"It is impossible for there to be more or fewer Gospels than there are. For since there are four cardinal points in the world in which we live, and four cardinal winds, and since the Church is scattered throughout the earth, and the pillar and foundation of the Church is the Gospel and the Spirit of life, it is fitting that she have four pillars."(Hieromortyr Irenaeus of Lyons)
When we read the Gospels, we must keep in mind that we have before us something like a layer cake:
The very bottom, first layer is the real historical events reflected (exactly like that) in them.
Which "peep through" the second layer, which is the Gospels themselves (the canonical and the surviving apocryphal texts, as well as other New Testament texts). For example, Jesus was indeed a Galilean by birth. And he was undoubtedly crucified during the reign of Pontius Pilate. And so on. Unfortunately, overall, this second layer is, to put it mildly, not very reliable.
The third layer consists of later edits ‑to the insertion, primarily from the Byzantine era. These were literally stuffed, like raisins into a bun, by the pious bishops of that time into what was supposedly sacred Scripture (let's be kind to them, they were believers, after all). Therefore, Jesus, for example, undoubtedly foretold the imminent coming of the "Son of Man" as the long-awaited Jewish Messiah, but he certainly did not send his disciples "to make disciples of all nations, baptizing them in the name of the Father and the Son and the Holy Spirit."
The fourth layer is—at least for the Russian-speaking reader—the Synodal Translation, completed in the 19th ‑century and still circulated by the Russian Orthodox Church. I will try to speak about it as carefully as possible in what follows. Otherwise, if I were to speak frankly, this book would not have passed the publisher's censorship.
And finally, the fifth layer is what is not directly in the Gospels themselves, but what the reader usually brings into them without noticing it.
In doing so, we commit two very natural, yet very serious, mistakes. Firstly ‑—and this is especially true for believers—as we read, we often unconsciously introduce our own preconceived notions. For example, at the very beginning of the Gospel of Mark, we read that someone named Jesus came to the Jordan to be baptized by John. And of course, we ‑know that it was God who came to John, born a man from the Virgin Mary! As a result, instead of understanding the author's ideas, we simply project our own familiar template onto the text.
