As part of the numerous scientific projects of the Romanian Patriarch Daniel (Ciobotea) to improve the quality of academic Orthodox education in Romania, the three-volume translation of the canons of the Orthodox was published by the Basilica publishing house of the Romanian Patriarchate in 2018 as a bilingual edition in Romanian and ancient Greek.
The translator and editor of this edition is Fr. Dr. Răzvan Perșa, associate professor for Canon law at the Faculty of Orthodox Theology in Cluj-Napoca (Romania).
His new translation of the Holy Canons into Romanian is all the more important since the last translation by Ioan Floca dates from the 1990s. This was published incognito and partly plagiarised the translation from 1930 of the work of Nikodemus Milash, translated from Serbian by Nicolae Popovici and Uros Kovincici (cf. Vol. 1, p. 51). In fact, the last complete translation of the canons comes from the first half of the 20th century. The new translation is based on the Greek edition Syntagma tōn theiōn kai hierōn kanonōn (Athens 1852), but the author has an extended comparison between the modern editions and the older ones. The canons are divided into three volumes as follows.
The first volume contains the apostolic canons and the canons of the Ecumenical Councils (”Canoanele apostolice și canoanele sinoadelor ecumenice”), the second volume the canons of the local Councils (”Canoanele sinoadelor locale”) and the third volume the canons of the Holy Fathers, supplementary canons and canonical prescriptions (“Canoanele Sfinţilor Părinţi, Canoanele întregitoare și prescripţii canonice”).
The extended introduction of the edition is entitled “The canons of the Church – between tradition and actuality” (“Canoanele Bisericii – între Tradiţiei și Actualitate”) and analyses three main topics. In the first part, Fr. Răzvan Perșa emphasizes the modern reception of the Orthodox canonical tradition and undertakes a valuable philological analysis of the ancient Greek term „canon”. The second part provides a comprehensive analysis of all existing translations of the canons into Romanian (1844 – Pidalion; A. Șaguna – 1871; M. Theodorian – 1906, N. Milaş – 1930; C. Dron – 1933; I. Floca – 1992 and Ion I. Croitoru – 2014).