Holy Scripture in the Orthodox Tradition

Scripture & Tradition

For Orthodox Christians, Holy Scripture is not a book that stands above or apart from the Church. It is a book that was born from the Church, confirmed by the Church, and is properly understood only within the Church. Scripture and Tradition are not two separate sources of revelation set in competition — they are two expressions of the one continuous life of the Holy Spirit in the Body of Christ.

The New Testament itself did not precede the Church. The Apostles preached, baptized, celebrated the Eucharist, and established communities of faith for decades before any of the Gospels were written. The letters of St. Paul, the earliest New Testament writings, assume communities already gathered, already worshipping, already living the Faith. Scripture emerged from that life.

It was the Church — through her bishops, her councils, her liturgy, and her lived discernment — that recognized which writings bore the authority of the Holy Spirit and which did not. The canon was not imposed upon the Church from outside; it was confirmed from within. This is why the Orthodox Church does not read Scripture as a private individual standing over the text with their own reason as judge. She reads it as a community, with the Fathers, in worship, under the guidance of the same Spirit who inspired it.

The Septuagint

The Old Testament of the Orthodox Church is not the Hebrew Bible as standardized by Jewish scholars after the first century. It is the Septuagint — the ancient Greek translation of the Hebrew Scriptures, known by the Roman numeral LXX for the seventy (or seventy-two) scholars tradition says produced it.

Origins. According to the Letter of Aristeas, a historical document from the third or second century BC, the Egyptian pharaoh Ptolemy II Philadelphus (r. 285–246 BC) commissioned a translation of the Jewish Law for the great Library of Alexandria. Seventy-two Jewish scholars — six from each of the twelve tribes of Israel — were brought from Jerusalem to the island of Pharos, near Alexandria, and completed the translation of the Torah (the five books of Moses) in seventy-two days. Over the following centuries, the remaining books of the Hebrew Scriptures were also translated into Greek, completing what we know as the Septuagint.

The Bible of the Apostles. By the time of Christ, Greek was the common language of the Mediterranean world, and the Septuagint was the Scripture most Jews outside of Palestine knew and used. It was the Bible of the Diaspora synagogues. When the Apostles and Evangelists wrote the New Testament and quoted the Old, they quoted almost exclusively from the Septuagint — not from the Hebrew text. Scholars have counted that of the roughly 300 direct Old Testament quotations in the New Testament, the large majority follow the Septuagint wording. This is not incidental. The Apostles received their Scripture in Greek, thought in it, preached from it, and saw in it the prophecies fulfilled in Christ.

Key theological differences. The Septuagint and the Masoretic Hebrew text (standardized by Jewish scholars around the 9th century AD) sometimes diverge in significant ways. The most famous is Isaiah 7:14: the Septuagint reads parthenos — "virgin" — while the Masoretic text uses almah, which can mean simply a "young woman." The Evangelist Matthew, quoting this prophecy in reference to the Virgin Mary, follows the Septuagint. For Orthodox Christians, this is not a translation error but the providential preservation of the Messianic sense of the text.

The Septuagint today. The Septuagint remains the Old Testament of the Orthodox Church to this day. It is read at Vespers and Orthros, chanted in the Liturgy, and studied by theologians and monastics as the divinely guided vehicle through which the Old Testament was prepared for Christian proclamation. Translations of the Orthodox Bible into English — such as the Orthodox Study Bible — translate the Old Testament from the Septuagint, not from the Hebrew Masoretic text.

Canon Formation

The word canon comes from the Greek kanon, meaning a rule or measuring rod. The biblical canon is the authoritative list of writings the Church has recognized as divinely inspired Scripture.

The canon was not decided at a single moment by a single council. It emerged over centuries through a process of liturgical use, apostolic testimony, theological discernment, and conciliar confirmation. Writings that were read in the eucharistic assemblies, traced to apostolic authorship or sanction, consistent with the rule of faith, and recognized across the churches — these were the criteria the Church applied, not always consciously or formally, but consistently over time.

The Apostolic Canons (c. 4th century), the Council of Laodicea (c. 363 AD), and the Quinisext Council (692 AD) all addressed the canon. The Councils of Carthage (397 AD and 419 AD) — whose lists were later affirmed by the broader Church — confirmed the wider Old Testament canon including the deuterocanonical books received through the Septuagint. The Church in the East was always attentive to the practice of Alexandria and the Greek-speaking world, where the Septuagint's broader canon was the norm.

It is important to understand that the Church did not create the authority of these books; she recognized it. The canon is the Church's formal witness to what she had always known and lived. The Holy Spirit who inspired the Scriptures is the same Spirit who guided the Church to receive them.

The Books of the Orthodox Canon

The Orthodox Old Testament follows the Septuagint and includes books not found in most Protestant Bibles. The New Testament is the same 27 books shared by all Christian traditions.

Books marked Orthodox are included in the Orthodox canon but not in the Catholic canon.

Canon Comparison

Many Christians encounter the Orthodox canon for the first time and wonder why it contains books unfamiliar to them. The differences trace directly to which Old Testament text each tradition inherited — the Septuagint or the later Hebrew Masoretic text.

The Protestant Reformation of the 16th century, following the lead of Jerome and later Martin Luther, adopted the shorter Hebrew canon as the standard for the Old Testament, setting aside the deuterocanonical books as edifying but not authoritative. The Orthodox Church, rooted in the Greek-speaking world of the Apostles, has never departed from the Septuagint tradition.

Reading Scripture with the Church

Orthodox Christians do not read Scripture in isolation, with private interpretation as the final authority. They read it within the Church — guided by the Fathers, shaped by the liturgy, and illumined by the same Holy Spirit who inspired the text.

The Liturgy of St. John Chrysostom, celebrated in Orthodox parishes every Sunday, is saturated with Scripture. Psalms are sung at Vespers and Orthros. The Epistles and Gospels are proclaimed at every Divine Liturgy. The Church year itself follows the arc of Salvation History — from Creation through Incarnation, Death, Resurrection, and the life of the Age to Come. To live as an Orthodox Christian is to be immersed in Scripture, not as a private reader, but as a member of the Body.

The Holy Fathers — Basil the Great, John Chrysostom, Cyril of Alexandria, Maximos the Confessor, and countless others — wrote extensive commentaries on Scripture. The Orthodox read Scripture with them, not past them. The Fathers do not replace Scripture; they illumine it from within the Tradition that bore it.

For those coming to Orthodoxy from Protestant backgrounds, this may be the most important reorientation: Scripture is not the Church’s authority from above, to which she submits. It is the Church’s written voice — born from within her life, entrusted to her keeping, and properly heard only within her worship.