“How is Christianity different from other religions? Of course, by Jesus Christ himself.
But not only. There is one more important difference: the cemetery. The emergence of Christianity is associated not only with the emergence of faith in Christ itself, but also with the emergence of a new, hitherto unseen people & for the first time placed cemeteries in the center of their settlements and began to bury the dead there."
Vadim Deruzhinsky (Vadim Rostov), analytical newspaper Secret Research.
The Riddle of the Triumph of the New Faith
I think that all of us who consider ourselves Christians know the circumstances associated with the emergence of the Faith. At least they should know them. For those who do not know them, I will briefly outline these historical events.
Christianity emerged as a modernization of Judaism, the main ideology of which was the search for the Promised Land and the New Israel, as is clearly stated in the Bible. Until about 150, Christians were obliged to observe the commandments of the Torah (to fully observe Jewish traditions, including circumcision), and Christians were exclusively Jews. The spread of Christianity among non-believers, like Judaism, was absolutely unacceptable, unthinkable. The Jewish world was split in two: half of the Jews remained Jews, half became Christians, and the share of Jews who converted to Christianity in these century and a half is determined by historians from 40 to 60% of all Jews.
At the time, Christianity was something completely different from what it is today. The scope of this article does not include a discussion of whether the European Church had the right to distort, after centuries, the original essence of Christianity, emasculating everything Jewish from it, to the best of its ability. I think that this was wrong, because over the past 2000 years Jesus did not give the European Church new information, and since all Faith is based on the events of those years, then we have no right to distort them and interpret them in a new way.
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Few of us today pay attention to the fact that the names of the apostles of Christ are Greco-Roman names, invented several hundred years after the events in Europe. I can not help but believe that it was blasphemy in relation to Christianity, when the founders of the Faith, instead of Jewish names, were given Greco-Roman, alien names. This came from banal nationalism. Christ knew his apostles precisely by their names, but he did not know any apostles with Greco-Roman names (as well as African, Chinese, Tatar), since he did not preach among non-Jews. Therefore, if Christ got into the Christian church today, He would not understand who is being discussed in the speeches of the priests and who is depicted on the icons.
You can cite a lot of things that are a distortion of the Faith on the part of Europeans, and often we do not even realize that this distortion itself would seem to the apostles and Christ insulting to their nationality and homeland. I will just note briefly: the fact remains that during the first century and a half of the Faith, all Christians were Jews, observed the Torah and circumcision, and Christianity itself had the task of replacing Judaism in Jewish society.
I am sure that sooner or later it would have happened, since later Judaism was still thoroughly reformed - that is, the grounds for reform were objective, and Christianity appeared in their context.
And here the grandiose figure of Shaul ha-Tarsi (the Apostle Paul), who did not allow Christianity to be realized as a reform of Judaism among Jews, and, on the other hand, created a huge Christian world among non-Jews, clearly showed himself.
For a century and a half the Jews drove Christian Jews out of Jerusalem and Palestine, the bulk of Jewish settlements in Europe, Africa, and Central Asia consisted of Jewish Christian communities. Local pagans, too, were often unfriendly to them, and the idea of “Christianizing” the local peoples naturally suggested itself, which should have contributed to the prosperity of the communities. This was actively discussed among the "new Jews". As Dr. Sh. Shavit writes (The History of Jewish People. Jerusalem, 1996, p. 19), “The question was difficult and serious, and Paul probably hesitated a lot before making a decision. But in the end, he came to the following statement: a Christian is anyone who believes in Jesus and accepts his teachings - regardless of whether he is a Jew or not. And Paul considered the observance of the commandments of the Torah optional."
A deep split took place in Christianity, many communities did not accept ideas that allegedly humiliate the "divine and chosen" origin of the Jewish people, and at the same time insult Yeshua (Jesus). In fact, Shaul ha-Tarsi created a new Faith that bears little resemblance to the old one, and this is his genius. He rejected the “chosenness” of the Jewish nation, seeing no prospects in the stifling tightness of self-isolation.
At the time of this rebirth of Christianity, there were at least 22 Gospels from different authors (all, of course, Jews). Only four were included in the New Testament, where there are no direct and rigid statements of Christ that a non-Jew has no right to become a follower of His faith. At the same time, the New Testament included 14 (!) Epistles of Shaul ha-Tarsi (Paul), where he, for the most part, explains to non-Jews that they can join the faith that is considered Jewish, and to the Jews - that they, circumcised (chosen by God) can to be on a par with uncircumcised Christians.
Shaul ha-Tarsi in these 14, in fact, analytical articles, successfully or somewhere unsuccessfully argues his new position in the interpretation of Christianity. But everywhere he does not encroach on the main thing - he does not oblige new non-Jewish Christians to do circumcision, since he considers circumcision to be a sacred issue, a sign of the chosenness of the Jews as a "higher nation", and, by the way, everywhere in his texts he puts them above other nations, and no doubt ahead of them. This is not surprising if you know who the Apostle Paul is: during his lifetime he was called an ardent defender of Israel. Finally, the Jews themselves, even Christians, were categorically opposed to non-Jews being able to circumcise: even in the family of Christian nations, there could be no question of equality in this matter, since then the “essence” of the people of Israel was lost. The impossibility of circumcision was one of the conditions for the spread of the Faith among non-Jews. I will noticethis condition deliberately put native Christians in the position of “second-class” believers, since they also accepted the Old Testament of the Jews, and it clearly states that it concerns those who are circumcised (who gave part of their flesh to God). It obviously turned out that the new believers had the Bible, but had no right to be fully involved in it.
Everywhere in the Bible (and in the Gospels before they were edited by the Ecumenical Councils in Europe in the 5th-7th centuries and in the letters of the Apostle Paul), it was not about the Lord God, but about God Yahweh - the God of the people of Israel. The name "Yahweh" was changed to the name "Lord", since "Yahweh" is a god for the circumcised, and "Lord" is something in common. To some, this may seem the norm, but I am surprised by such an unheard-of audacious attitude towards holy texts that distort their essence.
Moreover, today Christianity leaves the question of the Creator aside, and often (including on television) the highest officials of the Orthodox Church of Ukraine and Russia say that Jesus Christ is not only our God, but also the Creator. This contradicts what is reported in the Bible, where Christ is the Son of the Creator, but it correlates well with our local ideas, where it is better not to touch upon the question of the Creator at all, since it is spoken of in the Old Testament - as Yahweh, the God of the people of Israel. The Creator, according to the Old Testament (and the Torah), demanded that those who believe in Him give away a part of the flesh (circumcision), and it turns out that if we do not circumcise ourselves, then we do not believe in the Creator and in the Old Testament, alien to Him. Therefore, rather clumsy attempts to replace the place of the Creator with Jesus. However, this is a different topic. But, in my opinion, this is not only bad and sad,but it proceeds from that very uncertainty, deliberately set by Shaul ha-Tarsi, in his concept of "The Creator is the God of the people of Israel", and "Jesus is the" conductor of "knowledge of God among non-Jews."
It is not hard to see that this concept is inherently chauvinistic. Of course, everyone is free to believe in his own, but if we are talking about holy texts, then the desire to read and believe their original version, and not distorted, is fair. And the initial options create big problems for us. I will end the excursion to the basics of Faith by saying that for a thinking person, Faith is needed in its complete form, which does not raise questions. And here there are so many questions that it all seems neglected. Theology has long lagged behind real life and, alas, has not understood for a long time that the person of the XXI century. - this is not a man of the Middle Ages.
Shaul ha-Tarsi made a number of trips to the regions of the Roman Empire, where he propagated his teachings. This is how Europe becomes Christian.
All this is history. I think that it is no longer easy for any ordinary Christian to perceive these historical facts, since they, to some extent, leave an imprint on the perception of the Faith. But this does not mean that history should be hidden or distorted. Faith, by definition, has its own history, and just its better knowledge presupposes a closer approach to the sources - and the essence of the Faith. In addition, for a modern person, the path to Faith passes through his knowledge and through his ability to reflect and draw conclusions. If the Church continues to ignore all these realities, this is a direct path to oblivion or, at least, to the cooling of the Faith.
But here it is much more difficult to consider the question of what caused the TRIUMPH of Faith itself, which in a short time has become the religion of millions?
It is only to us who have absorbed Christian values with mother's milk, everything seems to be self-evident. But how did the Gentiles partake of the Faith? How did she attract them?
This question is all the more important because today, if not a few new people, then an insignificant number enter the fold of Christianity. And then millions became Christians very quickly.
I think the point here is that the “engine” of Christianity was not so much the concept of the Sacrifice of Christ, a concept difficult for the dark masses to understand and acceptable only for a spiritually developed person, but rather something else. Other, and became the reason for the spread of Christianity.
This - DIFFERENT - did not show itself among Jewish Christians, since there the ideas of Jesus spread only in connection with the new fate of Israel and the people of Israel (this was the "engine"). That is why I told in detail about the reform of Shaul ha-Tarsi, because it was he who introduced this new OTHER into Christianity.
So this new thing, invented by the Apostle Paul (or creatively born in the process of propagating ideas among the indigenous population), was that: if you believe in a new faith, then you will be resurrected in the near future - as soon as Jesus returns. And whoever does not believe will not be resurrected. The pagan religions did not offer such a perspective; it was new to the pagans. And just the story of Jesus Christ showed that this is REAL. Once He is resurrected, He is able to resurrect His flock. The overwhelming news that one can avoid death and return to earth in the flesh became the main and most powerful "engine" of Christianity.
An important detail: in the settlements of Jewish Christians, opponents of the reform of Shaul ha-Tarsi and more ancient, there are no cemeteries in the center of the settlements. And all the "native" Christians of Europe have them: that is, it was the teaching of the Apostle Paul that forced people not to bury their relatives outside the settlements (as is customary in all societies of Mankind), but to refer them to the center of the settlement - with the certainty that they are today or tomorrow all will be resurrected.
Here, by the way, the following circumstance surprises me. Perhaps I did not see something in the texts of the Bible, but there are no specific instructions in the Bible for Christians to bury their dead in the center of cities and villages, where it will be easier for the returning Jesus to resurrect them.
But at the same time in all - I emphasize - in all Christian (but not Christian-Jewish) settlements, until the 17th century, the dead were always buried in the center of the settlement. For archaeologists, this is the first and foremost sign that these settlements are Christian.
I do not exclude, but apparently this is so, today we have completely different texts of the Bible than those that were before Christians at the dawn of the Faith.
Sanitation versus Christianity
Archeology shows: here is a city before Christianity in the 4th century, here it is after Christianity in the same century. What is the difference? In one main thing: in the middle of the city a cathedral was built, and around it - the city cemetery. Previously, cemeteries were removed from the city, but now everyone is buried in the city center.
Archaeologists say: those in the city who have not yet become Christians watch in horror as Christians drag blue and green corpses into the city center, scaring people away. There they bury them. Wildness. But this is the whole point of Christianity.
This unsanitary practice was banned everywhere in Europe only during the Enlightenment, when the cohabitation of the cemetery and the city became dangerous and unbearable.
Philippe Aries in his famous book “Man in the face of death” (Philippe Aries “L'homme devant la mort”) gives a grandiose picture of the elimination of this Christian tradition, which has never existed in any other religion in the world. Already by the XIV century. in all major cities of France, the number of those buried in the city center exceeded the entire living population of the city by tens or even hundreds of times. The authorities were constantly tormented by this problem, inventing measures to dispose of the dead. Mass graves were created, where up to 1500 corpses were placed on 10 square meters - in piles.
Residents of the surrounding neighborhoods bombarded the city authorities with complaints. Everything in the house was saturated with a cadaverous smell - furniture, clothes, even food. The windows cannot be opened - it blows like corpse. Children are not allowed out of the house - the infection is around. This cadaverous smell accompanied the inhabitants even outside the city, wherever they went, - they were so saturated with it. The commissions showed that these areas, adjacent to the city center, where there were cemeteries, are prone to various diseases, and here rarely anyone lived to old age. Even worse, terrible epidemics constantly arose here, which already covered the entire country.
Travelers who came to Europe from Arab countries saw all this with horror and were amazed at how wild the faith of Christians was, forcing them to live with the dead. From the outside, all this for a new person, I think, really looked awful.
As Aries writes, in the XVIII century. public consciousness in this respect has moved off the ground. In 1737, the Paris parliament asked doctors to examine the city's cemeteries - this is the first official move in Christianity in this area. From the side of the Church, in 1745, Abbot S. Poret (“Letters on Burial in Churches”) came up with the idea of prohibiting Christian burial at churches. This is his ideal: clean, well-ventilated churches, where you can only smell incense, and not anything else, and where "you don't risk breaking your neck because of the uneven floor," constantly shifted by gravediggers. The author calls for the removal of cemeteries outside the city limits in order to ensure healthy air and cleanliness in the cities.
Abbot Pore was far from the first to suggest that the church authorities establish new cemeteries outside the city (following the tradition of Muslims and Jews). But he first pointed out that the resurrection of the dead, promised by Jesus, should not be expected literally, among the piles of coffins with the dead gathered in the city center. As a traveler, surrounded by suitcases, waits from minute to minute for his departure.
In the 60s. the prince of Condé spoke out decisively against the new cemetery in Paris - and was supported by the attorney general ("The walls of houses are saturated with stench and harmful juices, which may serve as an unknown cause of illness and death of residents"). This opinion was supported by parliament in 1763, when the authorities were literally inundated with countless petitions from the population and doctors. A revolutionary decree of parliament ordered the closure of all cemeteries existing in Paris and the creation of eight large necropolises outside the city, where each parish would have one common grave for all its inhabitants.
April 20, 1773 in Sollier, in the nave of the church of St. Saturninus, dug a hole for a woman who died of rotten fever. At the same time, a coffin with a body buried on March 3 was exposed, and when the woman was lowered into the grave, the coffin opened, and such a stench emanated from the old corpse that no one could remain in the church any longer. Soon, out of 120 children of both sexes who were being prepared for the first communion, 114 became dangerously ill, as well as the priest, the vicar, the gravediggers and more than 70 people. Of these, 18 died, including the priest and the vicar. This and other similar cases even more tuned public opinion to the idea of transferring cemeteries outside the city.
The famous French physician Felix Vic d'Azir, in his "Experiments on the Places and Dangers of Burials" (1778), claims that during epidemics, houses adjacent to cemeteries are the first to be hit. As he writes, the corpse of the patient completely retains the disease and its infectious power. The air of cemeteries spoils everything around: not only the health of people living nearby, but even food and things in their closets. So, in the houses located around the St. Innosan cemetery, the doctor notices, steel, silverware, gold braids - everything quickly loses its luster and fades.
Doctors aren't the only ones sounding the alarm. The records of the police commissioners of the time are rife with complaints from the local population. In a petition to parliament, residents of the block adjacent to the Saint-Merry cemetery complain that "everything necessary for life" deteriorates in their homes for several days. These complaints continued until the moment when the city authorities began to move old cemeteries outside the city limits, transport tens of thousands of the dead, and cleanse the land of corpse contamination. For a long time, these huge cemeteries have not been in the center of Paris, and the Parisians hardly even know that there were once communal public graves with tens of thousands of deceased in the places of their homes.
As it turned out, the problem of city cemeteries was long overdue. This is why the experience of Paris quickly spread throughout Europe. A few years later, a decree was issued in Russia prohibiting burial within the city and requiring new cemeteries to be located only outside the city boundaries.
By this time it was already forgotten that this prohibition odiously contradicts Christianity.
Poltergeist and vampirism versus Christianity
Speaking about the refusal of Christians from their tradition of burying the dead in the center of a city or village, I cannot ignore the fact that such a close cohabitation with the dead, inherent only in Christian countries, has always been associated with a mass of terrible inexplicable events, which in that era were called "Afterlife magic "(see, for example, the famous work of Charles Ferdinand de Schertz" Magia Posthuma ").
No other people in the world, except European Christians, have ever had such experience in observing posthumous events. I will note that today, when we bury our dead outside the city, and cemeteries and death itself are deeply distant from our lives, we ALREADY do not have this experience. It is precisely because the European Middle Ages seems extremely saturated with afterlife magic, because it was the only corner of the planet where the living lived in close proximity to the dead.
The most shocking phenomena of this "Afterlife magic" were poltergeist and vampirism in their various forms. The very epidemic of vampirism that swept Central, Southern and Eastern Europe three centuries ago (with the return to the European fold from Turkey of the Balkan countries) was largely determined by the fact that Christians buried their dead near their homes, and not outside the settlement, as Muslims. It was then that many villages, where vampirism raged, coupled with extreme poltergeist (phenomena, obviously, of the same nature), were completely removed from their homes, abandoned houses, arable land and went to a new place. They - obviously - were leaving the cemetery. As soon as they broke up a new cemetery in the center of the settlement near the church, the phenomena resumed. Logic dictated that it was easier not to change your place of residence,and to change the location of the cemetery - to take it as far away from the settlement as possible.
Immortality as the engine of Christianity
So why did the Christians bury their dead in the city center?
Here is the whole point.
Christians dragged their dead to the city center because they knew they would be resurrected today or tomorrow. Jesus Christ (following the version of Shaul ha-Tarsi) told them: I will return today or tomorrow, and, just as I rose again, I will raise all the dead. Therefore, Christians did not carry the dead somewhere outside the city, but carried them to the center of the city, to the temple - they knew that today or tomorrow they would all rise from the dead and meet their relatives together. And this faith was so strong that all Christian cemeteries were placed in the center of the city - waiting for the day of meeting with relatives.
This is what distinguishes all Christian cities from non-Christian ones in archeology.
Such were our cities until the 18th century, when an unimaginably many dead people accumulated in cemeteries in the center of cities. Christ did not return, did not revive anyone, and the limits of urbanization had long been exhausted. The cemeteries were transported outside the cities, and henceforth they began to be buried there. Which meant that people no longer believed in the promise of Christ. Precisely they do not believe, although this disbelief is cunningly clothed in the formula “they ceased to be taken literally”. How else to understand the words of Jesus, spoken quite literally? If He here expressed this to his followers “allegorically”, then why not consider that everything that Jesus said in general (in the retelling of His biographers) is also metaphors, imagery, beautiful language, and in one word - a populist deception? This is not about what Jesus said, but about what he did not say, what was invented for Him.
But it was precisely the promise of resurrection and immortality that was the engine of the spread of Christianity, which we spoke about above. What else could so captivate the dark masses more than a promise to live after death? Moreover, not as a kind of soul, it is not known where, but as a restored and rejuvenated person - among his relatives and friends. This is not a certain Afterlife, which later Christianity describes to us, but a completely earthly world. Much more understandable to everyone. And this - you must agree - is a completely different Faith than the Christianity that we know today.
Those who carried the bodies of their relatives to the city center knew that their children and themselves would be taken there, that they would be resurrected there. Jesus gave immortality to all, and the proof of the power of this promise was His resurrection. He was able to do it with himself, He promised it to everyone.
Imagine for a moment the situation of that era. We, say, live in Greece in the third century. And then numerous messages begin to come that many of our neighboring peoples have literally gone crazy - gone crazy. They do not bury their dead, but drag them to the city center, where they keep them supposedly because they are about to rise from day to day. This innovation was even more wild for those peoples who, according to their traditions, cremated the dead (as the Germans and Slavs did). Here it was not only about burial, but about keeping the corpses in the city center. With apprehension and distrust, we ask those who came from our neighbors: why is this necrophilia? Why will the dead be resurrected? We are told that there was a prophet Jesus Christ, who himself was resurrected and promised to return and resurrect everyone who is ready to believe in him. That's how simple - we are surprised. Well, since everyone was seized by this madness, then this, perhaps, has some meaning. Let us and we try to put our dead in the center of a city or village - it's not difficult. Maybe what will happen …
The rule was simple: whoever believes in Christ, he will raise him up. This screening out today seems inhuman and illogical (what difference does it make to Christ?). But he is the basis for the power and income of the church. She alone benefits from this condition.
All the conversations in the newly converted Christian communities were just about how great it will be when Christ comes and returns our departed to us. Here is a holiday! And dying yourself is no longer scary - it's like falling asleep, and tomorrow waking up in the middle of your beloved city, surrounded by friends and family. And right at the table, celebrate.
This is how Christianity conquered the minds of pagan Europe. That is why in those days Christians showed miracles of courage at executions (which was never again later in conflicts with other faiths), laughing at the executioners: they knew that they were immortal, that they would return to life in a day, month or year, to Earth … Will rise from the dead. They said to their executioners: you will execute us here, and we will very soon appear right there - unharmed. And we will deal with you. We cannot be destroyed, we are immortal.
From the point of view of the executioners, it seemed, frankly, complete idiocy. They fought against Christianity as an ideology destroying the whole way of life and bringing chaos and anarchy. But the more they fought against Christianity, the more successfully it spread.
In the pantheon of Christian saints who perished in the first centuries, there are no authors of ideas or thinkers, there are only people famous for encouraging the executioners themselves to seek sophisticated torture and executions. These are banal fanatics who frighten the executioners by the fact that, behold, I - like Christ - will rise up and return in a week, terrifying you.
They didn't come back. In the first centuries of Christianity - and in the new territories of Christianity - this was believed. But the older the Christian people became, the less this faith became. And more corpses in the city center. These corpses all piled up, piled up and piled up in anticipation of the resurrection, rotted to dust, confiscated, replaced with new ones, mixed up and lost, it is completely unknown - how much is possible? Then there was an explosion of unquenched hopes - crusades, cruelty and blood. Christ's promise to resurrect the corpses began to be forgotten as the corpses inevitably and irresistibly turned to dust.
And today Christians do not know about this main essence of Christianity. Only archaeologists and historians know. The Church is silent here: why show the collapse of the hopes of many generations?
Today, if the Church somehow comments on this whole epic with the collection of corpses in the center of cities and villages and the subsequent refusal of the Church from this practice, it is only in the spirit that, they say, the early Christians did not quite correctly understand the ideas of Christ. But, excuse me, thanks to this very understanding, such a wide spread of Christianity took place! It is thanks to THIS understanding of the promises of Christianity that we ourselves became Christians!
On the other hand, if even the early Christians allegedly misunderstood Christianity, what reason do we have to believe that we understand it correctly? Are we 2,000 years removed from the era of Christ?
