The Gospel in Brief

Name: The Gospel in Brief
Author: Leo Tolstoy

Count Leo Tolstoy (1828–1910) was a Russian novelist, author of War and Peace and Anna Karenina, who underwent a profound spiritual crisis around his fiftieth year. Renouncing his earlier life, he set out his new religious views in works such as A Confession and The Gospel in Brief, both in our library. In them he recast Christianity as chiefly a moral teaching drawn from the Sermon on the Mount.

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First published: 1883
Category: Theology
Length: 55k words · about 4 hours
Chapters: 18

About this book

Leo Tolstoy's own compilation of the Gospel story, published in 1883 after his spiritual crisis. Tolstoy harmonized and shortened the four Gospels according to his own understanding, presenting Jesus chiefly as a moral teacher and setting aside the miraculous and the Church's doctrines. It is included as background for understanding Tolstoy's later religious thought, not as a rendering of the canonical Gospels.