Head of the Department of External Church Relations and Chairman of Bible and Theology Commission Metropolitan Hilarion stated the other day that translating the text of the Bible into contemporary Russian would be timely and even desirable. This statement, as was reported by the Russkiy Mir Foundation, was made by Hilarion at the conference "Modern Bible Studies and Church Tradition". In other words, it was meant for experts rather than broad public.
In the opinion of Metropolitan Hilarion, the new translation would give people a chance to get to know the true Christian tradition better. And the main agent, to be sure, is the classic Russian literary language which, the hierarch knows, may render "the beauty and diversity of biblical texts, their spirit and meaning."
Contemporary requirements to any translations, biblical in the first place, are very stiff and just a good command of literary Russian is insufficient, for it is necessary to accurately understand the original, and here one cannot dispense with the contemporary data of comparative Semitic, cultural and archeological studies. In the final analysis the new Bible translation is a huge cultural endeavor. For it is necessary to create at the same time a scholarly accurate text that would not distort the realities that took place two thousand years ago and earlier, translate in a poetic and lofty style; and the text should also be as clear for our contemporaries as possible.
In reality everything is even more complicated, since the translation, in the words of Metropolitan Hilarion, "should not be divorced from the established church tradition". And therefore the Metropolitan's call cannot be underestimated; to a certain extent this is a missionary challenge.
We should remind that the existing translation of the Bible to Russian, the so-called Synodal version officially used by the Russian Orthodox Church, was prepared nearly 150 years ago, in 1876, and now it is, to put it mildly, somewhat alienated from today's everyday life, often eluding the understanding of the modern person. "Obviously, the linguistic and stylistic problems of the Synodal version are more and more hindering common people coming to the Church from understanding the meaning and beauty of the biblical text. The translation removing this obstacle can be looked upon as a missionary undertaking," Hilarion suggests.
Patriarch Kirill shares this view. Speaking at the opening ceremony of the same conference on Bible studies, he stated that not only would the new translation give an impulse to the revival of domestic Bible studies; it will allow the Russian Orthodox Church to reach out to other religions and secular scholars.
This is a serious problem indeed, given that during this one century and a half the world Bible studies as well as comparative linguistics in general, have shot far ahead, whereas the domestic Bible studies made no progress for quite a long time (no need to explain why). During this time the language itself has altered and new translation theories have emerged.
What do experts think? Rossiyskaya Gazeta addressed several questions to well-known Bible expert, philologist, assistant professor of the chair of history and philology of the Ancient East at the Institute of Oriental Cultures of Russian State University for the Humanities, Mikhail Seleznev.
In the scholar's opinion, a new translation is needed indeed. He reminded the history of creating the Synodal version. The point is that although the data of translation refers us to rather late history – the year 1876 was already dominated by the language of the post-Pushkin epoch, i.e. was very close to contemporary literary Russian, work on the translation had begun at the turn of the 19th century, prior to Pushkin. The work was carried out by the Russian Bible Society. Under Nicholas I the work was frozen, but resumed and brought to fruition under his heir Alexander II. Therefore the language of the Synodal version is pre-Pushkin Russian.
Not that it markedly interfered with our understanding of the biblical text, but the beauty and power of the original images is often dampened in the Synodal version – at least for modern man, Seleznev says.
Some flaws in the Synodal version can be discerned only by specialists, given that from the standpoint of contemporary Bible studies the beginning of the 19th century is almost the "stone age". There was practically no information on the archeology of the Ancient East, which is abundant nowadays; such a fundamentally important memorial as Qumran Scrolls (manuscripts dating back to III-I centuries B.C., written in ancient Hebrew and Aramaic and discovered in 1947 near the Dead Sea) was not known either.
There is one more shortfall of the Synodal version, however strange this may sound. For all its scholarly fastidiousness, the text was not properly edited. For instance, the same things are differently named in different passages: this concerns objects, geographic names and proper names.
Finally, the translation is often too literal; this was in line with the translation theory of the early 19th century, but it is out of tune with today's realities. The modern translation theory implies a more liberal handling of the text, whereby the meaning of any particular phrase must be rendered; word-for-word translation is superfluous.
The challenge is awesome indeed. The new Bible translation can become a real national project that would unite leading scholars, both secular and ecclesiastical.
In a certain sense this will be a test for our entire society. Will our scholars be adequate to the task? How will the basically conservative ecclesiastical community look upon the very intention to accomplish this grand-scale project? In bygone ages there were schisms and unrest in Russian Orthodoxy even over less significant and far-reaching issues. How will common people perceive the new translation? Thus this is not a merely scholarly endeavor; the mission also has great social significance. However the Church must communicate with the "world" in a contemporary language, especially when the matter concerns the fundamentals of our Christian faith. And the leadership of the Russian Orthodox Church seems to be well aware of this immense challenge.
Alexander Ryazantsev
