The Gospel in Brief: The Life of Jesus

by Leo Tolstoy (Author), Dustin Condren (Author)

• New

  Paperback
  2011

  $11.57

  The four Gospels that begin the Bible's New Testament tell the life of Jesus. But each Gospel relates a slightly different version of events. Some stories appear only in one Gospel, while certain other stories are different in each. What Leo Tolstoy sought to do in The Gospel In Brief was to apply his tremendous skills as a writer to tell the life of Jesus in one seamless narrative, thus integrating the four Gospels. The result is a work that reads like a novel, complete with twelve chapters. The project was very important to Tolstoy. With The Gospel In Brief , he sought to democratize access to the Gospel, making the life of Jesus accessible to everyone. (He particularly had in mind the Russian peasantry.) Tolstoy based his translation on his study of the original Greek versions of the Bible. Unfortunately the Russian Orthodox Church viewed the book as sacrilegious. How dare he re-write the sacred texts? The Church worked to suppress The Gospel In Brief , and in 1901, it permanently excommunicated Tolstoy, Russia's greatest novelist.

• Used

  Paperback
  2010

  $4.94

  `The one thing that is necessary, in life as in art,' Tolstoy once said,' is to tell the truth.' The Gospel in Brief is one of the most challenging and unsettling interpretations of the significance of Jesus ever written, which has intrigued and unsettled Christians, agnostics and atheists alike. Leo Tolstoy believed that the existence of God could be neither proved nor disproved and that the meaning of life lay beyond the limits of our minds. After much suffering and study, Tolstoy came to believe that the answer to the riddle of how we should live well can be found in the teachings of Jesus. The Gospel in Brief is his provocative synthesis of the four Gospels. Here, he believed, was the essential message of Jesus, a simple key to the good and purposeful life, with all the clutter and superstition of priests and theologians swept away.

• New

  Paperback
  1997

  $24.62

  The Gospel in Brief is Leo Tolstoy's integration of the four biblical Gospels into a single account of the life of Jesus. Inspired in large measure by Tolstoy's meticulous study of the original Greek versions of the Bible, The Gospel in Brief is a highly original fusion of biblical texts and Tolstoy's own influential religious views. Tolstoy explains that his goal is a solution to 'the problem of life', not an answer to theological or historical questions. As a result, he sets aside such issues as Jesus' genealogy and divinity, or whether Jesus in fact walked on water.Instead, he focuses on the words and teachings of Jesus, stripped of what Tolstoy regarded as the Church's distortions and focus on dogma and ritual. The result is a work that emphasizes the individual's spiritual condition in a chaotic and indifferent world. Like Tolstoy's celebrated literary achievements, The Gospel in Brief has the distinct bearing of a classic: in its urgency and directness it is remarkably current, as if it were written only yesterday rather than a century ago. Isabel Hapgood (1850-1928), author of A Survey of Russian Literature , also translated works by Gogol, Turgenev, and Gorky. Her translation of this classic work has been edited and introduced by F. A. Flowers III, an appellate lawyer from Birmingham, Alabama.