Home – Home – Jornals – Humanitarian sciences in Siberia 2018 number

The article offers to examine a case of modern reaction of a national Orthodoxy representative to the heretical (on his mind) idea of a bar code as the Antichrist’s seal. The essay is based on the original scenario of the world history and its ending. Its author, A.G. Murachev, borrowed the basis of his theory on Roman genesis of modern states and the united proletariat as the Antichrist’s servant from his mentor, Father Simeon, the hegumen of Lower Yenisey Dubches sketes, who died in Stalin’s labor camps after the skete destruction in 1951. His essays with theoretical formulations connected the ancient exegetics of Revelation to John with modern life were preserved and copied out in the sketes and peasant’s surrounding community. A.G. Murachev has significantly developed the ideas of Father Simeon, but without his great authority, hasn’t found many adherers in sketes - the main spiritual center of Old Belief supporters of a priestless sect. Among other disagreements there was one worth mentioning. A.G. Murachev unlike the skete ideologists believed that the end of the world according to a series of evidences was rather remote. In particular, this was the reason why he denied the theory of a computer-Antichrist that got into the Lower Yenisey Old Believers’ society and included the idea of a bar code as the Antichrist antipode’s seal, who, presumbly, had already come to this world. A.G. Murachev inexactly called this theory ‘Baptist tales’, as in the 1970s this theory was distributed by the New Evangelistic Church. The Yenisey scholar treated this theory as something alien to the Orthodoxy, and criticized his coreligionists for their interest towards this unorthodox heresy. The essay analyzed in the article is a perfect sample of manifestation against the transconfessionalism (term introduced by G.L. Freeze). In the meantime, borrowing of ideas from other confessions (Catholicism - through Ukrainian writers and Protestantism) was pointed out for the supporters of a priestless sect by N.N. Pokrovsky, N.D. Zol’nikova, et al. Thus, A.G. Murachev’s paper shows the ambiguousness of the confessional interaction process among the Old Believers.