Son of Man

Сын Человеческий (Son of Man), Men’s life of Christ, was published in Brussels in 1968 or 1969 under the pseudonym E. Svetlov and circulated in the Soviet Union in typescript. Written for readers who had never opened a Gospel, it narrates the earthly life of Jesus in continuous prose against a historical and geographical background, with appended discussions of the sources and of the reliability of the Gospels. It became one of the most widely read Russian religious books of the late Soviet period — and, because of its method, one of the most criticized.

Tradition: Russian Orthodox (Moscow Patriarchate)

The Book and Its Publication

The Moscow Patriarchate’s own Orthodox Encyclopedia describes Son of Man accurately and without hostility as a literary and historical reconstruction of the earthly life of Christ, first published in Brussels under a pseudonym (Православная энциклопедия, art. “Мень Александр Владимирович”). The publisher was “Zhizn s Bogom” (Life with God), the Russian-language house in Brussels through which most of Men’s work reached print, and the pseudonym was E. Svetlov (Russian Wikipedia, art. “Мень”; English Wikipedia, art. “Alexander Men”).

[Disputed: the date of the first edition. The Orthodox Encyclopedia and Randall Poole’s account give 1968; the English Wikipedia article and several bibliographies give 1969; the book is also counted as the seventh volume of the In Search of the Way, the Truth and the Life series, whose six numbered volumes appeared 1970–1983, which further complicates the numbering. The range 1968–1969 is given here; the discrepancy is a bibliographical one and affects nothing of substance.]

An English translation by Samuel Brown was published by Oakwood Publications in 1998.

The Composition

Men worked on this book across most of his adult life, returning to it and revising it repeatedly; the version that circulated most widely in the 1970s and 1980s was not identical to the one he was still emending shortly before his death (Yves Hamant, Alexander Men, ch. 3; Wallace L. Daniel, Russia’s Uncommon Prophet, ch. 4). It is therefore not a single-sitting book but the sediment of decades of preaching, catechizing, and answering the same questions from the same kind of visitor.

That fact explains its most obvious feature: it is written for someone who knows nothing. It supplies the geography, the Roman and Herodian political background, the religious parties of first-century Judaea, the shape of the Temple cult — everything that a Christian culture normally supplies without effort and that Soviet readers had been systematically denied. The Gospel narrative is then told as a continuous story against that background.

The Method, and What Follows from It

Men’s method in Son of Man is the source of both its reach and the criticism of it.

He narrates rather than expounds. The book is not a dogmatic treatise or a patristic commentary; it is a narrative life of Christ in the modern genre. The genre itself has a fraught history — Ernest Renan’s Vie de Jésus (1863) is its notorious ancestor, and Russian religious writers had reason to be wary of it. Men was writing knowingly within a form associated with rationalist reduction, and turning it to the opposite purpose.

He uses historical and critical scholarship openly. Men read and cited Western biblical scholarship, discussed source questions, and treated the historical setting of the Gospels as something to be investigated. He appended to the book discussions of the sources, of the historicity of Christ, and of the composition of the Gospels. Bishop Seraphim Sigrist, defending him, has pointed out that Men’s engagement with biblical criticism and with evolution was of a kind common in Orthodox seminaries and not in itself unusual (Seraphim Sigrist, in the exchange summarized in “Aleksandr Men: Current Criticism and Defense,” East–West Church and Ministry Report).

His Christology is high. This is the point at which his defenders are most emphatic. Sigrist’s response to the accusations of Arianism and the rest is that the alleged heresies “are not” in the actual text, which “evidences a very strong Christology” (Sigrist, in “Aleksandr Men: Current Criticism and Defense”). Men’s critics have replied that his re-phrasings of scriptural material tend to soften the divine claim — the accusation, made in its harshest form by the writer publishing as Archbishop Sergei Antiminsov, is that Men “arbitrarily changed the wording and meaning of Scripture, thus diminishing the divinity of Christ,” and that he set aside biblical miracle and eschatology (as summarized in “Aleksandr Men: Current Criticism and Defense”). [Disputed: the identity of “Archbishop Sergei Antiminsov” is not established in the accessible sources; the name appears in the polemical literature attached to the sharpest critique of Men and may be a pen-name. The charges are reported here as charges, with their source named as it presents itself.]

The disagreement is not adjudicated in this collection. What can be said neutrally is that the charge and the defence are both claims about the same text, that the text is available in Russian and in English, and that any reader who wishes to weigh them can do so directly — which is the appropriate outcome for a §4.2 dispute (see The Charges and the Defence).

Why This Book Reached So Many

Three reasons, and they are worth separating from any judgment about its theology.

It answered the actual question. A Soviet reader in 1975 who began to suspect that materialism was not the whole story did not first need a treatise on the essence and energies. He needed to know whether Jesus of Nazareth existed, what he said, and whether the documents were worth anything. Son of Man addresses exactly those questions and in that order.

It was readable. Men wrote clear, unfussy, narrative Russian, without the archaizing register that much Russian religious writing adopts. Readers formed on Soviet secular prose could read him without a dictionary of Church Slavonic.

It was available. Circulating as typescript, it was passed hand to hand precisely because it could not be bought; samizdat distribution selects hard for readability, since each copy costs someone nights at a typewriter. The reported reach of Men’s samizdat writings — including, according to the scholarly literature, into the hands of regional Communist Party officials — is itself evidence about the book’s usability (Randall A. Poole, “Fr. Alexander Men and the Traditions of Russian Religious Thought,” Northwestern University Forum, 2026).

The Book in the Whole Corpus

Son of Man is the keystone but not the whole arch. It sits at the end of a series that Men designed as a single argument: the six volumes of In Search of the Way, the Truth and the Life trace the religious history of humanity from its origins through the great non-Christian traditions to the prophets of Israel and the threshold of the New Testament, and Son of Man is where that history arrives (see In Search of the Way and the Pseudonymous Press). Read on its own it is a life of Christ; read in its place it is the conclusion of a universal history, and Men intended the second reading.

That design is precisely what his critics find dangerous — a Christ presented as the fulfilment of a history that includes the Bhagavad Gita and the Buddha — and precisely what his defenders find compelling. Both are reading the structure correctly.

See Also

References

  • Men, Alexander [as E. Svetlov]. Сын Человеческий [Son of Man]. Brussels: “Zhizn s Bogom.” [Disputed: 1968 per the Orthodox Encyclopedia and Poole; 1969 per the English Wikipedia article and several bibliographies.] English trans. Samuel Brown, Oakwood Publications, 1998.
  • Православная энциклопедия [Orthodox Encyclopedia], art. “Мень Александр Владимирович” (pravenc.ru/text/2562996.html). (“A literary-historical reconstruction of Christ’s earthly life,” first published in Brussels under a pseudonym; samizdat circulation in the USSR.)
  • “Aleksandr Men: Current Criticism and Defense.” East–West Church and Ministry Report (eastwestreport.org/articles/ew07302.htm). (The charges attributed to “Archbishop Sergei Antiminsov,” Feliks Karelin and Deacon Andrei Kuraev, and Bishop Seraphim Sigrist’s defence, including the judgment that the text “evidences a very strong Christology.”)
  • Poole, Randall A. “Fr. Alexander Men and the Traditions of Russian Religious Thought.” Northwestern University Forum in Russian Philosophy, Literature, and Religious Thought, 2026. (The Son of Man, Brussels 1968; samizdat circulation reaching regional party officials.)
  • Hamant, Yves. Alexander Men: A Witness for Contemporary Russia (A Man for Our Times). Trans. Steven Bigham. Oakwood Publications, 1995.
  • Daniel, Wallace L. Russia’s Uncommon Prophet: Father Aleksandr Men and His Times. DeKalb, IL: Northern Illinois University Press, 2016.
  • Renan, Ernest. Vie de Jésus. Paris, 1863. (The ancestor of the modern genre in which Men was writing, and the reason for Russian wariness of it.)