Old Believers and Text

The article is devoted to the study of the problem of textuality of the Old Believers’ community, where the text was an argument in proving the illegality of the actions of the reformers, determined the ideology of the movement, the political, social views of the participants, and the peculiarities of the religious life of the communities. Due to the appeal to ancient manuscripts and early printed books, a fund of citations was formed, that testified to the validity of Old Believers’ point of view on innovation. Having inherited from the scribes of Ancient Russia respect for the book, bordering on its sacralization, the opponents of church reform began to treat the selected fragments of texts in a similar way. As a result, the “canon of sacred texts” was formalized. As a result, these extracts began to be perceived by the Old Believers as reflecting the tradition of the Russian Church and equated to the reading of the Holy Scripture. The Old Believers used the fund of fragments of authoritative texts, formed by several generations, describing the tradition of the Russian Church, the defenders of which they proclaimed themselves. The canon of Sacred Texts was composed not only of extracts from ancient manuscripts, but also from pre-Nikon Moscow printed editions. Extracts from books published in the time of Patriarch Iosif, the content of which should be characterized as the creative heritage of the Kiev Metropolis, adapted for the Russian reader, became fundamental. Turning to the analysis of church policy in the first half of the 17th century allowed to conclude that the Church, solving the problem of religious education of the population, introduced these texts into circulation. Consequently, opponents of church reform had reason to use them by description of the Russian tradition.