Scripture and Tradition

What you'll notice

There's a book on the altar, and it isn't a missal. It's the Gospel book, usually bound in metal, sometimes in gold, lying in the middle of the Holy Table where everything else happens. Hapgood's service book says it sits there "to denote that God himself is mystically present thereon."¹ It comes out in procession, it's kissed, and when it's read, a deacon or priest chants it from the center of the church while everyone stands.

What you won't see is anyone following along. No pew Bibles, no page numbers on a screen. The Epistle is chanted by a reader, the Gospel by the clergy, and on certain feasts the Vespers service the night before adds readings from the Old Testament, each one announced with "Wisdom! Let us attend!"² And underneath the readings you'll hear more Bible than you expected. Psalms open and close the services. Whole verses get sung back and forth. The litanies, hymns and prayers are stitched out of Scripture almost line by line. You just don't need your own copy to hear it.

What it's called

Scripture is the Bible: the Old Testament and the New. The Orthodox read the Old Testament in the Septuagint (the Greek Old Testament made before Christ), and its books include some that most Protestant Bibles set apart or leave out, such as Tobit, Judith, Wisdom, Sirach and the Maccabees. Saint Athanasius called those the books "appointed by the Fathers to be read" by newcomers, and the Greek canon-law collection called the Rudder names that middle shelf the anaginoskomena (the "books to be read").³

Tradition (Greek paradosis, "handing on") is the Church's living memory: what was handed from the apostles to the Church and handed on since. The word comes straight from Saint Paul: "Therefore, brethren, stand fast and hold the traditions which you were taught, whether by word or our epistle" (2 Thessalonians 2:15).

What's actually happening

The Bible is read in church before it's read at home

For most of Christian history most Christians heard the Bible rather than read it, and the services were built for that. At the Liturgy you get an Epistle and a Gospel (The Prokeimenon and the Epistle; The Gospel). At Vespers and Matins you get psalms, canticles and, on feasts, the Old Testament (Vespers, Vigil, and the Daily Round). The readings follow the calendar, so the Church reads the Bible as a year, not a shuffle.

The Old Testament comes from the Septuagint

The Septuagint is the Greek translation of the Hebrew Scriptures that Jews made before Christ, and it's the one the apostles quoted most. When Matthew says a "virgin" shall conceive (Matthew 1:23), he's quoting the Septuagint's Isaiah 7:14. When Hebrews has Christ say "a body You have prepared for Me" (Hebrews 10:5), that's Psalm 40:6 (39:7 in the Septuagint) in the Septuagint's wording. The Orthodox Study Bible's Old Testament is translated from it, which is why its Psalm numbers sometimes run one behind your Bible's, and why it includes books like Sirach and the Maccabees, which the early Church read and most Protestant Bibles set apart or left out.

The edges of the canon are softer than you'd think

The New Testament is settled for the Orthodox: the same twenty-seven books Catholic and Protestant Bibles have. The Old Testament's edges are softer, and the honest thing is to say so. In 367 Saint Athanasius listed the Old Testament books as "twenty-two books in number," with Baruch, Lamentations and the Epistle counted together with Jeremiah, and he put Esther, Judith, Tobit, Wisdom and Sirach on the second shelf, books "not indeed included in the Canon" but read to new believers.⁴ The list attached to the Synod of Laodicea counts Esther in the canon and leaves out the rest of that second shelf.⁵ In 692 the Council in Trullo received the canons of Laodicea and of Athanasius, side by side, into the Church's law.⁶ The lists don't match, and the Church received them both. Orthodox Bibles such as the Orthodox Study Bible print the longer Old Testament.

How the New Testament list came together is its own story, and a famous myth grew up around it: see "The Council of Nicaea picked the books of the Bible".

Why it matters

Start with how high the Orthodox hold the Bible. Athanasius, listing the books in 367, calls them "fountains of salvation."⁷ The Gospel book sits on the altar because the Word of God is in it. In Orthodox eyes, Tradition never competes with it.

Classic Protestant confessions hold that Scripture contains everything necessary for salvation, and that nothing is to be added to it, by new revelation or by "traditions of men."⁸ The Orthodox also hold Scripture supreme. But they read it inside the Church's living Tradition: the councils, the Fathers, and the worship that carried the Bible before the canon was settled. To the Orthodox, Scripture is the heart of Tradition rather than a rival to it, and the Church is the household that wrote it down and still reads it aloud. The convert received by the rite in Hapgood's book promises exactly that: to "accept and understand Holy Scripture in accordance with the interpretation" the Church "hath held, and doth hold."⁹

Saint Basil the Great put the Orthodox instinct plainly in the 370s. Some of what the Church believes and practices comes from Scripture, and some was "delivered to us 'in a mystery' by the tradition of the apostles," and "both of these in relation to true religion have the same force." His examples are humble ones you can still see: the sign of the cross, and turning to the East to pray. "What writing has taught us" that? he asks.¹⁰

Nobody is keeping a second Bible hidden in a drawer. The claim is simpler: the Bible was never meant to be read alone. When Philip found an Ethiopian official reading Isaiah in his chariot, he asked, "Do you understand what you are reading?" The answer is the whole Orthodox case in one line: "How can I, unless someone guides me?" (Acts 8:30–31). The guide, for the Orthodox, is the Church that has been reading the book the longest. And the Church asks God for the same help every time it reads: before the Gospel at every Liturgy, the priest prays that God will "open the eyes of our understanding to the comprehension of the proclamation of thy Gospel."¹¹ Understanding Scripture is something you receive while you pray, in the company of everyone else who's listening.

That's also why the Creed matters here. Saint Cyril of Jerusalem called it the whole faith "in a few lines" for people who couldn't read the Scriptures (The Creed in Plain Words). Tradition, at its simplest, is the Church remembering what the Bible is about.

Where it came from

The Septuagint was made by Jewish translators in the centuries before Christ, and the first Christians, writing in Greek, quoted it constantly. The Church read the apostles' letters and the Gospels in its gatherings from early on, and recognized the New Testament books slowly, by use. The first surviving list of exactly our twenty-seven comes from Athanasius in 367.¹² Regional councils issued lists of their own, and Trullo gathered them into canon law in 692.

The word tradition is older than any of it. Saint Paul used it for what he'd handed on, by letter and by mouth (2 Thessalonians 2:15), and the Church never stopped using it the same way.

What you do

If you're Orthodox: read the Bible at home, and read it with the Church: the daily readings in the calendar are the simplest way in, and the Psalms are the Church's prayer book. When a passage confuses you, look at how the Fathers or the feast's hymns read it before you build a theory of your own. And when the Gospel book is brought out for veneration, kiss it, because of what's in it.

If you're visiting: bring your Bible if you like; nobody will mind, and you can follow the readings if you find them first. If you look up a psalm, remember that Orthodox books may number it either way, and the Septuagint's number often runs one behind yours. Listen for how much of the service is Scripture sung. Most visitors are surprised.

Go deeper

• Saint Athanasius, Festal Letter 39 (NPNF2 4), the list of 367.
• Saint Basil the Great, On the Holy Spirit 27 (NPNF2 8), on written and unwritten tradition.
• Orthodox and Protestant, for the wider conversation.
• The Gospel, for how the Gospel book is carried and read.

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