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

130 Mrs Humphry Ward, Robert Elsmere, 3 vols, Copyright Edition (London: Smith, Elder & Co.,1888), III, p. 167.

131 Léo Taxil, Vie de Jésus (Paris: Librairie Anti-cléricale, 1882). Taxil’s book is mentioned by name in James Joyce’s Ulysses, suggesting that it circulated for several decades. See Ulysses (London: Penguin, 2000), p. 51.

132 Orthodox French Lives of Jesus were particularly sentimental and lacking in any serious engagement with Biblical criticism, making them particularly vulnerable to parodic treatments. One of the few to enter into the Higher Critical arena was Father Henri Didon’s Jésus Christ, published in Paris in 1891, and translated into English in the same year: The Life of Jesus Christ, 2 vols (London: Kegan Paul, Trench, Trübner & Co., 1891). While entirely Catholic in spirit, it nevertheless followed Renan in its evocative descriptions of Palestine.

133 George Gissing, Thyrza: A Tale, 3 vols (London: Smith, Elder & Co., 1887), I, pp. 20-1.

134 Nicolas Notovitch, The Unknown Life of Christ, trans. from the French by Violet Crispe (London: Hutchinson and Co., 1895). In this modern Apocrypha, Notovitch claims that, during a stay in Tibet, he was given access by the chief Lama to ancient records recording the life of Jesus. Notovitch insists that Renan had been aware of his findings and was anxious to acquire them for his own purposes and inevitable glory. For this reason, Notovitch insists, the publication of the work had been delayed until after Renan’s death. This unlikely scenario, along with the extreme dubiety of Notovitch’s evidence, and his translator’s refusal to be associated in any way with the work she had undertaken to translate, confirms the account as more fiction than fact.

135 Levi H. Dowling, The Aquarian Gospel of Jesus the Christ: the philosophic and practical basis of the Religion of the Aquarian Age of the World and of the Church Universal, transcribed from the Book of God’s Remembrances, Known as the Akashic Records, by Levi (London: Cazenove, 1908). In The Hidden Gospels: How the Search for Jesus Lost its Way (New York: Oxford University Press, 2001), Philip Jenkins writes that ‘between 1908 and 1995, the Aquarian Gospel…went through fifty-two printings in hardbound editions, and thirteen in paperback’ (p. 47).

136 See Simon Nowell-Smith, The House of Cassell 1848-1958 (London: Cassell & Company, 1958), p. 99.

137 Alfred E. Garvie, Studies in the Inner Life of Jesus (London: Hodder & Stoughton, 1907), p. vi.

138 Walter Lloyd, The Galilean (London: Williams and Norgate, 1892), pp. 3-4.

139 James Stalker, ‘Our present knowledge of the life of Jesus’, Contemporary Review, 77 (January 1900), 124-132.

140 Ibid., p. 125; James Stalker, The Life of Jesus Christ (Edinburgh: T. & T. Clark, 1879).

141 Joseph McCabe, Haeckel’s Critics Answered (London: Watts & Co., 1903), p. 96.

142 T. R. Glover, The Jesus of History (London: Student Christian Movement, 1917), p. 243.

143 The Quest of the Historical Jesus, p. 478.

144 James Stalker, ‘Our present knowledge of the life of Jesus’, p. 125.

145 Margaret Maison, Search Your Soul, Eustace (London and New York: Sheed & Ward, 1961), p. 7.

146 Lady Catharine Long, Sir Roland Ashton: A Tale of the Times, 2 vols (London: James Nisbet and Co., 1844), pp. v-vi.

147 F. W. Farrar, Darkness and Dawn, 2 vols (London: Longman, Green, and Co., 1891), I, pp. vii, viii.

148 Ibid., I, p. viii.

149 F. W. Farrar, The Gathering Clouds, 2 vols (London: Longman, Green, and Co., 1895), I, pp. ix-x.

150 George Eliot, ‘Silly Novels by Lady Novelists’, Westminster Review, 10 (October 1856), 442-461, p. 461. As a writer who had rejected the evangelicalism of her early years and had laboured to produce a scholarly and finely phrased translation of Strauss’s Leben Jesu, Eliot was well placed to criticize the crassness of contemporary religious fiction; she would go on to demonstrate in novels such as Adam Bede, Middlemarch, and Daniel Deronda that the diversity of Christian faith in Victorian Britain could be explored in a subtle and challenging manner without resorting to sentimentality, caricature or sensationalism.

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

152 Cuthbert Lennox, George Douglas Brown (London: Hodder and Stoughton, 1903), p. 5.

153 Letters Between Samuel Butler and Miss E. M. A. Savage 1871-1885, ed. by Geoffrey Keynes and Brian Hill (London: Jonathan Cape, 1935), p. 36.

154 Samuel Butler, The Evidence for the Resurrection of Jesus Christ as given by the Four Evangelists, Critically Examined (London, 1865).

155 Ibid., p. v. It is clear from Matthew’s Gospel that there were post-resurrection rumours that the disciples, or someone else, had stolen the body of Jesus from the tomb. Matthew is the only Evangelist to include the detail of Pilate’s ordering the tomb to be sealed and guarded (27:65-6) and, presumably to counter stories about the faking of the resurrection, the episode of the chief priests bribing the soldiers to say that the corpse had been removed while they were asleep (28:11-15). That such stories formed the stuff of legend is suggested by the verse: ‘And this story is still told among the Jews to this day’ (28:15).

156 That continental scholarship was slow in reaching Britain is borne out in a letter from Charles Darwin to Samuel Butler, dated 30 September 1865, thanking him for sending a copy of the pamphlet on the resurrection, and remarking that the ‘main argument is to me quite new’. See ‘Correspondence with Charles and Francis Darwin’, BL, Add. MS 34486, ff. 56-86, f. 58.

157 D. F. Strauss’s mockery of the rationalist theory that Christ did not die on the cross was even more pronounced in A New Life of Jesus, Authorized Translation, 2 vols (London: Williams and Norgate, 1865). His outlining of the hypothesis insists on its absurdity: ‘It is impossible that a being who had stolen half-dead out of the sepulchre, who crept about weak and ill, wanting medical treatment, who required bandaging, strengthening and indulgence…could have given to his disciples the impression that he was a Conqueror over death and the grave’ (I, p. 412).

158 Letters Between Samuel Butler and Miss Savage, p. 27.

159 The True History of Joshua Davidson (London: Strahan and Co., 1873), unfolds a fantasy vision of a modern-day Christ, in the person of the aptly named eponymous hero, who returns to Victorian England to preach a creed of class equality. In his survey of the Christ figure in fiction, Theodore Ziolkowski concurs with Butler’s view of Linton’s best-seller, deeming it ‘an appallingly bad novel - a Christian socialist tract suspended on the barest framework of plot.’ See Fictional Transfigurations of Jesus (Princeton, New Jersey: Princeton University Press, 1972), p. 59.

160 Samuel Butler, The Fair Haven. A Work in Defence of the Miraculous Element in Our Lord’s Ministry Upon Earth, Both As Against Rationalistic Impugners and Certain Orthodox Defenders, 2^nd edn (London: Trűbner & Co., 1873), Memoir, p. 21. Hereinafter, all citations are from this edition of the work; page references are indicated in parenthesis following each quotation, with ‘P’ standing for Preface, ‘M’ for Memoir and ‘FH’ for The Fair Haven.

161 Letters Between Samuel Butler and Miss Savage, p. 28.

162 Ibid, p. 29.

163 Samuel Butler, The Fair Haven, New Edition (London: Jonathan Cape, 1913), p. x.

164 Edward Henry Bickersteth (1825-1906) won widespread acclaim for his hymns and devotional poetry. His Practical and Explanatory Commentary on the New Testament (1864) was a popular choice for religious instruction within the family.

165 Henry Alford, New Testament for English Readers, 2 vols (London: Rivingtons, 1863-6). Butler seems to have had no qualms about launching a merciless attack on the writings of Alford, despite the fact that he had died only a year before the novel’s publication.

166 In his notebooks, Butler contests the Arnoldian view that the Bible is a great literary text; while he finds something of value in the Song of Solomon, he considers the Psalms ‘querulous, spiteful and introspective’, and the writings of the prophets inferior to works such as The Pilgrim’s Progress and Tom Jones . See The Note-books of Samuel Butler, Author of ‘Erewhon’; Selections arranged and edited by Henry Festing Jones (London: A. C. Fifield, 1912), p. 202.

167 Letter from Charles Darwin to Samuel Butler, 1 April 1873, BL, Add. MS 34486, f. 60.

168 Edmund Gosse, Aspects and Impressions (London: Cassell and Company, 1922), p. 73.

169 The Note-books of Samuel Butler, p. 368.

170 Cited by Edward Clodd in Memories (London: Chapman and Hall, 1916), p. 261. As someone also engaged with Biblical scholarship, Clodd would have had a particular interest in Butler’s book and its failure to impress may well have influenced his own decision to select the safer option of a rationalist biography to expound his ideas on the life of Christ. Clodd’s Jesus of Nazareth: Embracing a Sketch of Jewish History to the Time of His Birth (London: C. Kegan Paul & Co., 1880), in common with The Fair Haven, endeavoured to be ‘of service to those…unable to follow in detail the methods of modern criticism’ (p. vi). While not a best-seller, its more familiar generic identity ensured that it reached a wider readership than Butler’s more hybrid work.

171 Letter to Samuel Butler from Charles Darwin, 1 April 1873, f. 61.

172 Edward Clodd, Memories, p. 261.

173 Letter from Charles Darwin to Samuel Butler, f. 61.

174 Letters Between Samuel Butler and Miss Savage, p. 36. Ironically, the ‘Memoir’ was initially regarded by Butler as ‘the stupidest part’. He explains to Miss Savage how he included the ‘Memoir’ solely to encourage readers to ‘swallow the rest’ (Letters, p. 34).

175 See Samuel Butler: Author of Erewhon, A memoir by Henry Festing Jones, 2 vols (London: Macmillan, 1919), I, pp. 20, 24; and Samuel Butler by Peter Raby (London: The Hogarth Press, 1991), pp. 136-7.

176 The Note-books of Samuel Butler, p. 346-7.

177 Quoted in Henry Festing Jones’s Samuel Butler: Author of Erewhon, I, p. 182.

178 In the Preface to Erewhon Revisited (London: Grant Richards, 1901), Butler wrote: ‘I would say that I have never ceased to profess myself a member of the more advanced wing of the English Broad Church…No two people think absolutely alike on any subject, but when I converse with advanced Broad Churchmen I find myself in substantial harmony with them’ (pp. vi-vii).

179 [Anon.], Philochristus: Memoirs of a Disciple of the Lord (London: Macmillan and Co., 1878). Hereinafter, all citations from this text refer to this edition, with page references given in brackets after each quotation.

180 Abbott’s association with Macmillan seems to have been encouraged by Seeley. In an undated letter to the publisher, Seeley recommends Abbott as a translator of Plato, describing him as having ‘a great command of English’ and being ‘a great worker’. See ‘Correspondence with Macmillan and Co.’, BL, Macmillan Archive, vol. CCLXXXIX, Add. MS 55074, ff. 41-2.

181 Letter from Edwin A. Abbott to Macmillan, 6 January 1874, BL, Macmillan Archive, vol. CCCXXIX, Add. MS 55114, f. 19.

182 Ibid., 23 January 1877, ff. 32-3.

183 Abbott could not have failed to notice the Earl of Shaftesbury’s denunciation of Ecce Homo as ‘the most pestilential book…ever vomited from the jaws of hell’; cited in The Life and Work of the Seventh Earl of Shaftesbury, K. G., Edwin Hodder, 3 vols (London: Cassell and Company, 1886), III, p. 164.

184 Abbott moved in fashionable literary circles. George Eliot names him as one of her guests at a Sunday lunch gathering which also included Trollope and Turgenev. See The Yale Edition of the George Eliot Letters, ed. by Gordon S. Haight, 7 vols (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 1954-6), V, p. 143.

185 Letter from Edwin A. Abbott to Macmillan, 6 January 1874, f. 19.

186 The sub-genre of the Early Christian novel encompassed a variety of religious viewpoints, ranging from Charles Kingsley’s anti-Catholic account of fifth-century Christian martyrdom, Hypatia (1853), to Cardinal Newman’s Callista (1856), partly written to counter Kingsley’s antagonistic presentation of the Primitive Church. Later in the century, Walter Pater would lift this form of historical novel to new aesthetic heights with Marius the Epicurean (1885). After Pater’s prose masterpiece, the genre became increasingly overworked, especially by orthodox Christians. One of its lowest points artistically came with Wilson Barrett’s The Sign of the Cross (1897), a novel adapted from his highly popular melodrama. Barrett’s tale of love between the Christian heroine and a Roman prefect and their eventual death in the amphitheatre of Christian martyrdom was eventually adapted for the cinema by Cecil B. de Mille in 1932.

187 Thomas Carlyle, On Heroes, Hero-worship and the Heroic in History (London: James Fraser, 1841), p. 18.

188 A comparative study of fictional representations of Jesus in the literature of the United States and Britain is beyond the scope of this thesis, though it is an area worthy of scholarly attention. One particularly interesting question is why American Biblical fiction was, as a general rule, about twenty years in advance of that produced in Britain. David S. Reynolds suggests that the Civil War did much to break down the caution which had held some writers back from treating Scriptural subjects in their fiction and that while ‘the Oxford Movement in England was impelling several novelists to weigh specific creedal alternatives, American Protestants were using fiction to advocate a non-sectarian piety for a nation that prided itself on religious freedom’. See David S. Reynolds, Faith in Fiction: The Emergence of Religious Literature in America (Cambridge Massachusetts: Harvard University Press, 1981), p. 200.

189 In an article entitled ‘Pater’s Marius and Historical Novels on Early Christian Times’, published in Nineteenth Century Fiction, 28 (June 1973), 1-24, Curtis Dahl comments that Ingraham’s novel was so famous ‘it gave name to a baseball team’ (p. 5).

190 J. H. Ingraham, The Prince of the House of David (New York: Pudney & Russell, 1856), p. v.

191 Ibid., p. vi.

192 Christ’s cursing of the fig tree did not sit easily with the orthodoxies of Victorian Christianity. F. W. Farrar devotes several pages to a discussion of the miracle, pointing out that ‘many argue that this is an untrue and mistaken story, because it narrates what they regard as an unworthy display of anger’. See The Life of Christ, 2 vols, 2^nd edn (London: Cassell, Petter and Galpin, 1874), II, p. 215.

193 Seeley’s depiction of Christ’s embarrassment when confronted with the woman taken in adultery was condemned in the Quarterly Review on account of its ‘coarseness and latitude’. See the Quarterly Review, 119 (April 1866), 515-529, p. 518.

194 Contemporary Review, 31(March 1878), 804-820, p. 807. The author of this review of Philochristus, John Llewelyn Davies, was one of the leaders of liberal theology at Cambridge and a good friend of Abbott’s.

195 Research into what is now commonly referred to as the ‘Synoptic problem’ was particularly active in the last three decades of the nineteenth century. Part of this ‘problem’ was ascertaining the existence and provenance of a common source text used by both Matthew and Luke to supplement the record of Mark; this hypothetical body of writing came to be labelled as ‘Q’ (from the German ‘Quelle’ or ‘source’) by twentieth-century scholars. Abbott was acquainted with several of the leading Cambridge theological scholars working in this area, including Brooke Foss Westcott, whose work he footnotes in the ‘Scholia’ of Philochristus. Abbott produced his own immensely detailed study of the New Testament in a ten-volume work entitled Diatessarica, 1-VII (London: A. & C. Black, 1900-1907); VIII-X (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1910-1917).

196 Edwin A. Abbott, Apologia: An Explanation and Defence (London: A. & C. Black, 1907), p. 12.

197 The name appears once in the New Testament in Romans (16:23).

198 Contemporary Review, 31(March 1878), p. 804.

199 Ernest Renan, The Life of Jesus, trans. unknown (London: Trűbner & Co., 1864), p. 190.

200 Apologia, p. 11.

201 Ibid., p. x.

202 Contemporary Review, 31(March 1878), p. 817.

203 [‘A Square’], Flatland: A Romance of Many Dimensions (London: Seeley, 1884). Published under a pseudonym by the author’s friend, J. R. Seeley, this book still commands considerable interest from the scientific community. It has recently been republished under the title: The Annotated Flatland: A Romance of Many Dimensions, Introduction and notes by Ian Stewart (Oxford: The Perseus Press, 2002). A leading expert on Abbott, Thomas Banchoff, published an influential article on the work entitled ‘From Flatland to hypergraphics: interacting with higher dimensions’, Interdisciplinary Science Reviews, 15 (1990), 364-372.

204 Quoted from a letter to the Reverend Charles Anderson in Edward Clodd’s Memories, p. 249.

205 Hamlet (1.2. 133); Othello (1.3. 159), The Norton Shakespeare, ed. by Stephen Greenblatt (London: W. W. Norton & Company, 1997), pp. 1675, 2110.

206 The Times, 13 October 1926, p. 19.

207 Letter from Edwin A. Abbott to Macmillan, 3 July 1912, f. 139.

208 In a letter to Macmillan , dated 22 March 1878, f. 45, Abbott mentions that ‘some of the religious papers talk about Philochristus as a ‘profane novel’, an entirely predictable response given the work’s treatment of miracles. However, if he had been expecting responses as vituperative as those received by Seeley for Ecce Homo, he would have been disappointed.

209 In a letter to Macmillan, dated 8 January 1916, f. 140, Abbott writes that the request from a Miss E. M. Farr to use Philochristus as a teaching aid had made him reconsider his decision not to republish the work. The third, and final, edition of the novel was eventually published by Macmillan in the same year. By coincidence, the work retained the anonymity of its first edition, Abbott having omitted his name from the new Preface by mistake.

210 As Others Saw Him: A Retrospect A. D. 54 (London: William Heinemann, 1895), p. vi. Hereinafter, all citations are taken from this edition of the novel, unless otherwise stated; page references are given in brackets after each quotation.

211 For the most detailed bibliography of Jacobs’s writings see Mayer Salzberger’s obituary article on the author printed in Publications of the American Jewish Historical Society, no. 25 (Baltimore: The Lord Baltimore Press, 1917), 156-173.

212 For a recent study of Jacobs’s work in the area of race science see John M. Efron’s Defenders of the Race: Jewish Doctors and Race Science in Fin-de-Siècle Europe (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 1994), pp. 58-90.

213 Anne J. Kershen, ‘Jacobs, Joseph (1854-1916)’, Oxford Dictionary of National Biography, ed. by H. C. G. Matthew and Brian Harrison, 61 vols (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2004), 29, pp. 566-7.

214 See the Preface by Israel Abrahams to Jesus: As Others Saw Him (New York: Bernard G. Richards Co., 1925), p. 5. It is interesting to note the addition of the prefix ‘Jesus’ to the title of later editions of Jacobs’s work. Making the book’s subject matter immediately obvious from its title may have been recommended by Jacobs’s American publishers.

215 Joseph Jacobs, ‘Mordecai: A Protest Against the Critics’, Macmillan’s Magazine, 36 (June 1877), 101-111, p. 111.

216 Joseph Jacobs, Jewish Ideals and other Essays (London: David Nutt, 1896), pp. xii-xiii.

217 Joseph Jacobs, Jesus: As Others Saw Him, p. 220.

218 Joseph Jacobs, Literary Studies (London: David Nutt, 1895). The final chapter of this work is dedicated to J. R. Seeley.