The Battle for the Synodal Translation

The first and longer half of the Russian Bible story: the founding of the Russian Bible Society in 1812–1813, the rapid production of a Russian New Testament (1820/1821) and Psalter with the young Philaret at the center of the work, and then the reaction at the close of Alexander I’s reign — the fall of Prince Golitsyn in 1824, the suspension of the Society in 1826 under Nicholas I, and the burning of the printed sheets of the Russian Pentateuch. It sets out the case made by the opponents of vernacular Scripture — Metropolitan Seraphim, Archimandrite Photius, and Admiral Shishkov — as seriously as the case for translation, and traces Philaret’s decades-long persistence through the long freeze of Nicholas I’s reign.

Tradition: Russian Orthodox (Synodal period)

The Slavonic Bible and the Problem It Posed

The Orthodox Church of the Russian Empire possessed, and had always possessed, a complete Bible — but in Church Slavonic, the liturgical language created in the ninth century by Sts. Cyril and Methodius and standardized in the so-called Gennadius Bible of 1499 and the printed Ostrog Bible of 1581, then revised under the Empress Elizabeth into the Elizabethan Bible of 1751 that remains the Slavonic text used liturgically to this day (Batalden, Russian Bible Wars, 2013, ch. 1; see Sts. Cyril and Methodius). By the early nineteenth century the gap between this sacred language and the spoken and literary Russian of educated society and of the common people had widened to the point that the Scriptures read in church were, for many, only imperfectly intelligible. The Slavonic of the liturgy was venerable and venerated; it was also, increasingly, a language one had to be taught. The question that would convulse the Russian Church for sixty years was whether the remedy — a translation of Holy Scripture into modern Russian — was a pious necessity or a sacrilege.

That question was never merely linguistic. Behind it stood a contest over cultural authority: over who controlled access to the sacred text, over the relation of the Russian Church to Western and especially Protestant biblical scholarship, and over the place of the Slavonic inheritance in a modernizing empire (Batalden, Russian Bible Wars, 2013, introduction and ch. 1). Stephen Batalden’s study takes its title — Russian Bible Wars — precisely from the fact that the translation generated not a single dispute but a series of them, recurring across the nineteenth and twentieth centuries.

The Russian Bible Society

The instrument of the first great translation effort was the Russian Bible Society, founded in St. Petersburg at the very end of 1812 and formally constituted in 1813 (initially as the St. Petersburg Bible Society), explicitly on the model of the British and Foreign Bible Society, whose agents and ethos shaped it from the start (Batalden, Russian Bible Wars, 2013, ch. 2; Florovsky, Ways of Russian Theology I, “The Struggle for Theology”). Its president was Prince Alexander Nikolaevich Golitsyn (1773–1844), the over-procurator of the Holy Synod and from 1817 head of the new “dual ministry” of Spiritual Affairs and Public Education — the most powerful patron of religion in the state, and a man of the mystical, ecumenical, Bible-centered piety fashionable at the court of Alexander I. The emperor himself patronized the Society, and its membership crossed confessional lines, drawing in Orthodox, Protestants, and Roman Catholics in a way that was both its strength and, to its critics, its original sin (Batalden, Russian Bible Wars, 2013, ch. 2).

At first the Society printed and distributed Scripture in Church Slavonic and in the languages of the empire’s many peoples; the decisive step came when, with imperial approval, it turned to a translation into Russian itself. In 1816 the Synod, at Golitsyn’s prompting, charged the St. Petersburg Theological Academy with producing a Russian New Testament — and the man placed at the head of that work was the academy’s rector, the young Archimandrite Philaret (Drozdov) (Batalden, Russian Bible Wars, 2013, ch. 2; Nichols, “Metropolitan Filaret of Moscow,” 1978).

Philaret at the Center of the Work

Philaret’s involvement was not honorary but textual and editorial, and it began with his own pen. He personally translated the Gospel of John, taking the most theologically demanding of the four Gospels for himself, and he supervised the division of the remaining Gospels and the rest of the New Testament among other scholars of the academies (Florovsky, Ways of Russian Theology I; Batalden, Russian Bible Wars, 2013, ch. 2). He wrote the preface to the Russian Gospels, setting out the rationale for the work — that the people had a right to the word of God in a tongue they could understand — and he laid down editorial principles for the translators. The four Gospels appeared in 1819, the complete Russian New Testament in 1820 (with a further edition in 1821), printed in parallel columns with the Slavonic so that the new rendering stood beside, and under the authority of, the old (Batalden, Russian Bible Wars, 2013, ch. 2). [Disputed: the standard date for the complete Russian New Testament is 1820, with a parallel Slavonic-Russian edition in 1821 (Batalden, Russian Bible Wars, 2013, ch. 2); some older accounts give 1821 for the first complete edition. The discrepancy reflects the rapid succession of printings rather than a substantive disagreement.]

The Society then pressed on into the Old Testament, beginning with the Psalter — the book most used in prayer and worship and therefore the most natural to render first. The Russian Psalter appeared in 1822 and was an immediate success, going through many printings (Batalden, Russian Bible Wars, 2013, ch. 3). Here a decision of lasting consequence was taken: the Psalter, and the Old Testament translation that followed, was made from the Hebrew Masoretic text rather than from the Greek Septuagint on which the Church Slavonic Old Testament depends. Philaret was the principal advocate of translating from the Hebrew original, holding that the Church should go to the Hebraica veritas, the underlying Hebrew, while consulting the Septuagint and Slavonic — a principle he would defend for the rest of his life and that would itself become a battlefield (Batalden, Russian Bible Wars, 2013, ch. 3; on its later contestation see The 1876 Synodal Bible and St. Theophan the Recluse). Work proceeded into the Pentateuch, and by the mid-1820s the first five books, with Joshua, Judges, and Ruth, had been translated and set in type.

The Reaction

The Russian Bible Society had risen on the tide of Alexander I’s mystical-ecumenical enthusiasm; it fell when that tide turned. By the early 1820s a conservative reaction had gathered against the whole religious policy associated with Golitsyn — the interconfessional pietism, the mystical and quasi-Protestant literature the Society and its allies circulated, the perceived subordination of the Orthodox Church to a vague supra-confessional “inner Christianity” (Batalden, Russian Bible Wars, 2013, chs. 3–4; Florovsky, Ways of Russian Theology I). The Russian Bible became, for this reaction, the visible symbol of everything it opposed.

The leaders of the assault were three. Admiral Alexander Shishkov (1754–1841), the philologist and minister of education who succeeded to Golitsyn’s portfolio, was the intellectual of the party: he held that Church Slavonic and Russian were not two languages but one, that the elevated Slavonic was the proper and dignified vehicle of sacred things, and that to render Scripture into ordinary Russian was to debase the holy and to dissolve the bond between the Russian people and their sacred tongue (Batalden, Russian Bible Wars, 2013, ch. 4). Archimandrite Photius (Spassky) (1792–1838), the fiery ascetic abbot of the Yuriev Monastery, supplied the zealotry, denouncing the Society’s publications as a Masonic and heretical contagion and working through the salon of his patroness Countess Anna Orlova and, with Count Arakcheev, at court to bring Golitsyn down. And Metropolitan Seraphim (Glagolevsky) of Novgorod and St. Petersburg, the senior hierarch, lent the cause the authority of the episcopate (Batalden, Russian Bible Wars, 2013, ch. 4).

In May 1824 the campaign succeeded in its first object: Golitsyn was dismissed, the dual ministry dissolved, and the patron of the translation removed from power. Seraphim became president of the Bible Society — and used the office to wind it down from within (Batalden, Russian Bible Wars, 2013, ch. 4). The translation of the Old Testament was halted.

The Burning of the Pentateuch

The most notorious episode of the whole “Bible war” followed. The printed sheets of the Russian translation of the Pentateuch — the first five books of Moses, together with Joshua, Judges, and Ruth, a print run of some nine thousand copies — never went out to the public. At the end of 1825 they were burned, by most accounts in the kilns of a brick factory belonging to the Alexander Nevsky Lavra in St. Petersburg, where the Bible Society’s stock had come under the control of its new managers (Batalden, Russian Bible Wars, 2013, ch. 4; biblical-cyclopedia and contemporary accounts, cited in Batalden). The destruction of an Orthodox translation of the books of Moses, ordered by Orthodox churchmen, is among the strangest events in the history of the Russian Church, and it has become the emblem of the reaction. [Disputed: the date of the burning is most often given as the end of 1825, with some sources placing it in early 1826 amid the change of reign; the figure of roughly 9,000 copies and the brick-kiln of the Alexander Nevsky Lavra are the best-attested details (Batalden, Russian Bible Wars, 2013, ch. 4), though a few older accounts vary on the precise location and number.]

The formal end came with the change of emperor. Alexander I died in late 1825; after the Decembrist revolt his successor Nicholas I, no friend of the mystical societies and suspicious of any association that gathered men outside the direct control of the state, suspended the Russian Bible Society by an ukaz of 1826, transferring its assets and its remaining stock of Slavonic Bibles to the Holy Synod (Batalden, Russian Bible Wars, 2013, ch. 4). The Society was not abolished outright at a stroke so much as dissolved and absorbed, but the effect was the same: the institutional engine of the Russian translation was gone, and the project to render the Old Testament into Russian was dead for a generation.

The Case Against the Translation

It would be a failure of the historian’s duty — and of this collection’s method — to present the opponents merely as obscurantists. Their case had real substance, and it was held by serious and in some instances holy men. Three arguments stood at its heart.

First, the sacral authority of Church Slavonic. For the opponents, Slavonic was not a dead or foreign language but the consecrated vessel of Orthodox worship and Scripture, hallowed by a thousand years of use and by the labors of Sts. Cyril and Methodius themselves. To set beside it a rendering in everyday Russian was, in this view, to relativize the holy text, to suggest that the language of the liturgy was a mere husk to be discarded, and to begin a slide by which the sacred would be assimilated to the profane (Batalden, Russian Bible Wars, 2013, ch. 4; Florovsky, Ways of Russian Theology I). Shishkov’s linguistic argument — that the dignity of Scripture required the elevated register, and that Russian and Slavonic were one language whose higher form alone befitted the word of God — gave this instinct a theory.

Second, the fear of Protestant and sectarian readings. The Russian Bible Society was an interconfessional body shaped by the British and Foreign Bible Society, and it circulated, alongside the Scriptures, a great deal of Western devotional and mystical literature of doubtful Orthodoxy. Putting an unannotated Bible directly into the hands of every reader, without the guidance of the Church’s tradition and liturgy, looked to the critics like the importation of the Protestant principle of private judgment — and they could point, not without reason, to the proliferation of sects in Russia that read the Scriptures for themselves and arrived at conclusions far from Orthodoxy (Batalden, Russian Bible Wars, 2013, chs. 2, 4). The choice to translate the Old Testament from the Hebrew Masoretic text rather than the Septuagint sharpened this fear, since the Septuagint was the Church’s own canonical Old Testament, received by the Apostles and the Fathers, while the Masoretic text was the Bible as fixed by the rabbis who had rejected Christ (on this textual debate see The 1876 Synodal Bible and Holy Scripture).

Third, the reverence of the people. The opponents claimed to speak for the simple Orthodox believer, for whom the Slavonic Bible and the Slavonic service were objects of deep love, and who had not asked for a Russian Bible and might be scandalized by one. Whatever its self-interest, this argument was not wholly cynical: the attachment of the Russian people to the Slavonic text was real, and it is part of why the eventual Synodal Bible was always positioned as an aid to private reading and study, never as a replacement for the Slavonic text in worship — where, to this day, Slavonic remains (Batalden, Russian Bible Wars, 2013, conclusion).

Against all this stood the case for translation, of which Philaret was the steadiest exponent: that the word of God is given for the salvation of all, that a Scripture not understood is a lamp under a bushel, that the Apostles themselves had preached and written in the common Greek of their hearers rather than in a sacred tongue, and that the Church honors the Slavonic inheritance precisely by continuing the work of Cyril and Methodius — who had themselves translated the Scriptures into the vernacular of their own day (Florovsky, Ways of Russian Theology I; Batalden, Russian Bible Wars, 2013, ch. 2; see Sts. Cyril and Methodius). The same dispute would erupt a few years later over the Scripture quotations in Philaret’s Longer Catechism, which his enemies forced him to recast in Slavonic (see The Catechism Controversy).

Philaret in the Long Freeze

For nearly the whole reign of Nicholas I (1825–1855) the Russian translation lay frozen. The official position was that the Slavonic Bible sufficed; private efforts at translation were discouraged and at times suppressed. Philaret, now Metropolitan of Moscow (from 1821) and the most eminent churchman of the empire, did not recant his conviction, but he had to husband it. He could not openly reopen the project against the will of the emperor and the over-procurators, and on the Bible question — as on others — he was at times an object of suspicion, his great prestige notwithstanding (Nichols, “Metropolitan Filaret of Moscow,” 1978; Batalden, Russian Bible Wars, 2013, ch. 5). His relations with Nicholas I were correct but cool, and there was a stretch in the 1840s when his bolder utterances kept him from the capital and from the inner direction of synodal affairs (see Church and Autocracy under Nicholas I).

The freeze did not hold perfectly. In the early 1840s the Pavsky affair showed both the depth of the underground demand for a Russian Bible and the severity of the official reaction to it. Archpriest Gerasim Pavsky (1787–1863), a gifted Hebraist and professor at the St. Petersburg Academy, had over many years translated much of the Old Testament from the Hebrew for his students; lithographed copies of these classroom translations circulated semi-secretly, and when the matter came to light between 1841 and 1844 it provoked a major investigation and the rounding-up and burning of the copies that could be found — by Batalden’s account, 305 of the 308 recovered (Batalden, Russian Bible Wars, 2013, ch. 5). The affair confirmed the authorities in their hostility and forced Philaret to move with extreme caution.

Yet it was in the midst of this hostile reign that Philaret prepared the intellectual ground for the eventual victory. He composed a reasoned memorandum setting out the case for translating the whole Bible from the original languages into Russian — the document that, retrieved and circulated when the climate changed under Alexander II, would do much to carry the Synod’s decision to resume the work (Florovsky, Ways of Russian Theology I; Batalden, Russian Bible Wars, 2013, chs. 5–6). [Disputed: scholars and reference works differ on the date and identity of Philaret’s defining memorandum on Russian translation. A note titled “On the dogmatic dignity and protective use of the Septuagint and the Slavonic translations of Holy Scripture” is dated by some to 1845; a programmatic note “On the need of the Russian Church for a translation of the whole Bible from the original texts into modern Russian” is dated by other reference works to 1834; the document revived and decisive in 1856–1858 is variously identified. The substance — Philaret’s sustained, written defense of a Russian translation made from the original languages — is not in doubt, but a single date should not be asserted (cf. Batalden, Russian Bible Wars, 2013, chs. 5–6; Florovsky, Ways of Russian Theology I).]

That patience — the willingness to wait out a thirty-year freeze without abandoning the conviction, and to leave behind the documents that would let a later generation finish the work — is the through-line of Philaret’s part in the story. He did not break the dam; he outlasted it. The turning of the tide under Alexander II, the Synod’s resolution of 1858 to resume, the renewed fight over the Hebrew text, and the completion of the 1876 Synodal Bible are the subject of the companion file (see The 1876 Synodal Bible).

References

Batalden, Stephen K. Russian Bible Wars: Modern Scriptural Translation and Cultural Authority. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2013. (The authoritative study. Ch. 1, the Slavonic Bible and the Elizabethan text of 1751; ch. 2, the founding of the Russian Bible Society in 1812–1813 on the British model, Golitsyn’s presidency, and Philaret’s editorial role and translation of the Gospel of John, the New Testament of 1820; ch. 3, the Psalter of 1822 and the choice of the Hebrew text; ch. 4, the reaction, the fall of Golitsyn in 1824, Shishkov, Photius, Seraphim, the burning of the Pentateuch, and the suspension of the Society in 1826; ch. 5, the long freeze under Nicholas I and the Pavsky affair of 1841–1844.)
Florovsky, Georges. Ways of Russian Theology, Part One. Trans. Robert L. Nichols. Vol. 5 of the Collected Works. Belmont, MA: Nordland, 1979. (The chapter “The Struggle for Theology” on the Bible Society, the reaction, and Philaret’s defense of translation; the theological assessment of the Hebrew-versus-Septuagint question.)
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 as churchman; his standing and marginalization under Nicholas I.)
The Holy Bible, Russian Synodal Version (Синодальный перевод), 1876; and the Church Slavonic Elizabethan Bible, 1751. (The two texts at issue: the Slavonic Old Testament following the Septuagint, the Russian Synodal Old Testament translated chiefly from the Hebrew Masoretic text.)