Ethical imperatives in historicist perspective: was Jesus Navis immoral?

The present article is dedicated to 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, place in Sacred history and some other features. The author considers in the article the following question: may 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 don’t know the historical context well. It is also shown that this approach allows to resolve yet another old problem: that of an accurate representation of the past without full exclusion of evaluative statements.The present article is dedicated to 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, place in Sacred history and some other features. The author considers in the article the following question: may 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 don’t know the historical context well. It is also shown that this approach allows to resolve yet another old problem: that of an accurate representation of the past without full exclusion of evaluative statements.