The Old and New Testaments on the pages of the “Foma” magazine. From mutual legitimization to contrast

Abstract

The article is devoted to the relationship between the Old and New Testaments is Foma magazine, an Orthodox publication working at the interface of religious and traditional media. The mediatization of religion, which created new space for open discussions on religious issues, led to the actualization of topics that seemed previously studied. However, when being discussed in the mediated space, such issues as, for example, the intertextuality of the Old and New Testaments are presented in a new way. The research is based on an analysis of the material from ten September issues of the Foma magazine. Based on the Essex school of discourse analysis, developed by E. Laclau and Ch. Mouffe, the nodal points of discourse on the Old Testament and the general semantic field in which the Old and New Testaments are mentioned together, working to strengthen given argument, legitimizing the New Testament are revealed. This semantic field touches upon the foundations of Christianity, love, the coming and the prophecies of the Messiah. Equivalence chains are also considered – key topics that are consistently associated with one of the texts and have an oppositional pair for the second text, allowing the authors of articles in the magazine to draw a line between the practices of the Old and New Testaments, contrasting them. In the system of these expanded oppositions, a boundary is drawn between several religious communities, which makes it possible to clarify the religious roots of the perception of the “other”, without tracing the commercialization of this distinction, which is often characteristic of the media space and its struggle for an audience.