The Bible

[JM]

Greetings friends. Would you be so kind as to explain the Eastern Orthodox view of scripture to me? It's place in the church or the role it plays in the Eastern Orthodox life? Does the EO undertake textual criticism? How does your denomination view the critical work performaned by Prots and RCs?

I have more questions but that's probably enough for now.

Thank you.

JM

 

[~Anastasia~]

Subscribing. This should be interesting.

I'll leave the other answers for someone better able to explain it, but I will say that Scripture is absolutely CENTRAL to the Church. The liturgy is composed largely of Scripture readings. We hear much Scripture every time we come to Church. We pray Scripture. We have readings set up for every day.

The Orthodox Church is not sola scriptura, but Scripture is the most important part of Tradition and nothing may contradict it, according to teachings I have listened to from many Church leaders.

I think I will leave it at that as well. Mostly I wanted to see where this conversation would go. Blessings to you!

 

[ArmyMatt]

Greetings friends.

what up?

Would you be so kind as to explain the Eastern Orthodox view of scripture to me?

the God's word that quotes God's Word directly. it is the most important, although not only, piece of the Holy Tradition that Christ gave His Apostles, inspired by the Holy Spirit. the Scriptures were written and put together by the Church, to be read in Church, to instruct the Church.

It's place in the church or the role it plays in the Eastern Orthodox life?

check out an Orthodox service (it's like 99% quoted from the Scriptures) or our calendar which has daily readings for every day of the year. we are also strongly encouraged to read it on our own. so in a word, the Bible is central to our life.

Does the EO undertake textual criticism?

depends on the kind.

How does your denomination view the critical work performaned by Prots and RCs?

it depends on how close the critical work falls in line with what the Church believes. a lot of us quote guys like CS Lewis or GK Chesterton, because they were very close in their thinking.

I have more questions but that's probably enough for now.

cool, hope you stick around!

 

[Knee V]

They are the written legacy of the Prophets and Apostles. They are the records of those who encountered God's revelation directly. We would say that God's revelation is not the book, but the Person-to-person encounter that the book describes. God's revelation is the act of him showing Himself to man. Revelation is a direct personal encounter. God's full and ultimate revelation of Himself is the Person of Christ, where He became one of us (and still is) and walked among us and spoke to us directly. The books that came after describe that revelation, but they themselves are not that revelation.

They are the only books in the world that tell the story of God's people encountering God's revelation, and they're written from the perspective of those same people.

(This post should not be understood as attempting to give an exhaustive answer.)

 

[Knee V]

We tend not to be as concerned about textual criticism as some others. The Scriptures mean what they mean, regardless whether different texts differ on some wording here and there. We live and experience the meaning of the Scriptures throughout the cycle of the church's services and readings. No group of scholars tweaking words is going to change that.

That said, we appreciate accuracy, and have no problem with a more accurate text. It's just that that is not going to have any bearing on what truth is. There was a Gospel before there was ever a complete New Testament, and we know that Gospel now just as well as we did before there was a New Testament. Writing the New Testament didn't change the Gospel, and tweaking those texts 2000 years later won't change it either.

In other words, we are not depending on the precise wording of the texts in order to know what Truth is.

 

[JM]

Thank you for your responses.

Is it accurate to say the Eastern Orthodox have a determined set of manuscripts underlying the Old and New Testaments? The Septuagint for the Old and what Protestants call the Minuscule 1495 for the New?

jm

 

[Knee V]

Thank you for your responses.

Is it accurate to say the Eastern Orthodox have a determined set of manuscripts underlying the Old and New Testaments? The Septuagint for the Old and what Protestants call the Minuscule 1495 for the New?

jm

Sort of. Different textual traditions developed in different places at different times. While the use of the LXX in Orthodoxy is fairly standard now, it was not always that simplistic. Take, for example, the Peshitta. People can use the Peshitta, which is not related to the Septuagint, and still be perfectly Orthodox. But if the question is more about the specific books and not the translation or textual tradition, then the answer is that the books found in the Septuagint are pretty much the books that make up our Old Testament.

I'd never heard of the Minuscule 1495 until your post. I looked it up, and it appears that the Patriarchal Text of 1905 is identical to or nearly identical to the Minuscule 1495. But the Patriarchal Text of 1905 is only the official text of the See of Constantinople. Other regional synods/churches may have different "official" New Testament texts, if they even have an official New Testament text.

I think the better approach to this issue is which texts are common, instead of which texts are official. With certain issues there is regional variation. As the texts themselves do not constitute the Christian faith, we have not found that making an official set of texts is all that pressing of a matter.

So those texts that you mentioned are pretty much what is common in Orthodoxy, and pretty much unofficially standard.

 

[JM]

I think the better approach to this issue is which texts are common, instead of which texts are official. With certain issues there is regional variation. As the texts themselves do not constitute the Christian faith, we have not found that making an official set of texts is all that pressing of a matter.

So those texts that you mentioned are pretty much what is common in Orthodoxy, and pretty much unofficially standard.

Thanks Knee V. That sounds a lot like the confessional Protestant view. Guys like Erasmus, Luther, Calvin, Beza, Turrentin, etc. all believed the church held scripture in common unlike the Roman view of "official" text. (Vulgate) The theologians mentioned above knew about and noted textual variants but never tampered with the text which is what we see Protestantism doing today. Passages like 1 John 5.7 were kept in the NT text because the church, in common, held it as scripture.

Next question. It seems very vague or undefined as to how things are sorted out in the Orthodox denomination...if traditions contradict, who decides what is sacred or holy tradition and what is not? Who offers a definitive interpretation of tradition? How is tradition recognized?

Thank you.

jm

 

[GratiaCorpusChristi]

I'm really curious to know if there are any Orthodox people around here who are comfortable with historical/higher criticism. JEDP Documentary hypothesis, three Isaiahs, negative historical evaluations of Exodus traditions, historical Jesus research- that sort of thing.

 

[Cappadocious]

Those things can be useful. Above all, they must not be feared as some indomitable force of modern culture, or described in terms of an "ism".

 

[gzt]

I'm really curious to know if there are any Orthodox people around here who are comfortable with historical/higher criticism. JEDP Documentary hypothesis, three Isaiahs, negative historical evaluations of Exodus traditions, historical Jesus research- that sort of thing.

A short answer is that the Orthodox shouldn't be too worried, as we're quite comfortable with the idea of the the Holy Spirit guiding the Church to compile documents over the course of a long time and the point of Scripture being to testify to Christ as God's revelation to the world, not that the Bible was dictated by God into the ear of the known named authors of the books to make something that was perfect in its autographs in every possible way (including penmanship), and then the 70 inspired translators of the Old Testament into Greek again took dictation directly from God into the true original language, Greek, since God came to save the Greek people. Unfortunately, I'm a statistician, not a Semitic philologist, so I can't discuss in the level of detail that you would perhaps like, and some of the rest of the people here are not particularly fond of academic readings of the Bible.

 

[GratiaCorpusChristi]

Well those are two comforting answers. Thank you both.

 

[ArmyMatt]

the higher criticism thing really does not matter, because the Church has the correct understanding, which is what matters. if in 100 years they find out that Hebrews was not written by St Paul it's no real big deal for us, because it is of the theology of St Paul.

 

[Cappadocious]

if in 100 years they find out that Hebrews was not written by St Paul it's no real big deal for us, because it is of the theology of St Paul.

I only recently found out that some take "Pauline" to mean "written by Paul" rather than "Paul's tradition". I thought the latter was normative.

 

[JM]

gzt brings us back to the questions I posted on the first page. It seems very vague or undefined as to how things are sorted out in the Orthodox denomination...if traditions contradict, who decides what is sacred or holy tradition and what is not? Who offers a definitive interpretation of tradition? How is tradition recognized?

 

[JM]

double post, sorryhttps://www.youtube.com/watch?v=R55Nl6GtvSk

 

[Lukaris]

gzt brings us back to the questions I posted on the first page. It seems very vague or undefined as to how things are sorted out in the Orthodox denomination...if traditions contradict, who decides what is sacred or holy tradition and what is not? Who offers a definitive interpretation of tradition? How is tradition recognized?

I think tradition is recognized as revelation & commandments of God from which the pattern of worship was established & scriptures written. These are highly intertwined with the established Bible being the major aspect of but not the full definition of tradition which lies in the overall worship of the church. I believe it is our understanding that the Holy Spirit maintains the overall faith in our Lord Jesus Christ in His church while our collective human faith affects its expression. I hope this makes sense.

 

[ArmyMatt]

gzt brings us back to the questions I posted on the first page. It seems very vague or undefined as to how things are sorted out in the Orthodox denomination...if traditions contradict, who decides what is sacred or holy tradition and what is not? Who offers a definitive interpretation of tradition? How is tradition recognized?

well, I think we would say that the Holy Spirit (who is the One that leads to all truth) speaks through the Church as a whole, so it can take time from a temporal POV to hash all this stuff out, but I can say (looking at history) it is the formula that works.

 

[Knee V]

gzt brings us back to the questions I posted on the first page. It seems very vague or undefined as to how things are sorted out in the Orthodox denomination...

That is true. Things can seem somewhat vague at times. Being conciliar can often look and feel rather disorganized.

if traditions contradict, who decides what is sacred or holy tradition and what is not? Who offers a definitive interpretation of tradition? How is tradition recognized?

The collective mind and voice of the church over time. Led by the Holy Spirit, the church recognizes the truth when it is proclaimed, whether in a council, by a single person, from the Scriptures, etc. Even when heresy seems to prevail for a time, it never does, and truth always wins out in the end, as has been the case with Orthodoxy since the beginning.

 

[JM]

Is truth discovered by majority rule/belief or understanding...as in a democracy?