6. Законническое иудейство
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The era of the Old Testament prophets was replaced by the discipline of the law, which set itself the goal of educating the entire society of Israel in the spirit of prophetic ethics and, in reality, created that Judaism that was rejected by Christ. However, the nomistic discipline cannot be considered a historically accidental fall of the Jewish genius, and Judaism should not be held solely to be the personal fault of those of its representatives with whom Christ dealt. This was the tragedy of Judaism, that it was a necessary consequence of the fundamental principles of the Jewish religion, that it fell to its lot to complete the building on the previously laid foundation, so that the completion was predetermined by the previous work. Judaism necessarily revealed most clearly the limitations that were part of the essence of the Jewish religion, and the beginnings of nomism were laid by the activity of the prophets. This is so indisputable that the last prophets, beginning with Jeremiah and Ezekiel, already enter the sphere of nomism. We will show the essential connection of Jewish prophecy with Jewish legalism.
The time of the prophets was a time of major historical catastrophes that weighed heavily on the fate of Israel. Imbued with deep faith in divine providence and equally deep love for their people, the prophets in the course of world history contemplated the judgment of God. For them, all history is the work of God's providence, the revelation of God's truth: it has one central point - the time of God's decisive judgment. This is “the day of Jehovah,” “that day,” “that time.” The “great day of Jehovah” is terrible. “This day is a day of wrath, a day of sorrow and distress, a day of horror and desolation, a day of darkness and gloom, a day of clouds and darkness, a day of trumpets and shouts of abuse against fortified cities and high towers” 463. The depiction of this “day” reflected all the depth of the living faith of the prophets, for whom Jehovah was the Lord of history, and all the horror of historical catastrophes that fell with an unbearable burden on the people of God. All nations and all nature take part in this day of Jehovah.
This day is the “time of nations” 464 when Jehovah shakes heaven and earth, sea and land, and shakes all nations 465 when He will show signs in heaven and on earth 466 stronger than the signs were when leaving Egypt 467: then the sun will turn into darkness and the moon will not shine 468, and terrified people will walk like blind people 469 .
The day of Jehovah is, first of all, His judgment on His chosen people. “I have chosen only you from all the tribes of the earth, therefore I will exact from you for all your iniquities” 470. Assur, Egypt, Nebuchadnezzar are the rods of Jehovah's wrath, the instruments of His indignation against Israel. Jehovah's judgment on Israel is carried out “before the eyes of the Gentiles” 471. Israel is scattered among the nations and, like chaff, scattered throughout their countries 472 , scattered among all nations, as grains are scattered in a sieve 473 , purified as if by alkali 474 , melted like silver in a crucible 475 , threshed out like grain bread 476 , destroyed to an insignificant remnant 477 .
But then this is Jehovah’s judgment over all nations who burdened Israel without regret, ruled over him arrogantly, and did not want to recognize themselves as Jehovah’s instruments. All nations are gathered and judgment is carried out on them for their arrogance, for the fact that they boasted and mocked the people of Jehovah 478, for the fact that they repaid Israel twice for their sins 479. The nations of the earth did not understand that Jehovah had gathered them together as sheaves on a threshing floor 480 ; lifting Jerusalem like a heavy stone, they strained their strength 481, their retribution turned on their heads 482. Jehovah avenges Israel, 483 ; the devastation of the nations and the ruins of their cities is the sacrifice of Jehovah, which He will slaughter for the children of Israel, from which they eat their fill of fat and get drunk with blood 484 . This judgment of the nations is the salvation of Israel - its small remnant 485 and the manifestation of the glory of God before the whole world 486. Jehovah Himself, as once from Egypt, saves His Israel 487, comforts them 488, redeems them at the price of all nations 489, gives them dominion over all nations - in the person of the restored Tabernacle of David, the Branch of the righteous 490.
The great day of Jehovah, beginning with weeping and mourning, ends with the rejoicing and triumph of Jerusalem 491, light and joy 492, song and heartfelt joy 493, because the dominion of the descendants of David will increase infinitely 494 and the king of Zion will come righteous and victorious 495. Nature itself will take part in the triumph of Israel: on “that day” the mountains will exude honey and milk will flow from the hills 496 - then there will be a new heaven and a new earth on which eternal joy will reign 497.
This is the historiographical framework of prophetic preaching. Ethical coverage of the historical process not only eliminated the predominance of the positive force of historical events in the eyes of the prophets, but also elevated a certain connection of events into law. They announced sorrow before joy, judgment before salvation, awakened the people's conscience and thus decisively differed from the false prophets who knew the “burden of Jehovah” - His terrible word only for pagan peoples, and predicted only salvation and peace for Israel 498. The true prophets of Jehovah, reproaching those who did not believe in the coming of the day of the Lord, 499 at the same time admonished those who were impatiently awaiting this day. “Woe to those who wish to see the day of Jehovah! What is Jehovah's day for you? It is gloomy, not bright” 500. As inextricably linked with moral testing, the day of Jehovah called, first of all, for moral correction and heartfelt purification, as an inevitable condition for subsequent salvation. “The day of Jehovah is great and very terrible, and who can endure it? Therefore, even now Jehovah still says this: turn to Me with all your heart in fasting, weeping and lamentation.
Tear your hearts, not your garments, and turn to Jehovah your God." 501 “Zion will be redeemed by justice, and her converted (sons) by righteousness” 502: this is the most valuable content in the preaching of the prophets. The time of judgment is the time of the purification of Israel, the blotting out of its iniquities, its clothing in the robe of righteousness 503, and the time of salvation is the time of the reign of righteousness and peace 504. And the Messiah is presented to the gaze of the prophets as the implementer of the moral order 505. Truth of life and moral maturity characterize, according to the teachings of the prophets, Jehovah's new covenant with Israel 506.
According to the meaning of prophetic preaching, the salvation of Israel is conditioned by its righteousness. This indicates for social ethics the exact limit and immutable goal - to prepare the people for messianic benefits, to make them worthy of them. Previously, in the brilliant times of the Jewish kingdom, the sanctification of God's chosen people lay in the most theocratic form of its system; Now, to sanctify people's life, social truth based on moral principles is required. Now it is required that sanctification be reflected in the very reality of social relations, in the sincere service of all to the public good - so that “the whole people are righteous” 507. For such dominance over social life, over all members of society, morality must acquire the character and force of a social law. Law gives force to truth, love and mercy in social relations: it creates society, in the strict sense of the word, distinguishing it from the state and the nation.
In this original basis of Jewish law, nothing changes from the fact that Jewish law embraces not only the ethical area, but also the ritual, since both areas are embraced by law from the social side that equalizes them. On the one hand, the ritual consecration of the Jews served as a symbol of their common devotion to their God; on the other hand, the ethical Jewish law expressed the idea of the separation of God's chosen people from other nations. This idea of the Jewish law could achieve complete clarity only by combining the ethical law with the ritual law, so that moral purification became visible in the forms of ritual purification. Here, in particular, we can mention the rules of an ascetic nature, the rules that determined bodily purity and types of food. Asceticism, as a limitation of natural life, as a path of personal improvement, was alien to the Jews: their asceticism was abstinence from pagan impurity, from the customs of pagan peoples, isolation from the pagan world 508.
Isolating God's chosen people from the pagan world, the ritual law from the side of the internal relations of Jewish society served, along with the ethical law, to unite each of its members with the social body, and had a completely social character. At the same time, the phenomenon that deserves full attention is that during the period of the rule of law, which replaced the era of the prophets who directed their preaching against the cult, the latter no longer acts as a native value, but its significance is completely determined by the law. Ritual sanctification from a legalistic point of view is valuable insofar as it is prescribed by the law, is its fulfillment 509. This must be kept in mind in order to understand why the prophecy, which began with the fight against the cult, ended 510 with the defense of the cult. Cult and religious custom were now elevated to the level of law, receiving essentially secondary importance, although with the inevitable danger of an acute rise on legalistic grounds.
The last prophets had in their spirit sufficient grounds for the fight against the soulless ritual form, standing in this case at the same height as the former prophets and keeping the cult within proper boundaries 511. But with the cessation of prophecy there was no longer any support for this restraint 512.
In any case, we must recognize as an indisputable conclusion the genetic dependence of legalistic discipline on prophetic activity. And our involuntary attention here stops at the characteristic feature that the prophets Jeremiah and Ezekiel, in whom we first encounter a clearly expressed bias towards nomism and ritualism, were primarily preachers of the individual side of morality over other prophets 513. This demonstrates with irresistible conviction that the law was a means of subordinating the individual to the requirements of social unity and social harmony. Personality, on the basis of the Old Testament, even with the higher ones presented to it; requirements, acts not in its internal absoluteness, but as a social element from which sincere submission to social law is required for the benefit of one and all. Everything protruding from such a framework should be looked at as a side current in the Old Testament channel 514.
It is appropriate to emphasize once again that the Jewish prophets introduced a moral current into the structure of institutions, protested against hypocritical ritualism and at the same time fell back into the mainstream of legalism and ritualism: they raised the moral tone of Jewish life to the extreme, but did not change its direction.
Based on a prophetic and ethical basis, the rule of law began with the reform of Josiah and was fully established by the circumstances of the return of the Jews from captivity and the efforts of Jesus, the son of Jozedek, Zerubbabel, Ezra, this “scribe, versed in the law of Moses, who set his heart to study the law of Jehovah, and to fulfill it, and to teach law and righteousness in Israel” (and Ezra VII, 6.10), and Nehemiah. These reformers found support in the prophets who assisted them - they developed the regime of early Judaism. To imagine his worldview, it would be necessary to consider the political and psychological conditions of the faith of the Jewish community upon returning from captivity, when believers had constant clashes with atheists both among the community itself and in the face of hostile pagan neighbors. We can judge the state of the believers during this time from the psalms included here. But we do not dwell on early Judaism, as a transitional era, interesting rather from a historical perspective, but not sufficiently illuminated.
More interesting for us is the later Judaism that began with the Maccabean era 515, when the prophetic voice had completely fallen silent and legalistic discipline had reached its full development. If the return of the Jews from captivity was for them “separation from the uncleanness of the nations of the earth, in order to resort to Jehovah, the God of Israel,” and if then the activity of legal scribes had already begun as teachers of the people of the Law of Moses; then during the period of the Maccabean struggle for national-religious identity, this separation of the Jews through the study of the law and its implementation intensified even more. Meanwhile, the political successes of the Maccabees were not so brilliant as to drown all hopes for the future, since it was under the Maccabees that a party of zealots of the law, the Asidean-Pharisees, emerged, who did not want to rest on the achieved political success and moved away from political interests in the name of the religious future. With the new decline in political independence, the isolation of the adherents of the law reached its extreme.
From this same time, increased voluntary emigration of Jews around the world and proselytism began. This contributed to the formation of the Jewish church, kahala: Judaism was no longer covered by the territorial borders of the people and did not coincide with its political structure, it now became a society proper, governed by the force of law. And if the Jews who had already returned from captivity were embarrassed by the simplicity of the second temple, now the life of the Jewish communities, scattered everywhere, was actually concentrated around local synagogues, as houses of prayer and study of the law, and was ruled by the scribes and Pharisees, “who sat in the seat of Moses.” In the ritual sphere itself, which embraced the ethical grain of prophetic teaching, religious custom rose above cult, penetrating into all corners of life; The priests who became the head of people's life, in whose hands the formal power was, themselves listened to the voice of the scribes and Pharisees.
As a result of this story, such an unlimited dominion of law appeared that it is difficult to form an idea about it. “Even if we, says Josephus, were deprived of wealth, cities or other benefits, the law, still less fashionable, will remain immortal with us. Not a single Jew, no matter how far he has gone from his fatherland, will be so afraid of a ferocious ruler that because of him he will lose the fear of breaking the law” 516. A little earlier Philo also wrote about the law 517.
It is difficult to exaggerate the importance of the law for the Jews. What the Jew is in the eyes of the whole world from the time of the captivity to the present day, what preserves him after he has lost his political significance and lost the church, what gives him extraordinary durability and puts an indelible specific imprint on him, this is all done by the law.
The main advantage of the law is that it completely subordinates the individual to the interests of society and creates a unanimous whole. Let us use the testimony of the same Josephus. Having said that all Jews know their laws, so that each “it would be easier to list them than to name his own name,” he continues; “It was this circumstance that caused an amazing unanimity among us: to have invariably the same idea of God, to not differ from each other in any way in our lifestyle and habits, all this results in the most beautiful spiritual harmony. After all, only here you won’t hear conflicting opinions about God... Likewise, in our everyday relationships you won’t notice any disagreement: we have all our activities in common, we have one thought, consistent with the law of God and saying that He looks at everything... The whole community is, as it were, the embodiment of holiness” 518.
However, this especially shows the insufficiency of the law and its temporary nature, that its weaknesses necessarily flow from its essence and are most clearly revealed when its domination is complete. The law embodies prophetic ethics, but it also puts an end to prophecy itself. It presupposes an exact form and a certain letter: it does not tolerate spiritual creativity, but requires the hardening (canonization) of old speeches, the study and interpretation of the old letter; it gives rise to scribes, eldership, external authority, is limited to external formal performance and elevates all morality to obedience. The law sanctifies life, not the person; it absolutely does not give room for internal absoluteness and personal freedom. This basic character of legalistic discipline is revealed in the harmonious system of the Judaistic worldview - ethical work and religious knowledge 519.
The first feature of nomistic practice is jurisprudence. The Jew looks at his life as a given task, expressed in clear and precise formulas, for the fulfillment of which he expects a reward, for non-fulfillment - punishment. The task is related to consequences, partly according to the law of natural causation, partly according to the will of God. In the first respect, we have a rational-utilitarian point of view of worldly “wisdom”, for which good behavior is smart behavior, and bad behavior is stupid 520; the second is the strictly religious-legal point of view, in which retribution is assumed both in temporary life and in the afterlife. However, the utilitarian assessment of morality in Judaism was closely intertwined with the religious-legal one, since external goods in the eyes of the Jew were the heavenly reward of righteousness. This is how, in particular, the Jew looked at poverty and wealth. The prophetic spirit, which created the image of the servant of God, left the Jews as a legacy of the conviction that the poor, along with the humble and contrite in spirit, are the primary participants in the messianic benefits 521.
But this conviction, which later served as a consolation for the poor, was decisively absorbed during the complete rule of law by the recognition of poverty as an undoubted and serious disaster. The Jewish righteous man saw his rightful possession both in wealth and in other earthly blessings, such as honor and longevity. The Evangelical Pharisees were lovers of money; they loved and received glory from people. Be that as it may, the Jew looked at all his “work” in a religious-legal light and assessed it not in the categories of fruit and deed, but in the categories of work and reward. He had constant scores to settle with the sky. For the Jewish consciousness, God appears primarily as a master who has assigned urgent work to everyone, or a king in the eastern sense of the word (δεσπότηςτῶν οὐρανῶν καὶ τῆς γῆς) 522 and a judge to whom an account must be given. The Jew was taught: “Think about three things and you will never fall into sin: where you came from, where you will go, and to whom you will have to give account. Where did you come from? From a corruptible embryo. Where will you go? To a place where dust and worms await you.
To whom will you have to give account? Before the King of kings ( הַמּלָכִים מַלכִי מלךּ לִפנִי ), before the All-Holy One, may He be glorified" 523 . From previous times, the Jew inherited the name of God the Father, but now the Father of Israel was not only an angry king for others (ἀπότομοςβασιλεύς) 524, - His paternal mercy towards the Jew was hidden behind His despotic power: the paternal favor of God distinguished the Jews from the pagans 525, but did not constitute an essential side in the internal relations of God to the Jew, for whom He was the despot Father (κύριε, πάτερ καὶ δέσποταζωῆς μου), very terrible ( φοβερὸςσφόδρα) 526. For the Jew, heaven was the place where his fate was decided, a sentence was pronounced over him, from where he expected either justification or condemnation. The most significant thing in the religious ideas of the Jew was that these acts of heavenly justice were understood by him in a legal sense, so that the question of his own fate was for him a question of whether God would recognize him as right or wrong. Therefore, he stood before the heavenly judgment seat with a feeling of horror and considered the fear of God to be the beginning of wisdom 527.
The Jew knew about the ineffable mercy of God and, perhaps, in Jewish literature there is more persistent talk about the mercy of God than before 528; but whereas before the Israelite expected salvation from the truth of Jehovah 529, now in the ideas of the Jew, the mercy of God only softens His truth, weakens it 530, and there is no original harmony between truth and mercy: mercy and anger fight in God 531. Therefore, the religious fear of a Jew can be replaced by hope, but it does not completely disappear from his heart, because it is his fear for his fate, the fear of a defendant, or a slave. The basis of this fear is that the fate of a person depends on the legal assessment of his affairs. “He who watches over a man’s soul will reward him according to his deeds” 532. The conflict between mercy and wrath is resolved by indifferent judicial justice 533. No matter how strong a person’s hope for mercy is, it can compress the area of fear in the heart, but it does not change its character as slavish fear, because this mercy is the mercy of a judge and this hope is the hope of a defendant or a slave.
Heavenly justice corresponds to human truth. The will of the despot and judge must be known to man accurately and completely; she demands from him, first of all, obedience. Diligence is the first virtue of the Jew; fulfilling the law is its righteousness, followed by a reward, and breaking the law is a sin, followed by punishment. One must repent of sin and satisfy the righteousness of God for it, then it is not imputed to man; on the contrary, every good deed, i.e. Every fulfillment of the law is recorded for a person in the heavenly book of life upon arrival. The religious experience of Judaism lacked a comprehensive mood, there were no moments in it that would contain eternity - it all fell apart into separate acts, into partial deeds, into fractional actions. Good is a deed, sin is also a deed or omission - it is an act or misdeed with a certain physiognomy, with a crystallized appearance. Therefore, God’s attitude towards man – reward and punishment – are also private acts of justice.
The mercy of God is manifested in the fact that He does not impute one or another sin to a person, He easily reconciles with them, 534 but the main property of God is His truth, which rewards or punishes a person only according to his deeds, so that his fate is determined by his own deeds. He who does the truth prepares life for himself from the Lord, and he who does untruth is himself guilty of the destruction of the soul. κυρί ῳ, καὶ ὁ ποιῶνἀδικίαν αὐτὸςαἴτιος τῆςψυχῆςἐνάπωλεί ᾳ) 535. The all-consuming concern of the Jew was formulated in the question: how to be justified before God? Since religious work was for him a means of determining his fate, and since the determination of his fate depended on heavenly justice, the entire justification of the Jew was reduced to the fulfillment of the law. You need to fulfill the law in such a way as to avoid punishment and receive a reward - precisely, casuistically. The whole life of the Jew was entangled in a network of rules and commandments, which always kept him in slavish tension.
If for the prophets the law was the realization of the moral order, through social truth, then for Judaism it became a condition of justification, and therefore the law itself filled all the attention of the Jew. The place of social ethics was taken by a nomistic system that unites the various social relations of the individual. The ethical law in Judaism, losing sight of the moral and heart basis, was fragmented into nomistic rules governing the relations of husband and wife, parents and children, masters and servants, rich and poor, friends, neighbors, not to mention the fact that the requirements of ritual purity dominated everything. And these shadowed rules, essentially nomism, were of a negative nature and showed the Jew rather what he should avoid than what he should do. Therefore, for Judaism, the negative formula is not accidental: “what you hate, do not do to anyone (ὃ μισεῖς μηδενὶποιήδ ῃ ς) 536, in contrast to the positive New Testament requirement 537.
Moreover, the law itself was for the Jew both a high blessing and a heavy yoke. If the main task of man is to be justified before heaven, and the only means of justification is given by the law, then, obviously, the possession of the law was in the eyes of the Jew a great advantage and an invaluable treasure. According to the Apostle Paul, the Jew “comforted himself with the law and boasted in God, because he knew His will, and understood the best, learning from the law, and was confident in himself that he was a guide for the blind, a light for those in darkness, a teacher of the ignorant, a teacher of babes, having in the law an example of knowledge and truth.”538 But inevitable and invaluable as a means of justification, giving its owners a great advantage over the pagans, the law had no intrinsic value, since righteousness did not provide an absolute subjective good and, minus nomistic narcissism, had significance only insofar as it was recognized at the divine court. Therefore, the law itself was a heavy yoke for the Jew, bearable only in view of the reward expected for it.
The Jew was a slave of the law 539 His moral energy was entirely directed to such deeds that can be accurately counted, for which one can count on receiving a reward. True, the Jew also knew such an area of moral activity that does not lend itself to precise regulation and does not have a strictly nomystical obligation, since the main thing here depends on personal mood - this is prayer, fasting and especially charity in the form of almsgiving, burying the poor, etc. According to Simeon the Righteous, “the world stands on three foundations: on the law, worship (cult) and charity” 540. But these actions were also subject to the same legal assessment and were considered excessive merits. Almsgiving was given a sin-purifying meaning, along with strictly legalistic deeds: “atone for your sins with righteousness and your iniquities with mercy for the poor” 541. “A good (deed) is prayer with fasting and almsgiving and justice. Alms save from death and cleanse from all sin. Those who do (deeds of) alms and (deeds of) righteousness will live long” 542.
He who gives charity to the poor lends to God Himself and can count on reward from Him 543: it seems impossible to go further than these frank calculations. On this basis of the legal assessment of charity, the identification in the Hebrew language of the concepts of truth and alms 544 was formed. Only in the Gospel is this jurisprudence put to an end, firstly, by the fact that here the hope of reward for obligatory deeds is decisively eliminated 545, and, secondly, by the fact that good deeds arising from personal disposition, from a loving heart, are recognized as obligatory 546.
The jurisprudence of nomistic ethics inevitably entailed another main feature of Judaism - bookish scrupulousness. If the law is seen as the only means of justification, then, obviously, the latter depends on knowledge of the law. Just as there is no other, more worthy subject of knowledge than the law; so, on the other hand, the law for the Jew is precisely the subject of knowledge, which serves as a condition for salvation. Without knowledge of the divine law it is impossible to be saved: according to Hillel, “the ignorant (בּ ֺ ור) is not afraid of sin (i.e., not fearing God), the simpleton (חָאָרץ עַם) cannot be pious” 547. True knowledge of God and His holy law is already an important step on the path of justification. “To know (ἐπίστασθαι) God is complete righteousness, and to acknowledge His authority is the root of immortality” 548. The complete path of justification for a Jew fell into two paths: faith and works, 549 and the concept of faith includes both trust in God and knowledge of His will. In ancient Judaism, predominantly the practical side of faith was put forward, in Judaism - the theoretical side.
The law must be studied and interpreted, and therefore legalistic wisdom was highly valued in Judaism. The scribes of the law were the people's teachers, and a necessary part of the synagogue worship was the reading and explanation of the sacred books 550. The legalistic regime naturally led to the canonization of Scripture, to the doctrine of the inspiration of its letters and to the tradition of the elders. Under such conditions, knowledge of the law has become quite a matter of books and school. The spontaneity of moral feeling was lost; The letter, not the spirit, became the supreme criterion in matters of morality. The need to apply the law to all cases of life, which was rapidly moving forward, developed casuistry in Judaism; the desire to create a fence around the law and entangle every step of the Jew with it led to a depressing set of petty rules. The most difficult question for the Jews became the question of the most important commandment of the law, since they no longer had access to a direct sense of ethical value, the feeling that the law weighs heavier 551.
What is revealed to simpletons and infants was hidden from the Jewish sages - they became blind leaders of the blind 552.
On the path of Judaism, both sinfulness and righteousness became visible and tangible. Therefore, despair, ethical pessimism, and moral complacency were equally possible here, so that the mental mood constantly fluctuated between these extremes 553. Shrouded in a multitude of laws and regulations, the Jew was confronted every moment with the possibility of sin. He, in the apt expression of Jesus, son of Sirach, “walked with his fall” 554. Each deviation from the law cried out for heavenly vengeance and stood menacingly in the memory of the sinner. It was also terrible that the violation of one commandment made a person guilty of the entire law 555. But sin was added to sin and sinfulness increased with overwhelming progressiveness. The sinfulness of one was intertwined with the depravity of others, the sin of ancestors entailed the sins of their descendants. On the slavish-nomistic soil of Judaism grew the doctrine of original sin and the belief in the moral weakness of man. As a result of Adam's sin, death, suffering and moral evil reigned in human life 556. “Oh, what have you done, Adam?
When you sinned, it was not only you who fell, but also us, who come from you” 557. Since Adam himself sinned under the influence of Eve, then “from the woman the beginning of sin and through her we all die” 558. But Eve was also tempted by the devil; therefore, “through the envy of the devil, death entered the world, and those who belong to his inheritance experience it” 559. In any case, the whole world (this “age”) is extremely corrupt, and the number of those being saved is very limited 560; the sons of men became flesh 561. A person is punished not only for his own sins, but also for the sins of his fathers 562. On the same basis, the Jewish teaching about two centuries was revealed - the present age of the animal kingdoms and the future age, when there will be a new earth and a new heaven, when human nature will change and righteousness will reign.
But ethical pessimism on the same path of legal justification was easily and conveniently replaced by the complacency of Pharisaic righteousness. The religious self-satisfaction of the Jews was fueled by the fact that “the adoption, the covenants, the law, the worship and the promises belonged to them” 563. And the merits of the fathers did not disappear without a trace for their descendants. Already in prophetic times in the form of a slave. God expressed the idea of the intercessory significance of innocent suffering. We saw that the image of the servant of God was not a complete reality for the prophets, since the all-consuming bliss of innocent suffering was not fully accessible to them; still less could this image be a synthesis of reality for Judaism. But the less accessible it was to the Jews from the inside, the more they assimilated it from the outside. Not comprehending bliss in suffering, indignant at its meaninglessness for the righteous man himself, they held on to their intercessory meaning the more tightly, and the more persistently they attributed their value to their descendants.
Good deeds are counted in heaven; suffering can be counted towards a person for his sins; the good deeds of the fathers and the innocent sufferings of the righteous form capital in heaven, which is at the disposal of the synagogue 564.
Although the only way for every Jew to take advantage of the benefits of God's chosen people and the reserves of the synagogue was the strict implementation of the law 565; but even on this path there was the widest possible scope for moral complacency. If every offense placed a Jew in the ranks of sinners, then, conversely, every legalistic deed was for him a guarantee of divine favor and future reward. All the power lies in the fact that righteousness was completely visible and easily calculated. The executor of the law could not help but consider himself righteous: the consciousness of the decisive impossibility of achieving perfection along the path of natural development would be an incomprehensible, completely groundless humility in him. Trust in works essentially produces the self-confidence of righteousness. Just as inevitably, it gives rise to hypocrisy. The hypocrisy of the Pharisee was not an accidental appendage to his ethical character, but it was a necessary outcome of the nomistic regime.
The Law gave the Jew the opportunity to see his good deeds, count them and count on them, and this opportunity necessarily leads to hypocrisy, i.e. transfers assessment to the periphery of the personality, makes one appreciate life, its forms, its appearance, and not the personality, which is not amenable to nomistic assessment, having its own bottomless depths. If the truth of God is a declaration of human righteousness, a demonstration of it; then human truth must not only exist, but also appear, as Philo directly says 566. This connection between the internal and the external meant not only that in Judaism the ethical law was clothed in ritual forms, but also that the latter was given dominant importance. Nomystical-ritual appearance absorbs a person’s internal energy, forces him to look not inward, but outward. External righteousness is precisely ostentatious righteousness, followed by human glory: external righteousness, performed not to be seen, is absolutely impossible and unthinkable.
God can only be served internally, for God alone one can perform invisible good, and since worship is performed in external forms and justification is transferred to the external nomistic-ritual sphere, this is inevitably worship for human glory. That is why the scribes-Pharisees were hypocrites, they accepted glory from people, and not from God. Their hypocrisy, as characteristic of them, did not consist in the fact that they accomplished their salvation only for show - such hypocrites could be among them, as they are possible everywhere - but in the fact that essentially and necessarily their righteousness was ostentatious with all their sincerity. Such hypocrisy was only the other side of ethical complacency. The Pharisee was “confident of his righteousness” because he “fasted twice a week and gave a tenth of all that he acquired.” Hypocritical self-righteousness, further, is covered with conceit and exclusivity. The more corrupt the whole world, this whole century, seemed to the Jew, the more valuable his own righteousness seemed to him, which set him apart from the world of sinners.
Whereas previously the Jews were isolated by God's chosenness, now their isolation was secured by law, their righteousness, which essentially boiled down to moving away from sinful customs - before this was the separation of true worshipers of Jehovah from the pagans, now - the separation of the righteous-legalists from the lawless sinners. The first was softened by the consciousness of God's undeserved mercy and the provision of universal goals, the latter acquired sharper features of rough activity and its own merit. The former isolation was brightened by the possibility of future universalism; the later Pharisaism had a gloomy flavor of proud conceit and decisive intolerance. This thickening of the shadow coloring was noticed even from the side that within the people themselves it became customary to distinguish scribes from simpletons (amhaarez), zealots of the law (peruschim or chaberim) from sinners. The former treated the latter - these gospel babies (νήπιοι) - with complete contempt. “This people is ignorant of the law, they are cursed” 567.
The sinners of the “Wisdom of Solomon” say this about the righteous man: “It is hard for us to look at him, for his life is not like the life of others and his ways are different; he considers us an abomination and moves away from our ways as from uncleanness” 568. The Evangelical Pharisee thanked God for the fact that he was “not like other people” 569. Such a sharp difference between the peruschim and the amhaarez within the Jewish community not only does not exclude the external separation of the community from the pagan world, but even strengthens it. Since the Jew recognized his legalistic righteousness, all non-Jews became for him “vile, lawless pagans” 570. Here was the soil on which the extraordinary church-national conceit of the Jews blossomed. From them, further than anything else, was the idea that “in every nation, he who fears God and does what is right is acceptable to Him” and “that not a single person should be considered bad or unclean” 571. It was the main conviction of Judaism that only a Jew can be righteous, while a pagan is “by nature a sinner”: the difference between a Jew and pagans was, in fact, the difference between a righteous person and sinners.
This difference fell in the realm of nomistic righteousness and constituted not only an advantage, but also a duty of the Jew. Legalistic discipline, while delivering righteousness to the Jew, was aimed at separating him from pagan customs: righteousness itself coincided with Pharisaism. Here the rules and customs of ritual purity played a prominent role. “The Legislator,” we read in the famous letter of pseudo-Aristaeus, “surrounded us with an impenetrable fence and iron walls, so that we, pure in body and soul, free from superstition, would have no communication with any of the other nations... So that through communication with others we would not become defiled and through dealing with the worst, we would not become corrupted, he surrounded us on all sides with laws on purity in food, drink, touch, - in what we hear and see" 572. Since the time of Nehemiah, Jews have been especially jealous of the purity of marriage, turning away from mixed marriages.
In the book of Jubilees, Israel is given the following commandment: “Do not associate with the nations, and do not eat with them, and do not do according to their deeds, and do not enter into kinship with them, for (every) thing they do is unclean, and all their ways are defiled and are an abomination.”573 Even up. Peter, having been embarrassed by some from James, withdrew from fellowship at meals with the pagans 574. A Jew was forbidden to “communicate or become close to a foreigner” and to enter his house 575. From the Gospel history we know that the Jews did not enter the praetorium to Pilate, so as not to be defiled before eating the Passover 576. Likewise, the entry of pagans into the Jerusalem temple was its desecration 577. To Aros. Bar. Jews say about themselves: “we will always be blessed, at least in the fact that we did not mix with the pagans” 578. The pagans themselves most of all “noticed” in the Jews their “difference in worship and food” 579. This Pharisaic disgust had important ethical consequences. Some of these consequences were beneficial for the people's life. The pagan world, which Judaism widely encountered, suffered from extreme carnal licentiousness.
The Jews, generally turning away from pagan customs, felt a special disgust for the cult of the flesh. Jewish literature vigorously preaches abstinence from carnal sins 580 . But at the same time, the evil consequences of pharisaism were striking. Of these, the most important was that the Jews, due to their Pharisaism, could not form a church proper, could not be consistent on this path, could not give their kahal a universal character: the proselytes of Judaism endured various restrictions. The idea of renouncing national boundaries in the name of universal nomism could not be born on a Jewish basis: the pagans were required to renounce their nationality in the name of Judaism. The Jewish Church, with all its impulses toward universalism, remained nationalistic in its final aspirations. No less important is the fact that in Pharisaism there were insurmountable boundaries and moral energy itself.
The highest requirement of Jewish ethics, shining like a precious pearl in the rubbish of book casuistry, was the commandment of charity, of almsgiving. And it is on this commandment that the distorting effect of Pharisaism is most noticeable. In ancient Jewry, love for one's neighbor was limited to the national region; this restriction was preserved in Judaism 581. But now a new limitation has been added here - the limits of nomystical righteousness. The rays of love did not extend to sinners. “Give to the good and do not help the sinner,” teaches Jesus, son of Sirach 582. We read the same thing in the book of Tobit: “Distribute your bread at the grave of the righteous, but do not give to sinners” 583.
This was the nomistic life understanding of Judaism. As in every religion, so in Judaism, the main religious core of the life outlook was surrounded by a system of beliefs and theological ideas that had either religious-practical or Gnostic interest. These were the Jewish afterlife, messianic and eschatological beliefs.
In ancient times Israel was indifferent to the afterlife of the individual; his religious hopes were limited by the earthly fate of the people. Death was the border of the Jewish faith: beyond the grave is Sheol, the region of sleep and oblivion, where the name of God is no longer glorified, where there is no hope in Him, where there is not even remembrance of Him 584. God for Israel was “God of the living and not of the dead.” Ancient Israel was not embarrassed by this bleakness of Sheol. But when the law created a regime of legal righteousness, then the attention of the Jew was riveted on individual destiny, since the reward for righteousness must have individual value. Experience shows that in this life there is no complete reward, and even the righteous suffer innocently while sinners undeservedly prosper. When such religious experience collided with a nomistic worldview, ancient ideas about Sheol could have a negative effect on moral energy. We find clear traces of this in the books of Ecclesiastes and Jesus. Sirakhova.
Ecclesiastes observes that “the fate of the sons of men and the fate of beasts is the same: everything came from. dust and everything will turn to dust,” and from here he concludes that “there is nothing better than for a person to enjoy his deeds” 585. The son of Sirach comes to the same conclusion, who advises everyone: “do not deprive yourself of a good day, and let not participation in good pleasure (μερὶς ἐπιθυμίας ἀγαθῆς) pass you by. Come and accept and comfort your soul, since there is no comfort to be found in hell” 586. In this case, there was only one outcome left for faith - to cross the threshold of death. The tomb cannot serve as the boundary of divine dominion: Sheol is just as much in the power of God as earthly life. The righteous who suffer in this life and the sinners who prosper here will find full reward beyond the grave. The book “Wisdom of Solomon” in the first chapters polemicizes against the views and conclusions of Ecclesiastes and develops other views.
In the eyes of the foolish, the exodus of the righteous seems to be destruction and the departure from us - destruction; in fact, the souls of the righteous are in the hand of God and their hope is full of immortality (ἡἐλπὶς αὐτῶνἀθανασίας πλήρης). Punished a little, they will be greatly benefited. When they are rewarded, they will shine like sparks running along a stem 587. The most remarkable place depicting the Jewish belief in reward after death is a large section in the book (Eph.) of Enoch ch. CII, 4 – CIV, 8. “Fear not you, souls of the righteous, and hope, you who die in righteousness. Do not be sad that your soul descends into the underworld in great sorrow, in grief, sighing and sorrow, and that your body has not received in your life what your goodness deserved.” Their fate seems to be the same as that of sinners, but for those who died in righteousness, “every good, joy and honor” are prepared beyond the grave. God's judgment will reveal their good life and their fate will be different from the fate of sinners. This should strengthen them for deeds of good in earthly life. “The angels in heaven remind them of them before the glory of the Great One for their good.”
They will rejoice like “the angels of heaven.” On the contrary, severe torment awaits sinners in the underworld - darkness, snares, blazing flames.
Thus, the Jew lived in constant fear of appearing before the face of the Judge of the living and the dead, in fear of Him who “can destroy both soul and body in hell.” Undoubtedly, this fear had an ethical meaning: it placed a person above everything that “kills the body, but cannot kill the soul” - it elevated it above the eudaimonic principle: “eat, drink, be merry, for tomorrow you will die” - it gave strength to religious faith, strengthened it for deeds of goodness in suffering and humiliation. But this exhausts the saving significance of the Jewish belief in reward after death: standing in connection with the religious-legal understanding of life 588, faith in immortality shares all its shortcomings and consolidates them. In particular, on the one hand, it devalues earthly life, reducing it to a level preparatory to the afterlife; on the other hand, it paints the afterlife entirely in earthly colors and, therefore, materializes religion to the highest degree: for the Jewish faith, the afterlife is the same earthly life transferred beyond the threshold of the grave.
In the latter respect, it is already important that for the righteous it seems possible in the afterlife to “inherit the earth” 589, “to eat, to lie down and to rise” 590, to eat from the tree of life 591 and to eat from twelve trees with different fruits, and twelve springs flowing with milk and honey 592; The Sadducees, who did not believe in an afterlife, could not understand who would marry a woman who had been married to several husbands after the grave. Even more important is that the afterlife bliss of the righteous, in essence, in terms of psychological content, seems to be completely earthly happiness: it includes triumph over sinners and vindictive gloating over their torment 593 . And although on the issue of the actual physiology of the afterlife we find more spiritual ideas in the Jewish apocalypses, nevertheless, this does not change the earthly nature of the afterlife bliss: since afterlife reward is a reward for righteousness and afterlife torment is a punishment for sins, both inevitably retain the features of earthly feelings.
A positive solution to the main question of reward after death inevitably gave rise to a whole series of additional beliefs and theological ideas. Thus, the afterlife appears either in the form of the immortality of the righteous 594, or in the form of their rise to eternal life 595 and, in particular, bodily resurrection; then it suggests a time of judgment. Next, for religious thought it was necessary to determine the image of immortality or the state before the resurrection, the image of the resurrection and the image of judgment. The concept of immortality in Jewish theology is undeveloped; The religious thought of Judaism settled more decisively on the resurrection of the dead. The latter appears either as a general resurrection for judgment 596, or (more decisively) as a resurrection of the righteous alone for eternal blessed life, while sinners are either destroyed or remain in hell 597. The desire to understand the possibility of immortality or the state of those who died before the resurrection forced us to distinguish between body and soul, or spirit, in man, and at this point brought Jewish thought closer to Greek anthropology 598 .
Next, it was necessary to distinguish between the state of the dead before and after the trial 599 and in the afterlife proceedings itself - private retribution for each and the general “great judgment” 600. Finally, we find in Jewish writing numerous and varied descriptions of the image of the resurrection 601 and the nature of eternal life, and, as already said, grossly sensual features are intertwined with more spiritual ideas: the righteous will become angels in heaven 602, shine like lights in the firmament and will be seated on thrones of honor 603; they will inherit eternal life and death will not possess them 604; at the resurrection the trumpet will sound 605, etc. In Jewish writing we will find a description of the wanderings of the soul, afterlife horrors, details of legal proceedings, heavenly dwellings as a place of bliss for the righteous, and hell as a place of torment for sinners in fire and chains 606. That in this case the Jewish apocalypticism gave wide scope to foreign influences and internal contradictions is easy to understand.
Messianic hopes were inherited by Judaism from prophetic times. While afterlife hopes were individual hopes, messianic aspirations were national. With this character they came from prophetic times, but depending on the main direction of Judaism, they experienced important changes. The main difference between Judaism and the prophets in this regard is that the prophets, with their preaching about the coming day of the Lord, awakened moral energy, announced judgment, primarily for Israel, demanded social truth from it, as the natural cause of the messianic kingdom of God, on the contrary - for Judaism, moral perfection was already given in legalistic righteousness and it lacked only external justification, external triumph over pagan sinners, to whom it belonged world dominion. The Jew was waiting for external justification not as the fruit of his righteousness, but as a reward from God, from His world order. For the Jew personally, the reward was beyond the grave, but for the people, these were messianic benefits.
The Jews expected the latter not only as God's chosen people, but also as a righteous people; Therefore, Jewish literature preferably speaks of the righteous as heirs of future blessings. However, from a Jewish point of view, only a Jew could be righteous, so national boundaries were characteristic of the messianic faith of Judaism. If, on the other hand, there were sinners among the people themselves, unworthy to inherit life, then the true Israel consisted precisely of the righteous. With the failure of the ecclesiastic impulses of Judaism, for him the community of saints and carnal Israel coincided. The messianic time was supposed to bring external justification to this righteous community of the descendants of Abraham.
For the Jewish tradition, messianic aspirations were embraced in the concept of the kingdom of God. But while for the prophets it was primarily the reign of God over Israel, for Judaism the first place was the reign of Israel over the world. “Will You at this time, O Lord, restore the kingdom to Israel?” His disciples asked Christ in Jewish language 607. The very idea of the kingdom of God, or theocracy, finding a vivid expression in Jewish writing 608, is generally found here rarely, like a distant echo of prophetic preaching, and gives way to the idea of the kingdom of the people of God, the nation of saints, the community of the righteous. This kingdom is being established for Israel by God, who judges all languages and enslaves them to His people. The prophet Daniel in a vision contemplates four large beasts - symbols of the pagan world kingdoms. The Ancient of Days sits on the throne as judge. Then - “behold, with the clouds of heaven came as it were the Son of Man (ὡ ςυἱὸς ἀνθρώπον), reached the Ancient of Days, and was brought to Him.
And to him was given dominion, glory, and a kingdom, that all nations, nations, and languages should serve him; His dominion is an everlasting dominion, which will not pass away, and his kingdom will not be destroyed” 609. We are already familiar with the prophetic image of the Son of Man, as the image of a suffering righteous man. In Daniel’s vision, this symbol means the people of God, the community of His righteous, receiving external justification from God, although nothing prevents us from implying by this image the king of this community as its representative. His vision was explained to Daniel in the sense that the beasts signify the pagan kings who successively receive worldwide power. “Then the saints of the Most High will receive the kingdom, and they will possess the kingdom, forever and ever... The kingdom, and the power, and the royal greatness in all the heavenly places will be given to the people of the saints of the Most High, and their kingdom is an everlasting kingdom, and all rulers will serve and obey it” 610. It is easy to understand why the people of the saints are depicted in Daniel under the image of the Son of Man: this signified their oppressed position.
This image of the book of Daniel corresponds in the book of Enoch with the symbol of a sheep or sheep suffering from unjust shepherds and the beasts of the field. But “to the sheep is given a great sword; then the sheep come out against the beasts of the field to kill them, and all the beasts and birds of the air scatter before them” 611. Sheep are the suffering righteous who are given power over sinners 612. In Prem. Sol. It is said about the righteous that they will judge nations and rule over nations, and the Lord will reign over them forever 613. In the book. On the Jubilees the promise is given to Israel: “I will give to your seed all the earth that is under heaven, and they shall rule over all nations of their own will; and after that they will take possession of all the earth and inherit it forever” 614.
So, the prophetic day of the Lord, the day of judgment, seemed to the Jews exclusively as a judgment on the pagans, a day of vengeance on the oppressors of Israel. And if Jewish writing persistently speaks of the sorrows befalling the community of saints on the eve of the Messianic time, then the Jews saw in these sorrows a sign of approaching salvation, and each of their generations considered its time to be the most difficult, so the teaching about the pre-Messianic sorrows gave them consolation in the present disasters and their hopes were entirely in the expectation of judgment over the pagans, their power over them.
The coming salvation in the minds of the Jews was firmly associated with the expectation of the Messiah. From the gospel history we know how intense this expectation of the Jews was. The messianic aspirations of Judaism, in their content, were closely intertwined with prophetic teaching, but also differed from the latter in many respects. Here, in the first place, we must put the feature of later pre-Christian Judaism that its messianic beliefs had personal certainty and focused on one future king-savior. Accordingly, the names Messiah-Christ 615, Son of God 616, Son of Man 617, Chosen 618, Son of David and King of Israel 619 were now used in a strictly messianic sense, whereas previously they had an indefinite application 620.
However, messianic certainty exhausted the new side in the use of these names and their immediate meaning did not go beyond the framework of the past: they retained their theocratic meaning, and still pointed to the coming Savior as the chosen one of God, His messenger, the executor of His providential will for the holy people. Even the name Son of God, not to mention other names, both in the Hebrew indefinite application and in the Jewish definite use, pointed not to the metaphysical essence of the person and not to his internal property, but to his external relationship to God and the people, to his purpose, election, service and authority - it had neither the metaphysical meaning that it received in Christian dogmatics, nor the internal religious meaning that Christ gave it, but it was used in an external historical-theocratic meaning, which he had in common with other messianic terms that were decisively unambiguous.
The main thing here is that Judaism was not interested in the essence of Christ, the inner side of Messiahship, focusing all its attention on His work, on His ministry - for the Jews, not only the main, but, one might say, the only messianic question was the question not about what Christ is, but about when Christ will come and what He will do, or rather, what God will do through Him. In this regard, our attention is also drawn to the fact that in some of the monuments of Judaic literature not a word is mentioned about the Messiah. This is explained by the fact that faith in the coming of the Messiah did not constitute an essential element of the Jewish religion, that it is an accidental and secondary part of Jewish contemplation, since nomism instilled in every faithful Jew the idea of the possibility of being a savior for himself, of being obliged only to himself. However, this train of thought is our logical conclusion from the premises of the Jewish religion, and it remains questionable whether the Jews themselves made such a conclusion: in the positive content of religion, not everything is constructed according to the schemes of abstract logic.
If the silence about the Messiah is explained by the accident of the messianic element in Judaism, given the undeniable intensity of messianic expectations, then one would have to admit the sharp division of the Jews into parties on the messianic question. We can only pretend to explain the possibility of silence, and for this it is enough to note that the messianic faith did not occupy a central position in the system of the Jewish religion, either in the sense of the church-dogmatic teaching about the person and work of Christ, or in the evangelical sense of absolute religious creativity: for Judaism, the Messiah was represented as the executor of God’s Plans for the chosen people, the accomplisher of the intended work with God-given powers. From this side, it was appropriate to say that the Messiah Himself will trust in the Lord - His King 621, so that the idea of God the Savior implied the work of the Messiah and silence about Him did not prove to be evidence of the absence of messianic hopes or their decisive groundlessness.
What is certain is that the kingdom of God over Israel 622 and the kingdom of Israel over the world occupied the main place in the messianic system of Judaism, leaving for the Messiah an intermediary role in the implementation of the kingdom of Israel on the basis of the kingdom of God and making His work not only unimportant, but easily implied.
The Jewish religion outlined a strictly defined activity for the Messiah: in order to establish a kingdom for Israel, the Messiah had to appear as a national hero, the king of the Jewish people. The Messianic ideas of the Jews were extremely nationalistic and narrowly political. This extreme and narrowness was also one of the features of Judaic messianism. The job of the Jewish Messiah is to defeat the enemies of Israel and bring him triumph over his enemies. The strongest and clearest expression of the Messianic aspirations of Judaism can be recognized as the XVII Psalm of Solomon 623. Here the psalmist, depicting in vivid colors the oppressed state of the Jews, turns to God with a prayer: “Look, O Lord, and raise up for them their king, the son of David, at the time that You, O God, have chosen for Your servant to reign over Israel.
And you will gird him with strength, so that he will defeat the rulers of the unrighteous, cleanse Jerusalem from the pagans who trample (him) in destruction - in wisdom, in righteousness he will reject sinners from the inheritance, crush the pride of the sinner like the vessels of a potter, destroy their entire being with a rod of iron, destroy the wicked nations with the word of his mouth, so that when he threatens the pagans will flee from his face and he will expose the sinners by the word of their hearts... And he will have the heathen nations under his yoke to serve him” 624.
So that this characteristic of Jewish ideas about the messianic kingdom is not one-sided, mention should be made of the ethical features of Jewish messianism. In the same XVII Psalm of Solomon, as in some other monuments of Jewish literature, the ethical character of the messianic kingdom is clearly outlined. The Messiah will gather a holy people and lead them in righteousness; He will not allow unrighteousness and the workers of iniquity into his midst; for Him all will be sons of their God, all will be saints 625. The religious benefits of the messianic time in the book of Jubilees are presented under the image of the vision of God 626. However, it is necessary to weaken the meaning of these ethical speeches inherited from the prophets. It is already important that the moral purity of the chosen people in messianic times is achieved, according to Jewish ideas, not by the salvation of sinners, but by the removal from them of both lawless pagan peoples 627 and Jewish sinners 628, and even by the extermination of sinners 629.
It is even more important that the righteousness of the faithful Jews preserved for the messianic kingdom is not assessed either as a future revival or as a natural cause of the promised benefits and, on the contrary, is considered in the sense of a legal condition and an external sign of the advent of the messianic kingdom. In this direction, apparently, they even went so far as to recognize the dependence of both the time and the character, glorious or humiliated, of the appearance of the Messiah on the moral state of the chosen people. And in any case, this dependence and, in general, the messianic-ethical expectations of the Jews always and inevitably reinforced the self-satisfaction of Jewish righteousness, but did not awaken their moral energy. Here everything was determined by the nomystical character of righteousness. Israel, according to Judaism, is not simply God's chosen people who will be the first to be judged on the day of the Lord, but a people of legalistic righteousness that lacks external justification.
Therefore, the messianic kingdom of Israel over the nations must be precisely the reign of a righteous people, the triumph of the law. According to the figurative expression 4 Ezr. (3 Esdras.), the Messiah will destroy the wickedness of the nations by the law (in lege, or per legem), which is like fire 630. All streams of this legalistic-messianic expectation steadily fall into the main channel of the thought that the Messiah will bring triumph to the law and give universal power to the forms of Jewish righteousness (κοινόςνόμος κατὰγαῖαν ἅ πασαν) 631. And in inextricable combination with this thought, it is necessary to evaluate the Jewish ideas about the righteousness of the Messiah himself: he must be legally righteous in order to deliver victory to the saints 632. Finally, the sufferings of the Messiah, which, however, are spoken of only in later Jewish monuments, could only be significant in the system of the Jewish religion as a means of His personal moral improvement.
These basic features in the messianic expectations of Judaism are complicated by a number of additional beliefs and ideas. The Jew, in the images of his fantasy, wanted to visualize his own bliss in the messianic time, the extraordinary fertility of the earth, longevity, many children, wealth and honor, the splendor of the new temple, God's judgment on the pagans, their humiliation and even extermination; further, the Jew tried to predict the time of the Messiah, created a doctrine about the signs of His coming and appearance...
Some of these images of Jewish fantasy have a miraculous character: the fertility of the earth, longevity and painlessness seem extraordinary; heavenly fire destroys sinners 633; Michael, the Grand Duke, stands for the people of Israel 634; all the sons of the covenant who survived until the time of the Messiah are miraculously gathered in Jerusalem 635, and the dead are raised. Based on the previous prophetic preaching, these supranatural ideas of Judaism, in comparison with the past, were distinguished not only by intensity and extensiveness, but also by a more solid foundation in the system of religious life. For Judaism, the natural causal connection between the onset of messianic benefits and the moral state of man and society, with moral effort, was finally lost. In legalistic righteousness, the Jew did everything he could do, and if the kingdom of God did not come, it was because its coming did not stand in a natural-causal dependence on spiritual and religious creativity and on the natural course of events and the available forces of nature, being determined by the will of heaven.
Therefore, miraculousness is integral to the composition of Jewish messiology. Messianic benefits were expected by the Jews from heaven 636. In other words, the Jew imagined the messianic blessings to be pre-existing in heaven; he waited only for the time of their revelation. According to the Prem. Sol. The kingdom of God (βασιλείαθεοῦ) exists in heaven before its revelation on earth, so that under exceptionally favorable conditions it can be seen in advance 637. According to the expression 4 Ezr. (3 Esdras.), “Zion will come and will appear to everyone prepared and arranged” (Sion venietetostendetur omnibus parata et aedificata) 638. Pseudo-Enoch saw in a vision how the ancient house (i.e. the Jerusalem temple or Jerusalem) was destroyed and “the Lord of the sheep brought a new house - larger and higher than the first, and set it in the place of the first” 639. This is the “coming heavenly city.” In particular, the Messiah, as the main mediator in the revelation of the kingdom of God, according to Jewish ideas, exists in heaven before appearing on earth in the messianic time. In this property of heavenly pre-existence, the Messiah in the language of Judaism is called the Son of Man.
The image of “as if the Son of man” coming with the clouds of heaven is found already in the book of Daniel 640. If in the very human form, in the very image of one born from a wife, natural weakness and humiliation are revealed, then in the procession with the clouds of heaven one must see the discovery of heavenly glory 641. With this vision of Daniel, the use of the term “Son of Man” begins with a new meaning, different from the prophetic image of the suffering righteous man. We find further development of Jewish ideas about the heavenly dignity of the Messiah in the book of Enoch. Here with the Head of Days comes the Son of Man, whose face is like the appearance of a man and, at the same time, like one of the holy angels. He, the Son of Man, “has righteousness, righteousness lives with him, and he reveals all the treasures of what is hidden, for the Lord of spirits chose him, and his lot before the Lord of spirits surpassed everything through righteousness into eternity” 642. Of the Son of man it is further said: “Before the sun and signs were made, before the stars of heaven were made, his name was called before the Lord of spirits...
He was chosen and hidden before Him (God) 643 before the world was created, and it will be before Him until eternity” 644. At 4 Ezr. (3 Esdras.) The Son of God is described as similitudo hominis (Syr.), homo cum nubibus caeli, vir ascendens. “This is the one whom the Almighty preserves for many times, who by himself will deliver his creation”; but “no one on earth can see my Son, except during his day” 645. This kind of supranatural ideas are also noticeable in the peculiarities of the translation of the LXX from the Hebrew text, so ps. SIH, 3 ἐκ γαστρος πρὸ ἑωβφόρουἑξεγέννησά σε, “from the womb before the morning star he begat you,” corresponds to the Hebrew - “from the womb of the dawn the dew of your youth will come to you”... It is known, that in the Talmudic literature the pre-existence of the Messiah, as well as other shrines - the Torah, the throne of glory, the sanctuary, “repentance”; – seems sometimes ideal, sometimes roughly real; The pagan idea of the heavenly prototype of man and the later teaching of Kabbalah about Adam Caedmon, the ideal prototype of the world, are also known.
Science raises questions whether in the Jewish apocalypses the pre-existence of the Messiah is understood ideally or really, and in what mutual relationship stand the messianic ideas of the Jewish apocalypses, the pagan and Kabbalistic idea of the prototype of man and the teachings of the apostle. Paul about Christ the heavenly man. These questions are resolved differently, since, at least, the messianic ideas of Judaism from a metaphysical point of view are rather unclear and confusing; but the religious and practical basis of Jewish beliefs must be recognized as indisputable. This basis is the belief in the miraculous nature of messianic blessings. The Jews were waiting for a miracle, hoping for a miraculous salvation. A miracle, at all stages of religious evolution, is characterized by two features: it is an expression of religious absoluteness in mechanical form, in the form of external omnipotence, spatio-temporal unlimitedness; then it testifies either to the oppressive sorrow of life or to the extreme attachment to earthly goods.
Likewise, in the Jewish religion, belief in miracles served as the most extreme manifestation of its national limitations. The Jew expected Messianic blessings from heaven, but he transferred his earthly desires to heaven: from heaven he expected an earthly city, earthly blessings, sensual manna, a national-political Messiah. This is why national aspirations and heavenly aspirations are not dissimilar in the Jewish system. Hence the transition to eschatological ideas turns out to be gradual.
The afterlife of the individual and national-messianic expectations do not exhaust the hopes of Judaism; cosmological and eschatological hopes are added to both. The Jews were waiting for the end of the world. We find the beginnings of this expectation already in the prophetic sermon, in which the judgment of God over the pagans is presented at the same time as the judgment over their gods, over the armies of heaven, in which the day of the Lord is depicted by cosmological features - the change of the sun and moon, the renewal of heaven and earth. These features in the preaching of the prophets may have a figurative meaning and, in any case, occupy a secondary place, constituting the setting of the main event, i.e. the advent of the kingdom of God on earth, and expressing the idea that the kingdom of God is realized in earthly conditions by divine forces. On the contrary, in Judaism the secondary became the main thing, so that the revelation of the kingdom of God became a private phenomenon in the cosmological catastrophe.
The general cosmological-eschatological scheme in the system of Judaism is represented by the change of two worlds, or ages, eons: the present age, this age, this world (αἰ ὼ νο ὗ τος הַוּהעולָם) and the future age (αἰ ὼ νμέλλων הבָא עולָ ). “The Almighty created not one age, but two” (nonfecit altissimusunum saeculum sed duo); “The Almighty has created this age for many, and the next for few” 646. This age continues from the time when heaven and earth and all their works were created, as well as the heavenly powers and all the creation of the earth, until the time when the sanctuary of the Lord is created in Jerusalem on Mount Zion and all the lights are renewed 647. The last hopes of Judaism were reduced to the advent of the new century. This world is not eternal; he is assigned a certain time. When this time passes, when this age 648 is completed, then this age will pass, disappear and a new great age will begin, the invisible age will open, the world of eternal life, the endless age 649.
Religious curiosity aimed at determining the duration of this age, at determining the times and seasons about which Christ said to the apostles: “it is not your business to know the times or seasons that the Father has appointed in His authority” 650. If in time the present age began with the creation of the world, then in its character it began with the time of sin - with the fall of Adam, or with the fall of the angels who entered into relations with human wives 651. This age is essentially a corrupt, unrighteous age, a corruptible and transitory age, an age of sorrows and torment. In particular, the righteous in this age inevitably suffer suffering due to the irreparable discrepancy between personal dignity and external goods. In the next century righteousness will reign, and the righteous will be comforted. In the vision of two centuries, the Jew sought an explanation for the inevitability of sin and suffering: this was his theodicy. He expected salvation, no matter how he understood it, only in the next century.
In other words, he considered it necessary for the Salvation of man to completely change human nature and the nature of this world: in this miraculously magical renewal of all nature, he believed his salvation. It was considered impossible to achieve good in the conditions of this century, to achieve it through moral and social improvement as a natural fruit of religious and ethical creativity; this entire century seemed to be a time of feat for which a reward awaits in the next century, a period of birth pangs, the agony of dying suffering. Pre-Messianic sorrows in this sense grow to the size of a cosmological catastrophe. This world is quickly coming to an end when its sorrows expand to the limit of death agony: the sky will not give rain, the fruits of the earth will be delayed, the sun will change and the moon will not appear in its time, blood will drip from the trees, the stones will cry out, there will be an earthquake, famine, untruth will increase among people, civil wars will arise 652, etc. From this worldwide catastrophe will arise a new creation, a renewed world.
“The first heaven will disappear and pass away, a new heaven will appear, and all the powers of heaven will shine in sevenfold forever. And after this there will be many weeks without number until eternity for good and righteousness, and from then on sin will no longer be remembered until eternity” 653. The author of the Book of Enoch shows special attention to astronomical laws, since for him, as for all Judaism, the fate of man and the fate of the heavenly hosts are mutually connected. The Jew was busy not so much with preparing the future, but with finding out the future and predicting it. Here is an explanation of the abundance of Jewish apocalypses, here is the basis of Jewish Gnosticism; desire to penetrate into the transcendental spheres, to grasp the laws of world periods.
Jewish Gnosticism extended even further. Behind the visible change of earthly events and behind astronomical phenomena, Jewish inquisitive thought saw the action of spirits, in which they believed the final explanation of world and human life. The whole world is ruled by angels; part of the angels fell; fallen angels lured people into sin and corrupted the earth 654. All the suffering in this world is the work of evil angels. Some of the evil angels are already imprisoned, where they will be kept until the great judgment 655; others enjoy freedom until that same great day of judgment. The renewal of the world and the salvation of the righteous is inextricably linked with the destruction of the power of evil spirits, with their final condemnation. God's judgment over evil spirits is presented in the form of God's struggle with them, and their final condemnation in the form of His victory over them and the defeat of their heads - Satan, the devil, Belial, Azazel, the prince of this world 656.
It is easy to see that the three types of Jewish aspirations are intertwined with one another. Thus, the afterlife reward of an individual, although it begins directly after death, is fully achieved either in the blessings of the messianic kingdom, or after the great judgment; further, messiology and eschatology are completely mixed up. When reading the Jewish apocalypses, it is sometimes impossible to decide what they are talking about, whether about the afterlife bliss of the righteous or about the messianic kingdom of Israel, and where judgment and retribution take place, in heaven or on earth. However, attempts are noticeable to distinguish between the messianic and eschatological spheres. On this path, the ideas of Antichrist and Chiliasm arise.
The Jews expected a double victory - on earth the victory of Israel over the pagan kingdoms and in heaven the victory of God over the devil, the prince of this world. Pagan kingdoms are carriers of demonic power and pagan kings turn out to be the embodiment of Satan. This is the idea of the Antichrist. The last pagan king, whose victory marks the advent of the messianic kingdom, appears at the same time as the most fierce enemy of Israel and the most stubborn opponent of God. So in Dan. VII, 24 – 27 the last king of the last pagan kingdom “utters words against the Most High and oppresses the saints of the Most High”; in VIII, 9 ff. such a king “ascended to the host of heaven, and cast down to the earth part of this host and the stars, and trampled them, and even ascended to the Leader of this host,” etc. In Psalm. Sal. II, 32 ff. the same opponent of God “does not think that he is a man” and says: “I will be the Lord of heaven and earth” 657.
Then the desire to distinguish the messianic time from the eschatological end of the world gave rise to the idea that the messianic kingdom would have a certain duration, that it would end with this world, and then judgment, resurrection and eternal life would begin. This idea is found in the book. En. XCI; 4 Ezr. (3 Esdras.) VII, 28 ff. Aros. Bac. XXX; XL, 3; LXXIV, 2. Moreover, the fate of the Messiah is determined differently: according to 4 Ezr. (3 Esdras.) VII, 29 Christ the Son of God at the end of the messianic kingdom will die, like all people who have breath, and according to Apoc. Bar.XXX, 1 The Messiah will return to heaven (redibit in gloria). We know that along with this there was the conviction that Christ abides forever 658. The duration of the Messianic kingdom is determined in 4 Ezr. VII, 28 in 400 years. The Talmud shows hesitation in this regard; most often a thousand-year duration is indicated (chiliasm) 659.
Be that as it may, the Jews lived in tense anticipation of the imminent end of this century and the onset of the next century 660. The question arises whether this expectation should not have had a beneficial effect on the moral energy of Judaism. This question must be answered in the negative. The most characteristic and significant thing in this expectation of the Jews was that the kingdom of heaven was presented to the Jews as coming in the future, and not as eternal, inherent in the present. It was not the opposition of this world and the otherworldly, the temporal and the eternal, the external and the invisible, but the opposition of the present and the future that dominated the ideas of the apocalyptics. And they called the upper world invisible, but only in the sense that it is invisible now and will be revealed in the future - they called it infinite, but only in the sense of the eternal extension of the present, and not in the sense of elevation above time and temporal interests. The eschatological framework of Jewish hope could not do the latter.
Although in the general scheme of apocalyptic expectations the revelation of the Messianic kingdom was only a partial phenomenon in a worldwide eschatological catastrophe, all the interests of Judaism were focused on this particular phenomenon: expecting with their minds a “new world”, with their hearts the Jew expected the Messianic time, the resurrection for the Messianic kingdom, dominion over enemies, feasts at the tables of the Messiah. Jewish apocalypticism, as noted by more than one scholar, did not devalue “this world” and its blessings, but devalued the “present” and its meaning, turning its gaze to the future.
The upper world was not the property of the Jew’s heart, but only of his mind. At the same time, we come to the very last characteristic feature of Judaism - to what can be called the Gnostic direction of religion. The Jew not only enthusiastically calculated the times and dates for the revelation of the kingdom of God, but he imagined the upper world in general as accessible to human knowledge - gnosis. And he greedily caught the mystical revelations of the apocalyptics, combined the representations of Old Testament writing into logical schemes, and constructed what can be called abstract theology.
Therefore, God became an object of gnosis for the Jew: for him God was revealed not in the history of the people, as was the case in the religion of Moses and the prophets, and not in the personal spiritual experience of the gospel religion, but in philosophical and abstract knowledge. Hence the transcendence of the religious concepts of Judaism. The very name of God became fearful, and the Jew was forbidden to pronounce it. Ὀνομάζωνδὲ τὸὄνομα Κυρ ί ουθανάτ ῳ θανατούσθ ῳ - this is how LXX Lev.XXIV, 16 was translated, where in the Hebrew original we read: he who blasphemes the name of Jehovah must die. The name of Jehovah began to be replaced by Gnostic epithets: the Most High, the Eternal, the Almighty, the Great, the Holy, the Creator of heaven and earth, the Lord of spirits. Abstract names came into use: sky, glory, power. Ancient anthropomorphisms began to be eliminated by allegorical interpretation.
Having attached his heart to the coming end of the world, to the cosmological-eschatological catastrophe, the Jew tried to penetrate with his mind into the secrets of the revelation of God in time, to comprehend the beginning of the world, to create a cosmogony. The concept of divine omnipotence, divine absoluteness and independence has now acquired philosophical precision. In particular, the idea of the creation of the world 661 was developed with complete certainty. Religious-historical monotheism now assumed a strictly logical form. Dwelling on the beginning and end of the world, Jewish religious thought carefully studied the structure of the world and the course of world life: it determined the number of heavens, the movement of the planets, the location of heaven and hell, and the succession of world periods. One can imagine how many nonsenses were expressed at the same time.
The favorite object of Jewish gnosis was the world of angels and evil spirits. Jewish theology tried to explore the nature of angel-spirits, endowed them with names, established their different classes and ranks... Angels participate in divine providence, some of them are guardians of nations, Michael is the patron saint of the Jewish people, and each person has his own guardian angel. Angels take a particularly close part in the struggle of God with the devil and his army. In general, angels are intermediaries in the relations of God with the world. A special position among these intermediaries is occupied in (later) Jewish theology by the hypostatized properties and actions of God - Wisdom-Sophia, the Word of God - Memra of Jehovah, Metatron, IIIechina, the Spirit of God. Here one cannot help but see echoes of ancient Hebrew religious images, but there is no doubt that these religious concepts will further develop, depending on the transcendence of the Concept of God. These. the images now received greater definition, filling the gap that had formed between God and the world.
This provided a point of contact with the pagan-philosophical idea of the Logos. However, we do not have data to judge whether there was a connection in pre-Christian Jewish ideas between these divine images and the image of the Messiah.
With no less attention, Jewish theology focused on the kingdom of evil spirits and demons. The fall of the angels and the origin of demons were understood in relation to the story of Gen. VI, et seq. Some of the angels “left the highest, holy, eternal heaven, and slept with women, and defiled themselves with the daughters of men, and took wives for themselves, and acted like the sons of the earth, and gave birth to sons - giants. The souls of giants after their death become evil spirits on earth, or demons. “The spirits of heaven have their home in heaven, and the spirits of earth, born on earth, have their home on earth.” They commit violence, cause destruction, and cause disasters 662. All sorts of diseases were especially attributed to the action of unclean spirits. Among the Jews, the art of expelling evil spirits and spells in general was widespread.
However, we do not need to enter into a detailed study of Jewish gnosis from the point of view of its content. We survey pre-Christian Judaism from the height of one point - the Gospel. But the Gospel, unlike Christian gnosis and even the apostolic epistles, presupposes the very fact of Jewish Gnosticism and magical practice, barely entering the sphere of their specific forms and real content. In other words, in the Gospel, Jewish Gnosticism appears as a popular faith, in its massive outlines, and not in those bizarre twists of religious fantasy that were accessible to limited circles...
We have finished our review of the Old Testament religion... In what sense can it be called the basis of the Gospel?
We have before us, first of all, a striking external observation: the Gospel is presented in the language of the Old Testament religion. The very fact of the dependence of the Gospel on the Old Testament religion can be called well-known, but the degree of this dependence, its limits and nature, are either not sufficiently recognized or not properly appreciated. The dependence of the Gospel on the Old Testament language must be called the most decisive. If the entire Gospel of Christ is decomposed into its constituent logical elements, i.e. into thematic sections, sayings and terms, and compare them with biblical and post-biblical Jewish literature, it turns out that there is not a single new element in the Gospel. Entire departments; eg The eschatological conversation, the beatitudes, verbally reproduce the cycles of thoughts familiar to Christ’s listeners. If not all thematic sections, then all the sayings and, in any case, all the terms of the Gospel were familiar to His listeners.
The sayings “inherit the earth”, “see God”, “on the third day they will rise again”, the terms “kingdom of God”, “Son of man”, “only begotten Son of God”, etc. - all this is taken from the religious Old Testament Jewish vocabulary. The Gospel of Christ is the only book in world history in terms of the absolute unoriginality of its elements, and it is a hair's breadth away from being the most uninteresting book; It deserves attention only in historical terms as a remnant of its era. What prevents the Gospel from being such a valueless quantity is that it gives new content within the framework of traditional religious language, being a product of the most original religious creativity. The combination of old words with a new meaning, with a new spirit, is what is most characteristic of the Gospel.
When Christ said that “God is not the God of the dead, but of the living,” He repeated the traditional saying, into which, however, he put a completely new meaning: whereas according to the Old Testament concept, Jehovah was only the God of the living, and was not the God of Sheol, according to the teaching of Christ, for God there are no dead, for Him everyone is alive. So the whole Gospel is a new word in an old language. In this character, the Gospel presents for researchers its temptation, which rarely can anyone resist. The temptation is to understand the Gospel based on its language, from the history and philology of its terms, from previously crystallized beliefs, religious ideas and hopes, while the content of the Gospel teaching goes beyond the historical and philological framework and lies above contemporary beliefs and hopes. Knowledge of the historical-philological framework and religious-folk background of the Gospel teaching is necessary so as not to introduce into its content what constitutes the historical background and external frame, but it does not provide anything from the internal content of the Gospel preaching.
When they limit themselves to this knowledge, then they close the path to the meaning of the Gospel. In scientific studies of gospel history, which is the actual history of gospel miracles, they are usually limited to a rationalistic interpretation or apologetic justification of gospel miracles, although the reason of gospel history lies in the unique sequence of gospel miracles and does not depend on their rationalistic-apologetic reliability. Likewise, in scientific studies of the Gospel teaching, they usually seek the historical-folk meaning of the Gospel speech, while some try in vain to interpret the entire preaching of Christ in the historical-folk terms of the Jewish religion and eliminate its original value, while others no less vainly try to understand the own content of the Gospel in the same historical and philological way. It is easy to understand that only the critical-negative side of this exegesis can benefit from success, and that its positive side is doomed to complete futility.
It is necessary and possible to yield to the last degree to the claims of negative criticism, since it establishes the historical and philological basis of the Gospel preaching, but it is necessary to insist that this basis does not exhaust the original content of the Gospel, i.e. and is not rejected by her and is not explained. It is necessary to recognize the most decisive dependence of the Gospel on the Old Testament Jewish language, but at the same time, the Gospel in its content remains the most original sermon in the history of religions. The Gospel teaching with all its lower side, all the points of its foundation rests on the Old Testament Jewish base, but it does not blur on the historical-national plane, rushing to the heights of personal religious creativity.
In what way is this double relationship of the Gospel to its historical basis more closely revealed?
Here we need to distinguish several stages. Firstly, the Gnostic concepts of the Old Testament religion, fully developed in post-exilic Judaism, settle in the Gospel as a colorless background, inevitable vocabulary, to which the Gospel treats completely indifferently, neither assimilating it nor discarding it, which is not in the least part of its content. There is nothing Gnostic in the actual content of the Gospel teaching, 663 and all Gnostic concepts found on its pages constitute an indifferent basis for it. This thesis is substantiated positively by the fact that the original content of the Gospel is given entirely elsewhere - in its teaching about the divine, or spiritual, life of man, and negatively by the fact that all Gnostic concepts reflected in the Gospel are borrowed from Jewish theology, and they are neither adopted nor rejected by the Gospel. Elements of Jewish gnosis serve only as an indifferent form for the new gospel teaching.
If we began to systematize these elements according to the Gospel, the result would be pure Jewish theology. Our scholastic theology is mainly a systematization of Gnostic elements, and it directly adjoins Jewish theology 664 without affecting the pure gospel teaching in the same way as the grammar of the New Testament (in the literal and narrow sense) language passes by the gospel content.
The Gospel is indifferent to Jewish theology, since they lie in different areas, and they do not even have points of significant contact 665. But the Gospel treats Judaism differently as a religious understanding of life and worldview. In this area, a clash was inevitable, and the content of Christ's sermon was revealed to the listeners in decisive opposition to Judaism. And the gospel word in this regard is so decisive that it closes the doors of the kingdom of heaven for everyone who, in their righteousness, stands at the level of the scribes and Pharisees 666. The Gospel returns the Jewish system of life understanding to the prophetic heights along which it itself passes, taking into itself those two commandments - about love for God and for neighbor, on which the law and the prophets hang 667, so that Christ testifies to Himself that He did not come to break the law or the prophets, but to fulfill 668. However, the Gospel is not only a statement of the Old Testament and does not stop at the prophetic stage: it goes forward.
The foundations of the Old Testament religion, through natural development, led to Judaism. And therefore, the Gospel could not reject Judaism, as its opposite, and at the same time accept without changing the foundations of the Old Testament religion: this would mean rejecting the fruits and accepting the roots. The foundations of the Old Testament religion in the Gospel are accepted and raised to a level at which faith should bear different fruits. By what was “said to the ancients,” Christ simultaneously meant both the prophetic root and the Jewish fruits, not only rejecting Judaism, but also freeing the Jewish religion from the limitations that were inherent in its essence.
What is the significant difference between the Gospel and the Old Testament religion? What moment in the history of religion represents the transition of the Jewish understanding of life to the Christian understanding? What new does the Gospel give?
This question can be answered, before presenting the Gospel content, with a formal description of the Gospel teaching.
Evangelical faith is the absolute form of religion - religion raised to the level of absolute expression. In the Gospel, an infinite number of zeros are added to the unit denoting a religious value - in the preaching of Christ, all bonds are removed from religion, faith is freed from all boundaries and the spirit is raised to such a height, before which the mountains are level with the valleys, from which an endless perspective opens up, on which it is immersed in boundless freedom. The ancients were commanded to love one's neighbor and hate one's enemy; Christ commands us to love every person, our own and others, the righteous and the sinner, the pure and the unclean. The ancients were forbidden to kill; the Gospel does not even allow anger. The ancients were commanded not to commit adultery, in the Gospel - not even to look at a woman with lust. In the Old Testament, religion called for not breaking an oath, in the new - for not swearing at all. There the ideal was justice and uniformity in revenge, here it was complete non-resistance to evil.
The Jew gave tithes to God, donated to the church from the excess; Christ teaches that a person should give everything of God to God, sacrifice everything until the last daily food, abandon everything that is his, hate all his own. Previously, a person calculated how many times he should forgive a sinful brother, seven times or more - the Gospel teaches to forgive an infinite number of times. The Son of the covenant in his piety placed his trust in God, believed that God would come at the right moment and deliver him, that heaven would reward him according to his deserts; the new Gospel frees a person completely from any concern about his face, about his soul (life), it speaks to the son of the Heavenly Father; “Forget about yourself, disregard God, renounce all rights and abandon all arithmetic.” The Gospel of Christ lifts the human spirit to heavenly heights and convinces it: “don’t hold on, don’t cling, don’t be afraid, give yourself all to God, don’t expect anything for yourself, melt into this boundless space.” It brings a person to the abyss of death, shows the reflection of heaven in it and calls him to lay down his soul in boundless self-sacrifice.
The Old Testament made man close to God; The Gospel infuses God into the very heart of man, teaches man to look at everything subspecieabsoluti, to desire absolutely, to do absolutely - according to the Divine. Christian charity is charity without end; Christian faith is boundless, unconditional faith, it is complete devotion to God; Christian love is self-sacrifice to the point of death. If for ancient man the desire to be like the gods was a sinful temptation, because he wanted to take the place of God, he measured divine greatness arithmetically; The Gospel teaches us how to achieve real and complete absoluteness; it gives us the strength not to stop halfway, to give up everything in order to acquire everything. Of all types of religious limitations, the Jewish religion was constrained by the highest, the very last - the limitations of the people's chosenness of God. The Gospel, throwing off all limitations from religion, also destroys this idea of being chosen by the people, creating a personal-spiritual religion.
The bearer of religious absoluteness can be not a people, but a person, a personal spirit - and the transition from the Old Testament to the Gospel is a transition from folk religion to personal religious creativity. The Old Testament at its very core is constrained by national limitations and particularism; Old Testament ethics is inevitably social ethics, naturally leading to a legalistic regime. The Evangelical religion is a religion of personal absoluteness, personal spiritual creativity. Such is the Gospel both in its origin and in its teaching. In its essence, it is the work of Christ alone, His original creativity; and as a doctrine, it addresses itself in every word to the personal spirit. With Christ, with His God-consciousness, a completely new thing begins in the religious history of mankind, something new to the point of human Self-Denial, limited by the people.
Undoubtedly, the emergence of Christianity did not violate the law of historical development, and it rests entirely on a historical basis; but the whole strength lies in the fact that the Gospel antithesis of Old Testament limitation is not one of those antitheses of one type of conditional to another type of conditional into which historical evolution is divided, but it is the antithesis of the absolute conditional, the internal to the external, the personal to the socio-historical. In Christ, the Jew said: “I don’t want to be just a Jew, I want to be a man - I don’t want to be just a man, I want to be one with the Heavenly Father.”
Thus, the entire Gospel, despite its Old Testament Jewish language, can be interpreted in a personal spiritual sense. And if we wanted to tear the Gospel away from its historical base, free it from its historical language and insert it either into our (personal) system of subjective worldview or into the system of our contemporary life, we could limit ourselves to the spiritual interpretation of the Gospel. With all this, the Gospel, considered in its historical form, has, to put it imprecisely, a certain irrational remainder that does not fit into the terms of a spiritual concept. More precisely, the Gospel has two aspects - rational-spiritual and irrational-mysterious. And it is not necessary to present the matter in such a way that in the Gospel one thing is rational-spiritual and the other is mysterious, but everything in it is spiritual and, moreover,; it's all mysterious. The entire Gospel can be explained in a spiritual sense, but it would be a clear violation of historical truth to deny any mystery in the Gospel, to moralize or rationalize it, to turn it into only a moral sermon.
I am not saying that this would be an error against dogmatic principles - that is not my concern; but this would be a blatant lie from a historical point of view. The Gospel is spiritual and at the same time mysterious in every part. Thus, Christ was not one iota bound by the authority of the prophets and the law, their tradition did not in the slightest degree hinder His direct relationship with the Heavenly Father, His entire Gospel is the work of His personal spiritual creativity and in this form it is assimilated by believers. However, there was something in Christ's self-consciousness and calling that made Him look upon His teaching and work as the fulfillment of the law and the prophets. This attitude towards the law and the prophets was not on His part an arbitrary adaptation of His preaching to the level of the hearers, but pointed to some mystery of His calling. Or – Christ’s speeches about His messiahship had for the Jews, first of all, a spiritual meaning: “I am not the Messiah in your sense, not the Son of man, not a king, not the Son of God... I am the Son of God in a completely new sense, I am a spiritual Messiah, a spiritual king.”
And yet the names of the Messiah, the Son of Man, the king of Israel were not in the gospel speeches a play on alien words, but they hint at some kind of real messiahship of Christ. Another example. All eschatological speeches of Christ must be understood figuratively and spiritually; nevertheless, the promise of the coming points to some reality, to some mystery of His self-consciousness... These mysterious hints of the Gospel cannot, by the very nature of their irrationality, be combined in the form of a clear teaching, which would necessarily take on a Gnostic character and in its perceptible features would be reduced to Judeo-Gnostic concepts; but they must be taken into account in the spiritual concept of the Gospel teaching, since they give a mysterious shade to the spiritual teaching of Christ. Not a single living phenomenon is exhausted by concepts, not a single living creativity fits entirely within the framework of a reasonable word.
And the teaching of Christ, which proceeded from His living religious experience, which was the work of His personal creativity, and not the logical fabrication of His mind, has irrefutable evidence of its creative vitality in this mysteriously irrational coloring. In the presence of the Old Testament-Jewish language of the Gospel, in its antithetism to the legalistic-Jewish worldview and the Old Testament-national limitations of religion and, finally, in its specific mystery is given its Old Testament Jewish basis.
Joel. II, 31; Ezek. XXXII, 7.
Ezek. XII, 15; XXII, 15; Jer. XIII, 24.
Is. I, 25; Small III, 2 – 5.
Soph. I, 10; Joel III, 2. 3.
Av. III, 12. 13; Is. VI, 13.
Jer. XXX, 17 words. Am. IX, 8 ff.
Am. IX, 11 ff. Jer XXXIII, 15; Zechariah III, 8.
Joel. III, 18; Is. XXIX, 17.
Is. LXV, 17 ff. LXVI, 22.
Jer. V; XXIII; XXVIII; Ezek. XIII.
Jer. V, 12; Small III, 14. 15; Is. XXX, 18.
Is. IV, 4; XLIV, 22; LXI, 10; Mich. VII, 19.
Isa XXXII, 16 – 17; LX, 21; LXI, 6; Soph. III, 3; Eze xviii. 81; Av. II, 14.
Is. XI, 4 ff. Jer XXIII, 5. 6.
Iis. With. Sire. XXXV, 1 – 5 et seq. Wed. Jude XVI, 16; Comrade XII, 8.
In the person of Jeremiah, Ezekiel, Haggai, Zechariah, Malachi. See Jer. XVII, 21. 22; XXXIII, 18 – 26; Ezek. XL–XLVIII; Agg I and II: Zech XIV, 16 20 – 21; Small III, 9 – 10 Wed. Is. LXVI, 20 – 23
Jer xi, 15; Zech VII, 5 – 7; Mal I, 10; Is. LXVI, 1 – 3.
Here we should also keep in mind the Jewish belief that the captivity atoned for the most important sins of Israel and appeased the wrath of God, so that the post-exilic religious issue concerned only less important sins, cleansed ritually. Hence, the fact that the purifying power of ritual institutions was limited to less important sins did not diminish the significance of these institutions in the post-exilic time, but rather elevated it. In the history of the Jewish religion it has always happened that what is most essential in the question of sin and righteousness has eluded the sphere of practical action, which was directed only to the moral periphery. And if this was already contained in the ancient Hebrew concept of sin and sacrifice, then it fully developed in the post-exilic period.
Jer. XVII, 10; XX, 12; XXXI, 31 – 33; Ezek. III, 20; XVIII, 2–4. 24 – 27; XXXVI; Wed Deut. XXIV, 16.
Post-exilic Judaism and post-prophetic ethics went in two directions - the path of legalism and the path noted in the literature of “wisdom” (חָכִמָה) - in the book. Job, Proverbs of Solomon and Ecclesiastes Some of the psalms also belong here. This is the philosophy of the Jewish people, sometimes rising to the contemplation of theodicy, sometimes descending to everyday prudence, clearly utilitarian in the practical field. This philosophy stands out among Jewish writing for its individualistic bias, which forced an interest in both questions of theodicy and the paths of utilitarian good; From the same individualistic soil, Jewish philosophy rose to universalistic tendencies. The latter provoke some hysterics into an enthusiastic assessment of Chochmic philosophy, which is directly connected with later Judeo-Hellenistic literature, indicating here the preparatory stages of Christian universalism, harmoniously revealed by the Apostle Paul.
However, in reality the gospel is antithetically associated with legalism???? essentially ignores everyday philosophy. This philosophy, for all the height of some of its contemplations and the stability of its moral views, did not have a popular basis and doomed itself in advance to the fate of an ahistorical worldview. I recall the image of Melchizedek, who, with his sublime monotheism, remained alone and did not enter the whirlpool of history. Likewise, the history of the Jewish people coincides with the evolution of religious legalism, and not with philosophical utilitarianism. However, there can be no talk of complete isolation, and the books mentioned noticeably reflect the features of the Jewish spirit: this is a side current in the same Jewish channel.
Terminus ad quem of pre-Christian Judaism - the destruction of Jerusalem under Titus in 70.
The decrees of Moses βέβαια, άσάλευτα, ακράδαντα, καθάπερσφραγῖδι. φύσεως. αὐτῆςσεαημαβμένα , μένειηαγίωςἀφ ’ ἧ ς ἡμέρας ἐγράφημεχρι νῦν καὶπρὸς τὸν ἔπειταπάντα διαμενεῖν ἐλπηςαὐτὰ , αἰῶνα ὥ ? καὶ κοσμος ᾖ. τοσαύταις γοῦν χρησαμένου τοῦ ἔθνους μεταβολαῖς κατὰ ?? διατεταγμένων ἐκιννηθηπάντων ὡ ς ἔοικετὸ σεμνόνκαὶθεοπρεπὲς αὐτῶν ἐκτετιμηκότων De Vita Μ . lib. II, 3 (14.15).
S. Ar II, 18. 19. 22 (178 – 181. 188).
Information about Judaism comes primarily from the following sources. 1) The latest, canonical and non-canonical, parts of the Bible - Hebrew and Greek. For the last ed. H. V. Swete. 2) Extra-biblical apocryphal and predominantly apocalyptic literature: The Book of Enoch in the Ethiopian (En.) and Slavic (Sl. En.) editions; Liber Ezrae quartus (otherwise quartus et quintus); Apocalypsis Baruchi (Syr.); ΨαλμοιΣολομωντος; Book of Jubilees, or Lesser Genesis; Αι διαθηκαιτων ιβ ’ πατριαρχων ; Assumptio Moyseos; Διαθηκη Αβρααμ; Οι σιβυλλιακοι χρησμοι (Oracula Sibyllina) esp. III, 97 – 829. Editions and foreign translations: Fabricius, Fritzsche, Kautzseh, Swete, Geffcken, Gebhardt, Flemming and Radermacher, Dillmann, James (Robinson), Charles. Slavic Book of Enoch in the edition of M. Sokolov and A Popov; N. Tikhonravov slav. The Revelation of Abraham and the Testaments of the Twelve Patriarchs; afterbirth in Russian translation in the book Fragment of Jewish Antiquities (from the Latin translation by Robert Bishop of Lincoln - from the apocrypha of V. Z., selected and published by I. A. Fabricius); The Book of Enoch, the Psalms of Solomon and the Book of Jubilees in the translation. prot. A. Smirnova; Liber Ezrae quartus is translated in our Bible (from the Vulgate) under the name of the third book of Ezra. 3) Works of Philo ed. (Mangey and) Cohnet Wendland; Josephus ed.
Niese, Russian translation (old) by Alekseev and Samuilov, (new) by Henkel (Jewish antiquities), Chertok (On the Jewish War), Israelson and Henkel (On the antiquity of the Jewish people - against Anion); Epistle of Aristeas (Pseudo-Aristaeus) ed. Wendland, rus. lane Alekseeva (appendix to the War of the Jews). 4) The New Testament and some works from church literature, such as Conversation with Tryphon the Jew by Justin, Philosophumen. 5) Rabbinic literature, from which the Talmud is translated by Pereferkovich and (also) Pirke Abot - in (edition and) translation by Levin. Of the authors who examined Judaism from one side or another. used in this essay Schurer, Weber, Hausrath, Beusset, H. Holtzmann, O. Holtzmann, Ehrhardt, Friedländer, Wellhausen, Stade, Volz, Grünebaum, Charles, Dalman, Baldensperger, Edersheim, Stave, Gfrerer, Dillmann, Stanton, Lazarus, prot. A.V. Smirnov and others. It is even possible to state and the reader must be warned that the following brief description of Judaism makes the least claim to originality, to a unique coverage of the subject; on the contrary, according to the objectives of his work, the author had to limit himself to the generally recognized features of Judaism, its indisputable aspects.
If throughout this work the author verified every thought with the data of critical science, then it was especially necessary to avoid any suspicion of tendentious coverage of the issue when characterizing pre-Christian Judaism. In this case, it is easier to bear the reproach of unoriginality of thought, of closeness to scientific manuals, of following established paths, than of biased grouping of material, or a one-sided depiction of the subject. A further note needs to be made regarding the following quotation. Primary sources are cited without explanation; If any reader, having decided to check the quotation, was met with bewilderment, the author warns that. Such perplexities are resolved only by the availability of all the publications mentioned above. Eg. I quote 4 Ezr. (3 Esdras.) VII, 32, this means that the Russian translation of our Bible coincides with the Latin editions; on the contrary, 4 Ezr. VII, 78 shows that this verse is not in the Russian translation and it was taken not from the Fritzsche edition, which does not have such an account, but from the Robinson edition (Bensly and. James).
From this point of view, drunkenness, quarrels, laziness, fornication, pride, usury are prohibited and love, respect for parents, mercy, non-anger, and forbearance are prescribed. Wed, above. We see an echo of this view in the Gospel in Matt. V, 25; Onion. XII, 58.
Is. XIV, 30 32; XXIX, 19; LXVI, 2.
Prem. Straw. XI, 11; XII, 19 21; XVI, 10.26; XVIII, 4.13; Volume XIII, 4; PS Salom. XVII, 27.
Test. Zab. 9. By Jubilee. V. 18 “God will be merciful to all who turn from all their wickedness once a year.”
T ov. IV, 15. The same in Philo: ἅ τις παθεῖν ἐχθαίρει, μῆ ποιεῖν α ὖ τὸν (Eusebius Praep. evang. lib. VIII, cap.VII).
Mf. VII, 12; Onion. VI, 31.
Thus, the law finally consolidated the idea of \u200b\u200bslavery, which was embedded in the very foundation of the Jewish religion.
Comrade XII, 8. 9. Wed. Proverbs X. 12; XI, 17 – 19.
Mf. VI, 1 – 4; 2 Cor. IX, 9. 10.
4 Ezr. (3 Rides) IX, 7; XIII, 23; Aros. Bar. LIV, 5. 16.
Onion. IV, 17; Acts XIII, 15.
And in this respect, that is, in relation to the feeling of sin and righteousness, the law completed what was laid at the basis of the Jewish religion.
4 Ezr. (3 Rides) III, 7 – 10; 21 words VII, 11 – 12; Aros. Bar. XXIII, 4: (quando) peccavit Adam, et decreta fuit mors contra eos qui gignerentur. In fact, about the dependence of death on Adam’s sin, cf. approx. Charles'aad h loc.
4 Ezr. (3 Rides) VII, 48 (118) Also Aros Bar XLVIII, 42. However, it was connected with the idea of original sin, at least in Aros. Bar., a clearly expressed thought about the free participation in the sin of Adam of each of his descendants. So LIV, 14. 19: si enim Adam prior peccavit, et attulit mortem super omnes immaturam; sed etiam illi qui ex eo nati sunt unusquisque ex eis praeparavit animae suae tormentum futurum: et iterum unusquisque ex eis elegit sibi gloriam futuram. Non est ergo Adam causa, nisi animae suae tantum; nos vero unusquisque fuit animae suae Adam.
4 Ezr. (3 Ed.) VII, 1 – 3; IX, 14 – 22.
Test. Zab. IX: σάρξεἰσι,
Comrade III, 3; Jude VII, 28.
2 Macc. VII, 37. 38, 4 Macc. VI. 28: δίκῃ. καθάρσιοναὐτῶν πο ί ησον τὸ ἐμὸν α ἷ μα καὶ ἀντ ί ψυχον αὐτῶν λαβὲ τὴν ἐμὴν ψυχ ή ν XVII, 22: ὥ σπερ ἀντ ί ψυχον γεγον ό τας τῆςτοῦ ἔθνους ἁ μαρτ ί ας · καὶ διὰ τοῦ α ἵ ματος τῶν εὐσεβῶν ἐκε ί νων καὶ τοῦ ἱλαστηρ ί ου θανάτου αὐτῶν ἡ θε ί α πρ ό νοιατὸν ᾿ Ισραὴλ προκακωθέντα διέσωσεν, Apoc Bar. ΧΧ IV, 1: Ecce dies veniunt, et apenentur libri, in quibus scripta sunt peccata omnium qui peccaverunt, et iterum etiam thesauri, in quibus justitia eorum qui justificati sunt in creatura collecta est. Cfr. XIV, 7; LXXXIV, 10. Test Abr. (recens. B ed James) IV: σύ ἐξ ἀρχῆς ἐποίησας αὐτὸν ἐλεεῖν ψυχὰς πάντων ἀνθρώπων.
Hence even 4 Ezr. (3 Rides) VII, 45 (115).
De rmgr. Abrahami 16 (86) ἶ ναι λυσιτελές καὶἀμείνων μὲν δόξης ἀλήθεια , εὐδαιμον δὲ τὸ έξ ἀμφοῖν κτλ
3 Macc I, II; los. Fl. Antiqu. XV, 417.
Prem. Sol III, 13 16; IV, 6; XIV, 23 ff. Book Enoch (her.) CVIII, 7; Test XII pair. Rub. IV. V, Isaac. II; Orac. Sibyll. III, 594 – 600.
Comrade IV, 13; I. from S. XIII, 19. 20.
Wed. Is. XXXVIII, 18.19; Ps. VI, 6; I. With. pp. XVII, 24 – 27.
I. s. P. XIV, 14.16 – 17.
This connection is also indicated in the famous review of Josephus in Antiq. XVIII, 3(14) “The Pharisees believe in the immortality of the soul and that beyond the grave people will face judgment and reward for virtue or retribution for crime during life.”
Enoch. V, 7; also Ar. Bar XIV, 13. Wed. Ps. XXXVI, 11; Mf. V, 5.
Enoch. LXII, 15 Wed 4 Ezr. (3 Rides) IX, 19 mensa indeficiens.
4 Ezr. (3 Rides) II, 18 – 19.
Enoch LXII, 12; Anniversary XXIII, 30.
Prem. Sol. I, 15; III, 4.
Dan. XII, 2; En. LI, 1 word. 4 Ezr. (3 Esdras.) VII, 32 ff.
2 mm. VII, 9 14. 36; XII, 43 – 45; XIV, 46; Ios. PL Antiq. XVIII, 3 (14); Test. Sim. 6.
Anniversary XXIII, 31; En. III, 7 8.
4 Ezr. VII, 78 – 101; En. ΧΧΠ, 3 – 4 words.
Apoc. Bar. LI, 10 12; Eh. LI, 4 10; Dan. XII, 3; En. СVIII, 12.13.
Psalm. Sal. III, 16; XIV, 7; Eh. XL, 9; 4 Ezr. (3 Esdras.) VIII, 54. Apoc. Bar. XXI, 22.
Eg. 4 Ezr. VII, 36 clibanus gehennae.
Anniversary XXXII, 19. On the inheritance of land cf. En. V, 7; Aros. Bar. XIV, 13.
Dan. IX, 25 – 26; 4 Ezr. (3 Esdras.) VII, 29; XII, 32; En. ХLVIII, 10; LII, 4; Ar. Bar. XXIX, 3; Psalm. Sal. XVII, 36;XVIII, 8.
4 Ezr. (3 Esdras.) VII, 28. 29; XIII, 32. 37. 52; XIV, 9; En. CV, 2.
En. XLVI, 2 – 4; XLVIII, 2; LXII, 5 (wife's son), 7; LXIII, 11; LXIX, 26. 27. 29 (husband’s son)
Psalm. Sal. XVII, 23 (cp. Sibyll. III, 49, V, 414). Wed. for all names and especially for the name “Son of David” New Testament.
This is how the Jews called priests, kings, prophets and even Cyrus anointed (Isa. XLV, 1). The entire Jewish people were the sons of God (Ex. IV, 22.23), because Jehovah created and arranged them (Deut. XXXII, 6), then the king (2 Kings VII, 14; Ps II, 7), also the angels (Job 1:6; II, 1; XXXVIII, 7). Also, the Son of Man, the servant of God (= chosen Isa. XLII, 1) also designates (cf. above) the entire Jewish people of the suffering righteous. – Among the Jewish expectations, the only thing that is not clear is the position of the prophet (cf. Deut. XVIII, 15), “who should come into the world” (John VI, 14): he, apparently, did not coincide with the Messiah (John 20. 21; VII, 40).
I am believed to have written four to five decades before Christ.
Psalm. Sal. XVII, 23 – 27. 32.
Psalm. Sal. XVII, 28 – 36. Wed. book Anniversary I, 22 ff. 4 Ezr. (3 Esdras.) VII, 27. 28, etc.
Book Anniversary I. 27 Wed., Sibyll. V, 426.
Psalm Sal. XVII, 27.29. 31.
En. XC, 26. 27; CIV, 7. 8.
En. XLV, 6; XLVI, 4; LXII, 13; LXIII, 11; LXIX, 27.
4 Ezr. (3 Esdras.) XIII, 38.
En. HS, 33; Comrade XIII, 13; Psalm. Sal. XI; 4 Ezr. (3 Esdras.) XIII, 40–47. Wed. Is. XLIX, 22; LX, 4 – 9; LXV1, 20.
4 Ezr. (3 Esdras.) XIII, 36 Wed. V Π, 26.
En. HS, 29 Wed. Aros. Bar. IV, 1 – V.
Cp. 4 Ezr. (3 Esdras.) XIII, 3; Homo cum nuhibus caeli; John III, 13; Mf. XXV1, 64.
More Yong. LXII, 6. 7. Cf. John VII. 27.
XLVIII, 3. 6. Cp. LXX, ?.
4 Ezr. (3 Esdras.) XIII, 3 26 32. 52.
4 Ezr. (3 Esdras.) VII, 50; VIII, 1. The New Testament maintains this scheme of two centuries (Mp. X, 30, etc. Eph. I, 21, etc.).
Hence the formula συντελείας, as in Jewish literature Dan. XII, 4. 13; Comrade XIV, 5; Aros. Bar. XXVII, 15; XXIX, 8; XXX, 3; Ass. Moys. I, 17; XII, 4, and in Christian Matt. XIII, 39. 49, etc.
Aros. Bar. XLIV, 12; LI, 8, etc.
El. XXI, 10, etc. Wed. Is. XXIV, 21 – 23.
Test. patr. Lev. ХVIII; Sim VI; Iud. XXV; Dan. V ; Ass. Moys. ?; En. X, 12 – 14; LIV, 4 – 6; LV, 4, etc.
Also Aros. Bar. XL, 1 – 2; Sibyll. III, 46 – 92 Wed. 2 Cor. VI, 15 and 2 Thess. II, 3.
John XII, 34 Wed. Onion. XXIV, 19–21.
Also in glory. En. XXXII – XXXIII; Apoc. XX ; Dialogue, cum Tryph. jud. LXXXI.
4 Ezr. (3 Esdras.) IV, 26.50; V, 41; VIII, 18. 61.
Eg. 4 Ezr. (3 Esdras) VI, 1, seq.
En.VI. VII. XV and others. Jubilee. V; Test Rub V; Apoc. Bar. LVI, etc.
However, in judging the Gnostic character of religious concepts in each particular case, one must be careful. The same religious concept can be used either in a gnostic, or in a religious-experiential and religious-creative meaning. Thus, the concept of divine omniscience constitutes a Gnostic concept if it presupposes abstract knowledge about divine knowledge, about its character, if it is constructed based on questions about the image of divine consciousness, about the possibility of foreseeing the future, about the relationship of divine foreknowledge to human freedom; on the contrary, it can be religious-experiential knowledge if it symbolizes the fact that a believer always and everywhere feels himself in the presence of God, always and everywhere lives in the activity of communion with God. God is spirit - this can be a Gnostic truth if it comes from the metaphysical distinction between spirit and matter, but it is a religious-creative truth if it, as a basis, is completely exhausted in the practical application that God must be served in spirit and truth.
That the world was created by God out of love for Man, this thesis either coincides with the human experience of divine love or is revealed, going beyond the limits of religious experience, in abstract knowledge of the motives of divine actions. If the idea of the afterlife likening a person to angels only means that earthly interests and personal passions can cross the threshold of the tomb, then this will not be a Gnostic truth; but if it is given the meaning that the analogy of angelic nature provides the basis for positive metaphysical knowledge of the image of our afterlife existence, then this is gnosis. Along with these concepts, which can be interpreted either in a Gnostic or in a religious-creative sense, there is a whole series of religious concepts and ideas that have a completely Gnostic content. These are thoughts about the nature of angels, about the image of the origin of the world and its end.
There is nothing gnostic in the content of the gospel teaching: those religious concepts that have a double meaning, either gnostic or religiously experiential, enter into the content of the gospel teaching exclusively from the religiously experiential side; the same concepts that have the same Gnostic meaning are used on the pages of the Gospel as indifferent language - just as we now talk about the sacrifices of Mars, about the bonds of Hymen to designate real phenomena of life and without any specific pagan content.
Jewish Gnosticism merged with pagan philosophy already with Philo and then in the church dogmatic movement, so that scholastic theology does not draw from Jewish Gnosticism alone, but in any case draws from it as well.
But this cannot be said about the church-dogmatic movement and even about the apostolic epistles.
Matt. XXII, 35–40; Matt. XII, 28 – 31.
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