What They Translated

The brothers’ translation work began with what worship required: the Gospel lectionary (the Aprakos) and the Psalter, then the Apostol (the Epistle readings) and the liturgical books needed to celebrate the services in Slavonic. After Cyril’s death Methodius, the Vita Methodii reports, undertook a far larger labor — the translation of the fuller body of the Scriptures (with certain exceptions), together with the Nomocanon, the book of Church law, and a Paterikon of monastic teaching. This file sets out what is securely attested of the translated corpus, what is contested, and the scale of the achievement.

Tradition: Pan-Orthodox (Equals-to-the-Apostles)

First, the Books of Worship

The translation began where the mission’s need was sharpest: the texts required to read the Scriptures and celebrate the services in Slavonic. The Vita Constantini reports that, immediately upon devising the alphabet, Constantine began to translate the Gospel, opening with “In the beginning was the Word” (John 1:1; Vita Constantini 14; trans. Kantor 1983). The form he began with appears to have been not a continuous Gospel text but the Gospel lectionary — the Aprakos Evangeliary, the selections arranged in the order of their reading through the liturgical year — which fits the immediate purpose of providing for worship; the Codex Assemanianus and other early manuscripts preserve this lectionary form (Lunt, Old Church Slavonic Grammar, 2001, introduction; Vlasto, The Entry of the Slavs into Christendom, 1970, ch. 2; Tachiaos, Cyril and Methodius of Thessalonica, 2001, ch. 5).

Alongside the Gospel came the Psalter — the prayer-book of the Church, recited daily in the office and woven through every service — and the Apostol, the readings from the Acts and Epistles (Vlasto 1970, ch. 2; Tachiaos 2001, ch. 5). To these were added the liturgical books proper: the formularies of the Divine Liturgy, the texts of the daily office (Matins, the Hours, Vespers, Compline), and the rites of the sacraments — the contents of what the Slavonic tradition would call the Sluzhebnik (the priest’s service-book) and the Trebnik (the book of occasional offices), here in their earliest form (Tachiaos 2001, ch. 5; Vlasto 1970, ch. 2). The Euchologium Sinaiticum, one of the oldest Glagolitic manuscripts, preserves an early Slavonic collection of such offices and prayers (Lunt 2001, introduction). The Vita Constantini sums up the goal: that the whole ecclesiastical order — “matins, the hours, vespers, compline, and the liturgy” — might be sung in Slavonic (Vita Constantini 15; Kantor 1983; see Liturgy in the Slavonic Tongue).

How Much of the Bible? The Brothers Together

A genuine question is how much of the Bible the brothers translated during the years they worked together, before Cyril’s death. The securely attested core is the liturgical Scripture — the Gospels (in lectionary and perhaps continuous form), the Psalter, and the Epistle-readings — the texts the Church’s worship demanded (Vlasto 1970, ch. 2; Tachiaos 2001, ch. 5; Lunt 2001). Beyond this the evidence is harder to read. [Disputed: the extent of the brothers’ joint biblical translation is debated — some scholars hold that Constantine and Methodius together rendered only the liturgical Scriptures (the Gospels, Psalter, and Apostol) needed for worship, leaving the bulk of the Old Testament untranslated until Methodius’s later labors; others credit the brothers jointly with a wider range of biblical texts from early in the mission; the Vitae do not give a precise inventory, and the loss of the earliest manuscripts makes the question difficult (discussion in Vlasto 1970, ch. 2; Tachiaos 2001, chs. 5, 9).] What is not in doubt is that by the time of Cyril’s death a working Slavonic Scripture and liturgy sufficient for the Church’s life existed — the foundation on which Methodius would build.

Methodius’s Great Labor

The fullest biblical translation is credited by the sources to Methodius alone, in the years after his release from imprisonment and toward the end of his life. The Vita Methodii gives a remarkable notice: that Methodius, having earlier had only the Psalter and the Gospel with the Apostol and selected church services, now, with the help of two priest-scribes who wrote rapidly, translated “all the books” of the Scriptures in full — completing the work, the Life says, in a matter of months — excepting only the books of Maccabees (Vita Methodii 15; trans. Kantor 1983; Dvornik, Byzantine Missions Among the Slavs, 1970, ch. 6; Tachiaos 2001, ch. 9). The claim that Methodius rendered the whole Bible (less Maccabees) in so short a span is hagiographically heightened and is reported here as the Vita‘s testimony (METHODOLOGY §3.5); scholars debate how complete and how durable this full Old Testament translation actually was, since it does not survive intact and the later Slavonic biblical text was repeatedly revised (Vlasto 1970, ch. 2; Tachiaos 2001, ch. 9). [Disputed: whether Methodius’s full biblical translation survived and shaped the later Slavonic Bible is uncertain — some scholars trace elements of the later Slavonic Old Testament to his work, while others judge that his complete translation was largely lost and that the surviving Slavonic Bible rests on later, partly independent efforts (discussion in Vlasto 1970, ch. 2; Tachiaos 2001, ch. 9).] What the notice securely attests is the brothers’ ambition: not merely a liturgical Scripture but the whole Word of God in Slavonic.

Beyond the Bible, Methodius is credited with translating two works of capital importance for the ordering of a Church. The first is a Nomocanon — a collection of the canons of the Church together with relevant civil law — giving the Slavonic Church its book of canon law (Vita Methodii 15; Kantor 1983; Dvornik 1970, ch. 6; Tachiaos 2001, ch. 9); this translation, often associated with the Nomocanon attributed in the Byzantine tradition to John Scholasticus, became the foundation of Slavic canon law (Vlasto 1970, ch. 2). The second is a Paterikon — a collection of the sayings and lives of the desert and monastic fathers — giving the young Slavic Church the inheritance of monastic spirituality in its own tongue (Vita Methodii 15; Kantor 1983; Tachiaos 2001, ch. 9). A penitential and other ecclesiastical texts are also associated with the brothers’ and disciples’ work (Vlasto 1970, ch. 2).

The Scale of the Achievement

The significance of this translated corpus is hard to overstate. To render the Gospels, the Psalter, the Epistles, the Liturgy, the daily office, the sacramental rites, the canons, and the monastic fathers into a language that had never before been written was to create, almost from nothing, the entire textual apparatus of a Christian Church — and to do it in a language for which the very words to express many of the concepts had first to be coined (Lunt 2001, introduction; Tachiaos 2001, chs. 5, 9). The brothers and their disciples had to find or forge Slavic equivalents for the technical vocabulary of Greek theology — terms for grace, salvation, resurrection, the Trinity, the divine persons — building a theological language where none existed (Lunt 2001; Vlasto 1970, ch. 2; see The Textual Legacy). The result was not a set of crib-translations but a literary corpus and a literary language, the foundation of everything the Slavic Churches would later write. It is on this corpus, far more than on any institutional structure (which collapsed in Moravia within a generation), that the brothers’ enduring influence rests: the books outlived the mission and traveled wherever Slavonic Christianity went (Obolensky, The Byzantine Commonwealth, 1971, ch. 4; see The Spread to the Slavs).

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.
Dvornik, Francis. Byzantine Missions Among the Slavs. New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press, 1970, ch. 6.
Tachiaos, Anthony-Emil N. Cyril and Methodius of Thessalonica. Crestwood, NY: St. Vladimir’s Seminary Press, 2001, chs. 5, 9.
Obolensky, Dimitri. The Byzantine Commonwealth. London: Weidenfeld & Nicolson, 1971, ch. 4.