The Gospel is first of all a story, but a story about the God-Man. Precisely because this is a story and historical evidence, there is a certain understatement in it. The Gospel requires explanation and disclosure. For faith is not exhausted by memory, but is fulfilled only in the creative and living assimilation of what has been seen and learned, in living recognition and communion with Christ. The historical image of the God-man, born on earth, living and teaching among people – such is the content of the Gospel story, and therein lies its mysterious originality. In the Gospel is given an integral and unified image – in our perception it very often doubles and disintegrates, just as it may have doubled in the consciousness of those who contemplated Christ Himself with sensual eyes – until the heart was seen by faith. In the Gospels, everything speaks of One; and to the same belongs the majestic beginning of the Fourth, the "spiritual" Gospel, and all the narratives of humiliation, sorrows, deprivations, sufferings, and death. And only he who grasps this integral and living unity with a single glance will understand the Gospel to the end and see exactly what their scribes wrote in the Gospels.

This is a living memory of the past, what happened, but not the past.

The Gospel is the story and record of eyewitnesses, the outline of an image imprinted and preserved in memory. If not all the four Evangelists were, in the proper and precise sense of the word, self-witnesses of the earthly life of the Saviour, then even those who were not, relied precisely on the story and memory of the self-witnesses. According to ancient testimony (Papias of Hierapolis, II century), the Evangelist Mark, "Peter's interpreter", in his narration relied precisely on the stories and sermons of St. Paul. Peter, although "he himself did not listen to the Lord and did not accompany him." The Evangelist Luke directly refers to "eyewitnesses": "Since many have already begun to compose narratives of events that are completely known among us, as those who were eyewitnesses and ministers of the Word from the very beginning have handed down to us, it has been decided that I, too, after a careful examination of everything from the beginning, should describe it in order" (Luke I. 1-3)... And at the same time, the Gospel in its fourfold composition is a record of the apostolic preaching - the written Gospel was preceded by the "gospel", the oral gospel. In this sense, the Gospel is the apostolic witness to Christ, the "memories of the apostles" or "memorial records," as St. Justin Martyr (second century) expressed it about the Gospels. In a sense, the Gospel is already an apostolic preaching, in which it is written, according to the direct testimony of the Evangelist John himself, not all that "Jesus did," and, of course, not all that the apostolic memory preserved (cf. Io. XXI. 25; TWENTIETH. 30). It was not the task of the Evangelists to give a complete historical account of the life of Christ, as it were, day by year. They drew His image and narrated Him in order to describe His face. This is not a chronicle, but a gospel.

The pictorial task did not require either chronicle rigor or chronicle completeness. The image does not lose its historical character and realism from this. The same must be said about the transmission and reproduction of the Savior's conversations and words. The Gospel can be called a historical icon, and moreover, it is an icon of the God-Man. To be more precise, four icons are a kind of four-shaped icon. And these four icons or images do not fully coincide with each other - even with a superficial observation it is not difficult to notice the "disagreements of the Evangelists". But it is necessary to remember how Christian antiquity treated them: it never tried or tried to erase or at least mitigate these visible "contradictions"; The history of the Gospel text knows nothing of such "biased corrections."

The Gospel images agree and coincide in the identity of the depicted, and the unity of the Divine-human face. And it must be added that the experience of the Gospel code was not successful in the Church, although very early such an experiment was made – to compile a single sequential story "by four" (the so-called Diatessaron of Tatiana, second half of the second century). The historical image of Christ is preserved in the Church in four reflections. And in all there is one Person, one Face.

The Gospel is the history of the earthly life of Man, who was not only a man.

So it was. In the multiplicity of individual memories, an unforgettable image of Jesus Christ comes to life. The earthly plane of the Gospel history is more than once cut through and permeated by the heavenly. To be more precise, it is always mysteriously transparent, the Divine reality always shines through historical evidence. True, not everyone can see it, just as they did not see it then... On the other hand, unbelievers and doubters are confused by this, and they are deterred by the historical authenticity of the Gospel story and description. It seems to them that something that is so unlike ordinary reality cannot be filmed or copied from nature. Hence the temptation to "correct" the Gospel image and tell it, to make it more ordinary. This is reflected in the hidden and biased denial of the Gospel miracle and the mystery of the Gospel, the mystery and miracle of God-manhood. No arguments can break such a denial, since it also rebels against the evidence of the Gospel. Here in the Gospel the preconceived opinion is confronted with a fact which it does not want to see and acknowledge, and therefore simply denies its validity as impossibility.

But the Gospel is not the history of man. And yet, nevertheless, a story, a description of what happened. There was something special and unprecedented, one and only: God appeared in the flesh, and in the form of a man was found... And therefore the Gospel is both the Gospel of the Son of God and the story of the Son of David. In the life of the God-Man one should expect in advance something unusual, unlike and different only from the life of people, to foresee the rupture and removal of ordinary human boundaries. Doubt opposes the Gospel evidence only with a preconceived denial of the possibility of God-manhood and the Incarnation of God in general.

With such a dissection of the Gospel story, its historical authenticity is indeed blurred, lost, for it is integral, for Christ was not a simple man. The story of Jesus of Nazareth, told within the boundaries of one humanity, is not history at all, but fiction, because it does not correspond to the depicted reality.

If Christ, depicted in the Gospel, is depicted as God, He was not a man, He did not exist at all in history, in earthly reality... Such a "mythological" conclusion is just as biased and vicious as the opposite extreme of "pure historicism": if man, then not God. These are two opposite, but conjugated, denials of the mystery of the Gospel, or, better said, of the Gospel fact. A biased denial of reality for the sake of a pretended impossibility... Either God or man... This false opposition is opposed by the reality of the Gospel: both God and man... The word was flesh...

You can break the Gospel image, and it will crumble into mortal fragments. But we must remember: the Gospel is an icon of the God-Man. Not a myth, and not a "pure story". Thus it was written, for so it was, was that which was described by the Evangelists. The seen and recognized face of the God-Man is inscribed. In the radiance of Divine dignity, human traits do not disappear or blur. They retain all their clarity and completeness. This is the mysterious originality of the Gospel image, which conveys the originality of the most miraculous face of Christ. The fullness of mankind - that is why Christ could be taken for "only a man", for the signs of the divinity are not intelligible to everyone. For others, they were a reason for bitter temptation. "The scribes who came down from Jerusalem said that He had Beelzebub, and that He cast out demons by the power of the prince of demons." And even "His neighbors" wanted to take Him, for they said that He had lost His temper (Mark 3:22, 21 et seq.: Matt. 9:34; Luke 11:15 et seq. John 8:48). "And when he came into his own country, he taught them in their synagogue, so that they were amazed, and said, 'Whence hath he such wisdom and power?' Is He not the son of carpenters? Is not His mother called Mary, and His brothers James and Josiah and Simon and Judas? and are not His sisters all among us? Where did He get all this? And they were offended because of him" (Matt. 13:54-57; Mk. 6:2-3)... From the Gospel we know that almost everyone took Jesus for a mere man – and not only His enemies, the scribes and elders, the bishops, Herod and Pilate, but also His neighbors and disciples – until the time comes... The fullness of humanity – hence the indisputable clarity and vividness of the pictorial drawing in the Gospel. The Gospel is full of living people, sketched in the fullness of their personal originality, which is often given to understand and feel in a few words. The faces of the Gospel appear before us so clearly and vividly that only from nature, from reality, can such an image be removed. And the image of Zechariah and the Forerunner, and the image of the Most-Pure Virgin, and the images of the often nameless believers and healed who flowed to Jesus - all of them bear in themselves a testimony to their authenticity, to their life reality. They are taken from life. Of course, the very clarity and figurativeness of the story does not fully ensure its historical authenticity. But in the Gospel story there is something more than just living visualization. There is a disinterested, free spontaneity of the story, which directly testifies to its reality. It is difficult to prove this, but it is even more difficult to doubt it, unless there is a preconceived will to doubt. It is directly felt that all the events of the Gospel are told from a living memory and a living impression. To give examples would be to retell the entire Four Gospels. A few recollections are enough. We have already mentioned Christ's sojourn in Nazareth, the temptation and doubt of His neighbors. More than once in the Gospel it is told about the perplexities and doubts of His disciples. Vivid realism captures the Lord's conversation on the way to the lands of Caesarea Philippi, the solemn confession and the senseless rebuke of St. Paul. Peter (Matthew 15:13-23; Mark 8:27-33). Or the story of how the mother of the Zebedee sons came to Jesus to ask Him to let them sit next to Him in the glory of His Kingdom (Matthew 20:20-24; Mark 10:35-41). Or the story of the resurrection of Lazarus (John 11:1-46). The last days of the Lord are described in undeniable realistic detail. "A certain young man, wrapped in a veil over his naked body, followed Him; and the soldiers seized him. But he left the veil and fled naked from them" (Mark 14:51-52). "And they compelled a certain Simon of Cyrene, the father of Alexander and Rufus, who was passing by from the field, to bear his cross" (Mark 15:21; Matthew 27:32; Luke 23:26). "And Mary Magdalene and Mary Josiah looked where they laid Him" (Mark 15:47; Matthew 27:61). All these small touches are appropriate only in the historical narrative, in the "memorable records" of eyewitnesses. The direct self-testimony of the Gospel stories is supported by certain realistic external features, names, nicknames, and names of cities. "After these things he went through the cities and villages, preaching and preaching the gospel of the kingdom of God, and with him the twelve, and certain women, whom he had healed of evil spirits and diseases: Mary, who was called Magdalene, from whom came seven demons, and Joanna, the wife of Chuza, Herod's steward, and Susanna, and many others who served him in their name" (Luke 8:1-3).

Of course, all this concerns the external frame, and the inner content and the very image of Christ exceeds this level and this frame. And the historical and realistic character of the Gospel story is all the more pronounced. The same must be said of Christ's speeches. He spoke like a Jew, in the language and images of his time and people. His words have a bright historical flavor. In terms of content and meaning, His preaching, of course, exceeded even the Old Testament measure; it confused not only the blind guardians of the letter of the law, but also such pious "teachers of Israel" as Nicodemus, and at the same time it contained the fulfillment of the Law and the prophets. In a sense, Jesus himself was one of the teachers of Israel. And this feature is in His Gospel image, of course, not only that. In a sense, the entire Gospel can be called a historical story from the life of the Jewish people. This is a half-truth that can easily degenerate into dangerous lies and deception. But this feature is also part of the Gospel truth. Christ submitted to the Law, lived according to the Law, and on the eve of His death on the Cross celebrated the Paschal Supper with His disciples according to the Law.

And not flesh and blood, but the Heavenly Father revealed that He is the Son of the living God, Ap. Peter (Matt. 16:16-17). He was not only a man and not only the Messiah, but also God. But not only by God, but also by man. "The Word was made flesh, and dwelt in us..." (John 1:14). According to ancient tradition, the Fourth Gospel was written last, in addition to and as if in the interpretation of the first three. This is a "spiritual" gospel, in contrast to the "carnal" narratives of the synoptics. In reality, of course, all the Gospels are "spiritual," and there is not a single "carnal" gospels. And the Gospel of Mark is "the Gospel of Jesus Christ, the Son of God" (Mark 1:1). At the same time, the "spiritual" contemplation of the Evangelist John unfolds in the clear boundaries of concrete history, and the historical, Jewish coloring of the depiction in the Fourth Gospel is perhaps even sharper and brighter than that of the synoptics. Not a single Gospel speaks of "man alone" and not only of God, but everywhere of the God-man. In all of them, earthly life is vividly and realistically described and depicted, in the historical flesh of which the Divine glory, truth, and the path to life were revealed. And it was not just revealed or manifested, but united in an indissoluble and perfect unity. "The Word was flesh"... It is about this fact, event, and at the same time the miracle and mystery that the Gospels narrate. In them it is pictorially represented and only partially called by the word that. which the Church later expressed in dogmatic definitions.

Otherwise, it is impossible to define the essence and content of the apostolic gospel – the historical testimony of the God-Man Christ. From a certain point of view, the whole meaning of the Gospel is in its historicism, in the indication of a single and singular event, of the one and only, living and historical person of Christ. From the very beginning, all the emphasis was on historicity. The whole New Testament breathes historical pathos - it was and came true... But this is not the historicity of a closed and enclosed in itself, only an earthly and natural flow of events. This is a story about the past and what happened, and not a figurative or symbolic, but a realistic story. For it was and happened – the meeting of heaven and earth, God and man. Meeting and connecting... "The Word was flesh"...