In this atmosphere of fierce religious disputes, political aspirations and intense expectation of the coming of the Messiah, Jesus spoke from the Galilean city of Nazareth. Galilee was the Northern region of Palestine, in which along with the Jews lived many pagans, ie neiudeyev, area mainly peasant, far from the violent disputes that raged in Jerusalem. There Jesus began his sermon, gathering around him a small number of his disciples. They were free men who earned their living by their own labor. His first disciples, according to legend, were the fishermen of lake Tiberias. At one point, Jesus became close to John by bathing, like John’s disciples, in the waters of the Jordan, but in General his activities were somewhat different. In Galilee his preaching met with little response, and he soon moved with his disciples to Jerusalem, where he took an active part in the religious debates there. The nobles and scribes of Jerusalem treated the natives of the Northern outskirts of the country with contempt, but the active preaching of Jesus soon drew attention to him.

Jesus declared himself (or agreed to be declared) the Messiah, the Savior, the Son of God. However, he preferred to call himself the Son of man. However, in the very common Apocalypses of the time, he was seen as a superhuman and even super-angelic person, partaking directly of God and his wisdom and existing from time immemorial, i.e. essentially as the Messiah. So the adoption of this name meant the recognition of his Messianic essence. However, Jesus spoke not for national liberation, but for the moral transformation of man, his inner liberation, the establishment of a personal connection with the all-good and loving God. According to him, not all Jews will be saved, but only those who believe in his mission-they are poor in spirit and hungry for truth, meek and merciful, sincere and peacemakers. These men are to be righteous, not by the outward righteousness of the Pharisees, but by the purity of their souls. The righteous should not offend anyone by action or even by thought, live in peace with all people, give property to the poor, do not commit adultery either in deed or in thought, do not resist evil, love enemies, be at peace with themselves, the world and God, and most importantly – be pure in soul. And that gives people real freedom. Thus, Jesus shifted the center of gravity from the outer world to the inner world of man, and the object of liberation was not an ethnic or political group, a people, a nation, but a specific human person. At the same time, as Jesus believed, the more humiliated a person is, the poorer, the lower position he occupies in society, the greater his chances of salvation. The ethical aspects are especially important in his sermon. Love for God and neighbor becomes the most important feature of a true believer. Jesus did not deny the Torah or the prophets, and even emphasized his loyalty to these foundations of the Jewish faith, but, like many reformers, he contrasted the letter and spirit of the biblical commandments, emphasizing the fulfillment of the spirit sometimes to the obvious detriment of their literal requirements. Denying strict adherence to external rituals, Jesus focused on moral self-improvement and, considering it the most important, considered possible close communication with such people, which the prevailing morality considered unclean, including prostitutes and representatives of the Roman authorities. This contrasted Jesus and his disciples with the Pharisees and the bulk of the Jews who supported the Pharisees. It was with the Pharisees that Jesus had to argue most of the time, because the high-ranking Sadducees did not condescend to argue with some poor prophet from faraway Galilee. A number of provisions of his sermon were also directed against the Essenes, despite their considerable ideological affinity.

Jesus not only proclaimed certain moral and religious norms, the observance of which was, according to him, a condition of salvation, but also asserted the proximity of salvation itself. The center of his preaching was the Kingdom of God — it is necessary to repent of their sins and follow all the commandments that Jesus proclaimed. The sign of the coming of this Kingdom will be various terrible signs, after which the angels will make the last judgment, in which the pure souls will be forever in Paradise, and sinners will also burn forever in hell (which he compared to the valley of Hell, located to the West of Jerusalem, where at one time sacrifices were offered by burning). The Kingdom of God will come in the lifetime of the existing generation, but on condition that they fulfill the commandments of love for God and other people, living, not formal faith, observance of moral purity. To do this, a person can and should give up everything that binds him to the earthly life-from family, property, old work, connections and contacts outside the circle of true believers. In this, the community of Jesus was similar to the EU – SEI. But if the Essenes, particularly the Qumranites, carefully guarded their views from outsiders and even punished those who divulged their secrets, then Jesus and his supporters, on the contrary, like John, not only openly proclaimed the tenets of their faith, but also sought to draw as many people as possible to the path of true, as they imagined, salvation.