Jesus Christ

Reading notes

• The Sinner from Toledo §16 Christ

  Invoked by Maria in silent reproach of Augustin's professed piety, which she judges incompatible with his hatred of women.

• Good People §57 изгнании торгующих из храма

  The expulsion of the money-changers from the Temple (Matthew 21:12-13, Mark 11:15-17, Luke 19:45-46, John 2:13-16), in which Christ drives out merchants and overturns their tables. Vladimir cites Vera's deliberate silence about this episode as proof of her selective, self-serving reading of the Gospel: an episode of forceful, even violent, righteous anger sits awkwardly beside a doctrine of total non-resistance, and he takes her avoidance of it as evidence that her Tolstoyanism is not fully thought through.

• To A. S. Suvorin, 18 October 1888. Moscow. §20 If Jesus Christ had been more radical and said, "Love your enemy as yourself,"

  Opens the letter's philosophical digression contrasting the general concept "neighbor" with the particular concept "enemy," illustrated afterward with examples from journalism, zoology, and medicine (\S20 continues to Botkin, Zakharyin, Virchow, and Pirogov as exemplars of thinking in general concepts).

• To I. L. Leontyev, 22 March 1890. Moscow. §4 а есть только одна, а именно та, которая дала нам во время оно Иисуса Христа

  Chekhov grounds his argument against a special "higher" literary morality by invoking a single, universal moral standard traced to Christ -- consistent with his general skepticism, expressed elsewhere in his letters, toward critics and moralists who claim writers owe readers a higher or different ethical accounting than ordinary people do.