The Hesychian Recension is an updated translation of the Bible into Greek made by someone named Hesychius around the year 300 AD.
Immediately, we have an issue. We know almost nothing about who this Hesychius guy was.
One of the big reasons for that is there were a lot of people named Hesychius during that time period. “Hesychius” just comes from the Greek word hesychia, meaning “quietness”.
When talking about this translation of the Bible, people will commonly confuse this Hesychius with others, like Hesychius of Jerusalem, or Hesychius of Alexandria.
Hesychius
However, it’s tricky to pinpoint who exactly our Hesychius is. When we are talking about “the Hesychian Recension”, we actually only have one ancient source. The Christian author Jerome, who translated the Bible into Latin.
Jerome wrote briefly about Hesychius’ translation on two separate occasions. The first time was in about 384 AD. At this point, Jerome had probably (probably) never seen Hesychius’ translation in person. He most likely was just reporting secondhand information about it.
Alright, so are you ready for what Jerome says about Hesychius? He wrote these words as a preface to his own translation of the Bible. Here is a translation of the one sentence he wrote in about 384 AD:
“I pass over those books which are called by the name of Lucian and of Hesychius… who… should not have revised either in the Old [Testament], or to pour out revisions in the New… the additions may now be shown to be false.”
I tried to make Jerome’s sentence easier to understand for our purposes. But basically, Jerome seems to be saying that Lucian and Hesychius made revisions to the Old and New Testaments, and that they added stuff to the Bible which was not originally in it.
So, that’s the first record we have of “the Hesychian Recension” even existing. A couple decades later, Jerome wrote one more brief sentence about Hesychius. In it, Jerome says that Hesychius’ revision of the Old Testament was very popular in Egypt, and especially in Alexandria.
Those two quotes by Jerome are the only mentions we have in ancient history of the Hesychian Recension.
However, by comparing this with some other ancient sources, scholars believe they have figured out a bit more about this specific Hesychius. It seems that this Hesychius was a bishop in Egypt who was executed by Roman persecution in the early 300s AD (maybe around 306 or 307).
I haven’t seen any sources call him anything but “Hesychius”. But, so that we don’t confuse him with any of the other people named Hesychius we can call him “Hesychius of Egypt”.
The Hesychian Recension
We have no surviving translation of the Bible labelled as “the Hesychian Recension”. But, we do know a little bit about it.
It was a recension of the Greek Old Testament. And, Hesychius seems to have also made some additions to the New Testament, or at least to the Gospels.
Many scholars say that the “Codex Marchalianus” is a “Hesychian-type” version of the Bible. Plus, many scholars say that some of the translations of the Bible into Coptic (especially Bohairic) were based off the Hesychian Recension. This would make sense because the translations into Coptic were made in Egypt around the same time that Hesychius lived.
However, this is all speculation. We really just don’t know.
Summary
All that to say, Hesychius of Egypt was (probably) a bishop in Egypt in the late 200s and early 300s AD. He made an updated translation of the Old Testament in Greek, and added some stuff to the New Testament. This translation of the Bible is called the “Hesychian Recension”. His “Recension” was popular in Egypt, but some ancient Christians did not like it because they didn’t think it faithfully represented God’s Word. Nowadays, we have no definite surviving copies of the “Hesychian Recension”.