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

A History of Irish Theatre 1601-2000 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002), pp. 143-4.

564 The scenario was in itself highly controversial, even if it was never intended for the stage. James Joyce points this out in a broadside addressed to Maunsel & Co., shortly after they had refused to publish Dubliners. In it he cites Moore’s The Apostle as a work that managed to pass their censorship regulations due to the fact that it was written by ‘a genuine gent/ That lives on his property’s ten per cent’. See ‘Gas from a Burner’, The Critical Writings of James Joyce, ed. by Ellsworth Mason and Richard Ellmann (London: Faber and Faber, 1959), p. 243.

565 George Barlow, Jesus of Nazareth: A Tragedy (London: The Roxburghe Press, 1896).

566 Ibid., p. 13.

567 The Apostle: A Drama in Three Acts (Dublin: Maunsel and Co., 1911), p. 39. Hereinafter, all citation will be from this edition, with page references indicated in brackets after quotations.

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

569 Moore remained tenacious in his efforts to stage his meeting between Paul and Jesus. He went on to produce a full-length script of The Apostle (London: William Heinemann, 1923), an extensively revised version of the original, based on The Brook Kerith. Seven years later, the play went through its second revision, and was published under a new title: The Passing of the Essenes (London: Heinemann, 1930). Finally, the twenty-year old scenario made its way onto the stage, accompanied by music composed by Gustav Holst, opening at the Arts Theatre in October 1930. Though this production was warmly received, it failed to live up to Moore’s expectations. He complained to Eglinton that he ‘found the play infinitely tedious on the stage…One man barked, thinking that barking was a good conception of Paul, and the other reduced Jesus to the image and likeness of a monthly nurse.’ See Letters of George Moore, With an Introduction by John Eglinton to whom they were written (Bournemouth: Sydenham & Co., 1942), p. 87.

570 Martin Luther, p. 34.

571 George Moore, Impressions and Opinions (London: David Nutt, 1891), p. 239.

572 The review which appeared in The Athenaeum, 22 July, 1911, 111-112, expressed reservations about the suitability of the play’s theme for dramatic presentation and deemed the depiction of Paul not to be ‘in good taste’; but its tone is measured, even wryly amused, when describing Moore’s ‘ingenuous’ contribution to Biblical criticism.

573 Moore moderated this ending in subsequent versions of the story, with Paul and Jesus parting and going in opposite directions.

574 Humbert Wolfe, George Moore (London: Harold Shaylor, 1931), p. 23. Moore’s choice of Paul as his eponymous hero could not have been confidently forecast from his early musings on Biblical drama. In the late 1880s, his interest had not settled on any one New Testament figure. In the novel, Mike Fletcher, the hero sketches out his plans for a trilogy of plays outlining the life of Christ. Following a strictly chronological sequence, Mike Fletcher explains how the first play will focus on John the Baptist, the second on Jesus, and the final one on Peter; though Paul does not feature in the post-crucifixion drama, the germ of The Apostle can be discerned when the artist goes on to outline his third play, which ‘ends in Peter flying from Rome to escape crucifixion; but outside the city he sees Christ carrying His cross, and Christ says He is going to be crucified a second time’. See Mike Fletcher (London: Ward and Downey, 1889), p. 127-8.

575 F. W. Farrar, The Life and Works of St Paul, 2 vols (London: Cassell & Co, 1879).

576 Albert Schweitzer, Paul and His Interpreters, trans. by W. Montgomery (London: Adam and Charles Black, 1912).

577 Irish Literary Portraits, p. 110.

578 Irish Review, 1 (October 1911), 415-6, p. 415.

579 Frank Harris, Contemporary Portraits, Second Series, p. 127. Paul’s physical appearance seems to have been a popular subject for speculation. In an entry on Paul in A Dictionary of the Bible, comprising its Antiquities, Biography, Geography, and Natural History, ed. by William Smith, 3 vols (London, 1860-63), John Llewelyn Davies writes: ‘We have no very trustworthy sources of information as to the personal appearance of Paul. Those which we have are the early pictures and mosaics described by Mrs Jamieson, and passages from Malalas, Nicephorus, and the apocryphal Acta Paul et Theclae. They all agree in ascribing to the Apostle, a short stature, a long face with high forehead, an aquiline nose, close and prominent eyebrows’ (II, 762).

580 Letters of George Moore, With an Introduction by John Eglinton, p. 52.

581 See Albert Schweitzer, The Psychiatric Study of Jesus, trans. by Charles R. Joy (Boston: The Beacon Press, 1958). Schweitzer’s study started out as a thesis offered for the degree of Doctor of Medicine, and was subsequently published in three separate articles in The Expositor, Eighth Series, Vol. 6, 1913.

582 In his monograph on Moore, Humbert Wolfe interprets the binary opposition of Moore’s two protagonists in gender terms, conjecturing that the author perceives Paul as ‘the man-god of Protestantism as opposed to the woman-god of Catholicism’. See George Moore, p. 24.

583 In Gerd Lüdemann’s recent study of the historical Jesus, he contemplates how Paul and Christ would have got on together: ‘Paul was a cosmopolitan and Jesus was a provincial. Had they ever met in person, they would presumably have had little to say to each other…Most likely Paul would simply have chuckled at the country bumpkin from Galilee…Jesus would probably not have reacted to Paul any differently. In any case he would hardly have understood Paul’s stilted theological arguments, for the pedantic, strict exegesis of commandments, prophets and scriptures with all their fiddly distinctions would not have been to his taste.’ See Jesus After Two Thousand Years (London: SCM Press, 2000), p. 687.

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

585 Letters of George Moore, With an Introduction by John Eglinton, p. 18.

586 Albert J. Farmer, Le Mouvement esthétique et ‘décadent’ en Angleterre 1873-1900 (Paris: Librairie Ancienne Honoré Champion, 1931), p. 382.

587 Alexandra von Herder, Jesus of Nazareth: A Poetical Drama in Seven Scenes (London: Heinemann, 1913). Von Herder wrote eight plays in all, most of which were never performed.

588 Edgar Saltus, Mary of Magdala (London: Osgood & McIlvine, 1891).

589 Robert Buchanan, The Ballad of Mary the Mother (London: Robert Buchanan, 1897), p. 79.

590 George Moore on Parnassus: Letters (1900-1933) to Secretaries, Publishers, Printers, Agents, Literati, Friends, and Acquaintances, ed. by Helmut E. Gerber and O. M. Brock, Jr. (Newark: University of Delaware Press, 1988), p. 130.

591 Lord Balcarres, Donatello (London: Duckworth and Co., 1903), p. 144.

592 Heinrich Weinel and Alban G. Widgery, Jesus in the Nineteenth Century and After (Edinburgh: T. & T. Clark, 1914), p. 424.

593 Letters of George Moore, With an Introduction by John Eglinton to whom they were written (Bournemouth: Sydenham & Co., 1942), p. 75.

594 In the Preface to the Revised Edition of The Lake (London: William Heinemann, 1921), Moore lists the works which he would like to be excised from his canon, quipping that ‘all these books, if they are ever reprinted again, should be issued as the works of a disciple - Amico Moorini’ (p. x).

595 Letters of George Moore, With an introduction by John Eglinton, p. 36. In a further letter to Eglinton, Moore states that 5, 000 copies of The Brook Kerith were sold in the month following its publication. See Adrian Frazier, George Moore 1852-1933 (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 2000), p. 403.

596 See Robert Langenfeld, George Moore: An Annotated Secondary Bibliography of Writings About Him (New York: AMS Press, 1987), pp. 105-17, for details of the energetic correspondence between the author and his readers.

597 The writer of the Foreword to a 1950s’ edition of The Brook Kerith still deemed it necessary to justify the novel’s treatment of a Biblical subject, averring that the work is ‘in no sense a perverse piece of religious controversy’ and will ‘neither anger nor offend those who accept the Bible story of the life and death of Christ’. See The Brook Kerith (London: Penguin Books, 1952).

598 In the Manchester Guardian, 29 September, 1916, p. 5, the reviewer of The Brook Kerith extols the artistic virtues of the novel but concludes that, of all the legends circulated about Jesus, Moore’s is ‘the most offending’. Lord Alfred Douglas tried, and failed, to bring a charge of blasphemy against the novel. See ‘“The Brook Kerith”. Process for Blasphemy Refused’, The Times, 7 September, 1916, p. 3.

599 A leading article in the Times Literary Supplement entitled ‘Literature and the War’, reported on The English Association’s conference organized to consider the effects of the war on the reading of literature. The conclusions drawn by the Association were that while many feared the war might deter the public from reading, the reverse seemed to be the case. The apparent increase in reading was put down to the fact that the slow and monotonous life of the soldier afforded him ample time to read; at the same time, the restrictive nature of civilian life made the book one of the most attractive forms of entertainment. See the Times Literary Supplement, 1 June 1916, 253-254.

600 In a work published in 1916, John M. Robertson comments on how the First World War has been ‘the pretext for endless religious discussions…ranging between medieval miracle-mongering and the lowest forms of journalistic charlatanism, with chronic debates on theism and on the military value of faith and prayer’. See The Historical Jesus: A Survey of Positions (London: Watts & Co., 1916), p. xxiii.

601 Pearse’s poem ‘The Mother’, for example, emulated the language of liturgy and presented the sons of Ireland as Christ-like in their sacrifices for the homeland. See Patrick Pearse, Poems (Dublin: Maunsel & Co., 1918), p. 333.

602 The figurative significance of Golgotha appeared to have been literalized when a British soldier was reported to have been discovered hanging in the manner of the crucified Christ, with bayonets serving as nails. Purportedly witnessed in Belgium by Lance Corporal George Barrie in April 1915, his account of the atrocity was widely disseminated by the press and led to a significant rise in recruitment. This physical re-enactment of the crucifixion was translated back into symbolic form in the Derwent sculpture, later withdrawn from exhibition when the story was dismissed as propaganda. Recent evidence has prompted a reconsideration of the incident: see Iain Overton, ‘The crucified soldier’, The Tablet, 19 April 2003, 15-16.

603 Spectator, 115, 11 September 1915, p. 336. ‘Christ in Flanders’ proved one of the most popular and frequently anthologized poems of its time.

604 The Times, 24 December, 1915, p. 7.

605 Recent Words from Christ upon This War and upon Our Coming Deliverance: Taken down by a Scribe (London: Cecil Palmer & Hayward, 1918), p. 27.

606 Robert Graves, 5 Pens in Hand (New York: Doubleday & Co., 1958), pp. 123-4.

607 Dial, 61, 21 September 1916, 191-3, p. 191.

608 Daily Express, 31 August 1916, p. 3. Moore’s reply to the Major-General’s letter confirms that his youthful hatred of Roman Catholicism had by no means abated, nor had his tendency to view Catholicism and Protestantism as binary opposites. Moore assumes from the Major-General’s use of the term ‘excommunication’ that he is a Catholic and that it would, therefore, be ‘no use discussing any religious or moral question with him’(Daily Express, 4 September 1916, p. 2). The unreliability of Moore’s generalizing was exposed in the General-Major’s second letter, which stated: ‘I am not a Roman Catholic, nor a Protestant, nor any other “ism”’(Daily Express, 8 September 1916, p. 2).

609 Elizabeth Grübgeld, George Moore and the Autogenous Self (Syracuse, New York: Syracuse University Press, 1994), p. 241.

610 Unless otherwise stated, all citations are from the first edition of The Brook Kerith: A Syrian Story (London: T. Werner Laurie, 1916), and page references are noted in brackets following quotations.

611 George Moore on Parnassus: Letters (1900-1933) to Secretaries, Publishers, Agents, Literati, Friends, and Acquaintances, ed. by Helmut E. Gerber and O. M. Brack, Jr. (Newark: University of Delaware Press, 1988), pp. 292-3.

612 Vernon Bartlett, ‘A Personal Vindication’, Westminster Gazette, 48, 3 October 1916, p. 2.

613 ‘A New Christian Legend’, Saturday Review, 122, 2 September 1916, p. 228.

614 George Moore on Parnassus, p. 284.

615 Letters of George Moore, With an Introduction by John Eglinton, p. 21.

616 See the Manchester Guardian, 29 September 1916, p. 5.

617 In a letter to Eliza Aria, Moore wrote: ‘A twelve hours ride in the desert is an experience that one would prefer to have behind one than in front of one. One generally gets it behind’ (George Moore on Parnassus, pp. 286-7).

618 George Moore, Modern Painting (London: Walter Scott, 1893), p. 54.

619 Augustus John, Chiaroscuro (London: Jonathan Cape, 1952), p. 226.

620 The Brook Kerith (Edinburgh: T. Werner Laurie, 1921), p. ix.

621 John Eglinton, Irish Literary Portraits (London: Macmillan & Co., 1935), p. 108.

622 Ibid., p. x.

623 Irish Literary Portraits, p. 109.

624 The Pastoral Loves of Daphnis and Chloë: Done into English by George Moore (London: William Heinemann, 1924), p. 1.

625 Moore versus Harris, ed. by Guido Bruno (Chicago: privately printed, 1925), p. 12.

626 Extensive study had been made of the anatomical details of crucifixion and the wealth of material available on the subject renders it impossible to ascertain the exact provenance of Moore’s information. One text which would have afforded Moore plenty of detail about Roman crucifixion was David Smith’s The Days of His Flesh (London: Hodder and Stoughton, 1905). A popular work, it went into new editions until 1911; see especially pp. 494 -7. We can be sure that Moore consulted Roman authors such as Suetonious, whose accounts of crucifixion he mentions in a letter to Eglinton (Letters of George Moore, With an Introduction by John Eglinton, p. 22).

627Letters of George Moore, With an Introduction by John Eglinton, p. 22.

628 Ibid., p. 76.

629 In explaining away the spear in the side as an invention of a money-grabbing centurion, hoping to win favour with the wealthy Joseph of Arimathea, Moore renders invalid a wealth of speculation over the blood and water reputed to have flowed from Christ’s body. For a survey of the numerous theories put forward to explain this Johannine detail, see J. H. Bernard, The International Critical Commentary: A Critical and Exegetical Commentary on the Gospel According to St John, 2 vols (Edinburgh: T. & T. Clark, 1976), II, pp. 646-8.

630 Letters of George Moore, With an Introduction by John Eglinton, p. 30.

631 George Moore, ‘A Prefatory Letter on Reading the Bible for the First Time’, The English Review, 7 (February 1911) 452-465, p. 457.

632 Moore’s highly derivative volume of poems, Flowers of Passion, features the tale of Ginevra who escapes over the convent wall in order to pursue an incestuous love affair with her brother; in Martin Luther, Catherine Bora is released from the convent, leaving her free to marry Martin Luther; in Mike Fletcher, the eponymous hero persuades Lily Young to leave Holy Orders prior to seducing her. In A Drama in Muslin, Cecilia retreats to the convent to escape the humiliation of being a disabled young woman in the competitive world of the Dublin marriage market.

633 Moore was pleased with his phrase ‘single strictness’; it formed the new title of the 1922 revision of the short story volume Celibates (1895)). In the Revised Edition of The Brook Kerith (London: Heinemann, 1927), the phrase replaces the ‘celibates’ of the first edition (see p. 296 of both editions).

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

635 Robert Stephen Becker puts forward this theory in his article ‘Private Moore, Public Moore: the Evidence of the Letters’, published in George Moore in Perspective, ed. by Janet Egleson Dunleavy (Gerrards Cross: Colin Smythe, 1983), p. 78; the letter from which he derives his evidence is published in his Ph.D thesis: ‘Letters of George Moore, 1863-1901, ed. by Robert Becker, Dissertation, University of Reading, 1980, p. 151.

636 Given the discovery of the Dead Sea Scrolls in the 1940s, which offered a connection between Jesus and the Essenes, today’s reader of The Brook Kerith could be forgiven for considering Moore’s New Testament vision as remarkably prescient. However, the sect and its link with Christ attracted keen interest throughout the nineteenth century. Even religious works intended for children featured chapters on the Essenes; see, for example, J. Estlin Carpenter, Life in Palestine When Jesus Lived (Sunday School Association, 1889), pp. 144-7. See George J. Brooke, The Dead Sea Scrolls and the New Testament (London: SPCK, 2005) for a recent discussion of the relationship between Essenism and Christianity.

637 Karl Venturini, Natürliche Geschichte des Grossen Propheten von Nazareth (Copenhagen, 1800-2).

638 Albert Schweitzer, The Quest of the Historical Jesus (London: SCM Press, 2000), p. 46.

639 Paul Régla, Jésus de Nazareth: Au Point de Vue Historique, Scientifique et Social (Paris: Georges Carré, 1891). The work’s main thesis is that Jesus was educated in an Essene community and that his life and ministry were driven by Essenian ideals and teachings.

640 Of course, Moore is not original in his choice of Joseph of Arimathea as one of his leading characters. Though only a fleeting presence in the Gospels, his legendary status grew steadily from the mid-twelfth century, or so, making him an attractive figure for the creative imagination. He appears in poetic works which span the centuries, including Malory’s Le Morte D’Arthur (1470), Spencer’s The Fairie Queen (1590-6), Blake’s The Four Zoas (1795-1804), and Tennyson’s The Idylls of the King (1891).

641 In The Woman’s Bible, ed. by E. C. Stanton and others (New York: European Publishing Company, 1898) an anonymous contributor asks: ‘How did it happen that Christ did not visit his mother after his resurrection?’ and goes on to question why Mary was treated so coldly by her son (p. 144). The rather more devout F. W. Farrar, tried to put such questioning to rest by explaining to his reader that Jesus’s words to his mother ‘Woman, what have I to do with thee?’ were not as harsh as an English translation suggested; rather, ‘the address “Woman”…was so respectful that it might be, and was, addressed to the queenliest’. See The Life of Christ, 2 vols (London: Cassell, Petter and Galpin, 1874), I, p. 165.

642 The Brook Kerith, Revised Edition, p. 192.

643 According to Joseph McCabe, Moore ‘loathed the very sound of the word sodomy’ (Eighty Years a Rebel, p. 64); if this had been the case, any homosexual overtones in The Brook Kerith must have been unconscious on the author’s part. The first of Moore’s biographers to engage with the issue of his possible homosexuality was Adrian Frazier.

644 Letters of George Moore, With an Introduction by John Eglinton, pp. 29-30.

645 Ernest Renan, The Life of Jesus, trans. unknown (London: Trübner & Co., 1864), p. 307.

646 F. C. Conybeare, History of New Testament Criticism (London: Watts & Co., 1910), p. 97.

647 The Nation, 19, 23 September 1916, 800-1, p. 800.

648 Times Literary Supplement, 14 September 1916, p. 438.

649 David Friedrich Strauss, The Life of Jesus Critically Examined , translated from the fourth German edition, 3 vols (London: Chapman, Brothers, 1846), III, p. 126.

650