I was browsing some blogs and ran across a comment which intrigued me:
Eastern Orthodoxy has no Biblical scholarship whatsoever. Orthodox appreciation of Scripture is about at the level where Catholic appreciation was when Pope Pius IX (?) was still issuing encyclicals to the effect that it was nearly a sin to produce or read vulgar language translations instead of the Vulgate (the original vulgar language translation).
The standard Orthodox line I've heard in regards to it (Biblical scholarship) is, "The Comma Johanneum is legitimate because we believe in it" albeit from Orthodox priests, not scholars.
From those sort of statements I induced that the entire faith tradition of Orthodoxy was positively hostile to any kind of critical scholarship.
Thoughts?
I think these statements badly mischaracterize the Orthodox relationship to 'Biblical scholarship', but they do rather capture the source of the misunderstanding. The thing is, 'Biblical scholarship', particularly textual scholarship arose out of specific context in Western intellectual history that really didn't have much relevence to the East. First, there was the fact that the West, for the most part, completely lost contact with the original Greek text. So when Greek manuscripts began to become available again during the Renaissance, the question naturally arose 'do we stick with the (translated) text we've been using for centuries or do we revisit it in light of this new-old data' (a question obviously completely irrelevent to the Greek East). Then on top of that came the Reformation with its movement away from authoritative Church Tradition and towards a sola scriptura stance. As the primary (or even sole) basis for doctrine became the text of Scripture, it became critically important to establish what the exact text was. Orthodoxy (and Rome) had long been aware of the existence of manuscript variants, but since all interpretation of Scripture was done within the context of the Church's established doctrine, it wasn't seen as that important. If a variant was bad enough that it really altered the meaning, then the manuscript could be corrected (or destroyed) but minor details or those affecting very fine points of meaning were simply not that important because doctrine was established by the whole Tradition of the Church and not by any one single line of Scripture.
In the same context, Orthodoxy had long been aware that the authorship of certain books was 'questionable'. The thing is this was thrashed out in the 2nd-4th centuries and the Church came to the conclusion that books like Hebrews, the Petrine epistles, the Johnnine epistles, may or may not have been written by the ascribed authors, but either way, their content was appropriate to Apostolic doctrine and they could be use authoritatively. In other words, the question of authorship was 'settled' but not in the sense of 'we've proven 2 Peter was actually written by St. Peter' but rather in the sense of 'whether it was written by St. Peter or not' the Church considers it an accurate account of Petrine doctrine. Thus, for us, new evidence or arguments about who did or did not write this or that book may be interesting--but it's not *important*, because the authority of the text is not solely in the author but in the in primatur of the Church.
Thus, in my experience, Orthodoxy is not 'hostile' to Biblical scholarship at all. Orthodox scholars are aware of it and take it into account where it's relevent--we just don't think it's nearly as relevant as many Western Christians think it is.
