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The Gospel in Brief (Texts & Contexts)

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Leo Tolstoy, in the thick of his spiritual journey, attempts a dangerous and potentially offensive act: re-interpret the gospels of the christian new testament. Abandoning the miraculous claims of the christian doctrine (Jesus' divine birth, numerous miracles of ministry, the resurrection, etc.), Tolstoy shifts his focus onto the social message of Christ. Whereas most orthodox and modern day christian churches emphasize the authority of Christ, Tolstoy considers such blasphemy and instead, emphasizes the spirit of truth, which dwells within every man, and its power towards transformation of the individual and the societal standards. Combining the four gospels into one account, Tolstoy creates a concise and appropriate representation of the teachings of the social philosopher Christ. A must read for christians and non-christians alike. Like Tolstoy, we must search for truth first and christianity second. -Kyle Flubacker

I have always felt that much of the Bible and the Church was hiding the heart of Christ's message. The Bible seems a tool that the Church arbitrarily canonized to use for justification; eerily much like the teachers of law that Christ came to nullify.

Tolstoy goes to the original Greek texts and renders a striking and illuminating account of Christ's message from the four gospels. He purposely does not delve into Christ's miracles or divinity. Why?

Well, Christ himself was more concerned that people understand his message of how to live one's life in the spirit than to worship him because of his divine acts. Religion is dead if it is not lived continually. Tolstoy dared to explain with clarity how to live Christ's message. It is harrowing if you understand what is asked of you.

"...small is the gate and narrow the road that leads to life, and only a few find it." -Matthew 7:24

I know why this was said now and is rarely emphasized in churches. Read this book if you want to change and are open to the idea that Christianity has been severely perverted.

This translation was done by Isabel Hapgood -- a late 19th century translator. She is the WORST translator of Tolstoy. She misses most of the meaning most of the time. Constance Garnett, on the other hand, is good. Michael Glenny is superb. You have to pay attention to the translator.

This is the kind of book either you like or you hate.

Three kinds of people will read this book. The first (and most moderate) will be Tolstoy scholars, etc. interested in his religious beliefs and influences, and there readings of this book will be value-empty and hygenic. The second group of people will be those akin of mind to Tolstoy, and they will love and cherish this book ahead of almost any other: when the philosopher Wittgenstein first read this book he decided that it was spectacular and went off into the countryside to begin to change the world (and failed... leaving Austria to go and study with Russell at Oxford....) The third group will be more traditional Christians-- for whom Jesus' particular authority and the authority of the Church handed down through the Fathers is paramount, and they, generally, will detest this work.....

I love this book. I find it splendidly written, insightful, and clever: I'm of the sort who would toss out the whole of the Bible excluding Ezekiel, Daniel, and James: I want Christ as a man and a social reformer. Unfortunately, Gandhi and Christ were not usually considered one in the same. For people like me, this book is a must-read and almost guaranteed as a world-changing event.

For more traditional Christians, this book is probably better left forgotten. It's going to be objectionable and even with his style being beautiful, there are better things to be read....

Some nights ago, I picked up a copy of this book, which has been sitting on my bookshelf for a while.

I started into this by a separate interest in the syntopical reading of War and Peace, and that led me though many elements of Napoleonic history. Along the way, I added this book because of my growing interest in Tolstoy and his place in Russian literature. Hearkening back recently to my studies of the Russian language and political structure 40 years ago, this cumulative interest was pushed to the tipping point by the recent production of Utopia, the Tom Stoppard plays about the 19th century evolution of a Russian literary tradition after Tolstoy.

The bases of my review and recommendation are simply these:

1) Born into a Christian tradition, I was familiar with the Gospels, but I have to plead ignorance of them more or less because I have always approached the Bible as a mystical and mysterious document, revealed only with the help of clergy and only while sitting in the pews of my Episcopal Churches.

2) After my deeply moving reading of the book, it was revealed to me for the first time the essential elements of Christ's teaching, unadorned by evangelistic zeal or liturgical ritual. It provided me a justification to discuss the Bible, the teachings of Christ, and the search for the spirit in polite secular conversations.

I think The Gospels in Brief is a straight up and highly penetrating search for the truly integrated essence of the four canonical Gospels of Mathew, Mark, Luke and John.

I feel compelled to recommend the book, simply because it is the only book I have ever read from cover to cover when starting to read it myself at 2:30 AM as a sleeping pill. I was enthralled and I never put it down until finished at about 6:30 AM.

No matter how I may otherwise view the more elaborate telling of the complete Gospels, I found in Tolstoy that it is true that the spirit and body are separable, and that if properly observed, the spirit of God, nature, providence or the "force" is in fact already in all of us if we only know where to look and how to look.

My only regrets after reading the book are:
1) that I cannot translate the original Russian for myself, and
2) that I cannot do it all for myself based on the Latin text of the Gospels themselves.

Christopher Hitchins aside, the book has altered my thinking about spirit and its power. It leaves me, however, with the challenge of how much to follow the teachings in a literal or figurative sense. For now, I provisionally choose to believe that I do no one good to give away all my worldly belongings and ambitions in fact. I am convinced so far that if I use them all to feed the spirit, as well as the mind and body, I can reveal the spirit just as well -- maybe better.

It ultimately comes to this. This book strips the decisions of spiritual faith bare and allows me to gain perspective on the issues, confronting my soul and my life of the flesh. That is a pretty good accomplishment for Tolstoy. It warrants our attention no matter who we are or where we come from. The cost is small -- the benefits are big. In economic terms it is a high cost/benefit read. Especially if "the body is willing but the spirit is weak."

Tolstoy's inspiring translation of the Gospels focuses on the problem of life while detailing Christ's instructions to man concerning the question of how we are to live. This work is revolutionary in the context that it summarizes all of Christ's instructions into 5 simple commands, all of which can be obeyed through one direct command: to love one another even as Christ has loved us.

In reading this book, I would recommend reading the body of the text before reading the introduction. As the text is potentially paradigm shifting for the reader, it is best to approach it with an open mind. Tolstoy's introduction, I have found, can be best appreciated after reading the text of the Gospel in Brief.

I would encourage everyone, Christian and non-Christian, to read this book to attain a clearer understanding of the teachings of Jesus Christ.

Tolstoi, one of the five best novelists of all time, in any language, was born into a rich and powerful family (second only to the Tsar) and loved wine, women and song; was married and had fourteen children. In short he was a superstar! And suicidal, depressed and lonely until he learned to live like a Christian instead of living like his church would have him live. He leaves the "churches" contributions out of the Gospels and leaves Christ in (for which he was proudly excommunicated). If you have rejected Christ because of the hyprocisy of the church and the people who run it - get this book and get a life.

I am, admittedly, a Tolstoy fan already, so I read this with a positive bias, but, that aside, this was one of the most powerful books I have read. I have always felt uncomfortable reading the New Testament because I can tell that liberties have been taken with the translation (just compare two versions) and I always think about all the people who have worked on it since its beginning. Tolstoy takes this into account and produces a condensed version that expresses the most important part of the NT: Christ's message. We are lucky enough to be the readers of a work that was written by a brilliant religous scholar. This is highly readable and simple, but at the same time, powerful and life changing. For people who are striving to be true Christian's in the way Christ intended without the murky trappings of organized churches, this is the interpretation of the New Testament to treasure.

The Russian Count Leo Tolstoy (1828-1910), best known for his novels, such as War and Peace and Anna Karenina, considered by many to have been the greatest novelist, had a spiritual crisis when he was fifty years old. He met with many wise individuals seeking answers to his questions, but was unsatisfied with their responses. So he turned to the study of Christianity and discovered a solution to his problems in his own unique understanding of the Christian Gospels.
Tolstoy, like many other writers, such as George Bernard Shaw, was convinced that Jesus' teachings were perverted by the people who transmitted them and that the explanations of his teachings in the non-Gospel New Testament books and in the writings of the church after his death have little or no relation to what he actually said. All of Jesus' disciples, Tolstoy wrote, without exception, were illiterate and uneducated workmen who the New Testament itself repeatedly testifies did not understand what Jesus was saying. Those who followed the disciples wrote what they wanted to write using Jesus to promote their own agenda.
The Bible writers, he says, inserted all kinds of miracles and superstitious notions that, being unnatural, could never have occurred.
So Tolstoy decided to rewrite the Gospels as a single book and only include the ethical teachings of Jesus. He took statements from each of the four Gospels, without concern for chronology, mixing the wording of one Gospel writer into the discussion by another. By mixing the ideas, he erased the agenda of each Gospel writer, for each had his own program, and created his own. Additionally, the Tolstoy version of Jesus' teaching is totally unlike the teachings of the Christian churches.
Why Tolstoy can say on the one hand that the Gospel writers did not understand Jesus while using their words in his own Gospel is difficult to understand. Be this as it may, the Tolstoy reading of the Gospel, as translated masterfully by Isabel Hapgood, is very thought provoking. Readers may accept his theology in whole, or in part, or reject it out of hand. But all who pay attention to his ideas will find them interesting.
Tolstoy did not believe in the conventional notion of God. God is the name given to "the infinite source of being." This infinite source of being is incomprehensible. It is not involved in current human affairs. It created everything out of love. People are related to the infinite source in spirit, not in the flesh, for the source is not physical.
People are the product or sons of this "father," another name that people apply to the infinite source. Thus Jesus is the son of what people call God, and so are all other humans the father's son. Jesus was not God; he was as human as all other people.
However, Jesus understood what others do not, that everything that the infinite source created was created with love. Therefore, if people want to relate to God, as they should, they can only do so by being like God, showing love to all people, indeed to all that God created. Tolstoy writes, "The Gospel puts in the place of what men call 'God' a right understanding of life. Without this understanding there is no life; men only live in so far as they understand life." Thus, the basic human command is to love unconditionally, to "love thy neighbor as thyself." As stated in Matthew 5:44, "love not only your own countrymen, but people of other nations." Tolstoy emphasizes that loving means acting toward people with love, not just thinking or feeling, and not just celebrating religious ceremonies.
Matthew 5 mentions five basic commands, and love is the fifth mentioned, but the first in importance. The others are (1) "Do not be angry, do not abuse; but having quarreled, make peace in such a way that no one may have cause for offense against you." (2) "Do not think that love toward woman is good; do not admire the beauty of women, but live with the one to whom you have become united, and do not leave her." (3) "Understand that every oath is evil" and therefore never swear. (4) "Do not resist evil, do not judge and do not go to law (courts), do not complain and do not punish."
Tolstoy followed the dictates of the first and fifth commands by remarkably translating the New Testament phrase "Pharisees" as "orthodox." This is an extremely significant innovation. Unfortunately, beginning in the second half of the first century C.E., disputes arose among the traditionally-minded Jews and the Jews who accepted the teachings of Jesus and the non-Jews that they converted to their beliefs. These disputes led to insults thrown by both groups. Some of these insults made their way into the New Testament. As a result, the New Testament used the term Pharisees, a noun that described some of the Jews, Jews who later evolved into Rabbinic Judaism, to describe Jews as a whole. This usage led many New Testament readers to suppose that all the Jews of Jesus' time rejected him and has led some people to anti-Semitism. These readers ignored other New Testament statements that made it clear that many Jews accepted Jesus' teachings. An example is John 12:19, "And the orthodox high priest saw all this and said to each other: `See what this man is doing. The whole people are following him."
Tolstoy removes this egregious problem by substituting the word "orthodox." This not only voids the text of anti-Jewish notions, but makes the writing clearer. The text is saying that from time to time, "orthodox" teachers, meaning those who held the ancient teachings, questioned Jesus' new instructions.
By making this change, Tolstoy is illustrating Jesus basic teaching to show love for everyone.
Years later, in 1903, Tolstoy showed his compliance with the first and fifth commands again when he wrote and published stories in aid of Jews who were made destitute by the massacres throughout Russia in that year. These very sensitive tales can be read in collections such as Twenty-Three Tales by Leo Tolstoy, translated by L. and A. Maude, Walking Lion Press, 2006.

I am 73 years old and wish I had read this book 50 years ago. It says it all.