Our Notes & References

The rare first edition of St. Paul’s Epistles in vernacular Russian – within a 4-year project to translate the Bible into Russian, marked by serious controversy between the Russian Bible Society and the Orthodox Church.

The Russian Bible Society (RBS) was founded in 1813 as a branch of the British and Foreign Bible Society, an organisation which aimed to avoid sectarian conflicts through the distribution of vernacular Bibles “without note or comment” (Zacek, 413). It originally printed the scripture in a range of languages for the non-Russian and non-Orthodox peoples of the Empire, including in Finnish, Armenian and Kalmyk, because the Orthodox Church retained the exclusive right to print the Bible in Slavonic.

The Church strongly resisted the use of Russian — as late as the early twentieth century children often learned to read Slavonic before Cyrillic (Kravetskii, 26), partially because the vernacular was thought to be merely an “imperfect copy” of Church Slavonic (Okabe, 121).

This rather important project of translating the entire Bible into Russian “owes its origins to Tsar Alexander I (who) was impressed by the fact that his ‘beloved Russians’ still lacked a vernacular Bible [and] recommended the Synod to consider the preparation of a version in modern Russian” (Darlow and Moule, 7784). This triggered a power struggle between the Church and the RBS, led by Philaret, the Metropolitan of Moscow (1782-1867) and Prince Aleksandr Nikolaevich Golitsyn (1773-1844), the Minister of Education. By printing in the vernacular they infringed upon the Holy Synod and attracted accusations of being “a revolutionary organisation, an enemy both of the altar and the throne… an alien, even diabolical institution (aiming) for the destruction of Christianity in Russia” (Zacek, 426-429).

Against the Church’s opposition, the RBS published its translation serially, beginning with the four gospels in 1818, followed by the Acts in 1819, and the complete New Testament in 1821 (Bryner, 324). This complicated bibliography is reflected on the title page of this volume, which shows that the Evangelarium is in its fourth edition, the Acts in their second, and the (Pauline) Epistles in the first edition. This state of affairs was not unusual for the Russian Orthodox Church.

Ultimately, with Alexander I becoming increasingly afraid of sedition and revolution, the RBS lost its power struggle with the Church and was forced to shut down in 1824 — Prince Golitsyn also fell from grace in the process. The master printer, stereotype founders and binders all appear to have been British and were all forced to leave Russia, effectively “(ending) the spread of the Holy Scriptures among the inhabitants of the Russian Empire in their own languages” (Zacek, 436).

Very rare: we could trace only one example selling at auction in recent decades outside Russia, about 20 years ago; WorldCat locates only one copy with this date, in Edinburgh University.

Bibliography

Darlow-M. 7785; Svod. Kat. 632; Bryner, Erich. 1974. ‘Bible Translations in Russia’. The Bible Translator 25 (3): 318–38; Okabe, Shoichi. 1985. ‘Russian Grammars before Lomonosov’. In Kanazawadaigaku bungakubu ronshū. Bungakka-hen, vol. 5. 1985-02-25; Zacek, Judith Cohen. 2009. ‘The Russian Bible Society and the Russian Orthodox Church’. Cambridge Core; Kravetskii, Aleksandr Gennadevich and Aleksandra Andreevna Pletneva. 2001. Istoria tserkovnoslavianskogo iazyka v rossii. Iazyki russkoi kultury.