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Life of Christ (Storia di Cristo)
1921 · translated from the Italian · 470 pages
Life of Christ (Storia di Cristo)
by Giovanni Papini
Papini spent years as a futurist and anticlerical polemicist, a man who made his name attacking everything the church stood for, before converting around 1920. Storia di Cristo was the result: a life of Christ written at speed and at heat, with no scholarly apparatus and no attempt at detachment, by a hostile witness who had changed sides and wanted everyone to know it. It sold enormously across Europe and America.
The convert behind the argument
Papini was a self-taught Florentine intellectual, co-founder of the reviews Leonardo and Lacerba, a pragmatist, a futurist and one of the most conspicuous anticlerical voices in Italy. His conversion around 1920 astonished Italian letters; his pre-conversion autobiography, Un uomo finito (The Failure), sits in our Changed Lives library, and this is the book he wrote after.
Summary
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 Dorothy Canfield Fisher's English translation in 1923, it became one of the international bestsellers of the decade. The 1923 translation is in the US public domain; note that in the EU the Italian text remains in copyright until 2027.
Who was Giovanni Papini?
Giovanni Papini (1881–1956) was a Florentine writer, largely self-educated, who co-founded the influential reviews Leonardo and Lacerba and was a central figure in Italian futurism. He was militantly anticlerical and antireligious for most of his early career.
He converted to Catholicism around 1920 and Storia di Cristo followed in 1921, making him famous well beyond Italy. His pre-conversion autobiography Un uomo finito (1913) is on our Changed Lives shelf; the two books are best read together, in that order. His later political entanglements with Fascism have complicated his reputation considerably.
Common questions
- What is Papini's Life of Christ?
- A life of Jesus published in Italian in 1921, written immediately after Papini's conversion from militant anticlericalism. It is deliberately unscholarly and deliberately provocative, and it became an international bestseller in the 1920s.
- How does this relate to The Failure on your other shelf?
- Un uomo finito (The Failure, 1913) is Papini's autobiography from before his conversion, and it sits in our Changed Lives library as a first-person narrative. Storia di Cristo is the book he wrote after converting. They are two different books, eight years and one conversion apart.
A note on the text. Life of Christ (Storia di Cristo) is in the public domain. What you're buying is our edition: the careful typesetting and correction. The original text is also available free here.
Related reading
His own story
The Failure (Un uomo finito)
Giovanni Papini · 1913
Papini's autobiography from before his conversion — the militant atheist writing at the end of his rope, eight years before he wrote this life of Christ.