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."

At all stages of the work, the team of translators of the Institute was aware that no real translation could equally satisfy all the diverse requirements of different readers. Nevertheless, the translators sought a result that could, on the one hand, satisfy those who turn to the Scriptures for the first time, and on the other hand, accommodate those who, seeing the Word of God in the Bible, are engaged in an in-depth study of it.

In this translation, addressed to the modern reader, words, phrases and idioms that are in living circulation are mainly used. Obsolete and archaic words and expressions are allowed only to the extent that they are necessary to convey the color of the narrative and to adequately represent the semantic shades of the phrase. At the same time, it was found expedient to refrain from using sharply modern, transient vocabulary and the same syntax, so as not to violate the regularity, natural simplicity and organic majesty of the exposition, which distinguish the metaphysically unfussy text of Scripture.

Библейская весть имеет решающее значение для спасения всякого человека и вообще для всей его христианской жизни. Эта Весть не является простым отчетом о фактах, событиях и прямолинейно назидательным изложением заповедей. Она способна тронуть человеческое сердце, побудить читателя и слушателя к сопереживанию, вызвать у них потребность в живом и искреннем покаянии. Переводчики Заокского видели свою задачу в том, чтобы передать такую силу библейского повествования.

В тех случаях, когда смысл отдельных слов или выражений в дошедших до нас списках книг Библии не поддается, несмотря на все усилия, определенному прочтению, читателю предлагается наиболее убедительное, на взгляд переводчиков, чтение.

В стремлении к ясности и стилистическому благообразию текста переводчики вводят в него, когда это диктуется контекстом, слова, которых в оригинале нет (они отмечаются курсивом).

В сносках читателю предлагаются альтернативные значения отдельных слов и фраз оригинала.

В помощь читателю главы библейского текста разделяются на отдельные смысловые отрывки, которые снабжаются набранными курсивом подзаголовками. Не являясь частью переводимого текста, подзаголовки не предназначаются для устного чтения Писания или для его истолкования.