Bible – RCS

Jouko Talonen Professor (emeritus), Doctor of Τheology University of Helsinki, Faculty of Theology (Ulrikankuja 6 B 41, Vantaa, Suomi, 01400)
jouko.talonen@helsinki.fi

Talonen J. Status and Development of the Evangelical Lutheran Church in Latvia from 1918 to 2018. An Outline, Religiya. Tserkov’. Obshchestvo. Issledovaniya i publikatsii po teologii i religii [Religion. Church. Society: Research and publications in the field of theology and religious studies], Saint-Petersburg, 2023, vol. 12, pp. 232–276.

doi: 10.24412/2308-0698-2023-12-232-276

Language: Russian

The history of the Evangelical Lutheran Church of Latvia (ELCL) from 1918 to 2018 is analysed. During the first period of independence (1918– 1940), the ELCL was the church of the majority of the population (55–57%). Quite positive was the period of the Kārlis Ulmanis’s rule. In Soviet Latvia in 1940–1941 and 1944–1987, the church was a persecuted and marginalized faith community. Efforts of Gustavs Turs (1890–1973), the «Red Archbishop», didn’t prevent the church decline. In 1987 the church had only 25,000 active members (about 1% of the population of the Soviet Republic). However, the straightforward estimation of the statistics if troublesome.
In the last years of communism, the church received new operational freedoms from the end of the 1980s onward. After Latvia became independent, the church’s activities continued to develop. However, there was no return to the National Church. However, the ELCL’s forms of work became more and more versatile starting in the 1980s. The Church’s theological profile has been conservative. This has been seen, among other things, in its solid relationship with the Lutheran Church-Missouri Synod in America, and in the fact that the church has stopped ordaining women.

Key words: Eucharist, liturgy, reform, Bible, righteousness, Trinity

URL: //rcs-almanac.ru/en/en-talonen-2023/

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Cyrill Andreevich von Buettner Senior lecturer, Faculty of Philology Saint-Petersburg State University (Universitetskaya nabereuzhnaya, dom 11, Saint-Petersburg, Russia, 199034), kirvonbuettner@gmail.com

Buettner С. A., von. Servant Songs: Textual Witnesses, Religiya. Tserkov’. Obshchestvo. Issledovaniya i publikatsii po teologii i religii [Religion. Church. Society: Research and publications in the field of theology and religious studies], Saint-Petersburg, 2015, vol. 4, pp. 314–320.

doi: 10.24411/2308-0698-2015-00016

Language: Russian

The following article looks over the textual witnesses from the co-called Servant songs. This name is used in Bible studies to refer to four texts from the Book of Isaiah (Isa 42:1–4; 49:1–6; 50:4–9; 52:13–53:12), which according to researchers was written in the Neo-Babylonian or early Persian era (6^th or 5^th centuries BCE). These texts are important for the Christian tradition since theologians saw them as prophecies about the death and resurrection of Jesus (especially in the case of Isa 53). The article particularly examines the textual witnesses written in Hebrew: scrolls that were found in the 1^st (1QIsa^a and 1QIsa^b) and the 4^th (4QIsa^b, 4QIsa^c, 4QIsa^dand 4QIsa^h) Qumran caves as well as the text of the medieval Masoretic Bible (MT). Furthermore, the ancient translations of the Bible from Hebrew, i. e. the Greek translation of the Septuagint, Theodotion, Aquila and Symmachus, the Aramaic translation of Targum Jonathan, the Syriac translation of the Peshitta and the Latin translation of the Vulgate are also studied. The article gives a basic description of their texts. Information about the dating of the textual witnesses, the level of preservation, most important manuscripts, critical editions of the text as well as a list of the major publications regarding the description of these sources are also given in the article.

Key words: Bible, Book of Isaiah, Servant Songs

URL: //rcs-almanac.ru/buettner-2015-en/