Home – Home – Jornals – Humanitarian sciences in Siberia 2022 number

V.S. Ikonnikov made a review of the critiques of the apocryphal stories in works by Maximus the Greek. The paper objective is to investigate several texts by Maximus the Greek not included mostly into the author’s codes of the learned monk that expose apocryphal contents of certain narratives. Two writings- miniatures, “An answer about the heaven’s epistle” and “Tale of Jesus Christ’s priesthood”, are the theologian responses regarding apocryphal stories. In the first brief statement, Maximus the Greek simply denies the existence of the epistle granted by God. It is known that the original text of “Tale of Jesus Christ’s priesthood” is on manuscript margins of the mid XVI century kept in the Russian State Library (fond 173/I № 57) as an autograph comment for the apocrypha by Theodosius the Jew. In such a context, the literary monument has been preserved as part of other collections of the XVI-XVII centuries. In his tale, Maximus the Greek made three statements contesting Jesus Christ’s priesthood. “The epistle to a certain man” contains the critique of the collected works “Lucidarius” sent to a certain George and translated from German. The article contains assumptions regarding the addressee’s personality, and details of two versions of the Epistle, the Slavic and Troitsk versions, known as parts of the hand-written collections of the late XVI-XVII centuries. The main feature of the Troitsk version consists in inserts of quotations from Lucidarius into the author’s text, likely made by an editor from the XVII century: they accompany the statements of Maximus the Greek and ensure their perception by the reader. The versions differ by the content amount. Another anti-apocryphal writing by Maximus the Greek “The tale of handwritten recording of sins” has been preserved in two versions, its handwriting tradition has been described.