Conceding the hypothesis that an addition indeed occurred, the text established in the Orthodox Church can be judged according to literary criteria, according to its use by the Fathers of the Church, etc, — above all according to the traditional understanding of biblical truth. This way the Church perhaps will reject the adverb in the course of time.
As it is, the New Testament of the Orthodox Churches won’t remove anger completely from human life, only the absurd form of it, keeping anger as a rational force, a power that denies forcefully the dark self of a person. Will a saint never feel angry, for any reason whatever? Then Christ is not a saint, because He entered the synagogue and threw all the tables and idols all over the place, as Salinger notes in Franny and Zooey, reminding that the Son of God in the New Testament has nothing to do with syrupy figures of a constantly meek teacher or with the foul mildness rightly rejected by the hero of the novel Catcher in the Rye:
“I can’t even stand ministers. The ones they’ve had at every school I’ve gone to, they all have these Holy Joe voices when they start giving their sermons. God, I hate that. I don’t see why the hell they can’t talk in their natural voice. They sound so phony when they talk.”
It would be a contradiction to adopt uncritically the ‘critical’ editions, the claim that they offer a reliable version — even if they agree sometime with each other on a single text. They can’t enjoy greater authenticity than the original New Testament used in the Greek–speaking Orthodox Churches, approved by community life and a whole tradition that starts in the first churches of the Apostolic period and reaches without interruption to our days.
However, one should care mainly about what Paul says (Cor. I, 2, 15) — personal thinking is not to be replaced by the authority of any text whatever.
In the absence of personal thinking all texts become useless, while thinking as formed in the experience of the Holy Spirit is able to suggest the truthfulness of a particular text without external support. Even beyond this, one must not forget that in ideal conditions the Bible is absolutely useless: how could have ever existed time or reason for reading, if a person’s mind always kept the greatest possible contact with God?
The New Testament Canon was formed to support the memory of the Church, like when we try to keep and strengthen our memory of a friend by reading letters, seeing photographs, etc: it is a body of texts / testimonies for the Incarnation of Christ and the life of the first churches. However, it is not a picture of some distant past: it contributes to the contact with the heart and living truth of the present time, it regards our constant spiritual birthday.
The New Testament is a precious collection of personal memories, a book that is active even when closed, since it heals a mind even if only in the awareness that it contains something so close to a beloved person as His words, His Disciples, emotions, thoughts and wishes. A Church is not a remote audience, we are close to Him getting even closer day by day — to the most real self of ours, to the relationship that defines each of us personally in and beyond any other relationship.
On this foundational understanding of the New Testament as a Place, where we arrive expecting a great help in order to recover memories of our most intimate relationship and genuine existence, intermediate developments may occur too, attempts to think on religious problems, etc.
It is great to open the Bible having specific questions each time to ask, this way gaining a singular strength and inspiration in our reading. Two or three chapters each day can also offer a sort of refreshment, just to breathe the biblical spirit, sometimes before sleep, even to find a phrase to end our day with, to invite its Meaning in our dreams.
Whatever the way one may prefer in reading the Bible, the urge of the Orthodox Liturgy remains always important: Wisdom upright let us listen! The Holy Book reveals its most essential value only when a mind is elevated beyond any particular question and answer.
*
I would have respected the traditional formation of paragraphs, if one existed, but it does not, perhaps because manuscripts are divided only by chapters. Of course, grammar, syntax, vocabulary and any other aspect of the text is the one used by the Ecumenical Patriarchate of Constantinople (1904/12 edition) and all Greek–speaking Orthodox Churches, as corrected by the Church of Greece.[1]
The present edition aims at personal study, which is the reason of using a relatively large typeface contrary to pocket editions that facilitate reading in the liturgy (something rather uncommon in Orthodox Churches), when one needs to stand up. Delenda are enclosed in [brackets,] but there is no reason for passages finally accepted, even after some doubt, to be printed in different font size or in any way marked and suffer some suspicion.