The Septuagint or “Greek Old Testament” and the New Testament, written in the Hellenistic koine, are considered as God-inspired texts and acknowledged as canonical by the Eastern Orthodox Church. Each attempt to translate the Bible into Modern Greek from the 16th to the 20th century met with confrontations between traditionalists and innovators. The first official translation of Holy Scripture, which was circulated in 1638 on the initiative of the “Calvinistic” Patriarch of Constantinople, Kyrillos Loukarīs, was condemned by the Holy Synod.

In the 19th century, new translations of the Bible were circulated on the initiative of the British and Foreign Bible Society. Adamantios Koraīs contributed to these activities; in 1808 he expressed his interest in a translation of Holy Scripture to the Bible Society – he had himself translated St Paul’s letters to Titus and Timothy. After consulting the Ecumenical Patriarch Grīgorios V, the translation was submitted to the Archimandrite Ilarion Sinaïtīs in 1818. Publication was thwarted by the revolution of 1821, and in 1823 the Holy Synod under Anthimos III condemned translations of Holy Scripture into Modern Greek altogether. In the end, only the translation of the New Testament was circulated in 1828 in London and in 1831 in Geneva, and governor Kapodistrias issued thousands of copies to the liberated Greeks. Subsequently, the Bible Society commissioned a new translation of the Old Testament from the deacon and professor of the Ionian Academy, Neofytos Vamvas, which was finished in 1851. One of its clerical opponents denounced it as “coarse Greek”. In 1836 the translation was condemned by the Orthodox Church as a piece of work of a Protestant Bible Society, and in 1839 any translation of the Old Testament was condemned.

The most turbulent phase of the history of Bible translations into Modern Greek unfolded in the early 20th century, after the ill-starred war of 1897, within the political climate of the language question and the Great Idea. The immediate cause was Queen Olga’s initiative to have the New Testament translated into simple language for the inmates of prisons and hospitals. With the unwritten approval of the Metropolitan of Athens, Prokopios, the translation was made by Ioulia Sōmakī (the queen’s personal secretary), assisted by her uncle Iōannīs Pantazidīs (professor of Greek at the University of Athens). It was published in Athens in 1900 in only a few copies, due to the adverse opinion of the Holy Synod. In the same year, another translation was circulated, which did enjoy the approval of the patriarch and the synod, made by the society Anaplasis (“Regeneration”). From 1901 onwards the newspaper Akropolis published the translation of the Gospel of Matthew by the demoticist Alexandros Pallīs. This set off the events that became known as the Evangelika. Polemics in the newspapers, recriminations in parliament, memoranda, and finally student demonstrations in defence of tradition escalated into riots. The opponents were suspicious of Queen Olga’s initiative because of her Russian descent, suspecting a dark setup of Pan-Slavism, intended to win over the Greeks of Macedonia for the Bulgarian Exarchate. The major issue was that the sacred Greek texts, which enjoyed unchallenged primacy, should not be downgraded to equal standing with the translations that had been made for the other Orthodox nations of the Balkans. The bloody events that took place in front of the university drew the attention of the Metropolitan of Athens and of the government authorities. The copies were confiscated and all translations of Holy Scripture were forbidden as “profane” and “unpatriotic”. In the end, Pallīs published his translation in Liverpool in 1902. The Evangelika led to the revisionary parliament of 1911, which added the second paragraph of article 2 of the constitution, prohibiting the translation of Holy Scripture without the approval of the Church. In 1975, after the fall of the military dictatorship, the formulation was adjusted to specify an “official translation into another type of language”, thus allowing for literary or other adaptations, which were already tacitly tolerated by the Church.