This article examines the New Testament teaching about man in the authentic epistles of Paul the Apostle. In particular, it studies the anthropological phenomenon of conscience as one of the important ethical terms in Christian worldview. In spite of the fact that this topic has been thoroughly investigated by Western biblical science, Russian theological environment has not been paying it sufficient attention. Therefore, from the position of theological and philological research within the framework of the historical and cultural approach, the article dwells on conscience expressed by Paul the Apostle through the term συνείδησις in the epistles to the Corinthians and the Romans, whose authorship as St. Paul’s is unquestioned by modern biblical studies. The research shows that Paul the Apostle used the term συνείδησις in a sense related to human awareness, without any explicit emphasis on morality as in the works by Stoic philosophers. For St. Paul, the term συνείδησις in a general sense means an autonomous anthropological instance of a person’s judgеment/assessment of his/her own behaviour in relation to the norms, laws and rules adopted by him/her. However, depending on the historical circumstances in the life of Christian communities, Paul the Apostle gave this term his own semantic connotations. According to this research, in the text of the Pauline epistles συνείδησις appears not only as a general anthropological phenomenon, but also as an independent (autonomous) personified witness to the truth, as an instance that checks the correspondence between the declared value norms in the mind and the person’s own behaviour. This instance reflects the mental activity of a conscious human as a person in any cultural and historical epoch regardless of his/her religious preferences.
A cultural turn in New Testament studies?
