On the Creation of the “Russian Synodal Bible”

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.