The true life is not just life outside of time—the present—but is also a life outside of the individual. Life is common to all people and expresses itself in love.
And therefore, the person who lives in the present, in the common life of all people, unites himself with the father—with the source and foundation of life.
Each two chapters share a connection of effect and cause. Besides these twelve chapters, the following is appended to the account: the introduction from the first chapter of John, in which the writer speaks, on his own authority, about the meaning of the teaching as a whole, as well as the conclusion from the same writer’s Epistle (written, likely, before the Gospel), containing some general conclusions on all that came before.
The introduction and conclusion do not represent an essential part of this teaching. They are simply general views on the teaching as a whole. Although the introduction and the conclusion both could have been omitted with no loss to the meaning of the teaching (especially since they were both written by John and do not come from Jesus), I held on to them for their simple and reasoned understanding of Jesus’s teachings, and because these sections, unlike the church’s strange interpretations, confirm one another and confirm the teaching as a whole while presenting the simplest articulation of meaning that could be attached to the teachings.
At the beginning of every chapter, apart from a short summary of its contents, I also present corresponding words from the prayer that Jesus used as a model to teach his students how to pray.
When I came to the completion of this work, I found, to my surprise and joy, that the so-called Lord’s Prayer is nothing other than Jesus’s whole teaching expressed in its most distilled form in the very order that I had already laid out the chapters, and that each expression in the prayer corresponds to the sense and order of the chapters.
1. Our father
Man is the son of God.
2. Who art in heaven.
God is the eternal, spiritual source of life.
3. Hallowed be thy name.
Let this source of life be holy.
4. Thy kingdom come.
Let his power be manifest in all people.
5. Thy will be done in heaven
And let the eternal source’s will come to be, both in and of itself
6. as it is on earth.
as well as in the flesh.
7. Give us our daily bread
Temporal life is the food of true life.
8. this day
The true life is in the present.
9. And forgive us our debts,
Let not the mistakes and as we forgive our debtors. delusions of the past hide the true life from us.
10. And lead us not into temptation.
And let them not lead us into deception.
11. But deliver us from evil.
And then there will be no evil.
12. For thine is the kingdom and the power and the glory.
And it will be your power and strength and reason.
In the third section of the more comprehensive account, which is still in manuscript form, the Gospels according to the four Evangelists are thoroughly explicated, without the slightest omission. In this current account, the following verses are omitted: the conception, the birth of John the Baptist, his imprisonment and death, the birth of Jesus, his lineage, the flight with his mother into Egypt, Jesus’s miracles in Canaan and Capernaum, the casting out of demons, walking on water, the withering of the fig tree, healing of the sick, the resurrection of the dead, Christ’s own resurrection and all references to prophecies fulfilled in Christ’s life.
These verses are omitted in the current short account because, since they do not contain any teaching but only describe events that occurred before, during or after Jesus’s ministry without adding anything, they only complicate and burden the account. These verses, no matter how they are understood, do not contain contradictions to the teaching, nor do they contain support for it. The only value these verses held for Christianity was that they proved the divinity of Jesus to those who did not believe in it. For someone who perceives the flimsiness of a story about miracles, but still does not doubt Jesus’s divinity because of the strength of his teaching, these verses fall away by themselves; they are unnecessary.
In the larger account, each departure from the standard translation, each interjected clarification, each omission is explained and justified by a collation of the different versions of the Gospel, contexts, philological and other considerations. In this short account, all of these proofs and refutations of the church’s false understandings, as well as the detailed annotations with references, have been left out on the basis that no matter how exact and correct the reasoning of each individual section may be, such reasoning cannot serve to convince anyone that this reading of the teaching is true. The proof that this reading is correct lies not in reasoning out separate passages, but in the unity, clarity, simplicity and fullness of the teaching itself and on its correspondence with the internal feelings of every person who seeks truth.
Concerning all general deviations in my account from the accepted church texts, the reader should not forget that our quite customary concept about how the Gospels, all four, with all of their verses and letters are essentially holy books is, from one perspective, the most vulgar delusion, and from the other perspective, the most vulgar and harmful deception. The reader should understand that at no point did Jesus himself ever write a book as did Plato, Philo or Marcus Aurelius, that he did not even present his teachings to literate and educated people, as Socrates did, but spoke with the illiterate whom he met in the course of daily life, and that only long after his death did it occur to people that what he had said was very important and that it really wouldn’t be a bad idea to write down a little of what he had said and done, and so almost one hundred years later they began to write down what they had heard about him. The reader should remember that such writings were very, very numerous, that many were lost, many were very bad, and that the Christians used all of them before little by little picking out the ones that seemed to them best and most sensible, and that in choosing these best Gospels, to refer to the adage “every branch has its knots,” the churches inevitably took in a lot of knots with what they had cut out from the entire massive body of literature on Christ. There are many passages in the canonical Gospels that are as bad as those in the rejected apocryphal ones, and many places in the apocryphal ones are good. The reader should remember that Christ’s teaching may be holy, but that there is no way for some set number of verses and letters to be holy, and that no book can be holy from its first line to its last simply because people say that it is holy. Of all educated people, only our Russian reader, thanks to Russia’s censorship, can ignore the last one hundred years of labor by historical critics and continue to speak naively about how the Gospels of Matthew, Mark and Luke, as we currently have them, were each written completely and independently by the respective Evangelist. The reader should remember that to make this claim in the year 1880, ignoring all that has been developed on this subject by science, is the same as it would have been to say last century that the sun orbits the earth. The reader should remember that the Synoptic Gospels, as they have come down to us, are the fruit of a slow accumulation of elisions, ascriptions and the imaginations of thousands of different human minds and hands, and in no way a work of revelation directly from the Holy Ghost to the Evangelists. Remember that the attribution of the Gospels to the apostles is a fable that not only does not stand up to criticism, but has no foundation whatsoever, other than the desire of devout people that it were so. The Gospels were selected, added to, and interpreted over the centuries; all of the Gospels that have come down to us from the fourth century are written in continuous script, without punctuation. Since the fourth and fifth century they have been subject to the most varied readings, and such variants of the books of the Gospel can be numbered as high as fifty thousand. All of this should remind the reader not to become blinded by the customary view, that the Gospels, as they are now understood, came to us exactly as they are from the Holy Ghost. The reader should remember that not only is there no harm in throwing out the unnecessary parts of the Gospels and illuminating some passages with others, but that, on the contrary, it is reprehensible and godless not to do that, and continue considering some fixed number of verses and letters to be holy.