On the study of the biblical New Testament period in historical and dogmatic terms

The historical presentation of dogmas 1, following the chronological method, as in many respects more convenient for it, 2 is naturally divided into two main parts. Part one embraces the biblical period of the Old Testament and the New Testament; part two - the church period, the first three centuries, ecumenical councils and post-ecumenical councils. With this division, the historical presentation of dogma, having as its task to trace the gradual revelation of the external, changeable, formal side of dogma, gradually studies the historical fate of this side in St. Scripture and St. tradition, the main sources of our faith, which together constitute the main, so to speak, phases of revealing this side of the subject. By such a division, the historical presentation of dogmas embraces the subject completely and does not introduce any artificial division into it, but uses the division that the subject itself represents, and at the same time remains faithful to the customs already established in the science of dogmatic theology of looking at how a certain dogma is revealed first in St. Scripture, and then in St. legends. That is why such a division has long been established in Western dogmatic science, which has singled out the testimony of St. scriptures into a special part of science and St. legends also in its special branch. Such a division of the historical presentation of dogmas is not, finally, an uneven division, as it might seem at first glance. The biblical period, embracing the Old and New Testaments, is so vast and offers so much for study that it can be considered equal in scope to the church period. We agree that such a division into biblical and ecclesiastical periods is not entirely accurate in terms of its terminology, since in the biblical period there was a church, so the biblical period can be called, in a certain sense, ecclesiastical. But if you are looking for an absolutely precise division, then in this case, as in many others, you need to completely abandon any attempt at division. An organic whole cannot be divided as precisely as inorganic things. If the organic could be separated in the same way as the non-organic, then it would cease to be organic; Organic can only be divided approximately correctly and accurately. That is why it is impossible even, strictly speaking, to divide the sources of our faith into St. Scripture and St. legend, they cannot be opposed to one another, as two completely separate sources; because it cannot be said that when one thing ended, then another just began; it cannot be said that hitherto - St. Scripture, and hence St. tradition, because tradition existed even when the scriptures appeared, and the saint himself. Scripture is, in a certain sense, only a type of tradition. Meanwhile, we are so accustomed to using the division of the sources of our faith into St. Scripture and St. the legend is that it usually does not even occur to us to find the illogicality of this division, to arm ourselves against it. In the same way, we usually contrast the expressions - biblical and church: we even have two sciences, one of which is called biblical, and the other church history, and we are not at all amazed at the incongruities of such a division, we do not object to it; because our ear is accustomed to these predicates in their application to church history and because we know that these expressions do not at all pretend to be absolutely accurate, but are used for the sole purpose of distinguishing, if possible, two parts of one in the essence of science. In the same sense, we allow ourselves to apply these epithets to the historical presentation of dogmas, as they are more common in Orthodox dogmatic science and represent a comparatively more accurate designation of two departments of science instead of other uncommon, even more strange to the ear of an Orthodox theologian and, moreover, comparatively less accurate divisions of the historical presentation of dogmas. The divisions that exist in Western theological science, what are the divisions - into biblical theology on the one hand and the history of dogma on the other 3. Assuming the division of the historical presentation of dogmas into the above two parts, we subdivide both parts into two more sections. We divide the biblical period into periods - the Old Testament and the New Testament, and the church period into periods - the first three centuries, the ecumenical councils and after the ecumenical councils. This article aims to acquaint readers with: I) the literature and presentation in Western science of the New Testament section or the second section of the first part of the historical presentation of dogmas, as well as the materials for it available in Russian theological literature and II) with the presentation that this department may have in our Orthodox dogmatic science. The modern setting of this department of historical-dogmatic science in the West can only be fully understood from the entire history of the development of science. That is why, in order to characterize the modern setting of the department of science we have taken in the West, we consider it necessary to present an outline of the history of Western literature in this department 4, touching in advance in the general outline of what has been prepared for the Protestant and Catholic world, regarding the study of St. scriptures in dogmatic terms, from the patristic and medieval, scholastic periods. So-called biblical theology, as part of the historical exposition of dogmas, appeared in very recent times, in the last century, owes its existence to Protestantism and is in its origin a product of the Protestant West; and therefore writings on this subject are a very recent phenomenon and belong primarily to the circle of Protestant theological literature. But if you pay attention in general to the explanation of St. scriptures in a dogmatic sense, on those works that prepared the appearance of biblical historical-dogmatic science, then the beginning of this latter goes back to the beginning of theology in general, to the first centuries of Christianity. From the very first centuries of Christianity, the church fathers spent a lot of time explaining the dogmatic meaning of St. Scripture, and although they did not write complete systematic expositions of the dogmatic teaching contained in St. writings of the Old and New Testaments, like contemporary Western theologians, however, their extensive commentaries on St. The books of the Old and New Testaments provide rich material for historical and dogmatic biblical science. For this purpose, it is enough to recall the exegetical piles of Origen, Theodoret, Chrysostom, Cyril of Jerusalem, Jerome and others. Further, in their purely dogmatic treatises, the church fathers were not content with simply citing the texts of St. scriptures, and so comprehensively clarified them that the letter of scripture came to life in their mouths, that the spirit of the Bible, the language, the characteristics of this or that writer in revealing dogmatic truths, became understandable. In a word, that living understanding of the Bible, which dogmatic science in the West is currently striving for, which it achieves at the cost of hard work, and which, although it possesses to a significant extent, does not fully possess, because it falls into various errors, was inherent in the fathers of the first centuries of Christianity, the closest successors of the apostles, was reflected in their various creations, although it was not expressed in a systematic and integral presentation of dogmatic biblical teaching. However, as an example of the beginnings of such a presentation, one can point to the following works belonging to the paternal period: the work of Cyprian - De testimoniis; on the creation of the bishop. African (VI century), Juilius - De partibus legis and on the works of Eusebius - (praeparalio evangelica), especially - demonstratio evangelica). Cyprian, in the above-mentioned work, treats in some detail and with some system the relationship of the Old Testament to the new, about prophecies and their fulfillment, about the confirmation of one Testament by another, in a word, he draws a parallel between the two Testaments in a dogmatic sense. Juilius, belonging to the Antiochian school, gives in his work a collection of evidence borrowed from scripture for the doctrine of God and the Person of Jesus Christ. Both works of Eusebius belong specifically to the Old Testament period. The first (15 books), being rich in content, treats, however, more about pagan religions in comparison with the revealed Old Testament and about the teachings of ancient pagan philosophers, in comparison with the Old Testament teaching, than it positively expounds the biblical Old Testament dogmatic teaching. Books VII – VIII present comparatively more material related to our subject. The second work (20 books, of which 10 have come down to us) directly relates to our subject, containing a detailed exposition of what in the Old Testament relates to the new, mainly what it contains related to the teaching about the Person and work of the redemption of Christ, to the gospel of Jesus Christ. – If from the paternal period, so rich in works on St. scripture, let us move on to the Middle Ages, to the times of scholasticism, we will find that these times were extremely poor in understanding the meaning of scripture and its dogmatic explanations. The reasons for this phenomenon are clear to those who know what medieval scholasticism was. At the end of the scholastic period in the West, they reached the point that, according to Erasmus, it was often possible to meet an eighty-year-old theologian who had not touched the New Testament in his entire life. “I’m surprised,” one Sorbonne doctor said to the humanist Robert Stefan, what these young men constantly point to us as proof of the new Testament: I swear to God, I, having been more than fifty years old, did not know that there was a new Testament.”5 The Middle Ages thus passed almost without a trace for biblical dogmatic science. Let us not dwell on the so-called period of the revival of the sciences, the period of the predecessors of the Reformation; This time is remarkable only for the acquisition of funds for the activities of St. writing - the study of languages ​​and philosophical techniques, so necessary for the study of St. Scripture, but not at all the remarkable works on St. scripture. Only since the Reformation has the study of St. Scripture in dogmatic terms receives in the West the importance that belongs to it. But here, too, the experiments of the so-called biblical theologians did not appear immediately with the advent of Protestantism. It was necessary to go through two and a half centuries of preparatory work before experiments in the strict sense of the historical presentation of dogmas appeared in Protestantism during the biblical period. Apparently, from the very beginning of the Reformation, everything could not have been more favorable to the immediate emergence of so-called biblical theologies. Let us only remember that Protestantism set itself the restoration of Christianity, early Christianity, the Christianity of the Apostolic Church, distorted by the Roman Church, as its main task; further, that it addressed St. writing primarily of the New Testament and focused its exclusive attention on it, as on the only, in his opinion, source of the true teaching of Christ, that at the same time it freed, so to speak, the hands of every biblical researcher, declaring that the meaning of the scripture is clear to everyone and, therefore, anyone can interpret it; finally, that it freed the interpretation of Scripture from all control of the church, declaring that it was not church tradition, but St. himself. scripture is the norm for interpreting scripture. Apparently, through all this, Protestantism laid solid foundations for the edifice of biblical theology and was now about to bring about its emergence. But in reality this was far from the case. The history of Protestant dogmatic literature in this respect represents two periods. The first - from the beginning of the 16th century to the end of the 18th - is the period that prepared the appearance of biblical theologies. The second period is from the end of the 18th century. to the present - there is a period of emergence and careful comprehensive development of biblical theology. The first half of the first period (XVI century and half of the XVII century) was especially fruitless for the study of St. scriptures in historical and dogmatic terms. In the 16th century, however, there were many commentaries on St. the writing of the new testament; Further, the dogmatists of that time paid special attention to the New Testament books of St. scriptures; when presenting each individual point of dogmatic teaching (locus) or paragraph, they turned to St. Scripture and examined how well-known dogmatic position is consistent with the New Testament revealed teaching; for all that, at the time described there could be no talk of biblical theology as part of the historical presentation of dogmas. The dogmatists of that time differed significantly from the biblical theologies of subsequent times; the difference between the two extended to both content and form. In their content, the dogmatic works of this time, despite the strengthening of the biblical element in them compared to previous dogmatic systems, still represented too little biblical material to resemble later works on biblical theology; in form they were not anything new; in terms of plan, methods and treatment of the subject, these were the same dogmatists, but by no means historical-dogmatic works. Such are all the dogmatic works that appeared in the 16th century, written under the influence of the work of Melanchthon and bearing, like Melanchthon's loci communes, for the most part also the names loci 6. This happened because, as usually happens, the desire to renounce certain modern views, modern formulas and language, to be transported to a distant age, to the world of then concepts and ways of expressing these concepts, is not enough, so that a system of views of that distant time appears, with content and form that actually belongs to that time. It usually happens that the first attempts to do something similar to what the Protestants wanted prove most of all the difficulty of transition from one era to another distant one and bear all the signs of a strong influence of already existing views and the way they are expressed on the experiences that appear with such tendencies. This happened with the Protestant dogmatists of the century under review. Desiring to think as the apostles thought about the subjects of faith, and to express their thoughts as the disciples of Christ expressed themselves, they, however, in their writings think as the sons of their age, as Protestants who separated from communion with the Roman Church, and also speak in the language of their time, which occurred not only from the rejection of the guiding principle in the living church tradition, but to a large extent from the news of the attempt itself; because subsequent Protestants, especially modern Orthodox Christians - essentially remaining with the same forces and means, but being older and richer in scientific experience than the Protestants of the 16th century - managed, despite some inevitable errors for a Protestant, to delve significantly into the spirit and clarify for themselves the features of the external expression of the dogmatic truths contained in the Holy Spirit. writings of the New Testament. Thus, the Protestants of the first time, no matter how much they talked about the need to transfer their thoughts to the times of the apostles, in essence, were too far from these times; in their dogmatic works they did not come from the Bible, not from a careful, comprehensive and detailed study of it - as one would expect from them, judging by their basic principle, and as is noticeable among many Protestants of recent times - but from pre-compiled provisions and formulas, and they were already looking for confirmation of themselves in the Scriptures. The study of scripture in a dogmatic sense was not a special goal for them, but a means. – Protestant theologians of the first half of the 17th century did even less for the science of biblical theology. This period, rightly called Protestant-scholastic in science, is the time of the last loci (reminiscent of the senfentiae of medieval scholastics) and the first systemata (reminiscent of the medieval summae), - it is the time of dominance in Protestant dogma of scholastic subtleties, formalism, casuistry, definitions, not inferior to medieval Catholic ones 7. The scholastic Protestants of this period, busy with their own subtleties and, in addition, with theological polemics with Catholics and among themselves, had neither the time nor the desire to study the dogmatic side of St. scriptures. If in any respect this time was useful for the future of biblical theology, it was only in the fact that with its extremes it aroused a reaction, and the reaction, expressed in pietism, gave birth to biblical theology. The second half of the period under consideration (from the 60s of the 17th century to the 60s or 70s of the 18th century) was more favorable for preparatory work on biblical theology. At this time, even among the last days of Protestant scholasticism, some progress in the study of St. writings in dogmatic terms - however, small, relating only to the form, but not to the essence of the matter. The progress consisted in the fact that the so-called dicta probantia, the proofs that had previously been attached to each locus, now began to be published as something separate from dogma and explained in dogmatic terms. Such collections were intended to be manuals for dogmatics. In them, the dogmatic material took the form of fragmentary data taken from various places of St. scriptures and mechanically compared with each other; the order and method of explaining them is the same as in the dogmatists of that time. These collections, which can be called the embryos of biblical theology as a separate branch of dogmatic science, usually bore the names collegia biblica, institutiones theologiae dogmaticae, theologia biblica, etc. names. From the works of this kind we can point out the works of: Schmidt 8 , Gülsemann 9 , Weissmann 10 , Zikler 11 , Heimann 12 and others - But especially contributed to the emergence of biblical theology, which appeared towards the end of the 17th century, pietism, as a protest against Protestant scholasticism, and degenerated from it along with other directions (historical and philosophical), so so-called biblical direction. With the advent of pietism, a number of theologians appeared who, rejecting the formalism of the orthodox Protestant system, turned to the Bible with special love and, not paying attention to the established theological terminology, began to look for forms of presentation close to the biblical presentation. From here arose a series of practical presentations of biblical teaching, which differed from the collegia biblica in that they retained the method of fragmentary presentation, and also in that the new dogmatic experiments did not so strictly adhere to the order and method of presentation used in the dogmatists of that time, although in essence they did not differ in content from orthodox dogmatism. However, since they were intended for practical use, they were not distinguished by their systematic form and had no scientific significance 13 . But the biblical direction, without creating the science of biblical theology, was, however, extremely useful for future science in that it prepared excellent ground for its development. Having brought dogmatic theology to the living source of St. Scripture, this direction again called to life Protestant theology, which was dying in the bonds of scholasticism. In particular, it corrected an important mistake of the previous Lutheran dogma, which borrowed data from Scripture for itself, without paying the slightest attention to the historical connection in which they stand in the Bible. Scholars of this movement have brought to prominence the idea of ​​historical disclosure; in particular, they began, in connection with the idea of ​​the kingdom of God (the main idea in their dogmatic works), to draw a line of distinction between the Old Testament and the new in dogmatic terms. The second period (from the 60s or 70s of the last century to the present) is the time of the emergence of biblical theology as an independent science, and its rapid and widespread development among various theological trends, which were so abundant at the end of the 18th and especially our 19th centuries. In the second half of the last century, the previous directions, including the biblical one, living out their last days, gave way to the main place to other directions - rationalistic, supranaturalistic and the rationalistic-supranaturalistic in between. Among all these trends, for the first time, biblical theology appears not only in embryo, as before, but as something more or less formed. The most important formative principle in this case was the rationalistic principle. Rationalism at this time penetrated more or less into all directions, even supra-naturalistic 14. In the rationalism of this time, more or less decisive, more or less obvious, we We encounter a break between a significant part of the thinking part of Protestant society and Protestant orthodox dogma. On the one hand, this gap was very favorable for the new branch of dogmatic science; since he gave this branch a reason to free itself from formal subordination to dogma, to stand out from it and begin a formally independent existence and development, independent of dogma. But on the other hand, it was just as, if not more, harmful; since, freeing this industry from one dependence, he placed it in another dependence - in greater or lesser material dependence on rationalistic views. Through this, biblical theology more or less moved away from orthodox dogma, not only in form, but also in content, and became a means in the hands of extreme rationalists to introduce rationalistic views into society through it and polemicize against orthodox dogma. Thus, Protestant biblical theology, having gained a lot at this time in a formal sense, lost even more in a material sense. Fortunately, not everyone had extreme rationalism at this time; among the supranaturalists it was to a weak degree; Moreover, the previous trends (biblical and historical), which arose from pietism, have not yet completely lost their influence. The works of Zemler, the last of the representatives of the historical trend, a semi-rationalist 15 who gave a strong impetus to the development of German rationalism, wrote an experimental historical-critical collection of dogmatic evidence, introduced historical-critical techniques into the study of the dogmatic side of St. scriptures 16; further - the pure rationalist Teller 17, the semi-rationalist (as regards biblical works, and then the perfect naturalist in the sense of the French naturalists of this time in his other works) Bardt 18, the rationalists Güfnagel 19 and Amon 20 and the supranaturalists Storr 21 and Zechariah 22. Of all these works, the most remarkable both in terms of scientific merit and in comparatively moderate direction is the work of Zechariah, which we will dwell on in order to show what form biblical theology had at the first moment of its existence. Finding that the Protestant dogmatic system, formed gradually under various influences, agrees with St. Scripture only in content, but not in form, not in terminology and arrangement of parts, which in general is the formal side of dogmatic teaching in St. Scripture is very different from the formal side of theological systems, that the modern way of thinking and expression is far from similar to the way of thinking and expression of biblical writers - Zechariah decided to write a statement of biblical dogmatic teaching in the Bible’s own words, in a special, biblical manner. At the same time, not wanting to give his work the character of a collection of biblical evidence, recognizing such work in the contemporary state of exegesis as more harmful than useful, finding that not all passages of scripture usually cited as proof of dogmatic teaching actually prove it, although the dogmatic positions themselves, which they prove, are correct, that there are many theological, basic terms, the biblical meaning of which is not the same as that given to them by the theological system, although again, the provisions expressed in these terms are in themselves correct - the author decided to write biblical theology as something integral, systematic, in order to contrast it with the then system of Protestant dogma, although he was aware that the restoration of a truly biblical dogmatic system presented enormous difficulties. The author is fully convinced that the results of his work will not contradict Protestant church teaching. His biblical theology embraces the biblical not only dogmatic, but also moral teaching, and not only the new, but also the old Testament, which he expounds together. It goes without saying that his work, for all its merits, especially for the time, could not have been perfect, as the first experience in building a new science. His most important merit lies in a fairly correct understanding of the task of science and the completely independent significance of biblical theology, then in the diligence, seriousness and caution of the author, and finally, in some individual successful interpretations of the meaning and letter of Scripture. But neither the plan of the composition nor the execution as a whole is far from perfect. There is nothing to say about the plan; its shortcomings are glaring. The execution shows in the author a person who has not studied, so to speak, the body of the Bible, who dealt more with only individual passages of the biblical text, which therefore he very often interprets completely arbitrarily. Further, the author, despite his seriousness and positivity, treats some dogmatic truths with the ease of the then moderate rationalism. Eg. He understands the redemption of man by I. Christ as the restoration by I. Christ of human happiness; the idea of ​​the death of Christ as a sacrifice for the sins of people, in his opinion, should be understood figuratively, etc. 23. Such are the shortcomings of even the best scientifically and soundest biblical theology of this time. What can we say about others? Others were distinguished by even less scientific merit and incomparably more extreme rationalism. However, we hasten to note that their rationalism, even the most extreme of them, had its limits. All the rationalists of that time, although they polemicized against the theological orthodox Protestant system, nevertheless recognized the authority of St. scriptures and defended their positions with the Bible, finding, of course erroneously, that their views are biblical views. Thus, having broken the connection with orthodox dogma, they did not realize that they had thereby broken the connection with the Bible, until, finally, one of them (Gabler) realized and clearly stated that there was a difference not only between the rationalistic views of that time and orthodox dogma, but also between rationalism based on the Bible, on the one hand, and the Bible itself, on the other. This is the sad result of the rationalist trend that dominated at the end of the last, eighteenth century. So, the time in question, on the one hand, brought a lot for our science, on the other hand, took away even more from it. Biblical theology was finally born, but it came with a body infected with a serious internal illness, from which it had to be healed in the future, although not completely, because Protestantism in its essence is affected by a serious illness and therefore cannot produce a completely healthy organism. Protestant theologians of the first quarter of this century were people of a transitional time. On the one hand, they were brought up under the influence of the rationalism of the 18th century, on the other, they alternately absorbed the rationalistic elements of the latest German philosophy (Kant, Fichte, Hegel) and were very unstable in their views, modifying and rebuilding them several times. It was a time, so to speak, of rationalistic ferment. What exactly did all these rationalists of the first quarter of the 19th century do? in Biblical Theology? The impetus for the further development of science was given by the same Gabler 24 who openly recognized the difference between the rationalistic system and the biblical dogmatic system. He expressed a very remarkable idea, prolific in its consequences, about the need to separate elements that are significant for all times from local, temporary, individual elements. To extract the former from the Bible, to separate them with the help of philosophy from the temporal, local and individual in Scripture, to substantiate these unchangeable elements and to present them in a system - all this, in his opinion, constitutes the task of dogmatics. And to perceive everything temporary, local and individual and to expound dogmatic concepts - as they appear in historical reality - is the task, in his opinion, of biblical theology. Having thus outlined a special task for biblical theology and having clarified this task, Gabler, with this statement of the task, gave the new science the character of a part of the history of dogma. Scientific work on biblical theology has taken precisely this direction since the beginning of this century. They have been going in this direction ever since. Unfortunately, as for the first quarter of this century, Gabler’s idea found extremely one-sided implementation in Protestant science, thanks to the dominance at that time of an extremely rationalistic, philosophical direction in it. Equally suitable for orthodoxies and deniers, it was developed at this time exclusively by the latter. In the biblical theologies of this time, so much importance was attached to the temporary, the local, that very little was left to the lot of the unchangeable, standing outside the conditions of time and circumstances. Jesus Christ in these rationalistic biblical theologies is portrayed only as a simple teacher of religion; Its main significance lies in the fact that he tried to elevate the Old Testament teaching, to cleanse it from the ideas of the Old Testament time, and in the fact that he passed on the teaching thus transformed to his disciples, who continued its further development, but at the same time changed this teaching in some points. The rationalist works of the present century on biblical theology can be divided into two categories: works imbued with extreme rationalism, and works of a moderate or so-called in-between direction. Let's talk about the first ones first. Lorenz Bauer, in his Biblical Theology 25, was the first to put Gabler's idea into practice. He defines biblical theology as follows: “Biblical theology, he said, must be purified from all extraneous ideas, the development of the religious theory of the Jews before Christ, the religious theory of Jesus and his apostles, carried through the various centuries and views of the sacred writers and deduced from their writings.” In accordance with this definition, Bauer makes a distinction between the biblical theology of the Old and New Testaments and insists that in New Testament theology it is necessary to distinguish different writers and carefully examine both the common features between them and their distinctive, individual features. That is why his biblical theology separately sets out first the teaching of Jesus according to Matthew, Mark and Luke (1st section), then also the teaching according to Ev. John (2nd division), then the teaching of the apostles according to the revelation of John (3rd division), according to 1 Peter (4th division), according to 2 Peter and according to the last. Jude (5th department), according to the last. ap. Paul (6th department) 26. Bauer's work is the first attempt at a purely historical scientific presentation of biblical theology. Having thus strengthened the independent existence of biblical New Testament theology, giving it the character of a department of the history of dogma, and finally separating biblical New Testament theology from the Old Testament, Bauer rendered no small service to the new branch of theological science. But at the same time, as a son of his time and a rationalist in direction, he made very important shortcomings in his work. And, firstly, he distinguishes the real view of Jesus Christ and the apostles from their teaching, following broadly the theory of adaptation, so that most of the New Testament teaching does not seem to be real, but only the imaginary teaching of Christ and the apostles. Secondly, when presenting dogmatic teaching according to one or another New Testament scripture, he follows not the plan and order that he should have followed, taking into account the natural connection of thoughts, but the order and plan of dogma, and in general introduces quite a lot of theoretical and dogmatic element, moreover, he goes into polemics with the Protestant theological system. Poelitz 27, Hartmann 28, Cludius 29, Schwartz 30, and others wrote in the same direction and almost at the same time. Soon after the works of these scientists, experiments of a slightly different kind appeared, which, however, strictly cannot be called biblical theologies, although more or less related to the latter. We mean works like the work of Kaiser 31, who set out to find out from the general theory of religions the origin of various points of biblical teaching and rituals and show how, historically, through natural development, Jewish and Christian views gradually formed and took on a biblical form. The shortcomings of this work are obvious from its direction; Moreover, this and similar works do not expound biblical teaching, but only deal with the question of its origin. The works of Kramer 32 , Boehme 33 , and Matthew 34 are not of particular scientific importance. Of the works of this time, belonging to the intermediate direction, the biblical dogmatists of De-Wette, Rückert and Baumgarten-Crusius attract attention. De Wette 35 derives his research from the following view of the religion of the Old Testament. Although in the religion of the Old and New Testaments, in his opinion, the spirit of religion and religious feeling are of a character of greater purity than in any other religion, nevertheless, this Old Testament and New Testament religion is not completely free from alien elements, sensual and current concepts. The content of religion is religious truth; the life of religion in feeling and the purest forms of its expression are aesthetic forms. In accordance with this definition of religion, De Wette tries to isolate the religious elements of the Old and New Testaments from the circle of elements alien, in his opinion, to biblical religion, in order to obtain material for biblical dogmatics in this way. At the same time, he compares the dogmatic material provided by history with the laws of ideal rational faith and religious feeling in order to see what belongs to purely religious elements and what to elements that are not purely religious. As for New Testament theology, the author divides it into two parts; the first embraces the teaching of Jesus Christ, and the second – the teaching of the apostles. The author finds pure religious teaching without any impurities only in the teaching of Christ, but not in the teaching of the apostles. Among the apostles, religious life, in his opinion, was already mediated by revelation in Christ. That is why the freedom and purity of the Spirit that dwelt in Christ could, in his opinion, only to a certain extent be inherent in the apostles; their spirit must contain an admixture of earthly human elements; and therefore the apostles, presenting only a reflection of the prototype, had to be more or less far from the latter, that is, from Christ - the prototype. In the teaching of the apostles, the author finds three main forms: Jewish Christianity, Alexandrian and Paulinian, although his division is not based on these main forms 36. De Wette's work does not represent a completely thorough study, although it is not devoid of significant erudition. The shortcomings of his direction are self-evident. – Rückert, in his work 37, pays special attention to the personal characteristics of the New Testament sacred writers. The sayings of the New Testament writers, in his opinion, also need to be divided according to their authors, just like the sayings of the Old Testament writers according to the time the latter wrote the Old Testament books. All New Testament writers correctly understood the essence of Christ's teaching, but there is a significant difference between them in the way they understood the particulars. Despite this, however, Rückert divides the New Testament teaching not according to writers, but as follows. He divides the entire doctrine into three sections: 1) the doctrine of God, 2) the doctrine of man, and 3) the doctrine of atonement, and within the circle of this division he tries to distinguish the views of individuals. This work is imbued with a comparatively more moderate rationalism. – Of all the experiments in biblical theology of the intermediate direction, Baumgarten-Crusius owns the most remarkable work 38 . It is remarkable for its thorough treatment of the material, for the thoroughness of this treatment, for its scholarship and comparatively more sound direction, although rationalism shines through very strongly here too and does a lot of harm to the dignity of the work 39 . Baumgarten-Crusius divides his work into two parts, general and specific; in the first he treats the books of St. scriptures, about sacred writers and Testaments, old and new; in a private section he sets out separately the various points of dogmatic teaching. As for the New Testament, in its general part it establishes the point of view on the teaching of Jesus Christ and the apostles. The general idea of ​​the new Testament is universalism, it is the basis of such a thing, such an institution, which should have significance for the whole world and for all times. This idea is not an echo of Jewish concepts or the concepts of time in general; this universalism is not the idea of ​​an upbringing. Paul, but there is the idea of ​​Christ. This idea is the idea of ​​uniting people in the kingdom of God. This idea unites all New Testament writings. Between the individual books of St. Scripture there is no significant difference regarding the accounting and method of presentation, either in general or in particular. If there is a difference, then the difference is immaterial; it consists in the forms of doctrine, the mood and views of various writers, in the language and in the form of evidence. Writers cannot be divided into classes, they cannot be divided into a conservative Jewish party and a liberal one; they can only be divided on the basis of their personal characteristics. It is also impossible to find gradual, periodic development, progress in the teaching of the New Testament, either in general or in relation to individual writers. And although the teaching of Christ is usually distinguished from the teaching of the apostles, such a distinction can only be allowed under a certain limitation. The apostles were faithful to the general principles of the religion and morality of Jesus Christ; they all recognized the main idea of ​​the kingdom of God, only they understood and represented it differently; the difference was only in the form and method of teaching. The author, starting from his main idea, divides the private section of his work into three parts: theology, anthropology and Christology. Since the 30s of this century, a new era has begun in the development of the science of biblical theology. If before this time biblical theology was developed exclusively by rationalists of the extreme and moderate trends, then since the thirties it has been developed mainly by theologians of the Protestant orthodox trend. On the part of the former, only occasionally, after a long period of time, two or three works appeared, while on the part of the orthodox, a long series of biblical theologies continuously follows one after another, so that Baur, speaking about the fate of science in recent times, complains that “in modern times, New Testament theology seems, as he puts it, to have taken not so much a step forward as back” 40, of course - from his point of view. At this time, only three complete biblical theologies appeared from the extreme negative direction. Extreme rationalism has recently taken the form of the so-called negative-critical direction. In the 30s of this century, the work of Cologne 41 appeared, constituting a transition to the negative-critical school; the author is already a mythist, but a very moderate one. Cologne, in comparison with all the works on biblical theology that had appeared before him, presented in his work the most complete, unusually hardworking and strictly historical method of presentation of the New Testament dogmatic teaching from a rationalistic point of view. Eliminating, as unusual for biblical theology, the desire for a practical, popular presentation, as well as its presentation in connection with the history and philosophy of religion, Cologne sets the following goals: first, to carefully distinguish the time and personalities of those teaching about this or that subject, as well as whether a famous person directly sets out his own religious views, or conveys only the views of another person; secondly, when presenting biblical concepts, strictly adhere to the view and way of thinking of the biblical writers, that is, be independent of the theological system, as well as from any philosophical school; thirdly, to find out the symbolic-mythical forms that clothe biblical teaching, and their relationship to pure biblical concepts and to the conviction of the teacher himself, that is, whether the author of a famous book recognized these symbolic-myths as myths or not. Having divided his theology into two parts, into the teaching of Jesus Christ and the apostles, Cologne further subdivides both parts into a general department and a private one 42 . The author is a pure rationalist; he imposes his completely rationalistic views on Jesus Christ and the apostles 43 . But at least he does not find that significant contradiction in the views of the apostles (albeit falsely attributed to them), which later rationalists found and find. Cologne comes to the conclusion that all the apostles agree with each other in their main dogmatic positions, so that he considers it possible to present their teaching in one coherent whole. True, the apostles, in his opinion, gave further development to the teaching devoted to them, more precisely defined points that remained uncertain, and in particular they developed their own view of the Face of Jesus Christ; further, however, differences inevitably had to appear between them, since they each followed their own path in the development of the teaching, - nevertheless, all these differences between them relate more to the image, the method of accounting, than to the essence of the teaching, more to the meaning that different persons attached to this or that point of the teaching, than to the very content of the teaching. In a word, according to Cologne, the difference between the teachings of the apostles is more formal than material. – After Cologne, for a long time there was no experience of a coherent presentation of biblical theology from the extreme negative direction. This phenomenon is quite understandable. All the attention of deniers, starting from the 40s, was directed to criticism of the text of St. books of the New Testament. From Strauss's Leben Iesu until very recently, the rationalists of our time have been primarily concerned with critical studies of the various New Testament books. But this is not the main obstacle to the emergence of biblical theologies. The main thing here is that in this critical work, scientists of this direction came to such negative results, found in the New Testament books so little historical, truly Christish and apostolic, and so many significant, in their opinion, contradictions not only in the content of various books, but also in the content of the same book, so much, in their opinion, mythical, various later growths on the original basis of Christ and the apostolic teaching - that it was impossible to even think about the whole and a coherent presentation of biblical New Testament dogmatic teaching. Under the hands of these historical critics, everything is holy. the writing of the New Testament turned into a myth that was gradually distorted, into a disordered collection of religious views and ideas; there was nothing practical and unified left, and therefore there could be no attempts to present biblical theology - which, in any case, presupposes the disclosure of a practical and unified view, at least (from a rationalistic point of view) in various phases of its development. Only recently, thanks to the comparatively greater moderation of negative criticism, its recognition, more than before, of the historical in St. the writings of the New Testament and therefore greater unity of dogmatic views set forth in various New Testament books - two works on biblical theology appeared. One belongs to Noack 44; the other - to the head of the Tübingen school, Baur. Baur's work, 45 published after his death by his son, represents the last word of the negative-critical school of biblical theology. This work does not have such scientific merits as we can rightly expect from its author, with whose name for some reason most are accustomed to connect the idea of ​​enormous learning. In fact, Baur's biblical theology, like most of his works, is based not on scholarship, but on direction and a rather fascinating popular presentation, alien to tedious quotations, but at the same time to a multifaceted consideration of the subject. The author in the first part of his work sets out the teaching of Jesus Christ, in the second - the teaching of the apostles. The presentation of the first part is based on the following provisions: the teaching of Christ is significantly different from the teaching of the apostles. The significant difference between them is that Christ places the center of his teaching not on his personality, but on moral demands, the idea of ​​the kingdom of heaven; meanwhile, the center of gravity of the apostolic teaching is not in the teaching of Jesus Christ, but in His person. However, the teaching of Jesus Christ stands at such a historical distance from us that, in fact, it cannot be the subject of purely historical research; it is something fundamental, primary, so that the entire content of New Testament theology relates to it as derivative and secondary. The teachings of Christ are little known to us; Only the teaching of the apostles is known. The teaching of the apostles represents the modification and development of Christ's teaching. The modification of Christ's teaching into the apostolic teaching was accomplished mainly through a psychological process that took place in the souls of the disciples after the death of their Teacher: the result of this process was faith in the resurrection of Jesus - this result was of enormous importance in the modification of Christ's teaching into the apostolic one. The apostolic teaching followed the path of ordinary historical and logical development. The author divides the second part of his work into three sections or periods. To the first period he attributes the teaching of St. Paul, set forth in the epistle to the Romans, Corinthians and Galatians, and the teaching set forth in the Apocalypse; this period extends for him until 70 A.D. Baur attributes to the second period the teaching set forth in the Epistle to the Hebrews, in the small epistles of St. Paul (excluding pastoral ones), in the epistles of St. Peter and James, in the Synoptic Gospels and in the book of the Acts of the Apostles; This period, according to Baur, extends to the first decade of the 2nd century. To the third period - the Gospel of John, the epistles of John and the pastoral letters of the apostle. Paul; this period extends until the end of the 2nd century. During these three periods, gradually, through logical development, the formation of the apostolic teaching was accomplished; the last phase of this development in the teaching of the gospel of John. There have been even fewer experiments in biblical theology since the 30s of this century from the circle of theologians of an intermediate direction. As far as we know, after the work of Baumgarten-Crusius, for as long as forty years, only two works appeared from the field of this direction: one belongs to. Reiss, the other - Weiss. The work of Reiss 46, a Strasbourg Frenchman, is not without the scientific merits that distinguish the works of the Germans. Like all the works of theologians of the intermediate direction, it represents a mixture of common sense concepts with rationalistic ones. The essay plan is as follows. First, the author depicts the religious state of Judaism before the coming of Jesus Christ; then he expounds the teachings of Jesus Christ; further characterizes the first phase of the development of the apostolic teaching, which, in his opinion, was conditioned by the reconciliation of Judaism with the teaching of Jesus Christ; here - the author includes the Apocalypse and the Epistle of the Apex into this mixture. Jacob. This is in the first three books of the essay. In the remaining three, the author characterizes two more phases in the development of Christ’s teaching by the apostles, or two types of apostolic teaching: the teaching of St. Paul and the teaching of the apostle. and Evang. John, seeing in the first the emancipation, as he expresses it, of Christ’s teaching from its connection with the Law of Moses, in the second - the elevation of Christ’s teaching over anti-Jewish polemics and the reception of Christ’s teaching of a speculative nature; The last book is called: Ideas and the Party. The author attributes the entire canon of New Testament sacred books to the 1st century, but makes it clear that he does not consider many of them to truly belong to the persons to whom they are attributed. The author’s concept of the divine inspiration of sacred writers and the peculiarities in their disclosure of dogmatic teaching is also extremely shaky. Weiss's work 47 appeared very recently. It represents, despite its modest title, a thorough and quite extensive work. It consists of five parts: the teaching of Jesus according to ancient tradition (1 part), the chief apostolic image of teaching in the pre-Paulian period (2 parts), Paulinism (3 parts), the chief apostolic image of teaching in the post-Paulian period (4 parts), John's theology (5 parts) 48. Most of the biblical theologies that have appeared in the Protestant world since the 30s of this century belong to the orthodox Protestant direction. Not only in quantity, but also in scientific merit, the theologies of this direction occupy first place in modern Protestant literature. These include the works of Neander 49 , Beck 50 , Lutz 51 , Schmid 52 , Lechler 53 , Messier 54 , Kanis 55 , Hahn 56 , Hoffmann 57 and Osterzee 58 . The most important five of them are: the works of Neander, Beck, Schmid. Hoffmann and partly Gan. Neander has the honor of being the founder of orthodox Protestant biblical theology, although he did not devote a special essay to the latter. In his history of the apostolic church, precisely in the rather extensive section of this history concerning the apostolic teaching, he was the first to give a truly faithful and at the same time scientific presentation of orthodox Protestant biblical theology. Neander introduces into biblical theology, not entirely new, but more correctly understood and formulated by him, the idea of ​​unity and diversity (Einheit und Mannigfaitigkeit), the idea of ​​unity in diversity and diversity in unity - both of Christ and the apostolic teaching, and the teaching of various apostles. Thus, in the apostolic teaching, he distinguishes four main types, or four main directions of the teaching of the apostles: 1) Paul, 2) Peter, 3) James and 4) John; but he looks at these types not as manifestations of real differences in the apostolic teaching, but as diverse expressions of the same teaching of Christ. Therefore, in the above directions, he sees nothing more than an expression of the living unity, richness and depth of the Christian spirit, which manifests itself, not without special intention, in various mutually replenishing and clarifying ways, types of formulation by the human mind of the divine teaching. In these four directions, he sees the purpose and ability of Christianity to give scope to the individual characteristics of individuals who perceive Christ’s teaching, to illuminate these characteristics with its light and to unite them with each other in the highest unity. Neander was the first to put biblical theology on a truly, generally speaking, correct path. Others followed the path outlined by Neander and developed Neander’s idea in detail, applying it to biblical theology. Beck, in his logic of Christian teaching, setting out to build a theological system from Scripture, partly recalled with his work the writings of the supranaturalists of the last century - Storr and Steidel. The work of this scientist attracts special attention due to the depth of his philosophical and theological analysis. A very prominent place among the works of this trend is occupied by the work of Schmid, a Tübingen professor who experienced numerous and varied influences, but in the end remained faithful to Protestant orthodoxy. Despite the extremely unsuccessful, too vague, broad statement of the task of biblical theology - which he understands as a scientific historical-genetic image of Christianity - his work is very remarkable for its extraordinary diligence and care in collecting and processing material, for its criticism of rationalistic views, for its extraordinary completeness of presentation and for its strictly orthodox direction. The first part of it contains a statement of the teachings of Jesus Christ; the second is the teaching of the apostles. In addition, both parts are preceded by a presentation of the life (first part) - the life of Jesus Christ, (second) - the apostles, which, in our opinion, is completely outside the task of science, if understood properly 59 . An equally important and valuable acquisition for science is the deeply learned and enormous work of Hoffmann, although it is not called biblical theology. In terms of content, this work is perhaps richer than all the works that have appeared so far. Unfortunately, the author cares little about the external processing of his extremely rich materials. The original form of his work does much harm to the composition. He jointly expounds the dogmatic teaching of both the Old and New Testaments under the usual dogmatic headings. He explains the places of St. The writings of the Old and New Testaments relating to one or another dogma, starting with the dogmatic position about the existence of God, are included in the most learned commentaries on this occasion, but at the same time they usually go into too special studies regarding almost every place. In conclusion, mention should be made of Ha’s work, which stands out from others for the vastness and scientific nature of the plan drawn up by the author for his work, of which the author, for some reason, has only completed one third so far, although his work was published quite a long time ago 60 . The great merits of Protestant theologians of this direction in terms of the study of St. scriptures in dogmatic terms. Their works can also be useful for the Orthodox theologian, greatly facilitating for him the work of studying the dogmatic side of St. scriptures. But from an Orthodox point of view, they also have many disadvantages. And above all, they reflect religious Protestant views on certain dogmatic issues. Further, as regards general, non-religious issues, then in this case, too, the instability of religious beliefs, which is so characteristic of Protestantism, manifests itself. No matter how beautiful, for example, the idea that formed the basis of their works on biblical theology is, it is not developed as it could have been developed on other, non-Protestant soil; this idea did not acquire the proper firmness, completeness and clarity among orthodox Protestants; it is not clarified in its particulars; their most frequent clarification is replaced by rather profound and vague phrases, for which, however, in addition to Protestantism, the vagueness of the German mind is partly to blame. Orthodox Protestants do not give a firm and definite solution to the question - what exactly is the essential unity and insignificant difference between Christ and the apostolic teaching. When implementing this idea in practice, they often have a noticeable desire to attribute more to the changeable and non-essentially unified than Orthodox science can allow; they more or less allow for the logical development of dogmatic accounting, although they do not express it directly. In general, they have noticeable ambiguity and hesitation in their ideas about their beloved Entwicklung, which they constantly talk about at the right time and at the wrong time. Let us repeat that Protestantism, suffering from a serious illness itself, could not create a completely healthy organism of science, although it does not follow from this that everything created by Protestantism was worthless. Recently, Catholic theologians have also entered the field of biblical theology. True, their works are so few that it is hardly possible to count just three works, and even then one of them relates to Old Testament biblical theology 61, constituting its monograph, the other is an introduction to New Testament theology 62, and only the third represents in one of its parts an outline of New Testament biblical theology: nevertheless, the very fact of their appearance is very significant for us. The last of the works we mentioned belongs to the Hessian professor Lutterbeck 63 . It is remarkable not only as the first, as far as we know, the only experience of Catholic biblical New Testament theology, but also for its merits. This is an extensive work, rich in erudition, the fruit of long-term work. The author, bearing in mind the rationalistic views spreading in society on the origin of Christianity and the essence of Christian teaching, set out to determine the difference between paganism, Judaism and Christianity and at the same time present an outline of the truly biblical New Testament dogmatic teaching. In accordance with this goal, he first takes and compares various pagan views with Christianity; then he takes Jewish views of recent times, also comparing them with Christianity, and, finally, syncretistic views, formed from the reconciliation of Judaism and paganism, again in their comparison with Christianity. This constitutes the content of the first volume of his work, which, in his own words, embraces pre-Christian development (Erster Band - Die vorchristliche Entwicklung). In the second volume, which bears his private title of development after Christ (Zweiter Band - die nachchristliche Entwicklung), the author first examines and expounds not pure Christian teaching - the teaching of the first heretics of Christianity, Gnostics and Judaizers, and then - the pure Christ and Apostolic teaching. As for this last part, which is especially important for us, the author, allowing only one formal development of Christian teaching, distinguishes a threefold way of formulating dogmas, which he calls Lehrbegriff, and this threefold way designates the names of the three persons of the apostles: Peter, Paul and John, whose teaching he expounds separately from one another and one after the other. Turning to our dogmatic literature, we do not find in it a single experience, a historical presentation of the dogmas of the biblical period. Let's see, however, whether it has prepared at least some materials for future experiments like Western experiments. In this regard, we can point to several works, partly translated and partly original, that have been appearing in our theological literature for some time. Some of them directly relate to the historical presentation of dogmas 64; others are not directly related. While presenting for the most part materials for the history of the life of Christ, the latter at the same time, however, contain more or less dogmatic materials 65. This can also include what has been done in our dogmatics, mainly in the dogmatics of the Right Reverend Philaret, to clarify the dogmatic teaching contained in St. the writings of the New Testament, as well as in the interpretations of the books of St. writings of the new testament 66. From the previous essay on the history of literature, so-called biblical theology in the West, it is clear where, how and with what character this part of the historical presentation of dogmas appeared there, what kind of statement this science had at the very first time, as a task of biblical theology, over time became more and more clear and in what form it exists in the West in different directions of Protestantism and in Catholicism at the present time. We have seen that the germ of biblical historical-dogmatic science is hidden in Protestant principles, that this germ developed under the influence of rationalist doctrines, that at first, after the birth of the new science, it was nourished almost exclusively by rationalist elements. Thus, its origin and the first period of its existence appear dark. But, as often happens, Protestant rationalists, plotting with their work to shake faith, plotting evil in their hearts, actually prepared in their work a support for faith, the triumph of good. The basic idea of ​​​​the separation of the essential and the inessential in the dogmatic biblical teaching - this idea, embedded in the body of the science they created, turned out to be a powerful weapon against themselves. The child they raised later turned out to be against them. The best people of the Protestant world tore it out of their hands, began to correctly separate those aspects of science that represented the makings of truth and justice, and managed to degenerate its organism to a certain extent. If, despite all this, Protestantism, even in the person of its best representatives, did not manage to remove from the body of the new science some more or less insignificant ailments, then this is the fault of those principles by which the Protestant world lives. Biblical dogmatic science, like any theological science in general, can be completely healthy only when it is transferred to another soil, when it is placed under the life-giving action of other, sound religious principles, such as the principles of Orthodoxy. But is such a perception of the work of Western theological science necessary in the circle of Orthodox theological sciences, is it necessary not for the West, but for ourselves, is it useful, is it possible, from the Orthodox point of view, and if necessary, useful and possible, then in what form? In our opinion, both our theological science and the intellectual-religious life of our educated society urgently require Orthodox experiences like biblical Western theology, and the emergence of the experience of an Orthodox historical-dogmatic exposition of the biblical period will be useful both for our science and for our religious-intellectual life. Given the known formulation of the task of this department of historical presentation of dogmas, it will not contradict the principles of Orthodoxy. And first of all, let us pay attention to the requirements of theological science. If only the historical presentation of dogmas should exist in the circle of our theological sciences as a separate branch, and it should exist 67 ; This is a historical presentation of dogmatic teaching according to St. Scripture, both the Old and especially the New Testament, is necessary. As for the New Testament in particular, the historical presentation of dogmas, having as its task to trace how the essentially unchangeable dogmas of the Christian faith were expressed in different ways, but at different times, in the word of man, meets, first of all, with the first and most important period in this external history of dogmas - with the period when for the first time the divine truths of the Christian faith were revealed to the world by the Son of God who descended to earth, and were offered by Him to people under in a form convenient for humanity of that time and under a similar form, they were preached to the entire universe by His holy disciples and apostles. To exclude this period from the historical presentation of dogmas, to limit the latter only to the church period, would mean starting science not from the beginning, but from the beginning, and depriving it of the opportunity to properly understand much of its church period 68. In order to understand why, in the mouth of the church and its fathers and teachers, dogmatic teaching in subsequent times received this and not another appearance, for this, the historical presentation of dogmas must, among other things, be studied, first of all, according to St. the writings of the New Testament, the form in which the revealed teaching came out of the mouth of Christ the Savior and the apostles. This form had and will never, of course, cease to have enormous significance in relation to the formulation of dogmas at all times of the existence of the Church of Christ. No matter how many changes have occurred in the presentation of dogmas from the time of their revelation to the world by Christ the Savior to the present day, the external formal side, language, etc. of all Christian dogmas, retains, however, very many traces of the influence of biblical expression on it that has not yet weakened. So, the presentation of dogmatic teaching according to St. Scripture in general and according to the writings of the New Testament primarily - constitutes the starting point for the historical presentation of dogmas. Without such an exposition, further forward movement in the field of the historical fate of the external side of dogma is unthinkable for a dogmatist historian. Further, the study of dogmatic teaching from the perspective in which it appeared on the lips of Jesus Christ and the apostles is important not only for science, but also for the religious life of educated Christians of all times, and ours in particular. For a Christian of any time, the experience of a coherent presentation of the dogmatic teaching of Christ and the apostles from the side of its original form cannot but have significance - such a presentation that, through comparison and clarification of one expression by another, it becomes understandable and alive for him that, which several centuries after the earthly life of Jesus Christ became little used and incomprehensible, the method of expression that existed during the earthly life of Christ the Savior and the apostles. In addition to satisfying the natural sense of curiosity, such an experience can help to revive religious ideas in the educated part of our society. The root of the theological language of any time is in the Bible, mainly in the New Testament writings; For those who have not studied the biblical language well, the language in which the truths of the Christian faith are usually presented is not entirely clear. And the incomprehensibility of the language greatly harms the cause of society’s lively interest in religious truths, the liveliness of its religious ideas, and vice versa; word and thought are so closely connected that an incomprehensible word fetters thought, and vice versa. In particular, for our time, the study of the external side of the biblical New Testament dogmatic teaching is of particular importance. In our time, the need for scientific and theological education is especially keenly felt. Given the particularly strong current arousal in our society of the need for independent thinking and study of everything that constitutes the subject of human knowledge, our so-called educated society cannot but want to scientifically study the area of ​​religious beliefs, trace their history and bring their deep meaning as close as possible to their understanding; but it has very few means for this, much less than, for example, our ancestors of pre-Petrine times had, who were very familiar with theological language, theologically read, and therefore possessed a significant stock of theological information. Our educated society, not to mention its paucity of theological information, is generally very little familiar with theological language, so that for a significant part of it theological terms often seem like hieroglyphs. The duty of theological science is to help him acquire the necessary information and means for the scientific study of objects of faith and, above all, St. scripture, the source of our faith and our theological language. Secular science in our times, with extraordinary zeal, began to study various written monuments from the past life of our people, hoping through this to achieve numerous results, both for the science of the Russian language, and for reviving the feeling of Russian nationality, patriotism, and so on. Moreover, the sacred duty of theological science is to do everything for its part to study St. from all possible sides. Scripture, this great monument of our faith, the study of which at all times, as history shows, has been very fruitful in religious and intellectual terms. The life of our Orthodox society all the more urgently requires the study of the dogmatic side of St. scriptures that our society has already been touched by the idea of ​​Western negative criticism of the biblical text, which, armed with apparently deep learning and hard work and taking up the study of St. scripture in a dogmatic sense, it is trying to prove that the letter of scripture not only bears the character of an external difference in many respects from our modern way of presentation and expression, but also contains a meaning significantly different from the meaning assimilated to it by the universal church. Such views of Western negative criticism, penetrating to us, persistently call our Orthodox theological science to a thorough study of the external and internal sides of St. scriptures in dogmatic terms in relation to modern requirements of science and life. But can Orthodox theological science, without ceasing to be Orthodox, create, like Western science, something like Orthodox biblical theology? Apparently, despite all her desire, she cannot do this without renouncing the principles of Orthodoxy - she cannot for two reasons. Firstly, apparently, the very idea of ​​a historical element in the dogmatic side of St. is repugnant to Orthodoxy. scripture, as not being consistent with the divine inspiration of scripture, recognized by the Orthodox Church. Apparently, given the divine inspiration of scripture, there can be no question of even an insignificant share of the human, personal and temporal element in scripture. But it seems so only at first glance. It is beyond any doubt that the Orthodox Church has always considered Scripture to be divinely inspired, not a product of the human mind, but a creation of the Spirit of God; but, undoubtedly, also that she understood divine inspiration in the following way, although she did not formulate the concept of divine inspiration in brief and precise terms. According to the teachings of the Orthodox Church, men enlightened by the Spirit of God, being under the influence or influx of St. Spirit, were not in such an ecstatic state that they were not aware of what they were saying and were completely deprived of the use of their abilities, as the Montanists understood divine inspiration, for which the fathers and teachers of the church denounced them, 69 but they possessed consciousness and their personal abilities, which were not paralyzed by the influence of the Holy Spirit, but which it only subordinated to the service of divine truth, protecting them from deviating into error. The Holy Spirit, making them his organs and communicating his truths to people through them, gave their minds only content, divine truths, leaving them to express this content, these truths, to their natural abilities, in the language characteristic of one or another organ of revelation, that is, to give revealed truths one or another external order and connection, to clothe the thoughts of the mind of God in one or another verbal form, although, of course, even at this the Spirit of God did not provide the Holy Spirit with the Holy Spirit. writers entirely to themselves. The Spirit of God elevated their natural abilities, but did not take away from them their natural disposition. In a word, according to the teachings of the Orthodox Church, the form of divinely inspired writing depended to a large extent on the personal characteristics of the organs of revelation and the content exclusively on the Spirit of God, who revealed divine secrets to people through them. This is exactly how the fathers and teachers of the church looked at the inspiration of Scripture. So eg. Irenaeus attributed to the ap. Pavel's tongue is quick and swift; In addition, I found in the messages of this apostle a special order and connection of thoughts and, wanting to express the thought of a certain amount of freedom in the organ of revelation, I expressed the following in the same place. thus: “in this way a man asks, and the Spirit answers” ​​70. Jerome, along with other church fathers, said that St. writers (prophets) in a state of inspiration were not deprived of the use of their abilities 71, found differences in the styles of various priests. writers, for example, the style of St. Jeremiah, compared with the style of St. Isaiah, was considered unprocessed (rustiсior), found in St. Pavel’s favorite phrases, personally characteristic of him and not entirely stylistically pure, 72, etc. Chrysostom, allowing for minor differences in the narrations of the evangelists, for example, regarding place, time, etc., looked at these features as evidence of the authenticity of the gospels, as written by different persons 73. We do not provide other evidence from the works of our fathers in favor of the above thoughts 74. True, in ancient times not everyone defined divine inspiration (as regards some of the most particular concepts included in the general concept of divine inspiration) exactly as we define it. There was in ancient times a whole school, to which some famous writers of the church belonged, who had a slightly different understanding of the inspiration of Scripture, namely the Alexandrian school. This school, with Origen at its head, although it did not completely reject the existence of the human and temporal element in scripture, did not explain its presence in scripture in the same way as we explain it. She deduced the origin of this element not from the personal characteristics of St. writers, not from a certain amount of freedom provided by the Holy Spirit to the organs of revelation, but from the special intention of the Spirit of God, so that the Holy Spirit Himself directly, for its special purposes, gave St. writers know human forms to clothe their divine truths. And this is the meaning, according to Origen and his school, there is not a single letter in Scripture that is not inspired by God 75 . Raising everything in scripture to the Holy Spirit, the writers of this school, although they allowed, between other meanings of scripture (moral and allegorical), a literal or historical meaning, they did not attach due importance to it, because they considered the allegorical, spiritual meaning to be primarily worthy of attention, the disclosure of which they were mainly concerned with, and they allowed a lot of arbitrariness in interpretation. Another ancient school, the Antiochian school, to which many famous fathers and teachers of the church also belonged, understood divine inspiration differently. This school tried to distinguish between the divine and the human in scripture, and explained the presence of the latter (of course only in the form, and not in the content of scripture) by the personal characteristics of the saint. writers, organs of revelation; in explaining the scripture, she tried to adhere to the grammatical-logical method of interpretation. The fathers and teachers of this school corrected the extremes of the Alexandrian school by introducing within proper boundaries the concept of the inspiration of Scripture 76 . But no matter what extremes individual writers and teachers of the church went to, the universal church always remained unchanged and unshakable in the true, alien to extremes, understanding of the inspiration of Scripture. So, the difference in opinions of some ancient fathers and teachers of the church about the inspiration of Scripture does not serve as a refutation of what we have said regarding the ever-present teaching of the church on this subject. True, admitting in principle the Orthodox view of divine inspiration and generally having a true concept of it, a private person can easily in practice exaggerate the importance of the personal, temporal and human in Scripture and thus fall into the opposite extreme of Montanism, as exemplified by modern rationalism. Nevertheless, it would be unfair to think that it is no longer possible for science and the individual involved in it to remain in the middle between the extremes of Montanism and rationalism. How Orthodoxy is the royal path between the extremes of false religions; Likewise, Orthodox theological science should and, in our opinion, can in this case adhere to a healthy middle. This is where we will limit ourselves in our brief discussion of the inspiration of Scripture, for we do not now have the goal of presenting to readers a detailed and thorough treatise on this important and extensive subject, 77 but we only want to indicate the Orthodox point of view on this issue - the point of view on which we stand, in order to eliminate any misunderstanding that may arise in the minds of the readers of our article. Secondly, apparently, there can be no talk of so-called Orthodox biblical theology because the necessary requirement of biblical theology is an explanation of St. writings of St. the same scripture, which Orthodox science cannot allow according to its principles. To allow a similar way of explaining St. Scripture, apparently, would mean refusing to recognize St. tradition as a guiding principle in explaining St. scriptures. This is what it seems at first glance, but upon closer examination the matter will appear in a different form. Orthodox theological science, firmly holding the banner of Orthodoxy, has never, however, considered it an apostasy from the principles of Orthodoxy to explain this or that passage of St. scriptures according to the context of speech, parallel passages, etc., i.e., explain St. scripture of St. the same scripture. Countless evidence of this can be found in the works of St. fathers, in Orthodox dogmatists of all times, including ours. Therefore, from the Orthodox point of view it is possible, under a certain condition, to explain St. scripture of St. but by scripture: one can explain the letter of scripture by the letter of scripture, without citing evidence from St. tradition, and at the same time be faithful to church tradition, speak and teach in the spirit of St. legends. How can this be? The answer to this can be the concept of tradition that our Orthodox Church has about it. Holy tradition is written and there is living. The first is contained in various definitions of councils and the works of St. authorized by the church. fathers who have come down to us in writing; the second lies in the spirit, in the meaning or understanding of the views and convictions that were betrayed to the church by Christ the Savior and the Apostles and which still live in the Orthodox Church, animate, penetrate it and are, with the assistance of the Holy Spirit, the force that subjugates the individual personalities of the members of the church, guiding their views and actions, in a word, their entire internal religious life. Submission to this living force and the guidance of this spirit that guides the true path that reigns in our Orthodox Church is also possible when a member of the Orthodox Church explains St. writings of St. the same scripture. It is not the subordination of the interpreter of St. writings to living tradition or the spirit of Orthodoxy will have a disastrous effect on his exegetical works, even if every time he explains each passage of St. scripture resorted to patristic writing, to written tradition, without being guided by the spirit of the Orthodox Church, he can easily reinterpret the patristic testimonies in his own way, which is very convenient to do when using fragmentary excerpts from them. We meet both phenomena in dogmatic works long before the advent of Protestantism: one - during the period of the first three centuries and ecumenical councils, the other - in the Middle Ages. The fathers and teachers of the church before I. Damascus, explaining St. scripture of St. in a dogmatic sense, for the most part, they did not cite passages from the works of their predecessors and from other written monuments of tradition, but only as a sign that they explained the scripture in the spirit of the Orthodox Church, generally referred to tradition, said that this is how the church has always taught, this is the faith of the fathers, etc., in other words, they were guided by living church tradition. If they sometimes cited passages from the works of their predecessors and from local symbols, they did so in dogmatic-polemical works 78 ; but we do not find similar excerpts in works exegetical and positively expounding the dogmas of faith, in experiments in the systematic presentation of dogmas. This was the case in the ancient church until I. Damascus, who was the first, in his “Accurate Exposition of the Orthodox Faith,” to support every frank thought with the evidence of written tradition 79 . We see something different among the Western scholastics of the Middle Ages. Loving to make excerpts from the works of the fathers, following the texts of St. writings, Western scholastics very often, however, fell into dogmatic errors. They were not saved by numerous excerpts from the works of their fathers; and this is because they were not animated by the spirit and meaning of living church tradition, under the guidance of which the ancient fathers explained St. scripture is scripture. So, this last technique is not essentially Protestant. In essence, it is a very ancient technique, and not the latest, Protestant one; it is a general Christian, ancient Christian reception. True, it can become Protestant, but only in the hands of a Protestant, or a person who is not firm in Orthodoxy, does it become Protestant when the authority of tradition is not recognized, when living tradition has dried up in a certain religious society, when the one who explains the Scripture is deprived of a guiding principle in the spirit of the church, or when he does not want to obey it, when, instead, he is left to the variability and instability of his mind. When, trying to be objective, he always explains the Bible by the Bible, he instead very often explains the Bible not on the basis of the Bible, but on the basis of his own personal considerations. The fact is that no matter how hard a person tries to delve into the spirit and letter of Scripture, he is not imbued with the truly Orthodox, church spirit, which is one with the spirit of the Holy Spirit. Scripture, he is not able to maintain the height of an objective attitude towards St. scripture and not introduce subjectivity into its interpretation. At the height of an objectively true understanding of St. Scripture can only be retained by a person who has completely surrendered to the guidance of the universal Orthodox meaning and spirit, that spirit and meaning with which the Bible is also imbued. For such a person there is no danger in explaining scripture by scripture itself. Therefore, in our opinion, the attempt of Orthodox theological science to expound the dogmatic teaching according to St. the writings of the new testament; just as the following words of Rev. Philaret of Chernigov: “The importance of the word of God, he says, requires that the word of God itself be the first subject of our attention and its meaning should be thoroughly studied; and the character of frank dogmatism requires that the dogmatist be a student of the word of God, and not assume a didactic tone in relation to the word of God. When dogmas are determined for us not by the word of God itself or, what is also, not by the explanation of scripture by scripture, but by the arbitrariness of the logical mind; the teaching of revealed truths more or less loses the character of revealed teaching 80 . Here, the venerable author rightly admitting the explanation of scripture by scripture and attaching special importance to it, did not even consider it necessary, in order to avoid various misunderstandings, to make a reservation like the following: “the explanation of scripture by scripture must occur, however, under the guidance of living church tradition; otherwise it will lead to the same thing as neglecting the study of scripture, that is, to the constructions of the logical mind.” Then writing the next paragraph - about the method of using St. by tradition, Rev. Filaret had every right not to make the above-mentioned increase, being quite confident that he would not be suspected of Protestantism, especially since all his dogma serves as confirmation that he studied tradition as carefully as he studied Scripture. Science, taking upon itself the presentation of dogmatic teaching according to St. Scripture, in essence, pursues the same goal regarding St. scripture, which etc. Philaret, with the only, far from significant, difference that St. Philaret, studying the foundations and method of expression of each dogma in St. Scripture, then moves on to the grounds and method of expression of the same dogma in St. tradition, - he also repeats, moving on to another dogma, after another - to a third, etc.; The science of the historical presentation of dogmas immediately takes all dogmas and studies the data for them in St. Scripture, for a time (just like the dogmatists that exist among us hitherto) leaving aside the scientific presentation of the data for them in sacred tradition, although he constantly has the latter in mind and does not for a minute lose sight of the guiding principle contained in living tradition, in the spirit of our Orthodox Church. But what kind of form should the historical presentation of the dogmas according to St. the writings of the New Testament among us, in our Orthodox theology? The general form of science (as well as the particulars in its plan and method) very much depend on the task and the goals that science has in mind, and therefore, before talking about the first, it is necessary to clarify the latter. Although the general goal of this section of the historical presentation of dogmas is the same as, in our opinion, the entire historical presentation of dogmas in general; nevertheless, this department, like any other, has its own special, private goals and objectives. The general task of this department, as we said above, is to study the external formal side of the teaching of Jesus Christ and the apostles, to present in a coherent whole the revealed teaching in this particular form, that is, in the words of Christ and the apostles, and to show at the same time what relates to the unchangeable essence of revelation and what relates to the changeable form and external disclosure of the revealed teaching. Particular goals stem partly from the very subject of science, but mainly from the apologetic character, which, in our opinion, should distinguish this department of the historical study of dogmas. Distortion by various kinds of rationalists of the teachings of Christ and the apostles, their attacks on the teachings of Christ, their hypotheses that Christ only gradually recognized himself as the Messiah and developed his teaching, as if the apostles continued this development, and both Christ and the apostles often fell into contradiction with themselves, as if Christ, even at the highest point of his self-consciousness, was not aware of himself and his work as they later appeared in the consciousness of His disciples, as if the teaching of Christ is unknown to us, and only the teaching of the apostles is known, etc., all this obliges science to pay special attention to the teaching of Christ and the apostles in their mutual relationship. Science must carefully delve into the essence of Christ’s teaching from the very beginning of His entry into the field of public ministry and pay special attention to the form of His speeches, as they are conveyed by the first three evangelists and the fourth - in a word, reveal what and how Christ the Savior taught from the very beginning of His preaching to the World and throughout all the Gospel stories. Then science must show what the essence of the apostolic teaching is in comparison with the teaching of Christ, in what Form it appeared among the apostles and how this form relates to the form and method of revealing the revealed teaching of Christ the Savior - in a word, what and how the apostles taught. Depending on such tasks and goals, there is a plan and method for the historical presentation of dogmas according to St. the writings of the new testament. If this exposition were to be subordinated to one general and main purpose; then its plan would not present significant features compared to the plan of other departments of the historical presentation of dogmas. It would be possible, without separating Christ’s teachings from the apostolic ones, to present them together, according to the order usually accepted in dogmatists, with some minor changes in this order, in accordance with the natural connection of concepts in which they were revealed by Christ the Savior and the apostles. Teaching I. Christ and the apostles, in essence, are completely identical; Christ's teaching contains no less and no more than what is contained in the apostolic teaching; the apostles did not add or subtract anything from it; The apostolic teaching in its essence does not even represent any logical development in comparison with Christ’s; Consequently, from this side there is not only no incentive to separate one and the other teaching, but on the contrary, there are strong incentives to present them together. Even the difference in form between them is not so great as to in itself prompt them to be presented separately. The form of apostolic accounting, despite its very significant difference from the form of Christ’s teaching, has, however, many similarities and similarities with the latter; it has its basis in the form of Christ's teaching; the language, the method of presentation and disclosure of the apostolic teaching are not completely new phenomena; they grew and developed on the basis of Christ’s expression and constitute the development of this non-essential side of revealed teaching. Thus, from this side there are no particularly strong and urgent motivations to present the teachings of I. Christ and the Apostles separately from one another; on the contrary, there are several incentives to present them together, each time comparing the prototype of the biblical New Testament language with its further development. The question of the plan of the department of historical-dogmatic science we are considering will appear in a completely different form if we look at it from the point of view of the particular special goals of this department. If only historical-dogmatic science in this department should pursue, among other things, apologetic goals; then she is thereby put into the need to expound the teachings of I. Christ separately from the teaching of the apostles, not because it had in itself a special desire to separate these two inseparable teachings, but precisely in order to prove their entire identity in essence and difference in form, in order to show that Orthodox science is not afraid to contrast, to put face to face all of Christ and all of the apostolic teaching, being fully confident that from this opposition all the untruths of rationalistic doctrines and all the truth will be revealed dogmatic beliefs of the Orthodox Church. So, for example, only by a separate presentation of all of Christ’s and the apostolic teachings can one thoroughly refute the opinion that I. Christ did not communicate to his disciples all the essential dogmatic teachings, that only very few, the most general dogmatic positions belong to Him, from which the apostles later drew their conclusions, which are also considered by us to be Christ’s dogmas, and their conclusion often contains more than the fundamental principles of I. Christ. Having outlined the entire range of dogmatic teachings of I. Christ, science will show how large the circle of this teaching is, what it contains, and in this way will avoid the reproach that by comparing Christ and the apostolic teachings in parts, it wants to mask the insufficiency of data in the teachings of Christ in comparison with the apostolic ones, as if Orthodox science is afraid to allow a comparison of both teachings face to face in their entire volume out of secret fear of being defeated. Further, when comparing both teachings in parts, and not as a whole, it is very difficult to prove with sufficient thoroughness that in the Gospel speeches of I. Christ, I. Christ’s own teaching is set forth, and not the apostolic one, that Christ has his own language and his own way of revealing the teaching, and that, thus, we have Christ’s teaching not only in the apostolic teaching, but that we have, in fact, and in the closest sense, the teaching Gentlemen with all the peculiarities of expression and presentation characteristic of Christ the Savior recorded by the evangelists. All this is especially clear from the integral presentation and contrast of Christ’s teaching as a whole to the apostolic one, and the features of the presentation and revelation by Christ the Savior of the truths revealed by Him to the world are highlighted with greater clarity. In the same way, with a mixed or combined presentation of both teachings, it is more difficult to show the inconsistency of the hypothesis that in the mind of St. Jesus Christ gradually formed the worldview that the Orthodox Church calls frank dogmatic teaching, and similar hypotheses and objections. So, we are decisively inclined in favor of a separate presentation of the teachings of I. Christ and the apostles 81. Historical presentation of dogmas according to St. The writing of the new testament should, therefore, in our opinion, be divided into two parts. Part one: the teachings of I. Christ in His own mouth. Part two: the teaching of I. Christ in the mouth of the apostles. But where are those sources, they will tell us, from which the author thinks to draw for himself data regarding the teachings of I. Christ, expressed in His own words? If this source is the gospel speeches of I. Christ, then the gospels were written not by I. Christ himself, but by the apostles, and, therefore, the teaching of I. Christ set forth in them cannot be called the teaching of I. Christ in His own mouth, but must be called the teaching of I. Christ in the mouth of the apostles, and therefore the division allowed by the author turns out to be untenable! Moreover, extreme scientific critics will object to us, before dividing the subject in this way, we must first decide the question: were the gospels truly written by eyewitnesses and listeners of I. Christ, His disciples; Are not the legends circulating among Christians about the life and teaching of the Lord written down by later followers of Christ, and does the author not fall into a double historical error, accepting for the teaching of I. Christ something that cannot serve as an expression not only of His own teaching, but even of the teaching of His disciples, apostles, and His closest followers? We allow ourselves to leave aside this last objection, since it is one that is completely beyond the scope of the duties of dogmatic science to answer, 82 and let us dwell exclusively on the first objection, which does not deny the authenticity of the Gospels, which therefore must be taken into account by us and which, finally, is very, apparently, natural and completely solid. Apparently, there is nothing incredible in the fact that the apostles could change the teachings of I. Christ, when conveying it in their gospels, could put their own meaning into it, as is usually the case with people who very often change what they hear in such a way that it is often difficult for the author of what was said to recognize his words in the mouths of others. Even more likely, apparently, is another assumption, namely: the apostles could express the essence of the teachings of I. Christ in their own words, in other words, they could put their own words into the mouth of I. Christ and thus, although they correctly conveyed the meaning of Christ’s teaching, they gave it their own form, which again occurs in life at every step. All these assumptions are based on facts borrowed from the everyday life of ordinary people - and facts of another kind, also encountered in human life, are omitted from attention; and on a thought that is too generalized, not limited enough, and therefore not completely fair even in relation to ordinary people, the conclusion is based on extraordinary people, the organs of revelation. We agree that ordinary people in their everyday lives very often, although by no means always, extremely inaccurately convey the meaning and letter of what they hear. Such inaccurate transmission depends on very many reasons: from a lack of concentrated attention to what is being heard, or otherwise from absent-mindedness, then - from a lack of vividness of mental abilities, which is often unable to follow quickly flowing speech, from weakness of memory, very often also from dishonesty, from the desire to deliberately, at the request of some small goals and passions, to change the meaning or some phrases of heard speeches, which is accomplished through the omission of some thoughts, through placing in another connection given thoughts, through the replacement of one expression with another similar one, but having its own, however, connotation, through the addition or omission of apparently unimportant expressions, but shading the thought, one way or another. In important circumstances of their lives, however, even ordinary people, if not guided by passions, quite accurately convey the meaning and even the letter of what they heard. Their attention is then entirely focused on what they are listening to; the activity of all their abilities is elevated: their abilities acquire double the usual energy, and the speech of the speaker is often completely engraved in their memory, or at least the most important phrases that make up, so to speak, the theses of the speech, are imprinted in their soul. Of course, no one will argue against facts of this kind; for everyone will more or less experience this on themselves. The latter kind of condition also applies to the apostles, but only to a higher degree than to ordinary people. The divine personality of Christ made an extraordinary impression on the apostles, children at heart, and therefore all the more receptive; in their soul, still virgin, untouched, except by the people's faith, by any other teaching and no scientific theories, those wondrous speeches could not fail to be imprinted forever, about which those who heard them ran to announce to their acquaintances that they had never heard anything like it. The unusually strong impression made by the Savior on all His listeners, especially on receptive listeners, such as the apostles were, the intense attention He aroused in the listeners, as a necessary result of an unusually strong impression, and the elevation of all the mental abilities of Christ’s disciples, inseparably connected with intense attention - all this guarantees this, and not another, outcome of their listening to the Savior’s speeches. It is all the more necessary to assume such an outcome because Christ the Savior, with truly divine wisdom, adapted to the understanding of His listeners, and therefore the lack of education of His disciples could not serve as an obstacle to their assimilation of His divine teaching. He began to reveal the content of His teaching from the moral truths that were most understandable to His listeners; then he gradually brought them to the most important and most difficult to understand dogmatic truths and, moreover, did not immediately reveal the latter in their entirety, but clarified the same truth piece by piece, taking advantage of all kinds of cases that presented themselves to Him. As for the method of presentation, in his speeches I. Christ spoke in the most accessible, popular language, speaking in aphorisms, parables and similitudes, by their very nature easily digestible and capable of being etched in the memory. Is it surprising if the Savior’s disciples could remember His speeches, which they could therefore convey in the exact form in which they were conveyed to Him, that is, in the form of aphorisms, parables and similarities? If I. Christ offered the people lengthy, artificially composed, oratorical and philosophical speeches (which, however, would not be worthy of the wisdom of not only a divine, but also a simple gifted folk teacher); then it’s a different matter 83 . Let us add to this the well-known fact that the ancients, with a lack of books, had an incomparably stronger memory than our memory, which, according to psychologists, has weakened since the introduction of printing, due to its lack of exercise; further, that even in our time, in some places where printed literature has not yet penetrated, entire folk poems are assimilated by folk singers almost immediately 84; and we will have to recognize the naturalness of the fact that the apostles could remember and transmit in writing to posterity the unartificial, uncomplicated, unusually simple, publicly and at the same time vividly expressed speeches of the Savior, striking in their inner meaning, especially for the time of that time, not brought up, like ours, in Christian truths. This should have been the case according to the natural order of things, not to mention that highest insight into the mind of St. writers, which, according to the Savior’s promise, was supposed to happen with the descent on them of the Spirit of the Comforter, who, according to Christ, was supposed to remind them of everything that He told them (John 14:26). If Baur (and others like him) had not limited themselves to analyzing only the state that occurred in the souls of the disciples after the Savior’s death on the cross, but had thought about their psychological state during the entire time of their conversion with the Savior before His death on the cross; then he would not say that we know almost nothing about the teachings of I. Christ, but we only know the teachings of the apostles. From the realm of possibility, from what could be, let us move on to the realm of reality, to what is. Analysis of the text of the Lord’s speeches recorded by the evangelists convinces us that these are His genuine speeches, both in terms of content and in terms of letters, accurately conveyed by the evangelists. The teaching of I. Christ in the Gospel speeches differs in many features in the way of revealing thoughts, in their formulation and in language, from the way of disclosing, presenting and expressing the same teaching by the apostles. The method of revelation among the apostles is different than in the speeches of I. Christ. In the latter, everything leads to faith in His person and in the truths He preaches; in the apostolic writings everything flows from faith in the person of Jesus Christ and the teaching He preached. In the gospel speeches of I. Christ, thought is clothed in figurative forms, in parables and similitudes; among the apostles she appears without this shell. In the speeches of I. Christ we encounter many expressions that are constantly used here (such as: son of man, kingdom of God, peace, my work, my works, etc.); in the apostolic writings these expressions are almost never used at all, for example. son of man 85 - or are used very rarely, being replaced by other expressions, which are the dominant terms among them 86. The question arises, where did all these, admittedly insignificant, but striking, differences between the speeches of the Lord, as they are set out by the evangelists, and the writings of the apostles come from? If we see that the apostles in all their writings have a different way of revealing, expounding and expressing the truths of Christ's teaching than in the gospel speeches; what reason do we have to assume that the apostles, conveying the speeches of the Savior, conveyed them in their own way, revealed the teaching of Christ in their own way, came up with parables and similarities on their own and imposed them on I. For Christ, the terms - in a word, gave His teaching a different shell than what they clothed His teaching, which they themselves preached? Wasn’t there an ordinary literary device on the part of the evangelists here? Didn’t they, for some purpose, put just such speeches, and not another kind, into the mouth of I. Christ? If there was a deliberate forgery here, then it was so skillful that it could not have been carried out by ordinary people, such as the apostles were. And why did they resort to such writing? To embellish, to present in the best possible way, the teaching of your Teacher? But it was so high, deep and extraordinary that it did not need such means; any embellishment and change would serve him not to benefit, but to harm. Finally, it is psychologically impossible that people who were under the irresistible impression of the extraordinary personality of I. Christ could doubt even for a minute that this or that of what the Savior said could have been said better than it was said, especially when they saw that no one could resist Him. But how, they will tell us, did the evangelists accurately convey the speeches of I. Christ, when in the presentation of speeches they differ from each other? Let's see what the differences between them are, how great they are, how important they are, and whether on the basis of them it is possible to refuse the evangelists an accurate transmission of the speeches of I. Christ. All the evangelists completely agree with each other on everything important and essential, namely that they completely agree on the way in which Jesus Christ gradually revealed dogmatic truths, that they clothe the latter in the same parables and similarities and use the same terms in speech, in a word, in most cases they are literally similar to each other. If in some cases we notice that one evangelist conveys the same speech more fully, another more briefly, in secondary matters one uses one expression, another another, one does not even cite a well-known speech at all, while another expounds it: then this only proves that one evangelist has one thing imprinted in his memory, and another at the same time another 87, and, moreover, that regarding the expression of some secondary, non-dogmatic thoughts, the evangelists do not found the need to be literally accurate. This, however, does not give the right to consider the gospel speeches of I. Christ in general, main and essential, not only regarding the content, but also regarding their letter, not accurately reproduced in the gospels. After all that has been said, 88 we hope that our division of the biblical New Testament period of the historical presentation of dogmas into the teaching of I. Christ in His own mouth and the teaching of I. Christ in the mouth of the apostles will not be strange for readers. In conclusion, let's say a few words about the method of presentation of the biblical New Testament period. Inclined to a separate presentation of the teachings of I. Christ and the Apostles mainly for the purposes of apologetics, we, however, must note that not all apologetic requirements regarding the dogmatic side of St. Scripture can be satisfied by the science of historical exposition of dogmas. The scope of its tasks does not and cannot include, for example, protecting the authenticity of various priests. books that make up the canon accepted by the church. This kind of apologetic task belongs to the field of another science - to the science of St. Scripture, specifically to the latter branch - isagogy. The historical presentation of dogmas considers the authenticity of all the sacred. books already proven; it uses the results regarding this subject developed by the science of St. scriptures (isagogy), but does not indulge in proof of the authenticity of one or another holy. books, since this latter would distract her from her direct task - clarifying the dogmatic teaching contained in St. scripture, in terms of its content and mainly the way of its expression. Further, and to those apologetic requirements that it is able to satisfy, it must satisfy as much as and to the extent that it can combine this with a positive presentation of its subject. It can only direct its presentation as a whole against certain errors concerning biblical dogmatic teaching, that is, its apologetics can be expressed in the plan, method of presentation and in paying special attention to subjects subject to reinterpretation by negative criticism. Thus, its presentation, in its apologetic direction, should, however, have a positive character, and not at all polemical. The main task of Orthodox historical-dogmatic science is not to destroy piece by piece the scientific edifice of biblical theology erected by Western rationalism, but to create an Orthodox edifice of the same science, which, being opposed to Western scientific constructions, would testify with its entire being to the extreme poverty, fragility, weak foundation, fantasticality and ugliness of these constructions and thus deal a stronger and more decisive blow to their existence than all the small fractional blows private controversy. That is why, in our opinion, biblical historical-dogmatic science should not enter into a private and special polemic with rationalistic views, although it should not omit a single case where it finds it convenient to expose all the dishonesty of negative criticism in handling the dogmatic data of St. new writings covenant. Among the same intractable apologetic tasks, in our opinion, we must include the requirement for a separate presentation of the teachings of I. Christ, first according to the first three Gospels, and then according to John, as well as a separate presentation of the teaching of each of the apostles who wrote St. books of the new testament. For the purposes of apologetics, such a presentation is, of course, useful, and that is why we encounter experiments of this kind in Western theological science. But such a presentation, in our opinion, is inconvenient in a systematic scientific presentation: 1) it expands to the extreme the already wide scope of science; 2) if it is possible in relation to the gospels and epistles of St. Paul, it is extremely inconvenient regarding the epistles of other apostles, acts and the apocalypse, which by no means represent all the data for the full circle of dogmatic teaching; 3) it can easily be replaced, without much damage to the most apologetic purposes, by comparing each time the first three gospels with the fourth and the writings of one apostle with the writings of others; 4) if it is appropriate anywhere, then, it seems to us, more in scientific monographs than in systematic scientific presentation. So, we come to the following conclusions regarding the task, plan and method of historical presentation of dogmas according to St. the writings of the new testament. The task of this department of historical and dogmatic science is to clarify the essence of the teachings of I. Christ and the apostles, to separate the shell from the grain, the form from the essence, to explain the form by the conditions of time, circumstances and the personal characteristics of the saint. writers, to compare both teachings - Christ's and the apostolic, as well as the teaching of one apostle with the teaching of another, both in material and formal terms, and to show the identity of the essence of both Christ's teaching with the apostolic one, and the teachings of all the apostles among themselves, and the difference in form will determine the limits of this formal difference 89. Its plan consists of a separate presentation of the teachings of I. Christ on the one hand and the teachings of the apostles on the other, without the most particular divisions of Christ and the apostolic teachings according to various books of St. scriptures. His method consists in a positive presentation of the subject with an apologetic tinge, expressed more in the general structure of science than in particulars. We hold this expression as officially accepted (Charter Spirit. Academician § 122). See our article entitled “On the Historical Presentation of Dogmas” in Chr. Thurs. for May 1871 However, since the development of the New Testament section of the biblical period went hand in hand with the development of the Old Testament section of the same period, our outline of the literature on one section will be applied in essential and general terms to the other section, although we will not talk here about works related to the Old Testament section. See Ebrard – Handbuch der Christlicher. Kirchen-r.r.d.– Dogmengeschichte. Erlangen, 1865. 2 Bd, s. 440. Melanchthon's Loci communes, published countless times (even during the life of their author up to 80 times), later gave rise to the Loci theologici of various authors; such as Loci-Striegel, Chemnitz, Haffenreffer. However, dogmatic works appeared under other names. See Gass – Geschichte der protest. Dogmatik. Berlin. 1854. 1 Bd. 1 and 2 Buch. The most remarkable scholastics of this time were Gerhard and Callicetus, who were the heads of Protestant scholastic schools. The first was the head of the anti-Melanchthian movement; the latter was the head of the Melanchthonian school, distinguished by more moderate scholasticism and a more moderate implementation of Protestant principles, which is why this school is usually called syncretistic. Calliketes is also called Melanchton redivivus. Unfortunately, the latter direction was far from being dominant at that time; its centers were mainly two universities: Helmstedt and Altofra. S. Schmidt – Collegium biblicum Argent. 1671 edit. 3. 1689. 4. Joh. Hülsemann – Vindiciae S. S. per loca classica systematis theolog. Lips. 1679.4. C. L. Weissmann – Institutiones theologiae exegetiec-dogmaticae. Tubing. 1739.4. I. G. Zieckier – Austürhrliche Erklärung der Beweissprüche der beil. Schrift, Jena. 1753 – 65. 4. Thle. 4. M. C. Haymann – Versuch einer bibl. Theologie in Tabellen. 3 Aufl. 1746. 4. Auft 1758. These are eg. track. works: I. Chr. Weidner – Deutsche theologia biblica. Leipz. 1722. A. T. Basching -Dissertatio inauguralis, exhibens epitomen theologiae e solis liueris sacris concinnatae, Göttinggov. 1756. C. A. Crusins ​​-Vorstellungen von dem eigentlichen und schrim__ässigen Plano des Reiches Gottes. 1768. Gruner -Praktische Einleitung in die Religion det beiligen Schrift. 1773. In the rationalism of this time, the place of scripture is replaced by the authority of reason as a formal principle, and virtue, based on faith in God and immortality, is taken as a material principle. However, unlike naturalism, the rationalism of this time was adjacent to positive Protestantism; in Christ he saw, it is true, a divine man, but one whose church, the kingdom of truth and virtue, corresponds to the requirements of reason and whose teaching, as it is set out in scripture, is in agreement with reason. Representatives of this direction: Teller, Henke, Fkkermann, Wegschneider. Supranaturalism, proceeding from the conviction that natural religion is insufficient for description, wanted to defend revealed religion, but at the same time set out to restore with the help of reason what was not destroyed by reason. It is clear that such a desire led supranaturalistic dogmatics to significant concessions to rationalism and gave access to a one-sided rationalistic element into supranaturalistic dogmatics. Its representatives are: Doderlein, Morus, Storr, Stendel and Halm. Rational supranaturalism appeared as a reconciliation of the two previous directions, which in formal terms stand on the same point of view and only diverge in material terms. This middle direction, which, it is true, saw in Christianity an extraordinary revelation, but only in agreement with reason, as regards its content, was in essence the same modified, softened rationalism. Its representatives: Ammon, Schott, Tzsch'rner, Bretschneider. Thus, wherever we turn, everywhere in Protestantism we encounter rationalism, either extreme, or moderate, or barely noticeable. He has a mixture of rationalistic elements and positive ones. Semler – Historische und kritische Samiolungen über die sogenannten Beweisstellen in der Dogmatik. 1764–68. Although his work does not bear the name of biblical theology, nevertheless, it is something completely different from the dogmatics of that time, as well as from previous biblical collections. Teller – Topice sacrie scripturae. Lips. 176l. Bardt – Versuch eines bibl. Systems der Dogmatik. Cota o Leipz. 1769–70. 2 Aufl. 1784 H..miiiUk-ь Jer Iip-'-er» Thoob'-fM'. biTangc-o. 1 Bd. 1785. 2 Bd. t. A_th. 1789. Ammon – Ensw_rf einer pngep bib]'к ;– Tiúologif;. Krlar.g. 1792. V.Ts:r.;b- ideologic, EHui-g. 2 A〉. 1. lrOI-2. So)!T- TVic'.r rúo ehrigtinnac – c . l P Parris libris n:ppiï:.c jure tlieorr:i(ritirdg. J733 u. J4>7. «.v.hamc – Bibiische Tbofloga.. od〉-r Untersi;eb,..',goi! Lea bib!. Gn.rtUs d.-r vorTiebrns-'er. Ts\eY. Lebgr Anil. TUl-icg. 1780. 3 Aul! 1789 See Schenkel's characterization of Zechariah's biblical theology in Stnd. und Kritik. 1852. 1 Heft. s. 40 f. With his academic speech, delivered by him in 1781 - De jasto discrimine theologie.’ biblicae et dogmaticae regendisque iitrue- F 16 iioibus. See his Kleinen theolog. Schritten. Ulm. 1831. Bd. 2. I.orenz Bauer – Biblische Theologie des N. T. Leipz, 1800. 4 Bde. Thus, the work is divided into 6 sections, with each section further divided into Christology, theology and anthropology. Politz – Das Urchristenthmn nach dem Geiste der sanmitlichen neutestam. Schril'ten entwickelt. 1 Th. Danz. 1802. Hartmann – Bliсke in den Geist des Urchristenthums. Düsseld, 1802 Cludius – Ura_sichte_ des Christenthums. Alioua. 1808. Schwarz – Die l.ehre des Evangeliams aus den Urkunden dargestellt. Heidelberg. 18_8. Kaiser - Bibl. Theologie uder Iudaismus und Christianismus nach der grammatisch – historischen Interpretationsmethode und naen freimuthigen Stellung in die kritisch – vergleichende Universalgeschichte der Religionen und die universale Religion. Erlang. 1813–14. Cramer – Yorlesnugen über die bibl. Theologie des X. T. Leipz. 1830. Boehme – Die Religion Jesn Cristi aus ihren Urkunden. H-'lle 1825. Religion der Apostel Jesn Christi, Halle. 1829. Mathaei – Religionsglaube der Apostel .Jesu. Götting. 1826–29. De-Wette – Biblische Dogmatik aften und neuen Testamentes oder kritische Darstetlung der Religionslehre des Hebraismus, des Judenthums und Urchristenthurns. Berlin. 1813. His division, both regarding the teaching of I. Christ and regarding the teaching of the apostles, is one. He divides both into two sections (revealed doctrine, general doctrine of faith, doctrine of salvation). These departments have private divisions; So the second section is divided into the doctrine of God, of angels and demons, of man. Rückert – Bibel: d. h. sysrematische Darstellung der theologischen Ausichten des N. T. Leipz. 1828. Baumgarten-Crusius – Grundzüge der bibl. Theologie. Iona 1828. Thus, the author does not recognize the doctrine of the universality and innateness of sin in humanity as New Testament biblical teaching. He considers the teaching about evil spirits to be a figurative teaching; Demons, hell, Gehenna for him are images of the people's worldview - images characteristic of this era, etc. Vorlesiingen über neutest. Theologie p. 43. Dan. von Kölln – Bibl. Theologie, heransg. von Dav. Schultz. 2 Bde; die bibl. Theologie des N. T. Leipz. 1836. The private section contains a presentation of individual points of teaching, and the author pays special attention to the difference between symbolic and non-symbolic in teaching. Although he divides the teaching of the apostles into three types: Palestinian, Alexandrian and Pauline, however, such a division did not have a particular influence on his presentation. As proof, we can point to the doctrine of the Trinity, the doctrine of the atonement, and the doctrine of evil spirits. He considers the three Persons of the Holy Trinity to be three names or three historical manifestations of the one God. He posits the work of redemption solely in the fact that Christ awakened in people through his teaching and life the conviction that human affairs are displeasing to God and that the Holy Spirit is pleasing to God. feelings and good will; The death of Christ does not mean retribution for the sins of people, but is understood, as if in scripture, as a simple transition of Jesus Christ to true being, to union with God. The author does not consider the devil to be a personal being, but only the personification of evil. Noask – Bibl. Theologie. Einleitung in s A. u. N. T. Halle. 1853. Baur – Voriesungeu über neutestamentliche Theologie. Leipz. 1864. Reass – llib' de la theologie chre_____ au siècle apostolique. 2 Vol. Strassb. 1852. Bernh. Weiss – Lehrbuch der bibl Theologie des N. T. Berlin. 1868. Osterzee Die Theologie des X. T. Ein Handbech -c.''s lYr: tiiHdie Vorlesungen und zum Selbsei i.iIhiim. Baimueii. 1869. Having set out to present the teachings of I. Christ and the Apostles in the form in which it came from the lips of Christ the Savior and His disciples, and at the same time ...... the identity of Christ... teachings in essence (against the rationalists) and their difference in the form and method of expression and presentation ....., on ..... the original forms of Christ and the apostolic teachings, ..... ... …………………………….. for his essay. He divides the teachings of I. Christ into .…… ………. parts: glorification of the Father in the Son, salvation…………….. Kingdom of God; The apostolic teaching is divided into two: 1)……………. Christianity in ..... unity with the old. Head ………..apostolic teaching according to James and apostolic teaching according to Peter and 2) the second main form of apostolic teaching or Christianity in its difference from the old ones. Head (this includes the apostolic teaching according to the Apostle Paul and the apostolic teaching according to the Apostle John). His biblical New Testament theology has three tasks: 1) to present the truths underlying the entire New Testament, 2) to depict the type and manner in which, with the unity of the basic view, various Lehrbegrbite could be formed, or to depict the development of religious and moral views in the apostolic age, and 3) to present these individual Lehrbegrbite as types of a single consciousness that arose from this development. In other words, the author wanted to present the New Testament teaching - first from the point of view of its essential unity, then from the side of its non-essential difference, and finally from the point of view of reconciling unity with difference. The author completed only the first part of the extensive task he himself set. Bade – Christologie des Altea Testamentes. Munst. 1850–51. 3 Bde. Joseph. Langen – Das Judenthum in Palästina zur Zeit Christi u. s. w. Freiburg. 1866. Lutterberk NpSsya-.yag ic.lic.-.ft Lclirbegrifl.' oder Uiiiersuchnntren iili〉r dns Zeï.):l:,-r dir Holinionj-wciule. die V'oîniíen des Christenthums und die erste Ges'áatBig ■(n. Ein Handbuch für ältesten Dogmengeschichte und systematische Exegese des N. T. Mainz, 1852. These are, for example: “The Teaching of St. John on the Word" - Philareta Chern. 1869. “The Son of Man - a conversation about the humanity of Christ” - Fr. Where__, transl. O. Politkovsky. 1868. “Teaching of the Old Books. Head Oh fresh Trinity." Kyiv, 1862. “Code of texts of St. Scriptures about repentance" - Litvinova. St. Petersburg. 1859. “Several articles about the apostle. Pavle." - Archim. F…. St. Petersburg. 1861, and some others like that. Arch. Michael: “About the Gospels and Gospel history.” Moscow. 186__ ... ed. and his translated “Introduction to the New Testament books of St. Scriptures." - Guericke. Moscow. 1869. – “Refutation of the fictitious life of Jesus” – Goethe. St. Petersburg. 1865. “Jesus Christ and His Time” - Press___. St. Petersburg. 18__. Jesus Christ is the true God.. …… Renan. St. Petersburg. 18__, etc. ................ and last to the Galatians (pr...... Philaret Chern.). See our article “On the historical presentation of dogmas” in Christ. Thurs. May. 1871 True, a complete and thorough understanding of the new testament itself is not possible without studying the old; but we do not reject this, but only speak about the urgent need for a historical presentation of dogmatic teaching according to St. the writings of the new testament; since without this a proper presentation of the church period in historical and dogmatic science is unthinkable. In particular Epiphanius, Vasily V, Chrysostom, Jerome. The latter is expressed in one place as a trace. thus: “neque vero, ut Montanus cum insanis feminis somniat, prophetae in exstasi sunt locuti, ut rescirent, quid loquerentur, et quum alios erudirent, ipsi ignorarent, quod dicerent (proem. ad Comment. in Nahum, Habbacue et Isaiam). True, apologists (Justin, Theophilus Athenagoras) used the expression ecstasy (Iust. Dial. p. 115: 〉'&#9632"; exsxi e: wv. Atlien. p. 1>: hat), but they used this expression in the meaning of the powerful action of the Spirit of God on the holy writers, without thinking at all to give this expression the meaning that the Montanists gave it. When Montanism appeared with its error, the fathers of the church. rebelled against the Montanists’ misunderstanding of divine inspiration as an ecstatic state of the organs of revelation, so that Miltiades, according to the testimony of Eusebius (Cer. Pet. V, 17), even wrote an essay entitled: Per! See one of the previous ones. note Nos, quotiescunque soloecismos aut tale qui.l annotamus, non Apostolum pnlsamus, ut malevoli eriminantur, sed magis Apostoli assertores sumus. Comment. in ep. ad Ephes. lib. P. ad cap. Sh, I. Zlat. 1 demon on Mf. § 2. And St. Irenaeus, speaking about the four Gospels, does not speak about the complete identity of their letters, but about the unity only of their spirit. “From this it is clear,” he says, that the Word that organizes all things, seated on the cherubim and containing everything, has given us the gospel in four forms (•cerpap.cpoov), but permeated with one Spirit (h\sgt: êiyipcv^v). Adv. haeres. Ш, II, 8. Ut quisque meminerat, gov. Blessed Augustine about evangelists, et ut. cuique cordi fuit vel brevius vel prolixius eandem tamen explicare sententiam, ita eos explicasse manifestum est. See Hengstenberg's Christologie des Alt. Baades, Band II, 2. S. 158 ff. However, they point out (for example, Canis in his work - System der lutherischeu Dogmatik t. III. p. 139) in Origen himself, places in which he apparently allows the existence of the personal and individual in writing. So, according to Origen (In Iohan, vol. 1, 5), the Apostle Paul expressed something personally on his own behalf. In his essay against Celsus (Contra Celsum VII, 4.7), Origen admits the idea that the Spirit of God elevated the natural abilities of his organs, which, therefore, declared themselves. Atque eam ob rein nos e sacris scripturis demonstramus, Jndacorum prophetas divino Spiritu illustratos... primos fuisse, qui pracstantioribus naturae adventu fruerentur, et per s. Spiritus contactum, ut ita loquar, mentem eorum perspicatiorem animamque splendidiorem tactam fuisse. In another place he speaks of the prophets: quibus divinus Spiritus ejusque eloquia committerentur. Moreover, Origen said that the gospels are higher than the apostolic epistles, and among the four evangelists, the first place belongs to the gospel of John (In Iohan.vol. 1,5.6). The latter, of course, can be explained from Origen’s point of view by the special goals of Providence; The first two passages almost need to be explained by the inconsistency so often encountered among writers of all times. We provide quotes from Curs, Compl. - Migne. For these schools and their views on divine inspiration, see churches. the story of Neander. For those wishing to become more thoroughly acquainted with this subject, please take a look. track. works: SuHntiuj – Docirina inspiration''s. 1810. – Budelbach – Di- Lehre von d. Inspiration d. heil. Schrift (Dess. Zoltschrift. 1810. H. I. 2.) – Grimm – Art Inspirat. in Ersch-Gruber's Encyclop. Sect. 11. B. 19. – Tholuck – Art Inspirat. in Herzog's Encyclop. V. S 682 ff. See eg. Acts of the Ecumenical Councils. Ed. Kaz. spirit. Academician Therefore, Protestant theologians consider him, although completely unfairly, the first scholastic. They dwell exclusively on one feature of his similarity with the scholastics that we have indicated and do not pay the slightest attention to many very important features of his difference from Western scholastics. Dogma. God . Philaret Chern Ave., vol. 1, p. 17, ed. 1. In foreign literature on biblical theology, as we see, in this case there is no uniformity in techniques; on the contrary, there is complete diversity. There we find both rationalists, jointly expounding the teachings of I. Christ and the apostles, and orthodox Protestants, expounding both teachings separately. The only Catholic experience of biblical theology so far adheres to the latter, that is, a separate method of presentation. A dogmatist, by the very nature of his science, always emerges and must emerge from data, which he interprets and must interpret as indisputable data. The authenticity of all St. books should be an axiom for him, the starting point of his works. This is required both by the nature of dogmatic science and by a proper understanding of its boundaries. To resolve such an objection would mean leaving the bounds of dogmatics and entering the realm of isagogy. We refer all such objectors to the numerous Western literature aimed at defending the authenticity of the gospels, their belonging to the persons under whose names they are known, and to refuting all hypotheses about their later, allegedly non-apostolic origin; from our own literature - to the venerable work of Archimandrite. Michael: “About the Gospels and Gospel History.” True, there are quite long speeches in the gospels; This is especially the speech of I. Christ, spoken to the disciples before suffering; but this speech refers to the last days of the Savior’s earthly life, to a time when His closest disciples were already sufficiently developed; Moreover, this kind of speech is also distinguished by its complete artlessness and simplicity. This is confirmed by the latest research by scientists, recently announced in our journalism, regarding the singing of Russian folk epics by folk singers. This expression is found in the apostolic writings only three times (Acts 7:56, Apoc. 1:13; 14:14), while in the gospels it is used, according to the calculations of German scholars, more than 90 times. What kind of terms the apostles replaced the most commonly used terms of I. Christ, this will be evident from the presentation of the teachings of I. Christ in the mouth of the apostles, which over time, we hope to present to the attention of readers. See in one of the previous notes the words bl. Augustine. We hope to present the reinforcement of all these general considerations with particulars to the attention of readers in our next articles, which we hope to publish in Chr. from time to time. Reading. The task of science outlined by them is, in our opinion, its ideal task. In defining it, we did not mean what science could be at the very first stages of its existence in our country, but what it should be, what goals it should pursue. We are very well aware that even the approximate implementation of the task we have indicated is possible only through the united efforts of several generations of workers in Orthodox theological science. Science is not created by one person; Moreover, it cannot come out perfect from the hands of one person. The first experiments are always, more or less, far from perfect. You might be interested in: