Russian Bible History

Christianity / Bible / Bible Canon

Russian Bible History

Church Slavonic Bible

860 - Cyril and Methodius create the Slavic script for writing the Gospel and some books of the Bible.
Only the books required for worship (Gospel, Apostle and Psalter) were translated.

Cyril and Methodius
Cyril and Methodius

988 - Rus' adopted Christianity, that is, the translation of Cyril and Methodius already existed, but Orthodoxy did not yet exist. So Rus' adopted Christianity, not Orthodoxy. Pravda accepted the Eastern version.

1054 - The Great Schism of the Church

1492 (a copy from 1499 has reached us) - Gennadievskaya Bible - the 1st Bible in Church Slavonic (almost complete).
Except for 3 Maccabees, which is not included in the main canon of the Bible.
Archbishop Gennady (Novgorodsky) collected all the translations that were possible.
Monk Benjamin translated the missing books from the Vulgate (more than 10).
Total books 49 OT + 27 NT.

1581 - Ostrog Bible - the 1st printed Bible in Church Slavonic language.
1st complete edition of the Bible in Church Slavonic/
The translation was initiated by Prince Konstantin Ostrozhsky, published by the first printer Ivan Fedorov.
The Gennadievskaya Bible was taken as a basis, which was corrected according to the text of the Septuagint.
The books translated from the Vulgate were re-translated from the Septuagint.

1663 - Moscow Bible - reprint of the Ostrozh Bible, the text of the Psalter was corrected.

1751 - Elizabeth Bible - revised Ostrozh Bible, work began by decree of Peter I.
The text became more homogeneous, became as close as possible to the text of the Septuagint, and not to the Septuagint and Vulgate, as the Ostrozhskaya Bible.
1756 - revised 2nd edition, used today as the main text for worship in the Orthodox Church.

At the end of the 19th - beginning of the 20th centuries, work was underway to create a critical edition of the Church Slavonic Bible.
A titanic work was carried out, but due to the revolution it was never completed.

In fact, a translation was never made from scratch, the basis was always the previous translation, which was cleaned up, corrected.
And there is no other way to do it, because the Church Slavonic language is dead, like Latin or ancient Greek, for example.

Russian Bible

1876 - Synodal Bible - the first Russian Bible is published (after much ordeal), the Bible in a language understandable to modern people.
This translation is the main one today. What is important is that the evangelical movement in Russia has now become possible.

And now the first translation of the Bible in a language understandable to people is published.
Only the country is illiterate for the most part.

But the evangelical movement has begun in the country, which was impossible without the Bible.

1917 - the communists come to power, banning the Bible, but eliminating illiteracy.

1987 - communism has fallen. For the first time in history, Russia has the Bible in its native language, is able to read it and there are no restrictions on this.
True, the language is more than a hundred years old, quite archaic.

2000 - The Moscow Patriarchate and the German mission "Light in the East" releasing modern versions of the Synodal Bible, simply replaced obsolete words and obsolete phrases with modern ones. 98% of the translation remained the same.

Now translations in modern Russian have appeared.
The first editions were very crude, but subsequent editions are of very high quality.