Gennady of Novgorod

Saint Gennady of Novgorod was archbishop of Novgorod and Pskov from 1484 to 1504, a fighter against the heresy of the Judaizers and the organizer of the first complete Bible in Slavonic. The Russian Church honours him as a hierarch and remembers him on 4 December.

He came, probably, from the Gonzov boyar clan of Moscow and was archimandrite of the Chudov monastery in the Moscow Kremlin. He supported Grand Prince Ivan III in disputes with Metropolitan Gerontius and, as punishment, in 1479 was thrown by Gerontius into an ice cellar, from which he was released by order of the grand prince. On 12 December 1484 he was made archbishop of Novgorod, the first prelate not chosen by lot since 1359. He arrived at Novgorod in January 1485 with the task of bringing the newly conquered Church, subject to Moscow since 1478, closer to Muscovite church practice. He faced opposition from the local clergy because he commemorated several Muscovite saints, but dealt with it by adding local saints to the commemoration. He paid for a third of the rebuilding of the walls of the Detinets, between 1484 and 1490.

The greatest difficulty of his archiepiscopate was rooting out the heresy of the Judaizers, at Novgorod and at Moscow, where it had spread. He is said to have taken as a model the methods of Spain, admiring how the Spanish king had dealt with heretics, and he called for their execution, writing in 1490 to Metropolitan Zosima. After their condemnation at the Council of 1490, the heretics were beaten with the whip and sent to Novgorod, where Gennady made them a shameful entry: on horseback, facing the horse's tail, with birchbark helmets on their heads, inscribed “This is Satan's host.” Some were burned, others sent to prison. In 1499, through his labours, the first complete codex of the Bible in Slavonic was compiled, called the Gennady Bible. In 1492, when many believed that the year 7000 from the creation of the world (that is, 1492) would be the end of the world and no longer calculated Easter, he calculated Easter for the next thousand years, according to other sources for 532 years, which had important consequences for services and for planting and harvest. In 1492 he gave Vologda to the diocese of Perm. He supported Cornelius of Komel, whom he visited in his hermitage.

At the Council of 1503 at Moscow, together with Joseph of Volokolamsk, he opposed Ivan III's plan to abolish monastic landholding. In 1504 he and his allies managed to obtain the full condemnation of the heretics, but in June of that year he was removed from his see, by the grand prince's will, accused of simony, and retired. He returned to Moscow and died in disgrace, on 4 December 1505, at the Chudov monastery. He was buried near Metropolitan Alexei, in the main church of the monastery, until its destruction in 1929, when the relics were lost, as were those of more than a hundred other people buried in the Kremlin. He is also honoured in the Synaxis of the Novgorod hierarchs, on 10 February.