Читать книгу Gospel harmony - Valeriy Sterkh - Страница 12

The «United Gospel» is my attempt to create a gospel harmony that directly connects the canonical Gospels of Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John into one cohesive narrative. For the content of the book, I used only the words and phrases from the four Gospels. The Russian version of the book is based on the Russian Synodal translation of the Bible, while the English translation uses the King James Version. In some places, I have added my commentary for clarity.

To align the four Gospels, the tables of synoptic parallels were used. The alignment was based on the Gospel Synopsis from the Orthodox Bible, which reproduces a related publication of the Moscow Patriarchate (Bible. Moscow: Russian Bible Society, 2000). In some cases, the comparison was made based the table borrowed from the Belgian edition of the Holy Scriptures (Bible. Brussels: Life with God, 1983). It is worth noting that, for the goals mentioned above, none of the two tables were acceptable «as is», for a number of reasons. In this respect, the interpretation of the Gospel narrative about the resurrection of Jesus Christ proved to be the most critical. To solve the apparent conflict, we have used the sequence from the Harmony of the Gospels, quoted in Seraphim Slobodsky’s «The Law of God» («The Law of God for Families and Schools». Jordanville: Holy Trinity Monastery, 1967).

The principles of the narrative and the analysis of individual chapters of the «United Gospel» will be presented below.