The life of St Gennadius of Novgorod
In 1487 he learned that a hidden heretical movement, later known as the Judaizers, had for years been quietly spreading anti-Trinitarian teaching through Novgorod under cover of ordinary merchant travel, dating back to around 1470. Recognizing that the danger reached well beyond his own diocese and threatened Moscow as well, Gennadius spent much of the rest of his episcopate working, alongside Joseph of Volokolamsk, to root out the movement's influence. Because the heretics had drawn support from Old Testament passages that diverged from the readings the Orthodox Church accepted as authoritative, Gennadius undertook the massive labor of assembling a single, complete Slavonic Bible that could settle such disputes with a fixed and trustworthy text. That work, finished in 1499, became known afterward as the Gennadius Bible, the first full codex of Scripture ever produced in the Slavonic tongue, a legacy that outlasted the heresy it had been built to answer.
