The Bible Explained for Family Reading

For many centuries, Christians around the world have sought to understand the mysteries of existence, find answers to eternal questions, and attain the path to the salvation of the soul through the Bible. Many efforts have been made to preserve and spread biblical texts. For centuries, Jewish scholars safeguarded, copied, and passed down the handwritten texts of the Old Testament from generation to generation. Around the 3rd century BC, the Old Testament, originally written in ancient Hebrew, was translated into ancient Greek: this was done for the Jews living in Alexandria who had forgotten the language of their ancestors. This translation was called the Septuagint. Later, in the 4th-5th centuries AD, the Catholic priest Jerome of Stridon translated the Old and New Testaments into Latin, and this translation later became known as the Vulgate. Thanks to the Septuagint and the Vulgate, translations of the Bible into various languages were subsequently carried out, including into Russian. In the 9th century, Cyril and Methodius translated the texts of the Holy Scriptures into Old Slavic, thus beginning the Slavic acquaintance with the Bible, and ten centuries later a translation was created under the editorial office of the Holy Synod. It is called the Synodal; it remains in demand even today.

Artist Julius Schnorr.