The ecstasy and joy that color the narrative of the Book of Acts is comparable to the triumphalism of the story of the Exodus from Egypt as recorded in the Old Testament. This delight and joy are transmitted to everyone who comes to an Orthodox church on Pascha, where the Acts are read not only as an Apostolic reading (at the Liturgy – from Pascha to Pentecost), but also in the evening before the beginning of the Paschal service – in a row, from beginning to end.

3. The Prologue of the Gospel of John—A Discourse on First History

Finally, the third starting point, which will also help us understand why the history of New Testament Tradition and Scripture must begin with Easter.

The Paschal Gospel reading (John 1:1-17) about the Word, Who was "in the beginning" and through Whom "all things were made," gives to the celebrated Pascha of the Resurrection of Christ a universal, universal, even supra-mundane, eternal dimension, that unsurpassed and unrepeatable scale, which is possible only when talking about the creation of the world or only about certain events of the Beginning, which determines the fate of the entire universe and mankind. In the Resurrection of Christ, as the New Testament sees it through the eyes of the Evangelists and other apostles, the work of recreating man, originally conceived by God as His image and likeness, is accomplished and completed. The execution of this task turned out to be difficult, dramatic and long. If death became the fate of any person after the fall of Adam, then it could not but become the fate of Man, who became the Son of God. And He did it to recreate Adam. He communed us in death, so that we might partake of Him in the Resurrection. And this is nothing more and nothing less than the work of recreating man. It took place in Christ's death on the Cross and in His Resurrection. As in the Old Testament, it took place on the sixth day (cf. Gen. 1:31), and ended on the seventh day with God's rest (cf. Gen. 2:2). After death on the Cross on the sixth day of the week of the Passion of the Lord[7] comes the Great Saturday of the Lord's rest, but the rest of death:

Сiz2 Saturday1та е4ст пребл7гославе1ннаz, в не1ййже хрсто1съ u3снYвъ, voskre1snetъ tridnе1ven. [8]

"It is finished" – these were the last words of Christ on the Cross, according to the same Gospel of John (John 19:28, 30). And then the new week begins, "the first day of the week," as all four Gospels emphasize (Matt. 28:1; Mk. 16:2; Lk. 24:1; Jn. 20:1, 19), when everything begins anew: man begins anew his history, he finds himself in a new, or rather, renewed quality, he is in the New Covenant with his God.

§ 17. Jesus Christ and the People of God (Church)

The "finished" of Jesus Christ is the fullness in all its aspects: theological, historical, liturgical, spiritual and personal...

Thus He became the long-awaited sole foundation (cf. 1 Corinthians 3:11) on which the Christian faith in the transfiguration of human nature and the entire created world rests, as well as the Christian hope that every believer can participate in such transfiguration, deification (cf. 2 Peter 1:4).

Further, the Church, following His first disciples, believed in Him as in the meaning and fulfillment of Holy History as the history of divine-human relationships. And what can be more important among the questions about the meaning of history than the question of the possibility of its divine-human dimension? Christ is the Alpha and the Omega, the beginning and the end (Rev. 1:8).

Finally, He also became the founder of Christianity and the Church in the historical sense, as a new religious worldview, a new religious tradition, and a new organized (in the broad sense of the word, and not in the sense of the original hierarchy) community of believers. Here, however, one detail is important. Christ did not come to gather His new Israel from scratch, but among a people with a good and even refined religious taste, brought up in the rich experience of the Holy History of the Old Testament. Where does this rich experience and exquisite taste come from? After all, God Himself was the pedagogue who long and patiently educated His people in order to send His Christ there.

At the same time, there was something that in no way suited Christ in Israel as He saw it, and could not be approved by Him as an example to follow. In assembling His Church, He was greatly concerned that it should in no way be built on the principles of hierarchical authoritarianism (cf. Matt. 20:25-26) and legalistic piety (cf. Matt. 23). We should not console ourselves with the thought that such traits were characteristic only of the people of Israel, modern Jesus Christ. If we look more closely at the subsequent history of the Church, we will see that sooner or later the above-mentioned phenomena become inherent in any venerable church tradition. If Christ's denunciations of legalism and other "ecclesiastical" sins, which we read about in the Gospels, had been addressed only to the Pharisees and scribes of that time, then the Gospel would not have been the Word of God addressed to all of us in the Church today, but more than a historical document about someone's disputes, more or less interesting and instructive for some of us.