I’ll take your word for it, I have never read the entire Bible. It’s typical of Eastern Orthodox Christianity to accept a much larger body of traditions than the Scriptures in what it considers “canon”; basically almost all the church activity during the Byzantine Empire (minus, majorly, the iconoclastic period), with a few pre-Schism Western influences. I get that Protestantism and its derivatives reject church tradition (?), while Catholicism has its own unique tradition, developed in parallel and on different lines than Orthodoxy. That’s what paganization means, accepting non-Bible influences into a Christian religion? (Going by the name, I thought it meant including influences of polytheistic pre-Christian religions.)
I’ll take your word for it, I have never read the entire Bible. It’s typical of Eastern Orthodox Christianity to accept a much larger body of traditions than the Scriptures in what it considers “canon”; basically almost all the church activity during the Byzantine Empire (minus, majorly, the iconoclastic period), with a few pre-Schism Western influences. I get that Protestantism and its derivatives reject church tradition (?), while Catholicism has its own unique tradition, developed in parallel and on different lines than Orthodoxy. That’s what paganization means, accepting non-Bible influences into a Christian religion? (Going by the name, I thought it meant including influences of polytheistic pre-Christian religions.)
Yes, much veneration of Saints is the syncretized version of the worship of pre-Christian gods.