The Orthodox, Judaism, and Islam

What you'll notice

Come to Vespers on a Saturday night and the first thing you'll hear sung is a psalm about creation: "Praise the Lord, O my soul," Psalm 104 (103 in the Septuagint).¹ A few minutes later the choir sings "Lord, I have cried unto thee," and the deacon censes the whole church while they sing a line from Psalm 141 (140 in the Septuagint): "Let my prayer be set forth in thy sight as incense, and let the lifting up of my hands be an evening sacrifice."² That's the Temple's evening offering, prayed in a suburban parish with a parking lot.

On Sunday you'll hear Hebrew without a translator: Amen, Alleluia, Hosanna, and "Lord of Sabaoth." In an Antiochian parish you may hear the Liturgy partly in Arabic, the language of a Church that has lived among Muslims for centuries.

What it's called

Judaism here means the faith and life of the Jewish people. Orthodox hymns more often say Israel, meaning God's people of the old covenant. Islam is the faith of Muslims, whose scripture is the Qur'an. The Church's greatest feast carries Israel's name for Passover: Pascha (the feast of the Resurrection, Easter), and Saint Paul calls Christ "our Passover" (1 Corinthians 5:7). A Note on Words has the word's history.

What's actually happening

Jewish roots in the worship

The Church prays the Psalms more than any other book. Vespers opens with one, Matins is built on them, and the Liturgy's antiphons are psalms with refrains (The Antiphons and the Beatitudes).

The first half of the Liturgy keeps the synagogue's pattern of reading and preaching. Jesus stood up to read in the synagogue at Nazareth, "as His custom was" (Luke 4:16), and in Pisidian Antioch Paul was invited to speak "after the reading of the Law and the Prophets" (Acts 13:15). Christians kept the pattern of reading, then explaining. Saint Justin Martyr, around 150, describes Christians reading "the memoirs of the apostles or the writings of the prophets," after which the one presiding "verbally instructs, and exhorts to the imitation of these good things."³ The Prokeimenon and the Epistle and The Homily trace the line into the service you'll attend. On the eve of every great feast, Vespers still reads three passages of the Old Testament.

How the Orthodox speak of Judaism today

The Church reads Saint Paul's warning to Gentile Christians: "remember that you do not support the root, but the root supports you" (Romans 11:18), and "the gifts and the calling of God are irrevocable" (Romans 11:29). The Church's history with the Jewish people hasn't always lived up to those verses. In 1993 Ecumenical Patriarch Bartholomew, greeting an academic meeting between Orthodoxy and Judaism, spoke of rejecting "the consequences of mutual prevailing hostility during the past" and of two living traditions whose roots are "in the same biblical ground."⁴ The Ecumenical Patriarchate and the International Jewish Committee for Interreligious Consultations have held such academic consultations since the first, in Lucerne in 1977; the twelfth met in Geneva in December 2025.⁵

The difference is real, and the Orthodox don't hide it: they confess Jesus as Israel's Messiah and the Son of God. Respect doesn't require pretending the two faiths agree about him.

Islam and the long experience under Muslim rule

For many Orthodox Christians, Islam is the faith next door. Jerusalem fell to the Arab armies while Saint Sophronius was its patriarch (634–644), and he opened the gates of the starving city after a long siege, on condition that the holy places be spared.⁶ Later, Saint John of Damascus, the great defender of icons, came from a family that served the caliph: his father was a treasurer at the caliph's court, and John held ministerial posts there before becoming a monk at the monastery of Saint Sabbas near Jerusalem.⁷ After 1453 the Ottoman sultans made the patriarch of Constantinople civil head of all the Christians in their empire, who were tolerated, taxed, and restricted (A Short History tells it).⁸

That history is still the present for the Patriarchate of Antioch. Its patriarch has been seated in Damascus since the fourteenth century, its main liturgical language is Arabic, and it is the largest Christian community in Syria.⁹ The Antiochian Archdiocese in America is its daughter.

What the Qur'an says about Jesus

The Qur'an honors Jesus. It calls him the Messiah, "Jesus, the son of Mary," and a messenger of God; its nineteenth chapter is named for Mary and tells of the angel's announcement to a virgin whom "no man has touched."¹⁰ It also denies what the Creed confesses: it rejects calling God three and says God is "above having a son," and it says of Jesus that "they did not kill him, nor did they crucify him."¹¹ So an Orthodox Christian and a Muslim can speak of Jesus and Mary with real warmth and still disagree about who he is. The Creed stands exactly at that point.

Why it matters

The Church can't explain itself without Israel. Its Scriptures, its psalms, its Pascha, and its Messiah came from the Jewish people, and the Orthodox say so every time they sing a psalm. Forgetting that root has never ended well.

With Islam, the Orthodox have something most Western Christians don't: centuries of experience living as a minority under Muslim rule, and the saints and scars to show for it. At its best, that experience produces Christians who know their Muslim neighbors by name and still say the Creed out loud.

Where it came from

The first Christians were Jews. At Pentecost Peter preached to Jews gathered in Jerusalem, and the apostles went first to the synagogues (Acts 2; Acts 13:14–16). The Church's daily prayer, its readings, and its feasts took the shape of Israel's before they took any other.

Islam arose in the seventh century, and Jerusalem passed under Muslim rule in the same century, while Saint Sophronius was patriarch. The Orthodox of the Middle East have kept the faith there, in Greek and Arabic, ever since.

What you do

If you're Orthodox: speak of your Jewish and Muslim neighbors the way your Church's leaders do: with respect, without blurring what you believe. Pray the Psalms; they were Israel's prayers before they were yours.

If you're visiting: if you're Jewish, you'll recognize more than you expect, from the psalms to "Holy, holy, holy." If you're Muslim, you'll find Mary honored on nearly every wall, and you're welcome to stand with everyone else. Either way, Communion is for Orthodox Christians; Can I Take Communion? explains.

Go deeper

• Romans 9–11 and Psalm 104 (103 in the Septuagint).
• Saint Justin Martyr, First Apology 65–67 (ANF 1), the earliest description of a Christian Sunday.
• Great Vespers on a Saturday night, from the first psalm.
• Vespers, Vigil, and the Daily Round and A Short History.

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