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

219 Jacobs was certainly acquainted with Abbott, if only by name; in his essay on Seeley, he refers to English Lessons for English People, a text co-authored by Seeley and Abbott (Literary Studies, p. 194). He also mentions ‘Dr Abbott’s remarkable view of the religious use of illusion’ in an essay on Robert Browning; see Jewish Ideals and Other Essays, p. 89.

220 Ibid., p. xix.

221 The figure of Pontius Pilate as recorded by Jewish historians, such as Josephus and Philo, is certainly less sympathetic than that of the Gospels. Lives of Jesus tended to follow the Christian tradition of viewing Pilate as the civilised ‘other’ of the Jews. In Charles Dickens’s The Life of Our Lord, written in the 1840s, especially for his children, the author underscores this distinction through parenthesis: ‘Pilate (who was not a Jew) said to Him “your own Nation, the Jews, and your own Priests have delivered you to me. What have you done?” Finding that He had done no harm, Pilate went out and told the Jews so…’. See The Life of Our Lord (London: Associated Newspapers, 1934), p. 100. For a succinct and authoritative account of the Christianizing of Pontius Pilate, see Paul Winter, On the Trial of Jesus, 2^nd edn (Berlin: Walter de Gruyter & Co., 1974), pp. 70-89.

222 Jesus: As Others Saw Him, p. 226.

223 Hostile views of the Pharisees were perpetuated by popular works such as Renan’s Life of Jesus. The freethinker, J. M. Robertson, pointed out in Ernest Renan (London: Watts & Co., 1924): ‘Renan, instead of trying…to save Jesus from the discredit of the wholesale vilification of Scribes and Pharisees, undertook to demonstrate that these were in the mass as black as they are painted’ (p. 54).

224 For a detailed discussion of Jewish attitudes to Jesus, see Thomas Walker, Jewish Views of Jesus (London: G. Allen & Unwin, 1931).

225 The conviction that the historical Jesus would have been taunted for his illegitimacy is still held by some modern Jewish scholars. Gerd Lűdemann, for example, asserts that ‘From the very first, people in his home town of Nazareth bombarded him with comments that he was a bastard without a proper father. Hence the taunt “son of Mary”’. See Jesus After Two Thousand Years (London: SCM Press, 2000), p. 688.

226 The Jewish Life of Christ, ed. by G. W. Foote and J. M. Wheeler (London: Progressive Publishing Company, 1885).

227 Athenaeum, June 22, 1895, p. 797.

228 Joseph Jacobs, ‘Jesus of Nazareth’, The Jewish Encyclopaedia, ed. by Isidore Singer, 12 vols (New York & London: Funk and Wagnalls Company, 1903), VII, p. 165.

229 S. Schechter, ‘As Others Saw Him’, Studies in Judaism, 3^rd Series (Philadelphia: The Jewish Publication Society of America, 1924), p. 45. This review first appeared in the Jewish Chronicle of London, May 10-17, 1895.

230 Essays in Jewish Biography, ed. by Alexander Marx (Philadelphia: The Jewish Publication Society of America, 1948), p. 252.

231 S. Schechter, ‘As Others Saw Him’, p. 31.

232 Athenaeum, 22 June 1895, p. 797.

233 Ibid., p. 797.

234 Jesus: As Others Saw Him, p. iii.

235 Marie Corelli was the nom de plume of Mary Mackay.

236 Marie Corelli, Free Opinions (London: Archibald Constable & Co., 1905), p. 40.

237 Ibid., p. 46.

238 Marie Corelli, ‘The Vanishing Gift’: An Address on the Decay of the Imagination (Edinburgh: The Philosophical Institution, 1901), p. 14.

239 Sympathetic interpretations of Judas were by no means uncommon in fictional, dramatic and poetic treatments. See, for example, the final stanza of Robert Buchanan’s The Ballad of Judas Iscariot (London: The Priory Press, 1904) in which the betrayer’s wandering soul finds a resting place with Jesus; and the conclusion to Coulson Kernahan’s dream vision, A World Without the Christ (London: Hodder & Stoughton, 1934), where Judas falls at Christ’s feet and is forgiven.

240 In George Barlow’s drama Jesus of Nazareth: A Tragedy (London: The Roxburghe Press, 1896), Mary Magdalene is the erotic centre of the play and the crucifixion is shown to be brought about almost entirely through the sexual rivalry between Judas and the rabbi, Ben Aaron, both of whom attempt to win her sexual favours. And Barlow’s scenario was by no means exceptional. The long-established tradition of identifying the Magdalen with other Biblical females such as the sister of Martha, Mary of Bethany, and the women who anoint Jesus’s feet, held much potential for fiction. Following the popular belief that Mary was a prostitute, writers could transform her into images of womanhood which held an abiding fascination for the Victorians: the femme fatale and the fallen woman. Edgar Saltus’s novel Mary of Magdala (London: Osgood & McIlvine, 1891) offers a typical late nineteenth-century treatment of the New Testament heroine: a ravishing beauty who captivates numerous men and, most especially, Judas.

241 Marie Corelli, Barabbas: A Dream of the World’s Tragedy, 3 vols (London: Methuen and Co., 1893), I, p. 216. Hereinafter, all citations are taken from this edition; page references appear in brackets immediately following quotations.

242 Corelli had very set views about a woman’s place in society, summed up in her poem entitled ‘The Message of the Madonna’: ‘Fie on that flag unfurl’d -/ The flag of your “suffrage” cause!/ What need you more glory and grace/ Of bearing and rearing the human race?’ See Poems (London: Hutchinson & Co., 1925).

243 Compare Nelly Dean’s description of Heathcliff: ‘I tried to close his eyes: to extinguish, if possible, that frightful, life-like gaze…They would not shut: they seemed to sneer at my attempts; and his parted lips and sharp, white teeth sneered too!’ See Emily Brontë, Wuthering Heights, New Edition (London: Smith, Elder and Co., 1850), p. 294.

244 Marie Corelli, A Romance of Two Worlds, 2 vols (London: Richard Bently and Son, 1886), II, p. 128. In a chapter entitled ‘Electric Creed’, Corelli expounds the theory that Jesus was electrified, a quality which enabled him to carry out miracles, including that of the resurrection. In the same chapter, she provides a list of textual proofs of this theory, aimed at marrying contemporary science with orthodox Christianity. It is a theory which also appears in non-fiction writing of the time. Bernard Lucas, for example, writing in The Fifth Gospel: being the Pauline Interpretation of the Christ (London: Macmillan and Co., 1907), explains that ‘Christ’s injunction to Mary not to touch Him may indicate the presence in His body of forces which would have proved fatal, like the shock occasioned by contact with a body highly charged with electricity’ (p. 194).

245 Lewis Wallace, An Autobiography, 2 vols (New York: Harper & Brothers, 1906), II, p. 933-4.

246 ‘A Note upon Marie Corelli’, Westminster Review, 166 (December 1906), 680-692, p. 684.

247 In The New English Bible, this verse reads: ‘Pilate now took Jesus and had him flogged’, thus making clear to those as literal minded as Corelli, that he would not have undertaken the scourging of Christ himself.

248 In Fiction and the Reading Public (London: Chatto & Windus, 1932), Q. D. Leavis writes that ‘Corelli had - for reasons best explained by a psycho-analyst - discovered the novel as a means of satisfying…suppressed desires…’ (pp. 167-8). G. B. Shaw identified a similarly erotic undercurrent in Wilson Barrett’s immensely successful religious melodrama The Sign of the Cross (1896), especially in the ‘terrible contrast between the Romans…with their straightforward sensuality, and the strange, perverted voluptuousness of the Christians, with their shuddering exaltations of longing for the whip, the rack, the stake, and the lions’. See G. B. Shaw, Plays of the Week, 11 January 1896, reprinted in Plays and Players: Essays on the Theatre (London: Oxford University Press, 1952), p. 64.

249 Thomas F. G. Coates and R. S. Warren Bell, Marie Corelli: the Writer and the Woman (London: Hutchinson & Co., 1903), p. 147.

250 Letter from Canon Wilberforce to Marie Corelli, quoted in Brian Masters, Now Barabbas was a Rotter (London: Hamish Hamilton, 1978), p. 129.

251 See Eileen Bigland, Marie Corelli: the Woman and the Legend (London: Jarrolds, 1953), p. 145.

252Saturday Review, 76 (November 1893), p. 546.

253 ‘A Note upon Marie Corelli’, p. 686.

254 The derivation of the name Iscariot is still considered uncertain by New Testament scholars. For an up-to-date summary of the various hypotheses put forward on the subject see William Klassen, Judas: Betrayer or Friend of Jesus? (London: SCM Press, 1996).

255 For details of the novel’s reception and sales, see Chapter 8 of Brian Masters’ Now Barabbas was a Rotter.

256 See William Stuart Scott, Marie Corelli: The Story of a Friendship (London: Hutchinson, 1955), p. 170.

257 Q. D. Leavis, Fiction and the Reading Public, p. 166.

258 Bertha Vyver, Corelli’s friend and lifelong companion, records how the author received a letter from a publisher asking her to write a Life of Jesus which he assures her ‘would be an enormous force for good’. See Memoirs of Marie Corelli (London: Alston Rivers, 1930), p. 165.

259 In his 1916 biography of Wilde, Frank Harris recalls how his subject ‘described himself on leaving Oxford as a “Professor of Aesthetics and a Critic of Art”’. See Oscar Wilde: His Life and Confessions, 2 vols (New York: printed and published by the author, 1916), I, p. 56.

260 William Rothenstein, Men and Memories (London: Faber & Faber, 1931), p. 311.

261 Complete Works of Oscar Wilde, 3^rd edn (Glasgow: Harper Collins, 2003), p. 1074. Hereinafter, unless otherwise stated, all quotations from Wilde’s works are taken from this edition, cited as Complete Works.

262 Oscar Wilde, ‘The Poet’s Corner’, Pall Mall Gazette, April 6, 1888, reprinted in The Collected Works of Oscar Wilde, ed. by Robert Ross, 15 vols (London: Routledge/ Thoemmes Press, 1993), XIII, p. 316; originally published as The First Edition of the Works of Oscar Wilde (London: Methuen, 1908-1922).

263 Oscar Wilde, The Complete Letters of Oscar Wilde, ed. by Merlin Holland and Rupert Hart-Davis (London: Fourth Estate, 2000), p. 761. The text of De Profundis quoted throughout this chapter is that printed in the aforementioned volume, hereinafter cited as Letters. While acknowledging the complexities of the letter’s literary identity and its variant forms, I have opted to refer to the work as it is most commonly known and not, as some critics would prefer, as ‘the prison manuscript’. For the purpose of this chapter, there are no significant variations between the letter printed in Letters (2000) and that edited by Wilde’s literary executor, Robert Ross, under the title De Profundis (London: Methuen, 1905). For a detailed account of the letter and its publication history, see the Introduction to The Complete Works of Oscar Wilde (II): De Profundis: Epistola in Carcere et Vinculis, ed. by Ian Small (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2005). A facsimile edition of the prison manuscript was published by the British Library in 2000.

264 Albert J. Farmer remarks: ‘…ses amis seront frappés par ses préoccupations bibliques, et l’évangile jouera un rôle de plus en plus grand dans son oeuvre.’ See Le Mouvement esthétique et‘décadent’ en Angleterre 1873-1900 (Paris: Librairie Ancienne Honoré Champion, 1931), p. 215.

265 Coulson Kernahan, In Good Company (London: John Lane, The Bodley Head, 1917), p. 223.

266 In an article entitled ‘The Influence of Baudelaire’, John Middleton Murry wrote: ‘We should never have heard so much of the so-called French influence…if Oscar Wilde had not been able to take advantage of the abysmal ignorance of French literature then prevailing [1890s].’ See Rhythm, March 1913, xxiii-xxvii, p. xxvii.

267 Richard Ellmann, Oscar Wilde (London: Penguin Books, 1987), pp. 80-1.

268 In the editorial commentary of his collection of Wilde’s oral tales, Guillot de Saix relates how Mendès’s Contes Évangéliques started to appear shortly after the publication of Wilde’s Poems in Prose in 1894. See Guillot de Saix, Le Chant du Cygne: contes parlés d’Oscar Wilde. Recueillis et redigés par Guillot de Saix (Paris: Mercure de France, 1942), p. 97.

269 Le Chant du Cygne, p. 95.

270 Ernest Renan, The Life of Jesus (London: Trübner & Co., 1864), p. 31. Renan’s use of the term ‘fifth Gospel’ caused particular offence to orthodox Christians, and Roman Catholics in particular. The Roman Catholic journal, the Month, in a review of Farrar’s Life of Christ, could not resist reiterating its objection to Renan’s heterodox view of the Holy Land: ‘We do not in the least believe that “Galilee is a fifth Gospel”’. See the Month, 22 (September 1874), 98-101, p. 99.

271 Letters, p. 743.

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

273 See W. E. Barnes, Canonical and Uncanonical Gospels, (London: Longmans & Co., 1893), for a contemporary discussion of the Petrine manuscript and a translation of the text.

274 See J. Wesley Thomas, ‘The Fifth Gospel’, Modern Language Notes, 62 (November 1947), 445-449, for an account of how Freeman Clarke’s plans to publish a spurious Gospel were uncovered.

275 The term ‘fifth Gospel’ persisted well into the twentieth century. In an article concerning the cult of Marie Corelli, the author avers that ‘only the most infatuated reviewers could have called the first-named book [Barabbas] “a fifth Gospel”’. See the Westminster Review, ‘A Note Upon Marie Corelli’, 166 (December 1906), 680-679, p. 687.

276 J. M. P. Otts, The Fifth Gospel: the Land where Jesus Lived (London: Oliphant, Anderson and Ferrier, 1892), p. i.

277 Marie Corelli, Ardath, 3 vols, 2^nd edn (London: Richard Bentley and Son, 1889), III, p. 147.

278 The Collected Works of Oscar Wilde, ed. by Robert Ross, XIII, p. 315.

279 Typical of Wilde’s view of didactic fiction is that expressed through the persona of Vivian in ‘The Decay of Lying’: ‘The ancient historians gave us delightful fiction in the form of fact; the modern novelist presents us with dull facts under the guise of fiction’, Complete Works, p. 1073.

280 Robert Harborough Sherard, The Life of Oscar Wilde (London: T. Werner Laurie, 1906), p. 381-2.

281 Complete Works, p. 1153.

282 Recalling his undergraduate years at Balliol College, Oxford, in the 1860s, John Addington Symonds writes: ‘Theology penetrated our intellectual and social atmosphere. We talked theology at breakfast parties and at wine parties, out riding and walking, in college gardens, on the river, wherever young men and their elders met together.’ See The Memoirs of John Addington Symonds, ed. by Phyllis Grosskurth (London: Hutchinson, 1984), p. 244. While the controversies raised over the publication of works such as Seeley’s Ecce Homo, Renan’s Vie de Jésus, and Essays and Reviews had abated by the time Wilde reached Oxford in the 1870s, he is likely, nevertheless, to have found a high level of interest in all things theological.

283 For details of the books which Wilde requested during his imprisonment, see Letters, pp. 660, 673, 682.

284 As Stephen Arata rightly points out in a recent article, ‘Most accounts of Wilde’s interest in Jesus…link it…to his lifelong fascination with Roman Catholicism’. See Stephen Arata, ‘Oscar Wilde and Jesus Christ’, Wilde Writings: Contextual Conditions, ed. by Joseph Bristow (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2003), p. 259. This critical tendency to foreground Wilde’s fascination with a certain decadent Catholicism neglects his much more wide-ranging engagement with religious ideas.

285 Fortnightly Review, July 1894, 22-9. ‘The House of Judgment’ and ‘The Disciple’ were first published in the Oxford undergraduate journal, the Spirit Lamp, 17 February, 1893.

286 Guillot de Saix suggests: ‘Il semble que ce soit des conversations d’Oscar Wilde à Paris avec des écrivains tels que Catulle Mendès, Marcel Schwob et Jean Lorrain que revint en faveur le genre du poème en prose illustré d’autre façon par Baudelaire.’ See Le Chant du Cygne, p. 29.

287 For the first full-length study of the prose poem form see Suzanne Bernard, Le Poème en prose de Baudelaire jusqu’à nos jours (Paris: Nizet, 1959).

288 Aloysius (Louis) Bertrand appears to have been the first writer to establish the prose poem as a genre with a collection entitled Gaspard de la nuit: Fantaisies à la manière de Rembrandt et de Callot, posthumously published in Paris in 1842. The dedicatee of Baudelaire’s Petits poèmes en prose, Arsène Houssaye, founder of the journal L’Artiste, also composed prose poems.

289 J.-K. Huysmans, Le Drageoir à épices (Paris, 1874).

290 J.-K. Huysmans, À Rebours (Paris: Bibliothèque Charpentier, 1891), pp. 264-5.

291 Wilde used this label in a review of a verse poem ‘The Story of the Cross’ in the Pall Mall Gazette, April 6, 1888, printed in The Collected Works of Oscar Wilde, ed. by Robert Ross, XIII, p. 316. Tate and Brady were the authors of A New Version of the Psalms of David, which versified the language of the Old Testament into rhyming quatrains. The work went through over 500 editions between 1696 and 1860.

292 It is possible that Wilde was aware of Arthur Rimbaud’s Proses évangéliques, rewritings of episodes from John’s Gospel, which convey the poet’s vehemently anti-Christian sentiments. See Arthur Rimbaud: Collected Poems, trans. by Martin Sorrell (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000), pp. 206-9.

293 Baudelaire’s description of the prose poem as ‘une prose poétique, musicale sans rythme et sans rime, assez souple et assez heurtée pour s’adapter aux mouvements lyrique de l’âme’, given in the dedication of Petits poèmes en prose, could apply equally well to the prose of the Authorised Version of the Bible.

294 Wilde parodies the Revised Version in a letter to E. W. Godwin. See Letters, p. 260.

295 Letters, p. 748. In De Profundis, Wilde shows an awareness of the continuing scholarly debate over which languages Jesus would have known. He dismisses Renan’s view that Christ spoke only in Aramaic as outmoded, and declares that ‘…now we know that the Galilean peasants, like the Irish peasants of our day, were bilingual, and that Greek was the ordinary language all over Palestine (p. 749). Yet Arthur Ransome is right in pointing out that this was not the ‘generally received view’; see Oscar Wilde (London: Martin Secker, 1912), p. 172. For a summary of late nineteenth-century thinking on the language(s) spoken by Jesus, see Albert Schweitzer, The Quest of the Historical Jesus (London: SCM Press, 2000), pp. 222-6.

296 ‘The Soul of Man Under Socialism’, Complete Works, p. 1186.

297 The Collected Works of Oscar Wilde, ed. by Robert Ross, XIII, p. 315. In De Profundis Wilde describes such repetitions of the Scriptures as ‘anti-spiritual’ (Letters, p. 748).

298 Lord Arthur Savile’s Crime and Other Prose Pieces (Leipzig: Bernhard Tauchnitz, 1909); The First Collected Works of Oscar Wilde, ed. by Robert Ross, 14 vols, (London: Methuen, 1908).

299 The Complete Works of Oscar Wilde (I): Poems and Poems in Prose, ed. by Bobby Fong and Karl Beckson (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000).

300 Wilde would have found a similar interest in the unrecorded after-effects of Gospel events in Renan’s Life of Jesus (p. 297), where the author imagines how Pilate ‘In his retirement…probably never dreamt for a moment of the forgotten episode, which was to transmit his pitiful renown to the most distant posterity’. Anatole France fictionalizes such an idea in his short story ‘Le Procurateur de Judée’, published in L’Étui de Nacre (Paris: Calmann Lévy, 1892). When asked if he remembers Jesus of Nazareth, Pilate replies in the negative, a moment of memory lapse that forms the climax of the story.

301 Poems and Poems in Prose, ed. by Fong and Beckson, p. 174.

302 Leonard Cresswell Ingleby, Oscar Wilde: Some Reminiscences (London: T. Werner Laurie, 1912), p. 350.