Gennady of Novgorod

Gennady of Novgorod, known also as Gennady Gonzov, was a hierarch of the Russian Church in the late fifteenth and early sixteenth centuries and Archbishop of Novgorod the Great and Pskov from 1484 until 1504. He belonged to the Gonzov family of Moscow boyars. The precise year and circumstances of his birth are not recorded in surviving chronicles or hagiographical texts. He became a monk and rose to be archimandrite of the Chudov Monastery (the Monastery of the Miracle of the Archangel Michael) in the Moscow Kremlin, a house closely tied to the court of the grand princes. After Ivan III of Moscow annexed the Novgorod Republic in 1478 and the last independently chosen archbishop was removed, the see was brought under Muscovite control. In 1484 Gennady was named archbishop, an appointment that expressed Moscow’s determination to integrate the Novgorodian church into the metropolitanate and the grand principality.

As archbishop, Gennady made the suppression of the so-called Judaizers his foremost pastoral and political concern. This heterodox current had appeared in Novgorod in the 1470s and was associated in the sources with a learned Jew named Skhariya, said to have come from Kiev. Certain Novgorodian priests, among them Aleksei and Denis, were accused of adopting views that denied the Trinity and the divinity of Christ, rejected icons, the veneration of saints, and monasticism, and preferred a strictly scriptural or Old Testament piety. The movement reached Moscow and found sympathy in court circles, including among relatives of Grand Prince Ivan III. Gennady conducted investigations, assembled written evidence, and urged a church council. He corresponded with Joseph of Volokolamsk and other conservatives. Through the diplomat Yuri Trakhaniot he inquired about the procedures of the Spanish Inquisition, hoping for similarly rigorous measures. A council held in 1490 condemned a number of the accused, but Gennady regarded the sentences as too mild and continued to press for harsher action in subsequent years.

Gennady’s other lasting achievement was the compilation of the first complete Bible in Church Slavonic, finished in 1499 and conventionally called the Gennady Bible. East Slavic manuscript tradition had not previously gathered all the canonical books into a single corpus; several Old Testament books were lacking or existed only in incomplete form. Gennady gathered translators and scribes in Novgorod. A Croatian Dominican named Benjamin (Veniamin) translated missing books from the Latin Vulgate. Printed Western Bibles and possibly Czech versions were also consulted. The resulting large codex, while dependent on the Vulgate for some books and not a critical text by later standards, became a foundation for later East Slavic biblical work, including the Ostrog Bible printed in 1581. Gennady likewise attended to liturgical chronology. In the Byzantine-era calendar then used in Russia, the year 7000 from the creation of the world corresponded to 1492. Many expected the end of the age in that year. When the world did not end, new tables for computing the date of Easter were required, and scholars in Gennady’s circle produced them. He was a noted collector of books and maintained a substantial library.

In the debates over monastic property that divided Russian monasticism around the turn of the sixteenth century, Gennady sided with the Josephites, who defended the right of monasteries to own land and populated estates, against the non-possessors associated with Nil Sorsky. Church councils in 1503 and 1504 dealt with heresy, widowed priests, and monastic lands. In 1504 Gennady was deposed from the Novgorod cathedra. Sources mention charges of simony, that is, the sale of church offices, though the deposition also occurred in a climate of political tension between Moscow and remaining Novgorodian elites and after years of struggle over the Judaizers. He was confined to the Chudov Monastery in Moscow, the house he had once ruled as archimandrite. There he died on 4 December 1505 and was buried. The Russian Orthodox Church numbers him among its saints. His principal feast is kept on 4 December, and he is also commemorated with the synaxis of the hierarchs of Novgorod. His reputation rests on his defense of Orthodox doctrine against the Judaizers and on the biblical compilation that bears his name, even as historians continue to debate the severity of his methods and the precise character of the movement he opposed.