Tradition Against Scripture? Anti-Jewish Animus Shaping Three Pericopes in the Byzantine Lectionary

Abstract

This paper examines the role of anti-Jewish sentiment in shaping the Byzantine Lectionary (BL) and its impact on the liturgical reception of Scripture. While previous scholarship has largely focused on positive interpretations within Byzantine hymnography and liturgy, this study argues that the BL not only interpreted the Bible selectively but also obscured or even subverted key biblical messages, particularly regarding Israel and Judaism. Through close analysis of pericopes from the Evangeliarion and the Apostolos, this paper identifies two primary mechanisms of textual manipulation: the omission of certain passages and the relegation of positive statements about Jews to weekday readings, effectively minimizing their reception. Hagiographical and hymnographical texts further illustrate how poetic language and theological motifs reinforced anti-Jewish interpretations. By situating these findings within the broader context of the crystallization of the BL, this study demonstrates on the basis of three pericopes that anti-Judaism permeated both the content and structure of Byzantine liturgical Scripture. This analysis underscores the need for critical engagement with the historical liturgy, revealing how ecclesiastical tradition at times conflicted with the biblical message and calling contemporary scholarship to confront the enduring theological implications of these liturgical practices.

1. Introduction: Discovering the Relevance of the Byzantine Lectionary for Both Biblical and Liturgical Studies

Speaking about the ‘Bible and Liturgy’ Eugen Pentiuc rightly states that this is “like [the] chicken-egg dilemma” if we try to discover which one came the first (Pentiuc 2022, p. 2). Similarly, in his paper on the relationship between liturgy and New Testament texts, Tobias Nicklas diligently raises the question of the role of the liturgy in shaping the biblical text itself: is the liturgy just transmitting, or even creating Scripture in the first centuries? He answers indicating that the liturgical milieu not only receives and interprets biblical texts, but at the same time, it creates biblical text by establishing what is to be read in the liturgical assembly and what is not (Nicklas 2022, p. 55). Furthermore, Silviu Bunta recently stated that from an Eastern Orthodox point of view the Scripture is “an expression of Tradition” (Bunta 2022, p. 240). The Orthodox Tradition—necessarily with capital T—is, of course, “characterized as a liturgical tradition” in the eyes of Eastern liturgical scholars (Alexopoulos 2022, p. 242) and at the same time biblical scholars consider that Scripture is, particularly, the “supreme record of revelation” (Stylianopoulos 2009, p. 25). This phenomenon of the entangled life of Scripture and Liturgy is best mirrored in the long and intricate development process of the Byzantine Lectionary System.

1.1. A Later but Relevant Biblical Text

It is a well-known fact that the BL has been largely ignored in research and only now can we observe a more serious approach to the corpus of the BL (Paulson 2022, p. 128). The tone of this ignorance has been set precisely by biblical research, although lectionaries represent at least a third of all existing biblical manuscripts. In the effort of textual criticism over the last five centuries to identify an Urtext, the oldest possible, closest to the original, the texts of the Byzantine Lectionaries have fallen into disgrace because the oldest manuscripts come from the 9th century. Specialists have only found traces of older stages of the BL preserved in marginal traditions of the Byzantine empire such as the Georgian and Armenian ones, which were recorded in writing before the great Jerusalem tradition was Byzantinized (Galadza 2018).

The influential liturgist Gregory Dix stated almost a hundred years ago that “the present Eastern Orthodox system… is a Byzantine invention which cannot at present be tracked back beyond the eighth century and is probably not much older in origin.” (Dix 2015, p. 362). Such statements have led to the neglect of lectionaries for decades and their relevance for both biblical textual and liturgical scholarship.

One of the primary reasons for this neglect is that critical editions of liturgical biblical manuscripts have been made by philologists with no liturgical knowledge and a lack of interest in the realities of the Byzantine liturgy (Engberg 2025, p. 149). A notorious example was the Chicago Lectionary Project, which generated a lot of good philological and historical research, but it made also great mistakes which influenced subsequent research. This short note on those efforts says a lot:

“…fatal shortcomings, above all a focus on hypothetical original sources rather than on the existing Byzantine books themselves, a narrow and biased selection of evidence, and an almost total neglect of the use and reception of the texts under examination. Abandoned by textual scholars, the Chicago project ground to an inconspicuous end in the 1960s”.

(Dolezal 1996, p. 128)

Only in the last two decades can we see real changes in scholarship, a development recorded recently by Alexopoulos (2022, pp. 244–45). The need for interdisciplinary studies has not only been stated, but has also been successfully initiated, with specialists from both Biblical and Byzantine liturgical studies increasingly involved (Buchinger and Leonhard 2022). Liturgists of other denominations are progressively interested in including a pertinent analysis of the Byzantine rite in their studies (e.g., Benini 2020), and Eastern Biblical scholars are becoming gradually aware of the relevance of liturgical studies for deepening the reception of biblical texts (Pentiuc 2014, 2021, 2022). Even prominent historians of the biblical text tend to recognize the relevance of the lived biblical text in the liturgical context acknowledging that the Byzantine text of the lectionary may offer sometimes much older textual variants (Aland 2022, p. 16).

1.2. A Non-Continuous, Highly Selective Text, and Relevant Omissions

In addition to the late period of formation of the BL, another specific feature, and even more relevant for this paper, is the fact that the BL offers an non-continuous biblical text. Biblical pericopes are truncated selections from the biblical books, chosen for Sundays, feasts, and weekdays with little sensitivity to the whole biblical text, to what remains before and after the pericope. If the first generation of BL researchers were mainly philologists, historians and biblical scholars without much interest in the liturgical context, who analyzed rather the content of the pericopes and the variability of the biblical text throughout history, today the attention of researchers is equally directed to what the lectionaries do not contain. In other words, what is not read in the liturgical context but is contained in a biblical book can teach us a lot about the Byzantine world and the way in which the Byzantines understood and interpreted the biblical texts:

“This unique characteristic has now been embraced within the ‘new‘ textual criticism as scholars endeavor to plumb the depths of the whole MS tradition and try to discover more about the social milieu of those who used the text. […] Within biblical textual criticism, there is now a better understanding that noncontinuous text forms can not only illuminate early church practices and interpretation of Scripture but also help to determine MS relationships and offer evidence for the creation of variants. […] Lectionaries played an integral part in the life of the church and the development of the biblical text. Lectionaries, as bearers of the Byzantine text, offer unique glimpses into how the church in Byzantium understood and used Scripture throughout the centuries in public worship. The field of textual criticism has only begun to mine the riches of these biblical artifacts and discover therein a distinctive lens into the Byzantine church, those who worshiped there and how they understood and experienced Scripture.”

(Paulson 2022, pp. 126, 128)

Of course, we do not have reports from the working sessions of those who thought about the structure of the BL and this is not the work of a single person, but a result settled over time and conditioned by historical and theological factors which existed in the middle Byzantine era. If this context shaped the structure of the biblical reading system, it means that observing the difference between what was selected to be read in worship and what was not selected, teaches us many relevant things about Scripture and its interpretation in Byzantium.

Moreover, it is not just a matter of the simple difference between the text selected or not selected for liturgical use. By effectively following the content of the Perikopierung process (Benini 2020, p. 64), we can observe that some passages are not read in worship and that behind the selections and omissions there are sometimes tendentious issues. Moreover, it is not only about entire passages that are effectively skipped, but also about small verses that were skipped or simply ignored, but which are an integral part of the biblical pericope—the so-called Sinnabschnitt. Thus, one can speak not only of a liturgical interpretation of Scripture but also of obscuring and re-writing Scripture for its use in the Byzantine liturgical context, a reality that led to the omission of some biblical texts and ultimately to the distortion of the biblical message in certain respects (Rapp and Külzer 2019, pp. 7–9).

1.3. The Neglected Liturgical, Theological, and Historical Context

Alexopoulos rightly stated that “the worshipper is exposed to the Scriptures in the liturgical context, and his/her understanding of the Scriptures is formed through the accompanying ritual context, including hymnography and iconography.” (Alexopoulos 2022, p. 244) In order to understand more deeply the motivation behind the selection present in the BL the researcher must consider the rich liturgical context consisting of hymnography, iconography, hagiography, and homilies that always accompany biblical readings (Olkinuora 2015, p. 19). At the same time, the historical context with its church legislation should not be ignored (Perșa 2023) because the political situation in Byzantium often influenced the creation of hymnography and implicitly induced a certain perspective on biblical texts (Demacopoulos 2025, pp. 15–16).

All of this constitutes the theological, social, and concretely historical atmosphere in which the system of biblical readings in the Byzantine liturgy crystallized. And it is well known that the period in which the Byzantine lectionary appears is marked by a strongly anti-Jewish atmosphere, which can be seen precisely in the hymnography and the other media mentioned, which is why I use the term anti-Jewish animus in my study. It is not about a single author or a single category of hymns, homiletic or hagiographic texts, but it is about an entire theological atmosphere that had a very strong impact on the entirety of Byzantine literary and artistic creation.

The fact that those hymns, the lectionary, the iconography, and the Byzantine hagiography which constitutes the complex context of the crystallization process of the BLs are used to this day in Orthodox churches makes our theme even more relevant.

1.4. Aim of the Study

The aim of this study is to draw attention to a neglected dimension in research on the BL, namely the role played by the strong animosity toward Judaism at the end of the first Christian millennium, a period that coincides with the crystallization of the system of biblical readings in the Byzantine liturgy.

Beyond current debates about the anti-Jewish elements inherent in certain New Testament texts themselves (Schreiber and Schumacher 2015), my particular interest lies in how the BL underscores and perpetuates these negative portrayals of Jews. Positive biblical references to Israel are downplayed or obscured, while readings that emphasize opposition to Christ and the apostles are highlighted and boldly integrated into the liturgical proclamation.

2. Materials, Methods and Limits of This Study

One of the major difficulties of the undertaking proposed in this study is the lack of critical editions. We do not possess critical editions of the BL—except for certain manuscripts—just as we lack critical editions of liturgical hymnography, hagiography, and Byzantine homilies, apart from isolated cases. The corpus of texts is far too vast, and research is still at an early stage, so that critical editions and historical studies exist only for fragments of the aforementioned categories. The pericopes of the BL discussed here contain the so called textus receptus or the text used today in the liturgical services of the Greek speaking Eastern Orthodox Church. Because historical studies on the litugical books of the Byzantine Rite are just emerging (Alexopoulos et al. 2025, pp. 3–4), and a list of different editions in Greek of the Apostolos and Evangeliarion is an impossible task for this short paper, we use here the BL available today online via the Greek Orthodox Church of America, Ecumenical Patriarchate.1

The focus of this study, however, is directed primarily toward the content of the texts. For this reason, I will simply use the textus receptus of the BL currently in use and I will proceed in the same way with the hymnographic texts. I will rely on a single hagiographic work, but one that is highly relevant for understanding the anti-Jewish animus in Byzantine society at the end of the first millennium: The Life of Saint Basil the Younger (Sullivan et al. 2014). Of course, there are already studies dealing with Byzantine liturgical anti-Judaism (Groen 2008; Ioniță 2024; Ioniță and Tobler 2024; Bucur 2022), yet no studies have so far traced the red thread that connects the reasons behind the selection of biblical texts in the liturgical framework to the complex context of Byzantine society and the phenomenon of theological and liturgical anti-Judaism

The thesis of this study is that Byzantine anti-Judaism played an important role in the selection of the biblical lectionary pericopes, without which the process of their crystallization cannot be fully understood. The lectionary influenced the perception of the biblical text in Byzantium not only through the omission of entire pericopes or of certain verses, but also through their shadowing or obscuring. By obscuring I mean the fact that some biblical texts were appointed to be read on Sundays, while others were assigned to weekdays, when very few Christians are present at the services and could hear these passages. In what follows, I will analyze several passages from each of the two main categories of biblical readings used in worship: the Gospel and the Epistle. Although some scholars argue that at least during the first eight centuries there were also Old Testament readings at the Sunday liturgy in the Eastern Roman Empire, the so-called “triple-lection theory” is currently highly disputed (Engberg 2025, p. 154). I will restrict the analysis to the Evangeliarion and the Apostolos, because including the case of Old Testament readings (the Prophetologion) would be too complex and would require a separate study.

I will limit myself to the Gospel of Matthew and the Epistle to the Romans because Matthew is the most frequently read Gospel within the Byzantine Lectionary and, at the same time, contains a high anti-Judaic potential. Even Jewish scholars have drawn attention to the need for a revision of the Lectionary, since the same biblical texts can receive a very different interpretation simply because of small details related to the liturgical setting (Levine and Brettler 2025, p. 233).

Thus, on the one hand, I have chosen two examples from Matthew 21 and 26 because both deal with the relationship between Jesus and the people, particularly the leaders of the Jewish people: by omitting certain verses from the biblical pericope within the Byzantine Lectionary, a particular negative image is created of the entire Jewish people—an intention also present in hymnographic and hagiographic texts that I use in support of this thesis. The condemnation of the whole Jewish people, and not only of its leaders, is a Christian interpretation that developed alongside the conflicts of the 7th century in Palestine, and it is precisely this vision that remains a constant in Christian theology concerning Judaism.

On the other hand, I have chosen the text from Romans 11 and the way it is presented, read, and heard in Byzantine worship, because this is the only biblical rumination that stands in contrast to the critical texts from the Gospels. What the faithful hear at the Divine Liturgy on Sunday—what passages are placed in the spotlight in the Sunday Byzantine Lectionary, and which parts of this Pauline debate are made audible—becomes highly relevant for us today.

In the liturgical context, such biblical passages, with additional liturgical constraints, were not neutral, they were accompanied by hymnography, hagiography and patristic interpretations that framed the “Jews” as enemies of Christ and contrasted them with the “new Israel,” the Church. Over centuries, this helped cement anti-Jewish attitudes in Byzantine Christian identity, which becomes increasingly narrow towards the end of the first millennium. (Demacopoulos 2025, p. 160).

3. Identifying the Anti-Jewish Animus of the Byzantine Lectionary

It requires little effort to notice that the Passion narratives, as read in the Byzantine tradition, place particular emphasis on the role of “the Jews” and the crowd’s cry, “His blood be upon us and upon our children” (Matt 27:25). Historically, this verse—prominently positioned within the liturgical cycle—was invoked to support the charge of collective Jewish guilt for the crucifixion (Meiser 2018, pp. 221–40). Similarly, parables such as the Parable of the Wicked Tenants (Matt 21:33–46) are included in the cycle. Patristic homilies often interpret this passage allegorically: Israel is seen as rejecting both the prophets and Christ, with the “vineyard” consequently transferred to the Church. Another striking example is the reading from Acts 6–7, recounting Stephen’s speech condemning the “stiff-necked” people who resisted the Holy Spirit—a speech that culminates in his martyrdom at the hands of a Jewish crowd. Within the lectionary framework, this text reinforced the motif of continuity between Israel’s rejection of the prophets and its rejection of Christ and his followers.

Looking at the BL pericopes, the Catholic liturgist Marco Benini observes the freedom (Freiheit) that characterizes the process of choosing the biblical text for the liturgical reading in the BL (Benini 2020, p. 145), and Gregory Paulson politely notices that in the BL “there are some interesting omissions” (Paulson 2022, p. 116). This “freedom” can be understood in both a positive and a negative sense. On the positive side stand the interpolations and harmonizations. Holy Week provides a key example. The evangelists’ accounts are sometimes woven together so that the faithful hear a more complete narrative. The goal is not philological fidelity but liturgical pedagogy: Scripture is proclaimed in such a way as to emphasize theological meaning over literary integrity. Such freedom serves to highlight certain theological emphases, as the BL often elevates Christological, typological, or eschatological aspects by selecting verses that reinforce those themes.

On the other hand, the negative manifestation of this “freedom” consists of deliberate omissions, shifts in emphasis, and the silencing of inconvenient passages. Entire pericopes or individual verses may be left aside, especially those that present a more positive image of Israel or that complicate the dominant theological reading of the text. By contrast, passages underscoring the opposition of “the Jews” to Christ and the apostles are prominently included, sometimes even repeated within the cycle. Thus, the same mechanism that creates rich theological syntheses also contributes to shaping a liturgical biblical canon marked by polemical emphases and by a selective reception of Scripture.

Shortly said, we may encounter omissions of entire passages. Certain readings are excluded from the cycle, meaning that an ordinary churchgoer—who depends almost entirely on the lectionary—may never hear them. Other biblical texts might be “shadowed” because they were meant to be read during the week, when so few people have the chance to hear them. This “shadowing” is significant, since it shapes the community’s “oral canon” of Scripture. At the same time, we may encounter omissions within pericopes: verses may be skipped, often to avoid theological or pastoral difficulties (e.g., harsh anti-Jewish polemics, difficult sayings about judgment, or passages that seem redundant in a liturgical setting). All of this points towards pastoral or liturgical practicality, because not everything could fit into the calendar. Some omissions may be simply pragmatic, but their cumulative effect still creates a selective hearing of the Bible.

3.1. Evangeliarion or the Gospel Lectionary

The Gospel Lectionary was regarded as the most important book in Byzantine tradition (Jordan 2025, p. 73). To probe more deeply into its content—and to understand the reasoning behind the selection of pericopes, as well as the “freedom” and the “interesting omissions” noted by Benini and Paulson—we must examine some particular passages. Although the examples are many, this study will focus on two pericopes from the Gospel according to Matthew, which are especially significant for the field of Jewish-Christian interaction.

3.1.1. Matthew 26:3–5—Omitting the Biblical Text

Despite the later critiques of the Chicago Lectionary Project (Dolezal 1996, pp. 128–41), David Pellet had already attempted, in his 1954 doctoral dissertation, to understand the logic of the Holy Week lectionary system (Pellet 1954, pp. 1–105). He observed that the Gospel of Matthew was the preferred text and noted that repetitions and interpolations from the other Gospels were sometimes inserted to enrich the narrative with further details about the sufferings of Jesus. Pellet was also the first to remark that one pericope from Matthew 26 ends with verse 2, while the following lection begins with verse 6, omitting verses 3–5 entirely, even though the tendency during Holy Week was to read almost the whole passion narrative. At the time he concluded, “there is no apparent reason why the next lection was begun at 26:6, omitting verses 3–5” (Pellet 1954, p. 40).

This remark immediately drew my attention, and I wanted to examine what those omitted verses actually contain. Indeed, a worshiper attending the service would most likely never notice this omission unless he or she already knew the biblical text by heart. If we take a closer look at these verses omitted by the Byzantine lectionary, I believe we can now suggest a plausible reason for their exclusion. But first, let us consider what the verses actually say:

³ Then the chief priests and the elders of the people assembled in the palace of the high priest, whose name was Caiaphas,⁴ and they plotted to arrest Jesus in some sly way and kill him.⁵ “But not during the Feast,” they said, “or there may be a riot among the people.”

(Mat 26:3–5 NIB)

At first glance, these verses may appear harmless, and one might struggle to find a serious reason for their omission. Yet their deliberate exclusion by those who determined the limits of the pericopes in the BL suggests a conscious avoidance. The verses in question portray the possibility that the people might revolt against the chief priests, elders, and the high priest.

This detail is highly relevant for my argument since it highlights an internal conflict within the Jewish community, between the hierarchy and the people. By contrast, the dominant theological atmosphere in the Byzantine Empire, especially after the Iconoclast period, when the lectionary reached its final form, favored the notion that the Jewish people as a whole were under God’s curse. I will return to this point and develop my explanation further after considering a second example. This second case, also drawn from the Gospel of Matthew and bearing similar content, will reinforce the argument as the two omissions are placed side by side.

3.1.2. Matthew 21, 43–46—Omitting the Biblical Text

The second example comes from the 13th Sunday after Pentecost, when the BL prescribes the Parable of the Householder, who planted a vineyard and entrusted it to tenants, yet the tenants failed in their duties and even killed the householder’s son. In the biblical text, the parable forms a single literary unit spanning Matthew 21:33–46. Modern Bibles and commentaries and even Orthodox editions of the Bible typically present it as a complete narrative from verse 33 to verse 46. (OSB 2008, 1311 and Cleenewerck 2015, p. 98) However, the BL deliberately truncates this unit at verse 42, omitting the final three verses (Roddy 2010, p. 65). Let us take a look at the content of those verses:

⁴¹ “He will bring those wretches to a wretched end,” they replied, “and he will rent the vineyard to other tenants, who will give him his share of the crop at harvest time.” ⁴² Jesus said to them, “Have you never read in the Scriptures: “The stone the builders rejected has become the capstone; the Lord has done this, and it is marvelous in our eyes?”

⁴³ “Therefore I tell you that the kingdom of God will be taken away from you and given to a people who will produce its fruit. ⁴⁴ He who falls on this stone will be broken to pieces, but he on whom it falls will be crushed.” ⁴⁵ When the chief priests and the Pharisees heard Jesus’ parables, they knew he was talking about them. ⁴⁶ They looked for a way to arrest him, but they were afraid of the crowd because the people held that he was a prophet.

(Mt 21:41–46 NIB)

In my view, these final verses omitted in the BL convey crucial information for understanding the role of Jesus Christ within the pericope, within the Gospel of Matthew, and—most importantly—in the hearing of Byzantine and Orthodox laity over the centuries. When the parable ends at verse 42, the audience retains the impression that the tenants—interpreted as the Jews in patristic exegesis—“will come to a wretched end,” and that the householder—God—“will rent the vineyard to other tenants,” that is, the Gentile Christian people. Because the tenants in the parable “rejected the Stone”—Jesus—the kingdom of God is taken away from them and given to those who will produce its fruits, namely the Christian people and the Christian empire, not both Jews and Christians (Levine and Brettler 2011, p. 39). This strong supersessionist interpretation, present in patristic writings from the earliest periods (Wüthrich 2025, pp. 52–63), should be critically re-evaluated in contemporary theology and liturgy (Vlach 2009 versus Azar 2022, pp. 1–25).

Yet it is important to remember that the Byzantine liturgy has undergone almost no official reform in the past millennium (Pott 2010), and scholarly discussion of anti-Jewish elements in the Orthodox liturgy remains at a very incipient stage (Ioniță and Tobler 2024, pp. 7–15). Had the Byzantine Lectionary included the final three verses of this pericope, the perception and interpretation of the parable would have been significantly altered by “restoring the full reading, the hearer of this pericope would understand that the conflict is no longer between God and “the Jews” as a whole, but between Jesus and the leadership of the Jewish people, that there is an inner Jewish conflict, while most of the Jewish people, according to Matthew, actually considered Jesus to be a prophet.” (Roddy 2010, p. 67).

The same is true with the above-mentioned pericope from Holy Week and other biblical texts that are beyond the scope of this study.

3.1.3. Byzantine Anti-Jewish Hymnography

As noted earlier, biblical and liturgical scholars have collaborated more fruitfully over the past decade. However, this interdisciplinary work must continue, particularly in the case of the BL. As D. Galadza emphasizes, it is important “to point out the significance of liturgical books other than lectionaries (i.e., hymnals, typika, or synaxaria) and liturgical texts other than biblical texts (i.e., hymnography or liturgical rubrics) for the study of lectionaries” (Galadza 2022, p. 127). For this reason, I argue that examining anti-Jewish hymnography composed contemporaneously with the BL can illuminate the role of the anti-Jewish theological atmosphere in the crystallization of the lectionary.

Hymnographers such as Theodore Studite, writing in ninth-century Constantinople, addressed Jews and Judaea in explicitly polemical terms: “Christ, whom you sought to stone, comes to you once more, O murderous Judaea (φονεύτριαν Ιουδαίαν)….” The Jews are described as “murderers of God” (θεοκτόνος), as those who “nailed You to the Cross and pierced Your side with a spear.” In these compositions, the Jews, collectively, bear responsibility for the death of Jesus. Other hymnographic texts reinforce the idea that the Church has now become the new Israel, composed primarily of Gentiles. All Jews, collectively, are portrayed as unbelieving, adulterous, and condemned, and their synagogue is rejected.

„Let us also come today, all the new Israel, the Church of the Gentiles (ὀ νέος Ἰσραήλ, ἠ ἔξ ἐθνῶν Ἐκκλησία), and let us cry with the Prophet Zechariah: Rejoice greatly, O daughter of Zion…” (Triodion, the 2nd Stichiron, Palm Sunday) „…O unbelieving and adulterous generation of the Jews, draw near and look on Him whom Isaiah saw: He is come for our sakes in the flesh. See how He weds the New Zion, for she is chaste, and rejects the Synagogue that is condemned…”

(Triodion, the 3rd Stichiron of Laudes, Palm Sunday)

In my view, all types of hymnography composed and subsequently incorporated into liturgical books, such as the Triodion, created a specific theological atmosphere that almost certainly influenced the “authors” of the BL. This influence can be seen in their decisions to truncate biblical texts at particular points or omit certain words, shaping the pericopes so that they aligned with a broader theological framework marked by anti-Jewish sentiment.

3.2. Apostolos, Praxapostolos or Epistles

The liturgical book containing the pericopes from the Epistles and the Acts of the Apostles was called the Apostolos or Praxapostolos. Compared to the Gospel Lectionary, the Apostolos has been even less studied. Due to the “scarcity of extant pre-tenth century Apostolos codices” (Gibson 2025, p. 119), I have drawn, as an external reference, on an example from hagiographical literature composed in mid-tenth-century Constantinople to help understand the reasoning behind the Perikopierung. I must emphasize that my focus is on the living text of the Apostolos that is, the received tradition as it is currently used in the liturgical framework of the Orthodox Church, rather than on a specific manuscript. A study examining differences among manuscript traditions would be highly valuable, but this remains a desideratum.

If the examples from the Evangeliarion illustrate omissions in the Sunday Lectionary, in the case of the Apostolos I will highlight the relevant phenomenon where negative texts about the Jews were assigned to Sunday readings, when they would be heard by a broader congregation, while more positive texts were scheduled for weekdays, when very few monks—or almost no one—would hear them in a liturgical context. For this purpose, I use as an example Romans 9–11, which biblical scholarship has identified and reassessed as one of the most important Pauline and New Testament texts regarding the relationship between the Church and Judaism. This text was largely ignored or misinterpreted for a long time in the history of the Church (Ioniță 2018, pp. 113–23).

3.2.1. Romans 9–11—Obscuring and Subverting the Biblical Text

On the fifth Sunday after Pentecost, the lectionary prescribes the fragment from Romans 10:1–10, which includes the notorious Pauline claim that “Christ is the end of the Law” (Romans 10:4). The selection of this particular text for Sunday reading, while the remainder of chapter 11—with its positive statements about Israel—is scheduled for weekdays, provides another clue to the theological logic underlying the BL.

It is worth recalling that the second-century heretic Marcion regarded Romans 10:4 as the only genuinely authentic Pauline text within the larger argument of Romans 9–11. Assigning a text to weekday readings largely relegates it to the shadows, since weekday liturgies are attended by the relatively few people who celebrate the Divine Liturgy daily. Although Marcion was condemned for his views on Judaism, the Old Testament, and his deliberate exclusion of any positive statements about Jews from the New Testament, later patristic tradition likewise struggled with the persistence of Judaism within the Christian empire (Seppälä 2019, pp. 180–98). Consequently, Orthodox theologians today acknowledge a strong, enduring “Marcionite” tendency within Byzantine and Orthodox liturgy and theology which not only obscures but even subverts the genuine biblical message (Ioniță 2013, p. 84).

3.2.2. Byzantine Anti-Jewish Hagiography

In support of my reading of this biblical text in the BL I would like to draw attention to a hagiographic work from tenth-century Constantinople that, in my view, vividly expresses the theological animus of that period: The Life of Saint Basil the Younger (Sullivan et al. 2014), recently edited and translated at Dumbarton Oaks. The text recounts that one day Gregory, a disciple of Saint Basil, was reflecting on his own sins and on the fate that awaited him at the Last Judgment, when a series of questions suddenly arose regarding the fate of the Jews. Gregory recalls Abraham, Isaac, Jacob, and Moses, who “revealed themselves as honored and pious before the Lord.” He then reviews the entire history of salvation, highlighting its key figures and the miraculous deeds of the prophets, before posing a rhetorical question to himself:

And were not Micah and Zephaniah and Amos and Ezekiel, Isaiah and Daniel, together with all the holy prophets, pleasing to God through this faith and did they not attain His kingdom? And do not we who reverently profess the Christian faith honor them and revere their represented images? So how is their faith evil and ours good? Their faith is surely good, since they do not place faith in idols, but in God Who made heaven and earth.

(Sullivan et al. 2014, p. 347)

This is the conclusion that Gregory reaches. The fact that the author notes these reflections as the outward expression of a continuous biblical reading is highly significant. Any careful reader of these pages (Part IV, 1–4) cannot fail to notice the correspondences between these passages and the ruminations of the Apostle Paul regarding his own people, as expressed in Romans 9:1–5. The frequent quotations of this text in The Life clearly indicate that the author was well acquainted with the Pauline epistle. Gregory appears inclined—drawing on his knowledge of the entire biblical corpus—to conclude that the Jews who killed Jesus acted out of ignorance, and that their descendants should not be condemned. Overcome with concern, Gregory seeks counsel from his spiritual father. With his characteristic sarcasm, Saint Basil immediately labels Gregory a “man of Jewish conviction,” a comment that underscores his own deep engagement with prophetic literature and the Old Testament:

Behold, the man of Jewish conviction (“ὁ τὰ ἰουδαïκὰ φρονῶν”) has come to us! Behold the one who has studied the entire Old Testament and learned from it that the accursed Jews hold their faith correctly, those […] who belong to the party of the Antichrist. […] Today has come to us the fine explicator of the Divine Scriptures, their exegete and most precise interpreter, who idolizes the prophets and […] maintains that the Jews now correctly hold their faith and belief […].

(Sullivan et al. 2014, p. 351)

Thus, even though Basil’s young disciple has private access to the Bible and reads the entire text, he not only encounters what is publicly proclaimed in the Church, but his understanding is immediately corrected by his experienced spiritual father. Both Saint Paul, in his Epistle to the Romans, and the author of this Vita make use of the “hardening” tradition, recalling that the heart of the Jewish people was hardened. Yet the outcomes of these two writings are markedly different. While the author of the Vita employs the hardening motif to depict the miserable state of the Jews at the Last Judgment and to justify their ultimate punishment, Paul directs his audience to recognize that Israel’s hardening is of divine origin and serves the deeper purpose of calling the Gentiles to faith (Romans 10:11–15). Using the same prophetic texts concerning Israel, the Vita author casts all Jews into the fires of Gehenna, whereas Paul exhorts the faithful—illustrated through the example of the olive tree (11:17–24)—not to render definitive judgments regarding the mystery of Israel (11:25). Paul insists that the gifts and calling of Israel will not be revoked (11:28) and that all Israel will ultimately be redeemed (11:26).

The tradition of the hardening of the heart, which also appears in Byzantine hymnography, finds clear parallels in the Vita: “O blind fools, witless and unwise sons of Israel…” In both the hymnographic tradition and the hagiographical text examined here, Christian authors employ prophetic language to justify Israel’s condemnation and the damnation of all Jews, while reserving the positive aspects for Christians. This interpretive strategy, however, departs significantly from the biblical message and from Paul’s argumentation in Romans 9–11. If we consider the large dissemination of this hagiographical text among the Slavic world and later among the Romanian countries, we can grasp the impact of such words among the Eastern Christian believers.

4. Discussion

Research on the anti-Jewish elements in the Byzantine, or in the contemporary Eastern Orthodox, liturgy is still in its early stages. Some scholars have emphasized that, within the vast corpus of Byzantine hymnography, explicitly anti-Jewish elements are relatively limited (Ioniță 2024). While prayers and iconography generally avoid anti-Jewish statements, poetry and homiletics more often give voice and space to strikingly negative sentiments and imprecations. This hostile discourse, which arose in the highly conflictual context of the middle Byzantine period (Demacopoulos 2025), has remained insufficiently addressed within the Eastern Orthodox Church. Both Orthodox and non-Orthodox scholars have called attention to this situation:

“While other religious traditions have been sensitive to the implications of such language as being contrary to the life of the Gospel and have taken measures to transform these readings, the Orthodox tradition as a whole solidly retains its anti-Jewish language and thus presents it de facto as dogma.”

(Roddy 2010, p. 67)

“The Orthodox liturgy of Good Friday […] represents a concrete proof of the religious indoctrination of the anti-Jewish content, legitimized over time by its inclusion in the liturgy and its transmission to the faithful by the hierarchy and clerics”.

(Taneburgo 2017, p. 163)

However, the present paper argues that the anti-Judaism of the Orthodox liturgy is not confined to Good Friday, nor can it be reduced to the relatively small percentage of explicitly anti-Jewish texts within the overall corpus of Byzantine liturgical writings. Rather, the anti-Jewish animus permeates almost every aspect of worship, including the very liturgical performance of Scripture itself. The Orthodox scholar Silviu Bunta has suggested that one must “approach Scripture on its own terms.” This means

“…the same as to approach it as the fathers did—is to ask questions that are not method-based and objective, but rather referent-based and subjective. These questions recover the proper direction between text and listener: the listener is no longer targeting the text, but the listener offers himself up as the target of the text. And fundamentally this is the ‘Scripture on its own terms’: not the Scripture as the listener approaches it, but the Scripture as it approaches the listener.”

(Bunta 2022, p. 232)

But how can this principle be applied when we clearly see tendentious hands at work in the selection of biblical texts for the Byzantine Liturgy—hands that deliberately avoid positive assertions about Jews and Judaism? And, furthermore, how could this principle be meaningfully applied if we identify ourselves with nothing other than Israel itself? The same scholar continues:

“The listener gains not a perspective, nor vocabulary, neither erudition, but a life that comes with its own fluency. With living a life different from one’s own—the life of the One-who-is—comes the fluency of that life, the one fluency of Tradition. This fluency is first and foremost expressed in worship, as Israel has already learned, in the worship inherited from theophanies and grounded in heaven.” (Bunta 2022, p. 241). “Many fathers, such as Maximus the Confessor and Gregory Palamas, will state in no unclear terms that discursive theology is not part of the Orthodox Tradition. Their claim and the texts analyzed here suggest that this is so in continuity with the theophanic experience of Israel. For Israel—and this is already expressed in the language of ‘covenant’—to be part of its identity meant to live a life passed through generations and handed down from heaven, and not to subscribe to certain beliefs and practices.”

(Bunta 2022, p. 238)

At this point, we realize that the old debate—especially prominent during the Protestant Reformation—on Bible versus Tradition becomes relevant once again. For if we speak only of Tradition and of the “theophanic experience” of Israel continued in the Church, we risk losing sight of the principle of authority: who is actually interpreting the biblical text correctly? An Orthodox theologian would answer: the Fathers. A Protestant one would say: the Bible itself should be read by every Christian ignoring any previous interpretation. But then why do the Fathers neglect important biblical passages such as Romans 11? Or why do they take anti-Judaism for granted?

Serafim Seppälä has dared to answer this difficult question, suggesting that even the Fathers might be wrong. As so often, the truth lies in the middle: we need the patristic interpretation of the Bible, and we are indeed enriched by the numerous voices of every Christian century; yet we must acknowledge that they interpreted Scripture within the limits of their own historical context. Their insights can still prove valuable for us, but at the same time we must confront them with the biblical text itself—because Scripture is, before any spiritual or personal experience of God, the concrete Word of God.

This is why Stylianopoulos rightly stated, in my opinion, that,

“The Church does not possess the Bible in such a way that it can do whatever it pleases with it, for example through virtual neglect or excessive allegorisation. […] The Bible as the supreme record of revelation is the indisputable norm of the Church’s faith and practice […]. The neglect of the Bible and the silencing of its prophetic witness are inimical to the Church’s evangelical vibrancy and sense of mission in the world. […] The Church in every generation is called to maintain the primacy and centrality of the Bible in its life, always attentive, repentant and obedient to God’s word.”

(Stylianopoulos 2009, p. 25)

If we accept such an attitude towards the Scripture, then we need to read the whole text. If we read selected pericopes, we have to read the whole pericope and not only a truncated part. And here the presence of anti-Judaism simply does not have any place.

Of course, future research should closely analyze and compare as many Lectionary manuscripts as possible to see exactly if the situation presented here and present in the received tradition overwhelmingly represents the lections or not.

5. Conclusions

After decades of scholarly engagement with the liturgical reception and interpretation of Scripture, the present study suggests that the Byzantine Liturgy—and particularly the Byzantine Lectionary—constitutes a complex site of theological mediation rather than a neutral instrument of biblical transmission. While the lectionary tradition undoubtedly preserved and sacralized the scriptural text within the rhythm of worship, it also reveals interpretive patterns that, at certain points, constrained or redirected aspects of the biblical message.

An examination of three selected pericopes from the Evangeliarion and Apostolos highlights two recurrent dynamics in this process: first, the omission or abridgment of passages whose inclusion might have complicated the prevailing theological narratives of the period; second, the marginalization of Pauline texts expressing a more affirmative view of Israel by assigning them to liturgical contexts of limited visibility. Such tendencies suggest that anti-Jewish motifs were not confined to hymnographic or homiletic texts only during Holy Week but also found structural expression within the lectionary system itself. In this respect, the Byzantine Lectionary—often described as the Church’s “living Bible”—embodies a selective hermeneutic that occasionally privileged polemical coherence over the full range of the scriptural witness.

The implications of this observation are primarily hermeneutical rather than confessional. The question is not one of indictment but of interpretation: to what extent do inherited liturgical frameworks condition the ways in which Scripture is heard and understood within ecclesial space? Addressing this question requires neither the abandonment of Tradition nor its uncritical idealization, but a recognition that the liturgical tradition of the Church is historically situated and interpretively active. In this regard, Amy-Jill Levine and Marc Zvi Brettler’s proposal for contemporary Christian engagement with Scripture is particularly instructive:

“Christians might invent midrash to help contextualize the anti-Pharisaic or antisemitic passages, or at least mention the ‘Good Pharisees,’ such as Nicodemus, Gamaliel, and, yes, Paul. At the very least, they should picture a Jew in the room when they preach and teach. If they would not make certain statements in the company of a Jew, whose very presence can help them consider how a text or commentary might sound, they should not make them at all.”

(Levine and Brettler 2025, p. 233)

Their suggestion underscores the ethical and hermeneutical responsibility inherent in all acts of scriptural interpretation, reminding contemporary readers and liturgists alike that the hearing of Scripture is always relational and never ideologically neutral. Further critical theological reexamination of the Byzantine Lectionary’s formation and reception, informed by such perspectives, may thus contribute to a more comprehensive understanding of how Scripture continues to function as a living word within Byzantine and post-Byzantine worship.