"Ты обнаружишь, что многие социально-христианские писатели считают, что...

“You will find that many socio-Christian writers believe that even at an early stage of development, Christianity began to distort and move away from the doctrine of His Savior. With this idea, we again and again encourage the concept of“ historical Jesus ”that various scholars come to eliminating the “later insertions and distortions,” and then using it, contrasting it with any of the Christian traditions. In the past generation, we supported the concept of “historical Jesus” on liberal and humanistic foundations. l put forward a new “historical Jesus” along the lines of Marxism, world catastrophe and revolution. These concepts (and we are going to change them approximately every thirty years) have many virtues. First, all of them direct man’s reverence for nonexistent, for each is historical Jesus is “unhistorical. Written sources say what is said in them, and nothing can be added to this. Therefore, after each“ historical Jesus ”one has to draw something out of them, downplaying some sides and exaggerating others, as well as building hypotheses s (we taught people to call them "brilliant"), for which no one would give a penny, but which are enough for the appearance of a whole galaxy of new Napoleons, Shakespeare and Swifts in the autumn advertising of any publishing house. Secondly, all these concepts measure the significance of their “historical Jesus” by some specific theory that He allegedly proclaimed. He must be a "great man" in the modern sense of these words, that is, a man who asserts something extravagant, an eccentric who offers people a panacea. So we distract people from who He is and what He has done. <...> Our third goal is to destroy the prayer life through these concepts. Instead of the true presence of the Enemy, which is usually felt by people in prayers and sacraments, we, in the form of a surrogate, give them a probable, distant, foggy creature that spoke a strange language and died a very long time ago. It is impossible to worship such a being. Instead of the Creator, before whom His creation is bowing, we offer a creature, the leader of its supporters, and in the end - an outstanding personality, which is approved by a rational historian. Fourthly, a religion of this kind, in addition to the unhistorical nature of its Jesus, distorts history in another sense. Only a few people from all nations came to the Enemy camp, exploring His earthly life according to the rules of science. In fact, humanity has not even been given material for His complete biography. And the first Christians turned under the influence of only one historical fact - the Resurrection and only one dogma - the Atonement, which acted on the feeling of sin that they had - sin is not against some bizarre law put forward for the sake of news by some "great man "but against the old, well-known and universal law of morality, which was taught to them by mothers and nannies. Gospel narratives appeared late and were not written to convert people to Christianity, but to instruct believers. "

Letters of Balamut