Gospel in Brief: The Life of Jesus

"The Gospel in Brief lives at the center of Leo Tolstoy's thinking about the meaning of life. In this absorbing volume---beautifully translated by Dustin Condren---the greatest of Russian authors revisits the Gospels with characteristic boldness, pushing through to the fiery core of Christianity. Although little known, this book remains hugely important." Jay Parini, author of The Last Station: A Novel of Tolstoy's Final YearThe 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.""Dustin Condren captures, in this fresh, idiomatic translation, the dazzlingly audacious achievement of The Gospel in Brief. Tolstoy's daring synthesis of the New Testament accounts of Jesus."---Edward E. Ericson Jr., editor of The Solzhenitsyn Reader"Tolstoy 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. Newly translated by Dustin Condren. The Gospel in Brief is a reminder that religion has more to do with liberation and subversion than with maintaining the power structures of those who are mighty in this world."---George Pattison, Lady Margaret Professor of Divinity, University of Oxford
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."