NEW TESTAMENT

Our Lord

Jesus Christ

In Russian translation

St. Petersburg, 1890

Small, 32-part sheet, in a black leather binding, a book, 626 pages, in two columns of small print. Judging by the pen inscription on the pretitle page: "1902", I have had it for 30 years until the current 1932. I read it every day, and I will read it as long as my eyes see, in all the lights that come from the sun and the heart, on the brightest days and in the darkest nights; Happy and unhappy, sick and healthy, believer and non-believer, feeling and insensitive. And it seems that I am always reading something new, unknown, and I will never read it, I will never know it to the end; I can only see it out of the corner of my eye, I feel it out of the corner of my heart, and if I did at all, what then?

The inscription on the binding: "New Testament" is erased so that it can hardly be read; the gold edge has faded; the paper has turned yellow; the leather of the binding has decayed, the spine has fallen behind, the leaves are crumbling and in some places they have also decayed, worn out at the edges, curled up in the corners into a tube. I should have given it to me to bind again, but it's a pity, and, to tell you the truth, it's scary to part with a book even for a few days.

IV

Just as I, a man, have read it, mankind has read it, and perhaps it will say in the same way as I do: "What shall thou put with me in the grave? Her. What will I get up from the grave with? With her. What did I do on earth? I read it." This is terribly much for man and, perhaps, for all mankind, but for the Book itself it is terribly small.

Why do you say to Me: "Lord! Lord!" and do not do what I say? (Luke 6:46).

And even stronger, more terrible, in the "unwritten", agraphon, not included in the Gospel, unknown word of Jesus the Unknown:

If you are one with Me,

and lie on my bosom;