Gospel

Reading notes

• The Bet §20 Gospel

  The prisoner's year-long, exclusive reading of a single 'slim and easily comprehensible' book, after four years spent on six hundred volumes of secular learning, marks the turn in his reading from accumulation toward a search for meaning.

• A Failure of Compensation §9 Gospel

  The book of Scripture the priest is about to read from when Mikhail Ilyich, hearing the opening greeting, interrupts the service to be helped out of the room.

• The Murder §51 first be reconciled with your brother

  Matvei paraphrases Matthew 5:23-24 ("if thou bring thy gift to the altar, and there rememberest that thy brother hath ought against thee... first be reconciled to thy brother"), turning a call to reconciliation into a weapon in the brothers' quarrel -- an irony Yakov himself registers (section 51), since Matvei's own conduct is anything but reconciling.

• The Murder §53 hard for a rich man to enter the kingdom of heaven

  A close paraphrase of Matthew 19:23-24 / Mark 10:24-25 / Luke 18:24-25 (see also the camel/needle's-eye saying that follows immediately in section 54); its unbidden return to Yakov's mind marks the first crack in his self-satisfaction with his own rule-bound piety.

• The Murder §54 about the camel

  Matthew 19:24 / Mark 10:25 / Luke 18:25: "it is easier for a camel to go through the eye of a needle, than for a rich man to enter into the kingdom of God." Chekhov does not spell the saying out here, trusting the reader to complete it from the immediately preceding paraphrase in section 53; the translation follows the source's compression rather than expanding the allusion.

• At Sea (a sailor's story) §16 Gospel

  The Christian scripture the pastor is shown holding and reading from at the story's opening, an emblem of the respectability he abandons later.