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This page will contain the daily readings from Holy Scripture for the weekdays of Great Lent, together with the Prokeimena and the Troparia for the Prophecy. All the translations are made from the Christian Old Testament, commonly known as the Septuagint, which has been the Christian text since the days of the Apostles. It was only in the sixteenth century that certain Christian bodies rejected this text in favour of translations based on the Hebrew Masoretic tradition. The Orthodox Churches have never taken this step. I should perhaps stress that these translations are provisional and in no way to be considered as definitive. Moreover they are translations of the texts as they are used in the contemporary Orthodox Church, and are in not intended to be translations of the Old Greek, or even of the Septuagint, as professional scholars understand these terms. It is perhaps worth pointing out that translating the Septuagint for use in the Orthodox Church is an exacting task and cannot be achieved by taking an existing English version made from the Hebrew, such as the New King James Version, or even the New Revised Standard Version, and altering it where the manual edition of Rahlfs differs from it. The Greek text frequently differs quite markedly from the Hebrew and this is particularly noticeable in the prophecies of Isaias and the book of Proverbs, both of which are used in Lent. For the latter we do not yet have a full critical edition. Moreover, the text in the Triodion sometimes differs from that in available editions of the Greek Bible. Furthermore the printed editions of the Triodion differ from time to time among themselves. The Prokeimena that accompany the Lenten readings form a lectio continua of the Psalter, and it is the custom on the Holy Mountain to give out not only the Tone of the Prokeimenon, but also the number of the Psalm. In English the only easily available version is that made by a pious evangelical English baronet in the nineteenth century. Unfortunately the Greek text from which he made his version is often not that used by the Church, and his version needs to be used with caution. Rubrics in red are taken from the Triodion, except for those in square brackets, which are editorial and represent the use of the Holy Mountain of Athos. Because HTML does not easily accept footnotes, I have added in blue in square brackets a few notes on the text and translation of the readings. Having now found a way of incorporating footnotes directly from Microsoft Word, the notes to the readings for the sixth week are somewhat fuller than those for the first five. |
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All texts and
translations on this page are copyright to This page was last updated on 03 November 2008 |