About the middle of the seventeenth
century, in the reign of Alexis, father of Peter the Great, Nikon,
Patriarch of the Russian Greek Church, attempted to correct the
Slavonic Scriptures and service-books. They were full of
interpolations due to ignorance, carelessness, or zeal, and in
order to remedy this state of the texts Nikon procured a number of
the best Greek and Slavonic manuscripts, set the leading and most
devout scholars he could find at work upon them, and caused Russian
Church councils in 1655 and 1666 to promulgate the books thus corrected.
But the same feelings which have wrought so strongly against our
nineteenth-century revision of the Bible acted even more forcibly
against that revision in the seventeenth century. Straightway great
masses of the people, led by monks and parish priests, rose in
revolt. The fact that the revisers had written in the New Testament
the name of Jesus correctly, instead of following the old wrong
orthography, aroused the wildest fanaticism.
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