Holy Scripture
13 topics
EssentialHoly ScriptureHoly ScriptureThe Church’s own book, received and canonised by her and read within her. Orthodoxy uses the Septuagint for the Old Testament, where the Latin West follows the Hebrew text, and holds the same twenty-seven books of the New. Scripture is not set over against Tradition but is its written heart: it is proclaimed liturgically before it is studied privately, and it is read with the Fathers rather than against them.EssentialHoly ScriptureThe Four GospelsThe four accounts of the life, death and resurrection of Christ that the Church received from the apostles: Matthew and John by two of the Twelve, Mark by the companion of St Peter, whose preaching Papias says he wrote down, and Luke by the physician who travelled with St Paul. St Irenaeus argued in the second century that there could be neither more nor fewer, as there are four winds and four living creatures before the throne, and the living creatures became their emblems in every church. The Gospel book is not only read: it lies on the altar, is carried out at the Little Entrance, and is kissed. Through the year the reading moves from one Gospel to another, John from Pascha to Pentecost, then Matthew, then Luke from the weeks after the Elevation of the Cross, and Mark chiefly at the weekends of Great Lent, so that the whole Church hears them in the same order at the same time.EssentialHoly ScriptureThe New TestamentThe twenty-seven books of the new covenant: the four Gospels, the Acts of the Apostles, the fourteen epistles of St Paul, the seven Catholic epistles and the Revelation to St John. The first list to name exactly these is St Athanasius’ Festal Letter of 367, and the Council in Trullo of 692 received the canons of the earlier councils and Fathers that set out the books, though the East long hesitated over Revelation, which St Cyril of Jerusalem left out of his list. It remains the one book of the New Testament from which no lectionary reading is appointed. In church the New Testament is not a single volume: the Gospels are read from the Gospel book on the altar, and Acts and the epistles from the Apostolos, each passage appointed for its day. The Greek-speaking Churches read it in the Byzantine text, printed by the Patriarchate of Constantinople in 1904, and the whole Church reads it as its own book, written within the Church and interpreted by it.ImportantHoly ScriptureEpistles of St. PaulFourteen epistles received by the Church as St Paul's: Romans, 1-2 Corinthians, Galatians, Ephesians, Philippians, Colossians, 1-2 Thessalonians, 1-2 Timothy, Titus, Philemon and Hebrews. The Fathers read them for Christ as the new Adam, for life in the Spirit, for the Church as His Body, and for the shape of a Christian life; justification is among their themes and is not the key that unlocks them. At every Divine Liturgy an epistle is read before the Gospel, most often from these, and the reading, like the book it is read from, is called the Apostle.ImportantHoly ScripturePatristic TypologyThe Fathers read the Old Testament as a set of figures that find their meaning in Christ, and they did not invent the method: St Paul says the rock in the wilderness was Christ and calls Adam a type of the one to come. So the passage through the Red Sea is baptism, the manna is the Eucharist, the three days of Jonah are the tomb, the bush that burns without being consumed is the Virgin bearing God, and the ladder Jacob saw is the same. This is not allegory in the loose sense: a type is a real event that really happened and that means more than it knew. The hymnography of the Church is built almost entirely out of it, which is why a reader who does not know the types cannot follow the services.ImportantHoly ScriptureThe Old TestamentThe Church reads the Old Testament in the Septuagint, the Greek text the Apostles quote and the Fathers expound. Alongside the books shared with the Hebrew canon it receives the anagignoskomena, "those that are read": Tobit, Judith, the Wisdom of Solomon, the Wisdom of Sirach, Baruch with the Letter of Jeremiah, the additions to Daniel and to Esther, 1 Esdras, 1 to 3 Maccabees, the Prayer of Manasseh and Psalm 151. Four of those stand in the Greek and Slavonic Bibles and not in the Roman canon. The Orthodox Church has never issued a closed list in the manner of Trent: these books are Scripture by the use the Church makes of them, read in the services and cited by the Fathers.ImportantHoly ScriptureThe Psalter (Book of Psalms)The 150 (151 in LXX) Psalms are the prayer book of the Church, recited or chanted daily. Divided into 20 Kathismata for reading over one week (twice in Lent). The Psalter is the backbone of the Liturgy of the Hours. St Basil calls the Psalter a book that heals what it touches, and it carries every human affection up to God.ImportantHoly ScriptureWhy Not Scripture AloneScripture is the Church's own book: she recognised which writings were hers, reads them in her services before anyone reads them privately, and interprets them by the mind of the Fathers. So the Reformation principle of Scripture alone is not rejected for lowering Scripture but for detaching it from the body that produced and preserved it, which in practice replaces the consensus of the Fathers with the judgement of the reader. Nor does Orthodoxy set Tradition beside Scripture as a second source: Scripture is the written heart of Tradition, and the Liturgy, the Councils, the canons and the icons are the same faith in other forms.ImportantHoly ScriptureActs of the ApostlesWritten by the Evangelist Luke as a continuation of his Gospel. Records the spread of the Church from Jerusalem to Rome after the Ascension. Key events: Pentecost, martyrdom of Stephen, conversion of Paul, Council of Jerusalem, Paul's missionary journeys. Read continuously from Pascha through Pentecost in the Orthodox lectionary.ImportantHoly ScriptureBook of Revelation (Apocalypse)The Apocalypse of St John the Theologian, the last book of the New Testament: a prophetic vision of the end, of the struggle between good and evil, and of the final victory of Christ. It is the one book of the New Testament from which no reading is appointed in the Gospel book or the Apostolos, an absence that goes back to the long dispute in the East over its canonicity. It is canonical nonetheless, and the Church reads it through St Andrew of Caesarea, whose sixth-century commentary settled its interpretation for the Greek tradition. Orthodox reading is symbolic and refuses millennialism, the expectation of a thousand-year earthly kingdom.ImportantHoly ScriptureThe Anagignoskomena (The Readable Books)The books of the Greek Old Testament that stand outside the Hebrew canon: Tobit, Judith, Wisdom, Sirach, Baruch, the Letter of Jeremiah, the additions to Daniel and Esther, 1, 2 and 3 Maccabees, 1 Esdras, the Prayer of Manasseh and Psalm 151. The Greek name means the ones that are read, and it is a description of practice: they are read in church, quoted by the Fathers and printed in Orthodox Bibles. The Orthodox list is not the Roman one, being longer by 1 Esdras, 3 Maccabees, the Prayer of Manasseh and Psalm 151, and the Greek Church has declined to rank them against the rest with a technical term, though the Russian Church calls them non-canonical. The Council of Jerusalem in 1672 affirmed them.ImportantHoly ScriptureThe Septuagint (LXX)The Greek translation of the Hebrew Scriptures made at Alexandria in the last centuries before Christ, which the Letter of Aristeas tells of as the work of seventy-two elders, and the Bible of the apostles: most of the Old Testament quotations in the New follow it, sometimes where it differs from the Hebrew. It carries the books the Church reads beyond the Hebrew canon, such as Wisdom, Sirach and Tobit, and it numbers the Psalms and the books of Kingdoms its own way. The Orthodox Church reads the Old Testament in it: the Greek Church uses it as its text, and the Slavonic Bible was translated from it. The nineteenth-century Russian Synodal translation followed the Hebrew instead, which is still argued over. Where the Fathers read a prophecy of Christ in it, as the Virgin shall conceive, the Church reads it with them.Holy ScriptureThe Twelve ProphetsHosea, Joel, Amos, Obadiah, Jonah, Micah, Nahum, Habakkuk, Zephaniah, Haggai, Zechariah and Malachi: twelve prophets whose books were copied as one scroll, the Book of the Twelve, and are called minor for the length of their books, not their weight. The Septuagint, the Church’s Old Testament, keeps them in an order of its own (Hosea, Amos, Micah, Joel, Obadiah, Jonah and on). They speak across three centuries, from the kingdom of Israel before its fall to Jerusalem rebuilt after the exile, and the Church hears Christ in them: Micah names Bethlehem (5:2), Zechariah the king coming on an ass (9:9), Jonah the three days in the belly of the whale (Matthew 12:40), Malachi the messenger sent before the Lord. Their words are read at Vespers on the great feasts, the whole of Jonah on Holy Saturday, and each is kept on his own day: Hosea 17 October, Joel 19 October, Obadiah 19 November, Nahum 1 December, Habakkuk 2 December, Zephaniah 3 December, Haggai 16 December, Malachi 3 January, Zechariah 8 February, Amos 15 June, Micah 14 August, Jonah 21 September (22 September in the Slavic Churches).