Nikon's Corrected Books and the Old Believers

In the middle of the seventeenth century Patriarch Nikon ordered the Russian service books corrected against Greek models, on the view that Russian practice had drifted from the sources. The corrections were small in themselves. The spelling of the name of Jesus gained a letter, the number of alleluias changed, processions were to go against the sun rather than with it, and the sign of the cross was to be made with three fingers rather than two. The reaction was not small. A large body of clergy and laity refused the new books, holding that the old ones carried the faith as Russia had received it and that the corrections implied the Russian church had been in error for centuries, and the resulting schism, the raskol, produced the Old Believers, who kept the pre-Nikonian texts and were persecuted for generations, some communities burning themselves rather than submit.

The episode is the clearest demonstration in Slavic Christianity that a liturgical language is not a neutral vehicle: the disputed items were orthographic and gestural, carrying no doctrine that either side would state differently, and they split a church. Old Believer communities still use the pre-Nikonian books and the two fingered sign today.