За Божия промисъл в една новобългарска реплика на средновековната легенда за Юда Искариотски
About God's Providence in a Modern Bulgarian Paraphrase of the Medieval Legend about Judas Iscariot

Summary/Abstract: The paper raises the question of the functioning of Biblical (Christian) concepts in the context of their secular reduction in different cultural and philosophical traditions in modern times. The object of the study is the didactic booklet “Curious tale of the villainous and bloody life of Judas Iscariot” of Michael Tashev (1907), which is actually a modern Bulgarian version of the apocryphal story about the life of Judas before his meeting with Jesus known through the Latin collection Legenda aurea of Jacob de Voragine once popular in Europe. The aim of the expositions: first – to establish the possible sources of the story, secondly - to trace the development of the main idea of God's providence (πρόνοια), which was reinterpreted under the influence of Enlightenment, influencing Bulgarian culture in the second half of the XlXth century. The analysis of the text shows that the idea of God's providence changes its meaning, due to the crossing of the three fundamental, but in this case simplified worldview systems competing in Europe: the Judeo-Christian, Gnostic (esoteric), and the Enlightenment (rationalistic) one. As a result, the Biblical idea is out of its original horizon of meaning as a heterodox form for expressing the Gnostic idea of the determinism.

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