The book belonged to the early works by R. Yu. Wipper (1859-1954) on religious topics, particularly, about the Early Christianity. The author observes the origin of Christianity in the context of the history of the Roman Empire and classical culture.
The author he considered it necessary to eliminate the tendentiously constructed history imposed, in his opinion, by the editors of the canon of the New Testament. In this research, the author attempted to divide the surviving texts into the pre-Christian and proper Christian, New Testament. He paid special attention to exposing the myth of the original ‘pure Christianity’ and argued with rationalists who dated the New Testament parts to the first century CE and considered the Gospels to be a record of the events described by direct witnesses, the disciples of Jesus. He noted that biographies of Jesus Christ and Apostle Paul were compilations, literary legends (myths) of the second half of the second century. In some places, the author focused on the hidden meaning and social orientation of the few remaining testimonies – the works by Seneca and Pliny, Josephus Flavius and the evangelists, the messages of the Apostles, the speeches by Dion Chrysostom, etc. On the base of the analysis of literary methods and the style, the author sought to show contradictions, inconsistencies in the texts, and sometimes even interpolation and falsification. No less interesting is the analysis of the very name ‘Christians’, which arose, in the opinion of the author, referring to the Latin form of this word, not earlier than the mid-second century. He rejected the traditional pattern of the origin of Christianity: first, the ‘pure’ initial doctrine of the wise founder; then, a number of deviations from it, the emergence of heresies of Gnostics, Montanists, etc. Having given a detailed description of numerous sects of the period of 130-140 CE (Gnostics, Marcionists, Montanists, etc.), the author traced back, how the specific features of those religious doctrines turned into elements of that corpus of texts, which is known as the canonical books of the New Testament.
In the book, the author considered Christianity as a product of a complex ideological process, starting at the times of Nebuchadnezzar, the New Babylonian Kingdom, and the early Jewish diaspora, and later – to Judaic Church. The author conducted a synchronous study of the facts of the emergence of Christianity and the cultural history of Rome, for example, analyzing the worldview of the Roman high society of the time of the Julian-Claudian dynasty. It was contrasted with the picture of the life and moods of the Roman society of the mid-second century. In particular, the author compared the image of the ‘suffering’ Christ with the image of suffering reformers from Plutarch: King Cleomenes, who was crucified in Egypt, and the Gracchi brothers.
He argued that Christianity, as well as Judaism of the time of the diaspora, was a faith of craftsmen, merchants, urban slaves (the word pagani, i.e. settlers, was interpreted as ‘pagans’). But the author considers it possible to speak about ‘Christianity’ only from the last quarter of the second century, that is, since the emergence of the episcopal organization of Christian Church.
The book is an example of a research based on extensive historical and philological erudition of its author, who could creatively considered the origin of Christianity in the epoch, when that topic has been already ideologically dogmatized in the Soviet research literature. However, he reproduces a scheme, typical for the first half of the twentieth century; a scheme built on excessive attention to the classical background of the Early Christianity, diminishing its Judaic elements. The author did not rely on epigraphic and papyrological data, and he was not aware of either the Qumran manuscripts, or the Nag-Hammadi library, discovered respectively in 1947 and 1945.