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

372 D. F. Strauss, The Life of Jesus Critically Examined, translated from the fourth German edition ,

3 vols (London: Chapman, Brothers, 1846), III, p. 361.

373 Hans W. Frei, The Eclipse of Biblical Narrative (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 1974), p. 313.

374 Oscar Wilde’s Oxford Notebooks: A Portrait of a Mind in the Making, ed. by Philip E. Smith II and Michael S. Helfand (New York: Oxford University Press, 1989), p. 163.

375 Letters, p. 743. Wilde’s idea of the miraculous is very close to Renan’s. In his Life of Jesus, Renan asks ‘Who would dare to say that in many cases…the touch of a superior being is not equal to all the resources of pharmacy?’ (p. 191).

376 Complete Works, p. 1089.

377 Le Chant du Cygne, pp. 299-300.

378 See Le Chant du Cygne, p. 124, for Maurevert’s account of the society in which Wilde delivered this later version of the story.

379 This distinction between Peter and Paul is explained in Galatians 2:1-10.

380 In 1880, Renan delivered a Hibbert lecture on the establishment of the Jews in Rome, and Peter’s and Paul’s respective roles in the founding of the Roman Church; this was later published in The Hibbert Lectures, 1880 (London: Williams and Norgate, 1881). Wilde may well have known this work.

381 Letters, pp. 744, 741.

382 Poems and Poems in Prose, ed. by Fong and Beckson, pp. 165-6.

383 Letters, pp. 651, 707.

384 Ibid., p. 687.

385 Edgar Saltus, The Anatomy of Negation (London: Williams & Norgate, 1886), p. 79. Wilde saw a good deal of Saltus during the American’s visits to London. In an account of her husband’s life, Marie Saltus relates how a discussion between Wilde and Saltus about fictionalizing the Bible initiated the writing of Salomé and Mary of Magdala respectively. See Edgar Saltus, the Man (Chicago: Pascal Covici, 1925), p. 51. Wilde would later praise Mary of Magdala for being ‘so pessimistic, so poisonous and so perfect’ (Letters, p. 453).

386 Letters, p. 748.

387 Ibid., p. 746.

388 Albert Schweitzer, The Quest of the Historical Jesus, p. 6.

389 Times Literary Supplement, 24 February, 1905, 64-65, p. 64.

390 Times Literary Supplement, 18 June, 1908, p. 193.

391 Complete Works, p. 1154.

392 Ernest Renan, The Life of Jesus, p. 206.

393 Letters, p. 748.

394 Ibid., p. 747.

395 Ibid., p. 741.

396 Ibid., p. 743.

397 Richard Ellmann, Oscar Wilde, p. 488. Guillot de Saix recorded Wilde’s version of the Ahab and Jezebel story, ‘Le Vigne de Naboth’ in Le Chant du Cygne (pp. 56-60), and reconstructed the tale into the form of a one-act drama. See ‘Oscar Wilde et Le Théâtre: Jézabel, Drame Inédit en un acte’, Mercure de France, 279, 1 November 1937, 513-49.

398 Gwendolen Lally, Jezebel (London: Arthur L. Humphreys, 1918). The copyright performance of the play was given at the Comedy Theatre in March 1912.

399 Oscar Wilde, Essays and Lectures (New York and London: Garland Publishing, 1978), p. xi, first published by Methuen & Co., London, 1909.

400 Letters, p. 732.

401 Gedeon Spilett, ‘An Interview with Oscar Wilde’, published for the first time in English in E. H. Mikhail’s Oscar Wilde: Interviews and Recollections, II, p. 356.

402 After his release from Reading Gaol, Wilde found a sympathetic publisher in Leonard Smithers. For a study of the relationship between Wilde and Smithers and the complex history of the publication of the Ballad of Reading Gaol, see James G. Nelson, Publisher to the Decadents: Leonard Smithers in the Careers of Beardsley, Wilde, Dowson (Pennsylvania: The Pennsylvania State University Press, 2000), pp. 173-223. See also The Early Life and Vicissitudes of Jack Smithers (London: Martin Secker, 1939), which includes an extremely partial account of Smithers’s dealings with Wilde, by the publisher’s son, Jack Smithers.

403 Hesketh Pearson, The Life of Oscar Wilde (London: Methuen & Co., 1946), p. 217. Walter Pater’s comment that ‘There is something of an excellent talker about the writing of Mr. Oscar Wilde’ also underlines the interconnectedness of Wilde’s spoken and written work. See ‘A Novel by Mr Oscar Wilde’, Bookman, November 1891, 59-60, p. 59.

404 Wilde’s ambivalence towards the textual is also evident in his non-religious writings. It is articulated particularly clearly in The Importance of Being Earnest, where characters are frequently shown as restricted, both socially and imaginatively, by the tyranny of texts such as legal documents, society papers, and maternal lists of eligible bachelors. Even Cecily’s invented diary, though ostensibly a creative outlet, is revealed as yet another document upholding society’s expectations of a young woman’s life and conduct.

405 Letters, p. 748.

406 Wilde’s appreciation of Jesus’s freedom from textuality concurs with Renan’s view that ‘His doctrine was so little dogmatic that he never thought of writing it or of causing it to be written’. See his Life of Jesus, p. 302.

407 Laurence Housman, Echo de Paris (London: Jonathan Cape, 1923), p. 34.

408 Arthur Ransome, Oscar Wilde (London: Martin Secker, 1912), p. 209.

409 Paul K. Saint-Amour, The Copywrights: Intellectual Property and the Literary Imagination (Ithaca and London: Cornell University Press, 2003), p. 96.

410 Richard Ellmann, Oscar Wilde (London: Penguin Books, 1987), p. 292.

411 Ibid., p. 292.

412 For a succinct overview of turn-of-the-century publishing practices see An Introduction to Book History, ed. by David Finkelstein and Alistair McCleery (New York and London: Routledge, 2005), pp. 78-80.

413 Guy Thorne, When It Was Dark (London: Greening & Co., 1903). Guy Thorne was the nom de plume of Cyril Arthur Edward Ranger Gull.

414 Albert Guérard, Art for Art’s Sake (New York: Lothrop, Lee and Shepard Company, 1936), p. 205.

415 The Oxyrhynchus Papyri, uncovered in Egypt, added to the increasing number of ‘logia’, or extracanonical sayings of Jesus; Paul Vignon’s The Shroud of Christ, trans. from the French (Westminster: Archibald Constable & Co., 1902) argued forcefully for the authenticity of the shroud, based on the hypothesis that the materials used to embalm Christ’s body acted as a type of photographic plate, onto which was recorded the ‘very features of the Saviour Himself’ (p. 84). An eminent scientist and teacher at the Sorbonne, Vignon was taken seriously by the scientific establishment, and his book was discussed in The Times newspaper on the two days prior to its publication. See The Times, 25 April 1902, p. 8; 26 April 1902, p. 9.

416 Guy Thorne, “I Believe” (London: F. V. White & Co., 1907), p. 33.

417 Ibid., p. 297.

418 For accounts of Thorne’s close friendship with Smithers, see Jack Smithers, The Early Life and Vicissitudes of Jack Smithers (London: Martin Secker, 1939), and James G. Nelson, Publisher to the Decadents: Leonard Smithers in the Careers of Beardsley, Wilde, Dowson (Pennsylvania: The Pennsylvania State University Press, 2000).

419 C. Ranger Gull, From the Book Beautiful: Being Some Old Lights Relit (London: Greening & Co., 1900), pp. xii, xiii.

420 Ibid., p. 79.

421 Here, as elsewhere in the collection, Gull imitates the genre of the Early Christian novel, most particularly Pater’s Marius.

422 When It Was Dark, pp. 259, 241.

423 See Le Chant du Cygne, p. 170-2.

424 Gull’s obituary in The Times mentions that When It Was Dark ‘formed the subject of sermons by popular preachers, headed by the Bishop of London’. See The Times, 10 January 1923, p. 7.

425 Richard Aldington, Life for Life’s Sake (New York: The Viking Press, 1941), p. 46. Gull wrote When It Was Light: A Reply to ‘When It Was Dark’, by a well-known author (London: John Long, 1906) to mollify those readers who had taken offence at the subject matter of When It Was Dark. Set in a rural parish, rather than the metropolis, When It Was Light features parishioners who refuse to believe in the inscription purportedly proving the resurrection to be fraudulent, holding tight to their faith until good triumphs and the hoax is exposed.

426 “I Believe”, p. 19.

427 Life for Life’s Sake, p. 46.

428 “I Believe”, p. 299.

429 See Théophile Gautier, Charles Baudelaire, , trans. by Guy Thorne (London: Greening & Co., 1915), pp. 169-188.

430 Coulson Kernahan, In Good Company (London: John Lane, The Bodley Head, 1917), p. 194.

431 In a Times obituary of 19 February, 1943, p. 7, Kernahan is described as ‘a versatile writer’. Long-lived, he produced novels and poetry, and essays on topics as diverse as Spiritualism, Victorian poets, cricket, dogs, and the value of National Service. Five of Kernahan’s ‘Triolets’ are included in a volume dedicated to ‘Humour’ in the eleven-volume series: The Poets and The Poetry of the Nineteenth Century, X, ed. by Alfred H. Miles (London: George Routledge & Sons, 1906). In his introduction to Kernahan’s work, Miles describes him as ‘one of the group of younger writers from whom much is expected’, p. 596.

432 In Good Company, p. 222.

433 Ibid., pp. 221, 231, 232.

434 Ibid., p. 223.

435 Wilde’s story doubtless took on various forms during its years in circulation. While it appears in Le Chant du Cygne in the form of a short apologue, Kernahan states In Good Company that it formed ‘the opening scene in a sort of religious drama which he intended one day to write’ (p. 223). In a note to her article ‘The Story-Teller at Fault: Oscar Wilde and Irish Orality’, Deirdre Toomey points out that ‘The genesis of Wilde’s tale can be dated since it responds directly to a controversy of January 1895. Ferdinand Brunetière published, in the Revue des Deux Mondes…an article, “Après une visite au Vatican”. He attacked the cult of science and denounced the failure of science either to understand human nature or to develop a new morality.’ See Wilde the Irishman, ed. by Jerusha McCormack (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 1998), p. 179, n35. However, if Kernahan’s claim that he never saw Wilde after the spring of 1892 is true (In Good Company, p. 215), we must assume that the story was circulating in some form prior to 1895.

436 In Good Company, p. 224.

437 Coulson Kernahan, The Child, the Wise Man, and the Devil (London: James Bowden, 1896), p. 14.

438 Ibid., p. 54.

439 Ibid., p. 55.

440 Coulson Kernahan, The Man of No Sorrows (London: Cassell and Company, 1911), p. 28.

441 Ibid., p. 37.

442 Kernahan mentions Thorne’s novel in Celebrities: Little Stories about Famous Folk (London: Hutchinson & Co., 1923), p. 145.

443 The Man of No Sorrows, p. 47.

444 Ibid., p. 46.

445 Coulson Kernahan, A World without the Christ (London: Hodder and Stoughton, 1934), p. 50.

446 The Child, the Wise Man, and the Devil, along with an earlier dream vision, God and the Ant (1895), enjoyed sales exceeding 100, 000. See Sarah Kemp, Charlotte Mitchell, David Trotter, Edwardian Fiction: An Oxford Companion (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1997), p. 223.

447 John Middleton Murry, ‘Who is the Man?’, Rhythm, VI (July 1912), 37-39, pp. 39, 38. ‘The Miracle of the Stigmata’ was first published in The English Review, V (April 1910), 12-26.

448 The Times Literary Supplement, 5 June 1913, p. 247. The only named story charged with being derivative was ‘The English Saint’.

449 Saturday Review, 115 (21 June 1913), p. 781; Harris’s somewhat turbulent time as editor of the Saturday Review may account for this particularly scathing appraisal.

450 The Nation, 13 (21 June 1913), 470-2, p. 470.

451 See ‘Le Miracle des Stigmates’ and ‘Simon le Cyrénéen’ in Le Chant du Cygne, pp. 126-7, 117-8.

452 John Middleton Murry, Between Two Worlds (London: Jonathan Cape, 1935), p. 179.

453 Hesketh Pearson, Modern Men and Mummers (London: George Allen & Unwin, 1921), p. 103.

454 Hesketh Pearson, The Life of Oscar Wilde (London: Methuen & Co., 1946), p. 181.

455 Hugh Kingsmill, Frank Harris (London: Jonathan Cape, 1932), p. 234.

456 Merrill Root, Frank Harris (New York: The Odyssey Press, 1947), p. 180.

457 Vincent Brome, Frank Harris (London: Cassell and Company, 1959), p. 142.

458 In Le Chant du Cygne, Guillot de Saix introduces Wilde’s stigmata story by explaining that ‘Le sujet du conte qui va suivre avait été vendu par Oscar Wilde à Frank Harris et développé différemment par ce dernier dans Le Miracle des Stigmates, nouvelle publiée dans…Unpath’d Waters’ (p. 124). Likewise, he introduces L’Ironie du Hasard by outlining how ‘Oscar Wilde avait vendu le sujet de ce conte à Frank Harris, qui le transforma et le publia dans son recueil: Unpath’d Waters, sous le titre The Irony of Chance’ (p. 215). While there is a great deal of discussion regarding Mr and Mrs Daventry in Wilde’s correspondence with Harris, there is no mention of the sale of either tale. It is tempting to conclude that Guillot de Saix was confusing the sale of the stories with the sale of Mr and Mrs Daventry. However, this seems unlikely, given that Guillot de Saix was left the draft of the play in the will of Cora Brown Potter (the first person to whom Wilde sold the scenario) and must, therefore, have been aware of its complex history. For a comprehensive account of the history of Wilde’s unfinished play, see H. Montgomery Hyde’s introduction to Mr and Mrs Daventry (London: The Richards Press, 1956), p. 39.

459 Guillot de Saix suggests that Gabriel Trarieux’s three-act drama, Joseph d’Arimathée, first performed at the Théâtre Antoine in 1898, was another work which took its inspiration from ‘Le Miracle des Stigmates’. However, in its treatment of the last week of Christ’s life, culminating in the eponymous hero’s revelation that Christ’s body had not emerged from the tomb by supernatural means, but had been removed by Nicodemus, it seems more to resemble ‘L’Inutile Résurrection’. See Le Chant du Cygne, p. 125.

460 Harris’s disagreement with George Moore is outlined in a series of letters collected by Guido Bruno - an ardent admirer of Harris - under the title Moore Versus Harris (Chicago: privately printed, 1925). In The Private Life of Frank Harris (New York: William Faro, 1931), Samuel Roth recalls how, when ‘The Miracle of the Stigmata’ was published, George Moore denounced it as ‘unconscionable plagiarism of a novel which he was in the course of writing’ (p. 154). At no stage in this ongoing dispute is Wilde’s name associated with the story.

461 Hesketh Pearson, The Life of Oscar Wilde (London: Methuen and Co., 1946), p. 184.

462 Enid Bagnold’s Autobiography (London: Heinemann, 1969), p. 91.

463 Robert Harborough Sherard, Bernard Shaw, Frank Harris and Oscar Wilde (London: T. Werner Laurie, 1937), pp. 138-140.

464 Ibid., p. 139. See Harris’s version in Oscar Wilde: His Life and Confessions (New York: printed and published by the author, 1916), I, p. 137, alongside Gide’s version in In Memoriam (Paris: Mercure de France, 1910), pp. 20-1.

465 La Vie et les Confessions d’Oscar Wilde, trans. by Henry-D. Davray & Madeleine Vernon, 2 vols (Paris: Mercure de France, 1928), I, pp. 134-5. It is ironic that in writing a book to put the record straight about certain facts about Wilde’s life, Sherard should fail to recognise a direct translation of Wilde’s published writing.

466 Modern Men and Mummers, p. 123.

467 My Life and Loves, 4 vols (Paris: Obelisk Press, 1945), III, p. 104 .

468 Enid Bagnold’s Autobiography, p. 87.

469Frank Harris to Arnold Bennett: Fifty-Eight Letters 1908-1910 (Pennsylvania: privately printed and not for sale, 1936), p. 14.

470 Ibid., p. 17.

471 Frank Harris, ‘Renan: The Romance of Religion’, The English Review, 7, (March 1911), 610-627; the interview was subsequently published in Contemporary Portraits, First Series (London: Methuen & Co., 1915).

472 Hugh Kingsmill, Frank Harris, p. 190.

473 Oscar Wilde: His life and Confessions, p. 136.

474 Frank Harris to Arnold Bennett, p. 39. Harris is, of course, borrowing Wilde’s phrase from De Profundis here.

475 Louis Marlow Seven Friends (London: The Richards Press, 1953), p. 27. Louis Marlow was the pen name of Louis Umfreville Wilkinson, author of numerous novels. As an adolescent, he had taken it upon himself to write to Wilde while he was in Reading Prison, and the correspondence between them continued until just a few months before Wilde’s death. Seven Friends is an account of his friendship with various characters, including Wilde and Harris.

476 Frank Harris to Arnold Bennett, pp. 39, 14.

477 For a detailed discussion of extra-canonical Gospels and their influence on early twentieth-century theology, see Philip Jenkins, Hidden Gospels: How the Search for Jesus Lost Its Way (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2001).

478 Frank Harris, The Women of Shakespeare (London: Methuen & Co., 1911), p. 278.

479 Maurevert’s version of the story is recorded in Le Chant du Cygne, pp. 299-300.

480 Unpath’d Waters (London: John Lane, 1913), p. 3. Hereinafter, all citations from ‘The Miracle of the Stigmata’ refer to this edition; page references are given in brackets following each quotation.

481 Le Chant du Cygne, p. 127.

482 Harris has frequently been accused of anti-Semitism; one of the stories in Unpath’d Waters, ‘Mr Jacob’s Philosophy’, is often cited as evidence. His depiction of the Jews in ‘The Miracle of the Stigmata’ also lays him open to the charge of anti-Semitism: they are presented as base, money-grabbing and argumentative. Harris’s description of ‘a red Jew, with head of flame’ (15) is reminiscent of the stereotypical Jew of Medieval Passion plays, as well as echoing the figure of Fagin in Dickens’s Oliver Twist.

483 Harris’s emphasis on Christ’s lack of masculinity is a somewhat vulgar reshaping of mid-to-late Victorian traditions to suit the realistic mode of his fiction. Images of an effeminate Jesus were to be found in both orthodox and heterodox depictions of Christ in the Victorian period. As the theologian, Norman Pittenger, points out in Christology Reconsidered (London: SCM Press, 1970), traditional Christianity produced ‘the anaemic, lifeless, almost effeminate Christ of the Victorian stained-glass windows’ (p. 61). As the Victorian era progressed, the effeminacy of Christ was given more heterodox interpretations, such as that found in Algernon Swinburne’s Poems and Ballads, 1866. Swinburne’s image of the ‘pale Galilean’ in ‘Hymn to Proserpine’ proved particularly influential on contemporary writers.

484 Frank Harris, My Life and Loves, I, p. 14. Harris’s most recent biographer, Philippa Pullar, proffers the theory that ‘As Frank’s sexual competence diminished, so he became more obsessed with other men’s sexual weaknesses - especially in those men whom he had admired’, adding that ‘As Frank’s physical and intellectual incompetence grew, so did his preoccupation with Jesus.’ See