The Gospel in Brief

PREFACE

This short account of the Gospel is my own synthesis of the four Gospels, organized according to the meaning of the teaching. While making this synthesis, it was mostly unnecessary for me to depart from the order in which the Gospels have already been laid out, so that in my synthesis one should not expect more but actually considerably fewer transpositions of Gospel verses than are found in the majority of concordances of which I am aware.

In the Gospel of John, as it appears in my synthesis, there are no transpositions whatsoever; it is all laid out in the exact order as the original.

The division of the Gospel into twelve or six chapters (if we were to count each thematic pair of two chapters as one) came about naturally from the meaning of the teaching.

This is the meaning behind these chapters:

Man is the son of an infinite source, the son of this father not by the flesh, but by the spirit.

And therefore man should serve this source in spirit.

The life of all people has a divine source. It alone is holy.

And therefore man should serve this source in the life of all people. That is the father’s will.

Only serving the father’s will can bring truth, i.e., a life of reason.

And therefore the satisfaction of one’s own will is not necessary for true life.

Temporal, mortal life is the food of the true life—it is the material for a life of reason.

And therefore the true life is outside of time, it exists only in the present.

Life’s deception with time: the life of the past or the future hides the true life of the present from people.

And therefore man should strive to destroy the deception of the temporal life of the past and the future.

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.

Only people who do not seek for truth and do not love the teachings of Christ can maintain such a view of the Gospels.

On the other hand, I ask the reader of my account of the Gospels to remember that if I do not look at the Gospels as holy books that come to us from heaven via the Holy Ghost, I also do not look at the Gospels as if they were merely major works in the history of religious literature. I understand both the divine and the secular view of the Gospels, but I view them differently. Therefore I ask the reader, while reading my account, not to fall into either the church’s view or the historical view of the Gospel customary to educated people in recent times, which I did not hold and which I also find incomplete. I do not look at Christianity as a strictly divine revelation, nor as a historical phenomenon, but I look at Christianity as a teaching that gives meaning to life. I was brought to Christianity neither by theological nor historical investigations, but by the fact that fifty years after my birth, having asked myself and all the wise ones in my circle who I am and what the purpose of my life is, I received the answer that I am an accidental clutter of parts, that there is no purpose in life and that life itself is evil. I was brought to Christianity because having received such an answer, I fell into despair and wanted to kill myself; but remembering that before, in childhood, when I believed, there had been a purpose to my life and that the believers who surrounded me—the majority of whom were uncorrupted by riches—lived a real life. I began to doubt the veracity of the answer that had been given to me via the wisdom of the people in my circle and I attempted to understand the answer that Christianity gives to the people who live this real life. I began to study Christianity and to study that which directs people’s lives within the Christian teaching. I began to study the Christianity that I saw applied in daily life and began to compare that applied belief with its source. The source of the Christian teaching was the Gospels, and in these Gospels I came upon an explanation for that meaning that directed the lives of all the people that I saw living the real life. But studying Christianity, I found next to this source of the pure water of life an illegitimate intermixture of dirt and muck that had obscured its purity for me; mingled with the high Christian teaching I found foreign and ugly teachings from church and Hebrew tradition. I was in the position of a man who has received a stinking sack of filth and after much labor and struggle finds that in this sack full of filth, priceless pearls actually lie hidden, a man who realizes that he is not to blame for his feeling of repulsion from the stinking filth and that not only are the people who gathered and preserved these pearls in the dirt not to be blamed, that they are in fact worthy of respect, but a man who nevertheless does not know what he ought to do with those precious things he has found mixed in with the filth. I found myself in this tormented position until I became convinced that the pearls had not fused with the filth and could be cleaned.

I did not know the light and I thought there was no truth in life. But having become convinced that people could only live by this light, I began to seek its source and I found it in the Gospels, despite the false interpretations of the churches. And having arrived at this source of light, I was blinded by it and was given full answers to my questions concerning the meaning of my life and the lives of others, answers that completely harmonized with all the answers from the other cultures familiar to me, answers that, in my opinion, transcended all others.

I sought the answer to the question of life, not to theological or historical questions. Therefore it was completely irrelevant to me whether or not Jesus Christ was God and where the Holy Ghost comes from and so on, and it was equally unimportant and unnecessary to know when and by whom which Gospel and which parable was written and whether or not it could be ascribed to Jesus. To me, what was important was the light which had illuminated eighteen hundred years of humanity and which had illuminated and still illuminates me. However, what to call that light, what its materials are, and who lit it was entirely irrelevant to me.

I began to look deeply into that light and toss away all that was opposed to it, and the further I went along this path, the more un-doubtable the difference between truth and falsehood became for me. At the beginning of my work, I still had doubts and there were attempts at artificial explanations, but the further I went, the firmer and clearer the task became and the more irrefutable the truth. I was in the position of a man gathering together the pieces of a broken statue. At the beginning there may still have been uncertainty as to whether a given piece was part of the leg or the arm, but once the legs had been fully reassembled, it became clear that a certain piece probably was not part of the leg and when, moreover, the piece seemed to fit with some other part of the torso and all the fracture lines seemed to align properly with the other pieces, then there could no longer be any doubt. I experienced this as I made forward progress in my work, and unless I am insane, then the reader should also experience that feeling when reading the larger account of the Gospel, where every thesis is confirmed directly by philological considerations, variants, contexts and concordance with the fundamental idea.

We might end the foreword on that point, if only the Gospels were newly revealed books, if the teaching of Christ hadn’t undergone eighteen hundred years of false interpretations. But now, in order to understand the true teaching of Christ, as he might have understood it himself, it is important to realize the main reason for these false interpretations that have spoiled the teaching and the main approaches these false interpretations take. The main reason for these false interpretations that have so disfigured the teaching of Christ, to such a degree that it is hard to even see it beneath the layer of fat, is the fact that since the time of Paul, who did not understand Christ’s teachings very well and did not hear it as it would later be expressed in the Gospel of Matthew, Christ’s teachings have been connected with the pharisaical tradition and by extension all the teachings of the Old Testament. Paul is usually considered the apostle of the gentiles—the apostle of the Protestants. He was that on the surface, in his relationship to circumcision, for example. But the teaching about tradition, about the connection of the Old Testament with the New, was introduced into Christianity by Paul. This very teaching on tradition, this principle of tradition, was the main reason that the Christian teaching was distorted and misread.

The Christian Talmud begins at the time of Paul, calling itself the church, and thus the teaching of Christ ceases to be unified, divine and self-contained, but becomes just one of the links in a chain of revelations which began at the start of the world and which continues in the church up to this time.

These false readings refer to Jesus as God. However, professing him to be a God does not prompt them to attribute the words and teaching of this supposed God any more significance than the words they find in the Pentateuch, the Psalms, the Acts of the apostles, the Epistles, Revelation or even the collected decrees and writings of the fathers of the church.

These false interpretations allow no other understanding of the teaching of Jesus Christ than what would be in agreement with all preceding and subsequent revelation. So their goal is not to genuinely explain the sense of Christ’s sermons, but only to find the least contradictory meaning for all the most hopelessly conflicting writings: the Pentateuch, the Psalms, the Gospels, the Epistles, the Acts, i.e., in everything that is considered scripture.

With such an approach to Christ’s teaching, it is obvious that it would become incomprehensible. All of the innumerable disagreements on how to understand the Gospel flow out of this false approach. One might guess—and guess correctly—that these explanations, which are interested primarily in reconciling the irreconcilable, i.e., the Old and New Testaments, would be innumerable. So, in order to profess this reconciliation as truth we must have recourse to external means: miracles and the visitation of the Holy Ghost.

Everyone reconciled the differences in their own way, and such reconciling continues today; but in their reconciliation, everyone asserts that their words are the continued revelation of the Holy Ghost. Paul’s epistles follow this model, as does the founding of the church councils, which begin with the formula: “It pleases us and the Holy Ghost.” Such too are the decrees of the popes, synods, khlysts^* and all false interpreters who claim that the Holy Ghost speaks through their mouths. They all rely on the same crude platform to confirm the truth of their reconciliation, they all claim that their reconciliation is not the fruit of their own thoughts, but the testimony of the Holy Ghost.

When one refuses to enter this fray of faiths, each of which calls itself true, it becomes impossible not to notice that in their common approach, wherein they accept the enormous amount of so-called scripture in the Old and New Testaments to be uniformly sacred, there lies an insurmountable self-constructed obstacle to understanding the teaching of Christ. Moreover, one notices that it is from this delusion that the opportunity and even necessity for endlessly varied and hostile sects arises.

Only the reconciling of an enormous amount of revelations can foster endless variety. Interpreting the teaching of one individual, who is worshipped as a God, cannot give birth to a sect. The teaching of a God who has descended to earth in order to instruct people cannot be interpreted in different ways because this would be counter to the very goal of descending. If God descended to earth in order to reveal truth to people, then the very least he could have done would be to have revealed the truth in such a way that everybody would understand it. If he did not do this, then he was not God. If God’s truths are such that even God couldn’t make them understandable to people, then of course there’s no way that people could have done it.

If Jesus isn’t God, but was a great man, then his teachings are even less likely to give birth to sects. The teachings of a great man can only be considered great if he clearly and understandably expresses that which others have only expressed unclearly and incomprehensibly.

That which is incomprehensible in the teaching of a great man is simply not great and the teaching of a great man cannot give birth to a sect. The teaching of a great man is only great insofar as it unifies people in a single truth for all. The teaching of Socrates has always been understood uniformly by all. Only the kind of interpretation which claims to be the revelation of the Holy Ghost, to be the only truth, and that all else is a lie, only this kind of interpretation can give birth to hatred and the so-called sects. No matter how much the members of a given denomination speak of how they do not judge other denominations, how they pray for communion with them and have no hatred toward them, it is not so. Never, going back to Arius, has any claim, regardless of its supporting dogma, arisen from anything other than condemnation of the falseness of the opposing dogma. To contend that the expression of a given dogma is a divine expression, that it is of the Holy Ghost, is the highest degree of pride and stupidity: the highest pride because it is impossible to say anything more prideful than, “The words that I speak are said through me by God himself,” and the highest stupidity because when responding to another man’s claim that God speaks through his mouth, it is impossible to say anything more stupid than, “No, it is not through your mouth that God speaks, he speaks through my mouth and he says the complete opposite of what your God is saying.” But, all along, this is exactly what every church claims, and it is from this very thing that all the sects have arisen as well as all the evil in the world that has been done and is being done in the name of faith. But apart from the outward evil that is produced by the sects’ interpretations, there is another important, internal deficiency that gives all of these sects an unclear, murky and dishonest character.

With all the sects, this deficiency can be detected in the fact that, although they acknowledge the last revelation of the Holy Ghost to be its descent onto the apostles and subsequent passage down to the supposedly chosen ones, these false interpreters never express directly, concretely, and definitively what exactly that revelation from the Holy Ghost is. Yet all the while it is upon this supposed continued revelation that they base their faith and by which they consider this faith to be Christ’s.

All the leaders of the churches who claim the revelation of the Holy Ghost recognize, as do the Muslims, three revelations. The Muslims recognize Moses, Jesus and Mohammed. The church leaders recognize Moses, Jesus and the Holy Ghost. But according to the Muslim faith, Mohammed was the last prophet, the one who explained the meaning of Moses’s and Jesus’s revelations; he is the last revelation, explaining all that came before, and every true believer holds to this revelation. But it is not so with the church belief. It recognizes, like the Muslim faith, three revelations—Moses’s, Jesus’s and the Holy Ghost’s—but it does not call itself by the name of the final revelation. Instead, it asserts that the foundation of its faith is the teaching of Christ. Therefore the teachings they propagate are their own, but they ascribe their authority to Christ.

Some sectarians of the Holy Ghost variety consider the final revelation, the one that explained all that preceded it, to be that of Paul, some consider it to be that of certain councils, some that of others, some that of the popes, some that of the patriarchs, some that of private revelations from the Holy Ghost. All of them ought to have named their faith after the one who received that final revelation. If that final revelation is from the church fathers, or the epistles of the Eastern patriarchs, or papal edicts, or the Syllabus of Errors, or the catechism of Luther or Filaret, then say so. Name your faith after that, because the final revelation which explains all previous revelation will always be the most important revelation. However, they do not do this; instead they promote teachings completely foreign to Christ, and claim that Christ himself preached these things. Therefore, according to their teachings, it turns out that Christ announced that he was saving the human race, fallen since Adam, with his own blood, that God is a trinity, that the Holy Ghost descended upon the apostles and spread via the laying on of hands onto the priesthood, that seven sacraments are needed for salvation, that communion ought to occur in two forms, and so on. It turns out that all of this is the teaching of Christ, whereas in Jesus’s actual teaching there isn’t the slightest hint of any of this. These false teachers should call their teaching and their faith the teaching and faith of the Holy Ghost, not of Christ. The faith of Christ can only rightfully refer to a faith based on Christ’s revelation as it comes down to us in the Gospels, and which recognizes this as the ultimate revelation. This is in accordance with Christ’s own words: “Do not recognize any as your teacher, except Christ.” This concept seems so simple that it should not even be a point of discussion, but strange as it may be to say so, to this day, nobody has attempted to separate the teaching of Christ from that artificial and completely unjustified reconciliation with the Old Testament or from those arbitrary additions to his teachings that were made and are still being made in the name of the Holy Ghost. What is even stranger to see in this error is the convergence of two camps on the extreme edges of the debate: the church leaders and the free-thinking historians of Christianity. One group, the church leaders, calling Jesus the second personage of the trinity, understand his teaching only through the filter of the supposed revelations of the third personage, whom they find in the Old Testament, in the epistles of the councils and the edicts of the church fathers. As a result, they preach the most peculiar principles, claiming that these principles are Christ’s. In just the same way, the other group, not recognizing Christ as a God, does not understand his teaching as he might actually have expressed it, but as Paul and the other interpreters have understood it. Considering Christ to be a man and not a God, these interpreters deprive Christ of the most legitimate human right to answer for one’s own words and not for another’s false reading of them. In trying to explain the teaching of Jesus, these scholarly interpreters entwine Jesus in ideas he never would have thought to speak. The representatives of this school of interpreters, beginning with the most popular of them, Renan, make no attempt to separate from Christ’s teaching—from what Christ himself actually taught—all that has been calcified onto it by his interpreters, and so, they make no more effort to understand this teaching than do the church leaders. They attempt to understand Christ as a phenomenon and to understand the proliferation of Jesus’s teaching through the events of his life and the conditions of his time.

It goes without saying that these historians should not allow themselves to be making this mistake. The problem that stands before them to solve is the following: eighteen hundred years ago, some sort of poor person showed up and said something. He was cut down and hung up and everyone forgot about him, just as millions of such instances have been forgotten, and for two hundred years the world did not hear a thing about him. But then, it turns out, somebody remembered him and what he had said and so he told it to another person and then to a third. And so on and so on, to the point that billions of people, smart and stupid, learned and illiterate, cling to the thought that this man, and only this man, was God. How can we explain this amazing phenomenon? The church leaders say that this occurred because Jesus actually was God. So everything makes sense. But if he was not God, then how can we explain that this man, specifically, is recognized by all as God?

And the scholars of this school earnestly attempt to uncover all the details of the conditions of this man’s life, paying no attention to the fact that no matter how much they seek out these details (and all they do is refer to what was printed in Josephus Flavius and the Gospels, they don’t actually seek anything out), even if they were to completely reconstruct Jesus’s life to the most minute details and discover when he ate a certain thing or where he slept, the question of why he—specifically he—had such an influence on people would remain, all the same, unanswered. The answer is not to be found in the environment where Jesus was born, who it was that raised him and so on, and it is even less to be found in what was taking place in Rome at the time and whether the people tended toward superstition and so on, but only in what this man preached, what was so special that it forced people to place him apart from all the others and recognize him as a God both then and now. It would seem that if you really want to understand this, then the first thing you would need to do is attempt to understand the teaching of this man and, it goes without saying, understand his actual teaching and not the vulgar interpretations of that teaching that were spread and are still being spread after him. But they do not do this. These scholarly historians of Christianity are so overjoyed with their understanding that Jesus was not a God and they want so badly to prove that his teaching was not divine and that it is therefore unnecessary. They forget that the more they try to prove that he was just a simple man and that his teaching was not divine, the further they will be from answering the question they are trying to solve, because they are wasting all their energy proving him a simple man and his teaching not divine. To see this delusion clearly, it would be worth looking at Renan and his followers: Havet, who naively asserts that Jesus Christ n’avait rien de chritien, and Souris, who demonstrates with great joy that Jesus was an exceptionally rude and stupid man.

The task is not to prove that Jesus was not a God and that therefore his teachings were not divine, any more than it is to prove that he was Catholic. The task must be to understand the essence of his teaching, this teaching that became so high and precious for people that they recognized the messenger of it as a God. I have tried to do this very thing; for myself at least, I have done it. And now I am offering it to my brothers.

If the reader belongs to the enormous majority of the educated, raised in the church faith, who have not strayed from that faith despite its incongruity with good common sense and conscience (for such a man, love and respect for the spirit of the Christian teaching must remain, otherwise, as in the proverb, he “throws the fur coat onto the fire because he is angry at the fleas,” considering all of Christianity a dangerous superstition), then I ask such a reader to consider that what pushes him away and what he deems superstition is not the teaching of Christ and that Christ can in no way be blamed for the repulsive beliefs that have been stitched onto his teaching and presented as Christianity. One must study the teaching of Christ alone, insofar as we have access to it—that is, those words and actions which have been attributed to Christ and which have an instructive meaning. Reading my account, such a reader will be convinced that Christianity not only is not a mixture of high and low, not only is it not superstitious, but that, on the contrary, it is the strictest, purest and fullest metaphysical and ethical teaching, above which no other human intellect has ascended to this day and in the radiance of which, though it may not do so consciously, all higher human activity operates: political, scientific, poetic and philosophical. If the reader belongs to that insignificant minority of educated people who cling to church faith, confessing it not for any external purposes but for inner peace, then I ask such a reader, before reading, to decide first in his soul, which is more valuable to him: spiritual peace or truth? If it is peace, then I ask him not to read; if it is truth, then I ask him to remember that the teaching of Christ, laid out here, despite the identical name, is a completely different teaching than the one he confesses, and that therefore the relationship of someone who confesses church faith to this account of Christ’s teaching is the same as the relationship of the Muslims to the sermons of Christianity. The question for him is not does this teaching in question agree with his faith or not, but only which teaching agrees more with his mind and heart. Is it the church teaching, which is founded on a reconciliation of all the scriptures, or is it the teaching of Christ on its own. For him, the question can only be framed like this: Does he want to accept a new teaching or remain in his own faith?

If the reader belongs to the group of people who externally claim church faith and value it not because they believe in its truth but because of external considerations, since they consider its ritual and preaching appropriate to their lifestyle, then let such people remember that no matter how many kindred thinkers they may have, no matter how strong they may be, no matter which thrones they may sit on, whichever high names they may call themselves, they are not in the position of the accusers, but of the accused, and not by me, but by Christ. Let such readers remember that they said what they had to say a long time ago and that even if they proved what they want to prove, they would merely be proving what all the hundreds of contradictory church faiths prove for themselves. They should remember that they have no need to prove anything; they should instead justify themselves. Justify themselves in the sacrilege of equating the teaching of Jesus the God with that of Ezdra, that of the councils and that of Theophylact and the sacrilege of allowing themselves to overinterpret the word of God and alter it based on the words of people. Justify themselves in slandering God, which they did by taking all the fanaticism that was in their hearts and dumping it on Jesus the God and passing it off as his teaching. Justify themselves in the fraud of hiding the teaching of God that was sent to bring goodness into the world, and putting in its place their own Holy Ghost faith. With this replacement they have deprived and continue to deprive billions of people of the goodness which Christ brought to the people, and in place of the peace and love he brought, they have brought sects into the world, along with judgments and all manner of evil, twisting it all in the name of Christ.

For those readers there are only two alternatives: humble repentance and renunciation of these lies or persecution of those who can expose them for what they have done and are still doing.

If they do not renounce their lies, they have only one choice: to persecute me. And having finished my writing, I now prepare for this with joy and with fear for my weakness.

—Leo Tolstoy