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

303 Wilde’s objections to rationalist readings of the Scriptures are voiced through Vivian in ‘The Decay of Lying’ who describes such approaches as ‘a degrading concession to a low form of realism’, Complete Works, p. 1089.

304 Athenaeum, 16 May 1908, 598-600, p. 599.

305 Cited from a letter from Corelli to Madame Remé in Eileen Bigland’s Marie Corelli: the Woman and the Legend (London: Jarrolds, 1953), p. 149.

306 Oral versions of both Gospel prose poems were recorded by several of Wilde’s literary acquaintances. André Gide, for example, transcribes Wilde’s spoken version of ‘The Master’ in In Memoriam (Paris: Mercure de France, 1910), pp. 20-1; and ‘The Doer of Good’ is set down from memory by W. B. Yeats in The Trembling of the Veil, Autobiographies (London: Macmillan, 1955), p. 286.

307 In The Romantic ‘90s (London: G. P. Putnam’s Sons, 1925), Richard Le Gallienne recalls how ‘One secret of the charm of Wilde’s talk…was the evidently sincere interest he took in the listener’ (p. 246); however, Henri de Régnier takes a somewhat different view: ‘He needed more someone to listen to him, than someone to speak with. One felt he could even have managed without the former’. See E. H. Mikhail, Oscar Wilde: Interviews and Recollections, 2 vols (London: Macmillan, 1979), II, p. 464.

308 The Trembling of the Veil, Autobiographies, pp. 286-7. The phrase ‘terrible beauty’ is, of course, from Yeats’s canonical poem ‘Easter 1916’; that he should use the same phrase of Wilde’s spoken tale as that articulating his response to the Easter Rising, emphasizes the power of its effect on him.

309 Writing in an article on Wilde’s spoken tales, Henry-D. Davray describes how their impact was heightened by the setting in which they were related: ‘Il lui fallait aussi le cadre, le milieu, - la mise en train d’un repas aux mets excellents, aux vins de choix, avec l’élégance du linge, de l’argenterie, des cristaux, de la porcelaine’. See ‘De Quelque “Poèmes en Prose” D’Oscar Wilde’, Mercure de France, 189, 15 July, 1926, 257-77, p. 266.

310 In Memoriam (Paris: Mercure de France, 1910), pp. 31, n1.

311 The Romantic ‘90s, p. 268.

312 Deirdre Toomey, ‘The Story-Teller at Fault: Oscar Wilde and Orality’, Wilde the Irishman, ed. by Jerusha McCormack (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 1998), p. 25. In his classic work, Orality and Literacy (London: Routledge, 2002), Walter Ong describes Ireland as ‘a country which in every region preserves massive residual orality’ (p. 68). Wilde himself regarded orality as a national characteristic, telling Yeats that the Irish were ‘the greatest talkers since the Greeks.’ See W. B. Yeats, The Trembling of the Veil, Autobiographies, p. 135.

313 Henry-D. Davray, who undertook the translation of several of Wilde’s works, gave this assessment of the author’s French: ‘Il possédait admirablement nôtre langue, dans laquelle son vocabulaire était étonnement étendu’. See Mercure de France, 189, 15 July 1926, 257-277, p. 271.

314 Fong and Beckson describe the stories in Le Chant du Cygne as ‘virtuoso performances but thoroughly unreliable’ (Poems and Poems in Prose, p. 218).

315 Ian Small, Oscar Wilde Revalued (Gerrards Cross: Colin Smythe, 1993), p. 206. Small expresses these doubts in Oscar Wilde: Recent Research (Gerrards Cross: Colin Smythe, 2000), pp. 56-7. In a footnote to ‘The Story-Teller at Fault’, Toomey points out that Small’s labelling of Wilde’s oral stories as “apocrypha” ‘assumes a chirographic-typographic mind-set’; see Wilde the Irishman, p. 178, n10. See also Paul K. Saint-Amour’s The Copywrights: Intellectual Property and the Literary Imagination (Ithaca and London: Cornell University Press, 2003), wherein the author uses Toomey’s argument as a foundation for his own contention that ‘Wilde contributed during his career to a counterdiscourse with private print culture’ (p. 95).

316 John Stokes, Oscar Wilde: myths, miracles and imitations (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996), p. 23.

317 A large majority of these tales had appeared previously in Mercure de France. See Guillot de Saix, ‘Le Cinquième Évangile selon Oscar Wilde: Dix-neuf Contes Inédits’, Mercure de France, 296, 1 February 1940, 257-273.

318 Le Chant du Cygne, p. 118. ‘Simon le Cyrénéen’, along with several others of the Biblical tales collected by de Saix, has the tone and structural rhythm of a narrative joke. Wilde’s sense of the comic in the Gospel narratives would have earned the approbation of theologians such as Adolf Jülicher (1857-1938), who argued that Christ frequently used comic stereotypes and exaggerations in his parables, elements which had been obscured by the church’s insistence on divorcing the stories from their cultural contexts and reading them as wholly allegorical. For a discussion of Jülicher’s interpretation of the parables, see Joachim Jeremias, The Parables of Jesus, trans. by S. H. Hooke (London: SCM Press, 1954).

319 W. B. Yeats, The Trembling of the Veil, Autobiographies, p. 130.

320 Le Chant du Cygne, pp. 113. This particular interpretation of Judas’s motivation draws on the detail only found in John’s Gospel (13: 23-26) that it is the ‘beloved disciple’ (assumed by Wilde to be John) who asks Jesus to name his future betrayer.

321 Ibid., pp. 120-1. Ellmann includes an English translation of this tale in his biography of Wilde, explaining that it ‘was recounted to André Gide soon after his [Wilde’s] release from prison’ and that it was one of several stories which ‘grandly paralleled his conviction that he was being betrayed in money matters by Adey and Ross, by Ernest Leverson, and others’ (Oscar Wilde, p. 488). The image of Judas as a shallow-minded money-grabber was, of course, a traditional one, originating from Matthew’s mention of the ‘thirty pieces of silver’ (27:3), and John’s account of him as a corrupt treasurer, whose personal greed leads him to berate Martha for wasting ointment to anoint the feet of Jesus (12:4-6).

322 The abiding fascination with the figure of Lazarus is exemplified in J. Paterson-Smyth’s A People’s Life of Christ (London: Hodder & Stoughton, 1921): ‘Often in this history we have wished to know the further life of men who have for a moment crossed the stage of Jesus. Above all others Lazarus… Why did he not tell of that world which Jesus pictured in His story of Dives as a world of vivid conscious thought and memory?’ (pp. 260-1).

323 Alfred, Lord Tennyson, In Memoriam, ed. by Erik Gray (New York: W. W. Norton & Company, 2004), Section 31, ll. 13-16, p. 22. Wilde was a great admirer of Tennyson’s poem; in a letter of 1876, he ranks it alongside Shakespeare’s Hamlet and Elizabeth Barrett-Browning’s Aurora Leigh (Letters, p. 26). One other poet whom Wilde admired, Robert Browning, had also treated the Lazarus story in ‘An Epistle containing the Strange Experience of Karshish, the Arab Physician’ (Men and Women, 1855).

324 Le Chant du Cygne, p. 104.

325 In a recent work, Charles Bernheimer states: ‘In poems, stories, plays, paintings, posters, sculptures, decorative objects, dance, and opera, well over a thousand versions of the Judean princess were made in Europe between 1870 and 1920.’ See Decadent Subjects; The Idea of Decadence in Art, Literature, Philosophy, and Culture of the Fin de Siècle in Europe (Baltimore and London: The John Hopkins University Press, 2002), p. 104.

326 Le Chant du Cygne, pp. 135-6.

327 In The Life of Christ, F. W. Farrar provides the following footnote: ‘For the traditional death of “the dancing daughter of Herodias” by falling through, and having her head cut off by the ice, see Niceph. i. 20’. See The Life of Christ, 2 vols (Cassell, Petter & Galpin, 1874), I, p. 394, n1.

328 Letters, p. 723.

329 Le Chant du Cygne, p. 115.

330 In Good Company, p. 223.

331 Le Chant du Cygne, p. 128.

332 Ibid., pp. 170-2.

333 For a detailed discussion of this sub-genre of Biblical fiction, see Theodore Ziolkowski, Fictional Transfigurations of Jesus (Princeton, New Jersey: Princeton University Press, 1972), pp. 17- 22. The creative tradition of placing the historical Jesus in a modern-day setting continued throughout the twentieth century, Charles Causley’s poem ‘The Ballad of the Bread Man’, published in Underneath the Water (1968), and Stanley Spencer’s painting Christ Preaching at Cookham Regatta (1953-9) being but two examples.

334 After 1851, Constant published under the name of ‘Eliphas Levi’ and turned his attention to occultism; this later work found a great admirer in Catulle Mendès.

335 W. T. Stead was editor of the Pall Mall Gazette from 1883 until 1889, and Wilde would have known him through his reviewing work for the journal.

336 Wilde’s father, Sir William Wilde, contributed to the archaeological researches into the Bible lands, visiting important holy sites during his stay in Palestine in the late 1830s, and recording his experiences in a travel book which included his own map of Jerusalem: Narrative of a Voyage to Madeira, Teneriffe, and along the Shores of the Mediterranean, including a visit to Algiers, Egypt, Palestine…Cyprus, and Greece, 2 vols (Dublin: William Curry, Jun. and Company, 1840). Written in an engaging conversational style, the work proved popular, all 1, 250 copies of the first edition being sold. For further details of Sir William Wilde’s journey to the Holy Land, see T. G. Wilson, Victorian Doctor: Being the Life of Sir William Wilde (London: Methuen & Co., 1942).

337 Gordon’s identification of these two sites, whilst visiting Palestine in 1883, was based entirely on literal readings of the Bible. Despite the paucity of scientific evidence to support his claims, ‘Gordon’s Calvary’ and ‘Gordon’s Tomb’ soon became established sites, finding a fixed place on maps and in guide books. On Gordon’s death in 1885, there was an enormous outpouring of hagiography about him; the Newdigate Prize Poem of 1888, for example, was ‘Gordon in Africa’ by Arthur Waugh (Oxford: A. Thomas Shrimpton and Son, 1888). Widely acclaimed as a hero, a saint, and a Christian soldier, it is unsurprising that his theories about Biblical sites were widely accepted by the majority.

338 Wilde follows Renan, and several other Biblical scholars, in regarding Jesus’s resurrection as a figment of the imagination of Mary Magdalene and the disciples.

339 Deirdre Toomey, ‘The Story-Teller at Fault’, p. 31. For an account of the influence of Joachimism on nineteenth-century authors, including Wilde, see Warwick Gould and Marjorie Reeves, Joachim of Fiore and the Myth of the Eternal Evangel in the Nineteenth and Twentieth Century, Revised Edition (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2001).

340 ‘Sonnet: On the Massacre of the Christians in Bulgaria’ was first published in Poems (London: David Bogue, 1881). Wilde had previously sent the poem to Gladstone, hoping for his approval (Letters, pp. 46-7). In some ways Wilde’s choice of reader is unsurprising: Gladstone had recently written two pamphlets on the Eastern question and his ardent defence of J. R. Seeley’s Ecce Homo (1865) associated him with the Broad Church movement and its openness to reading the Scriptures in new ways. Nevertheless, Wilde was taking quite a risk in sending this poem to a man who, for all his engagement with contemporary ideas about Christ, was a lifelong High Churchman. The sonnet’s mood is certainly agnostic, questioning as it does whether Christ had really ‘burst the tomb’ or whether his bones were ‘Still straitened in their rock-hewn sepulchre?’ Furthermore, Wilde’s uncritical citing of Renan’s description of Mary Magdalene’s account of the risen Christ as ‘the divinest lie ever told’, in his second letter to Gladstone (Letters, pp. 48-9), would not have endeared him to the statesman. It is likely that Wilde, along with many others, made the mistake of regarding Seeley as the English Renan, and that he took Gladstone’s approval of the English writer as an indicator of his acceptance of the views of his French counterpart.

341 Complete Works, p. 1184.

342 Ibid., 1180. The people’s rejection of individuality in Wilde’s tale resembles the people’s rejection of freedom in the Parousia fiction related by Ivan in Dostoevsky’s The Brothers Karamazov (Book V, Chapter 5). During a confrontation with the Grand Inquisitor of fifteenth-century Seville, Jesus is told that mankind does not desire the freedom promised by the Messiah, preferring to continue in the infantilized state brought upon them by the authoritarianism of the Church.

343 Wilde, of course, had already asserted Gautier’s aesthetic credo, as espoused in the Preface to Mademoiselle de Maupin (1835), in several of his works, most famously in his own Preface to The Picture of Dorian Gray, Complete Works, p. 17.

344 Complete Works, p. 1183.

345 Le Chant du Cygne, pp. 126-7.

346 In The Trembling of the Veil, Autobiographies, W. B. Yeats describes how Wilde announced his stigmata story as ‘a Christian heresy’ and proceeded to deliver it in the ‘style of some early Father’ (p. 136). It was no doubt this fusion of heterodox content and Biblical style which appealed to an 1890s’ audience.

347 For an early twentieth-century discussion of rationalist theorizing about Christ’s survival of crucifixion by theologians such as Karl Bahrdt, Karl Venturini, Heinrich Paulus and Friedrich Schleiermacher, see Albert Schweitzer, The Quest of the Historical Jesus, (London: SCM Press, 2000), chapters 4, 5 and 6.

348 Matthew Arnold, Literature and Dogma, Complete Prose Works, ed. by R. H. Super, 11 vols (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1960-77), VI, p. 268. Wilde was certainly well-acquainted with this work, referring to it frequently in his non-fictional writings and quoting from it in De Profundis (Letters, p. 741).

349 In the early years of the twentieth century, William Sanday, the Lady Margaret Professor of Divinity and Canon of Christ Church, Oxford, wrote that ‘No one now believes that the supposed death was really only a swoon, and that the body laid in the tomb afterwards revived’. See Outlines of the Life of Christ (Edinburgh: T. & T. Clark, 1905), p. 180-1.

350 Constance Howell, A Biography of Jesus Christ (London: Freethought Publishing Company, 1883), p. 56.

351 Ibid., p. 56.

352Given Sir William Wilde’s prominence in the medical world, and his editorship of the Dublin Quarterly Journal of Medical Science, it is likely that his elder son would have been more alert than most to developing trends in the field of anatomy.

353 For details of the development of anatomy in the nineteenth century see Ruth Richardson’s Death, Dissection and the Destitute, 2^nd edn (London: Phoenix Press, 2001).

354 With this Gospel example in mind, Frank Kermode points out that ‘some commentators continue to insist that the realism of John’s narrative is easily explained’ and that anatomical arguments are still advanced by those ‘who cannot accept that the historical account is an invention, founded on a repertory of texts brought to fulfillment by a literary narrative.’ See The Genesis of Secrecy: On the Interpretation of Narrative (Cambridge Massachusetts: Harvard University Press, 1979), pp. 104-5.

355 Published in 1847, William Stroud’s 500-page work, A Treatise on the Physical Cause of the Death of Christ (London: Hamilton and Adams, 1847), set out to prove, through anatomical exactness, that the effusion of blood and water from Christ’s side was medically sound. In so doing, he hoped that his treatise might ‘furnish Christians with additional motives to engage with energy in missionary exertions, both at home and abroad’ (p. 356). The author of one of the most popular Lives of Jesus, William Hanna, based his argument that Jesus died on the cross on Stroud’s work. See Our Lord’s Life on Earth, 6 vols (Edinburgh: Edmonston and Douglas, 1869), V, pp. 333-43. The authority of Stroud lasted well into the twentieth century. In The Days of His Flesh (London: Hodder and Stoughton, 1905), for example, the author, David Smith, quotes from Stroud’s treatise to prove his point: ‘medical science has confirmed the Evangelist’s testimony…Jesus died literally of a broken heart…In that awful hour when He was forsaken by the father, His heart swelled with grief until it burst, and then the blood was “effused into the distended sac of the pericardium”’ (p. 506). Six years after the publication of Stroud’s treatise, the American doctor, Abner Phelps, put together an equally detailed case in The Crucifixion of Jesus Christ Anatomically Considered (Boston, Massachusetts, 1853) to persuade doubters that ‘ the BODY OF CHRIST WAS DEAD, and that it had been some time DEAD…before it was pierced by a soldier’s spear’ (p. 21).

356 In a postscript to The Crucifixion of Jesus Christ Anatomically Considered, Phelps describes the experiments he carried out on dead bodies to ascertain whether a nail the size of a man’s finger could be driven through an average male hand without it breaking. Phelps had in mind John’s typological allusion to Exodus (12:46): ‘Not a bone of him shall be broken’ (19:36). It is a particularly telling example of how empirical science could be employed to serve those who believed in the supernaturalism of the Gospels.

357 There was interest in Lateau throughout Europe. In England, George E. Day wrote an article entitled ‘Louise Lateau, A Biological Study’, which was published in Macmillan’s Magazine, 23 (April 1871), 488-498, In a footnote, he states that ‘Dr Lefebre … took upwards of a hundred medical friends to examine the phenomena’, p. 490, n1.

358 Antoine Imbert-Goubeyre, La Stigmatisation, l’extase divine, et les miracles de Lourdes. Réponse aux libres-penseurs, 2 vols (Clermont-Ferrand, 1894).

359 Ibid., p. viii. Despite the efforts of religiously devout physicians such as Imbert-Goubeyre to prove the verity of stigmatics, the Catholic Church’s attitude towards them seems to have grown more circumspect. Prior to the nineteenth century, stigmatisation was common grounds for beatification. However, of the twenty-nine nineteenth-century stigmatics listed by Imbert-Goubeyre, none of them was declared a saint, suggesting that the Church had drawn up a different set of criteria for sainthood, one which would better stand the scrutiny of a scientific age.

360 J.-K. Huysmans, Là-Bas, 2^nd edn (Paris: Tresse & Stock, 1891), p. 10.

361 In a letter to Camille Lemonnier, Huysmans described Emmerich as ‘the most complete example of a stigmatist.’ See The Road from Decadence: Selected Letters of J.-K. Huysmans, ed. and trans. by Barbara Beaumont (London: Athlone Press, 1989). Emmerich’s stigmata first appeared in 1812 when she was 38 years old and stayed with her until her death in 1824. Her visions of Jesus and his life were told to the poet Clemens Brentano as he sat at her bedside; his notes formed the basis of The Bitter Sufferings of Our Lord Jesus Christ (1834) and The Life of Jesus (1857-60).

362 Sainte Lydwine de Schiedam , 5^th edn (Paris: P.V. Stock, 1901), pp. 83-4.

363 Complete Works, p. 1196; Letters, p. 732. Huysmans regarded the writing of his biography of Saint Lydwina as ‘an act of penance’ and ‘the literary equivalent of fasting’ (The Road from Decadence: Selected Letters of J.-K. Huysmans, p. 207). To sacrifice aesthetics for religious expiation would not have held the same appeal for Wilde.

364 In The Myth of the Resurrection (London: Freethought Publishing Company, 1884), Annie Besant discusses the tendency to equate belief in modern miraculous events with Catholicism: ‘The English Protestant turns up his nose at the miracles at Lourdes and at Knock, although they are a good deal better authenticated than those at Bethany’ (p. 134). Certainly, stigmata were generally regarded as a Catholic phenomenon. In a footnote to his article on Louise Lateau, George E. Day explains the word ‘stigmata’ for what he clearly expects to be a Protestant readership: ‘this term is applied by Roman Catholic writers to the marks of the wounds on our Saviour’s body as shown in most pictures of the Crucifixion.’ Macmillan’s Magazine, 23 (April 1871), p. 489, n1.

365 W. B. Yeats refers to the 1890s’ ‘tradition’ of converting to Roman Catholicism in his Preface to The Oxford Book of Modern Verse 1892-1935 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1936), pp. x-xi.

366 Le Chant du Cygne, p. 126.

367 Complete Works, p. 285.

368 Ernest Renan, Studies in Religious History, Authorized English Edition, (London: Richard Bentley and Son, 1886), p. 315.

369 Letters, p. 753.

370 Studies in Religious History, p. 326.

371 Thomas Scott, The English Life of Jesus (Ramsgate: Thomas Scott, 1872), p. 336.