Cemeteries and cemetery churches. Folk legends of the Ladoga area

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. For those who do not know them, I will briefly outline these historical events.

Christianity appeared 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 required to observe the commandments of the Torah (to fully observe Jewish traditions, including circumcision), and only Jews were Christians. 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 proportion of Jews who converted to Christianity in these one and a half centuries, historians determine from 40 to 60% of all Jews.

Christianity at that time was something quite different from what it is today.

This article does not include a discussion about whether the European Church had the right to distort centuries later the original essence of Christianity, emasculating from it, to the best of its ability, everything Jewish. I think that this was wrong, since over the past 2000 years Jesus did not give the European Church new information, and since the whole Faith is based on the events of those years, we have no right to distort them and interpret them in a new way.

Today, few people 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 cannot but believe that it was blasphemy in relation to Christianity when the founders of the Faith were given Greco-Roman, alien names instead of Jewish names. It 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 ones), since he did not preach among non-Jews. Therefore, if Christ got into the Christian church today, He would not understand who the priests are talking about 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 are not even aware that this distortion itself would seem to both the apostles and Christ offensive to their nationality and homeland. I will only briefly note: the fact remains that for 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 this would have happened, since later Judaism was still thoroughly reformed - that is, the grounds for the reform were objective, and Christianity appeared just in their context.

And here the grandiose figure of Shaul ha-Tarsi (Apostle Paul) clearly showed himself, who did not allow Christianity to be realized as a reform of Judaism among the Jews, and, on the other hand, created a huge Christian world among non-Jews.

Since the Jews drove Christian Jews from Jerusalem and Palestine for a century and a half, the bulk of Jewish settlements in Europe, Africa and Central Asia consisted of Jewish Christian communities. Local pagans were also often unfriendly towards them, and the idea of ​​"christianizing" the local peoples arose by itself, which was supposed to contribute 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 observance of the commandments of the Torah optional.

There was a deep split 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 offend 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 stuffy closeness of self-isolation.

At the time of this second birth of Christianity, there were at least 22 gospels by different authors (all Jews, of course). IN New Testament only four were included, where there are no direct and harsh statements of Christ that a non-Jew has no right to become a follower of His faith. At the same time, 14 (!) Epistles of Shaul ha-Tarsi (Paul) entered the New Testament, where he, for the most part, explains to non-Jews that they can join the faith, which is considered Jewish, and to Jews - that they, circumcised (chosen by God) can 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 be circumcised, since he considers circumcision to be a sacred issue, a sign of the chosenness of the Jews as a "higher people", and, by the way, everywhere in his texts he puts them above other peoples, and undoubtedly 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 against the fact that non-Jews could be circumcised: even in the family of Christian peoples, 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 note that this condition deliberately placed native Christians in the position of "second-class" believers, since they accepted and Old Testament Jews, and it clearly says that it concerns those who are circumcised (who gave part of the flesh to God). Obviously, it turned out that the new believers had the Bible, but did not have the 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 like the norm, but I am surprised by such an unheard-of impudent attitude towards holy texts that distort their essence.

Moreover, today Christianity leaves aside the question of the Creator, and often (including on television) the highest persons Orthodox Church 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 on the issue 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 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 the Old Testament, we are strangers to Him. That is why the rather clumsy attempts to replace the place of the Creator with Jesus. However, this is another topic. But, in my opinion, this is not only bad and sad, but comes from the very uncertainty, deliberately set by Shaul ha-Tarsi, in his concept "The Creator is the God of the people of Israel", and "Jesus is the" conductor "of knowledge about God among non-Jews ".

It is easy to see that this concept is inherently chauvinistic. Of course, everyone is free to believe in their own, but if we are talking about holy texts, then the desire to read and believe their original version, and not the distorted one, is fair. And the initial options create big problems for us. I will finish the excursion to the foundations of the Faith by saying that for a thinking person, Faith is needed in its complete form, which does not raise questions. And there are so many questions here that it all seems to be running. Theology has long since fallen behind. real life and, alas, for a long time does not understand that a person of the XXI century. - this is not a man of the Middle Ages.

Shaul ha-Tarsi undertakes a number of trips to the regions of the Roman Empire, where he propagates his teachings. This is how Europe becomes Christian.

All this is history. I think 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 implies a closer approach to the origins - and the essence of Faith. In addition, for a modern person, the path to the 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 causes the very TRIUMPH of Faith, 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, that everything seems to be taken for granted. But how did the pagans join the Faith? What attracted them to her?


This question is all the more important because today, if not a few new people, then an insignificant number enter the bosom 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 to understand for the dark masses and acceptable only for a spiritually developed person, but something else. Other, and became the reason for the spread of Christianity.

This - OTHER - did not show itself among Jewish Christians, since the ideas of Jesus spread there only in connection with the new fate of Israel and the people of Israel (this was the "engine"). The reason I spoke in detail about Shaul ha-Tarsi's reform was that it was he who introduced this new OTHER into Christianity.

So this new one, invented by the Apostle Paul (or creatively born in the process of propagating ideas among the native population), was that: if you believe in the 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 provide such a perspective; it was new to the pagans. And just the story of Jesus Christ showed that this is REAL. Since He has risen, He is able to raise His flock. The stunning news that it is possible to 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 older ones, 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 take them to the center of the settlement - with the certainty that they are today or tomorrow everyone will be resurrected.

Here, by the way, I am surprised by the following circumstance. Perhaps I didn’t see something in the texts of the Bible, but there are no specific instructions in the Bible for Christians to certainly bury their dead in the center of cities and villages, where it will therefore be easier for the returned 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 main sign that these settlements are Christian.

I do not rule it out, but apparently this is true, today we have completely different texts of the Bible than those that were before Christians at the dawn of the Faith.

Sanitation against Christianity
Archeology shows: here is the city before Christianity in the 4th century, here it is after Christianity in the same century. What is the difference? In one main thing: a cathedral was built in the middle of the city, and around it - a city cemetery. Previously, cemeteries were taken away from the city, but now everyone is buried in the city center.

Archaeologists say that 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 that is the whole point of Christianity.

This unsanitary practice was banned throughout Europe only during the Enlightenment, when the cohabitation of the cemetery and the city became dangerous and unbearable.

Philippe Aries in his famous book "The 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 was tens or even hundreds of times higher than the entire living population of the city. The authorities were constantly tormented by this problem, inventing measures for the disposal of the dead. Mass graves were created, where 10 square meters placed up to 1500 corpses - stacks.


Residents of the surrounding neighborhoods bombarded the city authorities with complaints. Everything in the house was saturated with a putrid smell - furniture, clothes, even food. Do not open the windows - it smells of corpses. Do not let the children out of the house - the infection is around. This cadaverous smell accompanied the inhabitants even outside the city, wherever they traveled - they were so saturated with it. The commissions showed that these areas, adjacent to the city center, where the cemeteries were located, are prone to various diseases, and here rarely anyone lived to old age. Worse still, terrible epidemics constantly arose here, covering the whole country.

Travelers who came to Europe from the Arab countries saw all this with horror and were surprised at how wild the faith of Christians is, forcing them to live with the dead. From the outside, all this for a new person, I think, really looked terrible.

According to Aries, in the XVIII century. public consciousness in this respect has moved off the dead center. In 1737, the Parisian parliament invited doctors to examine the city cemeteries - this is the first official demarche in Christianity in this area. On the part of the Church, the idea of ​​a ban on Christian burial near churches was put forward in 1745 by Abbot Ch. Pore ("Letters on Burial in Churches"). Here is his ideal: clean, well-ventilated churches, where only the smell of incense is felt, and nothing else, and where "you do not risk breaking your neck because of the unevenness of the floor," constantly shifted by the gravediggers. The author calls for the removal of cemeteries outside the city limits in order to ensure healthy air and cleanliness in cities.

Abbot Pore was far from the first to suggest to the church authorities that new cemeteries be built outside the city (following the tradition of Muslims and Jews). But for the first time he 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 the traveler, surrounded by suitcases, waits from minute to minute for his departure.

In the 60s. Prince Condé spoke out strongly against the new cemetery in Paris - and was supported by the Attorney General ("The walls of the houses are saturated with stench and harmful juices, which is, perhaps, 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. The revolutionary resolution of the parliament ordered the closure of all existing cemeteries 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 Saulieu, in the nave of the church of St. Saturnina, dug a hole for a woman who died of a rotten fever. At the same time, the coffin with the body buried on March 3 was exposed, and when the woman was lowered into the grave, the coffin opened, and such a stench came from the old corpse that no one could stay in the church anymore. Soon, of the 120 children of both sexes who were being prepared for the first communion, 114 became dangerously ill, as well as the curate, the vicar, the gravediggers, and more than 70 others. Of these, 18 died, including the curate and the vicar. This and other similar cases further incited public opinion towards the idea of ​​moving cemeteries outside the city.

The famous French physician Felix Vic d'Azir, in his "Experiments on the Places and Dangers of Burials" (1778), states that in times of epidemics, the houses located in the neighborhood of cemeteries are the first to be affected. As he writes, the corpse of the patient completely stores the disease and its contagious power. The air of cemeteries spoils everything around: not only the health of people living nearby, but even the food and things in their closets. So, in the houses located around the Saint-Innosan cemetery, the doctor notices, steel, silverware, gold galloons - everything quickly loses its luster and fades.

Doctors are not the only ones who are sounding the alarm. The protocols of the police commissioners of that time are replete with complaints from the local population. In a petition to Parliament, residents of the quarter adjacent to the Saint-Merry cemetery complain that "everything necessary for life" deteriorates in their homes within a few days. These complaints continued until the moment when the city authorities began to move old cemeteries outside the city, transport tens of thousands of the dead, and clear the land of cadaveric contamination. For a long time these huge cemeteries have not been in the center of Paris, and Parisians are hardly even aware that there were once mass public graves with tens of thousands of the dead on the sites of their houses.

As it turned out, the problem of urban cemeteries was long overdue. That 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.

By this time, it had already been forgotten that this prohibition was odiously contrary to Christianity.

Poltergeist and vampirism against Christianity
Speaking of Christians' rejection of their tradition of burying the dead in the center of a city or village, I cannot ignore the fact that such 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 the "Afterlife". magic" (see, for example, the famous work of Charles Ferdinand de Schertz "Magia Posthuma").

No other nation in the world, except European Christians, has ever had such experience in observing posthumous events. I note that today, when we bury our dead outside the city, and cemeteries and death itself are deeply removed from our lives, we ALREADY do not have this experience. That is why 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 manifestations of this "afterlife magic" were poltergeist and vampirism in their various manifestations. The very epidemic of vampirism that engulfed Central, Southern and Eastern Europe three centuries ago (with the return of the Balkan countries from Turkey to the European bosom) 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 an extreme poltergeist (phenomena, obviously, of the same nature), were completely removed from their homes, abandoned houses, arable land and left for a new place. They - which is clear - were leaving the cemetery. As soon as they again set up a new cemetery in the center of the settlement near the church, the phenomena resumed. Logic suggested that it was easier not to change the place of residence, but to change the location of the cemetery - to move it as far as possible from the settlement.

Immortality as the engine of Christianity
So why did Christians bury their dead in the city center?

Here is the whole point.

The Christians dragged their dead into the city center because they knew they would be resurrected today or tomorrow. Jesus Christ (following the version of Shaul ha-Tarsi) said to them: Today or tomorrow I will return, and just as I was resurrected, I will resurrect 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 in unison. And this faith was so strong that all Christian cemeteries began to be 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 large number of dead people accumulated in the cemeteries in the center of the cities. Christ did not return, did not revive anyone, and the limits of urbanization were exhausted long ago. The cemeteries were moved outside the cities, and henceforth they began to bury them there. Which meant that people no longer believed in the promise of Christ. They do not believe, although this disbelief is slyly clothed in the formula "they have ceased to understand it literally." But 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 in general everything that Jesus said (in the retelling of His biographers) is also metaphors, figurativeness, beautiful language, and in a word - 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 for the spread of Christianity, which we spoke about above. What else could so captivate the dark masses more than the promise to live after death? Moreover, not as some kind of soul, no one knows where, but as a person returned to life and rejuvenated - 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 will agree - is a completely different Faith than the Christianity that we know today.

Those who carried the corpses of their relatives to the center of the city knew that their children and themselves would also be carried 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 this with himself, He promised it to everyone.

Imagine for a moment the situation of that era. Let's say we live in Greece in the third century. And then numerous reports begin to come in that many of our neighboring peoples have literally gone crazy - gone crazy. They do not bury their dead, but drag them to the center of the city, where they keep them supposedly because they must be resurrected any day now. This innovation was even wilder 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 are interested in those who came from neighbors: why this necrophilia? Why are the dead raised? We are answered that there was a prophet Jesus Christ, who himself resurrected and promised to return and resurrect all who are ready to believe in him. It's as simple as that, we wonder. Well, since this madness has seized everyone, then perhaps this makes some sense. Let's try to put our dead in the center of a city or village - it's not difficult. Maybe something will happen...

The rule was simple: whoever believes in Christ, he will resurrect him. This screening today seems inhumane and illogical (what difference does it make to Christ?). But it is the basis for the power and income of the church. She alone benefits from this condition.

All the talk in the newly converted Christian communities was only about how great it will be when Christ comes and returns our dead to us. Here's a holiday! Yes, and dying yourself is no longer scary - it's like falling asleep, and waking up tomorrow in the middle of your favorite city, surrounded by friends and family. And immediately at the table, celebrate.

This is how Christianity won the minds of pagan Europe. That is why in those days Christians showed miracles of courage at executions (which never happened again later in conflicts with other faiths), laughing at the executioners: they knew that they were immortal, that in a day, a month or a year they would return to life, to Earth . Will rise from the dead. They said to their executioners: you will execute us here, and very soon we will appear right there - unharmed. And we'll 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 Christianity as an ideology that destroys the whole way of life and brings chaos, anarchy. But the more they fought against Christianity, the more successfully it spread.

In the pantheon of the saints of Christianity who died in the first centuries, there are no authors of ideas or thinkers, there are only people famous for inciting the executioners themselves to seek sophisticated torture and executions. These are banal fanatics, frightening the executioners with the fact that, behold, I - like Christ - will rise and return in a week, terrifying you.

They didn't return. 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 kept accumulating, accumulating and accumulating in anticipation of the resurrection, rotted into dust, removed, replaced by new ones, mixed up and lost, 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 unstoppably turned to dust.

And today Christians do not even know about this main essence of Christianity. Only archaeologists and historians know. The Church keeps silence here: why show the collapse of the hopes of many generations?

Today, if the Church somehow comments on this whole epic with the gathering 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, it was thanks to SUCH understanding that such a wide spread of Christianity itself took place! It is because of THIS understanding of the promises of Christianity that we ourselves have become Christians!

On the other hand, if even the early Christians supposedly misunderstood Christianity, what grounds do we have for believing that we misunderstand it? Are we 2000 years removed from the era of Christ?

Taken from the site ARCHEOLOGIA.RU