“Pharisees” in the “Laodicean Epistle” by Feodor Kuritsyn, in “The Secret of Secrets” Translated into Ruthenian, and in the East Slavic “Edited Pentateuch”: Is There a Connection?

The article discusses the reading zhitie fariseisku “Pharisaical way of life” from the so-called Laodicean Epistle – practically the only surviving work that contains ideas presumably attributed to the “Novgorod-Moscow heresy” (zhidovstvuiushchie “Judaizers”) of the late 15th and early 16th centuries. The main difficulty with this reading is that it presents the Pharisees in a purely positive context, which was highly unusual for traditional Christian literature. After Moshe Taube revealed that in the Ruthenian translation of the treatise Secret of Secrets, associated with the “literature of the Judaizers”, the term “Pharisee” was translated from the Hebrew word nazir “Nazirite; later, recluse, monk”, it became clear that the Pharisees in the Laodicean Epistle were in fact Nazirites, although the reasons for this translation decision remained unexplained. The article shows that in the Edited Pentateuch, which is of Ruthenian origin (presumably made in the second half of the 15th century in Kyiv), the “Law for a Nazirite” (Num 6:1–21) is regularly glossed with the heading “on the Pharisees” or “on the Pharisee fast”. Thus, the Pharisees were related not only to medieval recluses, but specifically to the Old Testament category of those specially consecrated to the Lord. This can be seen as a search the Jewish origins of Christianity for the predecessors of the “Judaizing”, so that the “Pharisees” of the Laodicean Epistle are the true original Christians.