Connecting and Translating the Four Gospels

Completed in manuscript during 1883 and set in type at a Geneva press in mid-1884, the harmony arranges pericopes in chronological order, translating afresh from the Greek while pruning what Tolstoy judged later ecclesiastical additions, thus yielding a text he believed closer to the moral kernel of Christianity. His method privileges the ethical message over miraculous embellishment, threading the Beatitudes, parables, and Passion narrative into a lean documentary sequence that reads with the pace of reportage rather than liturgical recitation; marginal notes reveal his desire to make scripture speak directly to the Russian peasant without priestly mediation. Although academic theologians dismissed the work as amateur philology, it furnished the narrative skeleton for “The Gospel in Brief” and for the didactic episodes in “Resurrection,” while the very act of a lay thinker producing a vernacular gospel shook Russia’s church-state compact and widened the debate on scriptural authority among late-imperial readers.

This critical reader's edition presents a modern translation of the original manuscript, crafted for the modern reader with clean, contemporary language and simplified sentence structures that clarify his complex Russian phrasing and specific antiquated references. Supplementary material enriches the text with autobiographical, historical, and linguistic context, including an afterword by the translator on Tolstoy’s personal history, impact, and intellectual legacy, an index of the philosophical concepts he employs—emphasizing Existentialism and influence by Schopenhauer—a comprehensive chronological list of his published writings, and a detailed timeline of his life, highlighting the personal relationships that shaped his philosophy.