Saint Innocent of Kherson

The Last Days of the Earthly Life of Jesus Christ

19th c. · Gospel history / Biblical scholarship · English translation, 2026

142,066 words · 12 hr read· Moderate

Source edition: Последние дни земной жизни Господа нашего Иисуса Христа (azbyka.ru; from the 2nd edition of the collected works of Innocent, Archbishop of Kherson and Tauris, St Petersburg, 1908, vol. 5)

Cover art: Christian Golgotha (sketch, c. 1880) — Henryk Siemiradzki (Polish, 1843–1902) (Wikimedia Commons / National Museum in Warsaw, Public domain)

In 1826 a young lecturer at the St. Petersburg Theological Academy began serializing, in the journal Christian Reading, an account of Christ's last days that readers could not get enough of — and that alarmed his superiors enough to delay a finished book for thirty years. Innocent (Borisov), later Archbishop of Kherson and remembered as "the Russian Chrysostom," walks Holy Week from Lazarus's raising to the guard at the empty tomb, joining the Gospels to the history and archaeology of first-century Judea. Two hundred five notes support the twenty-nine chapters; this is, as far as can be determined, the work's first English translation.