The collection of articles includes works written by the author in the last decades of his life. There are mainly materials and partly made texts for an integral part of the conceived book ‘The Classical Christianity’ – it was based on the course of lectures about the history of the Early Christianity made by K. at the Leningrad State University. The book was to cover a period from the most ancient time of shaping Christianity till the epoch of Emperor Constantine. Though, in the ready-made form there were only some chapters on the sources and the historiography of the Early Christianity, and on some general issues. In those chapters K. manifested himself as a radical and consistent critic of the reliability and early dating of the most part of sources, and, particularly, as a champion of the mythological theory.
The conclusive part of the book was an attempt to incorporate the findings in Qumran into the author’s concept of the origin of Christianity – they started to write about them in the U.S.S.R. c.1956-1957 (the discovery was made in 1947, the publication of the most important texts – from 1950-s).
In general, despite of certain fragmentariness of the content, the book by K. gave the most complete manifestation of that point of view at the origin of Christianity, which had been dominating in the research and popular literature on the topic issued in the U.S.S.R. in 1950-s.