The book includes a series of essays mainly of the comparative studies of Christian ideas and rituals. B. singled out ancient elements in Christianity that connected it not only with religions of the ancient world, but also with primordial rites and concepts. Considering some issues of the history of the so-called ‘higher religions’, the publication was not free from the characteristic of Soviet humanities and social sciences of 1920s. B. used the principles of comparative religious studies in describing Christian beliefs and rituals. He analyzed the remnants of Animism and magic in the Old and New Testaments, the origin of Jewish monotheism and the Christian Trinity, the myth of Jesus Christ and the Holy Spirit, the concept of angels and saints, the concept of the Last Judgment, hell and heaven.
B. revealed primordial ideas in Christianity, showed its connection with rituals and myths that were characteristic for the ancient form of religious beliefs. In the light of the richest ethnographic material, B. explained many Christian concepts through similar ideas of peoples of North-East Asia. For example, he argued that the myth of the Kamchadal raven Kutkha, who stole fire in the spirit of darkness in order to give it to people, and the legend of Prometheus, who stole fire from Zeus in order to give it to people, and Hebrew legends about Prophet Elijah, who brought down the fire on the sacrifice of the altar with his prayer, should be considered as ‘phenomena of the same order’, as well as the annual prayer of Christian Patriarch of Jerusalem, who invokes the heavenly ‘blessed’ fire on Easter candles.
This book was a part of the broader research ‘Religion in the Light of Ethnography’ conceived by B. The first part of this work, he was going to write on the base of materials prepared by him for lectures on the evolution of religious beliefs, in which the ethnographic roots of religion were to be shown from the emergence of religious beliefs to the shaping of Judaism and Christianity. The book was to contain an introduction, four large chapters (Pre-Animism, Animism, Polytheism, and ‘The So-Called Higher Religions’), and a conclusion.