PREFACE TO THE FIRST EDITION

Encountering any new translation of the books of the Holy Scriptures gives rise to a legitimate question in every serious reader about its necessity, justification, and an equally natural desire to understand what can be expected from new translators. This circumstance dictates the following introductory lines.

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The appearance of Christ in our world marked the beginning of a new era in the life of mankind. God has gone down in history and established a deeply personal relationship with each of us, showing with obvious clarity that He is on our side and is doing everything possible to save us from evil and destruction. All of this manifested itself in the life, death, and resurrection of Jesus. The world was given in Him the maximum possible revelation of God about Himself and about man. This revelation is shocking in its greatness: He Who was seen by people as a simple carpenter who ended his days on a shameful cross, created the whole world. His life did not begin in Bethlehem. No, He is "He Who was, Who is, Who is to come." It's hard to imagine.

And yet all kinds of people have steadily come to believe in this. They discovered that Jesus was the God who lived among them and for them. Soon, people of the new faith began to realize that He lives in themselves and that He has the answer to all their needs and aspirations. This meant that they acquired a new vision of the world, of themselves and of their future, of a new experience of life unknown to them before.

Those who believed in Jesus were eager to share their faith with others, to tell everyone on earth about Him. These first ascetics, among whom were direct witnesses of the events, clothed the life and teaching of Christ Jesus in a bright, well-remembered form. They created the Gospels; in addition, they wrote letters (which became "messages" for us), sang songs, made prayers, and sealed the divine revelation given to them. To a superficial observer, it might seem that everything written about Christ by His first disciples and followers was not organized by anyone or in any way: all this was born more or less arbitrarily. In some fifty years, these texts made up a whole book, which later received the name "New Testament".

In the process of creating and reading, collecting and organizing the recorded materials, the early Christians, who experienced the great saving power of these sacred manuscripts, came to the clear conclusion that all their efforts were guided and guided by Someone Powerful and Omniscient, the Holy Spirit of God Himself. They saw that there was nothing accidental in what they had recorded, that all the documents that made up the New Testament were in a deep internal relationship. Boldly and decisively, the first Christians could and did call the established code "the Word of God."

A remarkable feature of the New Testament was that its entire text was written in simple, colloquial Greek, which at that time spread throughout the Mediterranean and became an international language. However, for the most part, "it was spoken by people who were not used to it from childhood and therefore did not really feel Greek words." In their practice, "it was a language without soil, business, trade, service language." Pointing to this state of affairs, the great twentieth-century Christian thinker and writer C. S. Lewis adds, "Does this shock us?.. I hope not; otherwise we must have been shocked by the Incarnation itself. The Lord humbled Himself when He became a baby in the arms of a peasant woman and an arrested preacher, and according to the same Divine plan, the word about Him sounded in the folk, everyday, everyday language." For this very reason, the early followers of Jesus, in their testimony about Him, in their preaching and in their translations of the Holy Scriptures, sought to convey the Good News of Christ in a simple, close and understandable language to the people.

Happy are the peoples who have received the Holy Scriptures in a worthy translation from the original languages into their native language understandable. In their country, this Book can be found in every family, even the poorest ones. For such peoples it became not only a prayerful and pious, soul-saving reading, but also the family book with which their entire spiritual world was illuminated. In this way, the stability of society, its moral strength and even material well-being were created.

It pleased Providence that Russia should not be left without the Word of God. With great gratitude, we, Russians, honor the memory of Cyril and Methodius, who gave us the Holy Scriptures in the Slavic language. We also preserve the reverent memory of the workers who introduced us to the Word of God through the so-called Synodal translation, which to this day remains with us the most authoritative and most famous. The point here is not so much in his philological or literary characteristics, as in the fact that he remained with Russian Christians in all the difficult times of the 20th century. In many ways, it was thanks to him that the Christian faith was not completely eradicated in Russia.

The Synodal translation, however, for all its undoubted merits, is not considered quite satisfactory today because of its well-known shortcomings (obvious not only to specialists). The natural changes that have taken place in our language for more than a century, and the long absence of religious education in our country, have made these shortcomings sharply noticeable. The vocabulary and syntax of this translation ceased to be accessible to direct, so to speak, "spontaneous" perception. In many cases, the modern reader can no longer do without dictionaries in his efforts to comprehend the meaning of certain formulas of the translation, which was published in 1876. This circumstance is resonant, of course, with a rationalistic "cooling" of the perception of the text, which, being by its nature uplifting, must not only be understood, but also experienced by the whole being of the pious reader.

Of course, it is impossible to make a perfect translation of the Bible "for all time", such a translation that would remain equally understandable and close to readers of an endless series of generations, as they say, by definition. And this is not only because the development of the language we speak is unstoppable, but also because in the course of time the very penetration into the spiritual treasures of the great Book becomes more and more complex and enriched, as more and more new approaches to them are discovered. This was rightly pointed out by Archpriest Alexander Men, who saw the meaning and even the need for an increase in the number of Bible translations. In particular, he wrote: "Today, pluralism prevails in the world practice of biblical translations. Recognizing that any translation is to some extent an interpretation of the original, translators use a variety of techniques and language attitudes... This allows readers to experience different dimensions and shades of the text."

In line with this understanding of the problem, the staff of the Institute for Bible Translation, established in 1993 in Zaoksky, considered it possible to make an attempt to make a feasible contribution to the Russian reader's familiarization with the text of the New Testament. Driven by a high sense of responsibility for the work to which they devoted their knowledge and energy, the project participants performed a real translation of the New Testament into Russian from the original language, based on the widely accepted contemporary critical text of the original (4th Expanded Edition of the United Bible Societies, Stuttgart, 1994). At the same time, on the one hand, the orientation to Byzantine sources characteristic of the Russian tradition was taken into account, and on the other hand, the achievements of modern textual criticism were taken into account.

Naturally, the staff of the Zaoksk Translation Center could not ignore the foreign and domestic experience of translating the Bible in their work. In accordance with the principles that guide Bible societies around the world, the translation was originally intended to be free of confessional biases. In accordance with the philosophy of modern Bible societies, the most important requirements for translation were to be faithful to the original and to preserve the form of the biblical message wherever possible, with a willingness to sacrifice the letter of the text for the sake of an accurate conveyance of the living meaning. At the same time, it was impossible, of course, not to go through the torments that are absolutely inevitable for any responsible translator of the Holy Scriptures. For the divine inspiration of the original obliged us to treat its very form with reverence. At the same time, in the course of their work, the translators had to constantly be convinced of the correctness of the idea of the great Russian writers that only the translation that first of all correctly conveys the meaning and dynamics of the original can be considered adequate. The desire of the staff of the Institute in Zaoksky to be as close as possible to the original coincided with what V.G. Belinsky once said: "Closeness to the original consists in conveying not the letter, but the spirit of creation... The corresponding image, as well as the corresponding phrase, do not always consist in the apparent correspondence of words." Looking back at other modern translations, which convey the biblical text with severe literalness, made us recall the well-known statement of A.S. Pushkin: "An interlinear translation can never be correct."