This book was born many years ago, as a cycle of reflections aloud on the lines of the New Testament. It is no longer possible to establish who was the first (probably someone from the staff of Truth and Life) to come up with this title—"above the lines" and not "above the pages" of the New Testament. The title turned out to be ideal, because it was to individual lines of Scripture and reflections on them that those meetings were devoted, to which we gathered in the evenings in the Moscow Church of Sts. Cosmas and Damian, trying to listen together to what Christ tells us in the Gospel.

Of course, as a scientist, as a philologist and theologian, I prepared for each conversation by reading special literature, referring to serious scientific comments and a variety of works, sometimes unexpected. But then a conversation began, and it was built contrary to all the canons of a university lecture. The task was not to give a popular course on exegesis, even if it was based on modern research and included the latest discoveries of biblical scholars. No, it was different: to learn together to listen to every word of the Gospel, to learn to see behind every word the world in which Jesus preaches, and to accept every line of Scripture as a call that He addresses to us.

Oral conversations, turned into essays, were published in the journal "Truth and Life" since 1996, and then were once again revised and supplemented for a separate publication. There are a lot of elements of science in this book, but it has nothing to do with science. The book is devoted to what in the Middle Ages in Latin was called lectio divina, or the spiritual reading of Scripture. It is an attempt to learn how to read the Gospel in such a way that our personal prayer is born from reading, and from prayer grows a stable desire to respond in our real life to the call with which Jesus addresses us. Probably, neither my listeners, nor I, nor my friends, who then heroically helped me turn these conversations and essays into a book, have set and do not set any other tasks. We wanted to help the reader learn, opening the Gospel from any place, to immediately turn on, to be among those disciples who listen to the Teacher with glowing eyes, listening not just to remember everything He says, but to answer the words with which He addresses them, and, consequently, to us.

Sending the finished book to the printing house, I cannot but say special words of gratitude to Marina Sergeevna Fedorova, who was the first to come up with the idea of turning the texts of the lectures into written essays. I also thank all those who gathered in the evenings at Kosmodemyansky Church to take part in our conversations. This book would never have been born if it were not for the listeners. They forced me to prepare for each lecture, understanding it not merely as the time in which to speak about this or that chapter of the New Testament, but as an encounter with Christ, who preaches among us and whose preaching sometimes needs this or that phrase to be singled out, and this or that expression to be explained and interpreted.

Part I

The Four Gospels

Everyone who opens the New Testament has a question: why are there four Gospels? Why is the same story told four times in the Holy Scriptures? The Gospel of John, however, is somewhat different from the three previous ones. But the first three Gospels in many respects repeat each other almost verbatim — this is immediately evident if you write the text in three columns. But that's exactly what it is – almost verbatim, always with some differences in details.

Why is that?

Since ancient times, attempts have been made many times to bring together four or at least three Gospels into one whole, into a single narrative. The first such attempt was made at the dawn of Christianity by Tatian. Tatian's Gospel, which combined four stories in one, was used, but did not enter into the practice of the Church. The last such attempt was made by the Kiev priest Leonid Lutkovsky. He combined the Gospels of Matthew, Mark, and Luke into one, and to them he added the Gospel of John as different. His work was published by Literaturnaya Gazeta, but did not appeal to readers. No one published it a second time. For the reason, apparently, that the first three evangelists, not to mention John, are very different from each other.

The Gospel of Mark is the first in terms of the time of writing. It is quite short compared to the rest. In the Gospel of Mark, Jesus says less than in the accounts of Matthew, Luke, or John. There is a way of printing the New Testament when the words of Christ, speaking in Latin, ipsissima verba, are highlighted in red. So, there is much less red text in the Gospel of Mark than in the other three. Instead, the reader's attention is constantly fixed on what Jesus is doing. Miracles are described here in more detail than in Matthew, who tells about them concisely, briefly.

Although the English "from Mark", "from Matthew" indicates that this Gospel was written from beginning to end by one or another evangelist, tradition states that the Gospel of Mark was written for preaching among the Romans, on the basis of the preaching of the Apostle Peter in Rome. Mark repeated in his sermon what Peter had said, and then Mark's disciples composed the Gospel ano, secundum, "according to Mark." This does not mean by Marc, but according to Marc, that is, "according to the sermon." And in French, for example, it is not par St. Marc, but selon St. Marc, that is, "according to the sermon of Mark, according to what Mark once said."

It seems that the Gospel of Mark is really addressed to the Romans. From the Roman literature of the era of Emperor Augustus, close in time to the Gospel, we know that the Romans were a nation of warriors and poets. They are emotional, decisive, explosive, they do not like to reason, they know how to fight, suffer and perceive the world without halftones. They are very acutely aware of what Horace called "color vitae" – the colors of life. The Romans do not like abstractions – they are not the Greeks, who gave the world wonderful historians and philosophers, they are the ancestors of modern Italians. That is why the Gospel of Mark is filled with vivid visual images that are not found in Matthew, Luke, or John. And in this bright world, where everything was perceived to a greater extent through sight, the short Gospel of Mark with vivid descriptions of miracles, where Jesus speaks little, but acts a lot, such a Gospel could really be perceived as one's own...

Here is the scene when the Savior calms the storm on the Sea of Galilee. It is described in all four Gospels, but only Mark has such a detail, for example. Everyone says that Jesus slept during the storm. And Mark adds: "aft at the head" — that is, he gives us a purely visual image. And we immediately imagine how He slept: "at the stern at the head."