The 1876 Synodal Bible

The triumph of the Russian Bible. With the accession of Alexander II in 1855 the climate that had frozen the translation for thirty years thawed; in 1858 the Holy Synod resolved to resume the work, over the resistance of Metropolitan Filaret (Amfiteatrov) of Kiev. St. Philaret of Moscow, in the last decade of his life, was the project’s prime mover and steering hand — supplying the principle of translating the Old Testament from the Hebrew Masoretic text (a contested choice, since the Slavonic follows the Septuagint), revising the work himself, and carrying it to the threshold of completion. The Russian New Testament appeared in 1860; the complete Synodal Bible was published in 1876, nine years after Philaret’s death, and it remains the standard Russian Bible to this day.

Tradition: Russian Orthodox (Synodal period)

The Change of Climate

For three decades after the suspension of the Russian Bible Society in 1826, the official position of the Russian Church was that the Church Slavonic Bible sufficed and that a Russian translation was neither needed nor desired (see The Battle for the Synodal Translation). What changed was the reign. Nicholas I died in early 1855 in the midst of the Crimean War, and his son Alexander II acceded to the throne committed to a sweeping reappraisal of the rigidities of his father’s system — the reform impulse that would produce the emancipation of the serfs in 1861 (drafted, as it happened, by Philaret; see The 1861 Emancipation Manifesto). The accent of the new reign was on openness, education, and the lifting of restrictions, and in that atmosphere the long-suppressed question of a Russian Bible could at last be reopened (Batalden, Russian Bible Wars, 2013, ch. 6; Nichols, “Metropolitan Filaret of Moscow,” 1978).

The coronation of the new emperor in 1856 — held in Moscow, in Philaret’s own cathedral city — provided the occasion. With the Synod assembled, Philaret raised the question of resuming the Russian translation, and the issue was joined (Batalden, Russian Bible Wars, 2013, ch. 6; Florovsky, Ways of Russian Theology I).

The Resolution of 1858 — and the Resistance from Kiev

The reopening was not uncontested even now. The chief opponent within the episcopate was Metropolitan Filaret (Amfiteatrov) of Kiev (1779–1857), a hierarch of great personal sanctity and weight — and, confusingly for later readers, a near-namesake of Philaret of Moscow, the two “Filarets” standing on opposite sides of the question. The Kievan Filaret rehearsed and refined the case the reaction had made a generation before: that the Slavonic Bible was the consecrated text of the Russian Church, that a Russian translation would lower the dignity of Scripture and unsettle the faithful, and — pressing the textual point hardest — that to translate the Old Testament from the Hebrew rather than the Septuagint was to prefer the Bible of the synagogue to the Bible of the Church (Batalden, Russian Bible Wars, 2013, ch. 6; Florovsky, Ways of Russian Theology I). His memoranda against the project were forceful, and they articulated the abiding Orthodox unease that the whole enterprise never fully laid to rest.

Philaret of Moscow answered them, point by point, with the accumulated argument of forty years. The deciding factor was less the eloquence of either Filaret than the will of the new reign and the steady pressure of the Moscow metropolitan. In 1858 the Holy Synod resolved to resume the translation of the Bible into Russian, and the resolution received imperial sanction (Batalden, Russian Bible Wars, 2013, ch. 6). [Disputed: the decisive resolution is most often dated to 1858, the year the Synod formally approved resumption; some accounts emphasize the deliberations of 1856 at the coronation as the true turning point, and the imperial confirmation is variously dated 1858. The Kievan Filaret died in 1857, before the project was fully relaunched, which removed its weightiest episcopal opponent (Batalden, Russian Bible Wars, 2013, ch. 6).] The death of the Kievan Filaret in 1857 removed the project’s most authoritative opponent at the threshold of its revival.

In the renewed debate, Philaret’s old written defense of the translation was retrieved and put to work. The memorandum he had prepared during the freeze — arguing that the Russian Church needed a translation of the whole Bible from the original languages — now circulated as the charter of the resumed project (Florovsky, Ways of Russian Theology I; Batalden, Russian Bible Wars, 2013, ch. 6). [Disputed: the date and exact title of the Philaret memorandum decisive in 1856–1858 are given variously in the literature — some reference works cite an 1845 note on the dignity of the Septuagint and the Slavonic text, others an 1834 programmatic note on the need for a translation from the original texts; the point that a written defense by Philaret, composed in the years of suppression, proved influential when the question reopened is secure, but a single date should not be asserted (cf. Batalden, Russian Bible Wars, 2013, chs. 5–6).]

The Contested Principle: Hebrew or Septuagint

The textual question that ran through the whole “Bible war” came to its head in the resumed project, and on it Philaret’s influence was decisive and lasting. The Church Slavonic Old Testament, like the Old Testament of the Greek Church, follows the Septuagint (LXX) — the Greek translation made by Jewish scholars before Christ, used by the Apostles, quoted in the New Testament, and received by the Fathers as the Church’s own Old Testament. The Hebrew Masoretic text, by contrast, is the Old Testament as standardized by Jewish scholars in the early medieval period; it differs from the Septuagint in many readings and in the numbering of the Psalms, and at certain points (some messianic prophecies above all) the Christian tradition had long held the Septuagint reading to be the authentic one (on the Orthodox doctrine of Scripture see Holy Scripture).

Philaret held that the Old Testament should be translated from the Hebrew, as the original language in which it was written, while keeping the Septuagint and the Slavonic constantly in view and following the Greek where the Hebrew was obscure or where the Church’s tradition required it (Batalden, Russian Bible Wars, 2013, chs. 3, 6; Florovsky, Ways of Russian Theology I). This was the principle on which the Russian Psalter of 1822 had been made, and Philaret never abandoned it. In 1862 the Synod granted formal permission to use the Masoretic Hebrew as the base text for the Russian Old Testament — a decision that bears Philaret’s stamp and set the course of the Synodal translation (Batalden, Russian Bible Wars, 2013, ch. 6).

The choice was, and remained, contested. [Disputed: the Hebrew-versus-Septuagint question was never settled by consensus. Philaret of Moscow and the Synodal translators favored the Hebrew Masoretic text as the base, with reference to the Septuagint (Batalden, Russian Bible Wars, 2013, ch. 6). Metropolitan Filaret of Kiev opposed it before his death in 1857, and after the Synodal Bible appeared St. Theophan the Recluse mounted a vigorous public campaign insisting that the Septuagint, as the Old Testament of the Church, ought to have been the base — calling the Hebrew text in places corrupted and the reliance on it a capitulation to Protestant scholarship (Florovsky, Ways of Russian Theology I; Batalden, Russian Bible Wars, 2013, chs. 6–7; see St. Theophan the Recluse). The Synodal translation in fact follows a mediating practice — Hebrew-based in the main, but importing Septuagintal pluses, often in parentheses or brackets — so that it is neither a pure Masoretic nor a pure Septuagint Bible; scholars describe its textual character differently depending on which books they weigh.]

This is the textual debate in which Philaret and Theophan stand on opposite sides, and it is why the contrast between the two hierarchs is drawn elsewhere in this collection and in the Theophan collection. It is also why the Russian Synodal Old Testament has the peculiar mixed character it does — a Hebrew translation wearing, in places, a Septuagint dress.

The Work of Translation and the Completed Bible

The renewed translation was distributed among the four theological academies — St. Petersburg, Moscow, Kiev, and Kazan — each taking a portion of the Old Testament, with the whole passing under review (Batalden, Russian Bible Wars, 2013, ch. 6). The New Testament was taken up first, as the more urgent and the more nearly ready, much of it resting on the work of the 1820s. A revised Russian New Testament was issued in stages, the Gospels appearing in 1860 and the complete New Testament in 1862 (Batalden, Russian Bible Wars, 2013, ch. 6). [Disputed: the Russian New Testament of the resumed project is dated 1860 (the Gospels) and 1862 (the complete New Testament) in most accounts; the 1860 date is the one usually cited for the reappearance of the Russian Gospels, building with little change on the 1820/1821 text (Batalden, Russian Bible Wars, 2013, ch. 6).]

Throughout, Philaret was the steering hand and the final authority. In the last decade of his life he reviewed and corrected the translations sent to him, adjudicated disputed renderings, defended the project against its critics, and lent it the immense weight of his prestige as the senior hierarch of the Russian Church (Batalden, Russian Bible Wars, 2013, ch. 6; Nichols, “Metropolitan Filaret of Moscow,” 1978; Florovsky, Ways of Russian Theology I). He did not live to see the end. Philaret died on 19 November / 1 December 1867 (see Glorification 1994). The Old Testament translation continued under those he had set to the task, and the complete Russian Synodal Bible — Old and New Testaments together — was published in 1876, nine years after his death (Batalden, Russian Bible Wars, 2013, ch. 6).

Assessing Philaret’s Role

How decisive was Philaret personally? The honest answer credits him as the prime mover without inflating him into the sole author. He did not work alone: the translation was the labor of the four academies and of scholars such as Pavsky, Gerasim Pavsky’s Hebraism feeding into the enterprise even after his own translations were burned, and of the bishops and editors who carried it forward after 1867. He did not invent the project — it began under Golitsyn and the Bible Society while Philaret was a young rector. And he did not live to complete it. [Disputed: scholarly assessments of how decisive Philaret personally was vary in emphasis. Florovsky and the older Russian tradition present him as the indispensable architect and guarantor of the Synodal Bible, the one figure whose conviction bridged the founding effort and the completion (Florovsky, Ways of Russian Theology I). Batalden, while fully crediting Philaret’s role, sets it within a longer institutional and scholarly process — the academies, the Hebraists, the shifting politics of two reigns — in which Philaret is the central but not the only decisive actor, and notes that the project’s controversies outlived him (Batalden, Russian Bible Wars, 2013, chs. 6–7). The two emphases are compatible: Philaret was the prime mover, not the lone maker.]

What is not in dispute is the magnitude of the result. The Synodal Bible of 1876 became, and has remained for a century and a half, the standard Russian Bible — the text in which generations of Russians have read the Scriptures privately, the version printed by the Bible societies, used by Russian Protestants and Catholics as well as the Orthodox, and never displaced despite repeated later proposals to revise or replace it (Batalden, Russian Bible Wars, 2013, conclusion; see The Enduring Synodal Bible). It never supplanted the Church Slavonic Bible in the liturgy, where Slavonic remains the language of worship; it was always an aid to reading and study, the role for which Philaret had argued from the beginning. That a translation begun in the enthusiasm of one reign, burned and frozen for thirty years, and finished only after the death of its chief champion should have become the enduring Bible of the Russian people is the measure of Philaret’s persistence. He is rightly called the prime mover of the Russian Bible — the man who, more than any other, ensured that the Russian Church would in the end possess the Scriptures in the language of its people.

References

Batalden, Stephen K. Russian Bible Wars: Modern Scriptural Translation and Cultural Authority. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2013. (The authoritative study. Ch. 6, the change of climate under Alexander II, the coronation deliberations of 1856, the resumption resolved by the Synod in 1858 over the opposition of Metropolitan Filaret of Kiev, the 1862 permission to use the Masoretic Hebrew, the New Testament of 1860/1862, the distribution of the Old Testament among the four academies, and the complete Synodal Bible of 1876; ch. 7 and conclusion, the later Hebrew-versus-Septuagint controversy and the enduring status of the Synodal text.)
Florovsky, Georges. Ways of Russian Theology, Part One. Trans. Robert L. Nichols. Vol. 5 of the Collected Works. Belmont, MA: Nordland, 1979. (“The Struggle for Theology”: Philaret as architect of the translation, the two Filarets, and the theological stakes of the Hebrew-versus-Septuagint question, including Theophan the Recluse’s later objection.)
Nichols, Robert L. “Metropolitan Filaret of Moscow and the Awakening of Orthodoxy.” In Russian Orthodoxy under the Old Regime, ed. Robert L. Nichols and Theofanis George Stavrou. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1978. (Philaret’s standing under Alexander II and his role in the resumed translation.)
The Holy Bible, Russian Synodal Version (Синодальный перевод), complete edition 1876; New Testament 1860/1862. (The text itself: Old Testament translated chiefly from the Hebrew Masoretic text with Septuagintal readings supplied, New Testament from the Greek; compared with the Church Slavonic Elizabethan Bible of 1751, which follows the Septuagint.)