Introduction

Cambridge University Press 978-1-107-03211-8 — Russian Bible Wars Stephen K. Batalden Excerpt More Information Introduction The modern Russian Bible, like all such sacred texts, is a political and cultural document. One of the axioms of modern text criticism is that all texts, including such sacred texts as the Hebrew Bible and the Arabic Qur’an, reflect the historical circumstances surrounding their creation, translation, and dissemination. Within the three main Abrahamic traditions (Judaism, Islam, and Christianity), Christianity has arguably placed greatest emphasis upon the translation of its sacred text into local languages. That translation process, in turn, has added to the local significance of the Bible as a political and cultural artifact. A hallmark of the process of biblical translation in the Eastern Orthodox world is its unusual timing. In Eastern Orthodoxy, biblical translation occurred both earlier and later than elsewhere in Europe – earlier in the case of the Slavonic world because the original Slavonic translation of scripture took place as a part of the missions of Sts. Cyril and Methodius in the ninth century; and later because translation into modern languages, in contrast to the German and English translations of the Reformation era, came to the Orthodox world only from the nineteenth century. The relatively late translation of the Bible into Russian reflected, in part, the persistence of linguistic diglossia in Russian culture, a situation that exists to the present in which the historical evolution of the modern Russian language was paralleled by the continued authority of the old Slavonic biblical text for liturgical worship. Modern Russian biblical translation in the nineteenth century was from the outset highly politicized. The title for this work draws upon the language of “culture wars,” framing the politics of modern scriptural translation in figurative terms as Russian Bible wars. It is the thesis of this work that the debates over modern scriptural translation in nineteenth-century Russia contributed to the transformation of modern Russian religious culture by posing fundamental questions of authority within Eastern Christian tradition. These debates reached well beyond the confines of 1 © in this web service Cambridge University Press www.cambridge.org Cambridge University Press 978-1-107-03211-8 — Russian Bible Wars Stephen K. Batalden Excerpt More Information 2 Russian Bible Wars the religious culture into the wider public sphere. How and why did modern biblical translation become such a contested issue for nineteenth- and twentieth-century Russia? That is the question this volume seeks to answer. It may have been inevitable that modern Russian biblical translation would become politically charged, having been launched as it was by formal imperial proclamation in 1816. The fact that the establishment of the Russian Bible Society in the reign of Alexander I was closely identified with the work of the British and Foreign Bible Society ultimately heightened the controversy over biblical translation, and made the politics of the Russian Bible an issue also involving Russian cultural ties with the West. But the politics of modern Russian biblical translation extended well beyond its occasional imperial blessings and proscriptions, and the perceptions of western influence. Russian biblical translation was politically charged – and remained so at least to the end of the Soviet era – because it posed for modern Russian religious culture fundamental, unresolved issues of authority. At stake in these issues was the very arbitration of modern Russian religious culture itself. Who should be authorized to translate Holy Scripture? What texts should be considered authoritative? What linguistic medium should be used, and for what purposes? Who should have the authority to publish and disseminate Holy Scripture? These questions of authority invariably left the traditional arbiters of Russian religious culture − the Russian church hierarchy and its emperor – divided. Indeed, the failure of the religious culture to resolve these fundamental issues of authority left the church all the more vulnerable in the twentieth century. Two assumptions have guided this framing of the problem of Russian biblical translation. First, traditional Russian religious culture, while it necessarily responded to the interests of the wider believing community, invested official authority in a hierarchical elite.1 Russian religious culture was not intended to be brokered on the basis of “market” forces, but was rather subjected to the controls of the Russian state and the church hierarchy. In subordinating church administration to state authority, the Petrine church reform of 1721, while it did little to challenge the church hierarchy’sofficial authority in matters of faith and doctrine, demonstrated the power of the state over religious institutions. The Petrine reform 1 The relationship between elite ecclesiastical authority and the wider believing community has been well addressed for Orthodox Slavs in Eve Levin’s, Sex and Society in the World of the Orthodox Slavs, 900–1700 (Ithaca, New York: Cornell University Press, 1989). Levin’s point is that “the gap between ecclesiastical and community norms was not great” (302). But the ultimate arbitration of religious authority in early modern Russia, particularly in matters of biblical texts, translation, and distribution, continued to rest in the hands of elite ecclesiastical and political authorities. © in this web service Cambridge University Press www.cambridge.org Cambridge University Press 978-1-107-03211-8 — Russian Bible Wars Stephen K. Batalden Excerpt More Information Introduction 3 also reinforced imperial authority over official episcopal appointments. Catherine II’s subsequent secularization of monastic properties in 1764, while it may have limited the church’s economic independence from the state, drawing the state directly into local diocesan financing, reconfirmed the longstanding shared authority of church and state in matters pertaining to Russian religious culture. The capacity of the post-Petrine church and state to identify and label “heresy,” as in the case of the Old Believer communities, was an indication that this prescriptive, hierarchical authority continued to be embedded in modern Russian religious culture. Slavophile critics would argue that this hierarchical control became even greater, and more impersonal, in the aftermath of the Petrine reforms than it had been in traditional Russian religious life. Modern Russian biblical translation, by generating market demand and a modernized supply system for Holy Scripture, and by introducing modern text criticism, fundamentally challenged the prevailing traditional elite arbitration of authority in modern Russian religious culture. The second assumption underlying this study is that religious authority in Russia, as elsewhere, has always been culturally conditioned. H. Richard Niebuhr noted many years ago in his classic study, Christ and Culture, that religious traditions are never independent of culture.2 The transmission of religious tradition has always occurred within a cultural context. Religious traditions may challenge prevailing cultural norms, but they do so within concrete social or political contexts. Thus, as Elaine Pagels demonstrated so convincingly for early Christianity, even such basic matters as the establishment of the biblical canon were conditioned by specific political issues facing the early church, notably its confrontation with Gnosticism.3 In western Christian tradition, canon lawyers and inquisitorial judges served as the arbiters of church authority, interpreting with greater or lesser scholastic skill the norms of religious tradition. Such canonists, however, operated within clearly identifiable cultural and political constraints, despite their occasional claim to operate above culture at the direct command of divine authority. The contested politics of religious culture was often concealed in this arbitration and interpretation of divinely ordained authority. Whether it be papal bulls, hagiography, confessional literature, or even Holy Scripture, all such religious texts, like their secular counterparts, were constructed representations arising out of specific, contested circumstances. The fact that sacred texts have arisen out of concrete political contexts 2 H. Richard Niebuhr, Christ and Culture (New York: Harper Row, 1951). 3 Elaine Pagels, The Gnostic Gospels (New York: Random House, 1979). © in this web service Cambridge University Press www.cambridge.org Cambridge University Press 978-1-107-03211-8 — Russian Bible Wars Stephen K. Batalden Excerpt More Information 4 Russian Bible Wars merely defines their status as texts, and does not address their divine authority. This book, in focusing upon the contextual issues surrounding Russian biblical translation, recognizes modern Russian religious culture as a domain of contested authority worthy of scholarly study. As such, this is a work of history, not a guide to biblical exegesis or textology. In the absence of a more rigid canon law, Eastern Christendom developed alternative vehicles for defining a normative Christian tradition. These vehicles included a wealth of confessional, hagiographic, and patristic literature, as well as the aesthetically rich iconographic, musical, and sacramental resources of Orthodox liturgical worship. A most important part of that tradition was the transmission of sacred scriptural texts. For Eastern

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