Fire baptism over the change of spelling

 

I came across this the other day when I was researching what someone had claimed. The claim was that thousands...or millions, I think, the claim was, had died over a differing interpretation of a Bible verse. In the main, it is not a true claim, but there is a remarkable historical instance where a small revision of a religious text was used as a reason for a lot of deaths. Certainly, other theological issues became pretexts for wars and deaths, but not really claims over the interpretation of a single text. Not even during the Arian crisis was the theology based upon one differing textual interpretation of a single Bible text.

It happened in 17th-century Russia, during the Great Schism of the Russian Orthodox Church. The conflict was not a pretext for a war, but it was a tiny textual dispute that caused tens of thousands of people to voluntarily burn themselves to death.

The text in question was the Eastern Orthodox Liturgical Service Books. 

The Textual Discrepancy

In the 1650s, the head of the Russian Church, Patriarch Nikon, noticed that over centuries of handwritten copying, typographical and translation errors had crept into the Russian service books. He ordered a mandatory correction of the texts to match the original Greek.

The changes were incredibly minor text edits, such as:

1. The Spelling of Jesus: Changing the spelling from Isus (Исус) to Iisus (Иисус).
2. The Creed: Removing a single word from the Nicene Creed. The old text read that the Holy Spirit was "the true Lord and life-giver"; the new text removed the word "true" to match the Greek syntax perfectly. 
3. The Sign of the Cross: Changing the text instructions on how to cross oneself—using two fingers (representing Christ's dual nature) versus three fingers (representing the Trinity).

The entire conflict was how to interpret the sanctity of the text. Unlike so many religious wars, there was not a land to conquer, no money to be made, and no political ambition- the things that were behind much of the anti-Christian claims that so many people make, as Crosby, Stills, Nash sang:

Too many people have lied in the name of Christ
For anyone to heed the call
Too many people have died in the name of Christ
That I can't believe it all
   ---From the song Cathedral "Written by Graham Nash and originally appearing on CSN in 1977. This song is about a trip Nash took to Stonehenge and Winchester cathedral in a Rolls Royce while high on LSD."

 The Two Genuine Interpretations

• The Reformer Interpretation: Patriarch Nikon and the state argued that the text was just a vehicle for meaning. Correcting the grammar and spelling to match the original Greek was a logical, bureaucratic cleanup. 
• The "Old Believer" Interpretation: A massive portion of the population (the Old Believers) interpreted the literal, traditional Russian text as unalterable and divine. To them, changing even a single letter of the name of Jesus or removing a word from the Creed was an act of ultimate apostasy. They genuinely believed that using the new texts would damn their souls to hell and usher in the Antichrist

At a time when the church and state were intrinsically connected, so connected that Russian was actually in the name of the church, this was seen as an actual theological crisis. The state began to brutally persecute the Old Believers for refusing to use the new texts.

As The Encylopedia Britannica says: "The dissenters, sometimes called Raskolniki, were most numerous in the inaccessible regions of northern and eastern Russia (but later also in Moscow itself) and were important in the colonization of these remote areas. Opposed to all change, they strongly resisted the Western innovations introduced by Peter I, whom they regarded as Antichrist. Having no episcopal hierarchy, they split into two groups. One group, the Popovtsy (priestly sects), sought to attract ordained priests and were able to set up an episcopate in the 19th century. The other, the Bezpopovtsy (priestless sects), renounced priests and all sacraments except Baptism. Many other sects developed out of these groups, some with practices considered extravagant."

Some were executed, and in defiance, the Old Believers performed Mass Self-Immolation ("Fire Baptisms"): When government soldiers approached their villages to enforce the new textbooks, entire communities of Old Believers would lock themselves inside their wooden churches and set them on fire. Between 1675 and 1695, historians document that over 20,000 Old Believers burned themselves to death in these mass suicides. They died shouting the old spelling of Jesus's name, completely convinced that their literal interpretation of the old text was the only path to salvation.

This is perhaps the purest example in human history where a difference in text interpretation was not a cynical excuse for a war, but the absolute, direct cause of thousands of deaths.

This is not the end of the story. In Part 2, I will go over a bit more history and the influence of Alexander Dugin's efforts to restore the Russian Othordox church back to power.