Orthodox Christian Biblical Studies in Pursuit of Identity: The Role and Impact of Personal Research Practices Orthodox Christian Biblical Studies in Pursuit of Identity: The Role and Impact of Personal Research Practices

The article explores the pursuit of identity in Ukrainian Orthodox biblical studies not only in liturgical, exegetical, moral, educational and apologetic dimensions, but also from the perspective of academic criticism. It reviews the key points of this process, as discovered in the legacy of prominent representatives of the Kyivan biblical study tradition. Governmental influence on the Church’s educational policies, balancing between loyalty to the Orthodox tradition and Western biblical criticism, is among the factors that have shaped biblical studies, this issue being explored in the article. Historical milestones of biblical studies are presented, as is the research of prominent Kyivan scholars. Considering all these aspects and other crucial issues, the conclusion shows what makes the Kyivan tradition of biblical studies unique and of lasting importance.


Introduction
The research of the tradition of biblical studies at the Kyiv Theological Academy (KTA), which the author has been exploring for the past several years, includes a review of the legacy of both individual researchers and the entire professional community that generates knowledge about the Bible, lectures on it in the academic environment, and disseminates it for popular educational purposes.1 This research has exposed how important it is to explore this phenomenon both in terms of its institutional evolution and the personal research practices of prominent representatives of that tradition.2 Especially because the use of elements of prosopographic and biographic analysis has elucidated the methods -specific for the social environment, historical period, and religious denomination -in which knowledge about the Bible is generated and transmitted, and exposed these methods in the experiences of the given professional group and its individual representatives. After all, the tradition of biblical studies at the Kyiv Theological Academy in the 19th and early 20th centuries took its distinctive shape due to the activity of a whole academic community of researchers and professors who were united in the same communication environment, had inherited the same categorical vocabulary, hermeneutical principles of biblical studies, its scholastic nature, disciplinary instruction in academic departments, a specific professor-student connection in the retransmission of knowledge, and a critical reception of achievements made by other biblical study traditions.
In turn, the methodological focus on the research of biblical studies as a history of the exploration of the sacred text dominant in Ukrainian religious culture prompted the taking into account of the dual nature of the Bible -as both as the Word of God and the word of menin the perception of the scholars who were Orthodox Christian believers and viewed the Bible primarily as the Holy Scriptures of their own religious denomination. It requires making an interpretive effort to grasp their ideological and moral motives, theoretical views, and specific research techniques. As is known, this is how the hermeneutic approach is implemented, where a researcher makes some effort to interpret the intentions of a believer, focusing his or her mind on finding a way to communicate with God; and this is how the researcher engages in a dialogue with the history of a religious tradition.3 The use of the hermeneutic method requires taking into account the historical interconnection and synthesis of various hermeneutic paradigms and approaches to understanding the phenomenon of the Bible, which took place for several centuries -especially in the 19th and early 20th centuries in Kyiv academic theological culture, and was reflected in the academic theological works of leading Kyivan biblical scholars. The exploration of the Bible, fused with their personal life and research and translation experience, arises here in its scholastic dimension as a dialogue of cultures and traditions, centered on the individual who perceives himself or herself as both the key bearer of the tradition and the actual participant of the dialogue.4 Therefore, accumulated sources and facts have led to the interpretation of the personal scholarly activity of Kyivan biblical researchers from a somewhat new, but in fact quite anticipated, angle. It is about identifying the basis for the development of the identity of Ukrainian Orthodox biblical studies and their religious and academic specificity in the past few centuries. Earlier in history, this issue has objectively emerged during the transformation of traditional medieval Orthodox Christian Church practices. This transformation took place throughout the entire modern period as Orthodox Christianity was influenced by Western theological practices -Catholic and Protestant.
It became especially distinctive during the nineteenth century when the Russian Empire reformed Orthodox Christian theological education and strengthened the system of mass propaganda of Orthodox values. This process was wave-like rather than continuous, with attempts at reforms (not always successful) succeeded by reactionism. The main vector of theological development was determined and adjusted by apologetic demands of governmentalized church institutions. It was then that Western academic and theological influences significantly increased the debates about an independent and original development of Orthodox Christian biblical studies and theology overall -all the way to the exacerbated anti-Western phobias of various sorts.
The Orthodox Christian tradition of biblical studies entered the twentieth century with the same issue. At the time, Orthodox Christian researchers of the Bible, mainly in European and American emigration, had to define their theoretical, methodological, and instructional positions. Adherence to Orthodox dogmatic guidelines and own liturgical traditions had to be accorded with the challenges of theological traditions of different faiths and, what is extremely important, with the demands of academic rationality. Today, at the beginning of the 21st century, the social and cultural environment has become more favorable for the development of theological knowledge, and intellectual contact with traditions of other religious denominations is technically not a problem. But exactly because of this, the understanding and assertion of the specificity of the Orthodox Christian interpretation of the Bible in the national religious, cultural and educational environment remains important even today. Therefore, we believe it is necessary and possible to address, in this article, some key, in our opinion, theoretical and historical aspects of how the denominational, cultural, and intellectual identity of the Ukrainian Orthodox Christian tradition in biblical studies emerged and developed. It is worth underscoring that these aspects are being explored with a focus on the personal research practices of prominent Kyivan biblical researchers of different times, and on the fact that the characteristics of each historical period have always been discovered through the prism of personal life and intellectual experience.

Defining the Ukrainian Tradition of Biblical Studies as "Orthodox Christian" and "Kyivan": Institutional and Personalistic Indicators
At some point, one of our most exigent objectives was to define the subject matter of our research, i. e. the Kyivan tradition of biblical studies, specifically as "Orthodox Christian" and "Kyivan." Obviously, the goal was to consider the denominational specifics of the Orthodox Christian culture in terms of how the Bible, as a sacred text, is read, studied and interpreted. This included the unique role of the liturgical reading of biblical texts and the associated dominance of socalled "homiletic" exegesis. This para-liturgical practice had significantly distanced Orthodox Christian exploration of the Bible from the Western biblical and theological culture which was based more on rational criticism with its distinct "bookishness." 5 Furthermore, the goal was to reveal the identity of a certain tradition of Orthodox Christian biblical studies in connection with the local cultural and educational institutions and personalized research practices. Our study subsequently focused on the special intellectual and educational practice institutionally embodied in the work of the Orthodox Christian theological (ecclesiastical) schools, namely the Kyiv-Mohyla Academy (KMA, late 17th and 18th centuries) and the Kyiv Theological Academy (19th and early 20th centuries). The characteristic features of this practice included the following: 1) research and educational activity of students and professors in these institutions in certain specific areas of biblical studies, 2) transmission of biblical knowledge in time through the professor-student relationship, and 3) dissemination of knowledge beyond these schools through external contacts with other educational institutions and through educational activity.
The affiliation of any Bible scholars in the Kyivan Orthodox Christian tradition of biblical studies was determined by a complex interaction of a number of essential factors. From the formal institutional perspective, it included researches and narratives made at the above theological (ecclesiastic) schools by representatives of the Orthodox Christian Church, both clergy and laity. In the ideological sense, it refers to the commitment of these researchers and professors to Orthodox dogmas, rules of exegesis and apologetics (mainly those of the patristic, especially the Eastern, tradition). This loyalty determined their own research positions and types of contacts with the "non-Orthodox" research strategies and practices when such contact took place. The originality of disciplines revealed itself in the local specifics of research topics and subjects.
The personal dimension of this affiliation was objectively determined by studies at the KMA-KTA, biblical disciplines taught at this academy, theological dissertations defended, and the publication of Bible studies. The subjective dimension of personal affiliation included commitment of individual researchers to the profession, and belief in the lasting importance of Bible studies for the spiritual, religious, moral, and intellectual development of the individual and society.6 In this manner, key but fairly obvious underpinnings have been set for the identification of Kyivan Orthodox Christian biblical studies. They were associated with the Orthodox Christian tradition as a whole and allowed viewing Orthodox biblical studies in terms of "bibliology," "biblical exegesis," and "application of the Bible." 7 However, the next interesting objective was to identify the less obvious grounds for the identification of the Orthodox Christian biblical study tradition. These are the grounds that would allow speaking not only of traditional exegesis and apologetics but also of rational criticism of the Bible, the criticism that took shape in the nineteenth century and was defined as Bible studies (bibleistics). It was a branch of knowledge, a certain methodological and disciplinary direction in a broader array of Bible researches, which was specific due to its rational academic application of historical, linguistic, and literary criticism to the analysis and interpretation of biblical texts. By inheriting the methods and achievements of traditional textual ("low") criticism of the Bible and by being submerged in hermeneutic research and practices of modern times during the 18th and 19th centuries, the "bibleistic" trend developed in various forms of European "high" (historical, linguistic and literary) biblical criticism.
The problem for the Orthodox Christians was that they were inclined, for quite a long time (almost to the beginning of the twentieth century), to view this notion as pertinent to the research trend linked mainly to the "alien," "non-Orthodox" (mainly Protestant) traditions, and immersed deeply in the most critical rationalist methodology. So they tried to distance themselves from it.8 This problem was exacerbated by the fact that contact with Western biblical studies was inevitable in the nineteenth century and was a factor in prompting the selfidentification of Orthodox biblical studies and a fundamental impulse for its development.9 Moreover, a methodological trend had just started to take place in global biblical studies of that time, toward making a theoretical distinction between dogmatic and academic issues, a kind of dogmatic "pressure relief" for the historical academic study of the biblical text.10 However, the then church leadership perceived any attempts to critically compare Orthodox and Western methods of biblical criticism and biblical interpretation, and the application of the methods and data of various sciences, as "uncritical dependence," "compilativity," "Western inertia," and "trust in answers given by other people.  So, Orthodox Biblical scholars were forced to seek methodological and ideological allies and supporters in the West -among Protestant and Catholic conservative theologians, who rejected so-called "modernism," whose core was rationalistic biblical criticism. Therefore, it would be very interesting and heuristically fruitful to explore the historical foundations that facilitated the emergence of a specifically Orthodox Christian tradition of rational (and therefore critical) academic biblical research -along with the traditional exegesis and apologetics. Let us examine this further.

When and Why Ukrainian Orthodox Christian Biblical Studies Emerged: Objective Requirements, Needs, and Challenges
First, let us say a few words about a key point of how Christian biblical studies emerged and self-identified. This area of research became a logical and historical synthesis of traditional religious knowledge grounded on the Revelation and academic knowledge obtained through certain rationalized procedures. Theology sought to engage science to test its own judgments and development, and to logically deduce and justify a system of its tenets. So, what is the specific need of Christian tradition regarding the study of the Bible?
It is the need for a rational and critical authentication of its own textus receptus, the biblical text adopted by a certain Church for its worship and preaching. On the one hand, the God-inspired nature of the content and meaning of Scripture and the Word of God as well as its structure determined by the ecclesiastic experience (canons) will always be dogmatized invariants immune to rational criticism. However, critical validation may quite apply to specific historical, linguistic, and cultural parameters of the adopted version (revisions) of the text.
Historically, it generated the oldest biblical study disciplines, such as biblical textual criticism, canonical history, the history of text application, and the history of its translations. These disciplines have synthesized faith in the Bible as the God-inspired Scripture and faith in the sanctity of the canon accepted by the Church on the one hand, and the academic validation of its specific versions on the other hand. The early patristic examples of such a synthesis include the Eastern Christian reconstructions of the Greek Septuagint (Hexapla and Octapla by Origen) and the Western Christian translation and revision of the Latin Bible (Vulgate by Jerome of Stridonium and Abbot Alcuin).
It is important to underscore that the local denominational subcultures (Slavic Orthodox being one of the oldest) acquired their own basic versions of the sacred text by means that were no longer based on mystical revelation, but rather cultural means, through translations. This fact increased the sense that some kind of rational verification was needed. Accordingly, Ukrainian Orthodox biblical studies were first able to reveal their identity and distinction from a simple compilation of "alien" theories and research practices at the time when they rendered academic and critical (primarily textual and linguistic) validation of the Church Slavonic Bible as the primary text of faith doctrine and the liturgical tradition. No wonder that this validation was declared a "special objective" of Orthodox Christian biblical studies.12 The most important stages in the history of Slavic Bible studies included the following: 1) reconstructions of the so-called Cyril and Methodius biblical liturgical tradition along with the creation of the first complete Church Slavonic manuscript of the Bible (Gennadiivskyi manuscript, 1499), 2) the textual exegetic work of Maximus the Greek and the work of scribes of the Ostroh Circle, ultimately incorporated in the full Church Slavonic incunabula (Ostroh Bible, 1581), 3) later revisions, especially the Moscow Early Printed Bible, 1663, and 4) the so-called Petrovsko-Elizavetynska Bible from the mid-18th century.
These efforts have become the core of Orthodox biblical studies. So, it was not a coincidence that the Slavic Bible studies were considered a priority area which gave birth to "probably the only own and original academic school." 13 While the Bible was further explored as the Holy Scripture, a historical evolution took place in Ukraine. For centuries, compilations of biblical texts were disseminated primarily for liturgical purposes: TheLiturgicalGospels, TheBooksofApostles, TheBookof Psalms, and TheBook ofParoemias. Some books were also intended for private readings. The so-called Explanatory Psalter and The Prophets, InterpretativeGospels and TeachingGospels, The Conversations, The Homilies, and individual biblical books were compiled. They contained Slavic translations of patristic biblical commentaries: Athanasius the Great, Basil the Great, John Chrysostom, Gregory of Nyssa, Gregory the Great, Cyril of Alexandria, Jerome of Stridonium, Hesychius of Jerusalem, Hippolytus of Rome, Ephraim the Syrian, Theodoret of Cyrus, and Theophylact of Bulgaria.14 A specific thing about the Orthodox Christian liturgical use of the Bible was that, by the end of the 15th century, only fragments and certain collections of the Holy Scripture were available in the Church Slavonic language. The first complete manuscript of the Bible in Church Slavonic, the so-called Gennadiivskyi manuscript, was made in 1499 in Novgorod the Great. It became the basis for the famous Ostroh Bible that was made on this terrain. This event raised the prestige of Slavic Christian culture and strengthened the foundation for biblical exegesis and theological works in the Orthodox Christian environment.15 Regular penetration of the national language into religious life was another important and powerful factor. Church Slavonic liturgical and biblical texts were often copied and revised, given local language specificity. The European Reformation, with its desire to make the Scripture understandable to everyone, strongly induced the emergence of translations in the national languages in these lands. Religious and national self-determination motives, in a larger European context, inspired the need for such translations. The Peresopnytsia Gospel manuscript has become the most famous translation of the Bible into Old Ukrainian. 16 Already in the second half of the 16th and 17th centuries, Bible reading shaped the religious beliefs of broad groups of Orthodox Christians. From time to time ideas of different faiths were borrowed and adapted. This indicated the response of Orthodox Christians to Protestant and Catholic propaganda, and reflected the shift in perceptions and traditional religiosity brought about by the Reformation and Counter-Reformation.17 However, by the end of the 17th century, the Bible was mostly studied as part of liturgical use, church service, or didactic private readings based on original samples of patristic exegesis or those revised by local commentators. This is well illustrated in the works of Herasym Smotrytskyi, Tarasii Zemka, Kyrylo Trankvilion-Stavrovetskyi, Zakharii Kopystenskyi, Yoanykii Haliatovskyi, and Petro Mohyla.
New developments take place already at the beginning and middle of the 18th century (the period of the so-called "synodical" reforms promoted by bishops Theophan Prokopovych, Dymytrii Tuptalo, and metropolitan Stefan Yavorskyi). First, the text of the Slavic Bible was continually acquired, though with a broader range of tools. Secondly, the trend was toward reception of Western biblical criticism, including linguistic, literary, and historical. At the Kyiv Collegium (Academy), this evolution became particularly apparent starting from the 1730s when Prokopovych's protégé, Symon Todorskyi, trained at a pietistic university in Germany, implemented a fundamentally new tradition of learning other languages, including reading and studying the Bible. He initiated Hebrew studies and linguistic studies of the Bible at the Kyiv Academy. His innovation was to study the Hebrew language as a biblical one. This approach may have been borrowed from the Protestants, but it was a kind of "cultural revolution" for Orthodox biblical studies. The revolution consisted in the fact that the Masoretic Bible text was taken as one of the fully legitimate sources for the development of Todorskyi's own tradition. Importantly, this revolution also included the use of methods of linguistic, literary, and historical criticism of the Bible, which had already been developed by European biblical studies in the 18th century. Therefore, comparison of the Slavic biblical text with not just the Greek LXX but also with the Jewish Masoretic text resulted in the need to raise and address not only textual issues but also those of a linguistic, literary, historical and cultural nature. This happened due to differences of the LXX and Masoretic texts, both of which became dogmatically relevant to the Orthodox Christian tradition from the second half of the 18th century. This is how the new critical trend, and at the same time original Orthodox Christian biblical studies, in contrast to the borrowed "high criticism" of the Bible, started to evolve in the Orthodox Christian biblical culture. The monopoly of exegesis as a dogmatised interpretation started to gradually disappear. Exegesis did not disappear, but somewhat gave in to the biblical criticism that was expanding its boundaries. Biblical studies perse started to evolve and became a new, critical element of biblical research.
This "cultural revolution," with its focus on linguistic and literary criticism and comparative textual studies of LXX and Masoretic texts improved the Orthodox Slavic textus receptus. Kyivan researchers, followers of Simon Todorskyi's school, played a decisive role in producing the Moscow early printed Bible (Epyphanii Slavynetskyi) and the Peter and Elizabeth Bible (Theophylact Lopatynskyi, Symon Todorskyi, Yakiv Blonnytskyi, Varlaam Liashchevskyi, Gedeon Slomynskyi).18 The "cultural revolution" re-emerged from a new angle in the nineteenth century in connection with attempts to produce one more Orthodox Christian textus receptus -the Russian Bible. The experience of the Russian Bible Society and the development of the so-called Synodical translation were based on, among other things, the comparison of the LXX text with the Masoretic one as well as textual, linguistic, literary, and historical criticism to preserve the authenticity of the text and meaning of Scripture during translation. This prompted recourse to European biblical criticism experience and efforts to achieve better reception.19 The experience of the Kyiv Theological Academy of the 19th and early 20th centuries, embodied in the personal research practices of eminent professors, enables us to point out a few more aspects characteristic of the Ukrainian tradition of Biblical studies.

Orthodox Christian Biblical Studies at the Kyiv Theological Academy of the 19th and Early 20th Centuries: In Pursuit of Identity
The stories of the personal life and research of the professors that belonged to this institution provide interesting evidence of how Ukrainian Orthodox biblical studies shaped their own identity as they interacted with the European experience. A very remarkable story started to unfold from the first third of the nineteenth century. It was associated with the transformation of one of the traditional foundations of Orthodox biblical exegesis, namely its intimate connection with liturgical practice and the pastoral activities of priests. This focus of Orthodox biblical studies was bequeathed by the Apostolic Fathers of the Church. As noted above, the patristic biblical homiletic heritage served as the basis of church practices for centuries. So, what do we observe in the nineteenth century?
Several prominent KTA professors, who were clergymen, well demonstrated their affiliation with the academic dimension of a rational theological school, thus significantly expanding the traditional area of a priest or monk (liturgy, preaching or moral instruction). Academic biblical education was proclaimed to be the foundation for the work of a theologian or a church apologist.20 A cleric (priest, bishop) who instructed biblical knowledge now took an active part in academic discourse and utilized the whole available range of academic knowledge and didactic techniques. In a unique way, educated representatives of the Orthodox Christian clergy became organically integrated into academic culture. And it was not a "scholarism" for show, but a truly critical intellectual position integrated into the European cultural context.
As for instance, the Archimandrite, later Bishop Inokentii (Borysov) and KTA Rector in 1830-1839, made significant efforts to promote the historical method of Bible study and the role of biblical history.21 This was intended to compensate for an excessive allegoric approach to biblical interpretations and theological speculations.22 Bishop Filaret (Filaretov), KTA Professor and Rector in the 1860s, exemplified an Orthodox theologian scholar versed in European biblical research. Filaret was famous for his thorough and well-structured lectures on the Bible, and encouraged student research. His library, a model one at the time, was replenished regularly by books brought from abroad. It was used not only by the professor but by his students too.

21
Titov, ImperatorskaiaKievskaiaDukhovnaiaAkademiia, 359-64. 22 Florovskii,Putirusskogobogosloviia,461. 23 See Korolkov,"Preosviaschennyi Filaret," 11,[20][21][40][41][42]. These clergymen academics furthered the evolvement of the original Orthodox biblical studies that integrated the European experience. Each of them overcame the traditional image of an Orthodox monk or bishop as a "pious ignorant" who eschews reason for piety and avoids academic research for loyalty to patristic thoughts. Combining fidelity to the dogmatic tradition with a modern academic critical approach became an important systemic theme for Orthodox biblical studies.
Several more KTA representatives, through their personal life and professional stories, also illustrated a quest for unique identity undertaken by Orthodox biblical studies. For instance, Stepan Solskyi paid major attention to studying the Bible as the dominant of the national spiritual culture.26 At the same time, he was also known for his relevant re-thinking of Western biblical knowledge in the Orthodox way. He developed a concept of the "Orthodox Christian isagogic introduction." 27 Yakym Olesnytskyi demonstrated a profound conversance -exemplary for Orthodox Christians -with biblical archaeology and culture, biblical languages, and textual, historical, cultural, literary and linguistic criticism of the Bible. In his writings he demonstrated the prospects of the heuristic potential of history, art, and linguistic and literature studies. 28 Dymytrii Bogdashevskyi (later Bishop Vasylii) was an apologist of historical biblical narrative 29 and literal interpretation of the supernatural and miraculous element revealed in that narrative.30 In his deliberations, however, he came close to the problem of a comparison of scientific and non-scientific knowledge, and rational and non-rational elements of cognition. Archpriest Olexandr Glagolev emphasized the universal value of the Bible in the unity of the Old and New Testaments.31 On this basis, he overcame the confessional limitations and xenophobia not only in public and church life but also in biblical studies. His idea of the "ideological emancipation" of the Orthodox Christian perception of the Old Testament and the image of Jews 32 organically complemented his life experience. While being an Orthodox Christian cleric, Glagolev rejected Orthodox Christian anti-Semitism; he acted as an expert in the Beiliscase and personally stopped those who engaged in pogroms. 33 Glagolev  biblical criticism and the exploration of the limits for the application of academic methods in studying the Bible from the Orthodox Christian perspective were very valuable in this respect.35 Here, we would like to underscore another important point directly related to the identity of the Ukrainian tradition in biblical studies. The fact that the Kyiv Theological Academy of the 19th and early 20th centuries was the leading Orthodox Christian theological school was crucial to the ways in which the foreign experience of biblical studies was utilized, and what kind of criticism was addressed towards it. We are talking about another systemic feature of Kyiv Orthodox Christian biblical studies. It is a personal and professional life drama that unfolded when theological and academic discourses came together (or even collided, if you wish). Loyalty to the Orthodox dogmatic tradition came across and interplayed in a controversial manner with the personal experiences of professionals who were educated in a European way and familiar with significant achievements of various academic disciplines of the time.

Conclusions
It has proven to be extremely interesting and heuristically fruitful to explore some historical grounds that facilitated the emergence of a specifically Orthodox Christian tradition of academically rational (and therefore critical) Bible studies along with traditional exegesis and apologetics.
The Ukrainian Orthodox tradition of biblical studies revealed its identity and distinguished itself from a simple compilation of "alien" theories and research practices specifically when it undertook an academically critical (primarily textual and linguistic) approach to the study of the Church Slavonic Bible as a "prototext" of its own religious and liturgical tradition.
As the Bible was explored in this part of the world as the Holy Scripture, the medieval liturgical use and homiletic exegesis based on patristic examples underwent a historical evolution to a modern (17-18 centuries) orientation towards linguistic and literary criticism and comparative textology.
Giving a new hermeneutic status to the Hebrew language as a biblical language was another important indicator of the modern identity of Orthodox Christian biblical studies.
Personal research practices of Kyiv Theological Academy professors of the 19th and early 20th centuries also revealed new identity aspects of the Orthodox Christian tradition of biblical studies. They demonstrated that the Orthodox academic clergy had integrated into the academic dimension of a rationally organized theological school, and the European cultural context. They explored Western biblical studies from an Orthodox Christian perspective. They opened prospects for the use of the heuristic potential of various academic disciplines and rationalistic Combining loyalty to the dogmatic tradition with critical academic research and the personal experience of Kyivan Bible researchers as academics educated in a European manner was a significant systemic theme for Orthodox Christian biblical studies. The recognition and awareness of specific features of the Orthodox Christian exploration of the Bible in the Ukrainian religious, cultural and educational context remain important to the present day.