The passage in full
Never abridged. Parables are quoted whole and never cut before the ending, which is usually where the difficulty is.
A great deal of devotional writing repeats things that are lovely and not true — the eye of the needle as a gate in Jerusalem, the shepherd breaking the sheep's legs, the pelican feeding its young with its own blood. They circulate because nobody checks.
Every factual claim in these three volumes was traced to an identifiable source and checked against the strongest evidence available for it. Primary sources were used wherever they could be reached; where the honest answer was a translation, a lexicon or a modern scholar, that is what is cited, and it is cited by name. Where a well-loved detail could not be verified at all, it was cut — and where it was cut for a reason worth knowing, the book says so, in print, rather than quietly dropping it.
That is not scholarly fussiness. If a reader finds out that one memorable thing in a book of this kind was made up, they are right to wonder about the rest of it.
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The translation
Scripture is quoted from the Majority Standard Bible, translated from the Byzantine Majority Text — a form of the Byzantine textual tradition, closely related to the Greek preserved in Orthodox use. Where that text differs from the critical text most modern Bibles follow, and the difference matters, the reading is given and the difference explained rather than smoothed over.
Week one is an example. The critical text has a future — come, and you will see. The Majority Text gives the imperative — come and see. It is a small difference, and it is the reason the first volume is called what it is called.
The Fathers
This is an Orthodox book. The Church has been reading, interpreting and living with these passages for nearly two thousand years, and it would be strange to sit down with them as though nobody ever had. St John Chrysostom is quoted more than anyone else — he preached his way through Matthew and John sentence by sentence.
They are not brought in for decoration. They are brought in because they are frequently better than the modern reading, and occasionally because they contradict it — and when they do, that is printed too. There is a place where Chrysostom quotes a man as saying something the Greek does not have him say, and a place where a Father's own copy of the Bible plainly differed from ours. None of it is hidden.
What one week looks like
Every reading in all three volumes has the same shape:
The gist, then the depth
A short plain reading first, then the Greek, the Fathers, and whatever the English translation had to flatten.
In the modern world
Where the saying lands in a week that includes a job, a family and a phone. No pretending the difficulty is theoretical.
One practice
Small enough to actually do, with a daily return and a worked example of what it looks like when somebody does it.
Sources are printed at the foot of every reading, with working links, so anyone can go and check.
How the work was done
Four passes, in this order, on every one of the hundred and fifty-six readings.
- Find the sources. The Greek, the Fathers who preached on that passage, and whatever modern scholarship bears on it.
- Compare them. Where the manuscripts differ, or where the Fathers disagree with each other or with the modern reading, note it rather than pick a side quietly.
- Verify every quotation and claim. Back to the text it came from — not to whoever last repeated it.
- Cite it, or cut it. Anything that could not be stood behind came out.
What the figure on the front page counts. The home page says 544 sources cited, and that number is not an estimate. It is counted from the pages themselves each time the site is built: every distinct external source linked from a Sources section, plus every distinct work named there without a link — the Fathers in their printed editions, the lexicons, the reference works, the modern monographs. Sources read and not used are not counted, so the true number consulted is larger. Every one of the ones counted is at the foot of a page here, where you can follow it.
On the use of AI. Artificial intelligence was used throughout this project, and it would be strange to be exacting about sources while being vague about that. It was used to locate material, to organise and compare it, to cross-check quotations, and — most usefully — to argue against a draft and find the weak places in it. It was not treated as an authority on anything: nothing entered the books on its say-so, and every claim it surfaced was confirmed against a real source before it was printed. The judgements, the selection, the errors and the responsibility are Nicholas Evoy's.
Corrections
If anything on this site is wrong — a date, a source, a saint’s life, a claim that does not hold up — say so. That is not a courtesy; it is how the site is supposed to work, and corrections get made and acknowledged rather than quietly absorbed.