In today’s written and high-tech culture, our experience of Holy Scripture and Tradition, both of divine origin, can differ from the experience of previous generations of Christians. Before the advent of new forms of media, Christianity passed on the physical form of the Scriptures by manuscript (writing books by hand) and Christians were attuned to the Scripture through the hearing of the word, either in the liturgy or whenever books or letters were read aloud to others as it was the norm in antiquity, and even read aloud to oneself. Before the widespread tradition of manuscripts, oral tradition was the main vehicle for the apostles and the first Christians until the writing of the Gospels was taken up. Memory and the hearing of the words of Christ were normative for a long time before portable, personal Bibles were widely available. By the creation of that gap between a modern, technological culture and an oral and manuscript culture, where writing and listening were very important skills, this false opposition between Scripture and Tradition is brought up by Metropolitan Hilarion in this chapter.
From what St. Basil the Great says, teachings were preached out loud to all, called a kerygma, or were kept by Christians in the “household of faith,” called dogmata, both originating within the Church. Another essential aspect of Scripture and Tradition is the prophetic connection between the Old Testament and the Gospels. This “typological” interpretation, also known as foreshadowing or predicting events, is how a reader can make sense of the Old Testament, which sees the events of the New Testament as fulfilling prophecies made a long time ago. That may be a hindrance to some readers today because it requires a belief in miracles, and not only eye-witness accounts of Jesus and the biblical events. In this way, all dogmas of the Church are contained in the Scriptures, both Old and New Testament, and the Scriptures originate from the Church. The memory of oral tradition is also an integral part of the Gospel teaching as it was given to the apostles in unwritten form by Jesus Christ Himself and written down in the Church. In all, then, Scripture isn’t simply a matter of literary acquisition and Holy Tradition isn’t an unnecessary addition to the Gospel in Orthodoxy. Other rival claims to interpret Jesus Christ, Tradition or Scripture outside the Church’s own interpretation would be considered a distorted plagiarism to the early Church.