I was googling “best gospel books” or something like that and, lo and behold, I found the subject of this blog post, namely Leo Tolstoy’s The Gospel in Brief. My thought then was, well, Tolstoy was one of the great writers of all time, and a committed Christian, and so it would make a lot of sense to see what he had to say about the most important words ever written (and this time Tolstoy has written just a short book — not War and Peace!). I’ll divide this blogpost into two parts: (a) a brief discussion of the book itself and (b) some thoughts on the relationship, if any, between being Christian and being smart.
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The book is described on its back cover this way:
The most celebrated novelist of all time, the author of Anna Karenina and War and Peace, retells “the greatest story ever told,” integrating the four Gospels into a single twelve-chapter narrative of the life of Jesus. Based on his study of early Christian texts, Leo Tolstoy’s remarkable The Gospel in Brief—virtually unknown to English readers until this landmark new translation by Dustin Condren—makes accessible the powerful, mystical truth of Jesus’s spiritual teaching, stripped of artificial church doctrine. “If you are not acquainted with The Gospel in Brief,” wrote the philosopher Ludwig Wittgenstein, whose life was profoundly influenced by it, “then you cannot imagine what an effect it can have upon a person.”
Harper Collins says on its website:
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. Today, it has been little known to English readers—until now.
The American writer and academic Jay Parini says, “Although little known, this book remains hugely important.”
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Like the Reformation Protestants, Tolstoy criticizes and rejects The Church — though in his case it was not the Roman Catholic Church but the Russian Orthodox church (he powerfully throws down the gauntlet in his preface’s last paragraph (xxxiii)). On the other hand, to a Protestant’s dismay,Tolstoy seems to feel that he is only loosely guided by the Gospels’ actual text (xix-xxi). On the third hand, he puts the Gospels far above any other source of revelation — to an extent that would make not only the Orthodox and Catholics squirm, I think, but most Protestants as well (xxviii-xxix).
The book is most basically a harmonization of the Gospels, and its structure is rather neat, both literally and figuratively. The Gospel summary is divided into twelve (!) chapters, with a preface (18 pages) and introduction (2 pages) by Tolstoy beforehand and a conclusion (a summary of “The First Epistle of John the Evangelist”). afterwards. Each chapter has a title, a one- or sometimes two-sentence summary, a few words from the Lord’s Prayer (so that, by the twelfth chapter, the whole prayer has been recited in order), an italicized summary of 2-4 pages, and then the chapter’s text. There’s a verse index. Regarding the Lord’s Prayer angle, Tolstoy writes in the preface (xvii), “When I came to the completion of this work, I found, to my surprise and joy, that the so-called Lord’s Prayer is nothing other than Jesus’s whole teaching expressed in its most distilled form in the very order that I had already laid out the chapters, and that each expression in the prayer corresponds to the sense and order of the chapters.”
Here’s a key paragraph (xxi-xxii, but note that this is a different translation than the Dustin Condren translation that I read and otherwise quote on this post):
On the other hand I beg readers to remember that if I do not regard the Gospels as sacred books that have come down to us from the Holy Ghost, even less do I regard them as mere historical monuments of religious literature. I understand the theological as well as the historical view of the Gospels, but regard them myself differently, and so I beg the reader not to be confused either by the church view or by the historical view customary in our day among educated people, neither of which I hold. I regard Christianity neither as an inclusive divine revelation nor as an historical phenomenon, but as a teaching which gives us the meaning of life. I was led to Christianity neither by theological nor historical investigations but by this–that when I was fifty years old, having asked myself and all the learned men around me what I am and what is the meaning of my life, and received the answer that I am a fortuitous concatenation of atoms and that life has no meaning but is itself an evil, I fell into despair and wanted to put an end to my life; but remembered that formerly in childhood when I believed, life had a meaning for me, and that for the great mass of men about me who believe and are not corrupted by riches life has a meaning; and I doubted the validity of the reply given me by the learned men of my circle and I tried to understand the reply Christianity gives to those who live a real life. And I began to seek Christianity in the Christian teaching that guides such men’s lives. I began to study the Christianity which I saw applied in life and to compare that applied Christianity with its source. The source of Christian teaching is the Gospels, and in them I found the explanation of the spirit which guides the life of all who really live. But together with this source of the pure water of life I found, wrongfully united with it, mud and slime which had hidden its purity from me: by the side of and bound up with the lofty Christian teaching I found a Hebrew and a Church teaching alien to it. I was in the position of a man who receives a bag of stinking dirt, and only after long struggle and much labor finds that amid that dirt lie priceless pearls; and he understands that he was not to blame for disliking the stinking dirt, and that those who have collected and preserved these pearls together with the dirt are also not to blame but deserve love and respect.
Tolstoy boils down Jesus’ teachings to five commandments (see 35-36 and 38-41), which he further boils down to this (41):
(1) Do not be angry, but be at peace with all people; (2) Do not amuse yourself with depravity; (3) Do not take oaths for anyone for any reason; (4) Do not resist evil; do not judge and you will not be judged; (5) Do not make distinctions between nations; love the foreigner as you would your own people.
The edition I read (Dustin Condren translation) adds a secondary title, “The Life of Jesus”; I’m not sure where that comes from. Wikepedia notes that the book “is said to be the result of Tolstoy’s close study of the original Koine Greek New Testament” (footnote omitted).
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But of course you, gentle reader, are more interested in what I have to say about this book than some nobody like Ludwig Wittgenstein, let alone Wikipedia. Well, to quote myself from earlier: Tolstoy was one of the great writers of all time, and a committed Christian, and so it makes a lot of sense to see what he had to say about the most important words ever written (and the book is only about 180 pages long). So I’m not sorry I read the book and I would recommend that you read it, too.
Still, to be honest, Tolstoy’s cavalier attitude toward the Gospels’ text makes me nervous, and I was not blown away by his insights. I was reminded of Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes’s line about his fellow Justice, John Marshall Harlan: In an April 5, 1919, letter he compared Harlan’s mind to “a powerful vise the jaws of which couldn’t be gotten nearer than two inches of each other.” Thus, someone can be really smart and write really beautifully and have amazing intuitive and poetic sense — but not really be a great technician or logician.
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At the beginning of this blogpost, I promised some thoughts on whether there is any connection between being a Christian and being smart. Bottom line: I’m not sure there is, but I do think that, the deeper your intelligence, the harder it is to miss Christianity’s truth: The historicity of Jesus being the Son of God, and the sound logic and profound satisfaction of there being a God. The two favorites of this blogsite — Blaise Pascal and C.S. Lewis — were famously brilliant, Blaise as a polymath and C.S. Lewis as, among other things, the most well-read man of his generation.
An essay in Minding the Campus on October 11, 2024, by Gregory J. Rummo notes:
“The great pioneers in physics – Newton, Galileo, Kepler, Copernicus – devoutly believed themselves called to find evidences of God in the physical world,” writes Stephen C. Meyer in the Return of the God Hypothesis, his latest book in which he makes a convincing case for the Judeo-Christian origins of modern science. “The founders … assumed that if they studied nature carefully, it would reveal its secrets. Their confidence in this assumption was grounded in both the Greek and the Judeo-Christian idea that the universe is an orderly system—a cosmos not a chaos.”
I remember reading another essay years ago in The University Bookman arguing that, while there were plenty of smart writers who were liberals, the really first-rate writers tended to be conservatives. I just mention this in passing: It’s not precisely on point because (a) conservative isn’t the same as Christian, and (b) as I recall, the reason the Bookman reviewer thought the best writers were conservative is because the best writers took the world as it comes and honed their skills at observing it rather than trying to figure out how best to change it — which is not applicable to the current blogpost. Still, the common denominator is that the Left/atheists aren’t as smart as they think they are.
Concluding thoughts: If a genius (like Tolstoy) writes a book about Christianity, it makes sense to read it: A genius is more likely to have insights into Christianity (or anything else, of course) than a chump, and I think that one’s faith is not something that requires specialized training to yield insights. It is certainly not the case that only fools are Christians and all Christians are fools, as our secular elites seem sometimes to assume. Finally, bear in mind that Satan is unwise and wrong even if he has a high IQ.
P.S. Here’s an online version of the book (different translation, from something called, of all things, “Marxists Internet Archive”): https://www.marxists.org/archive/tolstoy/1887/the-gospel-in-brief/index.html