The Gospels

The Gospel in Brief is Leo Tolstoy's integration of the four biblical Gospels into a single account of the life of Jesus. Inspired in large measure by Tolstoy's meticulous study of the original Greek versions of the Bible, The Gospel in Brief is a highly original fusion of biblical texts and Tolstoy's own influential religious views.

Tolstoy explains that his goal is a solution to "the problem of life", not an answer to theological or historical questions. As a result, he sets aside such issues as Jesus' genealogy and divinity, or whether Jesus in fact walked on water. Instead, he focuses on the words and teachings of Jesus, stripped of what Tolstoy regarded as the Church's distortions and focus on dogma and ritual. The result is a work that emphasizes the individual's spiritual condition in a chaotic and indifferent world.

Like Tolstoy's celebrated literary achievements, The Gospel in Brief has the distinct bearing of a classic: in its urgency and directness it is remarkably current, as if it were written only yesterday rather than a century ago.

This book is the first English translation of a text that Michael Cahill identifies as the first formal commentary on Mark's Gospel. Thought to have been written by an early seventh-century abbot, the commentary was for almost 1000 years attributed to St. Jerome and as such exercised incalculable influence on subsequent commentary. St. Thomas Aquinas drew on it freely in his Catena Aurea, for example, as did the highly influential Counter-Reformation commentary of Cornelius a Lapide. Renaissance scholarship demoted the work to the pseudepigrapha of Jerome and it clearly lost status as a result. However, the contemporary recovery of interest in the commentary tradition ensures a welcome for the publication of this translation. Irrespective of authorship, the text is important in the history of biblical interpretation--it is the first commentary on Mark, and has had wide influence in the Latin west. It is written in the allegorical style, and attempts to provide an application of the gospel text to the practice of Christian discipleship. It is characterized by the use of other biblical texts, and through the use of bold face and italics in the translation, the reader is able to see the extent of quotation, paraphrase, and allusion. The extensive notes are designed to provide information on source material and on the author's technique. As the first Markan commentary this text holds a unique place in the history of biblical exegesis. This translation will make it available to scholars who do not read Latin, and will serve as a useful introduction to early and medieval Bible commentary, both in format and content.

The first comprehensive study of St. John's Gospel in forty years, this book provides new and coherent answers to what Rudolf Baltmann regarded as the two great riddles of the Gospel: its position in the history of Christian thought, and its central or governing idea. Ashton provides translations of all non-English quotations, and confines detailed exegetical arguments and intricate questions of specialized concern to the footnotes, therein making Understanding the Fourth Gospel an accessible study of the Gospel for the general reader.

Is historical criticism of the New Testament dead? In this telling collection of eight new studies on John's Gospel, the author of the acclaimed Understanding the Fourth Gospel argues that this is very far from the case. Challenging the assumptions of methodologies that ignore the historical context in which the Gospel was composed, Ashton offers a spirited defense of historical criticism and provides practical demonstrations of the many new insights that it can still yield. The first two chapters treat in greater depth two key themes (the Prologue of John and the Jews) which appeared in the author's earlier work. A third chapter supplements and corrects this larger work. The rest of the book explores further facets of the Gospel, and at the same time exposes some of the serious theoretical weaknesses in much recent writing on the Gospel.

This commentary expands Johannine studies in two directions. First, drawing on the methods of literary criticism, it gives new force to a view which is both ancient and modern--that John's gospel, far from being a poorly-edited mixture of sometimes-conflicting traditions, is in fact a coherent unity, an account of Jesus which, however diverse its sources, is a finely-chiselled work of art. Second, it indicates that the unity of John's gospel is founded ultimately not on history or theology but on spirituality. This too corresponds to a view which is both very old--John was always known as the spiritual gospel--and very recent. The present study spells out that idea in new detail. It indicates that the account of Jesus is so written that the tensions and complexities of the text reflect the tensions and complexities of human life, providing the reader not only with an account of Jesus but also with an anthropology--a map of the development of the human spirit.