The Four Gospels Harmonized and Translated

In a letter to his disciple Vladimir Chertkov, Tolstoy called this book the best thing his mind had produced. When friends proposed printing it ten years after he wrote it, he agreed, and his preface of 1891 admitted that it was far from finished and that he no longer had the strength to finish it. In 1902, prefacing a new edition, he went further: carried away by his discovery, he had forced obscure passages to fit his reading with artificial and probably wrong explanations of the Greek. He never rewrote it. The work goes back to the start of the 1880s, just after the crisis of A Confession, when Tolstoy decided that the only way to learn what Jesus had actually taught was to set aside what the church said about it and go back to the Greek text. Scholars had made harmonies of the four Gospels before, Frederic Farrar and the Strasbourg theologian Eduard Reuss among them, but they ordered the accounts by history. Tolstoy ordered them by meaning, drawing John in with the other three, and wove them into a single narrative in twelve chapters, translating verse by verse and arguing with the church interpreters as he went. He kept whatever bore on how to live. The stories of the birth he treated as legends that grow around any figure who becomes important after death, and he called the account of the resurrection a falsehood that the first Christians had used to spread a true teaching. An attempt in 1885 to get the work past the church censors failed. The émigré publisher Mikhail Elpidine printed it in Geneva in three volumes between 1892 and 1894, full of misprints, and an English translation followed in London from 1895. Tolstoy also drew from it a much shorter version, The Gospel in Brief.