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

Frank Harris (London: Hamish Hamilton, 1975), p. 347.

485 The German theologian, Adolf von Harnack, was an influential exponent of the view that Paul delivered whole communities from the yoke of Judaism. In a collection of popular lectures, he argues: ‘Someone had to stand up and say “The old is done away with”…he had to show that all things were become new. The man who did this was the apostle Paul, and it is in having done it that his greatness in the history of the world consists.’ See What is Christianity?, trans. by Thomas Bailey Saunders (London: Williams & Norgate, 1901), p. 175. The ready availability of English translations of Harnack’s work meant that his ideas had considerable influence on British theological thought. One of the most important theologians to counter Harnack’s view was Albert Schweitzer, whose major survey of Pauline studies, Paul and his Interpreters, trans. by W. Montgomery (London: Adam and Charles Black, 1912), was published shortly before Harris’s Unpath’d Waters. He spoke against viewing Paul as a Hellenizer, seeing him instead - as he saw Jesus - as part of an apocalyptic Judaism.

486 Le Chant du Cygne, p. 126.

487 Contemporary Portraits, p. 59.

488 Known as ‘the Pauline privilege’, the granting of a divorce to a man or woman whose partner refuses to convert to Christianity, still forms part of the canon law of the Roman Catholic church, and Harris’s own complex marital history would no doubt have drawn him to this relatively minor detail. For the sake of his storyline, Harris conveniently ignores Paul’s words given in I Corinthians 7:13-4: ‘If any woman has a husband who is an unbeliever and he consents to live with her, she should not divorce him…But if the unbelieving partner desires to separate, let it be so.’ Joshua, of course, does not want to separate from Judith, and her decision to leave him goes against the apostle’s advice quoted above.

489 In footnoting these texts, Harris is impressing on the reader his awareness of the ongoing theological debate over which of the two Gospels was written first. While Matthew’s Gospel was, until the mid-nineteenth century, traditionally regarded as the first account of Christ’s life, the case for Marcan priority started to assert itself in the 1870s and, by the late 1800s, Mark was widely accepted as the primary source for the life and ministry of Christ. In The Life of Christ in Recent Research (Oxford Clarendon Press, 1907), William Sanday writes that ‘It should be remembered that all critics in a greater or less degree…are agreed in starting from the Gospel of Mark’ (p. 92).

490 An American acquaintance of Harris’s, Mary Austin, shows Paul in a similar light, writing in her study of Christ: ‘…by the time the book of Mark was written it was not only believed that Jesus rose from the dead, but many other things were believed about him which were no part of his teaching, but were owed to Paul of Tarsus…Paul…would have cut off the manuscript of Mark with his own hand if he thought it contradicted in any particular that understanding of the teachings of Jesus which he claims openly to have received’. See The Man Jesus (New York and London: Harper & Brothers, 1915), p. 188. A heavily annotated copy of Austin’s book was found amongst Harris’s possessions after his death. Although ‘The Miracle of the Stigmata’ was published four years before The Man Jesus, there are a number of similarities between them, suggesting that the two writers discussed together the topic of Jesus and Paul. See Philippa Pullar, Frank Harris, pp. 347-8.

491 This translation by Thomas Common was published by H. Henry & Co., in 1896, as part of what was intended to be a complete edition of Nietzsche’s works. However, the project was abandoned after four volumes when the company went bankrupt. In the same year, three articles by Havelock Ellis, discussing Nietzsche’s life and works, appeared in The Savoy (Nos. 2, 3, 4), stimulating considerable interest in the philosopher. As Holbrook Jackson points out in The 1890s (London: Grant Richards, 1913), 1896 was the year ‘that any general interest in Nietzsche’s ideas began in this country’ (p. 155); from this time on articles on his life and work started to appear in the more established journals. For example, a detailed survey of Nietzsche’s life and work, by A. Seth Pringle Pattison, appeared in the Contemporary Review, 73 (May 1898), 727-750. The publication of extracts from Nietzsche’s major writings in Nietzsche as Critic, Philosopher, Poet and Prophet. Choice Selections from his works, compiled by Thomas Common (London: Grant Richards, 1901), also encouraged interest in his work.

492 In December 1908, Harris wrote to Arnold Bennett that he was just about to ‘add the portrait of Paul’ to his stigmata story. See Frank Harris to Arnold Bennett, p. 11.

493 In Nietzsche in England 1890-1914 (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1971), David S. Thatcher estimates that the tide began to turn in 1907 with Dr Oscar Levy’s series of English translations of Nietzsche’s works, and that Nietzsche ‘was the philosopher à la mode’ in England between 1909 and 1913’ (p. 42).

494 The Works of Friedrich Nietzsche: The Case of Wagner, Nietzsche Contra Wagner, The Twilight of the Idols, The Antichrist, trans. by Thomas Common (London: H. Henry and Co., 1896), p. 257.

495 Ibid., p. 304.

496 In The Antichrist, Nietzsche defines Paul as ‘the antithetical type of the “bearer of glad tidings”…the genius in hatred’ (p. 303). Harris follows suit in presenting Paul as an inciter of hatred and retribution, in stark contrast to the peace-loving Jesus.

497 In this respect, Harris’s fiction chimes with current theological thinking on the incipient stages of Christianity, especially that of Albert Kalthoff whose book, The Rise of Christianity, was translated into English by Joseph McCabe (London Watts & Co., 1907). In this work, Kalthoff cites the Pauline Epistles as evidence that ‘everything turns on the community’ and that it ‘is in the community-life that Christ first has terrestrial existence’ (p. 118).

498 For a discussion of women’s roles in the Primitive church, see Chapter Six of Elisabeth Schűssler Fiorenza’s In Memory of Her: A Feminist Theological Reconstruction of Christian Origins, 2^nd edn (London: SCM Press, 1995).

499 Ernest Renan, The Apostles, trans. unknown (London: Trűbner & Co., 1869), p. 69.

500 In a letter dated 4 December 1915, Harris boasts to Shaw: ‘one of these days you will see what these fifteen years of study of him [Jesus] has brought me.’ See The Playwright and the Pirate, ed. by Stanley Weintraub (Gerrards Cross: Colin Smythe, 1982), p. 23.

501 Elmer Gertz and A. I. Tobin, Frank Harris: A Study in Black and White (Chicago: Madelaine Mendelsohn, 1931), p. 187.

502 Contemporary Portraits. Second Series (New York: published by the author, 1919), p. 36.

503 Ibid., p. 36.

504 Oscar Wilde: His Life and Confessions, I, p. 136.

505 Augustus John, Chiaroscuro (London: Jonathan Cape, 1952), p. 129.

506 Undream’d of Shores (London: Grant Richards, 1924), pp. 207-9. This slight narrative closely resembles a story related in a letter of 1918 from Shaw to Harris, about Jesus’s mother letting the deformed and wretched into the gates of heaven when Peter’s back is turned. See The Playwright and the Pirate, p. 98. The volume also contains a somewhat bizarre tale within a tale, entitled ‘A Temple to the Forgotten Dead’, which explores briefly the possibility of light rays transmitting pictures of Jesus back to earth two thousand years after his death (pp. 293-5).

507 My Life and Loves, IV, p. 137.

508 Edouard Dujardin, La Source du fleuve chrétien, (Paris, 1904). Dujardin also composed two religious dramas: Marthe et Marie (Paris: Les Cahiers Idéalistes, 1923) and Le mystère du dieu mort et ressuscité (Paris: Albert Messein, 1924), both performed at the Théâtre Antoine in Paris.

509 Letters from George Moore to Edouard Dujardin, 1886-1922, ed. by John Eglinton (New York: Crosby Gaige, 1929), p. 109.

510 Edouard Dujardin, ‘The Abbé Loisy’, trans. by George Moore, Dana: A Magazine of Independent Thought, 1 (May 1904), 18-21.

511 Alfred Firmin Loisy, The Gospel and the Church, trans. by Christopher Home (London: Isbister & Company, 1903), p. 276.

512 The Source of the Christian Tradition, trans. by Joseph McCabe (London: Watts & Co., 1911). In his autobiography, Eighty Years a Rebel (Kansas: Haldeman-Julius Publications, 1947), McCabe claimed to have written over 200 books, more than any other living author (p. 5).

513 Letters from George Moore to Edouard Dujardin, p. 89.

514 Albert Kalthoff, The Rise of Christianity, trans. by Joseph McCabe (London: Watts & Co., 1907); Arthur Drews, The Witnesses to the Historicity of Jesus, trans. by Joseph McCabe (London: Watts & Co., 1912).

515 William Sanday, The Life of Christ in Recent Research (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1907), p. 148.

516 J. G. Frazer, The Golden Bough: A Study in Comparative Religion, 2 vols (London: Macmillan & Co., 1890). In the twelve-volume Third Edition of 1913, Frazer relegated to an appendix his discussion of the similarities between the scourging of Christ and the treatment of the mock king of the Saturnalia and the Sacaea, and the possibility that Christ might have been put to death in the annual ritual of the killing of Haman. In a footnote to the Note headed ‘The Crucifixion of Christ’, Frazer admits that the parallels drawn between Jesus and ancient scapegoat rituals are ‘in a high degree speculative and uncertain’ and insists that his theory ‘assumes the historical reality of Jesus of Nazareth as a great religious and moral teacher, who founded Christianity.’ See The Golden Bough: The Scapegoat, 3^rd edn, 12 vols, (London: Macmillan and Company, 1913), VI, p. 412, n1. For a detailed discussion of Frazer’s paralleling of ancient rites and the crucifixion of Jesus, see Robert Fraser, The Making of the Golden Bough (Basingstoke: Palgrave, 2002), pp. 136-155). In The Historical Jesus: A Survey of Positions (London: Watts & Co., 1916), John M. Robertson remarks on how theories such as Frazer’s reignited discussion of the historical Jesus (p. xx).

517 Moore’s choice of Martin Luther would no doubt have gone unchallenged in France where audiences were accustomed to seeing religious subjects presented on stage. In contrast, stage and film censorship in Britain withheld such treatments from the public. As late as 1929, the British Board of Film Censors banned a film about Martin Luther as ‘likely to offend a large section of the public.’ See Dorothy Knowles, The Censor, the Drama, and the Film (London: George Allen &Unwin, 1934), p. 238.

518 George Moore and Bernard Lopèz, Martin Luther: A tragedy in five acts (London: Remington and Co., 1879).

519 In her monograph on George Moore, Susan Mitchell records the author’s response to being asked about Martin Luther: ‘He instantly sprang from his chair and clutching his flaxen locks walked frantically about his room wailing: “What have I ever done to you that you should remind me of this thing?”’ See Susan L. Mitchell, George Moore (Dublin and London: Maunsel & Co., 1916), p. 19.

520Moore extends this typology in the historical romance, Héloïse and Abélard (1921), the hero of which he regarded as ‘a light before the dawn…who unlocked the dungeon in which the ecclesiastics had imprisoned humanity.’ See Moore Versus Harris, ed. by Guido Bruno (Chicago: privately printed, 1925), p. 19.

521John Eglinton, Irish Literary Portraits (London: Macmillan & Co., 1935), p. 92. ‘John Eglinton’ was the pseudonym of William Kirkpatrick Magee; as Chapters Five and Six of this study refer frequently to his published works, this pen-name will be used throughout.

522 Joseph McCabe, The Myth of the Resurrection (London: Freethought Press, 1925; repr. New York: Prometheus Books, 1993), p. 85.

523 ‘Letters of George Moore, 1863-1901’, ed. by Robert Becker, Dissertation, University of Reading, 1980, p. 405.

524 George Moore, Avowals (London: William Heinemann, 1936), p. 87.

525 George Moore, Hail and Farewell!: Salve (London: Heinemann, 1912), p. 266.

526 In a conversation broadcast by the BBC, Larry Morrow related the story of how Moore, while staying as an overnight guest, inquired of his hostess who the author was of the ‘beautifully written book’ on his bedside table, the title of which he pronounced as ‘The Bibble’. It is one of several anecdotes in an extensive Moore apocrypha. See W. R. Rodgers, Irish Literary Portraits (London: British Broadcasting Corporation, 1972), p. 232.

527 Father and Son (London: Heinemann, 1907) tells of Edmund Gosse’s upbringing in a Plymouth Brethren community and reveals how fundamentalists such as the author’s father, refused to read fiction, deeming it deceptive, corrupting and in direct opposition to the ‘truth’ of the Scriptures. Moore had been responsible for persuading Gosse to write what was to be his most successful work and was, presumably, well acquainted with its contents. See Adrian Frazier’s George Moore, 1852-1933 (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 2000), p. 559, n249.

528 George Moore, ‘Epistle to the Cymry’, printed as an appendix to Confessions of a Young Man (London: Heinemann, 1926), p. 290. Joseph McCabe recounts his own experience of Moore’s religio-aesthetic theory in practice: ‘I was dining one night at George Moore’s with the French novelist Edouard Dujardin and, the talk falling upon Newman, I confessed my literary hero-worship. Moore, whose blood-pressure rose whenever he heard this literary praise of Newman jumped up from the table with his customary bluntness and fetched his copy of the “Apologia”, with a marked page. “Read that,” he said truculently, “and tell Dujardin how many mistakes there are in that one page.” I read it through. “Eleven,” I confessed. “Thirteen,” Moore snorted.’ See Eighty Years a Rebel, p. 13.

529 George Moore, Salve, p. 195.

530 George Moore, ‘The Apostle By George Moore: Prefatory Note’, The English Review, V (June 1910), 564-576.

531 Ibid., p. 564. While Moore’s main concerns doubtless lay with Frank Harris at this time, he may also have in mind a disagreement he had had with W. B. Yeats over the play Where There Is Nothing, almost a decade earlier. Yeats gives his account of the dispute in Dramatis Personae, Autobiographies (pp. 452-3) and refers to it in a postscript to the first published text of the play: ‘“Where There Is Nothing” is founded upon a subject which I suggested to George Moore…but this did not go beyond some rambling talks. Then the need went past, and I gradually put so much of myself into the fable that I felt I must write on it alone, and I took it back into my own hands with his consent. Should he publish a story upon it some day, I shall rejoice that the excellent old custom of two writers taking one fable has been revived in a new form.’ Cited in the Introduction to Where There is Nothing/The Unicorn from the Stars, ed. by Katharine Worth (Washington D C: Catholic University Press; Gerrards Cross: Colin Smythe, 1987), p. 6.

532 Joseph Hone, The Life of George Moore (London; Victor Gollancz, 1936), p. 293.

533 Samuel Roth, The Private Life of Frank Harris (New York: Willliam Faro, 1931), p. 153.

534 Frank Harris, Contemporary Portraits, Second Series (New York: published by the author, 1919), pp. 125-6.

535 George Moore, ‘A Prefatory Letter on Reading the Bible for the First Time’, The English Review, 7 (February 1911), 425-465, p. 464.

536 George Moore, ‘A Prefatory Letter’, p. 464.

537 Paul Régla, Jésus de Nazareth: Au Point de Vue Historique, Scientifique et Social (Paris: Georges Carré, 1891).

538 Ibid., p. 336.

539 ‘A Prefatory Letter’, p. 464.

540 In an article describing his first and only meeting with Moore, Robert Graves points out that Moore’s thesis ‘that Jesus survived the cross was not new’ and that it had been more plausibly argued in Samuel Butler’s The Fair Haven’. See 5 Pens in Hand (New York: Doubleday & Company, 1958), p. 124.

541 While the play itself received scant praise, the introductory material met with approval. One reviewer insisted that ‘the Prefatory Letter…is so fine and so exciting that it is worth buying the book for it alone.’ See the Irish Review, I (October 1911), 415-416, p. 416.

542 ‘A Prefatory Letter’, pp. 458, 460.

543 ‘A Prefatory Letter’, p. 454.

544 Joseph Hone, George Moore, p. 311.

545 Virginia Woolf, The Death of the Moth and other Essays (London: The Hogarth Press, 1942), p. 102.

546 ‘A Prefatory Letter’, p. 458.

547 In a radio broadcast Richard Best, Eglinton’s colleague at the National Library, recalled how ‘Moore hadn’t much of a library…He didn’t buy books, and he never really read much’. See W. R. Rodgers, Irish Literary Portraits, p. 85.

548 ‘Prefatory Letter’, p. 461.

549 Ibid., p. 461. Moore had, of course, gained himself a reputation as a writer concerned with ‘sex problems’. In the 1880s and early 1890s he had covered a range of sexual issues including adultery, rape, lesbianism and the effects of celibacy on the individual.

550 Ibid., p. 461; see also Shakespeare’s Othello (5.2. 353), The Norton Shakespeare, ed. by Stephen Greenblatt (London: W. W. Norton & Company, 1997), p. 2171.

551 Ibid., p. 461.

552 Ibid., p. 462.

553 George Moore, Conversations in Ebury Street, (London: Heinemann, 1924), p. 186-7.

554 ‘Prefatory Letter’, p. 459.

555 Letters from George Moore to Edouard Dujardin, p. 88.

556 F. W. H. Myers, St Paul, ed. by E. J. Watson (London: Simpkin, Marshall, Hamilton, Kent & Co., 1916), p. 3.

557 Frank Harris, Contemporary Portraits, Second Series, p. 124.

558 Moore’s interest in presenting the figure of Christ is evident from the attention he paid to Wagner’s scenario for an operatic life of Jesus. In a letter of 1895, he thanks Lena Milman for her translation of the piece, adding: ‘It interested me very much. It seems to be a divine arrangement…It will come in useful one day.’ See George Moore in Transition: Letters to T. Fisher Unwin and Lena Milman, 1894-1910 , ed. by Helmut E. Gerber (Detroit: Wayne State University Press, 1968), p. 107.

559 For details of the Office of the Lord Chamberlain and its censorship of the English drama, see John Johnston, The Lord Chamberlain’s Blue Pencil (London: Hodder & Stoughton, 1990).

560 Wilson Barrett’s religious melodrama, The Sign of the Cross, played to great acclaim in both the United States and Great Britain. Set in Rome in the days of the Early Church, Barrett’s play tells the tale of the Roman prefect, Marcus, who falls deeply in love with the Christian heroine, Mercia, and accompanies her to her death in an amphitheatre of hungry lions. Barrett’s decision to set his drama in post-crucifixion times, ensured that it would meet the requirements of the Examiner of Plays, at the same time capitalising on the interest in the Primitive Church which had featured prominently in theological works of the final thirty years or so of the nineteenth century.

561 Two examples of private societies were those set up by Laurence Housman and Mabel Dearmer. Housman took advantage of this loophole in the law, forming the Bethlehem Society and staging his nativity play, Bethlehem, in 1902, the same year that it had been denied a licence by the Examiner of Plays. Following suit in 1911, Mabel Dearmer founded The Morality Play Society which presented her own works, The Soul of the World (1911) and The Dreamer (1912), and works by others, including W. B. Yeats’s The Hour Glass (1904) and Lady Gregory’s The Travelling Man (1909).

562 See The Times, 29 October 1907, p. 15. The letter was written as a formal protest against the ‘power lodged in the hands of a single official - who judges without a public hearing, and against whose dictum there is no appeal’; its signatories included Laurence Housman, John Masefield, G. B. Shaw, and W. B. Yeats, all of whom produced some form of Biblical drama in the course of their writing careers.

563 The jurisdiction of the Lord Chamberlain did not extend to Ireland; however, the Lord Lieutenant of Ireland had the power to withdraw the patent allowing performance rights should a production be deemed offensive. For details of stage censorship in Ireland, see Christopher Morash,