Another example. A rich young man runs to Jesus to ask: "Good teacher! What shall I do to inherit eternal life?" Mark has a detail: "ran up... fell on his knees before Him and asked." This movement of the young man who falls to his knees has been preserved only by the Gospel of Mark.

Jesus tells the disciples that whoever wants to be first must be last. And whoever does not humble himself like a child will not enter the Kingdom of God. This episode is found in both Matthew and Mark. In Matthew we read: "Jesus called a child, and set him in the midst of them, and said..." And in Mark, the word "said" is preceded by a participle phrase: "embracing him." This is again a bright visual detail.

A blind man named Bartimaeus cries out: "Jesus, Son of David! have mercy on me." The blind man is called to Jesus, and he runs up, throwing off his cloak. This detail, this movement – the blind man throws off his cloak and remains in only his tunic – is preserved only in the Gospel of Mark.

A woman with an alabaster, a small vessel with precious fragrant myrrh, comes to pour this myrrh either on the feet or on the head of Jesus. Mark depicts another characteristic movement: having broken the alabaster, the woman poured myrrh. She broke the vessel so that no one else could pour anything into it. And this scene is also found only in the Gospel of Mark.

On almost every page of the Gospel of Mark one can find such details that, without changing the content as a whole, without even adding any new strokes to the teaching of Jesus, give us the opportunity, as it were, to see what was happening, introducing into the story visual, as a rule, dynamic details: a discarded cloak, a broken vessel, a young man falling on his knees. Sometimes, as in the description of the Lord's entry into Jerusalem, they simply specify the narrative. The disciples go to some house to untie the donkey. Mark clarifies that the donkey was tied to the gate outside, in an alley. Not inside the courtyard, not on the street, but exactly outside and in the alley. These details are not found in any of the other Gospels.

Another distinguishing feature of Mark's Gospel is its language. He is extremely bad. In the Acts of the Holy Apostles, Peter and John exclaim: "We cannot but say what we have seen and heard" (4:20). The Evangelist Mark thinks approximately the same way, and this phrase from the Acts could be used as an epigraph to the Gospel of Mark. It is very difficult for him to write. He had never been a writer and never would be. He is the one whom the Evangelist John would later call the word "witness." Realizing that it is necessary to tell about Jesus, despite the fact that it is very difficult for him, he tells. He speaks in strange, sometimes funny, at times almost incomprehensible Greek, uses some unexpected images.

For example, in the story of the multiplication of the loaves, Jesus tells all the participants in this miracle to sit in rows. "Like vegetables in the garden," Mark observes. The authors of the Synodal Translation did not even dare to include this figurative comparison in their text. They simply wrote: "in rows" (and the Greek text here reproduces the structure of the Aramaic source, where this expression is repeated twice – "beds, beds"). Whether this is true or not, I hear here the voice of the Apostle Peter, his catechetical discourses, which formed the basis of the Gospel of Mark. This is an echo of the living preaching of a simple Galilean fisherman, in whose mouth such an expression is quite appropriate.

And here is another image. The Evangelist tells about the Transfiguration of the Lord. This is some kind of completely mystical text: Jesus is standing on a mountain, suddenly His clothes begin to shine like light or snow, and His face also shines. "His garments became shining, very white as snow, as a bleacher cannot whiten on the ground." Here again there is a comparison taken from everyday life, and again an echo of Peter's sermon is heard. The Evangelist does not say that Christ's garments have become "dazzling white," or, for example, "fantastically white," or "white as the snows of the Himalayas," etc. He remembers the bleacher and his work, and takes a specific image. In this example, which is extremely simple, all the uniqueness of the Gospel of Mark is as if focused. There is a lot of dynamics in this Gospel. Mark's favorite words are "immediately", "immediately". Everything happens very quickly here.

The Gospel of Mark, I repeat, was apparently written first of four.

The second was the Gospel of Matthew. It is one and a half times larger in volume than the Gospel of Mark, but at the same time, the events from the life of Jesus and the miracles are described here much shorter. Sometimes it is said: if the Gospel of Mark was written for the Romans and best meets the missionary tasks, then the Gospel of Matthew was created for the Jews and for the teachers of the faith. It is written in a language that can be called ecclesiastical. There are many words and expressions taken from the Old Testament, not to mention numerous quotations. There are editions of the Gospel where the text is typed in regular font, and quotations from the Old Testament are in italics. The most italics are in the Gospel of Matthew. Speaking, for example, about the Nativity of Christ, the Evangelist quotes from the prophet Isaiah: "Behold, a virgin shall conceive, and bear a son, and they shall call His name Immanuel, which means, God with us." And telling about the slaughter of the innocents, he quotes the prophet Jeremiah: "Rachel weeps for her children and does not want to be comforted, for they are not," etc.

But even if there are no quotations, the language of the Gospel of Matthew is somewhat stylized as the language of the Old Testament. It is a sacred, worship-related language, and texts written in it are chanted. This is the Jewish nature of the Gospel of Matthew. Jesus says a lot here, the text of Matthew is literally filled with His words. The evangelist is rooted in the culture of the Old Testament, and Jesus is revealed here primarily as a Teacher, as in the Talmud as a rabbis. (Although among the countless rabbis of the Talmud there are almost no miracle workers, people whose life, purity and holiness would draw the reader's attention. In the Gospel of Matthew, Jesus appears in many ways as a rabbi. It is no accident that the Sermon on the Mount begins with Him ascending a dais and sitting down. It is like the beginning of a "lecture": Jesus ascends the mountain as to a pulpit. And the expression "opened his mouth" is used in Greek to prepare the reader for the fact that he is about to learn something very important. It is impossible to say, for example, "he opened his mouth and asked to give him food or drink."

Further, Matthew says: edi'dasken ("taught") - the imperfect is used, that is, the past is incomplete. In the Russian language, there is no fundamental difference between an imperfect and an aorist, we say: "I read this book", meaning that we once read it. In Greek, as in French, the imperfect is only those actions that have taken place several times, repeatedly or constantly. The imperfect is used here to emphasize that Christ taught many times that we have before us not a "stenogram" of one sermon, but a series of sermons that have been repeated more than once, their "sum," a textbook of Christianity.

The teaching of the Savior is placed at the very beginning of the Gospel, so that this is where the reading begins. Then the Evangelist only mentions: "He taught them...", and not a word is said about what he taught, because the essence of the teaching is already set forth in the fifth, sixth and seventh chapters. Then there is simply a story about the preaching and miracles of Jesus, and the sermon is described in great detail, and the miracles are always brief. In short, this is not at all like the Gospel of Mark.

The text of Jesus' sermons in the Gospel of Matthew requires an extremely profound reading. Here you need to think about literally every phrase. Let me give you an example. "Blessed are they that hunger and thirst for righteousness, for they shall be satisfied." To thirst for truth is to "want justice." The Greek word used here is dikeosi'ni, which means "justice." Let us say: "Blessed are those who hunger and thirst for justice, for they shall be satisfied." The verbs "hunger" and "thirst" in Greek, as in Russian, require the genitive case, which has a partitive character. It's the same as in French, for example, du the or du pain. If I say not du the, but le the, it means that I want all the tea that there is in the world. A du the - I want a glass of tea. "I want bread" — again, if we don't use this partitive with du, then it turns out that I want all the bread (le pain) that is sold in Moscow today.