The Story of Christ (Storia di Cristo)

The book follows the Gospel narrative from the nativity to the resurrection, but it is written as polemic and rhapsody rather than as history. Papini uses no critical apparatus, takes the Gospels as they stand, and directs his real energy at the modern reader — the comfortable, the scholarly, the merely respectable — whom he attacks about as hard as he ever attacked the church.

The prose is the reason for its success: intense, present-tense, full of direct address, the work of a professional controversialist turning his equipment around. The passages on the people who actually saw and heard Jesus — now dust, now clay under the hooves of camels, and envied by no one in their lifetimes — are characteristic of its register.

Published in Italy in 1921 and in two English translations in 1923 — Dorothy Canfield Fisher’s in America and Mary Prichard Agnetti’s in Britain — it became one of the international bestsellers of the decade. Both translations are in the US public domain; note that in the EU the Italian text remains in copyright until 2027.

Mary Prichard Agnetti’s complete English translation (Hodder & Stoughton, London; her foreword is dated January 1923) is free at Archive.org. The better-known American translation by Dorothy Canfield Fisher (1923) is abridged — it says so in its own preface, and it omits Papini’s closing prayer to Christ entirely. Our edition is a corrected typesetting of Agnetti.

This edition follows Mary Prichard Agnetti’s English translation of Storia di Cristo, published at London by Hodder & Stoughton in 1924. The Italian original appeared at Florence in 1921.

It replaces an earlier edition of ours, and the reason is worth stating plainly.

We had published the famous American translation, Dorothy Canfield Fisher’s of 1923, and it is abridged. Fisher says so herself, in her own preface, which our edition carried: the translation was made “with the omission of occasional sentences, paragraphs and of one or two chapters.” She argues the cuts are “in no sense an expurgation,” and that may well be true of her motives, but it is an argument about why the omissions are harmless, not a claim that there are none. What she omitted includes the last chapter of the book. Papini ends the Story of Christ with a prayer to Christ, three thousand words of it, and in Fisher’s text it is simply not there: her final chapter is The Cloud, and after it comes the index.

We do not publish abridgements. So we looked for a complete English text, found one, and rebuilt the edition from it.

Agnetti’s translation has the prayer, as chapter XCIV. It runs to 3,124 words against the Italian original’s 3,040, which is the corroboration we wanted that it is the whole chapter and not a fragment. Her ninety-four chapters also follow the Italian’s ninety-six closely, where Fisher re-divided the book into a hundred and twenty.

Fisher’s text has not been used anywhere in this edition, not even to repair a damaged word. Collating one translation against another would splice two translators’ prose into a text that neither of them wrote. Where we have repaired damage from a second copy, that copy is another scan of Agnetti: three of them, from three libraries, against a base scan held by the University of Toronto. Every reading taken is a reading this translation actually has.

The base scan is unusually good — about six unknown words per thousand before any cleaning, where most of the scans we work from run three or four times that. What has been repaired is damage done by the scanner, not by the translator. Running heads, page numbers and catchwords have been removed; words broken at the line ending have been rejoined; letters the scanner confused have been restored where the book’s own vocabulary settles the question.

Agnetti says in her foreword that she found it hard “to soften and modify, without emasculating and deforming,” and that she supplied quotation marks around the Scripture Papini quotes without them. Both are her declared decisions, and they are the translator’s, not ours. We record them here so the reader knows whose hand is where.

Prepared by T.S. Baker Books, 2026.