Fr. John Morris sits in a pew in front of iconostasis of St. George Antiochian Orthodox Christian Church.
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Orthodox priest works to translate, publish Bible
Posted on Sat Oct 11 2008
Vicksburg Post - Vicksburg,MS
In his book, “The Bible Jesus Read,” prolific evangelical Christian author Philip Yancey makes a case for studying the Old Testament — what Jesus, the apostles and the New Testament writers called the Scriptures. While many Christians avoid reading the Old Testament, Yancey writes, “most assuredly, we cannot understand the New Testament apart from the Old.”
Christians today are able to choose from dozens of versions of the Bible — King James, New International, Amplified and so on — but many do not know that the Old Testament found in those Bibles can come from alternate translations of the Hebrew Scriptures.
Yancey writes, “When we read the Old Testament, we read the Bible Jesus read and used.” But most Bibles published today include an Old Testament based on a translation made many years after the Crucifixion, not the version Jesus and the apostles used, said the Rev. Dr. John Morris, historian and pastor of Vicksburg’s St. George Antiochian Orthodox Christian Church.
“The early Christian church used the Greek version of the Scriptures,” Morris said in an interview in his study at St. George. “This Greek version was called the Septuagint, for the Greek word for ‘70,’ the number of scholars Ptolemy hired about 200 or 300 B.C. to translate the Hebrew Scriptures into Greek.”
As members of St. George complete preparations for their annual Lebanese dinner, Morris reflected on his role in this year’s publication of the first-ever complete Orthodox Study Bible, which includes a Septuagint-based Old Testament with Deuterocanonical or Apocryphyal books, a New King James translation of the New Testament, and many study notes, articles, maps and reference material. Published in February after years in development, the study Bible is both a spiritual and historical reference work, Morris said, designed for the layman to read and use.
Morris is one of dozens of priests who, along with other clergy and lay scholars, wrote study notes for specific Old and New Testament books. This new edition updates the 1993 OSB which included only the New Testament and Psalms and study notes. Published by Thomas Nelson Publishers of Nashville, the OSB was developed by the St. Athanasius Academy of Orthodox Theology in Elk Grove, Calif. and edited by its dean, the Rev. Dr. Jack Sparks. Thomas Nelson also published the earlier edition.
As Yancey notes, New Testament writers often drew upon the Old Testament in quotes and allusions. Nearly all of those references, Morris said, came from the Septuagint. “That’s why the Septuagint is important to Orthodox Christians — because it was used by the original Christian church.”
“The Septuagint was a good strong anchor for theologians and scholars to determine, what was the Bible really like in apostolic times?” the Rev. Dr. Gordon Walker, emeritus priest at St. Ignatius Antiochian Orthodox Church in Madison, Tenn. said in a telephone interview. “In the New Testament, all but six of the Old Testament quotes that were used came from the Septuagint.” New Testament writers quoted Scripture more than 200 times, he said. The other six references were taken from Aramaic and Hebrew texts available at the time.
Walker was part of the group that undertook the development of the Orthodox Study Bible about 30 years ago. Along with Sparks, Walker was one of six founding members of a group that called themselves the New Covenant Apostolic Order, and later, the Evangelical Orthodox Church. The men were evangelical Protestant pastors and teachers in the 1960s and 1970s, some working for Campus Crusade for Christ.
Stirred by the sense that something was missing in their worship, the six men cooperatively began a search into Christianity’s roots and history that led them, along with about 2,000 other evangelicals, eventually to embrace Orthodoxy, a journey that was chronicled in Peter Gillquist’s 1989 book, “Becoming Orthodox.” Walker, a Southern Baptist minister, Bible teacher and evangelist at the time, took on the role of clearing all the research the others did with biblical teachings. “It had to line up with Scripture or we couldn’t buy in to it,” he said.
In an interview earlier this year in “Again” magazine, Gillquist, who served as project director for the New Testament portion of the OSB, called the new Bible “the number one contribution that we made to Orthodoxy in particular, and to Christendom in general.”
“The idea for a study Bible popped up relatively early in our journey,” Walker said. “Every single one of us had used the Scofield Reference Bible, an excellent reference Bible for Protestant evangelicals. Once we were convinced that we were going to become Orthodox, we began to talk about an Orthodox study Bible.”
For this complete edition, Morris contributed study notes on the book of Isaiah. “It took a long time,” Morris said. “It’s an important book of the Old Testament, with so many Messianic prophecies.” It also includes notes he contributed for the book of Romans that had been in the earlier edition, as well as the glossary he developed, which has been retained and updated.
A native of Oklahoma, Morris has pastored the Orthodox church in Vicksburg for about four years. He attended Oklahoma schools, receiving a doctorate in Russian history from Oklahoma State University before attending Holy Cross Orthodox Seminary in Brookline, Mass., and being ordained in 1980. He taught history and church history at colleges including Southwestern University in Georgetown, Texas, Kent State University in Stark County, Ohio and Marshall University in Huntington, W.Va. He also studied at Goethe University in Frankfurt, Germany, and has written extensively, including books on modern German history as well as Orthodox theology. He expects his latest book on the history of Christianity to be published in January.
Morris, raised in the Methodist Church, joined the Episcopal Church as a teenager and converted to Orthodox Christianity at the age of 26, he said, “because I wanted to be part of the historic church.”
The new study Bible, though intended for use by American Orthodox Christians, is also relevant and useful for Roman Catholic, Episcopal and Protestant worshippers, as well as anyone interested in the church and church history. “When we developed it we felt that we had to do it in light of Protestants and Catholics who might be reading it,” Walker said. “Researchers and academics also would have to speak about it in intellectual terms. Anyone who has done any academic study would know it was a very, very important translation of the Scriptures. People can be confident to know that we were diligent in looking at all the earliest manuscripts, trying to make sure we were faithful to how the Scriptures were intended.”
Besides study notes, the Bible includes color reproductions of Orthodox icons, a short essay on the history of the Christian church and many short commentaries. “The commentaries as much as possible were taken from the church fathers, and when I say church fathers, I mean very early, in some cases the second century,” Walker said.
“This is the only Bible that considers the teachings of the church fathers,” Morris said. The notes and commentary “show the mind of the ancient church. It’s not simply a commentary by one or two theologians but commentary that comes out of the mind of the church for the past 2,000 years. This gives us the authoritative interpretation of the Scriptures through the centuries.”
Orthodox Christianity is the second largest Christian denomination in the world, with at least 225 million followers. About 4 million Americans are Orthodox Christian.
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