07 — The Slavonic Scriptures and Liturgy
The enduring monument of the brothers is the body of texts they rendered into Slavonic — beginning with the Gospel lectionary and the Psalter, extending to the liturgical books needed for the Church’s worship, and culminating, after Cyril’s death, in Methodius’s translation of the fuller Scriptures. From these translations a new literary language was born, Old Church Slavonic, the first Slavic literary tongue and the matrix of the medieval literatures of Bulgaria, Serbia, and Rus. This section treats what the brothers translated and the textual legacy that grew from it.
Tradition: Pan-Orthodox (Equals-to-the-Apostles)
The translation work is the substance of the brothers’ achievement: the alphabet was the instrument, the translations were the books that made a Slavic Church possible. To render the Scriptures and the Liturgy into Slavonic the brothers had not only to invent a script but to forge a literary language — coining vocabulary for theological concepts, shaping a syntax capable of carrying Greek thought, and creating, in effect, the first written Slavic. The result was a corpus and a language that outlived the Moravian mission entirely and became the common inheritance of the Orthodox Slavs. These files set out the contents of the translated corpus and the character and transmission of the language it created.
Files in This Section
| File | Description |
|---|---|
| What They Translated | The Gospel lectionary and Psalter first; the liturgical books and the Apostol; the question of how much of the Bible the brothers rendered; Methodius’s later translation of the fuller Scriptures and the Nomocanon; what is securely attested and what is contested. |
| The Textual Legacy | Old Church Slavonic as a created literary language; its Byzantine-Greek model and Slavic substance; the manuscript tradition and the canon of earliest texts; the language’s afterlife as Church Slavonic across the Orthodox Slav world. |
See Also
- The Invention of the Alphabet — the script that made the translations possible
- Liturgy in the Slavonic Tongue — the worship the liturgical translations served
- The Spread to the Slavs — the diffusion of the Slavonic books across the Slavic world
- The Divine Liturgy — the rite carried by the translated liturgical books
References
- Vita Constantini (Life of Constantine), chapters 14–15. Trans. in Marvin Kantor, Medieval Slavic Lives of Saints and Princes. Ann Arbor: Michigan Slavic Publications, 1983.
- Vita Methodii (Life of Methodius), chapter 15. Trans. in Kantor, Medieval Slavic Lives, 1983.
- Lunt, Horace G. Old Church Slavonic Grammar. 7th ed. Berlin: Mouton de Gruyter, 2001.
- Vlasto, A. P. The Entry of the Slavs into Christendom. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1970, ch. 2.
- Tachiaos, Anthony-Emil N. Cyril and Methodius of Thessalonica. Crestwood, NY: St. Vladimir’s Seminary Press, 2001, chs. 5, 9.