septuagint. When St. Athanasius Academy
began to make its own translation of the LXX, there was only one English
version of it in print, a translation published in 1851 by a British scholar
named Sir Lancelot Brenton. (An older
translation of the Septuagint, by Charles Thomson, 1808, has been revived and
is now also available [see Amazon.com and search for "Charles Thomson"].) Therefore, St Athanasius Academy at
the beginning of its project set out to make their own English translation of
the Septuagint.
The plan for the translation
project is explained on the OSB website (slightly edited in these excerpts) [This was on line in 2011, but is no longer available.] :
Spearheading the
project was Fr. Jack Sparks as Project Director, with the close assistance of
Fr. Richard Ballew, and Fr. Peter Gillquist as Director of Development.... [T]he
following time-line [was] projected:
·
first drafts of translations and
notes in by July 15, 2001;
·
first editing completed by July 15, 2002;
·
back to original workers for their
further comments—to be returned by July 15, 2003;
·
final document completed by
general editors and the manuscript to the publishers by August 31, 2004.
...Inquirers commonly ask about how the translators
did their work. It was done by taking the
New King James Version of the Bible as a starting point and changing it
everywhere it differed from the Septuagint, with the result being a new and
thorough translation. [Italics added.]
While it is impossible to mention every translator,
techy, and editor who has contributed to the LXX Project, the general
editors—those key scholars who went over the final text and notes before
sending it off to the publisher—are as follows:
·
Metropolitan MAXIMOS, Greek
Orthodox Diocese of Pittsburgh;
·
the Rev. Dr. Michel Najim, former
Dean of Balamand Seminary in Lebanon
and currently Dean of St. Nicholas Cathedral in Los
Angeles;
·
the Rev. Dr. Eugen Pentiuc,
professor of Old Testament, Holy Cross Orthodox School of Theology; and
·
the Rev. Dr. Jack Sparks, Dean of
St. Athanasius Academy.
As the project has now been seen through to
completion, for the first time in history there exists a complete text of the
Orthodox Bible in the English language, with the added features of notes and
commentary, making it the only complete Orthodox Study Bible in the world.
Thanks be to God!
The Remarkable Case of the Psalms.
Apparently getting the Psalms translated from Greek presented special problems
during the decade from 1998 to 2007.
There are enough hints and slurs about that project to indicate a
complex story.
The Psalm translation of 1993 was
simply that of the New King James Version—thus a translation of the Jewish
Masoretic Text rather than of the Greek text of the Orthodox Church. The Psalms are recited constantly in the
liturgies and lectionaries of the Church; they are even more firmly familiar
than the Gospels. The problem here was
not past familiarity; there was no English version of the Greek Psalms. The problem here was to establish an English version of the Greek Psalms that could become
the Orthodox tradition in English.
Somewhere between 1993 and 2007,
the managers of the Septuagint project apparently considered including a
translation of the Psalms by
Father
Patrick Reardon.
Patrick Henry
Reardon began as an Evangelical who studied at Southern Baptist Theological
Seminary in Louisville, then at the Pontifical Biblical Institute in Rome, and finally
(after converting to Orthodoxy) at St. Tikhon’s Theological Seminary in South
Canaan, Pennsylvania.
He became the
pastor of an Orthodox church in
Pennsylvania,
and then was transferred to All Saints Church in
Chicago
in 1998.
In those years as pastor he
taught a series of classes on the Psalms which became a book in 2000,
Christ in the Psalms, published by
Conciliar Press (the affiliate of St. Athanasius Academy).
One negative reviewer of the St. Athanasius
translation commented that “the project became the
dubious, embarrassing 'translation' that we all
have seen,” and continued, “One only need ask Father Patrick Reardon what
happened to his translation of the Psalms...,” implying dire and unhappy
outcomes. (http://orthodoxwiki.org/Orthodox_Study_Bible
) Some at least did not view the process
very positively as it went on.
Somewhat later, there was another candidate for translating the
Psalms. The Wikipedia article on the
Orthodox Study Bible has the statement, “The Old Testament includes a new
translation of the Psalms
by Donald Sheehan of Dartmouth College.”
Donald Sheean taught poetry
at the University of Chicago from about 1969 to 1989, during which time he also
became first Executive Director of the (Robert) Frost Place in Franconia, New
Hampshire. He was accepted into the
Orthodox Church in 1984 and was ordained a subdeacon in 1987. In 1989 he resigned his position at the University
of Chicago and lived out a rigorously spiritual life in New Hampshire, teaching
at Dartmouth College until retirement in 2004.
According to a former student and to Sheehan’s wife Carol, Donald Sheehan
completed a translation of the Septuagint Greek Psalms in 2003. His wife is currently [written in 2010]
completing final edits and raising funds to finance the book’s publishing by
New World Byzantine Studios.
(Source: Sheehan’s obituary at
Dartmouth, after his death on May 26, 2010.
Thus it appears that two different
scholars had produced translations of the Greek Psalms on the understanding
that their work would be used in the Orthodox Study Bible, only to be
disappointed in that project. The
project ended up instead using a revised version of the New King James Version
for its Orthodox faithful. One can only
guess at the editors’ reasons for these turbulent changes.
Thus, the Old Testament (not just
the Psalms) of the OSB turned out not to be a new translation of the
Septuagint.
It is instead a
Revision of the New King James Version
based on the Greek of the Septuagint.
Peter
Gillquist did a taped interview, available on line, in which he discussed the the production of the OSB. (This 14-minute interview of Gillquist is itself an excellent introduction to the OSB!) [
http://audio.ancientfaith.com/interviews/osb_pc.mp3
] He acknowledged that matters of cost of production and publisher’s interest (a
Board chairman at Thomas Nelson publishers was a very interested Orthodox
Church member, and Gillquist himself had worked for Thomas Nelson for eleven
years) influenced the final decision to base the translation on the NKJV.
Adverse
Reviews, from the Orthodox Side
When the 1993 edition of the
Orthodox Study Bible (New Testament and Psalms) came out it was a new thing
under the sun.
Its sales soared and it
was clear there was an audience out there for it.
There were many positive responses from
important Orthodox Church people as well as sympathetic readers in the
religious public.
There were, however,
several responses from more particular Orthodox scholars and churchmen who made
mild to scathing adverse criticisms.
(See
three quotations and links under the heading “Criticism” in Orthodox-Wiki,
http://orthodoxwiki.org/Orthodox_Study_Bible
)
A Father Seraphim Johnson
commented, “As one reads the notes to the text, a false, non-Orthodox tone
becomes uncomfortably apparent.”
If it’s
really going to be a sales pitch to Evangelicals, say so.
“[I]t would be better to advertise the Bible
as ... 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.”
[
http://orthodoxinfo.com/phronema/review_osb2.aspx
]
A particularly sophisticated
critique was written, and republished more recently, by Archimandrite Ephrem (Lash)
in
Great Britain.
This review is formally polite, but with a
devastating undertone of disdain for such American and Evangelical folly.
Some of this review’s points will be
mentioned in later discussions.
[This review was available in 2011, but Archimandrite Ephrem's home page no longer has it. He died in 2016. Archimandrite Ephrem published many English translations of Orthodox liturgical texts -- how an Orthodox can praise and pray in English. See
https://orthodoxwiki.org/Ephrem_(Lash)
The Orthodox Approach to Scripture
Adverse critic Archimandrite Ephrem
singled out one really good thing in the 1993 edition of the OSB:
The article, “How to Read the
Bible,”
by The Right Reverend KALLISTOS,
Bishop of Diokleia.
(This is the writer Timothy Ware,
author of The Orthodox Church.)
This article is uniformly approved by other Orthodox
writers, whatever their opinion otherwise of The Orthodox Study Bible.
Apparently this powerful article had a life of its own before inclusion
in the Study Bible, and its quality sets it apart from the other light-weight
contributions from highly-placed church dignitaries (such as the preceding
essay on “The Bible: God’s Revelation to
Man”). This essay is presented here at
length, because it is the strongest statement in the book of what the Bible
means in the Orthodox Tradition.
 |
| Bishop Kallistos |
The essay begins by quoting a statement on Scripture from the
Moscow Conference of Orthodox and Anglican representatives in 1976—a Conference
in which the writer (a subject of the United
Kingdom), no doubt participated.
The Scriptures constitute a coherent whole. They are at once
divinely inspired and humanly expressed.
They bear authoritative witness to God’s revelation of Himself in
creation, in the Incarnation of the Word, and in the whole history of
salvation, and as such express the word of God in human language. We know, receive, and interpret Scripture
through the Church and in the Church.
Our approach to the Bible is one of obedience. (OSB, p. 1757.)
The rest of the essay is organized
around four adjectives which Bishop Kallistos says characterize “the Orthodox
Scriptural mind”: It is Obedient,
Ecclesial, Christ-centered, and Personal.
A section of the essay is devoted to each characteristic.
Reading the Bible with Obedience (pages 1757-1760). The Orthodox mind is obedient to Scripture
because it is divine revelation; “the Bible possesses a fundamental unity, a
total coherence, for it is the same Spirit that speaks on every page.” Like the Incarnation, though, the Scripture is
also fully human: “Each work in the
Bible reflects the outlook of the age in which it was written and the
particular viewpoint of the author.”
We Orthodox Christians neglect at
our peril the results of independent scholarly research into the origin, dates
and authorship of the books of the Bible, although we shall always want to test
these results in the light of Holy Tradition.
Being “obedient” to Scripture
requires two qualities: a sense of
wonder, and an attitude of listening. Wonder
should be evoked by all the mysteries and undiscovered “rooms” of Scripture,
like a child exploring the spaces in a wondrous mansion.
The model for listening is the
Theotokos, the Mother of God. (Orthodox folks do not refer to the Virgin simply
as “Mary,” in spite of the title of the Study Article on page 1361!).
When we enter an Orthodox Church,
decorated in the traditional way, and look up towards the sanctuary, we see
there in the apse the figure of the Mother of God with her hands raised to
heaven—the ancient Scriptural manner of praying that many still use today. Such is also to be our attitude to
Scripture—an attitude of openness and attentive receptivity, our hands invisibly
outstretched to heaven.
The Virgin was receptive to the
annunciation by the angel Gabriel, and she responded to the events of the
nativity and childhood of Jesus by “keeping all these things and pondering them
in her heart.” In such things, she “serves
as a mirror and living icon of the biblical Christian.”
Understanding the Bible through the Church (pages 1760-1763). The Orthodox Scriptural mind is “ecclesial,”
which means (1) that the Bible is received through the Church, since the Church
historically identified and maintained the Scriptures, and (2) the Scriptures
are interpreted by the church. Bishop
Kallistos hits his stride when presenting the liturgical interpretation of the Scriptures.
To illustrate what it means to
interpret Scripture in a liturgical way, let us consider the Old Testament
lessons at Vespers for the Feast of the Annunciation (March 25)... At the Annunciation there are five
readings:
(1) Genesis 28:10-17, Jacob’s dream
of a ladder set up from earth to heaven.
(2) Ezekiel 43:27-44:4, the
prophet’s vision of the Jerusalem
temple, with the closed gate through which none but the Prince may pass.
(3) Proverbs 9:1-11, one of the
great Sophianic passages in the Old Testament, beginning “Wisdom has built her
house.”
(4) Exodus 3:1-8, Moses at the
Burning Bush.
(5) Proverbs 8:22-30, another
Sophianic text, describing Wisdom’s place in God’s eternal providence: “Ages ago I was set up, at the first, before
the beginning of the earth.”
In these passages from the Old
Testament, then, we have a series of powerful images to indicate the role of
the Theotokos [the Greek means “God-bearer,” but its standard translation is “Mother
of God”] in God’s unfolding plan of salvation.
She is Jacob’s ladder, for by means of her God comes down and enters our
world, assuming the flesh that she supplies.
She is both Mother and Ever-Virgin; Christ is born from her, yet she
remains still inviolate, the gate of her virginity sealed. She provides the humanity or house which
Christ the Wisdom of God (I Cor 1:24)
takes as His dwelling; alternatively, she is herself to be regarded as God’s
Wisdom. She is the Burning Bush, who
contains within her womb the uncreated fire of the Godhead and yet is not
consumed. From all eternity, “ages
ago...before the beginning of the earth,” she was forechosen by God to be His
Mother.
Reading these passages in their
original context within the Old Testament, we might not at once appreciate that
they foreshadow the Saviour’s Incarnation from the Virgin. But, by exploring the use made of the Old Testament
in the Church lectionary, we can discover layer upon layer of meanings that are
far from obvious at first sight.
(And perhaps in this last comment
we have a clue to the appeal to the Evangelicals: whole new vistas of Scriptural meanings are
opened up by searching the Scriptures as part of the liturgies and lectionaries
of the Orthodox Tradition. The
Scriptures become vastly more intricate—and interesting, after decades of
dispensational interpretations had become pretty boring!)
Christ, the Heart of the Bible (pages 1763-1764). What makes the whole Bible Christian is
Christ. “He is the unifying thread that
runs through the entirety of the Bible, from the first sentence to the
last. Jesus meets us on every
page.”
Much study of Scripture by modern
western scholars has adopted an analytical approach, breaking up each book into
what are seen as its original sources.
The connecting links are unraveled, and the Bible is reduced to a series
of isolated units.... Orthodoxy prefers for the most part a “synthetic” rather
than an analytical style of hermeneutics, seeing the Bible as an integrated
whole, with Christ everywhere as the bond of union.
The Bible as Personal (pages 1764-1766). Saint Mark the Monk
(fifth/sixth century): “He who is humble
in his thoughts and engaged in spiritual work, when he reads the Holy
Scriptures, will apply everything to himself and not to his neighbor.”
I am to see all the narratives of
Scripture as part of my own personal story.
The description of Adam’s fall is equally an account of something in my
own experience.... “Where is Abel your brother?” is addressed to the Cain in
each of us. The way to God lies through
love for other people, and there is no other way.
This personal approach involves
three steps in reading the Scriptures.
First you read to hear the sweep of the sacred history, from creation, through promised land, to “God
Himself incarnate in Palestine,” to
the mighty works of the Church’s history.
Then you read for the particularity
of that history. “If you really love
the Bible, you will love genealogies and details of dating and geography. One of the best ways to enliven your study of
Scripture is to go on pilgrimage to the Holy Land....”
But the third step is to apply
this history and its particularity directly to ourselves. We are to say to ourselves, “These are not
just distant places, events in the remote past.
They belong to my own encounter with the Lord. The stories include me.”
The Bible is not merely a work of
literature or a collection of historical documents, although certainly it can
be approached on that level. It is, much
more fundamentally, a sacred book,
addressed to believers, to be read
with faith and love. We shall not profit
fully from reading the Gospels unless we are in love with Christ. “Heart speaks to heart”: I enter into the living truth of Scripture
only when my heart responds with love to the heart of God.
Orthodox Interpretations: The Notes
The Orthodox interpretation of the
Scriptures is presented mainly in the running Notes and in the Study
Articles. Some early reviewers
complained that the study notes were too simplistic, that they often amounted
only to crib-notes re-stating the content of the Biblical text. In this connection, it may be noted that the
editors had emphasized that they aimed the study materials at the comprehension
level of a high-school graduate—not at scholars (“Introduction to the Orthodox
Study Bible,” page xii).
Another complaint of early reviewers,
especially critics guarding the Orthodox heritage, was that not enough
quotations were given from the great classic “Fathers” who established the
Church’s readings of the Scriptures in ancient times. Bishop Kallistos had especially recommended
“the biblical homilies of St. John Chrysostom, which are available in English
translation in the series Nicene and
Post-Nicene Fathers, reissued by Eerdmans” (page 1763; “A second step [in
finding the “mind of the Church”] is to consult the writings of the Church
Fathers, especially St. John Chrysostom,” page 1761).
For better or for worse, many Progressive
people have learned in the last half century to think of John Chrysostom as one
of the most anti-Jewish of the ancient Church Fathers, though some emphasize
that Chrysostom’s sermons “Against the Jews” were only aimed at Christians who
were attending Jewish liturgies and festivals (see Wikipedia, “John
Chrysostom,” under “Writings”).
Nevertheless, the editors of the
complete OSB sought to include lots of quotes from the Fathers. The Index to Annotations shows 185 Biblical
passages in which St. John Chrysostom is cited, compared to 71 for St.
Athanasius, 35 for Basil the Great, 37 for Pope Gregory the Great, and only 18
for the great Western counterpart to Chrysostom, St. Augustine of Hippo. Here are a couple of examples of John
Chrysostom comments:
On Joshua 1:2: Moses, the lawgiver, could not bring Israel
into the promised land, which shows that the Law of Moses cannot save the
people. But Joshua [in Greek the name
Joshua is pronounced “Jesus”] brought them in, and in this he was a type of
Jesus Christ [which in Greek is “the Anointed Joshua”], who brings His own into
heaven through grace.
On Joshua 5:10-12 [the manna ceases
because the people have eaten the first unleavened bread in the promised
land]: Manna was a type of Christ as the
bread of life. So was the unleavened and
new wheat. We now eat this bread of life
in the mystery of the Eucharist. This
life is the divine life of God, which sets on fire those who partake of the
bread in a proper manner. Those who do
so leave the Eucharist breathing the fire of divine life, which is terrible to
the devil and his angels.
St. John Chrysostom was using the
Scriptures in homilies. Thus, each verse
or so may be the occasion for a homiletic remark that ranges anywhere over the
liturgies, creeds, or hymns.
A comment on the quantity of the Notes. There are long stretches of the Old Testament
where practically no comments are needed.
Thus there are pages in IV Kingdoms (II Kings in the Hebrew text) with
no comments at all, though things pick up when Elijah comes on the scene. Interestingly enough, the book of Proverbs
gets lots of Note space, though these are often just little homilies expanding
the point well made in the Scripture text (for example, Proverbs 16:1). In Proverbs the Notes take up about one-third
of the page on average. In Kingdoms it
is more like one-fifth. In the Gospels,
the Notes usually take up half the page, and Romans is about the same.
Orthodox Interpretations: the Study Articles
General articles. The Study Bible contains a few general
essays, by named authors. These are
“Overview of the Books of the Bible” (The Right Reverend BASIL, Bishop of the
Diocese of Wichita and Mid-America); “The Bible: God’s Revelation to Man” (The Right Reverend
JOSEPH, Bishop of Los Angeles and the West); and Bishop KALLISTOS on “How to
Read the Bible.”
There are also two articles
without named authors, presumably by the editors. These are “Introduction to the Orthodox Study
Bible,” one and a half pages, and “Introducing the Orthodox Church,” eight
pages. This latter essay ends with an
invitation to non-Orthodox folks to Visit, Read, and Write to learn more. Presumably the editors also produced the
six-page Glossary at the back, which includes a mixture of Biblical names and
terms with a few other terms important in Orthodox Tradition.
Study articles. The major interpretation materials, besides
the Notes, are the Study Articles. These
are one-page summaries or essays on forty-seven topics strategically located
throughout the Bible. No authors are
cited so they are the final responsibility of the editors. They apparently are intended as statements of
Orthodox Tradition and belief.
The Study Articles start off with
a bang—immediately addressing “Creation,” “The Holy Trinity,” and “Ancestral
Sin,” articles which accompany Genesis 1-3.
The Trinity has to be introduced immediately because the God who acts,
anywhere anytime, is the Holy Trinity. This short essay has four sections:
1) The Holy Trinity Created the
World, citing Genesis 1:1-3 and 1:26, where God says Let “us” make man in “our”
image, clearly speaking among the personas of the Trinity;
2) The Holy Trinity Saves the World,
citing the Father as Redeemer in Isaiah 63:16, the Son in Psalm 2, and the
Spirit in Isaiah 44:3 (read as a prediction of Pentecost);
3) The New Testament Affirms the
Holy Trinity in the Old Testament, citing John 1:1-3; John 8:58 (“before
Abraham was I AM”); Acts 2:17; and
Hebrews 1:8-10.
4) The Incarnate Son Fully Reveals
the Holy Trinity, citing Luke 1:35 (“the Holy Spirit” and “the Power of the
Highest” will overshadow the Virgin, conceiving the Son, thus acting as the
Trinity) and Matthew 3:16-17 (at the baptism of Jesus, the Spirit descends on
the Son and the Voice of the Father names the Son).
The first work of the Holy Trinity
was Creation. The article on Creation includes the
following:
Regarding questions about the
scientific accuracy of the Genesis account of creation, and about various
viewpoints concerning evolution, the Orthodox Church has not dogmatized any
particular view. What is dogmatically
proclaimed is that the One Triune God created everything that exists, and that
man was created in a unique way and is alone made in the image and likeness of God (Gn 1:26, 27). The Church Fathers [not official dogma] also
consistently affirm that each species of the animate creation came into
existence instantaneously, at the command of God, with its seed within itself. (Page 2.)
The Study Article on Ancestral Sin is the Orthodox treatment
of what the West emphasized as “original sin.”
Orthodoxy plays down the guilt aspect of this Sin: “We who are of Adam’s race are not guilty
because of Adam’s sin, but because of our own sin” (page 7).
Following Augustine, the West made
sin and guilt the center of the drama of redemption. The East did not look down at Sin so much as
it looked up at Deification—humans
being elevated to the heavenly Lord. The
Study Article on “Deification,” page 1692—not likely to be found in Protestant
Study Bibles—is therefore very important for the Orthodox perspective on
salvation.
When the Son of God assumed our
humanity in the womb of the blessed Virgin Mary, the process of our being
renewed in God’s image and likeness was begun.
Thus, those who are joined to Christ, through faith, in Holy Baptism
begin a process of re-creation, being renewed in God’s image and likeness. We become, as St. Peter writes, “partakers of
the divine nature” (II Peter 1:4).
Other Study Articles treat a range
of Old Testament topics, such as “Christ Our Passover,” given at the Passover
text in Exodus, and other aspects of Israelite cultic life: priesthoods, festivals, Sabbath, sacrifices,
and “the Saints of the Old Testament” (“...remembering these saints in her
liturgical calendar, the Orthodox Church demonstrates her understanding that
the Body of Christ transcends limitations of time and space,” page 652).
In the New Testament, besides the obvious items such as the Sermon on the
Mount, Parables, John the Baptist, and the Seventy of Luke 10, there are Study
Articles on ecclesiastical matters such as Chrismation (anointing with oil),
Ordination, Holy Baptism, the Eucharist, the Church, Marriage, the Priesthood, and
“the Four ‘Orders’ in Church Government.”
The Orders of the Church are documented in I Timothy. They are (1) the Laity, (2) the Deacons, (3)
the Presbyters, and (4) the Bishops. On
the bishops, “The Twelve were the first to hold this office (in Acts 1:20 ‘office’ could literally be translated
‘bishopric’) and they in turn consecrated other bishops to follow them” (page
1635). Thus the Apostolic Succession of
bishops still carried on by the Patriarchs of Alexandria, Antioch,
Constantinople, Rome,
and by default Moscow, is directly
descended from the twelve Apostles.
Overall, the Study Articles, as
well as the Notes, are well done, given the goals and the restrictions the
planners and editors set themselves.
There is a vast amount of ancient theological and ecclesiastical lore
packed into the study materials. However
some strict Orthodox ecclesiastics may object to the Evangelical “tone” and the
way Orthodoxy is sometimes presented, these folks have produced an
impressive—and for many ordinary Orthodox church people who are writing blog
comments and buying the expensive book—a welcome and enjoyable religious
work. They have almost certainly
launched a new phase in the growth of Orthodox Christianity in the
English-speaking world. (No doubt some skeptics
will say sooner or later, It would have happened anyway, without the 2,000 from
Arrowhead Springs.)
Some Evaluative Comments
There are two areas here. Evaluating the OSB from the viewpoint of
established Orthodox church people would mean assessing how well the Study
Bible digests and presents familiar and traditional materials—including the
etiquette of Orthodox speech and decorum.
Certainly the planners and editors hoped to meet this need, but evaluating
their success in this area is not for this writer to do. On the other hand, the book is also certainly
aimed at non-Orthodox but interested Bible readers.
1) The Orthodox Study Bible is a
new kid on the block. It is
significantly different in content, if not in format, from other study Bibles of
the current scene. For general Bible
students the new English version of the Septuagint is a major feature (on which
more below). The interpretative comments
on passage after passage are going to be taken as representative Orthodox views
of Scripture. In the first instance that
is useful general orientation for non-Orthodox students—who then have the
scholarly obligation to confirm its representative character if they are going
to attend to it more closely. A mine of
notes and articles not previously or easily available is given to the Bible
study world. Thanks!
2) The story behind this Bible is an intriguing chapter in recent
American religious history. The
publication of the Study Bible, with significant sales, gives Orthodox Churches
a higher profile in American life. The
journey from Arrowhead Springs to Antioch
is an eye-opener. Vast numbers of
Evangelical Christians are being made aware of a major option for Christian
life not previously on their horizons.
The Orthodox Churches, which used to be predominately immigrant-based
communities, have now reached the third and fourth generations, and they are becoming
as American as a revival meeting.
3)
The craftsmanship of
The
Orthodox Study Bible is excellent.
The articles are well written—whether one likes their contents or
not.
The organization of the work is
clear—though one wonders why the “How to Read the Bible” article was not at the
beginning instead of at the end of the book.
(Being the most substantial and challenging article in the book, the
editors probably did not want to intimidate readers until they had gotten them
oriented.)
The hardbound volume of 2008
is good quality binding and paper, with an attractive dust jacket.
The fonts are large enough and easy to
read.
(One reviewer complained that
there is no room on the page for notes, which is true.
Your notes have be on pages you stick in for
markers.)
Thomas Nelson, the publisher,
made a quality item and charged a quality price, $50, for it.
A comment on the Icons is appropriate. Archimandrite
Ephrem mostly hated the icons, for what are presumably “good Orthodox”
reasons. He did like “the
Transfiguration of Christ,” opposite page 1314, which is one of the more
traditional ones. There are twelve
brilliantly printed Icons, some of which have very sharp contrasts between dark
spaces and glowing, “metallic,” colors for the main subjects. (They are not all modern; “The Three Holy
Youths in the Furnace” is a print of a wall painting on Mount
Athos, Greece,
dated 1312 AD.)
 |
Theotokos
by the hand of Jan Isham
Orthodox Study Bible, opposite p. 738.
|
My favorite is “Mother of God,” facing page 738, a Theotokos one could really love.
The one I despise (for the implied theology)
is “Pentecost:
The Coming of the Holy
Spirit,” opposite page 1634, which portrays twelve haloed Apostles sitting placidly
in a large semi-circle forming a Byzantine council, with nothing at all
suggesting the liveliness of the Holy Spirit!
4) The Orthodox Study Bible presents a new translation of the Septuagint—or not. Apparently the original intentions of the
editors to produce an actual translation of the ancient Greek Bible—currently
in use in all Greek-speaking Orthodox churches—proved impossible to
achieve. It’s not easy to see why that
should be such a problem—except, perhaps, in the case of the Psalms (as seen
above).
Adopting the Septuagint for the
Old Testament introduces some novelties for American Protestant readers: The last book of the Old Testament is Daniel,
not Malachi; Job comes after the Psalms, not before; there are no books of
Samuel, but four books of Kingdoms; and the numbering of the Psalms is lower by
one in much of that book. (The Lord is
my Shepherd is not the twenty-third Psalm in the Septuagint.) The editors provide some charts at the front
to help this strangeness, but mostly the reader will be on her own.
For some, it is regrettable that
the editors made the New King James Version the basis for the Septuagint
translation. That English version
adheres to both an inferior Greek text and to some old-fashioned English. A fresh translation of the Greek would have
added a valuable resource for both scholarship and devotion.
It’s true that we have recently acquired A New English Translation of the Septuagint
(edited by Albert Pietersma and Benjamin G. Wright, Oxford University Press,
2007), but that is a super scholarly work from the International Organization
for Septuagint and Cognate Studies, Inc., and its renderings are often not
conducive to liturgies and devotions. The
NETS (as it is abbreviated) will stand—in its very inadequacy as a religious
version—as a critique of the St. Athanasius Academy’s abandonment of its
challenge: to make a really religious
translation of the Septuagint.
5) But now about
the Elephant in the Room: the Lack of History.
The
Orthodox
Study Bible is a fresh and innovative presentation of some really old
religious traditions.
The editors have
succeeded relatively well at the objectives they set themselves.
But how timely are those objectives?
The dust jacket says, “Ancient Christianity
Speaks to Today’s World.”
But does
it?
Most likely, it speaks only to those
who desire to escape this world!
Perhaps if you are somewhat jaded
Evangelical enthusiasts who have grown battle-weary with the recalculations of
the end-time, you may look out with enthusiasm on an entirely new horizon,
enhanced with chanted Scriptures, Small and Great Entrances, incense and icons,
a calendar full of saints and holy days—a large, mysterious, and awesome world,
ringing with heavenly sounds and symbols.
Evangelicals have tended to live in this world focused on the next one for
a long time.
They have been deeply
tempted to live for heaven and pass by this world’s misery.
One suspects that what Orthodoxy offers them
is a vastly more venerable, rich, and multiplex way to keep on living for
Heaven.
The Orthodox Study Bible is a flight from history, not a return to
history.
The liturgies and the
typological interpretations simply dissolve away the “particularity” of
Israel’s
history—which Bishop Kallistos claimed was so important to Orthodox Bible
readers.
The introductions to the Old
Testament books in the OSB are weak and uninteresting—because they have NO HISTORY
in them, either the history of the literature and the tradition process, or of
the actual history of communities with demographics, imperial aspirations and
fears, or religious movements that reshape the human images of God.
Needless to say you will learn nothing of the
modern quest for the historical Jesus from the notes in the OSB.
The world that made Orthodoxy
never knew the modern world.
Perhaps that’s why a couple thousand late-twentieth
century Evangelicals found Orthodoxy so attractive!
