Introduction

This is a complete Bible for English-speaking Orthodox Christians. Its Old Testament is Sir Lancelot Brenton’s 1844 translation of the Septuagint, with readings of Codex Alexandrinus set into the text as described below. Its New Testament is the King James Version in F. H. A. Scrivener’s 1873 Cambridge Paragraph Bible, conformed to the Byzantine text of Maurice Robinson and William Pierpont in its 2026 edition. The two Testaments share one English and one set of conventions for notes, names, spelling, grammar, and punctuation, and the quotations of the Old Testament in the New are linked at both ends after David McCalman Turpie’s tables.

The edition rests on a simple principle: the Scriptures of the Orthodox Church, in the English of her services. The Septuagint is the Church’s Old Testament and the Byzantine text her New Testament, and the Septuagint, as Brenton put it, “is not only a translation of the Old Testament, but it is the Old Testament translated into the language of the New.”^[1] Brenton wrote in the English of the King James Bible, and that English, in Holy Transfiguration Monastery’s words, “has been used for centuries now with a Christian import.”^[2] Its canon and order are those of the Church of Greece’s Septuagint. Its name says what it is: the Orthodox Liturgical English Bible.

The sections that follow give an account of every kind of change we have made to Brenton and to the King James Bible, in the manner Scrivener set for himself in 1873: name the change, state the rule, give the reason and the exceptions, and take responsibility for the result.^[3] We depart from our sources by consistent rules and record each exception.

Liturgical English

The English of this edition is the English of the King James Version: thou and thee to one person, ye and you to many, hath and saith, unto and wherefore. We keep it for the reasons Holy Transfiguration Monastery gave in its 1990 Pentecostarion and has followed in its service books since. The Church has always worshipped in a language set apart from the market: “Byzantines, Slavs, Arabs, Georgians, as well as the Latin Fathers, all composed their liturgical texts in a language that differed significantly from what was spoken in the market places,” and the distance between Jacobean and modern English is small beside that between liturgical and demotic Greek, or Slavonic and Russian.^[4] The words and phrases of this English “were developed specifically to render, in English, Christian writings that were composed in Koiné Greek,” and so “are well suited to represent Greek theological concepts in English.”^[5] A service in this English makes “the scriptural allusions in the text instantly recognizable,” and a Bible in it lets the worshipper recognize the services in Scripture.^[6] And a language reserved to the Church, like her architecture, vestments, music, and icons, marks off the sacred, and is a sign of God’s presence rather than his distance.^[7]

This is also the English of the Orthodox services as they have in fact been translated. Fr. John Whiteford observes that from the first English translations in the eighteenth century until the 1960s “it never seems to have even occurred to anyone that they should translate the services into anything other than the traditional style of English that we find in the King James Version”: Orloff’s translations at the end of the nineteenth century, Hapgood’s 1906 Service Book, Nassar’s 1938 compendium, and the Lenten Triodion of Mother Mary and Metropolitan Kallistos all use it, and “one cannot find a complete set of service books in English that are not in traditional English.”^[8] Hapgood is the link between the King James Bible and these services. She took the Scripture lessons of her Service Book from the King James Version and its psalms from the Prayer Book Psalter, “with occasional exceptions, when the exigencies of the Slavonic version or adaptation to special cases or services required slight changes,” and her book, aided by Saint Tikhon and funded in part by the Holy Synod of Russia, became the model for those that followed.^[9] A Bible in the same English lets readers read at home the words they hear in church.

The old grammar is also more exact. Traditional English, Whiteford notes, “allows for a distinction between the second-person singular pronoun (‘thou’), and the plural (‘you’), which is present in both Hebrew and Greek, and often this distinction is very important to the meaning of a text.”^[10] One verse shows it: “Marvel not that I said unto thee, Ye must be born again” (John 3:7). The Lord speaks to Nicodemus alone and then to all, and a translation with one word for both loses what the Greek says.

Liturgical English is not a dead language, and neither translation is untouchable. Whiteford, who would begin with the King James Version, does not hold that “there is no need to correct the KJV or to update it when changes to English have rendered a particular text very difficult for the average person to properly understand.”^[11] Holy Transfiguration Monastery has “not adopted the vocabulary of the Authorized Version uncritically,” and sets aside words that have become obsolete or changed their meaning, such as let for restrain.^[12] We do the same, by the rules given below: we keep the old pronouns and verb forms, remove obsolete spellings, change a few words to the Church’s usage, and bring the two translations into one grammar.

The Septuagint

The Old Testament of this edition is the Septuagint because the Septuagint is the Old Testament of the Orthodox Church. The Psalter and the Old Testament readings of every Orthodox service are taken from it, and the printed Old Testaments of the Church of Greece carry on its text. Metropolitan Peter of Christoupolis, in his preface to the Apostoliki Diakonia Septuagint, calls it “the Apostolic Bible, to which both the Lord and His disciples refer,” and “the Old Testament, the official text of our Orthodox Church.”^[13] Archimandrite Ephrem Lash, reviewing a Bible that printed the Psalms from the Hebrew, wrote that “the Church’s Psalter is that of the Greek Septuagint, and has been since the days of the Apostles. It is the one used in all Orthodox services, and it forms the basis of innumerable liturgical hymns and prayers which are frequently little more than a mosaic of words and phrases from it.”^[14] A Bible translated from the Hebrew gives the reader other words than the services use.

It is also the Old Testament of the Apostles. Edward William Grinfield’s Apology for the Septuagint of 1850 made the case from the history of the text: the version was “universally received by the Hellenists … as authoritative and canonical, being publickly used in their Synagogues, both before and after the Christian era”; Christ and the Apostles “make their principal citations in the words of the LXX”; and “the whole Christian Church, during the first four centuries, received this version, as canonical, and used and read it in public worship.”^[15] Grinfield counted the quotations. Of the 37 the Lord himself makes from the Old Testament, “thirty-three agree almost verbatim with the LXX, two agree with the Hebrew, and differ from the LXX, one differs from both, and one agrees partially with both”; of the roughly 350 direct quotations in the New Testament, “not more than 50 materially differ from the LXX.”^[16] The doctrinal vocabulary of the New Testament, “Repentance, Faith, Righteousness, Justification, Redemption, Sanctification,” and the titles “Lord, Christ, Saviour, Holy Spirit,” are the Septuagint’s, “and they are used precisely in the same meaning.”^[17] The Orthodox Church, he concluded, in holding to the Septuagint “asserts no more than what Augustine and the early Fathers maintained and believed,” and “adheres to this version, because she has received it in uninterrupted succession from the Apostles.”^[18]

Two examples show what is at stake. When the chief priests objected to the children crying Hosanna in the temple, the Lord answered from Psalm 8: “Yea; have ye never read, Out of the mouth of babes and sucklings thou hast perfected praise?” (Matthew 21:16). That is the Septuagint’s psalm, which the Church sings as the Communion Hymn of Lazarus Saturday; the King James Old Testament, following the Hebrew, has “ordained strength.”^[19] Here the psalm reads as the Lord quoted it: “Out of the mouth of babes and sucklings hast thou perfected praise” (Psalm 8:3). At Hebrews 10:5, “a body hast thou prepared me” is the Septuagint of Psalm 39, where the Hebrew has “mine ears hast thou opened”; the Epistle’s argument rests on words the Hebrew does not have. The quotation links in the margin mark hundreds of such places, and they put Grinfield’s argument where the reader can test it: the Lord’s quotation and the psalm he quotes stand in the same words on both sides.

Among the English Septuagints we chose Brenton’s for two reasons. It is written in the idiom of the King James Bible, and, as Robert Adam Boyd says, its “classical beauty … surpasses all other English translations of the Septuagint”;^[20] and it reports the readings of Codex Alexandrinus, as the next section explains. Holy Transfiguration Monastery also consulted it for the Old Testament readings of its Triodion.

Codex Alexandrinus

Brenton translated the Vatican text of the Septuagint in Valpy’s printed edition, which descends from the Roman edition of 1587 and so, with supplements and corrections, from Codex Vaticanus. His title page promised “the principal various readings of the Alexandrine copy,” and he gave them in footnotes and, for longer passages, in an Appendix.^[21] He left the choice between the two codices open: “The comparative merits of the two copies have been the subject of much controversy, but the question is yet undecided. The general opinion appears to be in favour of the Vatican, while at the same time many obscure passages are rendered clear, and many omissions supplied by the Alexandrine text.”^[22] We decide it for Alexandrinus, on three grounds.

The first is the New Testament. Swete wrote that “there is a considerable weight of evidence in favour of the belief that the Evangelists employed a recension of the LXX. which came nearer to the text of cod. A than to that of our oldest uncial B,” that the citations of the Septuagint “in the N. T. and by Christian writers of the first three centuries, often support the readings of A with a remarkable unanimity,” and that these facts “point to the presence in A of an underlying text of great antiquity”; the Psalter of Alexandrinus, he adds, was “evidently copied from a Psalter written for ecclesiastical use.”^[23] Paul asks in Romans, quoting Esaias, “Or who hath first given to him, and it shall be recompensed unto him again?” (Romans 11:35). Vaticanus and the Hebrew lack the clause, and so does Brenton’s text; Alexandrinus has it, Brenton gave it in a note, and this edition prints it: “Or who hath first given to him, and it shall be recompensed to him again?” (Esaias 40:14), with a note that Vaticanus and the Hebrew omit it.

The second is the services. Holy Transfiguration Monastery’s Triodion states: “We have found that the Greek text of many Old Testament readings in the Triodion that do not agree with Lancelot Brenton’s Septuagint text in the so-called Bagster edition, do agree with the Alexandrinus edition of the Septuagint. We have found this to be the case consistently throughout the Triodion.”^[24] Alexandru Mihăilă’s test of the Prophetologion in Judges 6 found it eclectic, but agreeing with Alexandrinus more often than with Vaticanus, 28 times to 18.^[25] The Eastern Orthodox Bible project has made the same choice, taking Alexandrinus as its base text “on the grounds that it represents the received liturgical and theological text of the Byzantine Orthodox tradition.”^[26]

The third is the Church’s own printed Septuagint. Codex Alexandrinus came to England from Patriarch Cyril Lucaris, and Grabe printed it at Oxford between 1707 and 1720. Breitinger reprinted Grabe’s text at Zurich in 1730–32, “now illustrated,” as his title page says, “with the various readings of the Vatican copy and other manuscripts”: Alexandrinus in the text and Vaticanus in the notes, as they stand in this edition.^[27] When the Holy Synod of Russia published the Old Testament in Greek at Moscow in 1821, it took its text from Breitinger, and the first edition issued in Greece, printed at Athens from 1843 to 1850 with the approval of the Holy Synod of the Kingdom of Greece, was a reprint of the Moscow Bible.^[28] Alexandrinus was preferred, as Mikhail Seleznev explains, for its closeness to “the late Byzantine manuscripts and to the Church Slavonic tradition.”^[29] The Zoe brotherhood’s editions from 1928 and the 1997 Apostoliki Diakonia Septuagint “opted for the Codex Vaticanus” instead, but, as Mihăilă notes, “without explicitly canonizing a particular manuscript tradition,” and Metropolitan Hilarion Alfeyev states that the Orthodox Church has never canonized any text, translation, manuscript, or edition of Holy Scripture.^[30] The choice is open to an Orthodox editor, and the evidence of the Apostles and the services points one way.

Conforming Brenton’s Text

We compared every reading of Alexandrinus that Brenton gave in a note or in the Appendix with Swete’s edition of the Septuagint, which prints Vaticanus with the readings of Alexandrinus and the other uncials in its apparatus, recording the manuscript’s first hand, its correctors, its erasures, and its doubtful letters.^[31] The printed Alexandrine Bibles would not serve, since none is a faithful transcript of the manuscript: Grabe set his own corrections and supplements in the text in a smaller type, and the Moscow editors, as Darlow and Moule observe, paid “no attention to the critical marks in that work,” so that “the result is an eclectic text, which cannot correctly be called a faithful transcript of Codex A.”^[32] Where Swete confirms that Alexandrinus reads as Brenton says, and where in the verse the reading stands, we set it in the text and give the displaced reading in a note that names its source: Vat. where Swete’s Vaticanus has the Greek the displaced words render, however freely, Bodleian Genesis where Swete’s manuscript E has it, Valpy where only Valpy’s printed edition, which Brenton translated, has it, and Brenton where the words are his own English and neither Greek text has them, with Heb. agrees where Brenton records that the Hebrew reads with Alexandrinus. Where Swete disagrees with Brenton, we follow Swete; where Swete is silent, we keep Brenton’s note as it stands. Each decision names the volume and page of Swete that settles it. We attribute words to a manuscript only where the evidence shows it has them. The same rule governs the New Testament, where a displaced Received Text reading is labelled TR, or with the name of the printed edition the translators followed there (Beza, Erasmus, and so on), or KJV, as the evidence allows, and it makes the notes of both Testaments one apparatus.

Ten further readings of Alexandrinus, which Brenton did not report, are decided one by one from Swete’s explicit evidence. Six correct the Greek of Valpy that his English follows, and their former readings are labelled Valpy. At Genesis 17:7, we add “me and” to the covenant formula, and at Genesis 19:33 and 19:35 we restore the daughters as the subjects of lying down and rising, where Vaticanus is missing; at 3 Kingdoms 15:28, we omit “son of Asa” from Asa’s name, where Vaticanus reads “son of Abiu” rather than Valpy’s “son of Asa”; and we follow Alexandrinus’s “this house” at Aggeus 1:4 and “That man shall be” at Jeremias 20:16, retaining the messenger’s rejoicing in the verse before it. In the other four Vaticanus has the Greek that Brenton’s English renders, and the former readings are labelled Vat.: we make the cattle explicit at Exodus 9:4, number twenty-five thousand men besides the seven hundred of Gabaa at Judges 20:15, give Saul the singular wounded subject at 1 Chronicles 10:3, and read the seventh year at 2 Chronicles 23:1. Each decision records the Greek, the precise English changes, and the witness to the displaced reading.^[33]

Brenton reported about 420 readings, of three kinds. Two thirds of them are readings within a verse, and these go into the text. The first in the book is typical: where Brenton has “And God said” at the end of Genesis 3, Alexandrinus has “And the Lord God said,” Swete confirms it, and this edition prints “And the Lord God said” (Genesis 3:22), with the note “Valpy omits the Lord,” since Vaticanus is missing until Genesis 46 and cannot be named, and Valpy’s edition reads “And God said.”^[34] Most substitute one word or phrase for another, many add words Brenton’s text lacked, and a few remove words it had. Twenty-five are passages. Twenty-one come from the Appendix, where Brenton gave the longer passages in full, among them David’s coming to the camp and his duel with Goliath in 1 Kingdoms 17 and 18, which Vaticanus lacks, now restored to the narrative with the note “Vat. omits verses 12–31.” One is a reordering: in 3 Kingdoms 7 Alexandrinus sets the building of Solomon’s house before the works of Chiram, as the Hebrew does, and we follow it with a note at each place. One comes from Brenton’s note at Ezekiel 1:13, and two are passages he announced but did not translate, described below. Where Alexandrinus omits verses Brenton printed, we remove them and keep their words in a note: the thirteen names Vaticanus repeats at the end of 2 Kingdoms 5:16, the two verses after 3 Kingdoms 5:14 on Solomon’s marriage to Pharaoh’s daughter, and the Vatican addition after 3 Kingdoms 12:24, each verse given in full under its number. The remarks of the Appendix that are not readings stand as notes at the verses they discuss, and the Appendix itself is not printed.

The rest, about 120, stay in the notes: where Brenton gave the reading only in Greek and none of the translations named below renders it, where it is a remark rather than a reading, and where the evidence is unclear. At Genesis 6:2 Brenton’s note gives “Alex. angels of God” for “sons of God,” and Swete confirms the reading, but the letters stand over an erasure and Swete is unsure of the hand; the text keeps “sons of God.”^[35] At Numbers 4:48 Brenton says Alexandrinus reads 8,450 for 8,580, but Swete’s Alexandrinus reads 8,550; Brenton’s note stays unchanged.^[36] A plain scribal slip stays a note even where Swete is sure of it: Alexandrinus spells Noah’s son Chaph at Genesis 5:32 and 6:10 and Cham everywhere after, and we do not make him change his name for two verses. Nor do we set in a reading that would leave a sentence unfinished: the Appendix gives Solomon’s command to bring the stones where Alexandrinus has it, at the end of 3 Kingdoms 5, but in Brenton’s text the command finishes the sentence that dates the building of the house, and Alexandrinus finishes that sentence with a clause Brenton did not report; his text stands, and the note on 3 Kingdoms 5:30 gives the Appendix’s form.^[37] We set in what we can show to be a reading, and print the rest where Brenton printed it.

The English is Brenton’s wherever he gave it, which is nearly everywhere. Where he gave the reading only in Greek, or his English for it is wrong or incomplete, we take the words from an existing translation of the same Greek, bring them into King James English, and record the source: R. R. Ottley’s 1909 translation of Esaias from Codex Alexandrinus, for that book; the King James Version, where the Hebrew reads with Alexandrinus; and the 1885 Revised Version where the King James Version does not render the idiom. So where Brenton gives the Alexandrine reading only in Greek and notes that it is the Hebrew idiom, this edition reads “the cause of thy people Israel as every day shall require” (3 Kingdoms 8:59), the Revised Version’s rendering, with “Vat. for ever” in the note.

At Ezekiel 1:14 Brenton gives the whole verse in his note: “And the living creatures ran and returned at the appearance of Bezec.” We print his sentence, retaining Bezec, which follows Alexandrinus’s βεζεκ, a transliteration of the Hebrew word for lightning. Two passages Brenton announced but did not translate come from the King James Version, which renders the Hebrew that Alexandrinus follows in them. At 1 Kingdoms 23:12 his note on the verse before says only “Verse 12 is here supplied by Alex.” The other is the account of Abia’s sickness and Achia’s prophecy in 3 Kingdoms 14:1–20, which Brenton’s note at 3 Kingdoms 14:21 says Alexandrinus supplies. Swete prints its Greek in full; we keep the King James clauses that match the Greek, and where it differs we adapt Brenton’s English from his Vatican account and his usage elsewhere, recording each adaptation. Verse 3 reads “And take with thee loaves for the man of God, and a cake for his children, and raisins, and a pot of honey, and go to him: he shall tell thee what shall become of the child” (3 Kingdoms 14:3), and verse 15 has the wind moving in the water and the making of an end of Israel in place of the Hebrew’s reed and uprooting; a displaced King James reading is labelled the Hebrew’s where the Hebrew supports it, and otherwise the King James Version’s.^[38] In each case a note says whose English it is. This is not a new translation of Codex Alexandrinus: outside the passages Brenton’s notes and Appendix identify, we make only the individually recorded corrections described above, retaining his surrounding English. Daniel is in Theodotion’s version throughout, as Brenton printed it and as the Church reads it, with Susanna, the Prayer and Song, and Bel and the Dragon in their Greek places.

The King James New Testament

The New Testament of this edition is the King James Version because the King James Version is the chief source of liturgical English. Holy Transfiguration Monastery translates “in the English of the Authorized Version” so that its scriptural allusions are known at once; Hapgood took her Scripture lessons from it; Whiteford, surveying the English Bibles available to the Orthodox, concludes that “we should begin with the text of the King James version.”^[39] Its Greek is also nearer the Church’s text than the critical text behind most modern versions: the Received Text from which the translators worked is a Byzantine text, imperfectly printed, and the great majority of its readings are the readings of the Byzantine manuscripts. The next section explains why the Received Text is not enough. This one explains which King James text we print.

The King James Bible has no single text. The edition of 1611 was revised at Cambridge in 1629 and 1638, again at Cambridge by Paris in 1762 and at Oxford by Blayney in 1769, and Blayney’s text, with its accumulated silent changes, is the one most Bibles still print. We use Scrivener’s Cambridge Paragraph Bible of 1873. Scrivener collated the 1611 editions against every principal edition down to his own day, restored the readings of 1611 that later printers had displaced, adopted the corrections of 1629 and 1638 “by their simple truth,” listed every change in an appendix with the edition that introduced it so far as he could determine, carried the translators’ own rules for italics and spelling through the whole volume, and set the text in paragraphs with the poetry in lines after Lowth.^[40]

Scrivener also defined the Greek behind the text. He reconstructed the text the translators followed, taking Beza’s fifth edition of 1598 and altering it wherever they had followed another, and published it in 1881 as The New Testament in the Original Greek according to the Text Followed in the Authorised Version. That reconstruction, with Stephanus’s 1550 edition, is the Received Text against which the notes of this edition are written; these are the two editions, as Boyd observes, that people “think primarily of” when they speak of the Textus Receptus.^[41] He served on the committee of the 1881 Revised Version, whose renderings we borrow where the Greek they render is the Byzantine reading, and he held that the mass of later manuscripts could not simply be set aside: “I stand midway between the two schools,” he wrote in 1889, “inclining much more to Burgon than to Hort.”^[42] Burgon in turn did not defend the printed text: “First, be it understood, that we do not advocate perfection in the Textus Receptus. We allow that here and there it requires revision. … What we maintain is the Traditional Text.”^[43] The editor whose text we print and the traditional text’s chief defender agreed that the Received Text needed revising toward the manuscripts. This edition undertakes that revision.

With Scrivener’s text comes the translators’ own apparatus: the Epistle Dedicatory and the Preface to the New Testament, printed among the preliminaries, and the 1611 marginal notes, which give the literal Greek and the renderings the translators weighed. We keep the margin because it is the translators’ own commentary on their work; the section on the notes says how we adapt it where the text has changed. We also keep the subscriptions that close the fourteen epistles from Romans to Hebrews, which say where each was written and by whom it was carried: “The first epistle to the Corinthians was written from Philippi by Stephanas, and Fortunatus, and Achaicus, and Timothy.” They belong to the King James Bible as English readers have known it and preserve an old tradition about the epistles, so we print them after the last verse and apart from it; because they are not Scripture, we leave their words as the translators printed them, respelling only their names, rather than conform them to the manuscripts. The closing notice of Acts, “The end of the Acts of the Apostles,” is a feature of the 1611 typesetting and is omitted.

The King James Bible gives the Gospels no subscriptions, but many Greek manuscripts close each with a note of when it was published, which Boyd prints in his Greek New Testament and translates in his English one. We set his English after each Gospel’s last verse, in the form of the epistle subscriptions: Matthew was published eight years after the ascension of Christ, Mark ten, Luke fifteen, and John thirty-two. The dates are tradition, not evidence of when the Gospels were written. Boyd cautions that “because these are scribal notes and not the sacred text itself, they should not be considered infallible,” and the subscription to 1 Corinthians shows why: it says the epistle was written from Philippi, but the epistle itself says, “I will tarry at Ephesus until Pentecost” (1 Corinthians 16:8).^[44]

The Byzantine Text

The Orthodox Church reads the Byzantine text of the New Testament, and the Received Text behind the King James Version is not quite that text. Boyd tells the history briefly. The Textus Receptus, “a close relative of the Byzantine text compiled from a small number of manuscripts,” was “the dominant form of the printed Greek New Testament from the early sixteenth century to the late nineteenth century”; but the first edition of Erasmus’s Greek New Testament “was produced from only seven manuscripts,” and “although those manuscripts were from the Byzantine family, they contained some readings that have very little support among Greek manuscripts.”^[45] Robinson puts it more sharply: in Scrivener’s or any other Received Text “many readings are printed in the main text that do not represent the dominant Byzantine consensus, nor even come close to such, but instead reflect numerous minority and weakly supported readings, as well as some readings that have no actual Greek manuscript support, but instead were rendered into Greek from Latin-based sources.”^[46] The Johannine Comma is the most famous case; the eunuch’s confession at Acts 8:37, the second “one shall be taken” at Luke 17:36, and the clause about Lysias at Acts 24:7 are others. In all, the two texts differ at nearly 2,000 places, most of them small.

Archimandrite Ephrem Lash made the Orthodox case for revising the King James tradition toward the Church’s text. Reviewing a Bible that defended the New King James text on supposedly scientific grounds, he wrote that “all that they needed to say was that the Byzantine text is the text accepted by the Orthodox Church,” and that its editors “should have taken their stand on the Orthodox ground that the Church’s text is the Orthodox text, full stop.” But he added that “even if the text of the NKJV is on the whole that of the Church, it needs careful checking and revision before it can be called Orthodox,” and gave as his example Luke 23:42, where the King James tradition, following the Vulgate, reads “into thy kingdom,” while “the Church’s Gospel and all the liturgical texts derived from it in both Greek and Slavonic have ‘in your Kingdom.’”^[47] This edition reads “Lord, remember me when thou comest in thy kingdom” (Luke 23:42). The checking Lash asked for is described below. It begins with the choice of a Byzantine text, and the Orthodox reader will expect the Patriarchal edition of 1904. We follow another, for the following reasons.

The Patriarchal Edition

Basil Antoniades prepared the Patriarchal edition at Halki for a committee of three, and the Ecumenical Patriarchate published it in 1904 and again in 1912. It remains, as Jovan Stanojević writes in his study of it, “the only text authorized by Orthodox ecclesiastical authorities” and “the most widespread text of the whole Greek New Testament in Greek-speaking Orthodox Churches,” and the Apostoliki Diakonia lectionaries reproduce it, though no council has sanctioned it or any other edition.^[48] Its aim was sound. The committee set out, in Antoniades’s words, to “restore the earliest text of the Ecclesiastical tradition, and in particular of the Church of Constantinople,” from the lectionaries and the Byzantine minuscules rather than from any printed edition or from the great uncials; it undertook to make “no transpositions, substitutions, additions, or deletions without the support of the manuscripts, except in rare incidents but with sufficient testimony elsewhere”; and it printed in smaller type what it could not justify.^[49] Stanojević’s study shows how far the edition fell short of that aim.

Its basis in the lectionaries is thinner than has been assumed. For Acts and the Epistles Antoniades used continuous-text minuscules for most of his witnesses, “because of the small number of the full Apostolos lectionaries and also because their text is similar to the text” of the lectionaries.^[50] The Chicago lectionary studies of the 1930s had already judged it, in Stanojević’s summary of Rife, “a poor lectionary text achieved by arbitrary methods,” and the modern collations of Jordan and Gibson find it “not particularly close to the text of lectionaries as a group or to the text of any particular lectionary.”^[51] Nor is it independent of the Received Text. Collating the edition and the 28 manuscripts Antoniades used at the 98 test passages of the Catholic Epistles, Stanojević found that at James 5:11 Antoniades printed the Received Text’s reading against 24 of his own manuscripts, and that among the witnesses collated at every passage none stands closer to his text than Stephanus’s 1550 edition, which agrees with it at 88 of the 98.^[52]

Its two most doubtful readings were not its editor’s. Acts 8:37 rests on a single manuscript whose wording is not the wording printed, so that “it seems that Antoniades adopted the verse from a printed edition.”^[53] The Johannine Comma, Antoniades wrote, “did not seem appropriate to include,” being “entirely unattested in the ecclesiastical texts, in the fathers and teachers of the Eastern Church, in the ancient versions, in the oldest copies of the Slavonic and even the Latin version, and in any known Greek manuscript written independently of the Vulgate in which this addition was gradually introduced. It is retained upon the opinion of the Holy Synod.”^[54]

Stanojević’s verdict is that the edition is “eclectic,” that “it was not produced independently of the Textus Receptus,” and that it “cannot be justified as a distinctively Orthodox edition, which suggests that the Orthodox Church needs another edition.”^[55] Christos Karakolis, a member of the Nestle–Aland committee, calls it “a hybrid” that represents neither a particular manuscript nor the Byzantine tradition as a whole.^[56] The fault was not Antoniades’s alone. Metropolitan Gennadius of Heliopolis wrote in 1938 that the edition “was an attempt made almost exclusively by the wise Professor Antoniades,” who “did not have enough time available,” for “a project demanding the contribution of numerous collaborators, a considerable length of time, and ample resources.”^[57] Antoniades himself closed his preface by saying that his edition “will suffer its own peculiar fate.”^[58]

What should replace it is disputed. Stanojević proposes an Orthodox edition built on the initial text of the Editio Critica Maior, admitting Byzantine readings by a stated rule.^[59] He reports, however, that most Orthodox scholars believe “the Orthodox edition of the Greek New Testament should be an edition of the Byzantine majority text,”^[60] and Ioannis Karavidopoulos, of the editorial committee of the United Bible Societies’ Greek New Testament, gives the ground of that belief: the critical editions “comprise an artificial text,” which “has never been read in the liturgical life of the church,” whereas the Byzantine text “has been read for many centuries (and is still being read) during the liturgical assemblies of the Orthodox Church.”^[61] We hold to that belief. Robinson and Pierpont’s edition pursues Antoniades’s own aim, the recovery of the Byzantine text from its manuscripts, with the collations he lacked.

Robinson and Pierpont’s Text

Maurice Robinson and William Pierpont first published The New Testament in the Original Greek in 1991, with revisions in 2005 and 2018; the text is in the public domain, and the 2026 edition published by Clearview Press was prepared with Robinson’s active involvement.^[62] It presents the Greek New Testament “according to its most dominant transmissional form,” established from collations of the Byzantine continuous-text manuscripts, without Erasmian readings and without conjecture; “where the Byzantine Textform itself is substantially divided, the main text reading is established on the basis of external and internal evaluation, with relatively equal alternate readings” in an apparatus at the foot of the page.^[63] The 2026 revision changes six readings of the 2018 text and revises the marginal readings.^[64] We follow it as the editors’ latest judgment of the evidence.

The theory behind the edition is Robinson’s “Byzantine priority,” set out in the essay printed with the 2005 edition. Any theory of the text, he argues, must explain “the origin, rise and virtual dominance of the Byzantine Textform within the history of transmission.”^[65] Westcott and Hort explained it by a revision made at Antioch between 250 and 350, probably by Lucian of Antioch, and their school has since given the recension up.^[66] Tregelles had already warned that “there is no proof of any recension of the text ever having formally taken place, or any revision on an extensive scale,”^[67] and Michael Holmes, a critic of the Majority text, grants that “there is no direct evidence that Lucian ever worked on the New Testament text, nor can the Majority text any longer be traced back to a single event,” so that “most textual critics are in the position of rejecting a key part of Hort’s argument while continuing to accept his results.”^[68] The “process” view that replaced the recension, a gradual assimilation of the manuscripts over centuries, cannot in Robinson’s judgment explain so wide a convergence.^[69]

Robinson’s own answer is that the Byzantine text predominates because it is the text that was copied, “preserved by the unforced action of copyists through the centuries who merely copied faithfully the text which lay before them,” as the vulgate texts of Homer and Hippocrates were, and that the text of the great majority of manuscripts “may in fact more closely reflect the original form of the NT text than any single MS, small group of MSS, or texttype.”^[70] The method is not counting. Its principles “reflect a ‘reasoned transmissionalism’ which evaluates internal and external evidence in the light of transmissional probabilities,” and the Byzantine text is “not postulated a priori to be the original form of the text” but reached “as a logical deduction from internal and external considerations viewed from within a transmissional-historical framework.”^[71]

The Byzantine text is “the form of text which is known to have predominated among the Greek-speaking world from at least the fourth century until the invention of printing”: the text of Saint John Chrysostom, whose Liturgy the Church celebrates, and before him of Asterius the Sophist, who died in 341, and of the Gothic version of the same century.^[72] Boyd measures its predominance among the surviving manuscripts: where they differ, the Byzantine reading is supported by a median of 96% of them in the Gospels and 90% in Acts and the Epistles, leaving aside the Pericope Adulterae and Revelation, where the Byzantine manuscripts themselves divide. The Byzantine textform, he concludes, “is ancient, highly uniform, and well attested by a variety of independent streams of transmission.”^[73] Its antiquity was conceded by a scholar who held it “the latest text,” with “the largest proportion of corruptions.” Collating the Chester Beatty papyrus of the Pauline Epistles, Günther Zuntz found that “readings (faulty as well as genuine ones) which so far had appeared to be late do in fact go back to the earliest times,” that the Byzantines “reproduced an older tradition,” and that “it seems to me unlikely that the Byzantine editors ever altered the text without manuscript evidence. They left so many hopelessly difficult places unassailed!”^[74]

The critical editions, by contrast, decide each variant on its own, and the text that results, Robinson objects, “within repeated short sequences, rapidly degenerates into one possessing no support among manuscript, versional, or patristic witnesses”; over a few verses, and sometimes within one, the Nestle–Aland text “simply [has] no proven existence within transmissional history.”^[75] Holmes allows that such criticisms “serve as a salutary reminder of the provisional character of current critical texts.”^[76] This is Karavidopoulos’s point made into a method: a text with no history of use against the text the Church has read. We follow Robinson’s preference for a text with an attested history of transmission and use.

Robinson and Pierpont’s is one of several modern editions of the Byzantine text. Hodges and Farstad’s Majority Text of 1982 and Pickering’s edition of Family 35, a late and uniform family whose readings at times represent fewer than a fifth of the manuscripts, are the others, with Antoniades’s.^[77] Robinson and Pierpont have revised theirs as new collations appeared, Robinson’s own of the Pericope Adulterae among them, and defended their method in print; Pierpont listed the changes the King James Version needs to follow the Majority manuscripts, and Boyd has twice carried their text into English.

The Pericope Adulterae and the Johannine Comma

Two passages call for separate comment. The Pericope Adulterae, John 7:53–8:11, is in the Byzantine text and in this edition. Here, as in Revelation, the Byzantine manuscripts divide into distinct forms; Robinson and Pierpont print the form von Soden called μ5 in their text and the μ6 form in a separate section.^[78] Antoniades printed it in full type, because, though absent from the daily readings, it stands in the Menaion for Saint Pelagia’s day, 8 October.^[79] The Received Text differs from the Byzantine text within it at a handful of words, and we follow the Byzantine text there as everywhere: at 8:9 “beginning at the eldest” where the Received Text adds “even unto the last,” at 8:10 “Where are those thine accusers?” where it adds “Woman,” at 8:11 “Neither do I judge thee” where it has “condemn.”

The Johannine Comma, 1 John 5:7–8, is not in the Byzantine text and is not in this edition. The words “in heaven, the Father, the Word, and the Holy Spirit: and these three are one. And there are three that bear witness in earth” occur in no Greek manuscript before the fourteenth century, and in those few only from the Latin. Scrivener set them in italics in the Cambridge Paragraph Bible, “now for the first time,” as a mark of “probable spuriousness,” judging that the passage “is probably no longer regarded as genuine” by anyone capable of an independent judgment of the evidence; Antoniades judged the same and was overruled.^[80] The verses read as the Byzantine manuscripts have them, “For there are three that bear record, the Spirit, and the water, and the blood: and these three agree in one” (1 John 5:7–8), and the displaced words stand in two notes marked TR, so that a reader who knows the King James text can see what we have removed and why.

Conforming the King James Text

Our first instrument was Pierpont’s Some Improvements to the King James Version from the Majority Greek Manuscripts, a list he drew up in 1975 and revised until 1990 of every place where the King James Version follows the Received Text against the Majority manuscripts in a way English can show, with the King James words, the change, and a weight by manuscript support: “only those places where the change is translatable, or potentially translatable,” and not “the many places where the King James Version may be improved in its rendering of the Greek text (but the Text itself is not involved).”^[81] It has about 955 entries, 347 of them in Revelation, and it is in effect Pierpont’s own instructions for revising the King James Version. But he compiled it against the Majority manuscripts as the collations of his day reported them, not against the 2026 text, so we checked every proposal against the Greek.

We compared Scrivener’s reconstruction of the Received Text with the 2026 Robinson–Pierpont text word by word and recorded every difference as a unit: nearly 2,000, including the nine places where a verse is absent or stands elsewhere. We then judged each unit with Pierpont’s instruction where he had one and the reports of the other witnesses that mark translatable differences, chiefly Boyd’s Text-Critical English New Testament and Graham Thomason’s Far Above All. Some 240 of Pierpont’s entries name a place where the two Greek texts do not differ. Where his Majority data gave a reading the Byzantine text does not, we set the entry aside; where it corrects the rendering of Greek the two texts share, his category c, we judged it as we judged the units, and carried it out or declined it, recording the reason at each place. Of the rest, we adopted more than 500 as they stand and replaced most of the remainder with our own rendering of the same construction, recording the reason at each place. Every unit is published on the edition’s website, with the Greek of both texts and, where the English changes, the words of both Bibles.

The differences fall into three kinds. About 1,050, more than half, English cannot show or the King James English already carries: a spelling of a name, Δαβίδ for Δαυίδ; a movable letter; a change of word order with no change of sense, as at Luke 1:10; an article with a proper name; a tense the King James future already renders. At these the King James words stand. About 890 are translatable, where the Byzantine text says something the King James words do not; they are met by about 810 changes of words and 40 that only mark or unmark a word as supplied, since one change sometimes carries two adjacent units. Nine are structural: four verses omitted, the doxology of Romans moved, and the two woes of Matthew 23 exchanged. Outside this count stand about 100 corrections of the English where the Greek is the same in both texts, which have their own section below.

The standard for a translatable difference is the King James Version’s own literalness: a difference is translatable when ordinary King James English shows it, in meaning, reference, number, tense, mood, voice, emphasis, or grammatical relation, even where the sense of the passage is unchanged. An article, a particle, an inflection, or an order of words does not by itself earn its own English, a revised passage is no more literal than its neighbours, and a difficult Greek reading is rendered as difficult English rather than smoothed. Most changes are a different word, a pronoun, a particle, or a word the translators had supplied in italics that the Byzantine text has in Greek, where the only change is that the word is no longer marked as supplied.

The wording of a change comes from the King James tradition wherever it can. The first source is the King James Version itself: where the translators rendered the same Greek, or a like construction, elsewhere or in the verse, we use their rendering, so that at Matthew 8:8 the centurion’s λόγῳ, the Byzantine dative, is “in a word,” as they rendered it at Luke 7:7. The second is Pierpont, whose list proposes King James wording for most of its changes. The third is the 1881 Revised Version, which is in the King James idiom; its rendering is admitted automatically as evidence where Westcott and Hort’s text, the nearest printed witness to the Revisers’ Greek, agrees with the Byzantine reading, while a recorded editorial decision may borrow wording that renders the Byzantine text where their Greek differs. The fourth is Boyd’s 2021 American Standard Version Byzantine Text, which conforms the American Standard Version of 1901, the Revised Version’s American form, to the 2018 Robinson–Pierpont text; we chose it because it is the revision Boyd made against the Robinson–Pierpont text, before he based his work on his own Greek edition, and we adopted his method, “every effort has been made to stay within the style and vocabulary of the ASV,” turning first to the version’s own footnotes and then to the King James Version.^[82] We consulted the Text-Critical English New Testament and Far Above All after these, and used our own wording only where none of them served.

Counted by source, about 560 changes of words follow Pierpont, 120 take Boyd’s wording, 50 the Revised Version’s, 30 a King James parallel, about ten the other two witnesses, and 65 are ours. Two thirds of the revision is Pierpont’s, nearly all of it is wording already current in the King James tradition, and our own words account for one change in twelve.

Every change was judged as a sentence, whatever its source. The last chapter of Revelation shows what that means. The King James Version reads at Revelation 22:19, “God shall take away his part out of the book of life, and out of the holy city, and from the things which are written in this book.” The Byzantine text differs from the Received Text at six places in the verse, four of which bear on the English. For “book of life” it has “tree of life,” and Pierpont, with every witness, directs the change. For the future “shall take away” it has the optative ἀφέλοι, a prayer rather than a prediction, which Pierpont does not mark but Boyd’s Text-Critical English New Testament renders “may God take away”; we took that wording. It lacks the conjunction before “the things”; Pierpont directs its omission but keeps the supplied “from,” and we removed both, since “from” was supplied for the conjunction that is gone. And the condition “if any man shall take away” is an aorist subjunctive where the Received Text has a present, which Pierpont proposed to render “should take away”; we kept “shall,” because the King James Version renders the aorist conditional with “shall” at Matthew 18:15 and in the paired condition of the verse before, and the Revised Version and Boyd keep it here. The verse reads, “and if any man shall take away from the words of the book of this prophecy, may God take away his part out of the tree of life, and out of the holy city, the things which are written in this book” (Revelation 22:19), with three notes giving the Received Text’s words, from which the reader can reconstruct the King James verse exactly.

Verses Omitted and Moved

The Byzantine manuscripts lack four whole verses of the Received Text, and we omit them as the Robinson–Pierpont text does: Luke 17:36, Acts 8:37, Acts 15:34, and Acts 24:7, with the clauses of Acts 24:6 and 24:8 that belong to the same addition.^[83] We print no number for them, so that the verses after keep their numbers, and quote each in full in a note on the verse before it, under TR, under the printed edition that has it (Beza, Erasmus, and so on), or under Scrivener, as the evidence allows. At Luke 17:35 the note stands beside the translators’ own marginal note, “This 36th verse is wanting in most of the Greek copies,” which shows that they knew it. The doxology of Romans, which the Received Text prints as 16:25–27, stands in the Byzantine manuscripts at the end of chapter 14, and we print it as 14:24–26, with a note at each place; the epistle ends at 16:24. The two woes of Matthew 23:13 and 14 stand in the manuscripts’ order, the reverse of the Received Text’s, and keep the numbers of their places, with a note at each. The Johannine Comma is not a fifth omitted verse: both verses of 1 John 5:7–8 remain, with their Byzantine contents.

Corrections Where the Greek Is Shared

In about 100 places we revise the King James rendering of Greek shared by both texts: a case or a preposition misread, a tense, a number, a word, a construction, or a Vulgate reading followed against the Greek. Each correction follows the Revised Version, Boyd’s revision, or Pierpont where they render the shared Greek otherwise than the King James English, and we prefer the translators’ own margin wherever it offered the better rendering; where the renderings differ in style alone, the King James words stand. Pierpont’s list has such corrections of its own, his category c, and we judged each against the 2026 text rather than set it aside because the Greek texts agree: a few restore the order Christ Jesus, keep a metaphor the translators had made a comparison, or drop a supplied connective, while the distributive plurals of “their own necks” (Romans 16:4) and “your hearts” (James 3:14) remain. Each correction carries a note giving the former King James words, normally after “or,” without a witness; where the Vulgate has the former reading, the note names it instead, as at John 10:16, whose unum ovile is one fold, at 2 Timothy 1:18, whose ministravit mihi supplies the recipient, and at the six places where it has Beelzebub. The Revised Version supports most of them and Boyd’s revision more than half.

The chief of them is “Remember me when thou comest in thy kingdom” (Luke 23:42), where the Greek is ἐν τῇ βασιλείᾳ, the services have it, and the Vulgate’s in regnum had led the translators to “into.” The same misreading of a case or a preposition underlies “for him” in place of “in him” at 1 Corinthians 8:6, which the translators’ margin had already offered, and “in Christ” for “for Christ’s sake” at Ephesians 4:32. A tense is corrected at 2 Thessalonians 2:2, where “the day of Christ is now present” renders the perfect ἐνέστηκεν, which the translators had made “is at hand,” the opposite of the claim Paul is refuting; at 2 Timothy 4:6, where “I am now offered” renders the present σπένδομαι; and at Matthew 25:8, where “our lamps are going out” restores the 1611 margin. A number is corrected at John 8:21, “shall die in your sin,” singular as the Greek is, and at 1 Corinthians 10:5, “most of them” for “many of them.” A word is corrected in “with the fist” for “oft” at Mark 7:3, as the margin had it and Pierpont urged; in “one flock” for “one fold” at John 10:16, where the Greek distinguishes αὐλή from ποίμνη; and in “the son of James” for “the brother of James” at Luke 6:16 and Acts 1:13, where the translators had supplied the kinship and chosen the wrong one. A construction is corrected in “godliness is gain” for “gain is godliness” at 1 Timothy 6:5, where subject and predicate had been exchanged, and in “cast off the anchors, they left them in the sea” at Acts 27:40.

The Notes on the Received Text

Every change of words for a difference of Greek carries a note in the margin giving the former English, and its label follows the evidence. The note says TR only where an apparatus records the reading as the Received Text’s, that is, where Scrivener’s reconstruction and Stephanus’s 1550 edition agree; where no apparatus records the place, where the two differ, or where the apparatus records Scrivener alone, the note names instead the printed edition the King James translators followed there: Beza where Beza’s edition of 1598 has the reading, and otherwise the edition Scrivener names in his account of the Greek they followed, chiefly Erasmus and the Complutensian text.^[84] Where no edition can be shown to have it, the note names Scrivener, whose reconstruction of the Greek behind the translation prints every reading; the King James Version is never cited as a witness to its own words. The notes take four forms: “fruit: TR fruits” replaces the words it is about; “said: TR adds by them of old time” puts words after them; “verily: TR omits” takes them out; and “but who: TR omits but” takes out part of them. An omitted verse is quoted whole in a note on the verse before it, and a moved passage is noted at both its places. A correction of shared Greek gives the former words after “or,” with no witness, unless the Vulgate has the reading the translators followed, which the note then names: six of the seven notes on Beelzebul read “Beelzebul: Vulgate Beelzebub,” and the seventh, at Matthew 10:25, where the Greek texts differ, names the Complutensian text, the one edition that prints the Latin form there.

The Books and Their Order

The canon and order of the Old Testament follow the Apostoliki Diakonia Septuagint of the Church of Greece, with two departures noted below: the Pentateuch; Jesus the Son of Navi, Judges, Ruth; the four books of Kingdoms and the two of Chronicles; 1 and 2 Esdras and Nehemias; Tobit, Judith, Esther; the Maccabees; Psalms, Job, Proverbs, Ecclesiastes, the Song of Songs, Wisdom, and Sirach; the Twelve Prophets, Hosea to Malachias; and Esaias, Jeremias, Baruch, Lamentations, the Epistle of Jeremias, Ezekiel, and Daniel.^[85] The books that English Bibles since 1611 have gathered into an Apocrypha, or dropped, stand in their Greek places, because the Septuagint is one book and the Orthodox Church receives them, 4 Maccabees apart, as Scripture: Tobit and Judith among the histories, Wisdom and Sirach among the books of Solomon, Baruch and the Epistle beside Jeremias, the additions to Esther and to Daniel within their books, and Psalm 151 at the end of the Psalter. Codex Alexandrinus contains them all, with the four books of Maccabees, which Vaticanus lacks. Scrivener, who edited the Apocrypha of the Cambridge Paragraph Bible when few editors would, wrote that so long as it “shall comprise a part of the Holy Bible in its largest form, or lessons shall be selected from it for the course of Divine service, it deserves far more regard than has been paid to it in recent times.”^[86]

The two departures concern the Prayer of Manasses and 4 Maccabees. The Prayer, which the Apostoliki Diakonia edition does not print among the books, stands here as a book of its own after 2 Chronicles, where the Slavonic Bible and the Russian Synodal Bible print it at the end of chapter 36, under the heading “The Prayer of Manasses King of Judah, When He Was Holden Captive in Babylon”; 2 Chronicles 33:18–19 records that the prayer was written, and the Church reads it at Great Compline.^[87] Fourth Maccabees, which the Apostoliki Diakonia edition prints as an appendix after Daniel, with a note that the Church has not numbered it among the canonical books but publishes it for the importance of its contents and its presence in the ancient manuscripts, stands here with the other three, as it stands in Codex Alexandrinus, in Swete, and in Rahlfs.^[88] With Daniel counted as one book with its additions, and the Epistle of Jeremias and the Prayer of Manasses counted separately, the Old Testament has 51 books and the Bible 78. The New Testament keeps the order of the English Bible, with Hebrews after Philemon and the Catholic Epistles after it, rather than the early Greek order Robinson and Pierpont print, since the English order is the order of the translation and of the Orthodox New Testaments published in English.

Names

The books bear the names the Orthodox Church gives them, in the forms the King James tradition had already given those names. The histories are the four books of Kingdoms, with Samuel and Kings added in the full titles; Joshua is Jesus the Son of Navi, the Greek Ἰησοῦς Ναυῆ, as the Apostoliki Diakonia heads him and as the King James New Testament calls him at Acts 7:45 and Hebrews 4:8; the prophets are Esaias, Jeremias, Michaias, Abdias, Abbacum, Sophonias, Aggeus, Zacharias, and Malachias. Brenton used most of these forms himself. Where we depart from him it is toward a form the King James tradition already had for the name in its Greek books, or nearer the Greek: Ezekiel as Sirach 49:8 spells him in the King James Apocrypha, for Brenton’s Jezekiel; Nahum and Abdias, forms the King James Apocrypha also has, in its 2 Esdras 1:39–40, for his Naum and Obdias; Aggeus as 1 Esdras 6:1 spells him; Michaias as the Greek Μιχαίας is spelled, where Brenton wrote the name with a Latin ligature; Abbacum, for his Ambacum, as the English service books spell him; and Hosea for his Osee, for recognizability. The table sets the names of this edition beside the King James Bible’s wherever they differ or either Bible lacks the book.

King James Bible	Orthodox Liturgical English Bible
Joshua	Jesus
1 Samuel	1 Kingdoms
2 Samuel	2 Kingdoms
1 Kings	3 Kingdoms
2 Kings	4 Kingdoms
Ezra	2 Esdras
Nehemiah	Nehemias
The Rest of Esther (Apocrypha)	Esther, the additions
(missing)	3 Maccabees
(missing)	4 Maccabees
(missing)	Psalm 151
Song of Solomon	Song of Songs
Ecclesiasticus (Apocrypha)	Sirach
Micah	Michaias
Obadiah	Abdias
Jonah	Jonas
Habakkuk	Abbacum
Zephaniah	Sophonias
Haggai	Aggeus
Zechariah	Zacharias
Malachi	Malachias
Isaiah	Esaias
Jeremiah	Jeremias
Baruch 6 (Apocrypha)	Epistle of Jeremias
Song of the Three Holy Children (Apocrypha)	The Song of the Three Children
2 Esdras (Apocrypha)	(missing)

Personal and place names follow the same principle: the Greek forms familiar from the New Testament and the services, in the forms the King James tradition had given them, and one name for one bearer in both Testaments. The translators spelled a name as the language they were translating spelled it, Isaiah, Elijah, and Hosea in the Old Testament and Esaias, Elias, and Osee in the New. Since both Testaments here are Greek, the Greek forms are the starting point throughout: Esaias is Esaias in his own book as in Matthew, and Elias, Jeremias, Jonas, Core, and Melchisedek keep their Greek forms, which are the forms the English services use. The translators themselves anglicized many Greek names, Abraham for Ἀβραάμ, Noah for Νῶε at Hebrews 11:7, Judah for Ἰούδα at Sirach 49:4, Bethlehem, Pharaoh, Sodom, Sinai, Tyre, and Sidon, and Brenton, transliterating afresh, often did not: he writes Abraam, Noe, Juda, Bethleem, Pharao, Sodoma, Sina. Where the King James New Testament or Apocrypha has an anglicized form of a Greek name, that form serves its bearer in both Testaments, so that Abraham is Abraham in Genesis and in Matthew; where the two Testaments of the King James Bible differ for the same person, we prefer the form of its Greek books; and where the King James tradition supplies no established form, Brenton’s stands.

Sixteen names depart from these rules, each for a reason its decision states. Hosea, Gideon, Boaz, Ahaz, Sarah, and Issachar stand in the forms of the King James Old Testament, by which English readers know them, in place of the Greek books’ Osee, Gedeon, Booz, Achaz, Sara, and Isachar. Hezekias for Ἑζεκίας and Elisseus for Ἐλισσαῖος stand nearer the Greek, with its rough breathing and double consonant, than the King James Ezekias and Eliseus, as Symeon for Συμεών and Melchisedek for Μελχισεδέκ stand nearer it than Simeon and Melchisedec, and Phoenix for Φοῖνιξ, the haven of Crete, than the King James Phenice. Phoenicia is the English name of the region Φοινίκη, in place of the King James Phenice and Phenicia, which English no longer uses for it, and of Brenton’s Phenice and Phoenice beside his Phoenicia; Thaeman, the Greek Θαιμάν, takes one spelling where Brenton also wrote Thaman and Theman and the King James Teman renders the Hebrew; Phineas is the English form of Φινεές, where the King James Old Testament has the Hebrew Phinehas; Mathusalah writes Luke’s Μαθουσάλα with the final letter the King James Old Testament gives the Hebrew name; and Navi is the services’ form. Beelzebul is not among them: the King James Beelzebub follows the Vulgate’s form.

A name is respelled by the person or place it names, not by its letters: it changes in every verse where that bearer appears and in no other. There are about 100 such names. Where the same letters belong to another bearer, two rules decide. A respelling that changes only a name’s form reaches every bearer to whom the Greek and the Hebrew both give that name, since the split exists in neither Scripture: the Levite Hebron is spelled as the city is, and the false prophet Sedecias as the king. But a bearer whose Hebrew name differs, whom the Greek translator alone wrote like another, keeps Brenton’s form, since the identification is the translator’s and the English reader knows him by another name: the town of Zabulon that the Hebrew calls Kitron stays Kedron at Judges 1:30 while the brook is Cedron, as John 18:1 spells it, and Josias’s father is Amon throughout, as Matthew 1:10 spells him, though Brenton writes him Amos in Kingdoms and Jeremias, while the prophet Amos keeps his own name.

Where the Greek itself gives one bearer two names, we keep both: the king of Judah is Azarias in 4 Kingdoms, where the Greek has Ἀζαρίας, and Ozias in 2 Chronicles and the prophets, where it has Ὀζίας. Where it gives two bearers two names, we keep the difference, whatever the Hebrew behind it: Phineas, Φινεές, but Phinees for the temple servants’ house at 1 Esdras 5:31, Φινόε; Phoenicia, Φοινίκη, but Phoenix for the haven of Crete at Acts 27:12, Φοῖνιξ. Declension is not a second name: Brenton made Manasse for the tribe and Manasses for the king out of the Greek’s declined and undeclined forms of one name, and all are Manasses here, the King James Bible’s form in both places. Nor are two Greek spellings of one bearer: Ῥαχάβ at Matthew 1:5 and Ῥαάβ at Hebrews 11:31 are the same woman, and she is Rahab in both. Two names are confined by decision: Jesus is the son of Navi alone, and the other men Brenton calls Jesus or Joshua are unchanged; and Hannah is Samuel’s mother only. The names in Brenton’s own notes stand as he wrote them, since a note is often about the very name it gives. In the prefaces and Brenton’s Introduction we use Esaias, Aggeus, Esdras, and Zorobabel; their other names stand as their authors wrote them, except that Brenton’s Preface follows his Introduction in writing Aristeas.

Chapters and Verses

The chapters and verses are the Septuagint’s, so that a verse is found under the number the Church of Greece, a Greek Orthodox Bible, or a Septuagint edition gives it, and never under the Hebrew’s number unless the Greek editions use it too. The Psalms are numbered as the Greek numbers them, with Psalm 151, and a psalm’s title counts as its first verse or two, as Swete and Rahlfs count it; the chapters of Jeremias from 25 onward stand in the Greek order; the additions to Esther are lettered within the chapters they follow; and the books are divided as the Greek divides them, so that Joel has four chapters and Malachias four, with Malachias 4 ending, in the Greek order, with the sending of Elias before the charge concerning Moses. For a reader who knows the King James numbers, the website publishes tables of chapters and verses giving the King James Bible’s number wherever it differs, with the verses one Bible has and the other lacks.

No single source gives the Septuagint’s numbering. Brenton’s own pages will not serve, because many of his numbers are borrowed: in the Apocrypha he printed the King James Apocrypha with its division; in 3 Kingdoms 4–11 the King James numbers out of their order; in Jeremias 25–51 the Hebrew’s numbers; in the Psalms he did not count the titles and restarted Psalms 9 and 113 at the Hebrew’s break; and in Proverbs 24–31 he printed the King James numbers in the Greek order. Rahlfs, though the modern standard, follows the Hebrew against Brenton, Swete, and the Church of Greece alike at several chapter breaks, Genesis 32, Exodus 22, and Jeremias 9 among them, and an Orthodox edition should not be Masoretic where the Greek tradition is not. Swete numbers Codex Vaticanus, and wherever Vaticanus lacks or joins words that Brenton’s English has, his numbers would divide the English wrongly. And the Church of Greece’s text, in the form we consulted on the Apostoliki Diakonia website, has many slips, a 9 for 19, a dropped numeral, a chapter’s first verse printed as the last of the chapter before.

We therefore number by agreement, with the Church of Greece as the Orthodox standard. We start from Rahlfs, in whose numbering Brenton’s text now circulates, and print the Church of Greece’s number wherever a second witness, Swete or Brenton’s own page, confirms it; that restores the traditional chapter breaks and the numbers Rahlfs letters or omits. We divide a verse otherwise only where the Church of Greece and Swete agree on the new division and Rahlfs or Brenton agrees with them, and only where Brenton’s English can take it, at the beginning of his sentence or clause. Where only the Church of Greece gives a number, Rahlfs’s stands. A verse supplied from Codex Alexandrinus keeps the number Swete or Brenton’s Appendix gives it. There are about 100 relabellings and as many redivisions, each recorded with its witnesses.

The rule leaves a few numbers unused, where the witnesses number the following verses but we keep Brenton’s division at the place itself rather than give a number to words no witness gives it to: the Epistle of Jeremias runs from 15 to 17, because the rejected verse 16 would begin inside Brenton’s clause, and Exodus 25 from 34 to 36, because Brenton prints within verse 34 the clause that the Church of Greece and Swete number 35. The Song of the Three Children runs on as Daniel 3:24–90, as Swete and Rahlfs number it and every Septuagint edition cites it. Where Brenton’s division is his own and the Greek editions place a verse’s edge only a phrase away from his, his division stands, since the verse is still found under its number.

Proverbs needs a word of its own. The Greek sets three passages that the Hebrew has at the end of the book, the Hebrew’s 30:1–14, 30:15–33, and 31:1–9, within chapter 24, so that the Greek chapter 31 begins at verse 10. We keep the Greek order and print the passages where the Greek has them, but under the Hebrew’s numbers, as the Church of Greece, Rahlfs, and Brenton all print them: the first verse of each passage shows its chapter, 30:1, 30:15, and 31:1, and the first verse back in chapter 24 shows 24:23. After 29:27 the text passes to 31:10, and a note there says that the Hebrew has the three passages at that point and that we print them in chapter 24. A reader with a King James reference finds the verse, and a reader with a Septuagint edition finds the order. Daniel has Susanna before chapter 1 and Bel and the Dragon after chapter 12, each under its own heading without a chapter numeral, and the Prayer of Azarias and the Song stand within chapter 3; Sirach’s Prologue is the book’s unnumbered introduction, as the Church of Greece prints it; and the Epistle of Jeremias has an unnumbered superscription before verse 1, as the Church of Greece and Swete print it. In the New Testament the only differences from the King James numbering are those the Byzantine text makes: the four verse numbers passed over, the doxology at Romans 14:24–26, and the exchanged verses of Matthew 23.

Paragraphs and Poetry

The text is set in paragraphs, with the verse numbers marking the sense without breaking it, because this is a Bible for reading. Scrivener called paragraphing “in substance only a return to the fashion that prevailed in our early versions, before the Genevan New Testament of 1557 unfortunately broke up the text into divisions at once so minute and so arbitrary as the verses invented by Robert Stephens,” and quoted an earlier paragraph Bible on the “very erroneous impression, that the Bible is rather a collection of apophthegms, or disconnected sentences, than composed of regular histories and treatises on religion.”^[89] The reference Bible of the last two centuries, two columns of numbered verses with a column of cross-references between them, was built, as Mark Bertrand observes, for looking things up, and “the easier they are to look things up in, the harder they are to read.”^[90] This is a reader’s edition: one column of paragraphed text with the least apparatus that will serve. Both translations were printed in paragraphs, so the Old Testament keeps Brenton’s and the New Testament Scrivener’s. Each chapter opens a new paragraph; within a chapter a continuation, a repeated formula, or an immediate reply may stand flush left, while a new movement of narrative or discourse is indented.

Poetry is the one thing the two translations did not share. Scrivener set the poetry of the King James Bible in lines “according to the principles first enunciated by Bishop Lowth,” with stanza divisions by sense and the Hebrew letters at the acrostics, and the New Testament keeps his poetry, in the Beatitudes, the canticles of Luke 1 and 2, the tribes sealed in Revelation 7, and, in Revelation 18, the fall of Babylon, though we divide and indent its lines after the Berean Standard Bible.^[91] Brenton printed the whole Septuagint as prose. Boyd’s 2020 Updated Brenton English Septuagint supplies what he lacked: the last of Boyd’s five light revisions was that “poetic formatting has been introduced for poetic portions of Scripture,” and because his text closely follows Brenton’s, his line and stanza divisions can be aligned with Brenton’s words.^[92] We take only the places where his lines begin and end, and print no word of his revision.

Which passages are poetry, Boyd and Scrivener decide together. Outside the Apocrypha, a verse of Brenton’s is set in lines where Boyd sets it in lines and Scrivener also sets its King James counterpart in lines, or where the verse has no counterpart; where Scrivener sets the counterpart as prose, prose stands. In the Apocrypha, whose verses the King James Bible numbers otherwise and whose Tobit and Sirach follow another text, Boyd’s lines stand on their own. Two boundaries are settled by decision against the rule: at Ecclesiastes 3:9 both set the question about labour as verse, and we keep it prose, where Brenton’s own printing begins a new paragraph after the poem of the seasons; at Sirach 50:27 Boyd sets Sirach’s colophon as verse, and we keep it prose, as Scrivener prints it. The terminal “Pause.” of the Psalms and of Habakkuk 3 stands on its own line at the right, the acrostic names of Lamentations stand as centred headings, and where a small-capital title opens one of Brenton’s prose paragraphs, it is set apart in italic as a descriptive title.

The Psalter is divided into the 20 kathismata and 60 stases in which the Church reads it, under the Septuagint’s numbering, with Psalm 151 outside the divisions. Archimandrite Ephrem Lash, reproaching an Orthodox Bible that had printed the Hebrew Psalter, said that its editors “could at least have printed the Psalms with the correct numbering and divided them into the traditional kathismata and staseis of the Church Psalter,” which “does not even require a knowledge of Greek, only access to Miss Hapgood’s compendium of Orthodox services.”^[93] A kathisma heading is set in small capitals and a stasis marked with three asterisks; in the 17th kathisma, which is Psalm 118 alone, the Second and Third Stases have headings and the “Middle” is marked at verse 94, as the Psalter is read at the Midnight Office and at funerals. The divisions are a frame for reading and change nothing in the psalms: Psalm 71 keeps its closing notice, “The hymns of David the son of Jesse are ended,” as its last verse.

The Notes

Both translations’ notes are kept, adapted to the present text and to one set of conventions. Brenton printed footnotes giving the literal Greek, the Hebrew where it differs, the readings of Codex Alexandrinus, and the renderings he had considered, with an Appendix of longer notes and passages; the King James translators printed in their 1611 margin the literal Greek and the renderings they had weighed, which Scrivener counted at 765 for the New Testament.^[94] Some 5,000 notes come from these two sources, and the eight long notes of Brenton’s Appendix stand as footnotes at the verses they discuss. To them we add about 1,250 notes of our own, every one the consequence of a change described in this introduction: the reading of Vaticanus or of Brenton displaced by Codex Alexandrinus, the reading of the Received Text displaced by the Byzantine text, the former King James words where we corrected the English, and the notes that say where a passage stands in the other text.

The notes stand in the inside margin beside their verse, without callers save for the few set below the text, each beginning with the verse number and the words of the verse it is about, followed by a colon. A reader looks from a verse to the margin, and the column of Scripture is unbroken. The labels are few: Gr. introduces the literal Greek; Heb. the Hebrew; Alex. and Vat. the two codices; Valpy the printed Greek Brenton translated, where it has a reading Vaticanus lacks; Brenton his own English, where neither Greek text has it; TR the Received Text, Beza, Erasmus, Stephanus 1549, and the Complutensian text and Aldine text the printed editions the King James translators followed, Scrivener his reconstruction of the Greek they translated, Vulgate the Latin where they followed it, and KJV the King James Version, as Brenton cites it; or, another rendering of the same words; lit. the literal rendering; i.e., q.d., and sc. as Brenton used them; and See and Compare before a cross-reference. Alternative renderings, cited words, and glosses are in italic without quotation marks, and labels and comments in roman; a note runs on from its colon in lowercase, a complete sentence ends with a stop, and a fragment with none. A note that offers another rendering quotes enough of the verse for the reader to substitute it without ambiguity, as “again: or, from above” at John 3:7 and “sons of God: Alex. angels of God” at Genesis 6:2. Brenton printed labels and cited words alike in italic, and the 1611 margin had its own conventions; both are brought to this one style, with the edition’s citations and book names, so that the reader learns one apparatus.

A 1611 note stands wherever its words are still in the text. Where the text now has the Byzantine reading the margin offered, as at Matthew 26:26, whose margin had “Many Greek copies have, gave thanks,” the margin note goes and the Received Text note records the former reading; where the margin glossed words the text no longer has, it goes with them, or, where the words changed but the note still applies, it moves to the new words; and where a correction of the English adopts the margin’s own alternative, the note is reversed, giving the former text after “or.” Where a reading of Alexandrinus is taken from Brenton’s note, the note is rewritten to give the displaced reading; a note that gives a reading we do not print stands as he wrote it; and the notes that only sent the reader to the Appendix are dropped, since the Appendix has come to the verse.

The Quotation Links

Where the New Testament quotes the Old, the two passages are linked at both ends: the first verse of the quotation names the passage quoted, and the first verse of the passage names the quotation, and, where Turpie’s class decides it, a sign says which text the quotation follows. David McCalman Turpie, in his 1868 The Old Testament in the New, tabulated every quotation and classified it by its agreement with the Hebrew and the Septuagint, using Brenton’s version for the Greek, “corrected or improved when required,” and Tischendorf’s text for the New Testament.^[95] His five classes are these: A, quotations that agree with the Hebrew where the Septuagint renders it correctly; B, that agree with the Hebrew where the Septuagint does not; C, that differ from the Hebrew where the Septuagint renders it correctly; D, that differ from the Hebrew but agree with the Septuagint where it departs from the Hebrew; and E, that differ from both where the two differ from each other.^[96] Class D is the one that matters to Grinfield’s argument: the places where the Apostles follow the Greek against the Hebrew, as Hebrews does in quoting “a body hast thou prepared me” from Psalm 39. The links print Turpie’s judgment as a gloss after the reference, in the three glosses the table explains, or leave the reference alone where his class gives no verdict between the texts, so that the reader sees at Hosea 11:1 that Matthew follows the Hebrew where the Septuagint differs, and at Psalm 39:7 that Hebrews follows the Septuagint where the Hebrew differs.

Gloss	Turpie’s classes	Meaning
Heb. + LXX	A, C I	follows the Hebrew and the Septuagint where they agree, allowing differences in wording
Heb. ≠ LXX	B	follows the Hebrew where it differs from the Septuagint
LXX ≠ Heb.	D	follows the Septuagint where it differs from the Hebrew
reference alone	C II, C III, E	departs from the Hebrew and the Septuagint by whole clauses where they agree, as when a verse is abridged or two passages are joined, or follows neither where they differ

We link 272 of the 282 rows of Turpie’s tables. Of the ten left out, five name no settled Old Testament passage, three he himself says are not quotations, one he repeats, and Matthew 27:35, whose quotation of Psalm 21:19 the Byzantine text lacks, no longer quotes the psalm; its words stand only in the Received Text note. Where the Byzantine text shortens a quotation, as at Romans 13:9, the words that remain still quote the passage and the link stands. Brenton’s own cross-references to the New Testament, a few dozen “See” notes, go where a link now names the same verses, and stay where they say more. Turpie’s classes judge Tischendorf’s Greek, the Hebrew, and Brenton’s Vaticanus Septuagint, not this edition’s English or its readings from Alexandrinus and the Byzantine text, so a quotation marked as agreeing may still differ in English wording.

Spelling and Grammar

The two translations, made more than two centuries apart, are adjusted with two aims: that the English of both Testaments be the English of the Orthodox services, and that it be one English. Everything else is left alone. The rules follow in the order of their importance, and each applies across the whole of Scripture.

The vocabulary of the services comes first. Holy Ghost becomes Holy Spirit throughout, and ghost becomes spirit wherever the word occurs, as the Orthodox service books have them; Hallelujah becomes Alleluia, the Greek form the liturgy uses. We keep the words Holy Transfiguration Monastery sets aside on theological grounds, propitiation and atonement, because the rule here is the services’ common usage, not a judgment of doctrine; the translators’ own notes stand beside them.

The grammar of the King James Bible comes next, and here the two translations become one. The King James Version is consistent in its old inflections: hath, saith, doth, the third person in -eth, thou with -est. Brenton, writing in the same idiom, slipped: he has saith on one page and says on the next, hath and has, doth and does. We carry the King James inflections through both Testaments and the readings quoted in the notes, by nearly 800 rules of the form “says: saith.” Five past tenses follow them. Brenton’s spoke, begot, bore, broke, and swore become spake, begat, bare, brake, and sware, since the King James Bible holds to each of these forms without exception in the books of its canon, spake more than six hundred times and spoke never; the participles spoken and begotten stand, and so does bore where it means to pierce. Boyd modernizes these forms, begat to begot and spake to spoke, on the ground that they “sound quite strange, if not incorrect, to modern ears”; they do not sound strange in church, where the services are full of them, and an edition made for the Church keeps the register the services keep.^[97]

The line is drawn where the counts leave a gap, between brake at seventy-seven and forgat at nine: tare, forgat, trode, and ware, which the King James Bible has in a handful of verses and the services hardly at all, are modernized wherever either Bible has them, tare to tore, trode to trod, forgat to forgot, and ware to wore, as the King James strake sail is struck sail. Where the translators themselves used both forms, drave and drove, gat and got, sang and sung, each translator’s own stands. Explanatory prose keeps its author’s grammar: Brenton’s preface and introduction, the translators’ preface, the commentary of the notes, and this introduction are not Scripture.

Possessives and articles go by sound. My and thy stand before a consonant sound and mine and thine before a vowel sound, exactly as a and an do: mine eyes, thine arm, mine own country, but my heart, thy house; a silent h takes mine, mine honour, and an intervening adjective governs the form, mine old age. A and an follow the same rule: a house, a hundred, but an hour, an heir. Scrivener saw the principle, that “my and mine, thy and thine, should of course be used respectively as a and an before a consonant, or vowel, or h,” but kept the inconsistent practice of 1611 because no editor had ever applied the rule; he applied it to the article except for an hundred.^[98] We apply it to both, in both Testaments, by the sound of the following word as it is pronounced today, so that the text reads aloud as the reader naturally reads it. The independent mine and thine are unchanged: “the silver is mine,” “thine is the kingdom.”

Obsolete spellings are revised for ease of reading. Scrivener judged that the editors who had cleared the 1611 page of its “uncouth, obsolete, and variable forms, which could answer no purpose save to perplex the ignorant, and offend the educated taste,” were “right in the main.”^[99] Shew is show, alway is always, amongst is among, throughly is thoroughly, subtil is subtle, brasen is brazen, spue is spew, Brenton’s our’s is ours; the eighteenth-century -ick of apostolick and musick becomes -ic, emerods becomes haemorrhoids, and many other forms go the same way, each by a rule that names the word. Latin ligatures are written as their two letters wherever the sources print them, in names and in Latin alike.

Two rules decide a spelling English still writes. Where both translations write it and neither writes it otherwise, it stands: the British honour, labour, and Saviour, which the services have too, and fulness, which both spell alike in every occurrence. Where the two translations spell a word differently, or either wavers, one form serves both, the King James Bible’s where it keeps to one, inquire for Brenton’s enquire, gray for his grey, wagon for his waggon, and otherwise the form now usual, connection for the connexion Brenton wrote beside it. A form English has given up is modernized whichever Bible has it and however constantly: expence, scrole, dulness. A word a translator transliterated rather than translated is a name, not a spelling, and follows the names: Brenton’s theraphin keeps the Greek θεραφείν, where the King James teraphim renders the Hebrew. Pairs the sources confuse are distinguished by sense: besides for addition and beside for position, borne for bearing and born for birth, farther for distance and further for continuation, diverse for different in kind and divers for several. One old form is kept for its meaning: Scrivener’s text has the translators’ shamefastness at 1 Timothy 2:9, where later printers had put shamefacedness, and shamefast is carried into Brenton’s Apocrypha to preserve that sense of modesty.

Compounds are hyphenated less than Brenton hyphenated them, for the reason Boyd gives: “Nineteenth century works make much greater use of the hyphen than what is commonly accepted today, which can be a bit distracting for the modern reader.”^[100] The two translations between them write the same compound all three ways English allows, sweetsmelling, sweet-smelling, and sweet smelling, and the common compounds take the form English now gives them. A compound English has closed is closed: today, anything, beforehand, breastplate, honeycomb. A compound modifier is hyphenated before its noun and open after it, sweet-smelling savour, whole-burnt offering, but well pleasing to God, and a compound English hyphenates wherever it stands keeps its hyphen after the noun too, stiff-necked, like-minded, long-suffering, mother-in-law. Others are opened, fig tree, high priest, Sabbath day, fellow servant, and every offering of the Law, burnt offering, sin offering, peace offering; the King James Bible, which writes fig tree forty times and the offerings open without exception, shows these to be the ordinary forms, and where it closes a compound English has since opened or hyphenated, fellowservant, stiffnecked, longsuffering, the present form stands there too. First-born, first-fruits, corner-stone, mercy-seat, stumbling-block, stumbling-stone, threshing-floor, ewe-lamb, turtle-dove, pre-eminence, battle-array, well-pleased, and money-changer keep their hyphens wherever they stand, by editorial preference, as does only-begotten before a noun, while the only begotten of the Father stays open. These choices give the translations one spelling for the same word: Luke’s turtle-doves follows the Law he quotes, Matthew’s money-changers follows Mark, and pre-eminence keeps its prefix distinct. The named place nouns likewise take a hyphen: burying-place, resting-place, dwelling-place, hiding-place, lurking-place, and market-place, with their plurals. This is a chosen consistency among the named nouns, not a rule for every compound in English. Compounds outside the declared changes keep their sources’ forms, and quotations in this introduction retain their sources’ spellings. None of these rules changes a word.

Punctuation and Type

Brenton punctuated as his century did, and Boyd describes the system: “Nineteenth century writers understood the comma, semicolon, colon, and period to represent pauses of increasing length,” and so used semicolons where a modern reader expects a comma, colons for an appended remark, and lowercase after a question mark or exclamation.^[101] That system stays, save at the verses recorded below, because it is the translator’s own and because it serves the voice; Scrivener found the pointing of 1611 too scanty to guide the voice in public reading and the modern pointing “heavier and more elaborate than necessity requires,” and Brenton’s needs neither remedy.^[102] Redundant punctuation goes: a comma, semicolon, or colon immediately before a dash or a parenthetical aside, as Boyd removes it in both his revisions, and a mark inside a closing parenthesis that belongs to the enclosing sentence moves outside.^[103] Periods, question marks, and exclamation marks are never changed by rule. Where a single verse needs other punctuation, the change is a recorded decision at that verse, and there are about 65. Most set the marks around a parenthesis or a dash as the sentence requires, or give a rhetorical question back its mark; others restore a stop the transcription dropped, as at 3 Kingdoms 5:25, divide clauses run together, take out a comma that parts a verb from what it governs, as at Psalm 56:2, or end as an answer what Brenton set as a question, as at Malachias 1:3. The six pairs of quotation marks Brenton set around names and speech go, since neither translation otherwise uses them; the name Codex Alexandrinus adds at Ezekiel 48:35, ‘the Lord is there,’ keeps its marks, because the clause stands as the subject of the sentence. In the New Testament the question marks follow the Robinson–Pierpont text where the Received Text pointed otherwise.

The words the translators supplied to complete the English sense, which the King James Bible prints in italics and Brenton partly in italics and partly in square brackets, are printed in ordinary type, for the reasons Boyd gives: no translation carries the practice out consistently, so that the italics mislead by their silences; a text that did carry it out “would be littered with italicized words, creating a visual distraction”; and “in modern English the use of italics implies emphasis, and it is awkward when relatively minor words seem to be emphasized.”^[104] Scrivener, who kept the italics, allowed that under their largest head “it may reasonably be doubted whether much advantage accrues from a change of type where the sense is not affected to an appreciable extent.”^[105] Brenton’s square brackets go on the same principle. In the books the Hebrew Bible has, they mark Greek that the Hebrew lacks, as at Genesis 35:16 and in the additions to Esther; in a Greek Old Testament that Greek is the text, and the brackets would mark the Church’s Scripture as doubtful by a Hebrew standard we do not apply. Where Brenton explained in a note what the Hebrew lacks, the note stays. In the books the Hebrew Bible does not have, his brackets mark English supplied without Greek behind it, as the translators’ italics do, and those words are printed like the others. Italic in the text is kept only for titles, the superscriptions of the Psalms and the descriptive titles of the prophets.

Capitals are reduced to ordinary use. The emphatic capitals of the King James Bible, JESUS at Matthew 1:21, Luke 1:31, and Luke 2:21, the inscription on the cross, MYSTERY, BABYLON THE GREAT, KING OF KINGS, AND LORD OF LORDS, and Brenton’s THE BEING and I AM, are set in ordinary case; Scrivener found the capitals of 1611 “much more free … than at present” and reduced them, and these are the last of them.^[106] The small capitals both translations used for emphasis go; a decorative opening of a book keeps them, and headings are set in them. King is capitalized before a named ruler, King David, and Mount where it begins a mountain’s name, Mount Sinai, the Mount of Olives; both stay lowercase where the word is a common noun standing before the name after an article or a demonstrative that qualifies it, directly or with adjectives between, the king Abimelech, the young king Antiochus, the mount Sion, as in the river Jordan. Sabbath and Scripture are capitalized. None of these changes touches a word.

These rules have limits. No word is modernized for being old: unto, wherefore, let meaning hinder at 2 Thessalonians 2:7 and Romans 1:13, conversation meaning conduct, prevent meaning go before, all stand, with the translators’ or Brenton’s notes to explain them. No rendering is altered under these systematic rules; changes of wording are recorded as textual decisions or corrections of the English. Textual changes and corrections of the New Testament English carry the former reading in a note; inherited English slips and constructions in the Old Testament are corrected without a new note. Scoped construction corrections restore the Greek’s grammatical relations while retaining the surrounding English. The prefaces of Brenton and of the translators take the declared spelling, compound, article, and vocabulary changes, with their names as described above, and keep their authors’ grammar. Evident misprints are corrected by explicit decisions. At Numbers 21:5 the Bagster printings of Brenton read “ought of Egypt” where his 1844 edition reads “out,” and we print “out.” At Sirach 41:8, “Who be unto you” becomes “Woe be unto you,” as the Greek requires. At Genesis 19:8, we restore the missing verb in “do not do injury,” following CCEL’s transcription and the Greek; the checked printings of Brenton all lack it. At Psalm 45:10, where the checked printings all read “as for the ends of the earth,” we print “to the ends of the earth,” as the Greek requires.

The Printed Page

The page is ISO B5, 176 by 250 millimeters, with a single column of text and the notes in the inside margin beside their verses; the few notes too long for the margin, and the eight long notes of Brenton’s Appendix, stand at the foot of the page with lettered callers, and the notes of the prefaces with numbered ones. The text is set in Valkyrie at 10 points on a 12.5-point line, with the Greek of the notes in GFS Heraklit and the Hebrew in Ezra SIL, and the lines are held to a grid so that they register front and back through the paper. Chapter numbers are large and lining; the other figures are oldstyle; verse numbers are superior, and the figure 1 is omitted at the start of a chapter. Headings and running heads are in small capitals, and the outer running head gives the first reference on an even page and the last on an odd one. Nothing interrupts the column but the headings of the books, the Psalter’s divisions, the titles of Daniel’s additions and Sirach’s Prologue, and the acrostic headings of Lamentations: there is no cross-reference column, no section heading, and no caller but those of the few notes set below the text.

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• Holy Transfiguration Monastery. The Pentecostarion. Boston: Holy Transfiguration Monastery, 1990.
• Holy Transfiguration Monastery. The Triodion. Boston: Holy Transfiguration Monastery, 2021.
• Karavidopoulos, Ioannis D. “The Ecumenical Patriarchate’s 1904 New Testament Edition and Future Perspectives.” Sacra Scripta 10, no. 1 (2012): 7–14. https://sacrascripta.reviste.ubbcluj.ro/publicatii/sacra_scripta/2012/KARAVIDOPOULOS%20-%20SACRA%20SCRIPTA%201_2012-2.pdf.
• Lash, Ephrem, Archimandrite. “Book Review: The Orthodox Study Bible.” Sourozh, no. 54 (1993). Reproduced by the Orthodox Christian Information Center. Accessed October 21, 2026. https://www.orthodoxinfo.com/phronema/review_osb.
• Metzger, Bruce M. The Early Versions of the New Testament: Their Origin, Transmission, and Limitations. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1977.
• Mihăilă, Alexandru. “The Septuagint and the Masoretic Text in the Orthodox Church(es).” Review of Ecumenical Studies 10, no. 1 (2018): 30–60. https://doi.org/10.2478/ress-2018-0003.
• Ottley, R. R., trans. and ed. The Book of Isaiah according to the Septuagint (Codex Alexandrinus). Vol. 1, Introduction and Translation with a Parallel Version from the Hebrew. 2nd ed. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1909.
• Pickering, Wilbur N., ed. The Greek New Testament According to Family 35. 3rd ed. Self-published, 2020.
• Pierpont, William G. Some Improvements to the King James Version from the Majority Greek Manuscripts. Wichita, KS: privately circulated, 1975; revised June 1990. https://oleb.bible/resources/improvements-kjv.
• Rahlfs, Alfred, ed. Septuaginta: Id est Vetus Testamentum Graece iuxta LXX interpretes. 2 vols. Stuttgart: Privilegierte Württembergische Bibelanstalt, 1935.
• Robinson, Maurice A. “The Case for Byzantine Priority.” Appendix to The New Testament in the Original Greek: Byzantine Textform 2005, edited by Maurice A. Robinson and William G. Pierpont, 533–86. Southborough, MA: Chilton Book Publishing, 2005. https://byzantinetext.com/wp-content/uploads/2016/11/editions-rp-11-appendix.pdf.
• Robinson, Maurice A., and William G. Pierpont, eds. The New Testament in the Original Greek: Byzantine Textform 2018. Nürnberg: VTR Publications, 2018.
• Robinson, Maurice A., and William G. Pierpont, comps. The New Testament in the Original Greek: Byzantine Textform 2026. Preface and layout by Abidan P. Shah. Henderson, NC: Clearview Press, 2026.
• Scrivener, F. H. A., ed. The Cambridge Paragraph Bible of the Authorized English Version, with the Text Revised by a Collation of Its Early and Other Principal Editions, the Use of the Italic Type Made Uniform, the Marginal References Remodelled, and a Critical Introduction Prefixed. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1873.
• Scrivener, F. H. A., ed. The New Testament in the Original Greek according to the Text Followed in the Authorised Version. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1881.
• Seleznev, Mikhail G. “The Russian Bible and Russian Bible Scholarship between the MT and the LXX.” Journal of Septuagint and Cognate Studies 50 (2017): 111–21. https://ccat.sas.upenn.edu/ioscs/journal/volumes/jscs50.pdf.
• Stanojević, Jovan. Orthodox New Testament Textual Scholarship: Antoniades, Lectionaries, and the Catholic Epistles. Texts and Studies, 3rd ser., 26. Piscataway, NJ: Gorgias Press, 2021.
• Swete, Henry Barclay. An Introduction to the Old Testament in Greek. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1900.
• Swete, Henry Barclay, ed. The Old Testament in Greek according to the Septuagint. 3rd ed. 3 vols. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1901–7.
• Thomason, Graham G. The Far Above All Translation of the New Testament. Version 1.0, August 26, 2026. https://www.faraboveall.com/050_BibleTranslation/NTinHTML_AVorder_Unicode.html.
• Tregelles, Samuel Prideaux. An Introduction to the Textual Criticism of the New Testament. Vol. 4 of Thomas Hartwell Horne, An Introduction to the Critical Study and Knowledge of the Holy Scriptures, 10th ed. London: Longman, Brown, Green, Longmans, and Roberts, 1856.
• Turpie, David McCalman. The Old Testament in the New: A Contribution to Biblical Criticism and Interpretation. London: Williams and Norgate, 1868.
• Westcott, Brooke Foss, and Fenton John Anthony Hort. The New Testament in the Original Greek: Introduction, Appendix. Cambridge: Macmillan, 1881.
• Whiteford, John. “King James English and Orthodox Worship.” Fr. John Whiteford (blog), September 9, 2016. https://fatherjohn.blogspot.com/2016/09/king-james-english-and-orthodox-worship.html.
• Zuntz, Günther. The Text of the Epistles: A Disquisition upon the Corpus Paulinum. London: Oxford University Press, 1953.

Notes

1. Brenton, Septuagint Version, 1:ix. ↩
2. Holy Transfiguration Monastery, Pentecostarion, 18. ↩
3. Scrivener, Cambridge Paragraph Bible, x, lxvii. ↩
4. Holy Transfiguration Monastery, Pentecostarion, 17. ↩
5. Holy Transfiguration Monastery, Pentecostarion, 18. ↩
6. Holy Transfiguration Monastery, Pentecostarion, 18. ↩
7. Holy Transfiguration Monastery, Pentecostarion, 19. ↩
8. Whiteford, “King James English.” ↩
9. Hapgood, Service Book, vi–vii; Whiteford, “King James English.” ↩
10. Whiteford, “King James English.” ↩
11. Whiteford, “King James English.” ↩
12. Holy Transfiguration Monastery, Pentecostarion, 18. ↩
13. Mihăilă, “Septuagint and the Masoretic Text,” 34–35. ↩
14. Lash, “Orthodox Study Bible.” ↩
15. Grinfield, Apology, ix–xi. ↩
16. Grinfield, Apology, 30–31, 37. ↩
17. Grinfield, Apology, 24. ↩
18. Grinfield, Apology, 5, 55. ↩
19. Boyd, introduction to Updated Brenton, “The Bible of the Early Church.” ↩
20. Boyd, introduction to Updated Brenton, “The Septuagint in English.” ↩
21. Brenton, Septuagint Version, title page and 1:xi. ↩
22. Brenton, Septuagint Version, 1:xi. ↩
23. Swete, Introduction, 395, 489–90. ↩
24. Holy Transfiguration Monastery, Triodion, 13. ↩
25. Mihăilă, “Septuagint and the Masoretic Text,” 47–51. ↩
26. Eastern Orthodox Bible, “1 Chronicles,” “Codex Alexandrinus as the Basis of the EOB.” ↩
27. Darlow and Moule, Historical Catalogue, 2:626, no. 4740: “nunc vero exemplaris Vaticani aliorumque MSS. codd. lectionibus var. nec non criticis dissertationibus illustratum.” Brenton describes the edition in his Introduction, printed in this volume. ↩
28. Swete, Introduction, 125–26, 184; Darlow and Moule, Historical Catalogue, 2:642–43 and 655, nos. 4796 and 4849; Mihăilă, “Septuagint and the Masoretic Text,” 36; Stanojević, Orthodox New Testament Textual Scholarship, 20. ↩
29. Seleznev, “Russian Bible and Russian Bible Scholarship,” 117. ↩
30. Mihăilă, “Septuagint and the Masoretic Text,” 36, 39, 58–59. ↩
31. Swete, Old Testament in Greek, 1:xi–xii. ↩
32. Swete, Introduction, 183–84; Darlow and Moule, Historical Catalogue, 2:642–43, no. 4796. ↩
33. Swete, Old Testament in Greek, 1:25, 31, 120, 532, 718; 2:23, 97; 3:70, 267. ↩
34. Swete, Old Testament in Greek, 1:5. ↩
35. Swete, Old Testament in Greek, 1:9. ↩
36. Swete, Old Testament in Greek, 1:264. ↩
37. Swete, Old Testament in Greek, 1:684. ↩
38. Swete, Old Testament in Greek, 1:708, 714–15. ↩
39. Holy Transfiguration Monastery, Pentecostarion, 18; Hapgood, Service Book, vi; Whiteford, “King James English.” ↩
40. Scrivener, Cambridge Paragraph Bible, x, xvii, lix–lx. ↩
41. Boyd, introduction to Text-Critical Greek New Testament, “The Textus Receptus.” ↩
42. Robinson, “Case for Byzantine Priority,” 563, note 89. ↩
43. Burgon and Miller, Traditional Text, 5. ↩
44. Boyd, introduction to Text-Critical Greek New Testament, “Colophons.” ↩
45. Boyd, Text-Critical English New Testament, v–vi. ↩
46. Robinson and Pierpont, Byzantine Textform 2018, v–vi, note 3. ↩
47. Lash, “Orthodox Study Bible.” ↩
48. Stanojević, Orthodox New Testament Textual Scholarship, 3, 46, 69, 72–73. ↩
49. Antoniades, preface, §§1,1–4 and 10,4–7, translated in Stanojević, Orthodox New Testament Textual Scholarship, 179–80, 184. ↩
50. Antoniades, preface, §5,4, translated in Stanojević, Orthodox New Testament Textual Scholarship, 182; Stanojević, Orthodox New Testament Textual Scholarship, 12, 93, 174. ↩
51. Stanojević, Orthodox New Testament Textual Scholarship, 61–63, 73. ↩
52. Stanojević, Orthodox New Testament Textual Scholarship, 141–43. ↩
53. Stanojević, Orthodox New Testament Textual Scholarship, 90, 184. ↩
54. Antoniades, preface, §11,1–3, translated in Stanojević, Orthodox New Testament Textual Scholarship, 184. ↩
55. Stanojević, Orthodox New Testament Textual Scholarship, 142–43, 176. ↩
56. Stanojević, Orthodox New Testament Textual Scholarship, 51. ↩
57. Gennadius of Heliopolis, “Πῶς οἱ Ἀμερικανοί,” Ὀρθοδοξία 13 (1938): 75, quoted in Karavidopoulos, “Ecumenical Patriarchate’s 1904 New Testament Edition,” 10. ↩
58. Antoniades, preface, §16,1, translated in Stanojević, Orthodox New Testament Textual Scholarship, 185; Stanojević, Orthodox New Testament Textual Scholarship, 72. ↩
59. Stanojević, Orthodox New Testament Textual Scholarship, 6, 171, 176–77. ↩
60. Stanojević, Orthodox New Testament Textual Scholarship, 54, 56. ↩
61. Karavidopoulos, “Ecumenical Patriarchate’s 1904 New Testament Edition,” 12. ↩
62. Robinson and Pierpont, Byzantine Textform 2026, iv. ↩
63. Robinson and Pierpont, Byzantine Textform 2026, vii. ↩
64. Robinson and Pierpont, Byzantine Textform 2026, iv, xii. ↩
65. Robinson, “Case for Byzantine Priority,” 534. ↩
66. Westcott and Hort, Introduction, 135–39. ↩
67. Tregelles, Introduction to the Textual Criticism, 104. ↩
68. Holmes, “Majority Text Debate,” 15. ↩
69. Robinson, “Case for Byzantine Priority,” 534, 578–80. ↩
70. Robinson, “Case for Byzantine Priority,” 534, 543–44. ↩
71. Robinson, “Case for Byzantine Priority,” 544, 556–57, 564. ↩
72. Robinson, “Case for Byzantine Priority,” 533; Aland, “Text of the Church?,” 141; Metzger, Early Versions, 384–88. ↩
73. Boyd, introduction to Text-Critical Greek New Testament, “The Byzantine Text,” with its notes. ↩
74. Zuntz, Text of the Epistles, 49–50, 55–56. ↩
75. Robinson, “Case for Byzantine Priority,” 534, 537; Boyd, Text-Critical English New Testament, v. ↩
76. Holmes, “Majority Text Debate,” 18. ↩
77. Boyd, Text-Critical English New Testament, xiii–xiv; Boyd, introduction to Text-Critical Greek New Testament, “Modern Editions of the Byzantine Text”; Robinson, “Case for Byzantine Priority,” 557. ↩
78. Robinson and Pierpont, Byzantine Textform 2026, ix; Robinson, “Case for Byzantine Priority,” 566, note 97; Boyd, Text-Critical English New Testament, xiv–xv. ↩
79. Antoniades, preface, §10,8, translated in Stanojević, Orthodox New Testament Textual Scholarship, 184. ↩
80. Scrivener, Cambridge Paragraph Bible, xxxvi; Stanojević, Orthodox New Testament Textual Scholarship, 167–70. ↩
81. Pierpont, Some Improvements, 5–6. ↩
82. Boyd, introduction to American Standard Version Byzantine Text. ↩
83. Robinson and Pierpont, Byzantine Textform 2026, x–xi. ↩
84. Scrivener, Cambridge Paragraph Bible, Appendix E, c–civ. ↩
85. Apostoliki Diakonia, “Παλαιά Διαθήκη,” table of books. ↩
86. Scrivener, Cambridge Paragraph Bible, lxvi. ↩
87. Bibliia: Sinodal’nyi perevod, 2 Chronicles 36:24. ↩
88. Apostoliki Diakonia, “Μακκαβαίων Δ’ Παράρτημα,” note following chapter 1, verse 35; Swete, Old Testament in Greek, vol. 3, title page. ↩
89. Scrivener, Cambridge Paragraph Bible, lix–lx. ↩
90. Bertrand, “Reformation or Revolution”; Bertrand, “Look of the Bible.” ↩
91. Scrivener, Cambridge Paragraph Bible, lx. ↩
92. Boyd, introduction to Updated Brenton, “Revisions to the Text.” ↩
93. Lash, “Orthodox Study Bible.” ↩
94. Scrivener, Cambridge Paragraph Bible, xxx. ↩
95. Turpie, Old Testament in the New, viii, xx. ↩
96. Turpie, Old Testament in the New, xvi. ↩
97. Boyd, introduction to Updated Brenton, “Revisions to the Text”; Boyd, introduction to American Standard Version Byzantine Text. ↩
98. Scrivener, Cambridge Paragraph Bible, li–lii. ↩
99. Scrivener, Cambridge Paragraph Bible, xlvi. ↩
100. Boyd, introduction to Updated Brenton, “Revisions to the Text.” ↩
101. Boyd, introduction to Updated Brenton, “Regarding Punctuation and Grammar.” ↩
102. Scrivener, Cambridge Paragraph Bible, xli. ↩
103. Boyd, introduction to Updated Brenton, “Revisions to the Text”; Boyd, introduction to American Standard Version Byzantine Text. ↩
104. Boyd, Text-Critical English New Testament, vii. ↩
105. Scrivener, Cambridge Paragraph Bible, xxxvi. ↩
106. Scrivener, Cambridge Paragraph Bible, liv. ↩