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The Gospel in Brief: The Life Of Jesus (Harper Perennial Modern Thought)
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About The Gospel In Brief: The Life Of Jesus
Product Description The most celebrated novelist of all time 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." From Publishers Weekly Tolstoy's no-frills, just-the-facts-ma'am version of the life of Jesus Christ and his teachings makes a readable account out of the four Gospels that begin the New Testament, but it bears little stylistic trace of the Tolstoy familiar to most readers. Starting with the conception by an "unknown father" (but glossing over the first 30 years of Jesus' life) and ending with the crucifixion (but avoiding the resurrection), Tolstoy's account is a tight, accessible, and refreshing distillation of Christ's teachings. The author eschews the miracles from Christ's story to focus instead on his messages. Those messages can be pedantic, but generally are conveyed with economy, although some of Christ's teachings--for instance, his views on celibacy for bachelors--are a hard sell today. Tolstoy's preface, in which he explains his conversion to Christianity and justifies his reconstruction of the Gospels by arguing that Jesus never wrote his own version, is a nice addition, as is the appendix of verses the Russian author draws on for his life of Christ. (Mar.) (c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved. From Booklist Tolstoy is best known as a novelist and towering figure in world literature, but he is also the author of several works of Christian theology, owing to a midlife crisis that sent him on a quest for spiritual meaning. Unfulfilled by many conventional answers, Tolstoy returned to the Russian Orthodox Christianity of his youth and determined that the teachings of Jesus could indeed give meaning to life. In this short work, he sets out to distill the essence of that teaching from the four Gospels and present the reader with one, harmonized account of Jesus’ teachings that is free from irrelevant details in the Gospel texts and the gloss applied to them by church ritual and hierarchy. Omitted, for example, is the resurrection story because Tolstoy believed it recounted only an event and did not present a teaching. The result is a fascinating and thoroughly unorthodox rewriting of the Gospels and restatement of Christianity. --Christopher McConnell Review “Dustin Condren captures, in this fresh idiomatic translation, the dazzlingly audacious achievement of The Gospel in Brief, Tolstoy’s daring synthesis the New Testament accounts of Jesus.” (Edward E. Ericson, Jr., editor of The Solzhenitsyn Reader) “A fascinating and thoroughly unorthodox rewriting of the Gospels and restatement of Christianity.” ( Booklist) “This is the first English translation in more than a century; Condren worked from Tolstoy’s original version and restored material deleted in previous translations. The result is not unlike Hermann Hesse’s ‘Siddhartha’ ― the story of a life that illustrates a path.” ( Los Angeles Times) “Newly translated by Dustin Condren, Tolstoy’s Gospel in Brief offers us a Jesus stripped of the overlay of Christian dogma and ancient metaphysics: his Jesus confronts readers with a real challenge and a call to change their lives.” (George Pattison, Lady Margaret Professor of Divinity, University of Oxford, and canon of Christ Church Cathedral) “ The Gospel in Brief lives at the center of Leo Tolstoy’s thinking about the meaning of life. ... Beautifully translated by Dustin Condren. ... Although little k
