The book was written in Beijing, when the author served at the Russian Spiritual Mission there. He and others translated Biblical texts into Chinese from the Slavic version. Previous Biblical translation were made by American missionaries from the English text, and the comparison of two Chinese versions set a question of differenced between the Slavic and English ones.

Aleksander Nickolaevich Vinogradov – Father Aleksey, after taking monastic vows – treated that book as a part of ‘scholarly report on his mission’, beside other texts compiled by him (a catalogue of the Chinese library of the Beijing Russian Mission, translations of missionary dialogues by Matteo Ricci, and others). He was not Biblichal scholar, and his education at the Demidov Legal School (graduated from it in 1874) trained him to compile reviews as a form of analytical work. It is obvious from the book. The author had an original idea to make a complete encyclopedic review of all subjects, connected with the history of translation of the Bible into English. He started with the origin of English writing and the textual history of the Hebrew Bible and goes to the differences of various groups inside the contemporary English Church, and Biblical exegesis. In fact, it is a sequence of vast reviews based on the best and the newest research works made in English: B. F. Westcott, F. A. Hort, G. McClintock, G. Strong. The author transplanted British Biblical criticism on the Russian soil and was sincerely enchanted with the research he used for his book.

The book could be very useful for the positive reception of the western research tradition in Russia, but there were two obstacles. First of all, it was written in heavy style and overburden with details. V, was not able to balance between the more and the less important topics and details. The structure of the book is rather complicated. The second problem that the book was published for his own account and was not distributed regularly. This, its influence was minimal.