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 claim in these three volumes was checked against a primary source. Where a well-loved detail could not be verified, 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 — the Greek text tradition the Orthodox Church has actually used. 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 these passages aloud, in the same order, for 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.
Who wrote them
Nicholas Evoy is an Orthodox Christian in eastern Ontario and a member of St Porphyrios Orthodox Mission in Clayton. He came to Orthodoxy as an adult. He also writes trivia for a living, which is where this site's quiz comes from and, less obviously, where the verifying habit came from: a question that turns out to be wrong in a room full of people is a lesson you only need once.
Corrections
If something in the books or on this site is wrong, say so. The address is printed inside every volume and it reaches a person, not a queue.