But all the more inevitable are differences in readings when it comes to the Bible, a book from which we are so far removed both in its spiritual level and in its historical and cultural environment. Therefore, whoever speaks of the Scriptures, his speech tells us no less about the Scriptures than about the Gospel. The choice of commented passages and the comment itself, the tone of the conversation, and the final conclusions all depend on the person's experience and culture. And the fact that we have not one Gospel, but four, and they are called "the Gospel according to..." – this in itself suggests that any retelling of the Good News of Christ is inevitably interpretive. One can even say with great intensity: if someone could read the Gospel in its entirety every day, then he would read a different book every day, for he himself changes, including under the influence of reading the inspired text (on this is based the Church's requirement of regular reading of the Scriptures).

But people listen credulously to preachers who declare: "We preach only the Gospel. We carry a simple and true understanding of the gospel. We live only and strictly according to the Gospel. Open your eyes, take in your hands the Gospel that we will give you, and read. We will give you obvious comments, and you will see that the Orthodox have simply distorted the words of the Gospel..."

These preachers are called Protestants.

Everything that a person touches, he makes "his own", he imposes on everything the inevitable imprint of his life and spiritual experience, he understands everything in his own measure.

Just as man's perception of the world is inevitably subjective, so is man's perception of the biblical text inevitable. However, only a philosophically ill-mannered mind will see in this circumstance a pretext for radical skepticism and relativism. Yes, we cognize the non-human world in a human way. But still, we learn. Yes, we perceive the Word of God in a human way, but we still perceive it. Theology knows the ways to extinguish the background noise of our all-too-human interpretations in order to cleanse them of the Purpose that the Revealing One Himself put into His word.

Since I am not writing a textbook on hermeneutics (the art of interpreting Scripture), I will only point out the most obvious ways to protect the Text from human bias.

The first of them is to remember that we are working with books that have come down to us in a multitude of contradictory manuscripts. This is very important and very joyful: God has entrusted His message to the rivers of human history. He did not throw a book carved on a diamond to us. He allowed His word to be carried across the earth and through the ages by human hands. It seems that everything that is handed to people is unreliable. But the Gospel was not lost[2].

And yet the differences are inevitable and irremovable in the handwritten transmission of the text). Of course, these are mainly misprints or involuntary changes in the text (introduction into the text of linguistic features characteristic of a given area and century). But there are some discrepancies that change the theological meaning of the whole phrase, and in these cases the choice between different manuscripts is a semantic interpretation. For example, in some manuscripts of Heb. 2:9 reads as "That by the grace (χαριτι) of God, He may taste death for all." In others, instead of χαριτι, there is χωρις: "far off." And then it turns out that Christ tasted death "far from God", "outside of God" (and this apostolic verse brings to mind the cry of the Savior on Golgotha: "My God, why hast Thou forsaken Me?!") [3]. He, Jesus, alone was forsaken by God, so that none of us would be left alone with death anymore...

Another example of a variant reading is Christ's prayer at the Last Supper: "Holy Father! keep them in Thy name, those whom Thou hast given Me!" (John 17:11, cf. 17:12). In the Synodal Russian translation, these words are understood by the translators as the transfer of the apostles from the Father to the Son. However, a number of manuscripts, on which some modern translations of the Gospel are based, do not contain the reading "given" (ους δε0δωκα0ς; indeed, this phrase can only refer to the disciples), but "given" ( δεδωκας, i.e. the singular neuter gender), and in this writing Christ speaks precisely of the fact that the Father gave His name to the Son: "Holy Father! keep them in Thy name, which Thou hast given Me!" Contextually more logical is the translation that speaks of the transfer of the name of the Father to the Son: after all, in Phil. 2:9-11 the Apostle says that "God <... > gave Him a name that is above every name, that at the name of Jesus every knee should bow, in heaven, on earth, and under the earth, and every tongue should confess that the Lord Jesus Christ is to the glory of God the Father"[5]. The son "hath inherited a most glorious name" (see Heb. 1:4). Such reading destroys all the constructions of Jehovah's Witnesses, for it turns out that it was His Name, that is, the name of Jehovah, that the Father gave to the Son.

In the oldest manuscripts of Scripture there are no word splits, no punctuation marks, and no capital letters. For example, how to read: "The voice of one crying in the wilderness: Prepare ye the way of the Lord" (Matt. 3:3) or "The voice of one crying: In the wilderness, prepare ye the way of the Lord" (Isaiah 40:3)[6]? In the first case, we hear a man who shouts from the desert, far from the cities, to the townspeople: "Hey, you, there, in the cities! Get ready: the Lord is coming!" In the second case, it is a voice that resounds in the city square and calls to come out of the cities, from the receptacles of sin and vulgarity, and in the desert, naked from the dilapidated garments of culture, to meet the Creator of the worlds. Depending on the location of the punctuation mark, the meaning changes quite significantly...

Where do I write a capital letter? To capitalize or not to capitalize Pauline's verse: "Our gospel <... > closed <... > for unbelievers, whose minds have been blinded by the God of this world" (2 Corinthians 4:3-4)? The Synodal translation believes that the "god of this world" is Satan. (And he does this to the great joy of the Jehovah's Witnesses, who thereby get an example of the application of the word "God" to a being who is not a god, and draw their own conclusion: since the fallen angel is called God, then all the more so the calling of Christ God does not mean that He really is God.) And at the end of the second century, St. Irenaeus of Lyons read as follows: "Among the unbelievers of this world, God has blinded the minds" (Against Heresies, 3, 7, 1).

Secondly, we should not forget that we work mostly with Bible translations. Protestants, like all other Christians, do not preach the Gospel in ancient Greek or ancient Greeks. This means that they are based on some translations.

Translators could deal with different manuscripts, that is, with different versions of the original source (which is especially important for the study of the history of the Old Testament text): "If the edition of the Seventy (Septuagint) had remained pure and in the form in which it was translated into Greek, then it would have been superfluous to translate the Hebrew books into Latin. But since different copies are now in circulation in different countries, and that authentic and ancient translation is corrupted and damaged... the Jews laugh at us" (Jerome, Apology against Rufinus, 2:28)[7].

But the main thing is that any translation is already an interpretation. Any word of a foreign language can be translated with several words of the translator's language. Which of the range of meanings of this word was used in this particular case? — The translator must guess about this (and substantiate his guess). Unfortunately. His guesses are not always indisputable, they are not always correct.