By: Fr Laurent Cleenewerck, EOB Editor
The question is sometimes asked in what sense the EOB New Testament (the Eastern / Greek Orthodox Bible) is properly an Orthodox edition and translation of the Scriptures, rather than simply another English version adopted or tolerated by Orthodox readers. The answer rests on four features of its origin, purpose, and method, which together distinguish it from translations produced outside the Church and later pressed into Orthodox service.
- An Orthodox translator, refined by years of Orthodox review
The EOB New Testament was not produced by a committee external to the Orthodox Church or by a publisher seeking a market. It was prepared by an Orthodox priest, working within the sacramental and doctrinal life of the Church, and it matured over many years through the input of reviewers — clergy, scholars, and attentive lay readers — who examined the text against the Greek, against Orthodox doctrine, and against the practical needs of English-speaking faithful.
The EOB NT as it now stands is therefore not the work of a single moment or a single hand: it is the product of sustained conversation, in which criticisms were received, weighed, and either incorporated or answered. This mode of production — personal responsibility exercised under continuing correction — is itself an Orthodox way of working.
- Intended for personal use, with theologically correct and coherent language
The EOB was designed first of all for personal reading and study — not, primarily, for liturgical proclamation. Accordingly, it could pursue a goal that ordinary English versions rarely attempt: terminological coherence with Orthodox theology.
As its introduction explains at length, key Greek terms are rendered consistently and in accord with their ecclesial meaning. Presbyteros is “presbyter,” not a word that obscures the continuity between the apostolic office and the Church’s priesthood; prokuneo is consistently translated because the Orthodox doctrine of worship vs veneration is connected to this word; hades is hades, not “hell,” preserving the distinction on which Orthodox teaching about death and the descent of Christ depends; terms such as hypostasis are handled with an eye to their doctrinal and Septuagintal resonances, with footnotes that lay the alternatives before the reader.
The aim throughout is that the English reader should encounter, as far as English permits, the same theological vocabulary the Church herself uses — so that Scripture, doctrine, and prayer speak one language (for instance “unto ages of ages”).
- Grounded in the ecclesiastical text and the manuscripts that the Church preserved
The EOB aims to follow the Patriarchal Text of 1904 — the official ecclesiastical text of the Greek New Testament published by the Ecumenical Patriarchate of Constantinople and received throughout the Greek-speaking Orthodox world. At the same time, it is fully aware that this printed text stands within, and occasionally alongside, the great stream of Greek manuscripts copied, preserved, and transmitted in and by the Orthodox Church across the centuries — the Byzantine manuscript tradition in its breadth. Where the Patriarchal Text differs from the wider Byzantine witness, or where the Textus Receptus or the modern critical editions read otherwise, the EOB does not conceal the fact: its apparatus of footnotes candidly reports the variants. The reader thus holds the Church’s text of reference while remaining in honest contact with the manuscript heritage that produced it.
- In the spirit of Saints Basil and John Chrysostom
This combination — fidelity to a received text together with frank awareness of other readings — is not a modern critical affectation; it is the manner of the Fathers. Saint Basil the Great and Saint John Chrysostom knew that the copies of the Scriptures before them did not always agree, and they said so, at times commenting on divergent readings and drawing profit from more than one. They treated textual plurality neither with anxiety nor with suppression, but with pastoral and theological discernment, using what served the truth. The EOB consciously stands in this patristic spirit: it presents the ecclesiastical text with reverence, notes the multiple textual traditions where they matter, and makes use of them as needed — trusting, as the Fathers did, that the Church’s faith is not endangered by an honest account of her manuscripts.
Illustrative readings: where the EOB follows the Byzantine text
The character described above is easiest to see in particular passages where the Byzantine tradition (the Majority Text, generally shared by the Textus Receptus) and the modern Critical Text part ways, and where the EOB stands with the text the Church has read. A convention of the edition should be noted first: passages which the Critical Text omits or brackets, but which the ecclesiastical text retains, are printed as Scripture within angle brackets ⟨ ⟩, with a footnote stating plainly what the Critical Text does. The reader, therefore, receives the Church’s text in full while seeing the textual situation at a glance. Among many examples:
Matthew 6:13 — the doxology of the Lord’s Prayer, “For yours is the Kingdom, the power, and the glory, now and forever,” is retained; the Critical Text omits it.
Matthew 17:21 and 18:11 — “this kind does not go out except by prayer and fasting” and “For the Son of Man has come to save the lost”: two whole verses absent from the Critical Text, present in the Byzantine tradition and in the EOB.
Mark 16:9–20 — the longer ending of Mark, double-bracketed as doubtful in critical editions, is printed as an integral part of the Gospel, as the Church has always read it.
Luke 2:14 — the angelic hymn reads “on earth peace, [and] good will among mankind,” following the Byzantine nominative (eudokia), where the Critical Text’s genitive yields “peace to those on whom his favor rests.”
Luke 22:43–44 — the angel strengthening Christ in Gethsemane and the sweat “like great drops of blood,” bracketed as doubtful in the Critical Text, stand in the EOB text.
John 5:4 — the angel who stirred the water of Bethesda, omitted by the Critical Text, is retained.
Romans 8:1 — the full Byzantine ending, “who do not walk according to the flesh but according to the Spirit,” is retained where the Critical Text ends the verse at “Christ Jesus.”
1 Timothy 3:16 — the EOB reads “God was revealed in the flesh” with the Byzantine theos, against the Critical Text’s relative pronoun (“He who was revealed in the flesh”), a reading with evident doctrinal weight.
In each case, the choice is not concealed but documented: the footnote apparatus records that the Critical Text omits or reads otherwise, and, where relevant, what the Majority Text and Textus Receptus do. The EOB thus follows the text preserved in the Church’s manuscripts and received in her printed editions, while telling the reader the whole truth about the evidence — precisely the combination of fidelity and candor described in the preceding sections.
A note on liturgical use
It should be said plainly that the EOB was not primarily designed as a liturgical translation, and this is a deliberate choice rather than a deficiency. “Liturgical English” is not one thing in the United States: the Orthodox jurisdictions differ in what they mean by it and in what they prefer. Some retain a marked preference for archaic, hieratic English — the idiom of “Thee” and “Thou” — while others, notably the Greek Orthodox Archdiocese, favor contemporary forms in their service books and lectionaries. No single translation register could satisfy both sensibilities at once, and a version engineered for one jurisdiction’s liturgical ear would sound foreign in another’s. The EOB therefore serves where a common ground truly exists: in the hands of the individual Orthodox reader, for study, devotion, and catechesis, offering a text that is doctrinally coherent, textually honest, and ecclesially rooted — while leaving each jurisdiction free to proclaim the Scriptures liturgically in the register its tradition has formed. Nothing prevents its use for reference or reading in settings where contemporary English is welcome; but its vocation is the formation of the faithful reader.