ETHICAL IMPERATIVES IN HISTORICIST PERSPECTIVE: WAS JESUS NAVIS IMMORAL?; [ЭТИЧЕСКИЕ ИМПЕРАТИВЫ В ИСТОРИЦИСТСКОЙ ПЕРСПЕКТИВЕ: БЫЛ ЛИ ИИСУС НАВИН АМОРАЛЬНЫМ?]

This article deals with the problem of moral evaluation of historical figures and events as illustrated by an example of one of the most prominent figures of Biblical stories Jesus Navis. He is one of those figures who commits something obviously morally wrong, if seen from the point of view of the dominant modern morality, but still is a moral authority for many people due to his commitment to God, his place in Sacred history and some other features. The author considers in the article the following question: can such persons and acts be ever evaluated in modern historical narratives? He presumes that to this question positive answer may be given without sticking to some kind of prejudice, and proposes an argument which combines a semantic thesis that from the truth of the proposition “x committed an immoral action a” does not necessarily follow the proposition “x acted immorally by doing a”, with the justification of the claim that only the first one is applicable to historical figures, given we do not know the historical context properly. It is also shown that this approach allows us to resolve another old problem, the one of an accurate representation of the past without full exclusion of evaluative statements. The first section formulates the following problem: is it possible to give a moral assessment of historical figures and their actions, including the heroes of the Bible from the point of view of ethics of today? The second section examines the main difficulties of incorporating moral assessments into historical narratives, especially in the narrative of Sacred history. The third section offers a solution based on semantic analysis, which uses the distinction between the assessment of an action and the assessment of a historical figure as the subject of this action. In the fourth section, general conclusions are made: it is shown how one can morally evaluate Biblical characters without passing off assessments as empirical facts and without falling into a moral anachronism. © 2023 St. Tikhon's University. All rights reserved.