Preface to the First Edition

The inquisitive mind of a person who wants to consciously relate to himself and to the world around him has always asked himself the questions: where does this world come from? Who controls it? What is man? Why does he live and how should he live?.. But all attempts to solve these questions have ended and are ending in complete failure, and the striving for truth still remains unsatisfied in anyone who does not turn to the only source of truth – the teaching of our Lord Jesus Christ – for their solution.

It is sad that many of the educated people of our century, knowing the names of almost all the pagan gods and the scandalous tales about their love affairs, knowing the life and deeds of the kings and philosophers of ancient Greece and Rome, getting acquainted with a special love for the fruits of foreign atheistic literature, do not know the Gospel, do not bother to read it consciously.

As if to justify their inattention and indifference to the Gospel, such people often say that it contains only an ideal to which one should strive, but an unattainable ideal, since the means proposed for this are beyond the power of man, and that in general much in it is vague and incomprehensible.

People who spoke in this way either did not read the Gospel at all, or read it superficially, thoughtlessly; otherwise they would not repeat these hackneyed phrases. True, a thoughtful, conscious reading of the Gospels in the form in which they were written by the Holy Evangelists requires a lot of time and some preparation from the reader of our time, and this is explained by the fact that:

1) none of them contains a complete exposition of the teaching of Jesus Christ, which in all its greatness is revealed only when one Gospel is supplemented by another;

2) the sequence of events in the earthly life of Jesus Christ, especially the time of His preaching and miracles, can also be deduced only from the totality of all four Gospels, and