I. D. Karavidopoulos, The 1904 New Testament Edition of the Ecumenical Patriarchate and Future Perspectives

The question arising now is the following: has the period of liturgical disuniformity ended definitively? Do we hear in the Divine Liturgy or in the sacraments (i.e. in the mysteries), or in the other rituals exactly the same text everywhere? We had the opportunity to point out some characteristic elements featuring the lack of uniformity among the editions of the New Testament available in Greece in the context of last year’s (2003) liturgical conference held in Prokopi, Euboia which was organised by the Committee for the Liturgical Renaissance under the Holy Synod of the Church of Greece.

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The Patriarchal edition of 1904, even though it was based on a limited number of manuscripts and lacked the possibility at that time of being assisted by today’s advances in technology, was the first serious effort in the Orthodox Church to produce a uniform text of the Greek New Testament which has been reproduced for many decades, and is still being reproduced not only by Apostoliki Diakonia but also by other Christian organisations in Greece such as Zoe and Soter, as well as by many other publishing houses.  There are, however, certain minor differences between these editions, and especially between those of the continuous text and the older editions of the liturgical pericopae. The recent edition of the lectionary by the Apostoliki Diakonia,^[4] carried out in collaboration with the Greek Bible Society, is a striking example of absolute agreement and uniformity between the continuous Patriarchal text and the liturgical text of New Testament readings.
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