According to Christian canons, a person must be ready to meet with the Heavenly Father at any moment. It is noteworthy that in the past thirty years, the Vatican has stepped up missionary activity, preaching the Catholic religion among football fans and Chinese idolaters, and the Pope even took several steps towards Orthodoxy. Maybe all this is out of fear of the coming end of the world?
Revelation of John the Evangelist
A significant portion of Christian theology is based on this biblical text, which tells about the coming coming of Christ, about the end of our world and the establishment of the Kingdom of God on Earth. Outstanding in terms of poetic power of images and dramatic content, the work was created in the 1st century AD, it is attributed to the Apostle John, the beloved disciple of Jesus. Four horsemen, whose name is Glad, Pestilence, War and Death, a harlot dressed in a purple robe, a dragon with seven heads coming from the sea, angels with trumpets and the Star of Wormwood - all this is the Apocalypse (in Greek - "revelation") of the great prophet, the last of those through whose mouth the Lord spoke.
Even an inveterate atheist becomes creepy from the picture of the death of the world. “An angel will appear and pour a cup into the springs, and the water will become blood, they will write the number of the devil on the forehead and right hand”, “… and no one will be allowed to buy or sell, except for the one who has the mark or the name of the beast, or the number of his name … - the descriptions are still the same! At the same time, the iron-winged locust surprisingly resembles airplanes, the image of an angel's bowl, from the spill of which terrible ulcers appear on the ground, is very similar to environmental pollution. Everyone remembered about the Star of Wormwood, bringing death, when Chernobyl struck (Chernobyl is an ordinary wormwood).
They began to interpret the Apocalypse almost immediately after it was written. Many leaders were called Antichrists - from the barbarian Aliarch and the Hun king Attila to Hitler and Mussolini. The Babylonian Whore honored the queens Margaret of Anjou, Isabella of France, Empress Catherine II and even Mata Hari. And Babylon, the repository of sins and temptations, is now most often called … Los Angeles (the city of angels) is symbolic, isn't it?
The text of the Apocalypse made such a strong impression on the early Christians that they did not want to include it in the Bible for a very long time - the revelation seemed almost heretical. In Orthodoxy, this is the only passage from the New Testament not used in worship. And at least four Apocalypses (two - a certain Baruch, one - the Apostle Peter and one - Paul) remained apocryphal - sacred texts that were not included in the canon. Until the fifteenth century, they walked "from hand to hand" among the Byzantine theologians and Christian thinkers in Europe, and then the papal see finally took care of cleaning the archives, and many works perished. However, some of the Syrian and Greek texts are still hidden in the Vatican's caches. Some of the apocryphas have been translated, including into Russian, but these editions can be found somewhere other than special scientific libraries,almost impossible.
World ends n
The prophets and priests have always promised the Christian flock the prospect of a flood, earthquake or death in hell of fire. But they did not listen - the same Noah unsuccessfully warned his compatriots about the wrath of God. Sometimes they listened and ended up committing suicide on the supposed end of the world. The apocalypse was timed to coincide with the appearance of comets and earthquakes, the beginning of centuries and millennia, epidemics and climate change, but the world has not collapsed to this day.
The thousandth year remained in the memory of contemporaries as a time of ominous signs: from 987 to 1033, it was as if all the horsemen of the Apocalypse walked across Europe at once. An earthquake struck the mouth of the Elbe, the Rhine flooded due to rains, in one year the crop was devoured by locusts, in another it was washed away by rains. "Antonov fire" - a fatal poisoning with flour infected with an ergot parasite - was incurable and, it happened, carried away whole villages to the grave. "Tailed stars" appeared even in broad daylight, thrilling sinners, eclipses foreshadowed the death of emperors and kings. Cannibalism spread among the common people of Europe from a severe famine. And noble people, meanwhile, were tonsured as monks, sometimes with whole families, donating their property to the monasteries. Everyone was waiting for the appearance of Christ to the people, but after the 1030s the tension subsided: the terrible hunger receded,the signs ceased - and the states of Europe peacefully moved towards the Middle Ages.
The year 1900 was also not without dark surprises: an earthquake in Georgia, a solar eclipse in America, burning oil in Baku, attempts on the life of princes and kings.
Poets at the beginning of the 20th century wrote: “Terrible dates are approaching. It will soon be crowded with fresh graves. Wait for gladness, cowardice, pestilence, and eclipse of heavenly bodies. " And ordinary peasants in the huts were waiting for the Second Coming at the festive tables. “… We waited for Easter, broke the fast, we sit, and the archangels are all trumpeting. Everyone was delighted, they began to drink and walk "- this is how the grandfather of the famous writer Maria Arbatova recalled about the unfortunate" end of the world ". But then instead of Armageddon, the First World War, the Spanish flu epidemic and the revolution broke out. The first claimed 30 million lives, the second - 40, the losses from the third have not yet been fully calculated.
In 2000, mankind was also waiting for trouble, especially since the year was a leap year. Terror attacks, hurricanes, sunken submarines and a solar eclipse in 1999 filled the hearts of ordinary people with anxiety and helped charlatans-fortune-tellers fill their wallets. But even the problem associated with the Windows operating system turned out to be just an excuse for jokes!
The prophecies of Nostradamus reckon the world to 3797. Jewish Kabbalists believe that the end of the world - "Saturday Shabbat" will come in 6000. Wait not long - according to the Hebrew calendar, the year is 5768. And according to Hindus, from the present era - "iron time" - until the return of Krishna there are only some … 400,000 years!
Papal secrets
Peter's Basilica, the first official Christian temple in the world, was given over to the church in 330. And since then Christ's deputies on earth have industriously collected the treasures of world culture in it. In the 15th century, Pope Nicholas V officially organized the Vatican Library (currently the world's largest collection of ancient manuscripts), but even before that, thousands of texts settled in church archives. It contains heretical writings of the Cathars and Manicheans, incunabula of occultists and warlocks, lists of the Gospels of Judas and Magdalene, a handwritten Bible of the 4th century (according to rumors, its text is very different from the canonical), autographs of Virgil and Cicero, protocols of the Inquisition, testimonies from the trials of here visions of saints and prophecies of mad monks. After the fall of Constantinople, Byzantine manuscripts and manuscripts, taken by the crusaders from the Holy Land, settled there. Napoleon, capturing Rome, transported some of the manuscripts to France, and when the Vatican succeeded in getting them back, two-thirds of the manuscripts died in transit. However, the most valuable thing was preserved. In total, the library, according to official information, contains 65 thousand manuscripts, 400 thousand published volumes, 100 thousand geographical maps and engravings and over 100 thousand units with autographs.
Until the 21st century, only Catholic priests could work with these materials.
In 2005, Pope Benedict XVI made the decision to open part of the archives for wide access, fulfilling the posthumous will of his predecessor, John Paul II. Well, the Vatican really had something to hide! This is, for example, the story of “Pope John,” a woman theologian who concealed her gender, for her outstanding talents, unanimously elected as the governor of God and torn to pieces by the crowd, after she began giving birth right at the Easter service. After this incident, for centuries, the cardinal, already elected by the Pope, sits on a special chair with a slot, first tucking his cassock over the seat, and the person checking it puts his hand under it, after which he loudly announces: "Ovo!", Which means "egg" in Latin. From this moment, everyone starts to applaud.
Was Pope Alexander VI Borgia the lover of his own daughter? Is there a genuine letter from Jesus Christ in which he spoke about the arrangement of the church after his death? Did Pope Leo XI collaborate with the Nazis, and if not, why did the Catholic Church not condemn the concentration camps? But in the most secret vaults of the Vatican library, where the apocrypha of the Apocalypse are kept, the uninitiated still cannot get into!
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Veronica Batkhan
"Sinegorye" (Chelyabinsk)