§ 16. Three Starting Points Suggested by Church Tradition

The liturgical annual cycle of readings of the Holy Scriptures of the New Testament at the Divine Liturgy in the Orthodox Church begins on Pascha, the feast of the Resurrection of Christ. The Prologue of the Gospel of John (John 1:1-17[1]) is read as the Paschal Gospel reading, and the first verses of the Book of the Acts of the Holy Apostles (Acts 1:1-8) are also read as the Paschal Gospel reading. At the same time, neither the Prologue nor the beginning of the Acts are stories or direct testimonies about the Resurrection of Jesus or even the appearances of the Risen One (as, for example, the last chapters of any of the canonical Gospels[2]). At the same time, what is discussed in the Prologue and in Acts has a close and direct, although not obvious at first glance, relationship to Christ's Resurrection[3].

To begin our acquaintance with the New Testament, it is interesting to consider the relationship between these three, seemingly different themes: the Resurrection of Jesus Christ (the meaning of the feast of Easter), the beginning of the history of the Church (the theme of the Book of Acts) and the Incarnation of God (the theme of the Prologue). Seeing these three topics in their close connection, we get, figuratively speaking, three points that "set the plane" of our upcoming course.

1. Pascha of the Resurrection of Christ

So, what happened when Christ was resurrected, and why is His Resurrection so fundamental? To begin with, let's briefly reconstruct history.

Around 6 or 4 B.C., Jesus was born in Israel at the end of the reign of Herod the Great. He spent His childhood and youth with His parents in Nazareth and was brought up in Jewish traditions. Having reached the age of about 30, he received Baptism from John the Baptist and for about three years[5] preached the approach of the Kingdom of God, without writing anything himself. He had disciples who followed Him everywhere. His preaching bore witness to an understanding of the religious aspirations of the Jewish people, to a subtle and profound knowledge of the Holy Scriptures, as well as to a penetrating vision of human psychology and human nature in general. The miracles and signs that He performed gave special weight to His preaching, so that at times whole crowds of people followed Him. They even wanted to make Him their king, first placing Him at the head of a national liberation movement to overthrow the "impious" rule of the Romans.

But gradually the number of disciples devoted to Him decreased. Firstly, even they, close disciples, did not understand much of what their Teacher said. Secondly, His preaching increasingly irritated the religious ruling elite of Judaism. Finally, condemned by the Jewish religious leaders, with the sanction of the Roman authorities, He was crucified on April 7 or 9, 30.

That seemed to be the end of it.

However, His Resurrection, or rather, His repeated appearances to His disciples, the Risen One, and then the descent of the Holy Spirit (as a kind of new quality of Jesus' presence among them) completely transformed the consciousness of the disciples. This led them to finally see in Jesus something they had not seen, nor could they have seen before, when they followed Him. This can be compared to the effect of a developer in photography: under its influence, after some time, captured events that once occurred appear.

The apostles had to remember what He said and did, and ponder, trying to understand the meaning of the mystery. At first, however, the disciples remained faithful Jews who saw in their Master the fulfillment of the Scriptures, in contrast to those who did not accept Him. The Scriptures, that is, the Bible, for them were what we now call the Old Testament. However, a few decades later, the Jerusalem Temple, the religious center of Judaism and the first Christians, was destroyed (70 AD). Then the disciples and those whom they converted to Christianity realized that they were the Christian Church, living by its own Tradition and its own rules of life.

Thus, the Resurrection of Jesus transformed the disciples, regenerated them after they were scattered like sheep without a shepherd, and gave birth to them anew as disciples who saw Their Teacher in a new way. The disciples became the Church, the new Israel, the New Testament people of God.

Before we dwell on what they saw, what happened to them, and how they began to talk and preach about it, let us give an important analogy.