The Orthodox Biblical Recovery

The constructive flowering of Orthodox biblical scholarship in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries — a learned, ecclesial reading of Scripture that recovers patristic exegesis while engaging the modern academy. This file surveys the principal figures and schools: Florovsky’s impulse; the St. Vladimir’s tradition of Breck and Tarazi; the Holy Cross tradition of Stylianopoulos and Pentiuc; and the critical use of tools such as the Orthodox Study Bible.

Tradition: Pan-Orthodox

From Captivity to Recovery

For much of the modern period, Orthodox theology — including its reading of Scripture — labored under what Georges Florovsky called a “pseudomorphosis,” a distorting dependence on borrowed Western categories, whether Latin scholastic or Protestant critical (Florovsky, Ways of Russian Theology, and Bible, Church, Tradition, Nordland, 1972; see The Historical-Critical Method). The twentieth century saw a deliberate recovery: a return to the Fathers as the living source, and, out of that return, the emergence of a genuinely Orthodox biblical scholarship — one that reads Scripture within the Church and her Tradition, yet with full command of modern learning. This recovery is centered in the theological schools of the Orthodox diaspora, above all in North America, and in the revival of Greek and Slavic academic theology (Andrew Louth, Modern Orthodox Thinkers: From the Philokalia to the Present, SPCK, 2015; Pentiuc, The Old Testament in Eastern Orthodox Tradition, Oxford, 2014, surveying the field).

Florovsky and the Impulse

The impulse came above all from Fr. Georges Florovsky (1893–1979), whose call for a “neo-patristic synthesis” reframed the whole task: not to defend Scripture against criticism with better apologetics, but to read it again with the mind of the Fathers, as the Church’s own book (Florovsky, Bible, Church, Tradition, ch. 5). Florovsky did not himself write biblical commentaries, but his program set the direction for those who did, and his insistence that the Bible is inseparable from the Church became the charter of Orthodox biblical hermeneutics (Louth, Modern Orthodox Thinkers, 2015). His close contemporaries in the Paris émigré world — Sergius Bulgakov, and later thinkers such as John Meyendorff and Alexander Schmemann — carried the same conviction into dogmatics and liturgical theology, insisting that Scripture lives in the worship of the Church.

The St. Vladimir’s Tradition: Breck and Tarazi

At St. Vladimir’s Orthodox Theological Seminary (Crestwood, New York), two scholars gave Orthodox biblical study its most influential modern voice in English.

Fr. John Breck produced the standard modern Orthodox hermeneutics in Scripture in Tradition: The Bible and Its Interpretation in the Orthodox Church (2001), the sustained argument that Scripture exists in Tradition — embedded in the liturgical, doctrinal, and spiritual life of the Church — so that its meaning is disclosed not by historical analysis alone but in the Church’s ongoing encounter with the risen Christ. Breck recovered the patristic practice of typology and the “fuller sense,” and articulated an Orthodox reading that honors the historical sense while refusing to be confined to it (Breck, Scripture in Tradition, SVS Press, 2001; and his earlier The Power of the Word in the Worshiping Church, SVS Press, 1986; see Scripture within Holy Tradition).

Fr. Paul Nadim Tarazi produced a large body of Old and New Testament introduction and commentary from an Orthodox standpoint — his three-volume The Old Testament: An Introduction and multivolume New Testament: An Introduction, together with commentaries — engaging critical scholarship extensively while reading canonically and theologically (Tarazi, The Old Testament: An Introduction, 3 vols., SVS Press, 1991–2003). Tarazi’s work is notable for taking the historical and literary questions seriously and for a distinctive, sometimes idiosyncratic, canonical reading; it demonstrates the range of the recovery — Orthodox scholarship is not a single method but a family of ecclesial readings.

The Holy Cross Tradition: Stylianopoulos and Pentiuc

At Holy Cross Greek Orthodox School of Theology (Brookline, Massachusetts) and its associated Greek scholarship, a parallel tradition developed with a fuller embrace of the critical method within an Orthodox frame.

Fr. Theodore Stylianopoulos gave the recovery its most careful methodological statement in The New Testament: An Orthodox Perspective (vol. 1, 1997), proposing the model of three interpenetrating levels — the exegetical (critical), the interpretive (theological), and the transformative (spiritual) — as a way for Orthodoxy to use critical scholarship while completing it in the Church’s reading toward holiness (Stylianopoulos, The New Testament: An Orthodox Perspective, Holy Cross, 1997; see The Historical-Critical Method).

Eugen J. Pentiuc, professor of Old Testament at Holy Cross, produced the fullest modern scholarly account of the Orthodox reception of the Old Testament in The Old Testament in Eastern Orthodox Tradition (Oxford University Press, 2014) — a comprehensive treatment of the Orthodox canon, the Septuagint, the text, the patristic and liturgical interpretation, and the modern engagement, and the standard reference on the subject. Pentiuc’s later work on the Bible in Byzantine and Orthodox worship extends the recovery into the study of Scripture as it lives in the liturgy (Pentiuc, The Old Testament in Eastern Orthodox Tradition, 2014; and see The Bible as the Liturgical Book). Greek scholars — Savvas Agourides, Georgios Galitis, John Karavidopoulos, Petros Vassiliadis — carried the same recovery in the Greek-speaking academy, engaging international critical scholarship as Orthodox theologians.

The Orthodox Study Bible, Used Critically

A conspicuous fruit — and a cautionary case — of the popular side of the recovery is the Orthodox Study Bible (New Testament and Psalms 1993; complete edition, Thomas Nelson, 2008). Its complete edition is notable for presenting an English Old Testament based on the Septuagint (the “St. Athanasius Academy Septuagint” translation) rather than the Masoretic Text — a genuine service, making the Church’s Old Testament text available in English and embodying the LXX priority (see The Septuagint as the Church’s Old Testament). Yet the volume must be used critically: its Old Testament translation has been faulted by scholars for leaning on the New King James Version and “correcting” it toward the LXX rather than translating the Greek afresh, and its study notes are popular and uneven in quality. Orthodox reviewers, while welcoming the LXX-based text, have cautioned against treating the edition as an authoritative scholarly work (the critical reception is discussed in scholarly reviews; Pentiuc, The Old Testament in Eastern Orthodox Tradition, 2014, notes the state of Orthodox English Bible translation). [Disputed: the scholarly value of the Orthodox Study Bible's Old Testament. It is welcomed for offering an accessible LXX-based English Old Testament, embodying the Orthodox priority of the Septuagint; but its translation method (revising the NKJV toward the LXX rather than rendering the Greek directly) and its popular notes have drawn substantive criticism in scholarly and Orthodox reviews. It is best used as a devotional aid, not a critical edition. Proponents value its accessibility; critics its imprecision.]

The Shape and the Unfinished Task

Seen whole, the Orthodox biblical recovery has a recognizable shape. It reclaims the patristic and liturgical reading of Scripture — christological, typological, ecclesial — as the Church’s own and normative way of reading (see The Patristic Mind; Christ the Key to the Scriptures). It engages modern critical scholarship, with varying degrees of embrace, as a servant to be used within the Church’s mind rather than a master to be obeyed (see The Historical-Critical Method). And it aims always beyond information at transformation — Scripture read for theosis, in the Church, unto communion with Christ (see Scripture and the Transformation of the Reader).

The task remains unfinished. Orthodoxy still lacks a complete critical Orthodox commentary series in English, a fully satisfactory scholarly LXX-based English Old Testament, and a settled consensus on the use of critical methods (Pentiuc, The Old Testament in Eastern Orthodox Tradition, 2014; Louth, Modern Orthodox Thinkers, 2015). But the recovery of the last century has given the Church what it most needed: a way of reading the Bible that is at once learned and faithful, modern and patristic, critical and prayerful — a genuinely Orthodox biblical scholarship, still growing.

References

Breck, John. Scripture in Tradition: The Bible and Its Interpretation in the Orthodox Church. Crestwood, NY: St. Vladimir’s Seminary Press, 2001; and The Power of the Word in the Worshiping Church. SVS Press, 1986.
Pentiuc, Eugen J. The Old Testament in Eastern Orthodox Tradition. New York: Oxford University Press, 2014. (The standard survey of the Orthodox reception and modern scholarship.)
Stylianopoulos, Theodore G. The New Testament: An Orthodox Perspective, vol. 1. Brookline, MA: Holy Cross Orthodox Press, 1997.
Tarazi, Paul Nadim. The Old Testament: An Introduction. 3 vols. Crestwood, NY: St. Vladimir’s Seminary Press, 1991–2003; and his New Testament: An Introduction.
Florovsky, Georges. Bible, Church, Tradition: An Eastern Orthodox View. Collected Works, vol. 1. Belmont, MA: Nordland, 1972; Ways of Russian Theology (on “pseudomorphosis”).
Louth, Andrew. Modern Orthodox Thinkers: From the Philokalia to the Present. London: SPCK, 2015.
The Orthodox Study Bible. Nashville: Thomas Nelson, 2008 (complete edition; NT and Psalms, 1993). (Used critically, per the note above.)