Another miserable soul with a deep distrust of organised Christianity was Soren Kierkegaard, and he too tried to make readers and listeners go back to the texts themselves by pressure washing them of the encrusted dogmatism, as he did in The Lily of the Field and the Bird of the Air. In reflection, we might turn back to the originals, or we might stick with Tolstoy. In creating a synthesis of the four gospels into one narrative written in a more earthy idiom, Tolstoy makes us reflect on what the gospels and Jesus actually say. But taken as a whole, his project is interesting. The problem was that he went so far from the original text in places that even allies of the aging sage thought he had gone overboard. His tortuous life indicates how serious he was about finding this truth.
Tolstoy’s goal was noble enough – a better Christianity to make a better people. Tolstoy sought to reshape Christianity into a practical guide, removing it from the clutches of the orthodox (he uses the same exact term for the Bible’s pharisees, just to make it clear to his readers who the enemy is and always has been). Christians have four official versions of Jesus, and as many apocryphal ones as they like – why ask for more!? As Dustin Condren notes in the introduction to his translation of the Tolstoy, in Tolstoy’s case he wanted “to find the practical, pure teaching of Jesus Christ, to free it from the linguistic patina of ritual and scripture, removing both the dogmatic and the supernatural”. Why rewrite the Gospels? Nikos Kazantzakis’s The Last Temptation is the second attempt at it that I’ve met this year, after Tolstoy’s The Life of Jesus: The Gospel in Brief.
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