01-23-2026, 12:47 AM
(01-22-2026, 05:08 PM)rayheinrich Wrote: So, I just had to go there...*pokes head from out of a hole*
Since I know the Russian Orthodox Church's Old Testament has additional books
that the King James Version Old Testament doesn't have, I pasted one of his erratic
postings into Microsoft Copilot's chat box and asked if there were references/names
that only came from the Russian Orthodox Church Old Testament. The first time I
asked this, it came back and told me that there was phrasing reminiscent of text
in 3 Maccabees which is a book in the Eastern Orthodox Old Testament that does
not appear at all in the King James Old Testament. When I asked it to be more
specific, it told me it couldn't find those references to 3 Maccabees. I asked it again,
in a few different ways, but its darling digital heart had settled into blindness.
Maybe someone else would like to give it a go, but I'm burned out talking with
flaky chatbots... though I do love them dearly, and they're really great for coming
up with Ethernet cable wiring diagrams, elegant sorting algorithms written in Python,
and propagation techniques for Sansevieria plants.
So Dyophysite Orthodox Churches (not just the Russians but also the Greeks, the Georgians, the Ukrainians, the Bulgarians, the Serbs, the Arabs, etc.) have a number of texts that aren't canonical to Protestants. The books we share with the Roman Catholic Church, you probably already know, so I won't list them here, but as for the books the Latins missed out on, there's 1 Esdras (included only in the Appendix of old editions of the Vulgate. Fun fact, when Church Fathers referred to two books of Ezra, they weren't referring to Ezra and Nehemiah, they were referring to 1 Esdras and Ezra-Nehemiah), Psalm 151 (the Miaphysite Orthodox Church in Syria has Psalms 151-155, in fact), and 3 Maccabees. And because both the structure of the Orthodox Church is not as centralized as the Roman Catholic Church and our notions of canonicity are somewhat looser (canonicity, for instance, could be defined as books which are read in Church services, only Revelation is never so read), the East Slavs in particular (maybe also the Georgians, I'm not sure) also consider as canonical the Prayer of Manasses and 2 Esdras (both in the Appendix of old editions of the Vulgate), while the Greeks have in their own appendix 4 Maccabees.
As for English translations, obviously the translators of the KJV never worked on Psalm 151, 3 Maccabees, or 4 Maccabees....and, in fact, the version of the Old Testament they based their translation on isn't the one used by most of the Dyophysite Orthodox Churches, since our Bible is based on the Septuagint---the pre-Christian translation, or set of translations, of the Hebrew into Greek---rather than the Masoretic, or a parallel Hebrew recension of the Bible whose earliest complete manuscripts only date back to around 1000 AD (we have complete Septuagint Bibles from around the time of Constantine, 700 years earlier). This confusion sorta dates back to St. Jerome, who decided to translate his Old Testament from the proto-Masoretic rather than the Septuagint, afaik because he thought that more quotations matched up that way, only he was kinda wrong about that (the New Testament was written in Greek after all) and imo he was sorta disregarding the established traditions of the Church at that point.
St. Jerome's proto-Masoretic version of the Psalms, however, never caught on, with most people preferring the Latin version based on the Greek (note that other translations of the Bible into Latin already existed by St. Jerome's time; in this case, afaik he just revised a preexisting one, if he was actually involved in the translation of this book at all), so a lot of English translations of the Psalms were based on the Greek before the KJV (one of those translations, the Coverdale Psalter, became the version used by the Book of Common Prayer for long after the KJV became the standard English edition of the Bible).
As for the whole Septuagint, there's a version that I've not encountered by some guy of all the books of the Protestant canon, then there's Sir Lancelot Brenton's 19th century translation (which is sort of a revision of the KJV for the Protestant canon, a copy-paste job of the so-called Apocrypha, and fresh translations of 3 Maccabees, 4 Maccabees, and Psalm 151), then there's modern translations like the New English Translation of the Septuagint (which is a sort of revision of the NRSV). All this to say, one should find some quotations of the Orthodox Bible that sound a lot like the KJV, though afaik the verbs should be a dead give away, since Brenton tended to forget that 3rd person present of his diction ended in -eth, not -es.
Bonus information: the Miaphysite Orthodox Churches (the Copts, the Syrians, the Armenians, and the Ethiopians) take the flexibility of the canon in the Dyophysite Orthodox mindset and really run with it, including more obscure books like the Book of Enoch (which, to be fair, is quoted as Scripture by St. Jude in his epistle) or 2 Baruch. The Book of Enoch has an 18th century translation somewhat based on the KJV, and then there's a collection of translations of a lot of these more obscure books from the early 20th century based on the Revised Version.
Written in less than an hour without the help of AI!
Just don't ask me to provide citations, not because I can't provide them, but because it's a lot of extra work. A good starting point is Gallagher and Meade's (2017) The Biblical Canon Lists from Early Christianity, or the various Oxford or Cambridge or whatever handbooks on canonicity and the Eastern Churches. Oh, and most of the translations I note above are freely accessible online, including even NETS: https://ccat.sas.upenn.edu/nets/edition/