Jesus, by contrast, says, “I did not come to judge the world but to save the world” (12:47). Jesus prepares a whip from cords in order to chase the money-changers from the temple (2:15-16); Raskolnikov sews his axe-noose and binds his fake pledge with thread, preparing to murder the pawnbroker. Raskolnikov’s power over “the whole ant heap” is an arrogant parody of Jesus’ “I have overcome the world” (16:33). Dostoevsky has Raskolnikov confuse earthly power (physical force, economic power, the intellect) with moral and spiritual power, as displayed by Raskolnikov’s fellow convicts’ humility before the frail Sonia.

In John, Capernaum is the administrative center of Galilee. Svidrigailov calls Russia’s capital, St. Petersburg, “the administrative center.” In St. Petersburg, Svidrigailov lives next door to Sonia, who rents from the Kapernaumovs, themselves reminiscent of the mute and the lame who come to Jesus to be healed. Capernaum is mentioned five times in John (as against seven times total in the three other Gospels of Matthew, Mark, and Luke). The name means “village of consolation,” and it is the site of two of Jesus’ miracles: He cures an official’s son without even seeing him (4:46-54); and he walks on water to Capernaum on the Sea of Galilee (6:16-21). Capernaum, then, is an appropriate association for Sonia. She offers consolation and miracle by reading to Raskolnikov from John at the Kapernaumovs’. This is the beginning of Raskolnikov’s movement toward relinquishing his pride in favor of Sonia’s faith.

Raskolnikov’s evidence at his trial contains further parodic inversion of Jesus’ life. When on the third day the stone is removed from Jesus’ tomb, all that remains of Jesus’ earthly self are the linen cloths, including the one that had been on his head (20:6), indications of the resurrection of his body. When Raskolnikov’s evidence is investigated, the police turn back the stone in the yard on Voznesensky (“Ascension”) Prospect to find Raskolnikov’s hidden booty and several extremely damaged banknotes. Money in Crime and Punishment is the emblem of earthly power as well as of compassion; here the booty from the murder rots as the unresur rected body rots; money initially signifies power to Raskolnikov, but Dostoevsky emphasizes with this biblical parallel that it can represent only earthly power. At the same time, the parallel hints at the potential, through confession, for resurrection of the spirit. Raskolnikov’s Golgotha comes when he confesses to Nikodim Fomich, but Raskolnikov has yet to achieve resurrection. Similarly, in John, it is not the climax of Jesus’ tale when Nicodemus gives Jesus the traditional Jewish burial at the end of chapter 19, or in 20 when Mary finds his body missing from the tomb. Completion of the miracle of Jesus’ resurrection takes place only in chapter 21, when Jesus appears to his disciples.

Dostoevsky’s scene of silent recognition at dawn by the shore is modeled on chapter 21 of John. Raskolnikov has accepted the truth of Jesus’ message as represented by Sonia, just as the disciples recognize, in the midst of their everyday labor, the truth of the miraculous appearance of their teacher after his crucifixion. John’s chapters 20 and 21, like Dostoevsky’s scene, bode the “promise of a . . . new view of life and of his future resurrection” (p. 516). Both epilogues are the necessary completion of their heroes’ sufferings.

As the most mystical Gospel, which nonetheless shows Jesus as human and part of day-to-day human life, John gives Dostoevsky’s “detective thriller” the deep power it would otherwise lack, despite the richness of the many literary, philosophical, and journalistic materials that inform it. The omnipresent intonations of John’s Gospel maintain the atmosphere of divine potential throughout the intense French-inspired naturalism of the novel. Once the reader is sensitized to the presence of John in the first six books, the epilogue becomes the inevitable and essential completion of the work.

Dostoevsky embeds a rich network of French allusions in his novel in order to refute them with the eternal truth of the Gospel of John. He rewrites the French theme of prostitution in Sonia Marmeladov. Her form of nobility, compassion, and self-sacrifice is modeled on Jesus Christ.