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

Manuscripts

Abbott, Edwin Abbott, ‘Correspondence with Macmillan and Co.’, British Library, Macmillan Archive, vol. CCCXXIX, Add. MS 55114.

Butler, Samuel, ‘Correspondence with Charles and Francis Darwin (1863-1880)’, British Library, Add. MS 34486, ff. 56-86.
Seeley, Sir John R., ‘Correspondence with Macmillan and Co.’, Macmillan Archive, vol. CCLXXXIX, British Library, Add. MS 55074.

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1 Ernest Renan, Studies of Religious History, trans. by Henry F. Gibbon (London: William Heinemann, 1893), pp. 49-50.

2 Marie Corelli’s religious novels, in particular, found favour with some clergy. One such, Father Ignatius, wrote that Corelli was ‘doing more for the faith than the archbishops and the bishops and the convocations put together.’ See Reverend Father Ignatius, The Sorrows of Satan: An Allegory of the Times (Edinburgh: Morrison and Gibb, 1896), p. 9.

3 Samuel Butler, The Way of All Flesh (London: Grant Richards, 1903), p. 52.

4 See Chapter One of this thesis for a full discussion of the works of D. F. Strauss and Ernest Renan and their impact on the British reading public.

5 The diversity of religious denominations and practice in 1850s’ Britain is evident from the data collected for the 1851 religious census of England and Wales. For an analysis of the results of this census, see Geoffrey Best, Mid-Victorian Britain 1851-75 (London: Weidenfeld and Nicolson, 1971), pp. 176-197.

6 The cultural historian, Richard D. Altick, writes that ‘From the sixties onward, religious publishing houses issued novels in ever greater profusion, and the pages of denominational periodicals were open to short stories and serial fiction supplied from the literary marketplace.’ See The English Common Reader: A Social History of the Mass Reading Public 1800-1900 (Columbus: Ohio State University Press, 1998), p. 126.

7 The Christian Advocate and Review, 43 (September 1864), 385-391, p. 385.

8 Ibid., p. 385. The first English translation of Ernest Renan’s Vie de Jésus (Paris: Michel Lévy, 1863) was the Life of Jesus, trans. unknown (London: Trűbner & Co., 1864). A cheap edition was published by the same company in 1867 and, in 1887, the ‘People’s Edition’ was published by the Temple Company, London. Such was the popularity of Renan’s Life that new editions continued to be issued well into the twentieth century. The Secularist publishers, Watts & Co, issued a complete edition with an introduction by Charles T. Gorham in 1904, and in 1927, J. M. Dent published the Life as part of the ‘Everyman’s Library’ series, with an introduction by Charles Gore.

9 Ibid., p. 389.

10 Ibid., p. 387.

11 Rev. George William Butler, ‘Is it True?’: A protest against the employment of fiction as a channel of Christian influence (London: William Macintosh, 1869), p. 7.

12 Favell Lee Bevan, The Night of Toil; or A familiar account of the labours of the first missionaries in the South Sea Islands (London: J. Hatchard & Son, 1838), p. vi.

13 ‘Is it True?’, p. 5.

14 Ibid., p. 28.

15 Richard D. Altick, The Common Reader, p. 121.

16 Joseph Parker, Ecce Deus (Edinburgh: T. & T. Clark, 1867), p. 74.

17 Ibid., p. 74.

18 The Times, 18 December 1891, p. 5.

19 The Times, 25 December 1891, p. 5.

20 The Times, 22 December 1891, p. 8.

21 Hale White, The Autobiography of Mark Rutherford, ed. by Reuben Shapcott (London: Trűbner & Co., 1881), p. 35.

22 Edmund Gosse, Father and Son: a study of two temperaments (London: William Heinemann, 1907), p. 24.

23 Thomas Hardy, Tess of the D’Urbervilles (London: Macmillan and Co., 1912), p. 202.

24 Frederic W. Farrar, ‘A Few Words on the Life of Christ’, Macmillan’s Magazine, 31 (March 1875), 463-471, p. 468.

25 Winwood Reade, The Martyrdom of Man (London: Trűbner & Co., 1872), p. 524. Warren Sylvester Smith, author of The London Heretics 1870-1914 (London: Constable & Co., 1967), describes Reade’s book as ‘One of the most quoted works of the age - a kind of substitute Bible for many Secularists’ (p. 5).

26 Sylva (pseud.), Ecce Veritas: An Ultra-Unitarian Review of the Life and Character of Jesus (London: Trűbner & Co., 1874), p. viii.

27 For a detailed account of the Secularist movement see Edward Royle and James Walvin, Radicals, Secularists and Republicans 1760-1848 (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1980).

28 Iconoclast (pseud.), Who was Jesus Christ? (London, 1861), p. 8.

29 Annie Besant, The Myth of the Resurrection (London: Freethought Publishing Company, 1884), p. 141.

30 A Bible Handbook, ed. by G. W. Foote and W. P. Ball (London: Progressive Publishing Company, 1886), p. iii.

31 G. W. Foote, What Was Christ? A Reply to John Stuart Mill (London: Progressive Publishing Company, 1887), p. 13. Foote was particularly dismayed that such a renowned freethinker as Mill could publish a panegyric on Christ in his essay ‘On Theism’, contained in Three Essays on Religion (London: Longmans, Green, Reader, and Dyer, 1874).

32 On taking over the co-editorship of the Freethinker in 1881, Foote introduced a column to the journal entitled ‘Profane Jokes’ along with a series of comic woodcuts, ‘Comic Biblical Sketches’. It was the comic sketches in particular which caused orthodox Christians great offence and led to Foote and his co-editor being indicted for ‘wickedly and profanely devising and intending to asperse and vilify Almighty God ‘ and for bringing ‘the Holy Scriptures and Christian Religion into disbelief and contempt’. See Warren Sylvester Smith, The London Heretics 1870-1914, p. 63. Having the misfortune to come up against a Roman Catholic judge, Mr Justice North, Foote’s trial concluded with a particularly harsh and tendentious summing up and he was duly imprisoned for twelve months, during which time the sales of the journal increased considerably.

33 G. W. Foote, Christmas Eve in Heaven, reprinted from the Freethinker in Arrows of Freethought (London: H. A. Kemp, 1882), p. 93.

34 G. W. Foote, Letters to Jesus Christ (London: Progressive Publishing Company, 1886), pp. 8, 9. The German theologian, Gerd Lűdemann, uses the same letter-to-Jesus device to open his recent work: The Great Deception: And What Jesus Really Said and Did, trans. by John Bowden (London: SCM Press, 1998). Though writing in a much more secular age, Lűdemann’s use of such a personal form of address enables him to strike a similar note of impertinence, as he tells Jesus: ‘…you didn’t say or do most of the things which the Bible tells us that you said or did. Moreover, you aren’t at all the one depicted by the Bible and the church tradition. You weren’t without sin and you aren’t God’s son’ (p. 1).

35 G. W. Foote, ‘Freethought in Current Literature’, reprinted from the Freethinker in Arrows of Freethought, p. 31.

36 Coleridge defines the views of those whose arguments are ‘grounded on the position, that the Bible throughout was dictated by Omniscience, and therefore in all its parts infallibly true and obligatory’ as ‘Bibliolatry’. See Confessions of an Inquiring Spirit (London: George Bell and Sons, 1884), pp. 319, 333.

37 Ibid., p. 331.

38 Essays and Reviews, ed. by J. Parker (London: John W. Parker and Son, 1860). A collection of essays by seven Church of England scholars, putting forward their opinions on contemporary developments in Biblical criticism, Essays and Reviews marks a turning point in Scriptural interpretation. It was denounced by the Upper House of the Convocation of Canterbury and by a large majority of the Lower House. Legal proceedings were taken against the essayists who were condemned by the Synod in 1864. Such stern and public condemnation ensured the widespread dissemination of the essayists’ main ideas, which included the recommendation that the Bible should be read as any other text. For details of the reception of Essays and Reviews, see Owen Chadwick, The Victorian Church, 1860-1901, 2^nd Edition (London: Adam & Charles Black, 1972), pp. 75-97.

39 Ibid., pp. 338, 375.

40 Ibid., p. 372.

41 Watts Literary Guide, 43, 15 May 1889, p. 2.

42 Arnold discusses his generally approving views of Jowett’s contribution to Essays and Reviews in his essay ‘The Bishop and the Philosopher’. See Complete Prose Works, ed. by R. H. Super, 11 vols (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1960-77), III, pp. 53-4.

43 Matthew Arnold, ‘Dean Stanley’s Lectures on the Jewish Church’, Complete Prose Works, III, p. 79.

44 Matthew Arnold, Culture and Anarchy, Complete Prose Works, V, p. 173.

45 Matthew Arnold, Literature and Dogma, Complete Prose Works, V1, p. 152.

46 Matthew Arnold, God and the Bible, Complete Prose Works, VII, p. 375.

47 Essays and Reviews, p. 405.

48 Matthew Arnold, Literature and Dogma, Collected Prose Works, VI, p. 363.

49 Matthew Arnold, God and the Bible, Collected Prose Works, VII, p. 377.

50 Matthew Arnold, ‘On Poetry’, Collected Prose Works, IX, p. 63.

51 G. W. Foote, ‘Freethought in Current Literature’, published in Arrows of Freethought, p. 29.

52 Matthew Arnold, Literature and Dogma, Collected Prose Works, VI, p. 363.

53 For a discussion of reactions against Arnold’s literary reading of the Bible see James C. Livingston’s Matthew Arnold and Christianity (Columbia: University of South Carolina Press, 1986), pp. 8-12.

54 Quoted in Owen Chadwick’s The Victorian Church 1860-1901, p. 44.

55 G. W. Foote challenged the assumption that the Authorized Version was at the core of English literary achievement, asserting that it had ‘always stood aside from the main development of English prose’. See G. W. Foote, The Book of God in the Light of the Higher Criticism, with special reference to Dean Farrar’s New Apology (London: R. Forder, 1899), p. 76.

56 Thomas Carlyle, On Heroes, Hero-worship and the Heroic in History (London: James Fraser, 1841), pp. 179, 181.

57 Charles Wordsworth, Shakespeare’s Knowledge and Use of the Bible (London: Smith, Elder & Co., 1864), pp. 2, 5. As the nephew of the Romantic poet, William Wordsworth, it is, perhaps, unsurprising that Charles Wordsworth should elevate Shakespeare to almost divine status.

58 ‘The Irreligion of Shakespeare’, The Secular Almanack, ed. by G. W. Foote (London: The Freethought Publishing Company, 1900), p. 15.

59 Isaac Taylor, Spirit of the Hebrew Poetry (London: Bell and Daldy, 1861), p. 24.

60 W. H. Fremantle, The Gospel of the Secular Life (London: Cassell, Petter, Galpin & Co., 1882), p. 102.

61 Bernard Lucas, The Fifth Gospel: being the Pauline Interpretation of the Christ (London: Macmillan & Co., 1907), p. 203.

62 Literary readings of the Bible continued to be viewed with some scepticism, if not disdain, by twentieth-century Biblical scholars. Frank Kermode’s The Genesis of Secrecy (1979) did much to counter these attitudes through its literary readings of the Scriptures in the context of a range of imaginative fictions, and its discussion of the work of the Biblical scholar, Austin Farrer (1904-1968), whose scholarship had been rejected for being too literary in approach. Robert Alter, co-editor with Kermode of The Literary Guide to the Bible (London: Collins, 1987), points out in The Art of Biblical Narrative (London: George Allen & Unwin, 1981) that ‘It is a little astonishing that at this late date literary analysis of the Bible…is only in its infancy. By literary analysis I mean the manifold varieties of minutely discriminating attention to the artful use of language, to the shifting play of ideas, conventions, tone, imagery, syntax, narrative viewpoint, compositional units, and much else’ (p.12). Such a definition of close analysis is, of course, very far from that understood by William Sanday in 1907.

63 For a discussion of the bowdlerizing of the Bible, see Chapter 5 of Noel Perrin’s Dr Bowdler’s Legacy (London: Macmillan, 1969).

64 Peter Cowell, ‘On the Admission of Fiction in Free Public Libraries’, Transactions and Proceedings of the Conference of Librarians, ed. by Edward B. Nicholson and Henry R. Tedder (London: Chiswick Press, 1878), p. 61.

65 Paul Sturges and Alison Barr, ‘The “fiction nuisance” in nineteenth-century British public libraries’, Journal of Librarianship and Information Science, 24 (March 1992), 23-32, p. 24.

66 W. E. Gladstone, ‘Robert Elsmere and the Battle of Belief’, Nineteenth Century, 23 (May 1888), 766-788, p. 766.

67 Peter Cowell, ‘On the Admission of Fiction in Free Public Libraries’, p. 66.

68 Anthony Trollope, An Autobiography by Anthony Trollope (New York: John W. Lovell Company, 1883), p. 159.

69 Peter Cowell, ‘On the Admission of Fiction in Free Public Libraries’, p. 60.

70 Lord Neaves, On Fiction as a Means of Popular Teaching (Edinburgh and London: William Blackwood and Sons, 1869), p. 12.

71 In the same year as Lord Neaves’s lecture, the Reverend George Butler took issue with ‘those who promote fictions to justify themselves by appealing to the Bible, and especially Lord Jesus Himself’ and asserted that: ‘In the parable a spiritual truth is told in symbolical language; but in the fiction there is no spiritual event or doctrine in view.’ See ‘Is it True?’, p. 8.

72 David Masson, British Novelists and their Styles (Cambridge: Macmillan and Co., 1859), pp. 264-5.

73 The first comprehensive survey of the religious novel in Britain was Margaret Maison’s Search Your Soul, Eustace (London: Sheed and Ward, 1961). More recent studies include Ulrich Knoepflmacher’s Religious Humanism and the Victorian Novel (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1970); Valentine Cunningham’s Everywhere Spoken Against: Dissent in the Victorian Novel (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1975); and Robert Lee Wolff’s Gains and Losses: Novels of Faith and Doubt in Victorian England (New York: John Murray, 1977).

74 ‘Is it True?’, pp. 3, 21.

75 See Catalogue ‘C’ of the Society for Promoting Christian Knowledge: Catalogues of Publications (London and Brighton: The Church of England, 1890), p. 29.

76 Andrew Lang, ‘Theological Romances’, Contemporary Review, 53 (June 1888), 814-824, p. 815.

1 The year 1778 is generally regarded as the start of the quest for the historical Jesus; it was in this year that G. E. Lessing published an extract from a work by Hermann Samuel Reimarus, the theologian generally credited with being the first to investigate the historicity of Christ and the Gospels. While Lessing was prevented by the censor from publishing any further extracts, the first publication ‘Von dem Zweke Jesu und Seiner Jünger.’ Noch ein Fragment des Wolfenbüttelschen Ungenannten (Brunswick, 1778), remained a source of inspiration for later writers.

2 Albert Schweitzer, The Quest of the Historical Jesus, First Complete Edition, ed. by John Bowden (London: SCM Press, 2000). Schweitzer’s book is the first major study of the critical research into the historical Jesus carried out in Europe in the nineteenth century. The first edition of the work was published in 1906 (Tübingen) and was translated into English by W. Montgomery (London: Adam & Charles Black, 1910). In the late 1990s John Bowden and Susan Cupitt, in preparing a complete edition of the work, discovered the translation to be unreliable, and they were obliged to revise it extensively. In the light of this, subsequent citations from The Quest will refer to the 2000 edition which includes Schweitzer’s extensive additions of 1913, hitherto untranslated.

3 In the Introduction to Jesus (New Jersey: Prentice Hall, 1967), Hugh Anderson states that ‘All the Gospel materials bearing on the life of Jesus were so assiduously studied by Protestant theologians that within the space of a few generations, some sixty thousand biographies, so it is estimated, had been produced’ (p. 16). Anderson gives no details regarding the provenance of the estimate, nor does he seem to include the very considerable number of Catholic Lives which were written in the later decades of the century. Both omissions render the figure of sixty thousand somewhat dubious. The estimate is, nevertheless, reiterated by Warren S. Kissinger in The Lives of Jesus (New York: Garland Publishing, 1985), p. xi.

4 For a full account of Strauss’s clash with the university authorities, see Chapter 8 of Horton Harris’s David Friedrich Strauss and his Theology (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1973).

5 David Friedrich Strauss, The Life of Jesus, trans. unknown, 3 vols (Birmingham: Taylor, 1842), I, p. vi.

6 Robert Buchanan, The Outcast: A Rhyme for the Time (London: Chatto & Windus, 1891), p. 33.

7 David Friedrich Strauss, The Life of Jesus Critically Examined, trans. from the fourth German edition [by Mary Ann Evans], 3 vols, (London: Chapman, Brothers, 1846), I, p. 19.

8 Ibid., I, p. 84. The term ‘fiction’ is, of course, a semantically complex one and has been - and remains - a site of considerable dispute, especially in the field of critical theory. It is reasonable to assume that one of the term’s meanings - imaginary prose narrative - was settled by the late nineteenth century, when works such as Henry James’s The Art of Fiction, published in 1884, employed it to signify a stable generic classification. Use of the term in its pejorative sense remained - and remains ­- common, especially amongst the more evangelical denominations.

9 D. F. Strauss, The Life of Jesus, I, p. 54.

10 Ibid., I, pp. 81-2.

11 Ibid., I, p. 83.

12 Ibid., I, p. 84.

13 The Westminster and Foreign Quarterly Review, 47 (April 1847), 136-174, p. 138.

14 Samuel Ayres, Jesus Christ Our Lord (New York: A. C. Armstrong & Son, 1906), p. 5. Ayres’s bibliography annotates and classifies 5,000 Christological works.

15 David Friedrich Strauss, A New Life of Jesus, Authorized Translation, 2 vols (London: Williams and Norgate, 1865), p. viii; translated from Das Leben Jesu für das Deutsche Volk bearbeitet (Leipzig, 1864). In the Preface, Strauss states that he has written ‘for the use of laymen and taken particular pains that no single sentence shall be unintelligible to any educated or thoughtful person; whether professional theologians also choose to be among my readers is to me a matter of indifference’ (A New Life of Jesus, p. vii.).

16 Ernest Renan, Vie de Jésus (Paris: Michel Lévy, 1863). The sales of Vie outstripped all expectations; one month after its publication in June 1863, Renan’s publisher wrote to him: ‘La Vie de Jésus continue à s’enlever comme du pain! Je compte mettre en vente la 5^e édition avant la fin de cette semaine’. See Lettres inédites d’Ernest Renan à ses éditeurs Michel & Calmann Lévy, ed. by Jean-Yves Mollier (Paris: Calmann-Lévy, 1986), p. 51, n4. The work went through 13 editions in the year following its publication, reaching its 61^st edition by 1921. The ‘édition populaire’ sold even more successfully, going through 130 editions by 1921. The most significant revision was that undertaken for the 13^th edition of 1864, wherein Renan explained his position on the Fourth Gospel, admitting that his original stance had been flawed. For bibliographical details of Renan’s Vie and other writings, see Bibliographie des oeuvres de Ernest Renan, ed. by Henri Girard and Henri Moncel (Paris: Presses Universitaire de France, 1923).

17 The first English translation was The Life of Jesus, trans. unknown (London: Trübner & Co., 1864); hereinafter, all citations are taken from this edition. It is evident from Renan’s correspondence with Michel and Calmann Lévy that the production of the first English translation was fraught with difficulties. Renan, fearing his English was not good enough to judge the quality of the translation, was anxious to employ a distinguished man of letters whom he could trust to do justice to the style of the original work, and who was au courant with Biblical studies. His first three choices for the job were the English theologian, Edward Higginson; the linguist and traveller, Sir John Bowring; and the journalist, George Augustus Sala, none of whom were able to undertake the work. After a good deal of negotiation, the first English translation was eventually carried out by Henry Harris, an acquaintance of Renan’s, who had published several works on religious topics. Renan was keen that this first, rather hasty, translation should not bear the name of the translator and that the door should remain open for future translations by more esteemed literary figures. For fuller details of the negotiations concerning the first English translation of Vie, see Lettres inédites d’Ernest Renan, pp. 50-69.