The “Enlightener” of St. Joseph of Volotsk in N.A. Rudnev's “History of Heresies and Schisms”. A Skeptic's View

Abstract

The primary sources on the Judaizing heresy are the letters of Joseph of Volotsk and the “Book Against Heretics,” better known as “The Enlightener.” The different attitudes of researchers toward the testimony of Joseph of Volotsk determined their position on the Judaizing heresy. The tradition of skepticism toward the accounts of Joseph of Volotsk was established by the work of Nikolai Andreevich Rudnev (1811–1876), a bachelor of the Moscow Theological Academy. The work was written by an author who, due to the infancy of Russian church history, did not possess the techniques of scholarly source criticism based on textual criticism methods, using a limited and poorly studied range of sources. This did not prevent N.A. Rudnev from casting doubt on the basic information about the Judaizing heresy contained in “The Enlightener,” from a position of extreme skepticism. Instead of relying on source material, the author preferred arbitrary constructions and conjectures. Subsequently, the skeptical approach of N.A. Rudnev was uncritically adopted by the majority of representatives of church-historical science and secular historians of the 19–20th centuries.