Faith, fiction, and the historical Jesus: theological revisionism and its influence on fictional representations of

Moore’s quest for the perfect style
It is clear from Moore’s correspondence and his non-fiction writing that he wanted The Brook Kerith to be received as an original and well-informed revision of the New Testament. Even more than this, though, he wanted the novel to confirm his status as a great stylist. Moore was always anxious about his writing technique, constantly experimenting to find a definitive rhythm and diction and revising previously published work with a vigour verging on the obsessive. Moore’s self-consciousness about his writing militated in every way against what he most desired: a ‘natural’ prose style. As W. B. Yeats shrewdly observed ‘His nature, bitter, violent, discordant, did not fit him to write sentences men murmur again and again for years. Charm and rhythm had been denied him.’⁶⁶⁹ In taking on a Biblical subject, Moore set himself two particularly onerous tasks: to work from a source text admired for centuries for its stylistic felicity, and to introduce current theological debates into the New Testament narratives. The eventual success of The Brook Kerith seemed to convince Moore that he had risen to such challenges, and gave him a confidence in his prose style conspicuously lacking in earlier years. Shortly after the 1927 revision of the novel, Moore described it as ‘a philosophical work that does not bore the reader in the philosophical passages’, a comment that perhaps says more about the author’s attitude to erudite writings than that of his model reader.⁶⁷⁰ In the same year, writing in the Advertisement to Celibate Lives, he presents himself very much as the natural storyteller, blessed with the gift of a fluent ‘melodic line’.⁶⁷¹

Moore worked painstakingly to ensure that the prose of The Brook Kerith befitted its subject matter. His reading of Lives of Jesus such as Renan’s would have made him acutely aware of the image of the poet-Jesus and the burden which this placed on any writer representing Christ’s words in fictional form. In The Brook Kerith Jesus’s speech is described as ‘moving on with a gentle motion like that of clouds wreathing and unwreathing’ (122), and the prose of the novel itself strives to capture such fluency. To avoid impeding the narrative flow, Moore omits speech marks, composes paragraphs of unusual density and keeps upper-case letters to a minimum. But while this has a striking effect on the page, the desired fluency is found wanting in the act of reading. The prose is interrupted by the frequent inclusion of verbs of speech which, since the standard punctuation of direct speech has been removed, are necessary to make clear who is talking. Similarly, Moore’s drawing back from the consistent employment of interior monologue obliges him to include phrases such as ‘Jesus said to himself’ and ‘as these thoughts passed through his mind’, which further impede the smoothness of the writing. However, his realisation that ‘No one can quote except Pater without bursting up his text [sic]’ seems to have informed his decision not to quote directly from the sayings of Jesus, and ensured that the prose was not disrupted even more severely.⁶⁷²

Moore employed a number of less direct methods of including the text of the New Testament in The Brook Kerith. Keeping the pre-crucifixion figure of Jesus firmly in the background for the first half of the novel, his teachings are presented second-hand through the voices of a variety of observers. Moore ensures that familiar sayings of Christ are slightly altered so, for example, the Scriptural image of the camel unable to pass through the eye of the needle becomes a ‘sword through the eye of the needle’ (202). Attention is drawn to this linguistic adjustment when Joseph tells Nicodemus how Jesus adapts expressions to suit his audience: where the wealthy listener is offered the image of the sword, his poorer brother hears how ‘It is as hard for a rich man to enter the kingdom of heaven as it would be for a cow to calve in a rook’s nest’ (202). By presenting the sayings of Christ as unfixed and dependent on audience, Moore reminds the reader of the orality of these teachings, at the same time casting doubt on the inerrancy of the Gospels: the words of Jesus which found their way into the Evangelists’ testimonies can only ever form a partial representation of his ministry. At the same time, his decision to ‘err on the side of homeliness’ when revising Biblical idiom,⁶⁷³ led inevitably to bathos, as one reviewer observed: ‘To those of us who know the gospel story in that well-nigh inspired translation of 1610…Mr Moore’s apocryphal conversations will not impress’.⁶⁷⁴ In other instances, Moore chooses to paraphrase New Testament texts. Christ’s declaration in the Sermon on the Mount that ‘it is better that you lose one of your members than that your whole body go into hell’ (Matthew 5:30), is incorporated into a conversation between Joseph and his father concerning male sexuality. The son, glad to be citing wisdom which approves his own celibacy, delivers a rather more extreme interpretation of the original: ‘that man should mutilate his body till it conform perforce to his piety’ (173). Again, Moore highlights how the spoken words of Jesus were always liable to be distorted to suit the particular needs of those who repeated them.

Yet if Moore avoided the type of direct scriptural quotation to be found in liberal Lives of Jesus, and the more conservative religious novels, he consciously strove to create a prose style rich in Biblical cadences. While the trajectory of The Brook Kerith was indisputably modern, Moore clearly sought to express it in language appropriate for its setting. In the early stages of working on The Apostle he wrote to Eglinton that he would attempt to ‘write the play in the language of the New Testament as far as possible, at all events to avoid modernisms of speech’.⁶⁷⁵ By the time he was ready to embark on the prose version of the scenario, he had doubtless learned that replicating the language of the Gospels was beyond his capabilities and he turned to the Old Testament to create a sense of historical authenticity. The novel’s opening in which Joseph’s grandmother tells him the story of Saul’s kingship, as recorded in Chapter 9 of I Samuel, provides Moore with the opportunity to rework Biblical text, at the same time establishing the rhythms of the Scriptures from the outset. Later on in the novel, a contracted version of Psalm 11 (376) and the even more familiar lines which open the Benedicite (368), are quoted directly in the context of the worship of the Essene monks, reminding the reader of the continuities between the Judaic faith and Christianity.

Critical responses to the writing of The Brook Kerith were mixed. Moore’s efforts to avoid ‘modernisms of speech’ were deemed unsuccessful and his attempts to create colloquial speech for the more rustic characters were singled out for particular derision.⁶⁷⁶ However, his attention to style paid off to some degree, one critic suggesting that The Brook Kerith was ‘reminiscent of Pater’s “Marius the Epicurean”’: a text often held up as a masterpiece of prose.⁶⁷⁷ One of the most interesting comments on Moore’s prose style came from one of his stenographers, Anna Kelly, who described it as ‘very like his physique - soft, full of light - and boneless’, a strange form of écriture féminine.⁶⁷⁸ Several other critics made direct connections between the man and his creation, detecting a strong Irish lilt to the writing. Moore staunchly denied such suggestions, declaring in the postscript of a letter to Ernest Boyd that he did ‘not think that there is a single Irish idiom in the book…all the idiomatic turns in The Brook Kerith are to be found in the Bible and… the Elizabethan prose writers.’⁶⁷⁹

Moore’s confidence in the success of his Biblical prose style was not entirely secure, however. Geraint Goodwin recalled the author telling him that he had ‘spent ten years of picking out the daisies’ in order to perfect ‘a green lawn’.⁶⁸⁰ The outcome of this decade of meticulous weeding was the 1927 Revised Edition of The Brook Kerith. Moore’s concern to create the Biblical mood that some critics had considered lacking is clearly discernible in this later version. Throughout the text the more archaic ‘thee’ and ‘thou’ forms replace the more modern ‘you’, regardless of the speaker’s age or status; it is a change which Moore claimed to be a reversion to his original choice of diction and which results in a number of syntactical contortions.⁶⁸¹ One other immediately noticeable example of his restyling is in the organization of the text. The even denser conflation of paragraphs throughout the Revised Edition suggests that Moore wanted to lend his prose a more modern, unconventional quality; yet, at the same time, his replacing of lower-case letters with upper-case to indicate more clearly where new speech begins, seems a concession to the more traditional reader. Some of the author’s revisions of lexis focus on Jesus himself, and tend to moderate the presentation given in the original version. The description of Christ’s ‘lean face lit with brilliant eyes’ (100) in the 1916 edition is altered to the gentler ‘lean jaws and thoughtful eyes’ (99), dissipating the unnerving energy of the original. None of these revisions, however, amounts to anything of real significance for the novel’s overall vision of the Gospels. As a writer constitutionally incapable of allowing his published work to rest, Moore seems to have undertaken the revision of The Brook Kerith for revision’s sake. The prose of the final version shows little improvement on the original, perhaps proving Yeats’s point that Moore’s relentless pursuit of style ‘made barren his later years’.⁶⁸²

One of the major contentions of Albert Schweitzer’s The Quest of the Historical Jesus was that nineteenth-century authors of Lives of Jesus had been unable to break free of contemporary forms of thought. By the beginning of the twentieth century, it had become a truism that writers who took on the challenge of recreating the Gospels ended up writing about their own life and times. A number of commentators discerned autobiographical elements in The Brook Kerith, likening the author to the character of Joseph of Arimathea who is constantly in search of a philosophy for life.⁶⁸³ Others read the novel in the context of Ireland and Irish Catholicism, the reviewer of the Nation regarding it as a political roman à clef, with Nicodemus as ‘a passionate Sinn Feiner, passionately, impetuously, vigorously identifying Jesus as the O’Connell of Home Rule for Judea.’⁶⁸⁴ There are, indeed, passages in the novel more redolent of a hellfire sermon delivered from a Roman Catholic pulpit in County Mayo, than of first-century Palestine, such as Jesus’s exhortation to Nicodemus to follow him ‘or else be for ever accursed and destroyed and burnt up like weeds that the gardener throws into heaps and fires on an autumn evening’ (222). And it is difficult to ignore the author’s personality when reading the novel’s ten-page digression describing the visit to the Kerith monastery of Essene monks who had split from the community in order to marry. The schismatic monks’ detailing of their dismal sexual experiences with their wives to their celibate listeners is a typical example of Moore’s puerile sexual imagination overriding his sense of aesthetics.

The Brook Kerith stands as Moore’s most strident declaration of his own quirky brand of Protestantism. His description of the novel as ‘simply unitarian [sic]’,⁶⁸⁵ and his insistence that his Jesus is ‘as Protestant as Renan’s is Catholic’ reveal his perverse adherence to the belief that Protestantism and agnosticism were virtually interchangeable.⁶⁸⁶ Too inconsistent and contradictory to be considered a thesis novel, it is more a testament to its author’s deepening involvement with the Gospels and modernist theology, and stands as his most important exploration of the religious temperament.

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CONCLUSION
In order then to make any advance in religious matters, it behoves those theologians who are above professional prejudices and interests to brave the singularity of extending their hand to the thoughtful among the laity.⁶⁸⁷
Addressed to the German people, D. F. Strauss’s exhortation of 1864 placed the responsibility of bringing the ideas of modernist theology to the educated layman firmly onto the shoulders of the scholar. In Britain, such a task was taken up enthusiastically by authors of Lives of Jesus, whose writings served to introduce some of the major issues to emerge from the scientific study of the Gospels into the public domain. However, the general reader had to work long and hard at extracting theological theory from what were predominantly imaginative reconstructions of Christ’s life and teaching. Furthermore, the majority of these works were written by members of the clergy whose main aim was to undermine, rather than explain, new ideas on their subject. While critical apparatus in the form of footnotes and lists of scholarly authorities gave some Lives the stamp of academic rigour, their authors’ main method of presenting Jesus was often closer to that of the fiction writer than the theologian. One of the central paradoxes to emerge from this study is that the more orthodox Christians strove to defend the factual realities of the historical Jesus, the more they drew on the resources of fiction to do so. In an era of increasing religious uncertainty, investing biographical studies of Jesus with the narrative qualities of the popular novel became a vital means of protecting the Scriptures from the destructive influence of Continental Biblical scholarship. As one turn-of-the-century observer pointed out:

There was always a desire among these writers to display more of the artist than the biographer. Whether conservative or liberal, they aimed more at edifying their respective audiences than at making them acquainted with the real events of the time.⁶⁸⁸

As the literary marketplace became ever more competitive, and society became slowly but surely more accepting of fiction as a means of treating the New Testament, so it was inevitable that the creative writer should supersede the biographer. Writing in the 1880s, the poet and novelist, Robert Buchanan, asserted confidently that:

We have reached the vantage-ground where the story of Jesus can be taken out of the realm of Supernaturalism and viewed humanly, in the domain of sympathetic Art. To even so late an observer as Rénan [sic] such a point of view was difficult, not to say impossible.⁶⁸⁹

And, indeed, in the last quarter of the century, orthodox and heterodox alike abandoned the speculative syntax of the biographer and fought out their respective positions on the Gospels through the art of fiction. In most cases, writers of Biblical prose fiction paid far more attention to the demands of narrative than to those of theology. Details from the four Evangels were selected for their imaginative appeal - regardless of scholarly dicta concerning their historical credibility - and were woven into a form of fictional harmony akin to those formerly constructed by pious Christians in an attempt to erase the disturbing discrepancies of the Evangelical records. Similarly, theological hypotheses were selected more with an eye to their narrative potential, than their academic respectability. One of the most frequently chosen was the long-superannuated ‘swoon theory’, which provided fiction writers with a scenario that had both the charm of the ancient legend and the potential for developing heterodox new trajectories of Christ’s life.

Yet despite the tendency of most fiction writers to put aesthetics before theology in their marrying of art and religion, the literary results were not always happy. Most of the works in this study show clear signs of their authors having struggled to adapt a source text whose lexis was so deeply embedded in the national consciousness. Moreover, the growing tendency of more liberal Victorians to regard the New Testament as a great work of literature made it an even more intractable subject for creative rewriting. Just as today’s filmic adaptations of classic novels are often deemed poor imitations of the originals, so artistic treatments of the Gospels were compared to their sources and found wanting. These fictional transfigurations risked bathos if they translated the language of the Authorised Version into the vernacular, and stylistic infelicity if they opted instead for a mix of archaism and direct quotation. And it was not only the primary facts (or fictions) of the New Testament which were a cause for anxiety: the intertextual presence of secondary ‘fictions’, such as Ernest Renan’s Life of Jesus, in the imaginative treatments which followed them, attests to the weight of influence under which the authors laboured.

Of the fictional works considered here, none could be pronounced aesthetically remarkable; this is due in part to the authors’ unfamiliarity with the process of transforming a sacred history (or myth) into prose fiction. While the genres of poetry and drama were part of a long-established literary tradition of recreating ancient texts to suit contemporary tastes and interests, the novel was a genre relatively new to the adaptive mode, its very quiddity residing in the novelty of its subject matter. In its incipient stages, New Testament fiction seems to have suffered from over-ambitious experimentation, as in the case of The Fair Haven, or from the aesthetic caution discernible in Philochristus. In addition, the historicism of such writings, demanding as it did the subtle weaving of contextual detail into the texture of the narrative, frequently resulted in stylistic awkwardness. However, by the Edwardian period, increasing secularity had brought greater freedom for writers who could, in the words of Richard Ellmann, ‘take for granted that a large part of their audience will be irreligious’, enabling writers such as George Moore to be more venturesome in their presentations of the Scriptures.⁶⁹⁰ The Brook Kerith is the first New Testament fiction that attempts to imagine the workings of the mind of Jesus, in a narrative which experiments with multiple viewpoints and free indirect speech, and which moves the figure of Christ out of the boundaries of the Gospel story to wander freely into an unknown future in the East.

In The Sense of an Ending, Frank Kermode writes that ‘Fictions are for finding things out, and they change as the needs of sense-making change.’⁶⁹¹ It is a definition which holds particularly true for the religious fictions of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries which, spurred on by theological revisionism, sought to make sense of rapid and profound changes in Christian thought and feeling. Representations of Christ in both the short story and the novel attest to both an enduring attachment to, and a liberation from, his image. Those who fully accepted that Jesus was not divine, still needed to make sense of how and why he had commanded so many followers for so many centuries. As Renan points out when discussing the work of Strauss:

What he leaves subsisting in the Gospels is not sufficient to account for the faith of the Apostles…It must have been, in other words, that the person of Jesus had singularly exceeded the ordinary proportions…⁶⁹²
And there were many competing versions of exactly how Jesus went beyond these ‘ordinary proportions’. Fiction writers of all religious persuasions could interpret the Evangelical records to mould Christ in their own image: the poet, the philanthropist, the teacher, the social reformer. Robert Graves, an author who would make his own contribution to the genre of Jesuine fiction in the 1940s, points out in his essay ‘The Cult of Tolerance’:

The Gospels remind us how many irreconcilable attitudes can be adopted towards a single confused subject. Thus, the orthodox religious attitude: ‘The Gospels must be accepted as a final court of appeal in all moral cases.’ The unorthodox religious attitude: ‘It is the greatest story in the world, but we doubt whether Jesus rose again from the dead.’ The rationalistic attitude: ‘A story that begins with the virgin-birth and a travelling star cannot be taken seriously.’⁶⁹³

Prose fictions, by dint of their popularity and accessibility became one of the most prominent and influential forms of discourse by which such varying approaches to the ‘confused subject’ of Jesus could be explored.

As the twentieth century wore on, so those intent on preserving the divinity and sanctity of the figure of Christ had to contend with ever more powerful media. The relatively private nature of fiction-reading began to look less threatening in comparison to the more public nature of the cinema, and radio and television broadcasting: new media which were quick to take up the challenge of creating depictions of Jesus for a twentieth-century audience.⁶⁹⁴ Even with the normative secularity of the early twenty-first century, and the increasing obsolescence of the blasphemy laws, the urge to reinvent the image of Christ persists. BBC 2’s recent decision to broadcast Jerry Springer: The Opera, with its depiction of a coprophiliac, nappy-wearing Jesus, incurred the wrath of the religious fundamentalist movement, the Christian Voice. But, as The Guardian’s headline to the article reporting the controversy makes clear, such images of Christ now tend only to shock ‘The Moral Minority’.⁶⁹⁵

In an aesthetic pronouncement especially germane to this study, Wilde insisted that ‘the originality…which we ask from the artist, is originality of treatment, not of subject. It is only the unimaginative who ever invents.’⁶⁹⁶ Of the fictional recreations of the Gospels considered here, Wilde’s apologues come closest to fulfilling his own artistic dictum. The ludic qualities of these New Testament tales, sustained by their purely oral status, enables them to raise pertinent questions about a variety of theological positions in a manner at once subtle and arresting. It is tempting to conclude, then, that imaginative representations of Jesus were best left unwritten. However, this would be to underestimate the impact of those authors who, by committing their portraits of Christ to the page, helped lift New Testament fiction out of the domain of Christian orthodoxy and pave the way for ever more radical interpretations of the historical Jesus.⁶⁹⁷

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SELECT BIBLIOGRAPHY