What is the almost two-thousand-year history of Christianity? This, of course, is the history of the preaching of faith in the Resurrection of Christ from the time of the Apostles and their first disciples to the present day, and consequently the history of those who preached this faith, the saints and righteous of all times, in "every generation" (that is, in each generation), as the anaphora of the Liturgy of Basil the Great says, who pleased God. This is the history of glorified and unknown martyrs who gave their lives for the right to believe and not to renounce their faith, the history of disputes about doctrine and theological searches, the history of monasticism and the embodiment of the Christian ideal in the lives of specific people.

But first of all, this is the history of the reading of the Gospel. Both the daily reading of Scripture during the Liturgy or Liturgy within the framework of any (Byzantine, Roman, Armenian, Coptic) tradition, the reading that is necessarily associated with the sacrament of the Eucharist, or "remembrance", as Jesus himself says in the Gospel of Luke, about the last, or Mystery, Supper that He celebrated with His disciples on the night when He was betrayed, and the private reading of the Word of God by Christians of all ages and peoples. Reading, which a person approaches in silence and complete silence – alone with God and himself. Therefore, this is also the story of the prayer that is born in the human heart during the reading of the Bible.

But it is also the history of the preservation of the text of the Gospel itself, the fate of its most ancient manuscripts, the copying of old manuscripts in the silence of ancient monasteries and the making of new copies of it, the history of the translation of its text into new languages – Latin, Coptic, Armenian, Georgian, Slavonic, and so on – and the painful search for those linguistic means that would help in translating into a new language as accurately and correctly as possible to convey the meaning of the original. The story of Blessed Jerome, who translated the Scriptures into Latin, and Mesrop Mashtots, the author of the oldest Armenian translation of the Gospel. Saints Cyril and Methodius and their successors with their Slavonic text of Scripture and St. Philaret (Drozdov) with his collaborators as the creators of the Russian, so-called Synodal, translation of the Bible.

Finally, the history of Christianity is the history of each Christian's personal response to the call that he finds in the pages of the Gospel. For example, this was the case with St. Anthony, who lived in Egypt in the fourth century A.D., who decided to go into the wilderness and became the founder of Christian monasticism, reflecting on the words of the Gospel: "If you want to be perfect, go, sell your possessions and give to the poor; and thou shalt have treasure in heaven" (Matt. 19:21). Accidentally entering the church at the very time when they were being read during the service, the future saint and ascetic ad se Dominicum traxit imperium, that is, "accepted the command of the Lord as addressed to him personally" and his auditis aliud non quesivit ("when he heard these words, he asked nothing else"), as Francesco Petrarch puts it in a famous letter, where he tells how he ascended Mount Ventosa on April 26, 1336, and on that day he himself felt that God was speaking to him through the mouth of Blessed Augustine.

Augustine speaks of the same personal call to God at the very end of the eighth book of his Confessions. He says that once, during prayer, he heard "a voice from a neighboring house, I don't know if it was a boy or a girl, often repeating in a chant: 'Take it, read it! Take it, read it!" stood up, interpreting these words as a divine command for me to open the book and read the first chapter that came to my eyes." The passage that opened up was the passage in Romans 13:13-14 where the apostle Paul says:

"Not in feasts and in drunkenness, not in bedrooms and in debauchery, not in quarrels and in envy: put on the Lord Jesus Christ, and do not turn the care of the flesh into lusts."

"I did not want to read further," Augustine continues, "and I did not need to: after this text my heart was flooded with light and peace; the darkness of my doubts has disappeared" (translated by M.E. Sergeenko).

Something similar was in the spiritual experience of St. Sergius of Radonezh, who built his entire life on the basis of other words of Jesus: "Whosoever will be great among you, let him be your servant" (Matt. 20:27). Archbishop Luke (Voino-Yasenetsky), who lived in the 20th century, and who was recently canonized, tells in his memoirs that he repeatedly realized from experience, reading the Gospel, that his specific words were addressed to him, and moreover, today. In fact, this is how every believer perceives the Scriptures, for for the believer the Bible in general, and the Gospel in particular, is not just a holy book, on the basis of the principles of which it is necessary to build one's life, but the Word of God, "living and active," which, as the Apostle says in the Epistle to the Hebrews (4:12), "penetrates to the division of soul and spirit, joints and brains, and judges the thoughts and intentions of the heart." It is not addressed to some abstract reader, but to me here and today by God Himself through the mouth of the prophets, His Beloved Son, or His disciples.

Augustine once described the Gospel as a low-entrance building that is difficult to enter, "the higher it becomes the farther one goes" (Confessions, III, 5, 9). He drew attention to the fact that the seeming simplicity of the Gospel often frightens the reader ("my arrogance did not reconcile itself to its simplicity") and does not allow him to penetrate into the heart of its text; but, Augustine goes on to say, "it has the property of unfolding as the child-reader grows." The Gospel is not an account of what Jesus did and said, much less is it a theological treatise setting forth the foundations of the faith. It would be best to call it, as Fr. Sergius Bulgakov did, "the verbal icon of Jesus," which must be contemplated in silence and silence, peering into it and fixing one's gaze on its details, penetrating into its depths, following the path of slow and sometimes very difficult reflections.

Indeed, reading the Scriptures can be very difficult at times. As in the ancient icon, as Augustine says, "there is something dark in it—not to close you off, but to sharpen your understanding." These words of Augustine are brilliantly commented on by St. Gregory the Dialogist, Pope of Rome (540-604), when in a sermon on the book of the prophet Ezekiel he writes: "Great is the benefit of the darkness of the Word of God, it exercises the mind, expanding it by effort, and exercise helps to grasp what the idle mind does not grasp."

It is also necessary to bear in mind the fact that Scripture, which Dante Alighieri speaks of best in one of his letters, "can be called polysemantic (polisemos), that is, having several meanings, for it is one thing to have a meaning that a letter carries, and another thing to have a meaning that is expressed by means of a letter. The first is called literal, while the second is allegorical, moral, or anagogical. Such a way of expressing it, in order to make it clear, can be traced in the following words: "When Israel came out of Egypt, the house of Jacob from a foreign nation, Judah became His holiness, Israel His possession." Thus, if we look only at the letter, we see that we are talking about the exodus of the children of Israel from Egypt in the time of Moses; in an allegorical sense, it refers to our redemption given by Christ; the moral meaning reveals the transition of the soul from weeping and from the burden of sin to a blessed state; anagogical — the transition of the holy soul from the slavery of present depravity to the freedom of eternal glory."

Of course, Dante uses the tools of medieval rhetoric, but at the same time he succinctly, but to the highest degree accurately, touches on extremely important problems. Each biblical text, precisely by virtue of its deliberate appeal to the reader, whom it is called upon to transform and lead to some new horizons, in addition to its literal meaning, dear to us because it turns us into real witnesses of what Jesus says and does, has,

first, moral or universal human content,

secondly, allegorical or spiritual meaning