Source: Chapter 4 of Russian Bible Wars: Modern
Scriptural Translation and Cultural Authority, by Stephen K. Batalden,
Cambridge University Press, 2013, pp. 125-162.
In May 1858, following two years
of intense internal debate within the Russian Orthodox Church, Emperor
Alexander II formally approved the Holy Synod’s petition to resume Russian
translation of the Bible. The two-year debate over the renewal of Russian
biblical translation would be defining for modern Russian religious culture not
only because it determined the manner in which publication of the Russian Bible
would proceed, but also because it set the stage for the reception that would ultimately
greet the synodal translation (sinodal’nyi perevod). The openness of the
debate and the renewal of Russian biblical translation reflected the reformist
impulse at work in Russia after the Crimean War when, during the reign of
Alexander II, issues long shielded from public debate, including serf
emancipation, could be openly aired. Over the course of the twenty years
following Emperor Alexander II’s coronation, renewed translation and
publication of variant editions of Russian Old and New Testaments culminated in
the 1876 publication of a complete Russian Bible authorized by the Russian
Orthodox Church – the so-called synodal translation. That synodal translation,
although it never replaced the Old Slavonic text in Orthodox liturgical
worship, remains to this day the most commonly circulated edition of modern
Russian scripture.
The renewal of Russian biblical
translation also reflected the ascendancy of Moscow Metropolitan Filaret
(Drozdov), whose absentee leadership within the Holy Synod following the death
in 1855 of Ober-prokuror Nikolai Aleksandrovich Protasov altered the dynamics
of official church power. Although the Moscow metropolitan never returned to
formal synodal meetings, he would ultimately prevail not only in the internal
Holy Synod debate over whether to reopen biblical translation, but he put his own
stamp on the translation process, guiding its development until his death in
1867. Having earlier led the Commission on Ecclesiastical Schools during the
reign of Alexander I when the commission worked with the Russian Bible Society
in overseeing modern Russian biblical translation, Metropolitan Filaret
reassumed church leadership of the translation process forty years later in the
reign of Alexander II.
To understand what prompted the
mid-century turnabout in the fortunes of modern Russian biblical translation,
how the renewed translation effort proceeded, and how once again the BFBS [British
and Foreign Bible Society] became involved in the effort, is to enter into the
changing dynamics of Russian religious culture itself. For it was in the
engagement with modern biblical translation, biblical text criticism, and the
open circulation of such sacred texts that nineteenth-century Russian religious
culture entered, however tentatively, what Jürgen Habermas has termed the
“public sphere” – the print-mediated public realm that began to function with a
measure of independence from narrow state, autocratic authority in the last
decades of the Russian Empire. Western involvement marginally accelerated the
translation process itself, contributing to the Russian church’s adaptation to
a more market-oriented modern religious consciousness – a distinctively
reflexive religious consciousness that recognized competing communities of
faith and alternative claims to truth. In short, the issues of authority
reopened by modern biblical translation – the authority of texts, the authority
to publish and disseminate scripture, and the authority of the linguistic
medium – became a critical part of Russian religious culture’s fledgling
engagement with modernity.
The Initial Debate
The reopening of modern Russian
biblical translation in the 1850s was prefaced by a significant church dispute
that prefigured the engagement of the Russian church with issues of modernity
and the public sphere. Internal Synod debate over whether to resume Russian
biblical translation revolved around three central questions: (1) what would be
the impact of any new translation effort upon the authority and liturgical use
of the Slavonic Bible?; (2) what would be the ecclesiological significance of a
renewed modern translation – specifically, how would any such translation
affect the relationship of the Russian church to its Slavic and Near East
Orthodox neighbors, the wider Orthodox East?; and (3) how would the translation
effort intersect with the missionary efforts of the Russian church? Each of
these questions posed problems of authority for the Russian church of the
nineteenth century, problems that have remained very much at the center of
modern Russian religious culture. The debate that ensued from 1856 to 1876 was notable
for its openness as well as for its substance.
The debate began within the Holy
Synod in 1856 during meetings held at the time of the coronation of Alexander
II. While one of the observers of the process, nineteenth-century church
historian I. A. Chistovich, has noted the initial agreement within the Synod
over the need for a Russian translation, there continued to be disagreement
about the textual base to be used in OT translation. [1] Moscow Metropolitan
Filaret, who had earlier sought to carve out a balanced position on the use of
both the original Hebrew and Greek texts for OT translation in his treatise “On
the Dogmatic Value . . . of the Greek Septuagint,” argued once again in 1856
that OT and NT translation should be based on “original” texts. One Synod
member expressed the concern that, while a synodally authorized Russian NT
might be able to be advanced more rapidly, the process could not be rushed in
the case of the OT. Concern over the OT base text ultimately led to a
compromise position wherein Russian OT translation would occur over an extended
time period during which there could be discussion of the matter within the theological
academies and the publication of variant editions. The provision for the
open-ended publication of variant OT editions permitted publication during the
1860s of the Pavskii editio princeps and the Makarii (Glukharev)
translations, thus indirectly reinforcing the use of the Hebrew Masoretic text
in OT translation. Although Filaret’s support for the use of both the Hebrew
and Greek texts in Russian OT translation was a minority position within the
Synod, it was to the Moscow metropolitan that the Synod ultimately deferred in
the development of guidelines for renewed Russian biblical translation. In
those guidelines Filaret appealed to the sentiments of his Synod colleagues,
indicating that while the Russian Bible Society Psalter had been translated
with insufficient attention to the Greek text, it could be rectified. [2] But
OT translation would need to be undertaken with reference to the Hebrew as well
as the Greek text.
Moscow Metropolitan Filaret’s
advocacy of renewed Russian biblical translation was strongly supported within
the Holy Synod by Kherson and Tavride Archbishop Innokentii (Borisov, 1800–57),
as well as by imperial confessor Vasilii Borisovich Bazhanov (1800–83) and the
future Metropolitan of St. Petersburg and Novgorod, Isidor (Nikol’skii,
1799–1892). Metropolitan Isidor, having been appointed to the diocesan seat of
St. Petersburg in 1860, assumed the leadership of the translation effort upon
the death of Filaret in 1867. Indeed, his outspoken championing of modern
Russian biblical translation may explain in part why Metropolitan Isidor was
never awarded the doctoral degree. Archbishop Innokentii, in turn, had been a
correspondent and devoted supporter of Archpriest Pavskii during the Pavskii
affair, and Bazhanov had succeeded Pavskii as tutor to the tsarevich Alexander Nikolaevich
after Pavskii resigned from the position. So the conflicts attending the issue
of the Russian Bible from the time of the RBS closure were well known to the
synodal supporters of a renewed biblical translation.
At the same time, the opposition
to a renewed translation generated a significant body of anonymous petitions to
the Synod, and the Synod’s lay ober-prokuror, Aleksandr Petrovich Tolstoi, was
known to be opposed to the matter. At the center of the opposition stood Synod
stalwart, Metropolitan of Kiev Filaret (Amfiteatrov, 1779–1857). The Synod’s
decision in 1856 to proceed with translation predictably elicited a major
reaction from the Kievan metropolitan, who had been unable to attend the
Synod’s September session in Moscow where the decision to proceed was taken. The
ensuing polemic over a renewed Russian biblical translation pitted against one
another the two most formidable conservative prelates in the Holy Synod – the
two Filarets – Metropolitan Filaret of Moscow versus Metropolitan Filaret of
Kiev.
Canonized in 1994, St. Filaret,
the metropolitan of Moscow, was the most significant Russian churchman of the
nineteenth century. A close observer and defender of Orthodox churches in the
Near East and an apologist for imperial autocracy and the institution of
Russian serfdom at home, he had been a guiding member of the RBS governing
committee forty years previously, serving also on the society’s crucial
translations and publications subcommittee. Anxious to preserve the authority
of the church and its institutions, particularly the institution of monasticism
which he sought to reinvigorate, Metropolitan Filaret advocated the reopening
of Russian biblical translation and publication in order to address the growing
public disaffection of the Russian laity and parish clergy, many of whom could
not comprehend the Slavonic biblical text. The Moscow prelate had no interest
in undermining the longstanding diglossia existing in Russia wherein there was
both a churchly Slavonic liturgical language and a separate modern Russian
literary language operating in tandem. Rather, Filaret Drozdov sought to
provide a modern Russian text to accompany the Slavonic, especially for the
private use of believers as they sought to understand and interpret the
difficult-to-read Slavonic scripture used in liturgical worship.
The other Filaret (Amfiteatrov)
was the founder of St. Vladimir’s Cathedral in Kiev, and followed in a long
line of distinguished Kievan prelates that included the early
nineteenth-century church leader and scholar Evgenii Bolkhovitinov.
Metropolitan Filaret of Kiev was sensitive to the controversies aroused by
earlier Russian biblical translation. He had supported Ober-prokuror Protasov’s
effort to declare the Greek Septuagint and Slavonic biblical texts inviolate.
Positioning himself as the defender of holy tradition, Filaret of Kiev believed
that renewed translation would threaten the spiritual inheritance of Russia,
especially the authority of the Slavonic Bible. In the ensuing conflict between
the two Filarets, the political context was firmly established for Russian
biblical translation in the last half of the nineteenth century.
In responding to the Synod’s 1856
proposal to resume modern Russian biblical translation, Metropolitan Filaret
Amfiteatrov took the fundamentalist or essentialist position, arguing again for
the infallibility of the Slavonic text and the rejection of a modern Russian
translation. In his “Zapiska” of 1857, penned shortly before his death, the
Kievan prelate offered a series of challenging arguments against a modern
Russian translation. His most basic line of attack was the charge that
translation and dissemination of the Bible in modern Russian would undermine the
authority of the Slavonic text. [3] What was needed in his view was not a
renewed Russian translation, but more diligent training in the sacred Slavonic
tongue. All that was needed for those who might be struggling with the Slavonic
text was a Russian biblical commentary. The Kievan metropolitan argued that the
Old Believer schism of the seventeenth century and the controversy spawned by
biblical translation in the early nineteenth century developed out of a basic
disregard for the holy and infallible Slavonic text. The Kievan metropolitan
was essentially continuing a line of attack that he had put forward in the
1840s, when after the celebrated Pavskii affair he supported efforts to
canonize the Slavonic text.
Anticipating this opposition,
Moscow Metropolitan Filaret had earlier counseled his Synod colleagues that the
Russian translation ought not to be represented as a liturgical text, but
should rather be offered as an aid for those believers who were unable to
understand the more obscure passages of the Slavonic text. Among the number of
such believers he also included those from the ranks of Russia’s own parish
clergy. His subsequent formal rejoinder to Filaret Amfiteatrov took the form of
a response to the Holy Synod in July 1857, shortly before the Kievan metropolitan’s
death. [4] In a telling reflection of the nascent public sphere already
beginning to be felt in nineteenth-century Russian religious culture, the
Moscow metropolitan asserted that it was no longer reasonable to expect the
public to gain access to Holy Scripture through the medium of the Slavonic
text. And in Filaret Drozdov’s mind, public accessibility to scripture was a
defining issue.
The debate over translation into
a common or vernacular language revealed a more serious issue behind the
defense of the Slavonic text – namely, the concern of both conservative
prelates for retaining a liturgical, biblical language that was identifiably
spiritual (dukhovnyi) in form and content. In other words, what the two
metropolitans shared was a commitment to maintain use of the Church Slavonic as
a sacred language for worship, much like the concern among Muslims for
retaining the special authority of the Qur’an in Arabic, or among Jews for the
authority of the Bible in Hebrew. Metropolitan Filaret Drozdov, no less than Metropolitan
Filaret Amfiteatrov, believed in the need to retain the sanctity of God’s Word
in the Slavonic. Despite his outspoken advocacy for modern Russian biblical
translation, Moscow Metropolitan Filaret was uncertain about the capacity of
the modern Russian language, especially the clerical Russian of the
nineteenth-century Synod chancellery, to convey the inspired Word of God in
liturgical worship. As in the subsequent review of the synodal translation (sinodal’nyi
perevod) in the theological journals of the day, so also in this opening
polemic between the two Filarets, the issue of an appropriately “spiritual” or
sacred language lay immediately beneath the surface.
The question over what was an
appropriately sacred language for modern Russian religious culture continued to
be a focus of interest in the twentieth century in the deliberations of the
All-Russian Church Council of 1917–18, in the renovationist, “Living Church”
movement of the 1920s, and in contemporary debates in Russia and in the
emigration. By the end of the nineteenth century, modern translations existed
for most liturgical texts, despite continued strict adherence to the use of
Slavonic texts in Russian church worship. [5] The concern for an appropriate
sacred language for Russian Orthodox worship was sharply defined in the émigré
debate between Father Georges Florovsky and Georgii Fedotov, the latter a
church historian formerly of the Leningrad religious underground. The two twentieth-century
émigré churchmen essentially reengaged the issue hidden in the debate between
the two Filarets in the 1850s. In a defining moment of the later debate,
Fedotov argued that Holy Scripture offered divinely inspired narratives of
simple fishermen, carpenters, lepers, and nomads. Such narratives did not need
to employ obscure or lofty language. As Fedotov concluded:
Today in the
Russian Church there are two deep streams of Russian spirituality vying with
each other: the Russian kenotic [sacrificial/suffering] tradition and Byzantine
theurgy. They struggle not for destruction, of course, but for predominance and
leadership. Who will win? St. Sergei of Radonezh or Areopagus? Upon the outcome
of this spiritual duel depends also the fate of Slavonic or Russian liturgics!
[6]
Fedotov, who frequently wrote
about the kenotic side of Russian spirituality, believed that the Russian
language was fully capable of conveying God’s action in history – simple
biblical narratives did not require artificially abstract expression.
Florovsky, on the other hand, while not opposed to Russian biblical
translation, remained more sensitive to the ascetic, theurgical side of Russian
religious culture, and he shared the nineteenth-century concern that holy texts
not be transmitted in what might be perceived to be a corrupted language. While
the positions of Fedotov and Florovsky were more nuanced than those of their
nineteenth-century predecessors, the debate of the two Filarets in the 1850s
anticipated precisely this larger discursive issue over appropriate spiritual
language. Filaret Amfiteatrov argued that a Russian translation would undermine
the sacred language of the Slavonic text. Filaret Drozdov, who was able to
carry the Synod with him, argued that a Russian translation would support and
clarify the Slavonic text. Neither was prepared to countenance the use of a
modern Russian text in liturgical worship.
An equally divisive issue that
came to feature in the debate of the Filarets over a renewed modern Russian
biblical translation was that of the intra-confessional question of how such a
translation would affect the relationship between the Russian church and other
Orthodox peoples of the All-Russian Empire (Vserossiiskaia Imperiia) and
the wider Orthodox East (pravoslavnyi vostok). Initially, Metropolitan
Filaret of Kiev posed the issue in such a way as to question the textological
principles of his Moscow counterpart. Seeking to discredit earlier Russian OT
translations that had used a Hebrew Masoretic textual base, the Kievan prelate
argued that a Russian translation based upon the Hebrew Bible parted from the
pure Orthodox textological tradition of the Slavonic Bible, grounded as that
was upon the Greek Septuagint. But the argument was quickly expanded to note
that the current Ecumenical Patriarch of Constantinople, unlike his early
nineteenth-century predecessor, had anathematized any effort to render Holy
Scripture – OT or NT – into modern Greek. Thus, by engaging in translation of
the Bible into modern Russian, the Synod, in the eyes of the Kievan prelate,
would be condoning the kind of activity that was elsewhere spurned within
Eastern Christendom. With respect to Orthodox Slavs, the argument devolved into
a de facto defense of empire, Metropolitan Filaret of Kiev claiming that modern
Russian translation would effectively separate Russia from other Slavic peoples
(such as Ukrainians, Belarusians, Bulgarians) who were joined to Russia through
their common Slavonic biblical/liturgical tradition. [7]
This opposition from Kiev was
greeted with a response on three separate levels. First, on the matter of the
Greek Septuagint, Metropolitan Filaret Drozdov had already expressed himself
during the 1840s in his opposition to the canonization of the Greek Septuagint,
and he was equally spirited in his opposition to the canonization of the
Slavonic Bible. For the Moscow prelate, the Septuagint was an important OT
textual base, but it was not alone in that respect. Earlier having penned his
work “On the Dogmatic Value . . . of the Greek Septuagint,” Filaret Drozdov
argued that the Greek Septuagint did have a special place in the Eastern
Church, but that the Septuagint remained a translation – the oldest extant
translation – from a Hebrew textual tradition that also needed to be embraced.
Filaret Drozdov’s effort to accommodate both textual traditions came to be
reflected in the ultimate synodal translation with use of the Hebrew base text,
but with the signature format of variant Septuagint readings footnoted on pages
throughout the Russian OT. In the years that followed the publication of the
synodal OT in the 1870s, the continuing debate over Hebrew and Greek
textological traditions constituted a significant part of a remarkably open and
substantive discussion within late nineteenth-century Russian biblical studies.
By raising the issue of the
Russian church’s relation to the Ecumenical Patriarch, however, the Kievan
metropolitan had posed issues of a more transparently political character – issues
that generated a candid and relatively strident response from the Moscow
prelate. Moscow Metropolitan Filaret was known for his principled independence
on matters involving Russian ties with the Orthodox East, often defending the Constantinople
Patriarchate’s position on such matters as Bulgarian church autocephaly over
the opposition of powerful pan-Slav sentiment in Russia supporting the
Bulgarians. Yet, on the issue of modern Russian biblical translation, Filaret
of Moscow saw no need to secure the approval of the current Ecumenical
Patriarchate, whose opposition to demotic translation was well known. The
metropolitan noted that, even as the Ecumenical Patriarch was not consulted on
Russian translations of the Greek church fathers, so also no prior consultation
was called for in the case of biblical translation. Aware of the degraded
condition of the Patriarchal See under Ottoman authority, Filaret argued that
the Greek hierarchy did not have the necessary information on which to base a
judgment regarding Russian biblical translation. Concluding his response on the
issue, Filaret Drozdov argued that the Constantinople Patriarchate was
dependent upon an unbelieving government (the Ottoman Empire) that could depose
it at will, and that therefore the Greek hierarchy lacked the full church
freedom necessary to judge the issue of Russian biblical translation. [8]
Metropolitan Filaret of Moscow believed the issue of modern Russian biblical
translation was not a matter for Constantinople to decide, perhaps
foreshadowing in the process other significant twentieth-century jurisdictional
disputes that have divided the Moscow and Ecumenical Patriarchates.
Even more politically charged was
the exchange between the two Filarets over the implications of Russian biblical
translation for Ukrainians and Belarusians. Goading the venerable Moscow
metropolitan, Filaret of Kiev wrote, “If one is to translate Holy Scripture
into Russian, then why not translate also into Ukrainian, Belarusian, and other
languages?” [9] Filaret Drozdov responded on three counts, demonstrating in the
process his imperial and nationalist sympathies in limiting translation to
Russian, but not Belarusian or Ukrainian:
Because the
Ukrainian and Belarusian languages are of a small minority and are little
developed; because many (but not all) Ukrainians and Belarusians understand Russian
and are able to read Holy Scripture in it; and, finally, because for church and
civil unity it is more useful that just the Russian language rule in Ukraine. [10]
Filaret of Kiev had countered
that, if the revered Moscow metropolitan really wanted to promote unity, he
ought to support the one Slavonic text for both liturgical and home use. “If
one is to be concerned about church unity,” wrote the Kievan metropolitan,
“then it would be more useful for there to be one Slavonic language used by
these Slavs and by us in both church worship and home reading.” [11] What this
exchange between the two metropolitans revealed was the potential manipulation
for political ends of the issue of modern Russian biblical translation. Indeed,
the exchange raised the tantalizing question of whether high-placed Russian
prelates commonly viewed the Slavonic text as serving “imperial” ends. Did part
of the importance of the Slavonic Bible rest in its alleged capacity to serve
as the architecture for a civil religion of the empire? And, if so, could a
Russian text serve in such a capacity for the empire’s Ukrainian and Belarusian
citizens?
Hidden in the 1850s debate
between the two Filarets was yet another issue bearing on modern biblical
translation. In the decades prior to the synodal translation, the political
aspects of this issue were set within a Russian religious culture that served
also as the context for expanded Russian missionary efforts among non-European
and non-Christian populations of the empire, the so-called inorodtsy or inovertsy.
Sensitive to the work of popular religious figures such as the Altai missionary
Makarii Glukharev, Filaret Drozdov referenced such missionaries in the debate
with his Kievan counterpart, offhandedly remarking that, after all, “even the
Aleuts have the Gospel in their own common language; ought not Russians to
deserve as much?” [12] In short, to accentuate the need for broad public
accessibility to Holy Scripture in a demotic or common language, the Moscow
metropolitan appealed to the parallelism of Russian missions functioning in
minority languages throughout Eurasia.
The background to Filaret
Drozdov’s appeal to Russian missions was of course to be found not only in the
case of the Altai mission, but in a series of missions that dotted the Eurasian
landscape in the years immediately preceding and following the Crimean War. By
1865, this missionary enterprise led to the creation of the first formal
Russian proselytizing effort – the Missionary Society for Assisting the Spread
of Christianity among Pagans (Missionerskoe obshchestvo dlia sodeistviia
rasprostraneniiu khristianstva mezhdu iazychnikami), renamed in 1870 the
Orthodox Missionary Society (Pravoslavnoe missionerskoe obshchestvo).
The intellectual center of such activity gravitated to Kazan, where Professor
Nikolai Ivanovich Il’minskii (1821–91), a highly regarded authority on the
Slavonic Bible, took the lead in preparing missionary biblical translations in
Turkic languages, notably in Chuvash and in Kazan Tatar. [13] Il’minskii became
convinced that language was the most important instrument of every missionary.
Recognizing from his own work that there was a great chasm between the learned
Tatar literary language and the everyday conversational language, Il’minskii
argued that common, spoken Tatar ought to be the ground for Christian schooling
and biblical translation among the Tatars. Often only the mullahs could
understand literary Tatar, so heavily infused was it with Arabic and Persian phrases.
As Il’minskii wrote in 1858:
In order to
serve effectually for the Christian enlightenment of the baptized Tatars, translations
ought to be made in a language entirely comprehensible to them – that is, in a
conversational language. [14]
Thus, from the earliest stage in
the reopening of modern Russian biblical translation, Orthodox missions offered
a parallel argument for modern biblical translation, a parallelism fully
embraced by Moscow Metropolitan Filaret. The linkage between Russian missions
and modern Russian biblical translation would also be taken up by western Bible
societies, notably the BFBS, which seized upon the reopening of modern biblical
translation not only to develop the society’s own Russian translation, but also
to support non-Russian translations commissioned by the society in Kazan and Petersburg.
By the time of the Russian missionary conferences of the 1890s, this linkage
became so clearly a part of the religio-political culture that it yielded a
curious backlash. Orthodox churchmen came to view with increasing alarm the
inroads of western, specifically Protestant, Bible Society agencies and
colporteurs whose hawking of scripture was seen as a form of dangerous
proselytizing that might trigger the growth of sectarianism on the Russian
frontier, at the expense of Russian Orthodoxy (see Chapter 6). But, in the
debate of the 1850s, the focus of the Moscow metropolitan dovetailed closely
with the aims of Russian missionaries, who tended to share the metropolitan’s
desire for translations of Holy Scripture publicly accessible to a mass
audience.
Synodal action and
publication of the Synodal New Testament
In his July 1857 rejoinder to the
Kievan metropolitan, submitted to the Holy Synod, Filaret Drozdov reported
that, in the end, despite their differences, Filaret Amfiteatrov had consented
to the resumption of Russian biblical translation, but on condition that it not
be hurried. Thus, as Chistovich has noted, the reopening of such translation in
1858 ultimately came with the unanimous support of the Holy Synod – a unanimity
assured also by the intervening death of the Kievan metropolitan, Filaret
Amfiteatrov. Synod support was quickly followed by the emperor’s confirmation
reopening modern Russian biblical translation. The Synod resolution approved by
the emperor specifically called for the translation to be undertaken by theological
academy professors under the control of the Holy Synod. Responding to the
concern that the process not be rushed, the Holy Synod accordingly called for
immediate work on the New Testament, to be followed by a more lengthy period of
OT translation during which time alternative Russian OT variants could be
published openly in the scholarly journals of the respective theological
academies. No doubt with an eye toward the Pavskii affair, Metropolitan Filaret
Drozdov recommended that the Russian Psalter of the Bible Society era, which
had been translated “with insufficient consideration of the Greek text,” should
be corrected with appeal to both the Hebrew and Greek texts. Similarly, in the
case of the prophetic texts, they were not to be published immediately, but
only later, in the academy journals, with allowance for possible corrections
recommended from academy scholars.
On the matter of NT translation,
the St. Petersburg Theological Academy was given responsibility for translating
the Gospel of Matthew; the Moscow Theological Academy responsibility for the
Gospel of Mark; the Kazan Theological Academy for the Gospel of Luke; and the
Kiev Theological Academy for the Gospel of John. After the initial division of
responsibilities proved to be too time-consuming and duplicative, the process
was redivided among the academies in 1859 to ensure no duplication of effort. [15]
At each of the academies,
translation commissions were formed. In the case of the St. Petersburg academy,
for example, the translation commission met from 1858, initially with the goal
of completing the translation of the Gospel of Matthew. Commission members
included Evgraf Ivanovich Loviagin (1822–1909), instructor in the Greek
Department and assistant to the inspector of the academy; Moisei Aleksandrovich
Golubev (1824–69), professor in biblical exegesis; and, from 1860, the
Metropolitan of Novgorod and St. Petersburg, Isidor (Nikol’skii). Additional
commission members were added to handle OT translation. A graduate of the St.
Petersburg academy, Isidor had served as rector of Moscow Theological Seminary
before his appointment to the episcopate. Having briefly assumed the Kievan
diocesan seat following the death in 1858 of Metropolitan Filaret
(Amfiteatrov), Isidor was appointed to St. Petersburg in 1860. From that point
forward, Isidor personally oversaw the editing of the synodal translation, a
position made all the more significant by the intervening death of Metropolitan
Filaret Drozdov in 1867.
In revising and retranslating the
New Testament, the translators were guided by Filaret Drozdov’s injunction to
use the authoritative Erasmian Greek textus receptus as well as Slavonic
biblical tradition. [16] The authorized synodal edition of the four Gospels was
published in St. Petersburg in 1860 (see Figure 9). [17] Following a similar
process of academy revision under Metropolitan Isidor’s editorial oversight,
the remaining books of the Russian NT were issued by the Synod in 1862,
initially in a diglot edition with the Slavonic text. [18] The publication of
the Synod’s authorized NT in Russian translation, 1860–2, was a landmark in
Russian biblical studies. It signaled not only the effective reopening of
Russian biblical translation, but also a renewed opportunity for marketing or
disseminating modern biblical texts.
The end product was a compromise
text that, like the earlier Bible Society translation, reflected the churchly
Russian language of the nineteenth century. As a result, the issue of the
authority of the language in biblical translation remained just as problematic
in the aftermath of the synodal NT as it had been in the debate between the two
Filarets. A leading biblical textologist of the early twentieth century, Ivan
Evseev, summarized the situation by indicating that the Russian Bible was
“sufficient for elementary needs in edifying reading, but it cannot satisfy any
higher requirements.” He pointed to recent crucial developments in both
critical Greek NT textology and the modern Russian language, his point being
that the synodal translation employed a decidedly “pre-Pushkin” churchly
language. [19]
Despite such critical
assessments, the Russian sinodal’nyi perevod became, from its issuance,
the exclusive source base used in biblical commentaries from the 1860s right up
to the Bolshevik Revolution. The relative obscurity of the Slavonic text meant
that, however undistinguished the Russian Bible may have seemed to its critics,
the new translation, not the Slavonic text, found its way into virtually
all manuals produced for students of theology in the last fifty years of the
Russian Empire. This was also true for most citations to scripture found in
literary works of the day. [20] As Francis Thompson has noted, the appearance
of the Russian text “inevitably led to questions about the Slavonic text,”
because of the differences that set the synodal translation apart from its more
obscure Slavonic counterpart. [21]
Alongside Professor Evseev’s
concern over the failure of translators to use a modern Russian literary
language, there are two additional observations relevant to the authority of
the language used in the synodal Russian NT. The first has to do with the
relationship of the synodal text to that of the Russian Bible Society NT issued
forty years earlier. Using two of the more readily recognizable passages, it is
instructive to compare the two texts (see Table 1).
Allowing for the difference of
construction in John 1:3, the two texts are otherwise virtually the same. It
may be countered that these are relatively exceptional passages unlikely to be
changed radically because they would have been well engrained in the religious
culture, or public consciousness. Yet not only does that fail to recognize the
broad similarities of the two texts across a wide spectrum of the New
Testament, but such a counterargument indeed makes the very point intended here
– namely, that the language of the Russian Bible Society NT, as the received
text, significantly influenced, consciously or unconsciously, the structure and
formation of the authorized synodal NT. The “pre-Pushkin” language of the RBS
New Testament was also the language of the synodal NT.
Lest this judgment somehow be
seen to diminish the significance of the modern Russian translations of the
nineteenth century, it is well to remember a second point about the language of
Russian biblical translation at that time. Despite its archaisms, the churchly
language of modern Russian biblical translation in the nineteenth century
continued to be “edifying reading” for twentieth-century readers, retaining its
communicative value, because in part it also served as a reaction to Soviet
“bureaucratese.” Similarly, the late Nobel Poet Laureate Czesław Miłosz, when
asked why he set about learning Hebrew and retranslating the Psalter into
Polish late in his life, replied that one of his reasons for embarking on a
translation of the Bible was to address the degradation of the literary
language in post-World War II Poland. [22] The appeal of a bygone past, of
cherished archaisms, speaks of course to the continuing authority in varying
ways of the King James Bible in English, the ancient Grabar text in Armenian
and, by extension, both the Slavonic and modern Russian synodal texts.
The Synodal Old Testament
With the complete Russian New
Testament having been issued in an authorized synodal edition, Moscow
Metropolitan Filaret turned to the matter of the Old Testament, using a January
1863 letter to newly appointed Synod Ober-prokuror A. P. Akhmatov as the
occasion for reviewing the principles agreed upon earlier by the full Synod for
OT translation. Filaret’s letter to the ober-prokuror was accompanied by a
note, “On the Continuation of the Translation of Holy Scripture into Russian,”
that summarized how the matter should proceed. [23] Noting that the original decision
of the Synod to proceed with modern Russian translation had not been just a
matter of his own personal intervention, but had been unanimously approved by
the ten prelates present at the original 1856 meeting of the Synod in Moscow,
Metropolitan Filaret reviewed the considerations that would need to be followed
as the process moved forward. First, he noted that the Synod had recommended
priority be given to the correction and retranslation of the Psalter. The
Psalter was one of the most difficult Old Testament books to translate, as
Filaret noted, using the occasion also to remind the ober-prokuror of the
commitment to employ both the original Hebrew and Greek texts in OT
translation. While there was no need to rush the OT translation, the importance
of the Psalter was such that it deserved special attention, a precedence that
had been recognized earlier in the era of the Russian Bible Society.
Recalling the Synod’s decision to
permit publication of variant Old Testament translations while work proceeded
deliberately on the preparation of the Synod’s own approved translation,
Metropolitan Filaret reconfirmed the sequence of the work on the Old Testament.
In addition to work on the Psalter, initial publication of the Russian
Pentateuch should also be attempted, to be followed sequentially by translation
of the historical books, then the poetic books, and finally the prophetic
books, or books of the major and minor prophets. Filaret’s note effectively
reconfirmed what had already begun to evolve in practice – namely, a two-track
system of translation and publication whereby variant OT readings could be
prepared and published in academy or other religious journals, with those
publications serving to inform a second track of translation and publication
undertaken by a formal translations committee gathered in St. Petersburg to
create what would ultimately be the Synod’s own authorized Old Testament
edition.
Key Participants
in the Preparation of the Synodal OT Translation
Because of its importance for the
preparation of the authorized synodal OT, the composition of the translations
committee attached to the St. Petersburg Theological Academy has understandably
commanded great attention. Although Moscow Metropolitan Filaret continued to
participate in the review of translations right up until his death, local
oversight of the translation process, especially in the case of the OT, fell
increasingly to Metropolitan Isidor (Nikol’skii) of St. Petersburg and
Novgorod, the leading member of the Holy Synod following Metropolitan Filaret’s
passing in 1867. Known for his even-handed temperament and ability to work
through divisive issues, Metropolitan Isidor had earlier served in the diocesan
seat of Polotsk and Mogilev where he addressed the conflicted issue of the
Uniate or Greek-Catholic population. Similarly, he served as exarch of Georgia
during a critical transitional period in the history of Transcaucasia. In each
of these posts he was known for his “akkuratnost’,” a habit of attention to
detail. By the 1860s, following the death of Metropolitan Filaret Drozdov, he
held seniority in the Holy Synod, where he brought the kind of conciliatory air
and moral influence that also helped advance the OT revision process to
completion. Initially appointed to the St. Petersburg and Novgorod diocese in
1860, he inherited oversight of the preexisting St. Petersburg Theological
Academy translations committee initially established for translation of the
Gospel of Matthew.
With the committee’s broadened
responsibilities, its membership also expanded. From the outset the committee
had included two prominent academy faculty members – Evgraf Ivanovich Loviagin
(1822–1909), who taught natural sciences and later assumed the chair in New
Testament Greek language and literature, and Moisei Aleksandrovich Golubev
(1824–69), who held the academy’s professorial chair in biblical exegesis and
who knew Hebrew. Loviagin helped guide the translation process in connection
with the Greek Septuagint readings and provided his own translation of the OT deuterocanonical
books. Golubev’s contributions included translations of several historical and
poetic books from the Hebrew Masoretic text.
The most important addition to
the translations committee for the Synod’s Old Testament was Daniil Khvol’son
(1819–1911), a professor of Hebrew, Old Syriac, and Chaldean philology in the
Oriental Faculty of St. Petersburg University. Khvol’son’s translations rest
behind an estimated two-thirds of the synodal OT text. [24] The appointment of
Daniil Khvol’son for OT translation brought a person with international
distinction in Near Eastern languages to the Synod’s translation effort. Of
Jewish parentage, Khvol’son was born into very modest circumstances in Vilnius.
Having come under the tutelage of the Jewish Enlightenment scholar Abraham Geiger
in Breslau, Khvol’son completed his studies at Breslau University in the
Faculty of Semitics where in 1850 he defended his doctoral thesis on the Sabaeans.
Specializing initially in Arabic religion, he became known for his work in a
variety of ancient Semitic languages. He returned to Russia in 1851, working
initially in St. Petersburg as a censor for Hebrew books. Regarded as “the most
famous Russian Jewish apostate of all time,” he converted to Orthodox
Christianity in 1855 under the influence of the Near East traveler and Russian
Minister of Public Instruction, Avraam Sergeevich Norov, whose name Khvol’son
assumed as his own patronymic – Daniil Avraamovich Khvol’son. [25] In
1855, he assumed the post at St. Petersburg University, combining his position
there with instructional responsibilities in Hebrew and biblical archeology at
both the St. Petersburg Theological Academy (1858–83) and the Catholic
Theological Academy (1858–84). Although Khvol’son’s major scholarly
contributions were to Hebraic and specifically biblical scholarship, he was
known also for his seminal contributions to Old Syriac, Arabic, and Khazar
paleography. [26]
Following the death of Moisei
Golubev in 1869, Pavel Ivanovich Savvaitov (1815–95) was added to the
translations committee. Savvaitov was the son of a Russian priest from the
region of Vologda. A graduate of the St. Petersburg Theological Academy,
Savvaitov returned to the academy in 1842 following a brief period as professor
of philosophy at Vologda Seminary. At the academy he taught patristics and
hermeneutics, the latter field having been developed in Russian theological
education only from the period of the 1808 Commission on Ecclesiastical
Schools. Savvaitov’s work served as an early definition of this field of
hermeneutics for Russian biblical exegesis. [27] His work sought to carve out a
careful line that allowed for biblical exegesis to be guided by church
tradition, while at the same time recognizing the appeal to the scripture text
as an independent authority in argumentation. At the conclusion of his Bibleiskaia
germenevtika, Savvaitov’s six “rules” for interpreting the Bible included
the admonition in the case of historical biblical accounts to “defend the
historicity of supernatural occurrences and oppose all false opinions about the
miracles of God” – a mark of the degree to which his hermeneutics differed from
historico-critical text studies of a later era. [28] Savvaitov’s selection for
membership on the translations committee may also have been influenced by his
earlier work with translation, including his preparation of a Zyrian grammar
and dictionary. [29]
The challenge for the
translations committee attached to St. Petersburg Theological Academy was to
address the differences in the original Hebrew and Greek base texts, while also
building upon the achievements already made in Russian OT translation in the
first half of the nineteenth century. In balancing the appeal to Hebrew and
Greek source texts, the St. Petersburg translations committee ultimately
created a composite text that was neither slavishly tied to the Greek
Septuagint (or Slavonic Bible), nor consistently in accordance with the Hebrew
Masoretic text. Symbolic of that balancing effort was the signature manner in
which variant Greek Septuagint readings not accepted by the committee for
incorporation into the main Russian translation were occasionally referenced in
Russian translated footnotes at the bottom of the relevant page. The meetings
of the translations committee were not minuted, but the effort to carve out a middle
ground was evident not only in the footnoted entries within the synodal OT, but
also in the personal reflections of the committee’s most illustrious member.
Commenting to a western observer on the potential limitations of such a mixed
translation, Daniil Khvol’son described the synodal translation as a
“conjectural translation,” adding that “it cannot be considered a faithful
rendering of the Hebrew text, even though in some instances in which it differs
it is sustained by the New Testament.” [30] Sensitive to the mixed translation
and the critique that followed its issuance in the 1870s, the Holy Synod in
1876 asked Daniil Khvol’son to explain and clarify the footnoted references in
the Synod’s own Pentateuch. [31] It seems that within a decade of the death of
Moscow Metropolitan Filaret, there was already some institutional memory loss
over the manner in which the esteemed Moscow prelate had sought to balance
Hebrew and Greek textology in the architecture of the Russian OT.
Such balancing, of course, was
not required in those cases where the OT text was supported by only one
language source base, Greek or Hebrew. Thus, in the pivotal issue of
deuterocanonical texts, or the apocryphal readings supported only by the Greek
Septuagint, translations from the Greek were inserted directly into the Russian
OT. This was not an issue for the translation of the Pentateuch, for which
there were no additional deuterocanonical texts, but for the OT historical,
poetic, and prophetic sections, translation directly from the Greek Septuagint
was overseen primarily by St. Petersburg professor of NT Greek, Evgraf
Loviagin, and the deuterocanonical books were inserted into each of the final
three sections of the synodal Russian Old Testament.
Meanwhile there were inevitable
delays that stalled production of the synodal OT, not the least of them being
the untimely death in 1869 of Moisei Golubev, whose translations of OT
historical and poetic books were published as supplements to the journal of the
St. Petersburg Theological Academy, Khristianskoe chtenie, between 1861
and 1869. [32] With the death of Golubev, the primary translator from the
Hebrew Masoretic text became Daniil Khvol’son, who submitted his work to the
St. Petersburg Theological Academy’s translations committee for editorial
revision. Khvol’son benefited from the earlier Pavskii and Makarii
translations, which were among several OT translations circulating openly in
the 1860s. [33] Khvol’son was also able to utilize the unpublished RBS Octateuch,
unbound copies of which still existed in Petersburg.
While the work of the
translations committee in St. Petersburg was but one of the translation centers
established in the four theological academies in Kiev, Kazan, Moscow, and St.
Petersburg, the committee operating at the St. Petersburg Theological Academy
incorporated suggestions from other academies. This final revision, which also
benefited from the editorial oversight of St. Petersburg Metropolitan Isidor,
became the approved synodal version. The resulting authorized synodal Old
Testament was published by the St. Petersburg Press of the Holy Synod in four
separately bound editions between 1868 and 1875 – the Pentateuch in 1868, the historical
books in 1869, the poetical or uchitel’nye books in 1872 (including the
revised Psalter), and the major and minor prophets in 1875. [34] Thus, even though
it was not issued as a single bound volume until 1876, by 1875 the Synod had
completed the translation and publication of a modern Russian Bible in an
authorized version – the sinodal’nyi perevod.
The BFBS and the Synodal
Russian Bible
Because of its continuing agency
presence in St. Petersburg, British and Foreign Bible Society records provide
an additional perspective on the synodal translation. As an agency committed to
distributing the Bible in the languages of the Russian Empire, the BFBS had an
interest in the availability and potential circulation of a modern Russian
text. At the same time, the BFBS operated under its own ideological strictures,
not the least of which was its insistence on circulating scripture “without
note or comment,” and without the apocryphal or deuterocanonical texts. The opposition
of British evangelicals to circulation of the deuterocanonical texts of the
Bible – the Apocrypha controversy – meant that, by 1825, the BFBS was forced to
take the position that it would not circulate copies of scripture containing
the deuterocanonical books of the Bible. This in turn set the BFBS Petersburg
agency on a path toward potential conflict with the translation process under
way in reformist Russia. How did the BFBS respond to this reopening of biblical
translation in the post–Crimean War period, particularly on the thorny issue of
Russian OT translation?
The BFBS had never been far
removed from Russian biblical translation and dissemination, even in the period
when modern translation had been relegated to the underground. While its
Leipzig and London revised editions of Russian Bible Society scripture
published between 1838 and 1860 never circulated openly in Russia, agents of
the BFBS continued to serve in Petersburg throughout the period, even during
the difficult days of the Crimean War when Russian and English forces faced
each other in military combat. [35] Upon publication of the Russian translation
of the Gospels in 1860, the Petersburg BFBS agency secured approval from the
London home office to market the edition in its Petersburg shop. [36] Archibald
Mirrielees, the British merchant in Petersburg who served on the BFBS
Petersburg agency committee, wrote to London heralding the significance of the
first synodal edition of the Gospels, noting that “the demand has been very great,
the shop being literally crowded and the number of copies sold to one applicant
limited to 50 as the edition [36,000 copies] was likely to be soon exhausted.”
[37] The activities of the Petersburg BFBS offices began to outstrip the
capacities of the part-time agents who were serving voluntarily for the BFBS
while also seeing to their independent commercial interests. The demand for the
synodal Russian edition of the Gospels and subsequently for the full New
Testament forced the St. Petersburg BFBS agency to reorganize its operations in
the decade of the 1860s, adding a full-time agent and launching an ambitious
program of colportage. Purchasing stock from the publishing house of the Holy
Synod in Petersburg, the BFBS became the largest wholesale and retail outlet
for Russian scripture, its agency sales by the close of the century reaching
distribution figures of approximately one million copies annually (see Chapter
6).
The commercial success of the
BFBS in disseminating the synodal NT, however, could not long camouflage the
problems the society would encounter in addressing the Russian Old Testament.
The BFBS confronted three intractable situations that ultimately thwarted the
effort to circulate a Russian Old Testament – namely, difficulty with the
textual base of the synodal translation, identification of alternative
translators should the society develop its own variant Russian OT text, and the
barriers it would encounter to marketing such an alternative BFBS Russian OT
text.
The first of these issues
involved the conflict noted between the BFBS and the Russian church over OT
textology and the placement of notations within biblical editions. On the
matter of textology, BFBS editorial superintendents well into the nineteenth
century considered the Greek Septuagint to be an inferior, “translated” text,
upholding instead exclusive use of the Hebrew Masoretic text for OT
translation. Most odious to the Bible Society was the fact that the Greek
Septuagint included deuterocanonical texts it had rejected, but that the Synod
had included in its OT text. For the BFBS, it mattered little that Russian
inclusion of the deuterocanonical books reflected the role of these texts as
traditional parts of the established liturgical text, the Slavonic Bible.
Asked to examine the issue more
closely, the BFBS Petersburg agent William Nicolson, newly appointed in 1869,
contacted Synod translator Daniil Khvol’son, and then reported to London on his
“very long conversation over the matter” with Khvol’son:
He tells us that
the Synod’s translation is not altogether his work. There was a committee
consisting of four persons appointed to examine the work after it passed through
the hands of Dr. Chwolson and his coadjuters. He gave, I may remark by the way,
no flattering account of the composition of that committee, there being scarcely
a Russian ecclesiastic who knows anything of Hebrew. The translation, so far as
the Pentateuch is concerned . . . is a sort of hodge-podge between the Hebrew and
Septuagint. In many passages, as for example, Gen. 4:7, the Hebrew text has been
preferred, while the additions to be found in the Septuagint have been put within
brackets. In other portions, however, the version of the Septuagint has been preferred
(for example, in Gen. 47:3 and other instances). [38]
Khvol’son’s comments on the
composition of the Synod committee, though they may have been correct about the
command of Hebrew in the translations committee after the death of Moisei
Golubev, were almost surely intended to advance his own standing with the BFBS
Petersburg representatives.
While the Pentateuch, published
in a Synod-authorized Russian edition in 1868, posed no problem over the
deuterocanonical books, all subsequent parts, including the second volume of
historical books issued in 1869, contained deuterocanonical readings. Thus, by
the end of the 1860s, the BFBS London home office recognized that despite mild
protestations from British merchants on the Petersburg BFBS agency committee,
such as William Mirrielees, who could not quite understand the fuss over
deuterocanonical texts, a fundamental obstacle stood in the way of its
Petersburg agency’s sale of the synodal Russian OT text.
Anticipating this OT impasse, the
BFBS London home office had already begun to use early nineteenth-century RBS
editions of the Psalter and the first eight books of the Old Testament in
published reprintings and edited revisions. Such BFBS Old Testament editions
began with the 1852 Psalter printed in Leipzig, and continued with revised
publication of the Octateuch in London in 1861. [39] The problems the London
home office had in retaining reliable Russian native speaker editors and
proofreaders were well illustrated in the case of the Octateuch. In order to
prepare copy for the press, the BFBS turned to the noted Russian émigré in
London, Alexander Herzen, who in turn recommended his assistant Vasilii
Ivanovich Kel’siev, the notorious Russian nihilist revolutionary, who had taken
residence at the time in Britain. [40]
Despite these editions of the
Russian Octateuch and Psalter published for the BFBS in the West, the BFBS
lacked its own reliable Russian text for the majority of the Old Testament at a
time when both the Petersburg and Vienna BFBS agencies were experiencing
growing demand for such a modern Russian text. Early in 1865, three years
before the synodal OT editions began to be published, Andrew Muir, who was then
serving as the society’s part-time agency representative in Petersburg,
responded to this demand by suggesting that the BFBS add its own competing
Russian OT text to those then surfacing in Russia:
I annex a list
of new translation of parts of the Old Testament into Modern Russ, which have
lately appeared. As there seems no prospect of the Old Testament being published
as a whole by the Synod here, and your ordinary editions of the Pentateuch [sic]
might be revised if a competent person could be found, you could thus with
little difficulty complete the work. Your doing this would perhaps hasten the
movements of the Synod. [41]
Muir thought that western
involvement in Russian biblical translation and publication might stimulate
competitive Synod action. On the translation process itself, Muir reasoned
somewhat simplistically that all the BFBS needed to do was contract with a
local Russian scholar to provide a complete OT text by combining revisions of
the existing BFBS edition of the Octateuch and Psalter with revisions of one or
another of the formerly clandestine Russian OT texts then openly being
published in the religious journals of Alexander II’s Russia. To that end, Muir
recommended that the BFBS contact Leon Mandel’shtam, a distinguished polyglot
scholar who despite the restrictive atmosphere of Nicholas I’s Russia, had been
the first Jewish graduate of the University of St. Petersburg in 1843.
Mandel’shtam was then in Berlin, but had earlier been employed by the Russian
government to compose a Hebrew/Russian lexicon. According to Muir, Mandel’shtam
might even be willing to relocate to London to undertake such an assignment. [42]
In the end, after BFBS Vienna
agent Edward Millard raised questions about the appropriateness of employing a
Jew for BFBS translations, the decision was made to employ a Jewish convert to
Christianity, Vasilii Levison, for preparation of an independent BFBS edition
of the modern Russian Old Testament in potential competition with the synodal
translation already in preparation. [43] With the hire of Levison the BFBS committed
itself to the preparation of its own rival Russian OT text. The profile of
Vasilii Levison represents a particularly interesting case of Jewish conversion
to Russian Orthodoxy. [44] Following his conversion at the age of twenty-five,
Levison moved from his German homeland to Russia, where he taught Hebrew from
1840 to 1860 in Catholic and Orthodox seminaries in Petersburg. Then he
accompanied the Russian mission to Jerusalem where he also came to the
attention of missionaries from the London Society for Promoting Christianity
among the Jews. Having translated several works of theology into German for the
private reading of the Russian empress, the German wife of Nicholas I, Levison
ingratiated himself with the imperial family. Despite his knowledge of Hebrew,
however, Levison had an insecure command of modern Russian. Thus he hired a
Russian native speaker, his former seminary student Petr Ivanovich Bogoliubov
(d. 1880), to assist him throughout the translation process. Bogoliubov had
taught church history and Greek at the St. Petersburg Theological Seminary (not
to be confused with the postgraduate Petersburg Theological Academy) before
becoming director in 1854 of the St. Petersburg Home for the Upbringing of Poor
Children (Dom vospitaniia bednykh detei). In addition, the BFBS Petersburg
agency arranged for a two-person team of Russian correctors, Professors Hoffman
and Nikolai Astaf’ev (the latter a founding director of the Society for the
Dissemination of Holy Scripture in Russia), to review the translation and
proofread the resulting publications to be printed in London.
Arriving in Petersburg in 1869,
BFBS Petersburg agent William Nicolson (see Figure 10) lamented the terms of
the agreement whereby Levison was paid a lavish monthly salary, rather than
specific remuneration for completed work. But despite delays in completing his
Russian translations, Levison managed to translate and the BFBS managed to
publish in London the OT books of 1 and 2 Samuel, Proverbs, and all the major
and minor prophetic books well in advance of the parallel work under way on the
synodal translation. [45] Upon the sudden death of Vasilii Levison in 1869, the
BFBS Petersburg agency was again faced with having to locate a reliable translator
to complete its own Russian OT edition.
By 1869, however, the Holy Synod
had commenced publication of its authorized Russian OT edition, thus raising
the question for the BFBS offices in Petersburg and London of the feasibility
of proceeding with a separate BFBS Russian Old Testament. The unwillingness of
the BFBS to circulate a synodal OT that included the deuterocanonical books
meant that, in the end, it was obliged to hire a new translation team to
complete the BFBS Russian Old Testament. Within weeks of Levison’s passing, BFBS
Petersburg agency committee representative William Mirrielees wrote to BFBS
editorial superintendent Girdlestone in London noting the recent progress of
the Holy Synod in translating and publishing its own Russian OT, which included
apocryphal readings. Then, in a move that would commit the BFBS to the
completion of its parallel Russian OT, Mirrielees proposed that the BFBS hire
the Synod’s translator, Daniil Khvol’son, to complete the BFBS translation of
the Russian OT from the Hebrew. [46] The London BFBS editorial subcommittee
readily agreed that the Petersburg agency should engage the services of
Khvol’son, a process that after protracted negotiation led to the hiring of
Khvol’son and his Russian colleague, Pavel Savvaitov for the completion of the
BFBS Russian OT translation. [47]
As a result, by 1871 the very
same translators who were at work preparing the synodal Russian Old Testament
translation had also been engaged to prepare the BFBS Russian OT translation,
the only ostensible difference being the more exclusive Hebrew Masoretic source
base used in the BFBS translations. There followed in fairly prompt succession
the translations by Khvol’son/Savvaitov of those OT portions that had not
previously been translated by either the Russian Bible Society or the team of
Levison and Bogoliubov. Added to this were revisions of the Russian Psalter and
the Octateuch to bring them into conformity with the translation exclusively from
the Hebrew Masoretic text. [48] Although Khvol’son urged the BFBS Petersburg
agency to revise also those books that had been translated by Levison and
Bogoliubov (including the major and minor prophets) in order to bring them into
conformity with the language and translation practices of Khvol’son and
Savvaitov, the BFBS postponed such action, preferring to bring its completed
BFBS Old Testament out quickly in a single volume in 1875 shortly before the
complete 1876 synodal Russian Old Testament.
While the BFBS had managed to
identify and engage competent, internationally recognized Petersburg
translators to complete a BFBS edition of the Russian OT in a uniform format by
1875, there remained the hurdle of securing rights to the circulation and sale
of its own or an appropriately modified synodal translation. BFBS Petersburg
agent Nicolson managed to secure a contract for publication by the Synodal
Press of an edition of the BFBS Russian Old Testament without the
deuterocanonical readings, but this one-time edition issued in 1882 created
lasting animus at the Holy Synod where Ober-prokuror Konstantin Pobedonostsev
argued that the Synod ought not to be publishing editions of scripture in
competition with its own. Given its strict policy of not circulating texts
including the deuterocanonical books, the BFBS Petersburg agency was obliged to
limit its circulation of Russian scripture, for the most part, to NT printings
of the sinodal’nyi perevod. The one exception to this policy involved
the circulation of an OT diglot edition in Hebrew and Russian. Having been
given the authority to circulate these diglot editions for the Jewish
population in the Pale of Settlement, the Vienna BFBS agency issued several
printings throughout the remainder of the nineteenth and early twentieth
centuries. [49]
What conclusion can be drawn from
this picture of competing Russian translations in the years following the
Crimean War when modern biblical translation was again possible in the Russian
Empire? At the time of the RBS closure in 1826 all the major questions of
authority surrounding biblical translation and dissemination remained
unresolved: What source texts were to be considered authoritative for
translation of Holy Scripture? Who had the authority to translate Russian
scripture? Who had the authority to disseminate such Russian texts? And, what
linguistic medium was to be considered authoritative for biblical translation?
By proscribing modern biblical translation, Nicholas I had artificially closed
off all official translation, leaving these issues of authority essentially
unresolved.
The reopening of modern biblical
translation was accompanied by a flurry of publication, particularly of Old
Testament texts that had been circulating underground during the thirty-year
hiatus in modern Russian translation. Indeed, for a while it appeared as though
there might be a more open religious marketplace, a “public sphere,” in which
multiple translations published in religious journals would be evaluated within
an increasingly diversified Russian Orthodox religious culture. The debates on
the pages of the religious journals about the merits of one or another
translation seemed to anticipate such a gradual transformation of the Russian
religious marketplace. Even Russian state authorities were thought to encourage
the new religious marketplace, when they granted rail concessions to BFBS representatives
who were transporting the society’s stock of scripture to depots, and to
colporteurs who were traveling the Eurasian frontier.
Yet in the years following the
1867 death of Moscow Metropolitan Filaret, conservative circles within the
Russian church hierarchy, including the church’s lay ober-prokuror, sought to
maintain narrow churchly authority over the translation and publication of Holy
Scripture, yielding state sanction for the authorized synodal translation, and
limiting the dissemination of alternative texts. By the time of Alexander II’s
assassination in 1881, even though the Russian church had completed its
landmark authorized Russian Bible, ecclesiastical leadership personified by
Ober-prokuror Konstantin Pobedonostsev had come to fear modernist forces and
retreated into a period of more conservative, hierarchical control.
Nevertheless, public accessibility to the Russian Bible opened a period of
significant debate over texts as the sophistication of biblical studies in the
Russian theological academies advanced in the nineteenth century.
No doubt it was this development
of the field of biblical studies in late imperial Russia in which the war over
rival translations ultimately yielded its greatest impact. [50] Within the
emergent field of Russian biblical studies, the impact of western scholarship
and western Bible societies continued to be felt, especially in the theological
academies. The BFBS-sponsoredOld Testament translation may well have sped to
completion the Synod’s own translation, and in doing so contributed to the
ongoing debate over textology, especially OT textology. Long after the variant
translations were being issued in the 1870s, Ivan Troitskii, the student of
Daniil Khvol’son and successor to Khvol’son in the chair of Hebraic studies at
St. Petersburg University and the St. Petersburg Theological Academy, confided
to BFBS Petersburg agent William Nicolson that he even considered the BFBS
translation to be superior. Nicolson shared the news with his London home
office:
I have to report
an interview with Prof. Troitsky, Dr. Chwolson’s successor as Professor of
Hebrew in the St. Petersburg University, and an able Hebraist, as becomes a
pupil of Chwolson’s, in which he, a native Russian and Orthodox believer,
testified, I confess somewhat to my surprise, that our translation is decidedly
better [Nicolson’s italics] than the Synod’s – less wordy, simple and more
idiomatic. He tells me in his own words that the Synod’s is more paraphrastic.
[51]
Yet, in the debate over the
authority of source texts, over the language of translation, and over
circulation, the landmark publication of the Bible in Russian, the sinodal’nyi
perevod, failed to resolve the issues of authority posed by modern biblical
translation. Some of the most important rounds of the Bible wars in Russia lay
ahead. Two of the controversies, in particular, illumine the significance and
reception of the Russian Bible in the last decades of the nineteenth century.
Scholarly Debate
Spawned by the Russian Bible
The first such debate spawned by
the issuance of the Russian Bible was not at all new, but was rather a
continuation of the longstanding polemic over the authority of source texts –
specifically, the decision to use the Hebrew Masoretic text in the modern
Russian biblical translation. Even before the bound synodal translation of the
Bible had been issued in 1876, the question was once again enjoined by Bishop
Feofan of Vladimir (Feofan Govorov, 1815–94; Feofan Zatvornik following his
canonization in 1988), who used the pages of Dushepoleznoe chtenie and Domashniaia
beseda to reassert the distinctive authority of the Septuagint text for the
Orthodox church, and to emphasize the inauthentic status of the Hebrew
Masoretic text. [52] He argued that the Septuagint was the infallible
translation from the original Hebrew text, and thus should itself be considered
the original OT text. The Hebrew Masoretic text was, by contrast, a corrupted
text, thus explaining the differences between the Greek and Hebrew originals.
Bishop Feofan alleged that the differences between the Hebrew Masoretic text
and its Greek Septuagint counterpart were to be explained by mistakes in the Masoretic
transcription, and in what amounted to a veiled anti-Semitic conspiracy theory,
he insisted these mistakes were introduced intentionally by Jews to undermine
Christianity’s claim to being the natural heir to the Old Testament covenant.
Those supporting the use of the Hebrew original to address obscurities in the
Slavonic and Septuagint readings were mistaken, he maintained, because such
obscurities as existed merely reflected how divine action is often beyond the
capacity of humans to comprehend. Thus it was important that the obscurities be
preserved. [53]
The critique from Bishop Feofan
Govorov triggered an immediate response in the pages of Pravoslavnoe
obozrenie from Pavel Ivanovich Gorskii-Platonov (1835–1904), a
distinguished former student of Gerasim Pavskii and professor of Hebrew and
biblical archeology at Moscow Theological Academy. [54] Drawing on the late
Moscow Metropolitan Filaret’s treatise “O dogmaticheskom dostoinstve,”
Gorskii-Platonov challenged Bishop Feofan’s argument that the Orthodox church
held the Septuagint to be inviolable. Responding to the claim that because the
Slavonic text was taken from the Septuagint, only the Greek text should be used
in Old Testament translation, the Moscow theology professor reminded the bishop
of Vladimir and Suzdal that the Orthodox church had never declared the Greek
text inviolable, and indeed had often engaged in the correction of its own
texts, not infrequently appealing to the use of the Hebrew original for that
purpose. He also cited the case of the ancient Syrian church that translated
scripture from the Hebrew rather than the Greek, and yet no one challenged the
essential Orthodoxy of the Syrian church.
As regarded the books and
passages in the Septuagint that were not in the Hebrew Masoretic text,
Gorskii-Platonov noted that, contrary to the force of the bishop’s position,
the Apocrypha were not considered by the Orthodox church to be canonical.
Moreover, with respect to the textual differences between the Greek and Hebrew
original texts, he reckoned that for every one hundred words of text, there
were only five on which the two texts differed, and that there was no reason to
assume in each and every case that the Greek text should be given priority.
Gorskii-Platonov was most
disparaging of Bishop Feofan’s appeal to the purity of the Septuagint text, and
the claim that the Hebrew Masoretic text had been corrupted. The reason for
scholarly attention to biblical textology, he claimed, was that there had been
errors of transmission in all texts, and that any claim for textual purity was
inappropriate and unfounded. Even had Bishop Feofan wanted to translate the
Russian Old Testament exclusively from the Septuagint, he would encounter
variant readings of the Greek Septuagint. As for Feofan’s red herring that “to
defend the Hebrew is to become Protestant,” Gorskii-Platonov countered that the
printed texts of the Septuagint had been produced using rational scholarly
methods, so that in using one or another Septuagint variant, advocates such as
Feofan would inevitably be drawn into the very kind of reasoned choices for
which they had accused others of Protestant sympathies. [55]
Finally, on the matter of
Feofan’s scurrilous claim regarding the intentional corruption of the Hebrew
text by Jews for polemical purposes against Christianity, Gorskii-Platonov
argued that if Jews had really sought to change the Hebrew text to defend
themselves against Christianity, one would assume that the passages they would
have changed would have been those appealed to in early Christian writing
against Jews. Yet, as Gorskii-Platonov noted, that had not been the case. He
reasoned therefore that changes in the Hebrew text had nothing to do with
anti-Christian polemics. In his summary statement, he concluded that “the
notion of intentional or partly intentional corruption of the Hebrew text
should be discarded like an old weapon which is now completely useless.” [56]
In the continuing debate, Bishop
Feofan proposed that the synodal translation be abandoned and that there be a
new Russian Old Testament translation based exclusively on the Greek
Septuagint. By the 1890s, that proposal had in fact begun to be addressed, with
publication in the pages of the Kazan Theological Academy journal, Pravoslavnyi
sobesednik, of a Russian OT translation directly from the Septuagint. [57]
While the translation by P. A. Iungerov of the Kazan Academy never reached the
audience captured by the sinodal’nyi perevod, its very production
reflected the ongoing debate in Russian biblical studies spawned by the modern translation
of the Bible. Arthur Repp rightly sees the debate in Russian biblical studies
between Bishop Feofan and Professor Gorskii-Platonov as the continuation of the
earlier debate between the two Filarets, a debate in which two very different
visions of Russian Orthodoxy were being advanced – one an appeal to a timeless
and unchanging tradition, the other an appeal to tradition that sought to
accommodate modern biblical historico-critical methodology. [58] In retrospect,
however, the Feofan–Gorskii-Platonov polemic, while it reflected the lively
public discussion associated with the development of biblical studies in modern
Russia, has today been superseded by the Qumran discoveries of the Dead Sea
Scrolls. These discoveries have tended to neutralize the charges and
counter-charges over scribal and translator error, revealing instead the
existence of significantly varying biblical text traditions at a much earlier
stage (150 BCE to 70 CE) than was conceivable at the time of the late
nineteenth-century debate over the textology of the Russian Bible.
Within the polemical world of
nineteenth-century Russian biblical studies, however, one dispute captured
particularly wide attention, for it involved a key translator of the sinodal’nyi
perevod, Daniil Khvol’son. The conflict arose in connection with the
publication by Khvol’son of a straightforward historico-critical text analysis
relating to the Gospel accounts of the Last Supper. [59] The Khvol’son work has
received considerable attention in western scholarship because of its challenge
to traditional Christian accounts of the Pharisees and Sadducees in the New
Testament. Such traditional accounts, often based on the synoptic Gospels that
were probably compiled after 70 CE, offer a negative portrait of the Pharisees
as legalistically preoccupied with purity and man-made laws, as opposed to Jesus
Christ’s concern with God’s unconditional love. Khvol’son challenged this
binary opposition between the followers of Christ and the Pharisees, noting
that in the first century, ties between Christians and Jews of Pharisaic disposition
were characterized by close loving relationships. Indeed, some of the teachings
of Christ, as in the Sermon on the Mount, were consistent with the teaching of
the Pharisees and with later rabbinical thought. Ironically, it was rather the
Sadducees, largely composed of priestly and aristocratic families, with whom
early Christian followers experienced the greatest conflict. The subsequent
negative depiction of the Pharisees, according to this view, may well have
reflected attitudes present during a later period when the Gospels were
written, and when Christianity was more focused on its Roman Gentile world, and
less closely associated withits early Jewish roots. The Khvol’son recasting of Pharisees and
Sadducees is widely accepted today in the historical-critical text literature.
Khvol’son’s reframing of the
picture of Pharisees and Sadducees in early Christian and rabbinical text
traditions constituted but one part of his article. It was to another part of
his work that most attention came to be riveted – namely, his effort to explain
the discrepancy in the synoptic Gospels over the date of the Last Supper. [60]
The Gospels of Matthew, Mark, and Luke all recorded the Last Supper as
occurring on “the first day of Unleavened Bread” – the fourteenth day of the
month of Nisan in the Jewish calendar. In the Gospel of John, however, the Last
Supper was placed on the thirteenth day of Nisan, the eve of the day of
Unleavened Bread. Khvol’son, whose article offered a solution to this supposed
conflict, sought to quiet those rationalist critics who would challenge the
authority of the Gospels based upon such internal discrepancies. Khvol’son’s
argument accepted as a starting point that the similarity of the three Gospel
accounts was based upon the use by the Gospel writers Mark and Luke of the
Gospel of Matthew, which was originally written in Aramaic or old Syriac.
Khvol’son arrived at his solution
to the dating discrepancy while reading an old Syriac NT edition, for it became
clear to Khvol’son in the reading of the relevant passage in the old Syriac
Gospel of Matthew that the source of the differing dates was likely owing to
scribal error. The original Matthew text (26:17) went as follows:
Now on the first
day of Unleavened Bread the disciples came to Jesus, saying, “Where will you
have us prepare for you to eat the Passover?”
But, Khvol’son came to recognize
that the passage in the original Aramaic of the Gospel of Matthew most likely
read:
Now as the first
day of Unleavened Bread approached, the disciples came to Jesus, saying,
“Where will you have us prepare for you to eat the Passover?”
In the Aramaic original, the
italicized words would have been identical, leading Khvol’son to suspect that
in copying the original manuscript the first of the duplicative verbs was
likely omitted. If so, Matthew’s original Aramaic account would have been in
full agreement with the Gospel of John that the Last Supper occurred on the
thirteenth day of Nisan, the eve of the day of Unleavened Bread. [61]
Khvol’son proceeded to explain
why Jesus would have celebrated the Passover on the thirteenth day of Nisan,
rather than on the fourteenth day as stipulated in Mosaic law. From his study
of Mosaic law, including the Jewish interpretations that preceded those
represented in the Mishnah and Talmud (authorities for rabbinical Jewish
tradition), Khvol’son found an indication that when the fourteenth day of Nisan
fell on a Friday, as it did in the year of Jesus’ death, the feast was shifted
to the previous day so as not to conflict with the observance of the Sabbath
when the sacrifice of a lamb would have been prohibited.
While Khvol’son’s exercise in
historico-critical text analysis was hailed by reviewers – Repp notes that the
Kazan Theological Academy’s journal, Pravoslavnyi sobesednik, labeled it
one of the finest articles of the year – it also met with virulent opposition
from Archimandrite Vitalii Grechulevich (1822–85), a popular author of Gospel
harmonies and publisher of the journal Strannik. [62] Archimandrite
Vitalii claimed the Khvol’son article contained fabrications that were
scandalous to Christians. He argued that “the first day of Unleavened Bread” in
Jesus’ day meant not only the fifteenth day of Nisan, but the fourteenth as
well. Stooping to ad hominem and anti-Jewish rhetoric, he suggested that
Khvol’son, as a convert to Christianity from Judaism, considered rabbinical
literature more authoritative than Christian tradition. Unwilling to accept any
possibility of corruption of scriptural texts, Archimandrite Vitalii was
incensed over what he considered an anti-Orthodox attempt to challenge the
inerrancy of Gospel texts.
Khvol’son’s response to the
diatribe of Vitalii Grechulevich was to restate his views, noting in the
process that the rule found in rabbinical sources that the Passover celebration
was to take precedence over the Sabbath was not necessarily followed in Jesus’
time. As for the matter of Vitalii Grechulevich’s claim identifying the first
day of Unleavened Bread as incorporating both the fourteenth and fifteenth day
of Nisan, Khvol’son noted that there was nothing in three thousand years of
Jewish writing to support such a claim. Finally, Khvol’son rather ingeniously
noted how his solution to the dating of the Last Supper indirectly supported
the Eastern Orthodox practice of using leavened bread in the celebration of the
Eucharist because the eating of unleavened bread would have awaited the next
night. It must have been rather galling for the patriotic Russian clergyman to
read that his solution for the dating of the Last Supper supported western,
rather than Eastern Orthodox liturgical practices.
The mismatched polemic between
the historico-critical text scholar and the popular cleric reflected, as Repp
has noted, a “growing divide” between the modern Russian biblical scholarship
of the academy – unleashed as it was by the reopening of Russian biblical
translation – and the less-well trained audience of clergy and laypeople for
whom, ironically, the Russian Bible was intended. [63]
There was also a dark side to the
Bible wars of the last half of the nineteenth century – the specific attempt by
some to turn legitimate textological disputes over biblical sources into ad
hominem and anti-Semitic attacks against Russia’s increasingly sophisticated
Hebraic scholars. Conversely, as documented in Chapter 5, it was these Russian
scholars in the field of Hebraic studies – the architects of the modern Russian
OT – who effectively challenged one of the greatest threats to Jewish–Christian
relations in Eurasia, the scurrilous charge of blood libel.
NOTES
1. Chistovich, Istoriia perevoda Biblii, 261–323; see
also Serdechnyi privet: Sbornik statei, izdannykh S.-Peterburgskoi dukhovnoi
akademiei v pamiat’ piatidesiatiletiia sviatitel’skogo sluzheniia
vysokopreosviashchenneishago Isidora Mitropolita Novgorodskago,
S-Peterburgskago i Finliandskago (St. Petersburg, 1884). For the
unpublished exchange between the two most prominent prelates of Kiev and
Moscow, see “Sbornik statei o raznykh predmetakh,” Rukopisnyi Otdel,
Rossiiskaia natsional’naia biblioteka (RORNB, Manuscript Room, Russian National
Library), fond S.-Peterburgskaia dukhovnaia akademiia, delo
A.I.80, 381 leaves.
2. Chistovich, Istoriia perevoda Biblii, 265.
Filaret’s reference may also relate to the RBS debate over Septuagint readings
in the translation of the Psalter.
3. “Otvetnaia zapiska,” RORNB, fond S.-Peterburgskaia
dukhovnaia akademiia, delo A.I.80, ll. 95–104; also Chistovich, Istoriia
perevoda Biblii, 269–83.
4. Chistovich, Istoriia perevoda Biblii, 262–4 and
293–4. For the full response, see Filaret, Sobranie mnenii i otzyvov
Filareta, mitropolita moskovskago i kolomenskago po uchebnym i
tserkovno-gosudarstvennym voprosam, iv: 244–59.
5. B. I. Sobe, “Problema ispravleniia bogosluzhebnykh knig v
rossii v xix–xx vekakh,” Bogoslovskie trudy, 5 (1970): 25–68.
6. G. P. Fedotov, “Slavianskii ili russkii iazyk v
bogosluzhenii?” Put’, no. 57 (August−October 1938): 28.
7. Chistovich, Istoriia perevoda Biblii, 270–1.
8. Moscow Metropolitan Filaret’s response, missing from the
Chistovich history, can be found in “Konfidentsial’naia zametka o raznoglasii
vzgliadov dvukh mitropolitov Filaretov . . . o perevode Sv. Pisaniia,” ROGPB, fond
S.-Peterburgskaia dukhovnaia akademiia, delo A.I.80, ll. 111–111
ob.
9. Ibid., l. 109 ob. Chistovich, Istoriia perevoda Biblii,
275, omits this exchange between the two Filarets.
10. “Konfidentsial’naia zametka,” l. 110; Chistovich, Istoriia
perevoda Biblii, 290.
11. “Konfidentsial’naia zametka,” l. 110.
12. Chistovich, Istoriia perevoda Biblii, 262–3.
Filaret’s reference is to the Aleut/Russian diglot edition of the Gospel of St.
Matthew (1840).
13. On Il’minskii, see P. V. Znamenskii, Na pamiat’oN. I.
Il’minskom (Kazan, 1892); and Paul W. Werth, At the Margins of Orthodoxy:
Mission, Governance, and Confessional Politics in Russia’s Volga-Kama Region,
1827–1905 (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2002).
14. Quoted internally in Eugene Smirnoff, A Short Account
of the Historical Development and Present Position of Russian Orthodox Missions
(London, 1903), 33.
15. Chistovich, Istoriia perevoda Biblii, 263–5,
314–16. Although Metropolitan Filaret called for the use of both Greek and
Hebrew original texts in OT translation (“O dogmaticheskom dostoinstve,” Pribavleniia
k izdaniiu Tvorenii Sviatykh Ottsev v russkom perevode, 17 [1858]: 452–84),
he sanctioned a process that ultimately gave priority to the original Hebrew
Masoretic text with footnoted Septuagint variant readings.
16. The appeal to the Erasmian Greek NT standardized in the
Elzevir edition published in Moscow in 1810 became an issue bearing on the
evaluation of the textology of the Russian NT (see Afterword).
17. Gospoda Nashego Iisusa Khrista Sviatoe Evangelie ot
Matfeia, Marka, Luki i Ioanna na russkom narechii (St. Petersburg:
Sinodal’naia tip., 1860). See Appendix, no. 43.
18. Deianiia i Poslaniia Sviatykh Apostolov s
Apokalipsisom na russkom narechii (St. Petersburg: Sinodal’naia tip., 1862)
– Appendix, no. 49. There followed in 1863 the complete NT, a rebinding of the
two separate parts of the Russian NT with the common title, Novyi Zavet
Gospoda Nashego Iisusa Khrista na russkom narechii (St. Petersburg:
Sinodal’naia tip., 1863) – Appendix, no. 62.
19. Ivan E. Evseev, Stoletniaia godovshchina russkogo
perevoda Biblii (Petrograd, 1916), 34. See also Viktor Zhivov, Kul’turnye
konflikty v istorii russkogo literaturnogo iazyka xviii–nachala xix veka (Moscow:
Institut russkogo iazyka, AN SSSR, 1990); and his “Iazyk Feofana Prokopovicha i
rol’ gibridnykh variantov tserkovnoslavianskogo v istorii slavianskikh
literaturnykh iazykov,” Sovetskoe slavianovedenie, 1985, no. 3: 70−85.
20. On this use of the Russian, rather than the Slavonic
text, see Fedor Eleonskii, Po povodu 150-letiia Elizavetinskoi Biblii: O
novom peresmotre slavianskogo perevoda Biblii (St. Petersburg: A. P.
Lopukhin, 1902), 194–212.
21. Francis J. Thomson, “The Slavonic Translation of the Old
Testament,” in Interpretation of the Bible: On the Occasion of the
Publication of the New Slovenian Translation of the Bible, ed. Jože
Krašovec (Ljubljana/Sheffield: Slovenian Academy of Sciences and Arts/Sheffield
Academic Press, 1998), 713. The issuance of the NT in diglot editions tended
also to call attention to these differences.
22. Czesław Miłosz, “Problems of Biblical Translation,”
unpublished lecture at Arizona State University, January 20, 1984.Miłosz noted
his concern over language degradation and his parallel commitment to the study
of Hebrew in memory of the Holocaust.
23. “O prodolzhenii perevoda Sviashchennago Pisaniia na
russkoe narechie,” in Sobranie mnenii i otzyvov Filareta (Moscow, 1887),
v: 388–90.
24. See “Khvol’son, Daniil Avraamovich,” in Entsiklopedicheskii
slovar’ (St. Petersburg: Brokgauz-Efron, 1903), lxxiii: 136.
25. On Khvol’son as “the most famous Russian Jewish
apostate,” see Michael Stanislawski, Tsar Nicholas I and the Jews: The
Transformation of Jewish Society in Russia, 1825–1855 (Philadelphia, PA:
Jewish Publication Society of America, 1983), 146. In his rather unsympathetic
portrait of Khvol’son, Stanislawski dismisses the conversion as simple
expediency for the purposes of professional advancement. Drawing on Saul M.
Ginsburg’s study of Russian Jewish converts to Orthodoxy, Meshumodim in Tsarishn
Rusland: Forshungen un zikhroynes vegn Yidishn lebn in amolikn Rusland [“Apostates
in Tsarist Russia”] (New York: Tsiko bikher farlag, 1946), 120–1, Stanislawski
attributes to Khvol’son the famous epigram, “I believe that it is better to be
a professor in St. Petersburg than a melamed in Eishishok.”
26. On Khvol’son, see the tribute by his distinguished
student, St. Petersburg Theological Academy professor, Ivan Troitskii,
“Professor D. A. Khvol’son,” Zhurnal ministerstva narodnogo prosveshcheniia,
n.s. 34 (1911), no. 8, otd. 4: 90–9; also the biographical entry in Men’, Bibliologicheskii
slovar’, iii: 349–50. For Khvol’son’s work on the OT text, see “Istoriia
vetkhozavetnogo teksta i ocherk ego drevneishikh perevodov,” Khristianskoe
chtenie, 1874, chast’ 1: 519–74, chast’ 2: 3–74.
27. Pavel I. Savvaitov, Bibleiskaia germenevtika, 2nd
edn (St. Petersburg, 1859). First published in 1844, this standard work on
biblical hermeneutics has been the subject of controversy. Fedor Eleonskii has claimed
that Savvaitov simply translated and revised an earlier work used in seminary
instruction, Delineatio Hermeneticae Sacrae, ad usum studiosorum Sacrae
Scripturae accommodata. See F. G. Eleonskii, “Otechestvennye trudy po
izucheniiu Biblii v xix v.,” Khristianskoe chtenie, 1901, no. 1: 5–28
and no. 5: 633–60. See also the treatment of Savvaitov in Alexander I. Negrov, Biblical
Interpretation in the Russian Orthodox Church: A Historical and Hermeneutical
Perspective (Tübingen: Mohr Siebeck, 2008), 97–102.
28. Savvaitov, Bibleiskaia germenevtika, 141.
29. See P. I. Savvaitov, Grammatika zyrianskogo iazyka
(St. Petersburg, 1849) and his Zyriansko-Russkii I Russko-Zyrianskii slovar’,
2 vols. (St. Petersburg, 1849).
30. See Khvol’son to BFBS, received in London, December 8,
1870, BFBS Agents Books (Russia), no. 125, 234 (BSA/D1/7/125). Khvol’son’s
critique of the synodal OT text needs to be seen, however, in the context of
his offer then being considered by the BFBS Petersburg Agency to complete on
retainer for the BFBS a parallel Russian OT translation more consistently
faithful to the Hebrew original.
31. The synodal questioning is documented in Troitskii,
“Professor D. A. Khvol’son,” 90–9.
32. Khvol’son’s comments on the delay caused by the death of
Golubev were relayed to London BFBS offices by its Petersburg agent William
Nicolson. See Nicholson to R. B. Girdlestone, December 3, 1870, BFBS Agents
Books (Russia), no. 125, 231 (BSA/D1/7/125).
33. On St. Makarii’s translations, published in Pravoslavnoe
obozrenie, see Chapter 3, n. 53. The Pavskii OT books were similarly
serialized in the journal Dukh khristianina, 1862–3 (Appendix, no. 56).
Kiev Academy Professor of Hebrew Mikhail Spiridonovich Guliaev published his
separate translation of the historical books of the OT, Istoricheskie knigi
Sviashchennago Pisaniia (Kiev, 1866). See also Leon Mandel’shtam’s Russian
translation of the Pentateuch published in Berlin in 1862 (Appendix, no. 54).
34. The separate parts of the Russian OT prepared by the St.
Petersburg committee were published in 1868 (Part i, Pentateuch), 1869 (Part
ii, historical books of Joshua−Esther), 1871 (Psalter), 1872 (Part iii, poetical
books, Job–Ecclesiasticus, with the Psalter), and 1875 (Part iv, the prophetic
books, Isaiah − 3 Esdras) by the Synodal Press of St. Petersburg and were
issued under the general title Sviashchennyia Knigi Vetkhago Zaveta v
russkom perevode (Appendix, nos. 91, 97, 104, 111, and 121).
35. Richard Knill’s role as BFBS agent in Petersburg
(1825–33) was perpetuated in a succession of BFBS agents, who oversaw the
translation and distribution of biblical texts. Upon the reopening of biblical translation,
BFBS agents commissioned the society’s own biblical translations, both in
Russian and non-Russian languages of the empire. Petersburg agents included:
John Brown (1833–40), Thomas Ellerby (1840–53), Archibald Mirrielees (1853–7),
and informally thereafter on the BFBS Petersburg agency committee, William
Mirrielees (1857–65), Andrew Muir (1860–9), Adalbert Eck (1865–9), William
Nicolson (1869–97), and William Keen (1896–1918). See S. K. Batalden,
“Revolution and Emigration: The Russian Files of the British and Foreign Bible
Society,” in The Study of Russian History from British Archival Sources,
ed. Janet M. Hartley (London: Mansell Publishing for the University of London
School of Slavonic and East European Studies, 1986), 147–71.
36. The BFBS editorial subcommittee undertook only the most
perfunctory review, sending a copy of the synodal 1860 Gospels to a former
Siberian missionary for the London Missionary Society, Edward Stallybrass, who
approved of the text (see BFBS Minutes of the Editorial Subcommittee, vol. 6,
June 5, 1860, 105–6; and the note of Stallybrass’s support, 114 [BSA/C17/1/6]).
A member of the Petersburg agency committee, W. Lee, also forwarded a positive
evaluation of the text, but there was no evaluation by a native speaker of
Russian (W. Lee to W. H. Ropes, May 31, 1860, St. Petersburg, in BFBS Editorial
Correspondence Inwards, no. 1, 322 [BSA/E3/1/4/1]).
37. A. Mirrielees to H. Knolleke, June 13, 1860, BFBS
Editorial Correspondence Inwards, no. 1, 323 (BSA/E3/1/4/1).
38. Nicolson to R. B. Girdlestone, St. Petersburg, December
3, 1870, BFBS Agents Books (Russia), no. 125, 230 (BSA/D1/7/125).
39. In preparing the Leipzig Psalter (Appendix, no. 32), BFBS
called upon John Paterson’s collaborator in the RBS, Ebenezer Henderson, to
cleanse the RBS Psalter of its chapter headings, notes, and the 151st Psalm
(see BFBS Minutes of Editorial Subcommittee, vol. 4, August 13, 1851, 38; and
January 27, 1852, 53–4 [BSA/C17]). The 1852 BFBS Psalter was reissued in London
reprintings of 1854 and 1855 (Appendix, nos. 34 and 35) using the stereotype
plates purchased from Tauchnitz in Berlin. The London edition of the Russian
Octateuch (Genesis−Ruth), Bibliia; Vosem’ knig vetkhago zaveta: Piatiknizhie
Moiseevo, Iisus Navin, Sud’i i Ruf’, was issued in 1861 and again in 1862 (Appendix,
nos. 48 and 50).
40. On Kel’siev and his collaboration with the BFBS, see S.
K. Batalden, “Revolutionaries and Evangelicals in Concert: Alexander Herzen,
Vasilii Kel’siev, and the British and Foreign Bible Society,” paper delivered
to the Russian-Speaking Society, Cambridge, UK, February 10, 2004. Kel’siev,
whom Herzen refers to as “a nihilist in the surplice of a deacon” in My Past
and Thoughts (London: Chatto & Windus, 1968): iii: 1333, was also the
pseudonymous “Vadim,” who created his own independent Russian translation of
the Pentateuch in a version that renders OT names in Russian with Hebrew
pronunciation (Moshe, rather than Moisei). For his controversial Pentateuch, see
Appendix, no. 40. Kel’siev also proofread for the BFBS a revised small 24mo
edition of its London Russian Psalter issued in 1860 (and reprinted in 1862) –
an edition that became known as the “imperative Psalter” for its prodigious use
of exclamation points (see Appendix, nos. 42 and 53).
41. A. Muir to H. Knolleke, St. Petersburg, January 3, 1865,
BFBS Editorial Correspondence Inwards, no. 3, 309 (E3/1/4/3). The reference
should be to the BFBS Octateuch, not Pentateuch.
42. Muir to Knolleke, St. Petersburg, January 3, 1865
(BSA/E3/1/4/3). For the 1862 Mandel’shtam Hebrew/Russian diglot of the
Pentateuch, or Torah, see Appendix, no. 54, and the discussion in Chapter 5.
Mandel’shtam’s preface to the diglot is addressed to Jewish schoolteachers,
exhorting them to train their children to read the Bible and to be good
citizens of the Russian Empire. See also the 1872 reprinting (Appendix, no.
108). Mandel’shtam prepared a separate Hebrew/Russian diglot of the Psalter
(see Appendix, no. 109). The personal library of Leon Mandel’shtam today rests
at the foundation of the New York Public Library Judaica collection.
43. Millard to Knolleke, Vienna, February 17, 1865, BFBS
Editorial Correspondence Inwards, no. 4 (BSA/E3/1/4/4). Millard cautioned
against Mandel’shtam, referencing in coded language Mandel’shtam’s Jewish
identity – “my experience of birds of this feather is such as to advise great caution.”
After correspondence with BFBS agents in Vienna, Petersburg, and Odessa in
winter and spring 1865, the BFBS editorial subcommittee in London authorized
the hiring of Vasilii Levison in April 1865 at a salary of 200 rubles per
month. See BFBS Minutes of the Editorial Subcommittee, vol. 8, April 19, 1865,
56–8 (BSA/C17/1/8).
44. On Levison, see the attestation of Gottlieb Abramsohn to
BFBS agent Millard, Berlin, December 31, 1864, BFBS Editorial Correspondence
Inwards, no. 3, 312–13 (BSA/E3/1/4/3); also “Levison, Vasilii Andreevich,” Evreiskaia
entsiklopediia (repr. Moscow: Terra, 1991), x: 117–18.
45. For London publication of these Levison/Bogoliubov
Russian OT editions, see Appendix, nos. 81–2, 84–5, 93–4, and 102. Upon his
arrival in Petersburg, BFBS agent William Nicolson assessed the work of Levison
and Bogoliubov rather negatively (see Nicolson to BFBS, November 2, 1881, BFBS Editorial
Correspondence Inwards, no. 16, 133–41 [BSA/E3/1/4/16]). His assessment not
only reflected the advice he had received from the subsequent BFBS translator
Daniil Khvol’son, it also reflected the critical evaluation of the
Levison/Bogoliubov BFBS texts by Moscow Theological Academy Professor Nikol’skii
in the Russian journal, Pravoslavnoe obozrenie (M. Nikol’skii, “Russkii
perevod Biblii I znachenie evreiskoi filologii,” Pravoslavnoe obozrenie,
1876 [April]: 645–72). Nicolson ultimately recommended BFBS revision of the
Levison translations to make them conform to the subsequent BFBS translations
undertaken by Daniil Khvol’son and Pavel Savvaitov.
46. W. S. Mirrielees to R. B. Girdlestone, St. Petersburg,
July 15, 1869, BFBS Editorial Correspondence Inwards, no. 7 (BSA/E3/1/4/7). The
death of Levison came prior to the arrival in Petersburg of BFBS agent William
Nicolson. Thus Khvol’son’s initial contact within the BFBS agency was William Mirrielees.
47. After some haggling over what rate should be paid for the
translation and whether the existing BFBS Russian Pentateuch needed revision,
the terms of Khvol’son’s engagement were confirmed in early 1871. See Nicolson
to Girdlestone, St. Petersburg, January 4, 1871, BFBS Agents Books (Russia),
no. 125, 253–4 (BSA/D1/7/125); and BFBS Minutes of the Editorial Subcommittee,
vol. 10, February 1, 1871, 71 (BSA/C17/1/10).
48. The remaining books were published in 1873 (Appendix,
nos. 112–15). The revision of the Psalter (no. 114) included, for the first
time, the renumbering of the Psalms according to the Hebrew numbering system.
In order to issue the complete OT, BFBS also needed to reissue its Octateuch
(Genesis−Ruth) in a compatible 12mo format. To do so BFBS utilized the services
of Khvol’son and Savvaitov, seeking a consistent translation from the Hebrew
Masoretic text and eliminating all bracketed Septuagint footnotes present in
London editions of the Octateuch. The resulting revised BFBS Russian Octateuch (Appendix,
no. 126) effectively brought to completion the BFBS translation of the Russian
OT, which the society proceeded to combine with the NT text in a bound 1875
complete edition of the Russian Bible (Appendix, no. 128), issued just prior to
the Synod’s complete bound edition of 1876 (Appendix, no. 130).
49. This Hebrew/Russian Vienna diglot (Appendix, no. 132)
employed the BFBS, not the synodal, Russian OT text. While this diglot could
circulate through the BFBS Petersburg agency, BFBS outlets in the Russian
Empire were never permitted to circulate the BFBS Russian Bible in a Russian-only
edition, even though the Vienna BFBS agency produced such a text. The first
printing of the BFBS Russian-only biblical edition was issued in 1877
(Appendix, no. 134). Despite the proscription against circulation, some copies
of the full BFBS Russian Bible circulated clandestinely in regions of Ukraine
adjacent to Austro-Hungarian territory. Lacking synodal blessing, however, the
BFBS Russian-only OT text never circulated openly in the Russian Empire.
50. See, in particular, Repp, “In Search of an Orthodox Way”;
also Eleonskii, “Otechestvennye trudy po izucheniiu Biblii”; and Negrov, Biblical
Interpretation.
51. Nicolson to Wright, St. Petersburg, June 7, 1894, BFBS
Editorial Correspondence Inwards, no. 32, 77 (BSA/E3/1/4/32).
52. See the critical articles by Bishop Feofan (Govorov)
directed against the synodal translation and use of the Hebrew Masoretic text:
“Po povodu izdaniia sviashchennykh knig Vetkhago Zaveta v russkom perevode,” Dushepoleznoe
chtenie, 1875, chast’ 3, no. 11 (November): 342–52; “Pravo-slovo ob izdanii
sviashchennykh knig Vetkhago Zaveta v russkom perevode,” Domashniaia beseda,
1875, vyp. 47 (November 22); “Ob upotreblenii novago perevoda vetkhozavetnykh
pisanii,” Dushepoleznoe chtenie, 1876, no. 9 (September), chast’ 3,
100–6; “O nashem dolge derzhat’sia perevoda 70 tolkovnikov,” Dushepoleznoe
chtenie, 1876, chast’ 2, no. 5 (May): 3–21; “Reshenie voprosa o mere
pravoslavnago upotrebleniia evreiskago nyneshniago teksta, po ukazaniiu
tserkovnoi praktiki,” Domashniaia beseda, 1876, vyp. 2; and “Bibliia po
perevodu semidesiati tolkovnikov est’ zakonnaia nasha Bibliia,” Domashniaia
beseda, 1876, vyp. 20–4.
53. Bishop Feofan, “Po povodu izdaniia sviashchennykh knig
vetkhago zaveta v russkom perevode,” 343–8. On the polemical exchange between
Bishop Feofan and Professor Gorskii-Platonov, see also Repp, “In Search of an
Orthodox Way,” 137–44.
54. P. I. Gorskii-Platonov, “Neskol’ko slov o stat’e episkopa
Feofana: ‘Po povodu izdaniia sviashchennykh knig Vetkhago Zaveta v russkom
perevode’ (Dushepoleznoe chtenie, 1875, no. 11),” Pravoslavnoe obozrenie,
series 2, 1875, no. 11 (November), chast’ 3: 505–40; see also his “O
nedoumeniiakh, vyzyvaemykh russkim perevodom sv. knig Vetkhago Zaveta,” Pravoslavnoe
obozrenie, 1877, pt. 1 (January): 69–104, (February): 260–84, and (April):
681–702.
55. Gorskii-Platonov, “O nedoumeniiakh, vyzyvaemykh russkim
perevodom,” 691.
56. Gorskii-Platonov, “Neskol’ko slov,” 533. The passage is
cited also in Repp, “In Search of an Orthodox Way,” 143.
57. The Iungerov translations included an initial 1890 Kazan
University Press publication of the book of Micah (Appendix, no. 185).
Iungerov’s translations were serialized in Pravoslavnyi sobesednik, and
then published separately by Kazan University Press. In addition to Micah, the
Iungerov translations (see bracketed entries by year in Appendix) included:
Amos (1897); Proverbs (1908); Jeremiah (1910); Ezekiel (1911); Daniel (1912);
Job (1914); and the Twelve Minor Prophets (1913).
58. Repp, “In Search of an Orthodox Way,” 144.
59. D. A. Khvol’son, “Posledniaia paskhal’naia vecheria
Iisusa Khrista i den’ ego smerti [The Last Passover Supper of Jesus Christ and
the Day of his Death],” Khristianskoe chtenie, 1875 and 1877. Responding
to challenges to his article, Khvol’son restated his conclusions in an article
by the same title in Khristianskoe chtenie in 1878. The work was
republished under separate cover in St. Petersburg in 1892.
60. For a recounting of Khvol’son’s dating of the Last
Supper, see Repp’s interpretive account, “In Search of an Orthodox Way,”
145–53.
61. Khvol’son, “Posledniaia paskhal’naia vecheria,” Khristianskoe
chtenie, 1875 (February): 462; and Repp, “In Search of an Orthodox Way,”
147.
62. Repp, “In Search of an Orthodox Way,” 148; for the
article by Vitalii Grechulevich, see [A.V.], “Posledniaia paskhal’naia vecheria
Iisusa Khrista i den’ ego smerti,” Strannik, 1876, no. 11: 97–126 and no.
12: 185–289.
63. Repp, “In Search of an Orthodox Way,” 153.
