We cannot avoid the problem of science and methodology: we will force ourselves to prove things that are simply impossible to prove in the name of science, for example, Paul's authorship of the Epistle to the Hebrews or the creation of the world seven thousand years ago. But we will have to convince everyone that this is exactly what our correct science is, although in fact it will not be a science at all, but will only borrow some scientific forms. For example, a few decades ago, a dissertation was defended at an Islamic university in an Arab country, proving that the earth is a plane around which the Sun and the Moon rotate, because this is how the Koran describes it. It sounds ridiculous, but today there is more and more Islamic research proving the opposite: no, the Qur'an teaches that the earth is spherical. This sounds no more convincing. It would seem that there is a simple way out: to admit that at the time of the writing of the Qur'an (as well as the Bible), people believed the earth to be flat, and the text reflects these views. For Islamists, this is inconceivable, since the Qur'an is dictated to them directly by God and does not contain the slightest inaccuracy or incompleteness – but why should we Christians take on such an intolerable burden?

The second problem is pedagogical. I happened to see people (I knew two well) who were Orthodox Christians, began to study biblical studies, and... left the Church, losing faith at least in the Church, if not in God. It can be said that their faith was weak, and that biblical studies is a spiritually dangerous field, I will not argue with this. But there is another side to this problem. It was explained to these people at one time that the Church has a certain standard set of correct answers to all questions. Until they subjected these answers to their own analysis, they were satisfied with them. But as soon as they tried to understand everything from the position of reason, the answers ceased to be convincing. Honesty demanded that they reject either the arguments of reason or the postulates of faith — they decided to follow reason. Unfortunately, no one suggested to them at that moment that faith is not hostile to reason, it does not necessarily include all those elements that were presented to them by the fundamentalist environment as the only possible ones for a Christian.

Back in the early nineties, I happened to see a brochure on the truth of the Bible, where everything was built on the book of the prophet Jonah. The author reasoned as follows: atheists say that a person cannot live three days in the belly of a whale and stay alive, and therefore they reject the Bible. But there are cases (he gave examples that I have not had the opportunity to verify) when sailors fell into the mouth of a large fish and came out of it after a while alive, so the Bible is right. It seems that this move has completely failed. The author, in effect, declares that the Bible is right if and only if the account of the book of Jonah is to be understood as fully explicable from a scientific point of view, namely that whales swallow people and people remain alive. If we reason in this logic, the answer of an unbiased rational person can only be this: whales do not swallow people alive, therefore the Bible is wrong, it is a collection of ancient myths that has nothing to do with reality. Among all the possible explanations of the book of Jonah (it was a miracle, it can be understood allegorically, etc.), the author chose the most losing one and bet on it, as if on a stake, the entire truth of his faith. One cannot help thinking that inveterate atheists with their clumsy criticism of religion serve the Church better than such a preacher!

Finally, it is a spiritual problem. With such an approach, I am afraid, our Church runs the risk of sharing the fate of Alexandria, once the most glorious and greatest in the whole East. The Alexandrians stubbornly adhered to the formulations of their great father, St. They did not depart from them in any way, did not in the least belittle the Divine dignity of Christ, but fell first into heresy, and then into insignificance. Today, the Coptic Church still preserves the verbal formulations of the Holy Scriptures. St. Cyril, preserves its ancient rites, but it is already an ethnographic relic, an island in the Muslim or secular sea. Her fate is a warning to us.

So, the time has come to draw a completely predictable conclusion. Fundamentalism often presents itself as a way out of the situation into which liberal biblical criticism seeks to lead Christianity. In fact, this is not a way out, but exactly the same challenge as this criticism, only a challenge from the other side, and less obvious for the Orthodox. Fundamentalism is not identical with sound, creative conservatism, which is much more suitable for the Orthodox Bible scholar. At this point, of course, one can ask what this sound conservatism should consist of, but it is a much more complex question, and I do not yet have an answer to it. My talk follows more of an apophatic model: what should be avoided and what we should create can only be determined by all of us together and shown in practice.

15. Linguists on evolution

In the fall of 2006, St. Petersburg schoolgirl Masha Schreiber and her father filed a lawsuit against the Ministry of Education: their religious feelings were offended by teaching the theory of evolution at school. The lawsuit was lost, Masha left her native school and went all the way to the Dominican Republic. Whether the theory of evolution is taught in the tropics, or whether it is explained that the world was created in a ready-made form in six days, we know nothing about this. But among Christians, disputes on this topic do not cease to this day: how to treat evolution? Is it a scientifically proven theory or a conciliarly condemned heresy?

It is better to talk about evolution for biologists. I am a philologist, and I would like to draw attention to another issue that is described very differently in the Bible and in modern textbooks: the development of languages.

It is obvious to everyone that languages change over time. It is difficult for us to analyze the Old Russian chronicles, and when we try to read Shakespeare in the original language, we are convinced: Hamlet did not speak in the way they speak today in London or New York. There was a time when these changes were described as a "corruption" of the originally pure language: Italian, Spanish, French, and other Romance languages were corrupted vernacular Latin. It is true that these languages are based on vernaculars, but now that a great literature has been created in each of them, no one would call the language of Dante or Cervantes "spoiled Latin." Although Ukrainian, for example, can still be heard today that it is a "Little Russian dialect", spoiled by Polish borrowings. And some Ukrainians insist that, on the contrary, the Russian language is the language of Kievan Rus, spoiled by Turkic and Finno-Ugric borrowings.

Of course, this is not a serious approach. It is obvious that languages develop, that different new languages can come from the same root, that they can influence each other, change beyond recognition and die. But if this is happening in the present time, it must have been the case in those times from which no written sources have come down to us? Comparative-historical linguistics is engaged in the reconstruction of such changes. It tells us, for example, that the Russian words beginning and end originated from the same root with an alternating vowel: ken/kon. In the word beginning there was a prefix na-, the suffix was lo (cf. shilo, soap), and the root changed unrecognizably. But linguists can give exact parallels to all the changes in other words, these were regular processes.

Moreover, the Greek word kainos meaning "new" and the Latin recens meaning "recent" are derived from the same word. Naturally, this is no longer a Russian or Slavic root, but an Indo-European one. Once upon a time, the ancestors of the Slavs and many other peoples of Eurasia understood each other, because they spoke close Indo-European dialects, and linguists can reconstruct their main features based on the data of modern languages. When in the 19th century the linguist A. Schleicher reconstructed the grammar and vocabulary of the Indo-European language, he even wrote a fable in it — he was so sure that his reconstruction was reliable. But time passed, serious changes were made to its reconstruction, the very possibility of writing in Indo-European was called into question... Modern linguistics draws more modest, but also more reliable conclusions.

On the other hand, linguists now compare completely separate languages: it turned out that the Indo-European languages have common roots with the Turkic, Semitic and many other languages. This macrofamily is commonly called "Nostratic" today, and our ancestors probably spoke the corresponding language about 15 thousand years ago. The brilliant Russian linguist S. Starostin suggested that 40-50 thousand years ago, mankind used one language, from which all the languages of antiquity and modernity originated. However, we cannot reconstruct it.

Does this statement remind us of something already known from the Bible? Of course, the story of the 11th chapter of Genesis about the construction of the Tower of Babel and about the confusion of languages. Only there it says that linguistic unity was lost in an instant. And scientists claim that languages moved away from each other gradually, over thousands of years, and we see proof of this in the very structure of languages... What to do here?

In the Middle Ages, before the birth of modern linguistics, there was a popular theory that the original language of mankind was Hebrew, the language of the Old Testament (often identified with Aramaic or Syriac). Adam spoke in it with God in Paradise, and with the confusion of languages, only it remained intact, and the rest of the languages moved away from it more or less.