The Bible

The Bible as the Orthodox Church reads it, in its Greek beside an English translation, verse by verse: the Old Testament in the Septuagint, 54 books and parts, 28,292 verses, and the New Testament in the Greek the Ecumenical Patriarchate of Constantinople printed in 1904, twenty-seven books, 7,957 verses, where any Greek word can be tapped for its dictionary form, its meaning and its grammar in plain words.

The Old Testament

The Old Testament of the Orthodox Church is the Septuagint, the Greek translation made before Christ, which the New Testament most often quotes. Its books stand here in the Church's order and under its names, the Psalms numbered as the Church numbers them.

The Law

The Histories

The Books of Wisdom

The Prophets

Appendix

The New Testament

The books stand in the order the Church reads and prints them: the Gospels and the Acts, then the Catholic Epistles of St James, St Peter, St John and St Jude, then the Epistles of St Paul, then the Apocalypse. Western Bibles put St Paul before St James.

The Gospels

The Acts of the Apostles

Acts Πράξεις τῶν Ἀποστόλων 28 chapters

The Catholic Epistles

The Epistles of St Paul

The Apocalypse

Revelation Ἀποκάλυψις Ἰωάννου 22 chapters

The texts, and whose they are

The Old Testament

The Greek is the Septuagint as the Orthodox Media Network, founded on Mount Athos, published it from the Greek Church's printed text; its producers ask only that the text be published as it is, which it is here, letter for letter. That text has no 2 Maccabees and no Prayer of Manasseh: those two are given in the Greek of Brenton's edition (Samuel Bagster and Sons, London, 1851).

The English is the translation Sir Lancelot Brenton made of the Septuagint in 1851, its spelling and words brought into present British use by Michael Paul Johnson in 2012; both are in the public domain. Brenton translated the Greek of his own edition, which follows the Codex Vaticanus, so here and there his English follows another reading, numbers a verse differently, or has a verse this Greek does not. Each verse here is paired with its English by what it says, not by its number: where Brenton numbers the verse differently his number is shown beside it, and a verse one side lacks is marked as such. Where the 2012 edition leaves out a verse Brenton translated (the story of Semei in 3 Kingdoms 2, for one), the verse is given in Brenton's own words of 1851, and marked so. Sirach, Proverbs and 3 Kingdoms differ most between the two editions. Words in square brackets are the translator's, added for the sense, as Brenton printed them; a ⌃ after "you" marks the plural, as the 2012 edition does.

The order and the names are the Church's. The four books of Kingdoms are the two books of Samuel and the two of Kings in Western Bibles, and 1 and 2 Chronicles are also called Paralipomenon. 4 Maccabees and the Prayer of Manasseh stand in an appendix, as in printed Greek Bibles. The Prayer of Azariah and the Song of the Three Youths, Susanna, and Bel and the Dragon, which belong to Daniel, have pages of their own, as in these sources.

The Psalms are numbered as the Church numbers them, from the Greek: Psalm 50, "Have mercy on me, O God", is Psalm 51 in the Hebrew numbering that most Western Bibles follow. Each psalm's page gives both numbers.

Nothing on these pages was written by an AI model.

The New Testament

The Greek is the Patriarchal Text: the edition of the New Testament the Ecumenical Patriarchate published in 1904, prepared by a committee under Vasileios Antoniades from the lectionaries read in the churches of Constantinople, and reprinted with corrections in 1912. Maurice A. Robinson and Jussi Ala-Konni prepared the electronic text and checked it against both printings, and Robinson parsed every word; their work is in the public domain. The punctuation and the paragraphs follow Robinson's text, which writes movable ν throughout.

Small type. The 1904 edition printed in small type the words whose place in the text its editors judged doubtful, and a few passages kept although the Church's own manuscripts lack them, Acts 8:37 among them. They are printed smaller here too; reprints from 1929 on did not keep the small type everywhere. The words about the three witnesses in heaven, 1 John 5:7-8, stand in italic small type: the preface says they are found in none of the Church's texts nor in the Eastern Fathers, and were kept on the opinion of the Holy Synod.

The accents. Robinson's transcription has no accents. Each word here takes the accents of the same word in Robinson and Pierpont's edition of the Byzantine text (2018), where that edition prints it at the same place, which is nearly everywhere; otherwise from Nestle's edition of 1904, or from the same word elsewhere. A word whose accent changes in the run of a sentence (καί before another word, an enclitic such as μου) is printed as the rules of Greek accentuation give it. The letters are the Patriarchal Text's own; the accents are an editorial layer and may differ here and there from the printed page.

The English is the World English Bible, a modern translation in the public domain, made from the Byzantine (Majority) text of the Greek, which is close to the Patriarchal Text. Where the two differ, the Greek is the text. It stands here until an English translation made within the Orthodox Church from this Greek can be used. Four verses are not in the World English Bible (three of them the Patriarchal Text prints in small type), and the Patriarchal Text has no Mark 7:16.

The notes on each word. The English under each word is from the Berean Interlinear Bible, and the dictionary entries from John Jeffrey Dodson's Greek-English Lexicon, both in the public domain; eight words Dodson lacks are explained from James Strong's dictionary of 1890. The grammar is read from Robinson's parsing by fixed rules and said in plain words. A few spellings were checked against the Translators Amalgamated Greek New Testament of STEPBible.org (CC BY 4.0). Nothing on these pages was written by an AI model.