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.

So, in the Greek version of the Gospel, instead of the expected genitive case, the accusative case is used: "Blessed are those who hunger and thirst for righteousness." Not "truth", but "truth". When you read the Gospel in Greek, it immediately makes a great impression. Here we do not mean any specific justice in relation to someone or something, but all justice that exists in the world. The fact that the word "truth" is not in the genitive, but in the accusative case is immediately striking: this form makes the phrase, on the one hand, somewhat clumsy, and on the other hand, surprisingly capacious and bright.

There are a lot of such passages in Matthew, and when, I repeat, you read his Gospel in Greek, they immediately attract attention. However, it is difficult to translate such passages, they must be specified in notes, which, as a rule, is done in editions of the Holy Scriptures in almost all languages.

The Gospel of Luke stands out because it is written in good language, as opposed to the simply bad language of the Gospel of Mark and the somewhat strange, singing, either ecclesiastical or synagogue language of the Gospel of Matthew. The Gospel of Luke is good Greek literature from the first century. Edward Mayer, the famous German historian of the early 20th century, wrote about this.

The Evangelist Luke was a Greek from Antioch, which was one of the largest intellectual and cultural centers of the ancient East. He received a versatile education, was a doctor. How do we know this? Let us recall the parable in which it is said that it is easier for a camel to go through the eye of a needle than for a rich man to enter the Kingdom of Heaven. The Evangelists Matthew and Mark use the word raffis here – this is an ordinary sewing needle used by women. And in the Gospel of Luke, the word belone is used – the surgeon's needle. This word is from the Corpus Hippocraticum, a collection of works by the ancient Greek physician Hippocrates, that is, a purely medical word. Another confirmation is the scene of the healing of the demon-possessed youth. Matthew tells about the illness of this boy without much detail: he goes mad, throws himself into the fire, then into the water, i.e. he looks simply insane. In Mark's program, everything is much more specific, according to his description, you can make an accurate diagnosis: this is epilepsy (a person possessed by a "dumb spirit" throws himself to the ground, emits foam, gnashes his teeth and freezes). Luke, on the other hand, describes the disease in a completely different way. He was not horrified by the repulsive picture of an epileptic seizure, since he, as a doctor, had certainly had to treat such patients; Luke's attention is focused on the suffering of the sick youth, who cries out before the attack, and when the attack "retreats by force," he is completely exhausted. This is exactly the attitude to human suffering, without which the profession of a doctor is impossible.

In addition, Luke is a historian, he read Thucydides and other Greek authors. In addition to the Gospel, he wrote a historical work, the Acts of the Holy Apostles. Luke's authorship is confirmed by a comparative analysis of the vocabulary and style of these two New Testament texts. Acts is a brilliant literary work, which is a comparative biography of the apostles Peter and Paul. In the same vein, the comparative biographies of Plutarch, which were written much later than the Acts, are sustained, although Plutarch is mistakenly considered the first master of this genre. Luke, according to him, strives for acrivia - this is a word that is almost impossible to translate into Russian, means a truthful, accurate, consistent presentation of facts. As a historian, Luke attaches great importance to chronology, as if inscribing the events of the Gospel in world history, and even the genealogy of Christ leads not from Abraham, like Matthew, but from Adam. It is not surprising, therefore, that the Gospel of Luke arouses great interest both from the point of view of a deeply thought-out composition and from the point of view of content. Let us compare it with the two Gospels already considered.

The Gospel of Mark is missionary in nature and can be brilliantly used for missionary purposes. And the statistics confirm that this is indeed the gospel for missionaries. There is the International Summer Institute of Linguistics (SIL) headquartered in London, which translates the Holy Scriptures into the languages of small peoples. In his card index, the Gospel of Mark occupies the first place in terms of the number of translations of all biblical texts. It has been translated into the most exotic languages. Any missionary who works with people who have not yet been enlightened by the light of the Gospel truth will say that the reading of the New Testament must begin with the Gospel of Mark.

Remarkable evidence of this can be found in the memoirs of Metropolitan Anthony of Sourozh. He tells how once, when he was about fourteen years old, Father Sergius Bulgakov came to the school where he studied. A remarkable pastor and thinker spoke about Christ, but this conversation did not arouse great interest in the future metropolitan, rather, on the contrary. However, Fr. Sergius Bulgakov did stir him up in some way. When the boy came home, he asked his mother for a New Testament, and looking at the table of contents, he realized that the Gospel of Mark was the shortest one. In order not to waste time (at fourteen years old people are very busy!), he decided to read this, the shortest one. "And that's where I came across," says the Metropolitan, "because it was written for the same little Roman savages as I was then."