According to the prophetic books, this is the Russian Kingdom: for two Romes (Rome and Constantinople – Ed.) have fallen, and the third (Moscow – Ed.) stands, and the fourth will not be" (See: Malinin, The Elder of the Spaso-Eleazarian Monastery Philotheus and His Epistles, Kiev, 1901). The Monk Joseph departed to the Lord at the age of 76, on September 9, 1515, shortly before his death he took the great schema.

The relics of the monk rest under a bushel in the cathedral church of his monastery. The church-wide veneration of the saint was established in 1591, under Patriarch Job. Many of the disciples and followers of the Monk Joseph of Volotsk also entered the ranks of Russian saints, were archpastors of the Russian Church; The monastery itself became the center of spiritual enlightenment for many centuries (

Publication of the Volokolamsk Patericon, containing the life of St. Joseph: Theological Works. Collection Ten. Moscow, 1973. Pp. 175-222.). The greatest feat of the Monk Joseph of Volotsk was his struggle against the heresy of the Judaizers. From the time, according to the testimony of the Tale of Bygone Years, the Equal-to-the-Apostles Prince Vladimir rejected the temptation of the Jewish faith, brought by the Khazar preachers, and Rus' was renewed by the grace of Baptism, "the great Russian land remained in the Orthodox faith for 470 years, until the enemy of salvation, the all-evil devil, brought the vile Jew to Veliky Novgorod," writes the Monk Joseph in the Enlightener.

Assessing the heresy of the Judaizers as the greatest danger to which Rus', Russian Orthodoxy, and Russian statehood have ever been exposed, the Monk Joseph does not exaggerate. This heresy had a truly all-encompassing character: it affected all aspects of the doctrine, took possession of the minds of many people of the most diverse classes and conditions, penetrated to the very heights of church and state power, so that both the First Hierarch of the Russian Church and the Grand Duke were affected by it, and in Orthodox Russia unthinkable outrages were committed, described with sorrow by the Monk Joseph in "The Enlightener".

But God is not mocked, and the events directed by the enemy of the human race to perdition turn to the glory of God and to salvation. The Monk Joseph writes about the ineffable wisdom and goodness of God's Providence, about "Divine cunning" in the 4th Sermon of the "Enlightener"; this power of God's Providence was also manifested in the history of Russia in the victory over the heresy of the Judaizers, a victory inspired by the Spirit of God and headed by two luminaries of the Russian Church: Saint Gennadii of Novgorod († 1505, Comm. 4 December) and the Monk Joseph of Volotsk.

Let us set forth the essence and the main milestones of this struggle and this victory. In 1470, the Novgorodians invited the Lithuanian prince Mikhail Olelkovich († 1482) to reign. In the prince's retinue, the Jew Skhariya also arrived from Kiev. "And he was a tool of the devil," writes the Monk Joseph, "he was trained in every villainous invention: sorcery and blackmail, stargazing and astrology."

Taking advantage of the weakness of the faith of some clerics, Skhariya, or rather, Satan himself through his hands, took up the planting of Judaism in the bosom of our church. Skhariya's mission was a success, especially since soon several more Jews arrived from Lithuania to help him. The seductive danger of the destructive heresy lay in its hidden nature: it was not an open inculcation and preaching of the Jewish religion; The transformation of a person who grew up in the Orthodox faith into a heretic, rejecting all the foundations of Christianity, took place gradually and imperceptibly.

Among the first adherents of Skhariya and his teachings were the priests, through whom the heresy spread especially disastrous and terrible. The first of them was the priest Dionysius, then the Novgorod archpriest Alexis and some others. These priests and the clergy and laity seduced by them, as St. Joseph testifies, "committed such iniquities as even the ancient heretics did not commit."

On the surface, the adherents of the heresy remained Orthodox Christians and retained outward piety. Before people who were firm in the faith, they appeared as strict zealots of Orthodoxy, denouncing and cursing false teachings. In secret, they committed their foul deeds. They began by arousing doubt in the faint-hearted and weak-believing in certain passages of Holy Scripture, and above all of the New Testament; they also seduced with the help of the "renounced" they distributed, i.e.

books condemned by the Church – manuals on the secret sciences and distorted copies of the Holy Scriptures; they also used all the arsenal of Jewish blackbooks and sorcery available to them to deceive inexperienced souls. Step by step, the deceived man came to the fullness of heretical teaching. The Judaizers denied the Holy Trinity, blaspheming the Son of God and the Holy Spirit. They rejected the Divinity of the Saviour and His Incarnation, did not accept the saving Passion of Christ, did not believe in His most glorious Resurrection; nor did they recognize the general resurrection of the dead, they denied the Second Glorious Coming of Christ and His Dread Judgment.

They did not recognize the Holy Spirit as a Divine Hypostasis. The heretics rejected the apostolic and patristic writings and all Christian dogmas, taught to observe the law of Moses, to keep the Sabbath and to celebrate the Jewish Passover. They denied church institutions: sacraments, hierarchy, fasts, feasts, temples, icon veneration, all sacred objects, services and rites.

They especially hated and blasphemed monasticism. The Judaizers cursed at the Holy Cross, holy icons and relics, committing outrages against them, unimaginable for a person who grew up in Orthodox Russia. According to the testimony of the "Enlightener", mocking the shrines, they said: "Let us desecrate these icons, as the Jews desecrated Christ." The continuation of this mockery of all that is holy was fornication and debauchery.

The Judaizer priests celebrated the Divine Liturgy after eating and drinking, after fornication, blasphemously cursed the Holy Body and the Precious Blood of Christ, and committed other desecrations, of which, in the words of the Monk Joseph, "it is impossible even to write." The heresy of Judaism was an irreconcilable and at the same time secret denial of the foundations of Christianity. This negation was its meaning and content.

That is why it is easy to find in it not only a clearly readable Jewish basis, but also numerous echoes with the most diverse anti-church and anti-Christian teachings. In the strict sense – and this is especially emphasized by St. Joseph – the "heresy of the Judaizers" was not a heresy, that is, an arbitrary distortion of Christian truth, but an apostasy – a complete negation of Christianity and its complete opposite; The fact that this denial was not declared clearly and openly only added to the danger.