The Orthodox and the "Old Believers"
Reading wikipedia today, just because I was bored, I stumbled upon the question of the Orthodox Church Reforms made by Patriarch Nikon (I was searching about Mordvins in general and Nikon was from this ethnical group). The changes introduced by him include some new practices based on suposedly unchanged Greek Orthodox teachings, while the old and supposedly distorted Russian practices were abandoned after a council and forcefully removed from the Church, except by a small group of dissidents called the "Old Believers", many of them who immigrated from Russia to flee from religious persecution. But then, the article also tells:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Patriarch_NikonNikon was much bolder and also much more liberal. He consulted the most learned of the Greek prelates abroad; invited them to a consultation at Moscow; and finally the scholars of Constantinople and Kiev convinced the eyes of Nikon that the Muscovite service-books were heterodox, and that the icons actually in use had very widely departed from the ancient Constantinopolitan models, being for the most part imbued with the Polish baroque influences. Later research was to vindicate the Muscovite service-books as belonging to a different recension from that which was used by the Greeks at the time of Nikon, and the unrevised Muscovite books were actually older and more venerable than the Greek books, which had undergone several revisions over the centuries and ironically, were newer and contained innovations.
The great schism, known as raskol, still divides the Orthodox today. But I would like to see the comments of Orthodox Christians in these forums questioning the above affirmation, and if indeed the Russian practices remained unchanged while the Greek ones didn't.
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