Introduction

Alexander Pavlovich Lopukhin was born in 1852 in the village of Mityakino, in the province of Saratov, into the family of a village priest, and was formed from the first within the world of the Russian Church. He passed through the Saratov theological seminary and then entered the St. Petersburg Theological Academy, from which he graduated in 1878. A gifted linguist and an omnivorous reader, he was drawn early toward the meeting-point of theology, history, and the modern sciences, and he began writing for church periodicals while still a student.

His life took an unusual turn shortly after his graduation. Around 1879 he was sent across the Atlantic to serve as reader and psalmist at the chapel attached to the Russian diplomatic mission in New York, and he remained in America some two years. The experience left a deep mark on him. He returned not only with a travelogue and a series of essays on religious life in the United States but with the material for his master’s dissertation, a study of the Roman Catholic Church in North America and the causes of its rapid growth, which he defended in 1881. That early exposure to a plural, competitive religious landscape—Catholic, Protestant, and Orthodox living side by side—helped give his later work its characteristic breadth of reference and its habit of engaging other Christian traditions directly rather than at second hand.

Back in St. Petersburg, Lopukhin joined the faculty of the Theological Academy, first as professor in the department of comparative theology and, from the mid-1880s until his death, as professor of ancient civil history—a chair from which he ranged freely across the history, archaeology, and antiquities of the biblical world. He became one of the great editorial workhorses of the Russian Church. He directed several of its leading journals, among them the Church Herald (Tserkovny Vestnik), Christian Reading (Khristianskoe Chtenie), and The Wanderer (Strannik); he translated the popular English lives of Christ and of the Apostle Paul by F. W. Farrar and made them known to Russian readers; he wrote a widely used Biblical History that ran through many editions; and he launched the great Orthodox Theological Encyclopedia, a reference work continued after him by other hands. It was as an appendix to The Wanderer that he undertook the crowning project of his life, the Explanatory Bible.

He did not live to see much of it. Lopukhin died in the village of Tyurisevya, outside St. Petersburg, in the late summer of 1904, at the height of his powers, having completed the commentary on the Mosaic Pentateuch—the first volume—and little more. He was buried at the Nikolskoe cemetery of the Alexander Nevsky Lavra. Under ordinary circumstances the death of the founding editor would have ended such an enterprise. Instead, a group of scholars gathered to finish what he had begun, and they chose to do so under his name. Every subsequent volume was issued with the standing inscription “the edition of the successors of A. P. Lopukhin.”

Among these continuators were biblical scholars and churchmen drawn from the Russian theological academies of St. Petersburg, Kiev, Moscow, and Kazan—professors such as A. A. Glagolev, F. G. Eleonsky, I. G. Troitsky, and A. I. Pokrovsky, and the future bishop Iosif (Petrovykh), among others. Their names, it is worth adding, are not merely a matter of record: they appear inside the commentary itself, where the exposition of a difficult passage will cite the monograph or dissertation of one of the very men then carrying the project forward, so that the work quietly documents its own making. They are, in the fullest sense, the work’s co-authors, and the tradition of naming the whole for Lopukhin is not a fiction but a form of gratitude: he set the plan, the standard, and the tone, and they held to all three across nearly a decade of steady labor, one volume appearing almost every year until the last were issued together on the very eve of the First World War. The reader will meet their hands most clearly in the historical and prophetic books of the Old Testament and across the New, where the same method and the same measured voice continue seamlessly from the volume Lopukhin himself wrote—a continuity of manner so complete that the seam between founder and successors is all but invisible on the page.

The Explanatory Bible belongs to a specific moment in the life of the Russian Church. By the 1890s the Church possessed the Scriptures in the authoritative Slavonic and in the Russian Synodal translation completed a generation earlier, and it possessed a rich patristic heritage of interpretation; what it conspicuously lacked was a single, modern, complete commentary on the whole Bible pitched to the educated layman and parish priest. Western Europe had produced such series in abundance—Catholic and Protestant alike—and the critical scholarship of the nineteenth century, much of it German, was pressing hard questions about the authorship, dating, and historical reliability of the sacred books. Russian readers were increasingly aware of these debates but had few resources in their own language that engaged them from within the faith.

Lopukhin’s aim was to fill exactly that gap. The commentary was published, volume by volume, as a free supplement to The Wanderer, so that it reached a broad subscribing public rather than a narrow academic one. Its purpose was frankly pastoral and catechetical as much as scholarly: to lay open the meaning of every verse of Scripture, to make the accumulated wisdom of the Fathers accessible, and at the same time to give the reader an honest account of what contemporary learning—archaeology, philology, ancient history, the natural sciences—had to say, and how a believing reader might hold the two together. It was meant to strengthen faith by information rather than to insulate it from inquiry. This is why the work never reads as a mere anthology of older exegesis: it was written for people living in the modern world and wrestling with modern questions, and it takes those questions seriously.

The scope of the enterprise is its first astonishment. The Explanatory Bible comments on every book of Scripture as the Slavonic-Russian Bible receives it—the entire Old Testament, including the longer books received in the Orthodox and wider tradition (Tobit, Judith, Wisdom, Sirach, Baruch, the books of Maccabees and of Esdras, and the rest), and the entire New Testament from Matthew through Revelation. In this corpus the work is preserved as a set of separate per-book commentaries, one file to a biblical book, running from Genesis to the Apocalypse. Together they form a continuous exposition of the whole canon.

Each book is treated the same way. A general introduction opens the commentary, discussing the book’s name, its author and date, its occasion, structure, and principal themes, and the questions of authenticity that attach to it. The introduction to Genesis, for example, works through the Hebrew and Greek titles, the ten toldoth or “generations” that give the book its architecture, and the grounds for regarding it as a genuine and unified Mosaic composition; the introduction to the Psalter surveys the names, number, and authorship of the psalms; the introduction to a prophetic book opens with the nature of prophecy itself. The introduction to Matthew weighs what is known of the evangelist, argues for the Gospel’s early date and its address to Jewish readers, and lays out its fourfold plan.

After the introduction the commentary proceeds through the text, taking up short lemmata—a verse or a clause at a time—and expounding them in turn. The method is consistently twofold. On one side it is historical and grammatical: it attends to the sense of the Hebrew or Greek words, to the customs and geography and chronology behind the text, and to the parallels elsewhere in Scripture, which are cited in profusion. On the other side it is patristic and theological: it gathers the interpretations of the Fathers—Ephrem the Syrian, Basil the Great, John Chrysostom, Theodoret, Athanasius, John of Damascus, and the Alexandrians, alongside Western Fathers such as Ambrose, Jerome, and Augustine—and weighs them against one another, often preferring the reading that best unites the literal and the spiritual senses. A single verse of Genesis can thus open onto the whole company of the Fathers on the meaning of “in the beginning,” or onto the identity of the Spirit that “hovered over the waters.” The density of internal cross-reference is a hallmark of the method: a comment on one verse routinely gathers a dozen or more parallels from across both Testaments, so that the reader is continually shown Scripture interpreting Scripture, the Old Testament read forward to Christ and the New read back into its roots.

The proportions shift, naturally, from book to book and Testament to Testament. In the Gospels the commentary attends closely to the harmony and divergence of the four evangelists, to the Palestinian setting, and to the fulfillment of prophecy; in the Pauline epistles it follows the tight movement of the argument clause by clause; in the Psalter and the prophetic books it balances the historical occasion of each poem or oracle against its enduring and Messianic sense. The books received in the wider canon beyond the Hebrew Bible—Tobit and Judith, Wisdom and Sirach, Baruch and the Letter of Jeremiah, the books of Maccabees and of Esdras—are given the same careful treatment as the rest, with introductions that face frankly the questions of their origin and standing. Nothing in the canon as the Slavonic-Russian Bible presents it is passed over.

What gives the commentary its distinctive character is the way it holds this patristic core together with the learning of its own century. It draws freely on the biblical scholarship of the West—Catholic authorities such as Cornely and Vigouroux appear beside the findings of Assyriology and the comparison of Genesis with the newly recovered “Chaldean” creation and flood accounts. Where nineteenth-century criticism had raised sharp challenges—the documentary analysis of the Pentateuch, the division of Isaiah, the late dating of Daniel—the commentary engages them on their merits and generally defends the traditional positions: the Mosaic authorship and unity of the Pentateuch, the single authorship of Isaiah, the early composition of Matthew. It does so by argument rather than by anathema, reporting the critical case and answering it. On the famous collision between the six days of creation and the findings of geology, the commentary rehearses the options canvassed by Fathers and moderns alike and commends what it calls the “visionary” understanding, in which the days are the frames of a revelation granted to the first man rather than a technical chronology—an approach it presents as reconciling a literal reading of the text with the long ages of science. Throughout, the Septuagint and the Slavonic tradition are treated as authoritative witnesses standing beside the Hebrew Masoretic text, and the reader is regularly shown where the versions differ and why it matters.

The cumulative effect is a commentary that is neither a devotional paraphrase nor a purely academic apparatus, but a genuine synthesis: reverent, informed, and remarkably even in quality across seventy-seven very different books and many hands.

The lasting significance of the Explanatory Bible lies in the balance it struck at a moment when balance was hard to find. On one side stood a purely confessional exegesis that could ignore the questions the age was actually asking; on the other, a critical scholarship that too often dissolved the sacred text into a bundle of sources and left the believing reader with nothing to stand on. The Lopukhin commentary refused both. It insisted that the Scriptures are the inspired and unified word of God, to be read within the living interpretive tradition of the Church, and it insisted with equal seriousness that faith has nothing to fear from honest learning—that philology, history, and the natural sciences, rightly used, illuminate the text rather than undermine it.

This is why the work has worn so well. Its handling of a given scientific hypothesis of 1905 may now be dated, but its patristic backbone does not date, and its governing conviction—that the plain sense, the tradition of the Fathers, and the best available knowledge can be brought into a single coherent reading—remains as serviceable now as then. For the spiritual reader it opens the text as the Fathers opened it, drawing out the Christological depth of the Old Testament and the moral and doctrinal riches of the New. For the student it models a way of taking criticism seriously without surrendering to it. The commentary’s tone is instructive here as well: it argues, it does not denounce; where Christians of different traditions are cited, they are cited as fellow laborers in the understanding of Scripture, and where interpretations conflict, the disagreement is set out fairly before a judgment is offered. That irenic, information-rich temper is a large part of what has made the work trusted far beyond the circle in which it was born.

Within the Russian Church the Explanatory Bible rapidly became, and has remained, the standard general commentary on the whole of Scripture—the work a priest or a serious lay reader is most likely to reach for first. Its afterlife is itself a small drama of twentieth-century church history. Completed in 1913 on the eve of catastrophe, it survived the long Soviet decades largely out of print and hard to obtain. Its great revival came at the millennium of the Baptism of Rus’. In the late 1980s the Institute for Bible Translation in Stockholm produced a photographic reprint that compressed the original volumes into three, and a large printing—on the order of a hundred and fifty thousand sets—was given to the Russian Orthodox Church as a gift from the Christians of Northern Europe for the thousand-year jubilee. At a stroke the commentary was back in circulation across Russia, Ukraine, and Belarus, and it has been reprinted, digitized, and consulted continuously ever since. That a work of turn-of-the-century scholarship should have become, a century later, one of the most widely used biblical reference works in the Russian-speaking Orthodox world is the clearest possible measure of what its authors achieved.

The Explanatory Bible was written in Russian, and the present English edition is a fresh translation made directly from that public-domain Russian text—the commentary edited by Lopukhin and completed by his successors and issued between 1904 and 1913. The goal has been a clear, readable, contemporary English that conveys the commentary’s meaning and its measured scholarly voice without archaism, while remaining faithful to what the authors actually wrote.

A few conventions of this edition are worth noting. The attribution follows the work’s own long-standing practice: the commentary is presented as the Explanatory Bible of Lopukhin, with Alexander Pavlovich Lopukhin named as editor and author of the founding volumes, and it is understood throughout that he died in 1904 with only the Pentateuch complete and that his colleagues and successors carried the work to its finish—continuators to whom the whole is rightly indebted and who are credited as such. Those who prepared the present English text are credited as translators, never as authors. Scripture citations are given in a modern style, with book, chapter, and verse in Arabic numerals in the familiar form (for example, Rom. 6:22). The scriptural lemmata that head each unit of comment follow the Church’s Scripture faithfully, and the Septuagint versification and canon that the commentary itself presupposes are preserved, so that references resolve as the authors intended. The introductions and internal cross-references belonging to each biblical book have been carried over intact, so that the reader has the same guided entry into every book that the original provided.

This English edition is offered for study and for the general reader. What it offers is continuous access to one of the great monuments of Russian biblical scholarship: a verse-by-verse commentary on the whole of Scripture, at once learned and devout, in which the voice of the Fathers and the questions of the modern world are held together on every page.

Because the series comments on every book of the Bible, no one need read it from cover to cover. The natural way in is alongside one’s own reading of Scripture: open the commentary on the book at hand, begin with its introduction to get the lay of the whole, and then follow the exposition verse by verse as you read. The introductions repay attention in their own right, since it is there that the larger questions—of authorship, date, structure, and purpose—are set out before the detailed comment begins.

A first-time reader will find some of the richest and most characteristic writing in the opening chapters of Genesis, where the commentary’s whole manner is on display: the patristic voices marshalled and compared, the Hebrew weighed against the Greek, and the long questions of creation and the days handled with a care that has kept them worth reading. From there the Psalter and the Gospel of Matthew make good next steps—the one for the devotional heart of the Old Testament, the other for the fullest of the evangelists. Throughout, it helps to follow the cross-references the commentary supplies; they are not ornament but the very sinew of its method, and tracing them is the surest way to read Scripture as its authors intended it to be read, whole and of a piece.