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

CHAPTER ONE

IN SEARCH OF THE HISTORICAL JESUS: NINETEENTH-CENTURY LIVES OF CHRIST
From the late 1830s to the end of the nineteenth century, scholarly preoccupation with the historicity of the Gospels generated a form of Biblical literature, generically classified as ‘Lives of Jesus’.¹ Characterised by their appeal and accessibility to the lay reader, these biographical works proved highly marketable. Authors of a wide spectrum of religious views exploited this relatively new genre to convey their own particular stance on the historical Jesus, at the same time responding to the Lives which had gone before them. In The Quest of the Historical Jesus (1906), the first comprehensive survey of over a century of critical enquiry into the life and teachings of Christ, Albert Schweitzer states that ‘Not all the Lives of Jesus could be cited. It would take a whole book simply to list them’, a claim not to be dismissed as mere hyperbole.² More recent studies in the field estimate that 60,000 or so such works were published in Europe and the USA in the mid to late nineteenth century.³ Considering the sheer volume of these biographies, it is unsurprising that a large majority of them are highly formulaic, and it is the purpose of this chapter to focus solely on some of the relatively few Lives of Jesus which provided blueprints for the superabundance of imitations. Attracting a wide readership, the works discussed below had considerable influence on contemporary discourse about Christianity, and provided some of the impetus for the fictional representations of Christ which emerged from the late 1860s onwards.

D. F. Strauss’s Leben Jesu (1834) and the frontiers of fact and fiction

Many of the Lives of Jesus written in the second half of the nineteenth century were instigated by David Friedrich Strauss’s Leben Jesu, a ground-breaking study of the Gospel narratives. Mounting as it did a sustained attack on the veracity of the New Testament, the work quickly gained notoriety, resulting in its author being removed from his post as tutor at the University of Tübingen just a matter of weeks after its publication.⁴ It took eight years for Leben Jesu to reach the English reader, its first translator explaining in his Address that ‘The illiberal tone of the public mind [had] prevented its publication being attempted by any respectable English publisher, from a fear of persecution.’⁵ Four years on, George Eliot’s translation brought Straussian ideas further into the public arena and, while it is unlikely that Strauss’s densely argued and erudite Life would have been read in its entirety by the layman, there is no doubt that its central contentions were widely circulated and energetically debated. As the century wore on, Strauss’s name and ideas began to feature in the domain of prose fiction. The Life of Jesus found its way onto the bookshelves of characters in novels such as W. H. Mallock’s A Romance of the Nineteenth Century (1881), Edna Lyall’s Donovan (1882), and Mrs Humphry Ward’s Robert Elsmere (1888). It also appeared in poetic works; for example, Robert Buchanan’s fictional atheist and outcast, Philip Vanderdecken, the Flying Dutchman, recalls his study of ‘The Leben Jesu’ in ‘The First Christmas Eve’, one of a series of verse poems which form The Outcast (1891).⁶

Strauss’s penetrating analysis of the Gospels is separated into three chronological parts, each one divided into chapters and further into sub-chapters. Moving methodically through the New Testament sources, the author endeavours to distinguish between the recording of what might have been actual events and what might have been constructed solely by the religious imagination. He rejects the supernaturalist approach to the Scriptures as contrary to contemporary understanding and knowledge of the world, at the same time holding up the often convoluted and far-fetched theories of the rationalists to intellectual ridicule. Influenced by the idealist philosophy of Hegel, he breaks down the stalemate which had persisted between these two opposing schools of thought, and expounds his own interpretive strategy based on the belief that the Gospels grew out of a mythopoeic process. What for rationalists such as Reimarus had been lies and forgeries, were for Strauss the consequence of a mode of thought peculiar to a bygone age when perceptions of ‘truth’ differed radically from those of the nineteenth century. In order to grasp the essential differences between the minds of the disciples and those of modern men, Strauss insisted, the religious historian must resist anachronistic thinking and transplant ‘himself in imagination upon the theatre of action, and strive to the utmost to contemplate the events by the light of the age in which they occurred.’ ⁷

Strauss’s heterodox reading of the Scriptures adumbrated the agenda for future decades of theological tussles; the miraculous elements of the New Testament narratives, the identity and intentions of their authors, and the historical value of the Fourth Gospel were all areas laid open for argument, as was his theory of the mythopoeic nature of Christian origins. Strauss’s insistence that ‘the line of distinction between history and fiction…was not drawn so clearly as with us’ was a perplexing notion for the many orthodox readers who regarded fact and fiction as binary opposites, and who associated the term ‘fiction’ with fakery and lies.⁸ Strauss notes how, for traditional Christians, the Bible is strictly true, while ‘the histories related by the heathens of their deities, and by the Musselman of his prophet, are so many fictions’.⁹ Fiction for the traditional Christian, then, is associated with error, false belief and the unconverted. Strauss’s reading of the Scriptures blurred such a rigid demarcation of truth and lies; for him, the very development of the Christian faith was embedded in a complex evolutionary process whereby the real and the fictive were interwoven. Strauss explains the process thus:

In general the whole Messianic era was expected to be full of signs and wonders…merely figurative expressions soon came to be understood literally…and thus the idea of the Messiah was continually filled up with new details, even before the appearance of Jesus. Thus many of the legends respecting him had not to be newly invented; they already existed in the popular hope of the Messiah, having been mostly derived with various modifications from the Old Testament, and had merely to be transferred to Jesus, and accommodated to his character and doctrines.¹⁰
Viewed from Strauss’s diachronic perspective, Christ’s contemporaries are seen to have had linguistic difficulties with the pronouncements of their elders, just as nineteenth-century Christians struggled, at times, to understand the religious imagination and idiom of the disciples. In addition to this unintentional fiction, created by the superimposing of the past on the present, Strauss identified an entirely aesthetic fiction which developed once myths were established and became ‘the subject of free poetry or any other literary composition.’¹¹ Akin to literary fiction, this poetic embellishment of the dominant religious ideas was contrived to strengthen belief, though still, according to Strauss, ‘without evil design’, being in accordance with the will of a community.¹²

The implications of Strauss’s work for the theology of its time and their potential impact on faith were forcefully expressed by a critic writing in the Westminster and Foreign Quarterly Review:

It is the pride of Strauss, that he un-creates. At his spell, the warmth of every faith, the accumulated glow of old ages, that alone renders the Present habitable, suddenly becomes latent: the facts, the scenes, the truths that re-absorb it, run down in liquefaction, pass off in vapour, and restore the world to a nebular condition.¹³
Here, the arresting notion of ‘un-creation’ and the images of deliquescence, convey a hauntingly desolate picture of a post-Straussian world, in which civilization reverts to original chaos. Reviews such as this one made it clear that Strauss’s work had struck too fierce a blow against traditional Christianity for it to remain solely within the community of scholars. The proliferation of Lives of Jesus grew out of an urgent desire to bring these heterodox ideas to the lay reader and, in the majority of cases, to counter and reject them. If Strauss’s work had reduced Jesus to an idea, a figment - albeit it a highly significant one - of the religious imagination, the biographical works which proceeded it attempted to reinstate a sense of historical reality. The authors of these Lives transformed the relatively slender Gospel stories into hefty volumes, supplementing New Testament stories with extra-Biblical material and psychological conjecture, and rewriting them in a prose style often verging on the pleonastic. If Strauss’s trenchant analysis threatened irrevocably to undermine the verity of the Gospels, Lives of Jesus offered a means of rehabilitating, or even replacing, them; as the first bibliographer of the genre, Samuel Ayres, pointed out: ‘if all the Bibles and Testaments were destroyed tomorrow, they could almost be reconstructed from the literature that has grown up around the life of Christ’.¹⁴
Ernest Renan’s imaginative reconstruction of the life of Christ
In the Preface to A New Life of Jesus, Strauss avers that ‘We must address the people since theologians refuse to listen.’¹⁵ While ostensibly directed at the professional theologian, it is also a covert undermining of the achievement of Ernest Renan’s Vie de Jésus, published a year earlier in 1863.¹⁶ Having gone through ten editions of 5,000 copies each in its first year and having been translated into eleven European languages by the end of 1864, Renan’s study of Christ could be said to have already accomplished the task of conveying current thinking on the Gospels to the non-specialist.¹⁷ Though claiming to have ‘joyfully hailed the work of Renan on its appearance’, Strauss goes on to damn it with faint praise:

I accept it respectfully, and though by no means tempted by its example to alter my own plan, I may say that all I wish is to have written a book as suitable for Germany as Renan’s is for France.¹⁸

It is evident here that for Strauss, as for the majority of theologians of his time, studies in the historical Jesus were inseparable from the national characteristics of both authors and readers. Such a deterministic mode of thinking was also to be found in the periodical press. The Edinburgh Review regarded the Life as proof of the unbridgeable gap between the French and English temperaments:

The French mind, in particular, is so easily dazzled by brilliancy, and so readily captivated by dramatic finish and vivid portraiture…Englishmen have not so much faith in the laws of dramatic unity, or in the irrefragability of logic.¹⁹

And forty years on, looking back on a century or so of Christological research, Schweitzer was forthright in his assertion of the superiority of the German temperament in matters theological, and the relative weakness of the French, as evidenced in Renan’s Life.²⁰ It was an argument that Renan had already engaged upon in an essay entitled ‘The Critical Historians of Jesus’, published in Studies of Religious History (1857). In this he asserts somewhat bullishly:

We can affirm that if France, better endowed than Germany with the sentiment of practical life, and less subject to substitute in history the action of ideas for the play of passion and individual character, had undertaken to write the life of Christ in a scientific manner, she would have employed a more strict method, and that, in avoiding to transfer the problem, as Strauss did, into the domain of abstract speculation, she would have approached nearer to the truth.²¹

This was, of course, no empty boast: Renan would put his theory into practice a few years later in his Vie de Jésus.

At the heart of this debate over national temperament lay issues of both methodology and style. Where Strauss favoured the forensic scrutiny of the primary texts, Renan preferred a more impressionistic and imaginative approach. In his Introduction to the Life of Jesus, Renan accuses Strauss of concentrating too fully on the theological, thereby rendering the figure of Jesus a mere abstraction. Conscious that ‘Many will regret…the biographical form’ of his study, he takes on the role of biographer regardless, insisting that the truth will only be uncovered with ‘some share of divination and conjecture’ and by ‘combining the texts in such a manner that they shall constitute a logical, probable narrative, harmonious throughout.’²² Such an approach did not meet with Strauss’s approval. In the first chapter of The New Life of Jesus, he states unequivocally that Christ is ‘no subject for biographical narrative’, arguing that the Jesus of dogma and the Jesus of history are irreconcilable, the inevitable result of the biographical method being the demise of theology.²³ Yet whatever Strauss’s misgivings about Renan’s choice of form might have been, he could not have denied the enormous success which resulted from it.²⁴ What the work lacked in theological scrupulosity, it more than made up for in readability, and its adaptation of the Gospel narratives for a novel-reading public was its tour de force. Placed alongside it, Strauss’s original Life of Jesus must have appeared prohibitively learned and tenebrous to the common reader, conforming to Matthew Arnold’s description of the Germanic style as ‘blunt-edged, unhandy and infelicitous’.²⁵

The response to Renan’s Life of Jesus was immediate and prolific.²⁶ Believers were predictably outraged by its denial of miracles and Christ’s divinity, freethinkers viewed it as a sentimental dilution of Strauss, and theologians derided it for its lack of scholarly restraint.²⁷ Whatever the ideological standpoint of the critic, however, there was general agreement that Renan’s depiction of Jesus was highly imaginative and executed in a style rather more literary than academic. While some of the more puritanical critics judged Renan’s exuberant prose inappropriate for its subject, others regarded it as its greatest quality, establishing the author’s reputation as a brilliant stylist.²⁸ In an address of thanks to Renan, following his delivery of the Hibbert Lectures in 1880, Dr James Martineau praised the lectures for their ‘marvellous charm of literary form, in the command of which the French are the first among European nations, and…M. Renan among the French.’²⁹ Even one of Renan’s fiercest detractors, the Catholic theologian, Marie Joseph Lagrange, had to concede that ‘Renan’s art stripped exegesis of the heavy garments with which the climate of Germany had smothered it…and the sensation still continues.’ ³⁰ Indeed, the attraction of Renan’s art continues into the present day. Writing at the close of the twentieth century, the literary critic, Edward Said, reaffirmed the uniqueness of Renan’s Life of Jesus:

The text of his book is sober enough, but what it does to the textual form of the Gospels, their matter and their existence, is highly adventurous, particularly if we take account of the extraordinarily imaginative connection made by Renan between a subject like Jesus, textual records of his life and teaching, and retrospective critical analysis.³¹

While Renan may have declared his preference for the biographical form in his treatment of the Gospels, what Said deems the ‘highly adventurous’ nature of his work stems largely from its reaching beyond the usual perimeters of biography. As the late Ben Pimlott remarks in his last published essay: ‘Most of the world’s greatest religions have a biographical element: at the core of Christian teaching are four resonant biographies’, and Renan no doubt realised that the biographical mode was not in itself enough to produce a fresh and absorbing new version of Christ’s life.³² So Renan draws on the conventions of contemporary genres such as travel writing, the historical novel and realist fiction to create a work of great originality. Countless critics of the Life have commented on its kinship with the novel, and there is no doubt that Renan understood how easily what Hans Frei defines as the ‘realistic or history-like quality of biblical narratives’ could be adapted to appeal to readers more accustomed to prose fiction than history or theology.³³ Yet while Renan’s depiction of setting and character, his manipulation of narrative pace, and his literary style invite it to be read as a work of fiction, its historical foundations - contentious though they were - thwart such a straightforward reading. The Life’s substantial critical apparatus such as footnotes and appendices serves as frequent reminders to readers that they are engaging with a non-fiction text relating the life of a historical figure.³⁴

There are points in the narrative, however, where Renan’s adroit fusion of fact and fiction threatens to erase the borderline between the discourses of history and fiction. This is particularly pronounced in his portrayal of the ‘missing years’ of Christ’s life, a Biblical lacuna which offered great scope for imaginative speculation and one which had already been exploited in numerous apocryphal writings. Take, for example, Renan’s description of Jesus’s education:

He learnt to read and to write, doubtless, according to the Eastern method, which consisted in putting in the hands of the child a book, which he repeated in cadence with his little comrades, until he knew it by heart.³⁵
Here biographical conjecture, indicated by the parenthetical ‘doubtless’, is easily cast aside as the sentimental image of the young Jesus chanting merrily with his ‘little comrades’, forms in the reader’s mind. Read fleetingly, the second ‘he’ of the sentence seems to refer to the same substantive as the first ‘he’, Jesus himself; read more carefully, however, it is clear that it is the typical Eastern child whose cheerful diligence is being evoked. While the grammar of the description acquits Renan of sheer invention, the overall impact owes more to the author’s historical imagination than to verifiable ‘facts’. And while Renan is assiduous throughout the work in maintaining the technical indicators of the biographical mode, frequently prefacing his comments with phrases such as ‘it seems that’, ‘it must have been’ and ‘it is probable that’, his authorial voice is remarkably protean. Further on in the narrative, for example, he makes an intimate appeal to the reader to consider how ‘The last hours of a cherished friend are those we best remember’, in order to appreciate the lasting impact of the Last Supper on the disciples.³⁶ At other times, such as directly following Christ’s death on the cross, he shifts his address from the reader to the subject:

Rest now in thy glory, noble initiator. Thy work is completed; thy divinity is established…A thousand times more living, a thousand times more loved since thy death than during the days of thy pilgrimage here below, thou wilt become to such a degree the corner-stone of humanity, that to tear thy name from this world would be to shake it to its foundations.³⁷

In this emotive apostrophe, Renan offers a redefinition of the concept of Christ’s divinity to all who reject the supernatural: Jesus’s greatness inheres not in a resurrection, but in the enduring impact of his days on earth. Furthermore, the prayer-like cadences of the prose, aided by the archaic ‘thy’ and ‘thou’, seem to emulate the fervent devotion of the faithful, effecting what Mary Robinson shrewdly termed ‘pious unbelief’.³⁸ Coming at the end of the chapter which relates Christ’s suffering on the cross, it forms the kind of dramatic climax regularly employed by nineteenth-century serial novelists. However, in the opening paragraph of the succeeding chapter, Renan reasserts the voice of the historian, informing the reader matter-of-factly of the Jewish laws concerning crucified corpses, and citing Origen’s interpretation of Christ’s premature expiry on the cross. Through this diversity of styles Renan’s Life takes on a heteroglossic quality, identified by Mikhail Bakhtin as characteristic of the novel form.³⁹ The fluctuations of narrative tone resemble the interplay of the diverse social voices provided by the characters in a work of fiction. While Renan never deviates from a heterodox reading of the Scriptures, he employs a range of typifying lexis, suggestive of multiple presences: the scientist, the historian, the worshipper, the cicerone. In so doing, he enriches the narrative texture of the writing, greatly enhancing its appeal for the reader.

The voice which seemed to touch contemporary readers of the Life most forcefully was that of the traveller. In contrast with the early nineteenth-century Protestant writers who undertook scientific study of the Levant solely to verify Scriptural authenticity and prophecy, Renan employs his first-hand knowledge of Palestine to endue his work with an air of antiquarian charm.⁴⁰ The 1860s was a decade which saw a surge of interest in the archaeology and antiquities of the Near East. In 1865 the Palestine Exploration Fund (PEF) was founded in Britain under the patronage of Queen Victoria, with the intention of funding excavations of the Bible lands and of Jerusalem in particular. Reviewing a decade or so of its projects, the London Quarterly Review pronounced that:

The ‘Land’ and the ‘Book’ are indissolubly associated. The one cannot be fully understood without the other. The land must be seen through the eyes of the book, and the book through the eyes of the land. M. Renan, in a memorable passage, describes the surprise with which he discovered the harmony existing between the gospel narrative and the places to which it refers. He declares that the scenes of Our Lord’s life are un cinquième évangile. ⁴¹
The citing of Renan as instrumental in forging a link between landscape and sacred texts confirms the very considerable impact the Life had on the British public, not least because of its use of the phrase ‘the fifth Gospel’, which was common parlance by the late nineteenth century.⁴² More or less in line with Christian orthodoxy, the aims of the PEF differed fundamentally from those of Renan.⁴³ Having carried out an extensive itinerary of travel in Palestine in the early 1860s, Renan had plenty of topographical knowledge to contribute to his rewriting of the Gospels, and he used this, for the most part, for aesthetic purposes. The Life dispels former nineteenth-century images of Palestine as decaying, desolate and accursed by God by picturing the Bible lands as they might have been in the time of Christ.⁴⁴ Taking the reader back to a former age, Renan gives the impression that he is showing Jesus in his original setting (true to his promise that he would take up some of the historical ground ignored by Strauss), at the same time creating an atmosphere verging on pastoralism:

Galilee…was a very green, shady, smiling district, the true home of the Song of Songs, and the songs of the well-beloved. During the two months of March and April the country forms a carpet of flowers of an incomparable variety of colours. The animals are small and extremely gentle:- delicate and lively turtle-doves, blue-birds so light that they rest on a blade of grass without bending it, crested larks which venture almost under the feet of the traveller, little river tortoises with mild and lively eyes, storks with grave and modest mien, which, laying aside all timidity, allow man to come quite near them, and seem almost to invite his approach.⁴⁵

By way of such lyrical descriptions of the natural environment, with their shifts of tense from past to present, the reader is offered a kind of literary escapism. Consider, also, this portrayal of the land of Christ’s ministry:

The rivulet of Ain-Tabiga makes a little estuary, full of pretty shells. Clouds of aquatic birds hover over the lake. The horizon is dazzling with light. The waters, of an empyrean blue, deeply imbedded amid burning rocks, seem, when viewed from the height of the mountains of Safed, to lie at the bottom of a cup of gold. ⁴⁶

Here, syntactical variation, rich imagery and elaborate adjectives paint a reassuring setting in which to envisage the historical Jesus, the appeal of aesthetics replacing that of faith in an age of ever-increasing religious scepticism. It was largely this kind of representation of the natural world of Palestine which earned Renan his reputation as a writer more inclined to romanticism than serious theology. One of his most vehement critics, the French Reformed pastor, Edmond de Pressensé, took particular exception to Renan’s insistence on a spiritual correspondence between Christ and his environment.⁴⁷ Pressensé complained that Renan’s ‘exquisite passages…polished like the finest diamond’ ascribed ‘an exorbitant influence to nature in the development of the soul of Jesus.’ ⁴⁸ Indeed, for the orthodox reader, Renan’s urging that the ‘birds of heaven, the sea, the mountains, and the games of children, furnished in turn the subject of his instructions’ placed Christ too close to the earth and too far away from his heavenly father.⁴⁹ Similarly, his suggestion that Christ’s soul was enriched and elevated more by the temperate climate of Galilee, than by the Almighty, placed his subject’s sensibilities closer to those of a Romantic poet than a holy man, a characterisation some considered highly irreverent.⁵⁰

Renan, like so many of the biographers of Jesus who followed him, brought his subject squarely in line with the spirit of the age. For those of a less conventional turn of mind, Renan’s Romantic Christ held considerable appeal in an increasingly scientific era. A Jesus who could be admired as a product of nature, rather than as a mysterious emanation from the heavens, was welcomed by readers unable to accept the Gospel miracles, but reluctant to give up what they saw as the ideal example of human greatness. As Renan explains in ‘The Critical Historians of Jesus’, what Strauss ‘leaves subsisting in the Gospels is not sufficient to account for the faith of the Apostles…It must have been, in other words, that the person of Jesus had singularly exceeded the ordinary proportions’.⁵¹ Renan’s subsequent portrayal of Christ as the finest human being of all time, a pattern for all to follow, is echoed by agnostics such as John Stuart Mill, who defines him as ‘a standard of excellence and a model for imitation’, one who could provide a spiritual guide for the unbeliever.⁵² Renan’s Jesus is a man of ‘extraordinary sweetness’ and ‘infinite charm’, kind to women and children and adored by them in return.⁵³ In many respects this image of Christ proved extremely attractive for many nineteenth-century readers, partial to sentimental and idealized images of women and children. Moreover, Renan’s speculation about whether Jesus reflected on the ‘young maidens who, perhaps, would have consented to love him’, during his agony in the Garden of Gethsemane, hinted at his potential to become both husband and father, and aligned him more easily with the mid nineteenth-century normative view of masculinity.⁵⁴ Likewise, Renan’s description of Christ as ‘no longer a Jew’ was very much in line with the mid-century view of the Saviour as the instigator of a revolutionary new faith, one who had broken entirely with the Judaic religion.⁵⁵ Renan takes care, though, that his leading character is not unfeasibly good: Jesus is susceptible to adulation, taking pleasure from being hailed as ‘son of David’.⁵⁶ He is also given to bouts of bad humour and melancholy, leading him ‘to commit inexplicable and apparently absurd acts’, a changeability frequently criticized by Renan’s opponents for being inimical to the Christian ideal of an immutable figure of divinity, and which prefigured Schweitzer’s vision of Christ as a fervid apocalyptic.⁵⁷ Renan emphasizes that, like all human beings, Jesus is prone to change, doubt, and anxiety, and he allows the reader tantalizing glimpses into his putative inner life. He evokes Christ’s thoughts in the Garden of Gethsemane through a series of speculations: ‘Did he curse the hard destiny which had denied him the joys conceded to all others? Did he regret his too lofty nature, and, victim of his greatness, did he mourn that he had not remained a simple artisan of Nazareth?’ ⁵⁸ Here Renan is careful to maintain the dividing line between fiction and biography, employing authorial questions, rather than free indirect discourse. By the following century, however, biographers would employ the narrative technique of contemporary fiction writers to build on Renan’s narrative methods, dropping the conjectural syntax, and conveying Christ’s thoughts as if coming directly from his own mind.⁵⁹

One aspect of Christ’s personality which Renan conveys as both constant and indisputable is his appreciation of, and facility with, words. As critics highlighted the author’s stylistic felicities, so the author draws attention to the same qualities in his subject. Renan’s Jesus has the soul of a poet: he has a sensitive appreciation of the verses of the Old Testament; he enjoys the linguistic energies of wordplay; he inspires an entirely original form of parable, ‘charming apologues’ articulated in ‘beautiful language’.⁶⁰ Just as British writers tended to compare the words of Christ to those of Shakespeare, so Renan likens them to those of Molière. Endowing Christ with literary flair is another means by which the heretical contents of the Life are softened: Jesus may not be divine, but his eloquence and poetic sensibilities furnish him with a spiritual quality entirely in keeping with the founder of a world religion. It was, perhaps, the coincidence of the literary talents of both author and subject which led some readers of the Life to consider it a work closer to autobiography than biography.⁶¹ At the start of the twentieth century, Schweitzer was to make a similar observation in relation to the entire genre of Lives of Jesus, averring that ‘each individual created Jesus in accordance with his own character’.⁶² Yet this identification of the writer with his subject fails to recognize the enormous scope and influence of Renan’s work. Far from capturing the essence of only one man in Jesus, he succeeds in capturing the mood of the 1860s in all its contradictoriness. In The Gospels, Renan claims that ‘the life of Jesus will always obtain a great success when the writer has the necessary degree of ability, of boldness, and of naïveté to translate the Gospel into the style of his time’, and there is no doubt that he more than succeeded in fulfilling his own criteria.⁶³ His Life is, to use Thomas De Quincey’s definition, an example of the ‘literature of power’, in contradistinction to the ‘literature of knowledge’.⁶⁴ Those readers looking for the latest in theological scholarship would have found little of note in Renan’s rewriting of the Gospels; however, those seeking a vision of Jesus which would move, inspire and comfort them in an increasingly materialist century needed to look no further.⁶⁵

J. R. Seeley: the English Renan?
Ecce Homo: A Survey of the Life and Work of Christ was published in 1865.⁶⁶ By the end of 1866, the identity of its author had been revealed as John Robert Seeley, then Professor of Latin at University College London.⁶⁷ Numerous reviewers compared Seeley’s work with Renan’s Life, asseverating that a British Renan had entered the controversy over the life of Jesus.⁶⁸ Yet, of the plethora of liberal Lives of Jesus produced in the final forty years of the nineteenth century, Seeley’s is in many ways one of the least like Renan’s. Certainly, it shares some surface similarities. As in Renan’s Life, Christ’s humanity is emphasized throughout, beginning with its bold title: Ecce Homo or ‘Behold the man!’, the supposed words of Pontius Pilate, recorded in John’s Gospel (19:5);⁶⁹ and in the main body of the work, Seeley expounds his conviction that ‘within the whole creation of God, nothing more elevated or more attractive has yet been found than he’, a human perfection which enables Jesus to inspire ‘an enthusiasm of humanity’.⁷⁰ Like Renan, Seeley shows an acute awareness of contemporary issues, relating the story of Christ to Victorian debates over issues such as philanthropy, scientific advance, and the abolition of slavery. And where Renan compares Jesus to Molière, Seeley chooses to compare him to Britain’s equivalent: Shakespeare. Yet Seeley’s work differs starkly from Renan’s in both its selection of textual material and in its stylistic methods. If Renan wrote with the creative flair of the novelist, then Seeley wrote with the control and clarity of the accomplished lecturer.⁷¹ Ecce Homo is structured around a series of sustained discussions of various aspects of Christ’s ministry, the second half of the study being separated into a number of meditations on abstract concepts such as morality, mercy and forgiveness. Where Renan creates cliff-hanger endings for his chapters, Seeley supplies chapter summaries, focusing the reader’s mind on the salient points of what he describes as his ‘investigation’ into the life of Christ.⁷² Eschewing the traditional methods of the biographer, Seeley selects Gospel incidents to illustrate his ideas, rather than presenting them in a linear narrative. New Testament figures such as Mary Magdalene, Judas, and Joseph of Arimathea, for all their potential for imaginative development, find no place in Seeley’s restrained study. In contrast to Renan’s exuberant prose style, Seeley writes in an oddly oblique and often distant manner, defined by one reviewer as ‘Power without show of power; a quiet, simply-evolved, unrhetorical form of sentence and paragraph’.⁷³ Voiced in the third-person throughout, Ecce Homo has none of the directness of Renan’s Life; the reader is neither invited to speculate on Christ’s state of mind, nor to visualize the Palestinian landscape. Renan’s poet-Christ becomes the somewhat less Romantic tutor-figure in Seeley’s vision. The Edinburgh Review was typical of its time in accounting for the essential differences between Renan and Seeley in terms of national characteristics: where the Frenchman had approached his subject ‘on the side of the imagination’, his English counterpart had produced a work which is ‘undramatic’ and ‘characteristic of…the country whence it sprang’.⁷⁴

Hailed by the Fortnightly Review as the ‘most important religious book that has appeared in England for a quarter of a century’,⁷⁵ and described by Schweitzer as the ‘classical liberal English life of Jesus’, Ecce Homo was undoubtedly a work of great significance.⁷⁶ However, its impact can be attributed more to its omissions and ambivalences than to any more concrete qualities. After giving the prefatory disclaimer that ‘No theological questions whatever are here discussed’, Seeley assiduously avoids the New Testament debates of his day.⁷⁷ Most conspicuously of all, he steers clear of discussing whether the Gospel miracles were real or imagined, and omits any mention of the Passion, the most vehemently disputed area of the source texts. This theological fence-sitting renders the work unusually open to interpretation, and critical responses did not always align neatly with denominational standpoints. While, for example, the Evangelical J. K. Glazebrook’s condemnation of the work as one of the ‘infidel publications of the day’ was entirely predictable,⁷⁸ the praise heaped on the work by Gladstone, a High Churchman, was not.⁷⁹ As John Henry Newman so aptly put it in his review of the Fifth Edition of Ecce Homo, the onus is put upon the reader to decide whether Seeley is ‘an orthodox believer on his road to liberalism, or a liberal on his road to orthodoxy.’⁸⁰ Indeed, Ecce Homo generated a formidable number of reviews and monographs by its very indeterminacy.⁸¹ Lacking the scholarly rigour of Strauss and the populist appeal of Renan, and refusing to declare his views on issues as crucial as Christ’s divinity, Seeley cannot be easily placed along the continuum of Lives of Jesus. There is no doubt, however, that the stir caused by its publication played a crucial role in further animating the quest for the historical Jesus. The title of Seeley’s work, which had caused great offence to readers on account of what was then considered to be its pagan origins (Pilate was, after all, a Roman), reverberated in some of the titles of works responding to it; Joseph Parker’s Ecce Deus, the ‘ultra-Unitarian’ Ecce Veritas, and D. Melville Stewart’s Ecce Vir, ensured that the original title was kept in the public consciousness well into the twentieth century.⁸²

British Lives of Jesus and the exploitation of the fictional mode
Though Seeley’s study no doubt influenced what was written about Jesus and his life, it had less effect on how they were presented, and Renan’s Life remained the dominant stylistic model. While some of the more traditional elements of English society tried hard to ignore Renan’s Life of Jesus in the vain hope that it might disappear back across the channel, its impact on British lives of Christ proved indelible.⁸³ One of the most surprising aspects of Renan’s influence is the way in which his style was emulated more frequently by the orthodox writer than the heterodox. Rationalist writers such as Thomas Scott produced Lives of Jesus which self-consciously resisted appealing to the imagination of the reader. Scott’s The English Life of Jesus, has all the austerity of Strauss and none of the warmth and antiquarian charm of Renan, features which may account for its limited readership. Where Renan appealed to the emotional empathy of his readers, Scott appealed to their sense of logic; where the French writer fused the four-fold Gospel into a compelling drama, the English writer insisted that any ‘attempt to harmonize the several contradictory narratives can produce only a ridiculous medley, which may be best compared to attempts to mingle oil and vinegar.’ ⁸⁴ For Scott, the New Testament already contained enough fiction - the Fourth Gospel being an egregious example - without writers on the life of Christ adding additional layers to it.⁸⁵ There is, indeed, a superciliousness of tone, verging on the puritanical, in Scott’s writing which many readers must have found off-putting. His scepticism is expressed with palpable disdain, if not disgust: the early rationalist theory that Jesus might have been revived following his crucifixion is deemed to be ‘not merely absurd but revolting’ and the poetic qualities which even the most hardened unbeliever appreciated in the Gospel of John are dismissed as sophistic and elitist.⁸⁶ The overall impression the reader gains of the author of The English Life of Jesus is that of someone intent on reaffirming the unorthodox kernel of Renan’s argument, while resolutely refusing to imitate its stylistic felicities.

There were, however, some biographers of Christ who were more than willing to copy Renan’s literary style, especially when it was to beat him at his own game. One such was William Hanna, a Free Church of Scotland minister whose six-volume study of Christ was the most expansive British Life of Jesus published. Originating in a series of sermons, Hanna’s work was entirely devotional in intention, his structural approach being to ‘harmonize the accounts given by the Evangelists…to construct a continuous narrative’.⁸⁷ In carrying out such an organization, he shows a shrewd appreciation of the Gospels’ potential for imaginative retelling. In terms more suited to the theatre than the pulpit, he refers in the Preface to ‘the motives and feelings of the different actors and spectators’ of the New Testament and their place in the story of ‘the great Central Character’; his handling of the narrative lives up, in parts, to this promise of drama, particularly in the fifth volume, which is devoted to the Passion. ⁸⁸ With seemingly unconscious irony, Hanna dedicates much of the seventh chapter of this volume to warning the reader of the dangers of dramatic prose-writings in his own highly dramatic prose. Taking Christ’s instruction to the daughters of Jerusalem, ‘do not weep for me’ (Luke 23:28), as his text, Hanna interprets the phrase as warning against excessive emotionalism, in itself a form of ‘selfish gratification’.⁸⁹ He goes on from this to express the traditional Protestant disapproval of ‘indulging to excess the reading of exciting fiction - tales in which the hero of the story passes through terrible trials, endurances, agonies of mind and heart’, going on to describe how ‘hearts may pulse all through with pity as we read’ and how ‘we may wet with tears the page that spreads out some heartrending scene.’⁹⁰ Here, Hanna’s rousing language only serves to confirm the lure of such a mode of storytelling, and the reader cannot fail to notice the close parallels between his chosen fictional example and the harrowing crucifixion narrative to follow. Though lacking the literary flair of Renan, Hanna’s retelling of the Passion still manages to arouse the very sensations he warns his readers against. In his description of Christ’s death on the cross, for example, his use of the historic present tense and the accumulation of short, abrupt sentences, stripped of polysyllables, seem aimed at stirring the emotions of the reader:

A sudden change comes over his spirit. He ceases to think of, to speak with man. His eye closes upon the crowd that stands around. He is alone with his Father. A dark cloud wraps his spirit. He fears as he enters it.⁹¹

Further on in the Passion narrative, Hanna invites the reader to share the ‘reality’ of the New Testament scene: ‘The burial is over now…but let us linger a little longer, and bestow a parting look on the persons and the place, - the buriers and the burying-ground’.⁹² Here, the author’s direct address to the reader infuses the writing with a tone of confidentiality, while his continued use of the present historic tense and his invitation to ‘linger’ at the death scene render it inescapably mawkish.

By the end of the 1860s, works such as Hanna’s were in plentiful supply. Indeed, one reviewer, writing in 1872, observed that ‘Lives of Jesus multiply with a rapidity that makes hopeless all freshness, and very much worth. They merely repeat one another like sermons’.⁹³ This sounding of the death knell for the Lives of Jesus genre was, however, somewhat precipitate. Sensing that there was still a strong market for a Life of Jesus with popular appeal, the publishing company Cassell, Petter and Galpin approached Frederic William Farrar with a view to his producing for their readers ‘a sketch of the Life of Christ on earth as should enable them to realise it more clearly, and to enter more thoroughly into the details and sequence of the Gospel narratives’.⁹⁴ The commission offered a generous payment for the completed work and expenses for an excursion to the Holy Land, the latter detail suggesting that the publishers were keen to replicate the immense success enjoyed by Renan’s Life, with its sustained focus on Christ’s homeland. Choosing Farrar was an astute move. Though by no means a prominent theologian, Farrar’s posts as Chaplain to the Queen and Headmaster of Marlborough College ensured that his name was familiar to the reading public; moreover, as the author of edifying novels about public school life, he had the credentials to appeal to a more traditional readership.⁹⁵ Farrar was doubtless aware of the challenge involved in writing a saleable Life of Jesus at a time when the genre seemed to be reaching the height of its popularity and responded to it with great ingenuity. Eager to appeal to the whole spectrum of readers, he made clear in his Preface that he was writing both for ‘the simple and unlearned’ and the ‘professed theologian’;⁹⁶ and while he insists that his Life is ‘unconditionally the work of a believer’, he is also keen to stress that it will not prove ‘wholly valueless to any honest doubter who reads it in a candid and uncontemptuous spirit’.⁹⁷ To carry out his ambitious intentions, Farrar employs diverse methods of interpreting and presenting the Scriptures, calling upon the everyday logic of the rationalist, the linguistic skills of the translator, and the literary flair of earlier writers to portray his essentially orthodox vision. At the same time, he provides copious footnotes and lists of authorities to demonstrate his knowledge of the Higher Criticism, making regular reference to Jewish Scripture and religious practice.

Farrar’s Life of Christ enjoyed instant success. The author’s son noted in his 1905 biography of his father that:

Twelve editions, at the rate of one a month, were exhausted in the first year of its publication. Since its first appearance the work has gone through thirty editions in England alone, has been ‘pirated’ in America, and has been translated into almost every European language, including two independent translations into Russian, and even into Japanese. ⁹⁸
Its popularity was no doubt aided by generally laudatory reviews which admired its deft combination of scholarship and piety; approval was even expressed by the Roman Catholic journal, the Month, which declared that ‘there is more learning about it than about the pretentious flippancy of Rénan [sic]’.⁹⁹ It was a comparison that would have afforded Farrar a great deal of satisfaction, given his eagerness to counter the pervasive influence of Renan’s Life. In the Preface to the Life of Christ he warns the reader not to expect ‘brilliant combinations of mythic cloud tinged by the sunset imagination of some decadent belief’, an obvious jibe at Renan’s literary methods.¹⁰⁰ Yet Farrar’s book offers the reader a prose style every bit as vivid and effusive as Renan’s, an irony underscored by a significant number of reviewers. The Athenaeum was one of the most severe critics of Farrar’s use of language; judging the rhetoric of The Life of Christ ‘excessive and artificial, often far-fetched and fanciful’, it envisaged a reader who, ‘dazzled with the gaudy glitter, sighs for repose.’ ¹⁰¹ Farrar’s son recorded how ‘the terms “florid” and “exuberant” have been recorded ad nauseam’ in response to The Life of Christ, and this deriding of the aesthetics of the work seemed to stick in the critical consciousness.¹⁰² Two decades on, in a review of Wilson Barrett’s melodramatic Early Christian novel, The Sign of the Cross, the critic comments that he had ‘long feared that someone might arise who would oust the Dean from his proud pre-eminence in classical romance’.¹⁰³ Such criticism recalled that directed towards Renan, whose writing had also been ridiculed for its romantic excesses, and Farrar was doubtless stung by the coincidence. In a letter to Macmillan’s Magazine, written a year after the publication of his Life, Farrar defends himself against those reviewers who had accused him of depicting the crucifixion in a gratuitously gruesome manner, insisting that he had no intention ‘to add, or to invent, one touch or colour of pain or dreadfulness’.¹⁰⁴ Indeed, throughout the Life of Christ, Farrar vents his disapproval of all types of sensational writing associated with the Scriptures, accusing the authors of the Apocryphal Gospels of rendering Christ’s boyhood ‘portentous, terror-striking, unnatural, repulsive’ in their over-imaginative writings.¹⁰⁵

Notwithstanding Farrar’s avowed distaste for stylistic over-indulgence, the popularity of The Life of Christ was due largely to its author’s manipulation of imaginative detail and dramatic language. If anyone deserved the epithet ‘the English Renan’, it was Farrar, and not only for his literary style. While the orthodox Englishman differed radically from the Frenchman in his essential view of Jesus, he followed him in portraying a man who is sweet-natured, a uniquely gifted storyteller, and a lover of nature. Making extensive use of Renan’s habit of imaginative conjecture, Farrar’s portrait of Christ is filled with the kind of quotidian detail to be found in the realist novel. The reader is told of Jesus’s physical appearance and his eating and sleeping habits; his hair ‘the colour of wine, is parted in the middle of his forehead, and flows down over the neck’ and his skin is ‘of a more Hellenic type than the weather-bronzed and olive-tinted faces of…His Apostles’ ¹⁰⁶; his diet is plain but healthy, consisting of ‘bread of the coarsest quality, fish caught in the lake…and sometimes a piece of honeycomb’ ¹⁰⁷; and he has ‘the blessing of ready sleep’.¹⁰⁸ Yet however much Farrar’s characterization of Jesus might resemble Renan’s in certain respects, he was mindful that his Christ could not be accused of the effeminacy so frequently identified in the French portrait.¹⁰⁹ In a manner anticipating the muscular Christianity of Thomas Hughes, Farrar interprets Jesus’s refusing of an opiate to ease his physical suffering on the cross, as a sign of his masculinity, an act of ‘sublimest heroism’;¹¹⁰ and, where the Fourth Gospel simply reports that ‘Jesus wept’ (11:35) at the death of Lazarus, Farrar qualifies the phrase by adding that his tears were ‘silent’, indicating the emotional restraint expected of the Victorian male.¹¹¹ As with his methods of characterization, Farrar’s editing and selection of his source material suggest the instinct of the popular novelist. Though departing from some of his more evangelical predecessors in admitting, in the Preface to The Life of Christ, that a convincing harmony of the Gospels is both impossible and undesirable, he nevertheless follows Renan in selecting and shaping his source materials to ensure maximum dramatic impact. Matthew’s account of Pontius Pilate is chosen for the intriguing detail of his wife’s dream; John’s narration of the anointing of Christ’s feet with costly ointment is chosen over those of the Synoptists as it features Mary, sister of Lazarus, already a distinctive character in the story, rather than the anonymous women of the other three versions. In other instances, Farrar conflates all four texts: for example, bringing together all the women said to be at the foot of Christ’s cross in his re-imagining of the crucifixion scene.¹¹²

Farrar may well have regarded his reshaping of the New Testament narratives as a means of making up for the artistic shortcomings of their original authors. He explains to the reader that the rude simplicity of the Gospel accounts is in itself proof of their integrity and that men who ‘were constantly taking His [Christ’s] figurative expressions literally, and His literal expressions metaphorically’ could hardly have been expected to produce sophisticated biographies of their Saviour.¹¹³ Indeed, in his letter to Macmillan’s Magazine, he attests that Lives such as his are needed to add life and energy to the spare Gospel accounts of Christ’s life ‘often narrated without clear notes of time and place’.¹¹⁴ And, while insisting that New Testament stories such as that of the woman taken in adultery - a great favourite of the Victorians - ‘transcend[s] all power of human imagination’, he has no qualms about embellishing their often stark outlines.¹¹⁵ Nowhere is this more apparent than in his retelling of the Passion narratives:

Around the brows of Jesus, in wanton mimicry of the Emperor’s laurel, they twisted a green wreath of thorny leaves; in His tied and trembling hands they placed a reed for sceptre; from His torn and bleeding shoulders they stripped the white robe with which Herod had mocked Him - which must now have been all soaked with blood - and flung on Him an old scarlet paludament -some cast-off war cloak, with its purple laticlave, from the Praetorian wardrobe. This, with feigned solemnity, they buckled over His right shoulder, with its glittering fibula;¹¹⁶
In this description of the scourged Christ, Farrar’s highly-wrought prose serves to heighten the drama of the ordeal. The anaphoric structure of the lengthy sentence detailing the indignities being inflicted on the victim, along with the two parentheses, serve to emphasize Christ’s dignified stillness before the mocking gaze of the spectators; and in the contrastingly short sentence which follows, the adjective ‘glittering’ is shocking in its incongruous modification of an open wound. A few pages on, the depiction of the actual crucifixion is as grisly and explicit as any to be found in medieval miracle plays:¹¹⁷

His arms were stretched along the cross-beams; and at the centre of the open palms, first of the right, then of the left hand, the point of a huge iron nail was placed, which, by the blow of a mallet, was driven home into the wood, crushing with excruciating pain, all the fine nerves and muscles of the hands through which they were driven. Then the legs were drawn down at full length; and through either foot separately, or possibly through both together as they were placed one over the other, another huge nail tore its way through the quivering and bleeding flesh.¹¹⁸

Perhaps anticipating the criticism this particular passage would receive in the journals of the day, Farrar adds a footnote justifying the violence of the description: ‘I write thus because the familiarity of oft-repeated words prevents us from realising what crucifixion really was, and because it seems well that we should realise this.’ ¹¹⁹ Though only the Fourth Gospel suggests that Jesus was nailed to the cross, Farrar is content to ignore the agreement of all three Synoptic accounts for the sake of this arresting image of the torture and penetration of the sacred body.¹²⁰ And Farrar’s fascination with the ‘quivering flesh’ of Christ continues to reveal itself in his description of the effects of crucifixion. Though, ostensibly, he itemises the physical torments of crucifixion victims in general, the reader is encouraged to imagine them as peculiar to the suffering Christ. The author paints in words an image in every way as brutal as that depicted in the early sixteenth-century painting by Mathias Grünewald of a torn and bleeding Man of Sorrows:

The unnatural position made every movement painful; the lacerated veins and crushed tendons throbbed with incessant anguish; the wounds, inflamed by exposure, gradually gangrened; the arteries - especially of the head and stomach - became swollen and oppressed with surcharged blood.¹²¹

Farrar’s writing here sensationalizes pain, the dense nature of the sentence serving to enmesh the reader in its recounting of every physical detail.

Not all of Farrar’s methods of engaging his reader are so dramatic. As a professedly devout work, Farrar’s Life was writing back to heterodox biographies, the majority of which hailed from the Continent. Producing the definitive Life of Jesus was increasingly a matter of national pride, and Farrar’s liberal sprinkling of lines from the work of British poets, past and present, throughout his work, imbues it with a strong sense of national identity.¹²² Quotations, some indirect, some direct, are placed within the text, often to reinforce a moral truth or to provide an apt parallel to a thought or deed of Jesus; others form the epigraphs which subscribe each chapter heading. Poets from previous centuries, such as Milton and Pope, share equal space with contemporary poets such as Browning, Clough and Tennyson. But it is Shakespeare who takes pride of place. Speeches from the major tragedies, and even a few of the comedies, find their way into almost every strand of the narrative. In some instances, the sources of these citations are indicated; in others, the playwright’s words appear in quotation marks, unaccompanied by the title of the play from which they derive, suggesting that the implied reader is well educated and literary.¹²³ This omnipresence of a writer who had been regarded for over a century as emblematic of Englishness lends Farrar’s Life of Christ a strong national identity, distinguishing it clearly from its Gallic predecessor.

As the best-selling English Life of Jesus, Farrar’s work formed the model for the majority of orthodox studies of Christ up to the close of the century. And there were plenty of them. Farrar had proved beyond any doubt that the public appetite for such works was far from sated, and numerous writers continued to exploit the genre. However, only those capable of emulating Farrar’s artful fusion of orthodoxy and popular appeal attracted any significant readership. Two such were Cunningham Geikie and Alfred Edersheim, both of whom wrote lengthy studies of Jesus which attracted a wide readership. The first of these to be published, Geikie’s The Life and Words of Christ (1877), replicates Farrar’s Life in its evocation of Palestinian landscape, politics, religious ritual and family life, and its listing of theological authorities. It also follows Farrar in connecting Jesus with a literary elite. Geikie insists that ‘We all know how lowly a reverence is paid to Him in passage after passage by Shakespere [sic], the greatest intellect known’, and extends the list of Christ’s admirers to include Europeans such as Goethe and Rousseau.¹²⁴ And though by no means as extravagant in its style as Farrar’s Life, it succeeds in rewriting the Gospel stories in a manner guaranteed to appeal more to the reader of historical romance than the scholar. Published six years after Geikie’s Life, Alfred Edersheim’s The Life and Times of Jesus the Messiah promised to veer somewhat from Farrar’s model in its foregrounding of Judaic cultural, social and religious customs.¹²⁵ Yet, despite this change of emphasis and the author’s prefatory denial of ‘any pretence…to write a “Life of Christ” in the strict sense’,¹²⁶ it conforms in most senses to the pattern of its forerunner, not least in its evocative prose, tense shifts, and liberal use of conjecture, evident in its retelling of the anointing of Christ:

As she stood behind Him at His Feet, reverently bending, a shower of tears, like sudden, quick summer-rain, that refreshes air and earth, ‘bedewed’ His Feet. As if surprised, or else afraid to awaken His attention or defile Him by her tears, she quickly wiped them away with the long tresses of her hair that had fallen down and touched Him…And, now that her faith has grown bold in His Presence, she is continuing to kiss those Feet which brought to her the ‘good tidings of peace’ and to anoint them out of the alabastron round her neck.¹²⁷

While Edersheim dismissed Renan’s Life of Jesus as ‘frivolous and fantastic’, he, like Farrar, owed its author a considerable debt of gratitude for providing a highly successful stylistic model.¹²⁸
Alternative Lives of Christ

The enormous success of Farrar’s Life of Christ was a cause for much celebration for those orthodox Christians who regarded it as a powerful antidote to Renan’s version. Yet, by the late 1870s, there were plenty of heterodox alternatives in print. Eminently ripe for parody, the Lives of Jesus genre underwent scabrous re-workings by Secularists such as G. W. Foote, whose vulgarizations of the Bible circulated throughout the 1880s.¹²⁹ One typical example, The Comic Life of Christ, is described in Mrs Humphry Ward’s novel, Robert Elsmere: ‘It contained a caricature of the Crucifixion, the scroll emanating from Mary Magdalene’s mouth, in particular, containing obscenities which cannot be quoted here.’¹³⁰ Continental counterparts of these bawdy treatments of the New Testament were also in circulation, those by the French writer, Léo Taxil, proving particularly popular.¹³¹ His Vie de Jésus, first published in 1882, is a crude parody of French Lives of Christ, featuring lewd woodcuts accompanied by a salacious prose narrative.¹³² In his novel Thyrza (1887), George Gissing draws attention to such crude traducing of the Scriptures through a character’s account of a ten-year-old girl being sent a Biblical burlesque by her atheist working-class father, compelling the reader to consider the effects of Biblical burlesques on the young and impressionable.¹³³ For those unorthodox readers who found such material blatant and vulgar, there were other types of ‘alternative’ Lives of Jesus on offer. Nicolas Notovitch’s The Unknown Life of Christ, translated into English from the French in 1895, provided an intriguing, if entirely spurious, account of Jesus’s life between the ages of fifteen and thirty.¹³⁴ And the not insignificant number of readers fascinated by Spiritualism could discover ‘new’ details about the life of Jesus through the mediumship of Levi Dowling, recorded in the Aquarian Gospel of Jesus the Christ.¹³⁵

By the end of the nineteenth century, interest in the historical Jesus, and the innumerable Lives which sprang from it, were in a steady decline. Farrar’s The Life of Lives, Further Studies in the Life of Christ, published in 1900, did not sell well, despite its author’s established reputation, and it must have been clear to any writers still intent on treating Christ as their main subject, that they would need to search out new strategies for so doing.¹³⁶ Alfred E. Garvie, for example, remarks wearily in the Preface to his Studies in the Inner Life of Jesus (1907) that ‘enough is being written about the scenery, the upholstery and drapery of the life of Jesus’, and chooses instead - as his title announces - to concentrate on the psychology of his subject.¹³⁷ Likewise, in The Galilean (1892), the Unitarian author, Walter Lloyd, aims ‘rather to draw a portrait than to write a history, and, by clearing away the accumulations of centuries to see what manner of man Jesus of Nazareth was.’¹³⁸ This shift in emphasis had already been identified by the Scottish Free Church pastor, James Stalker, in an article entitled ‘Our present knowledge of the life of Christ’, published in the Contemporary Review at the turn of the century.¹³⁹ Stalker, himself the author of a brief and uncontroversial Life of Jesus, remarked on how ‘study is moving on from the story of Jesus to His mind’.¹⁴⁰ But if approaches to Jesus were changing, interest in him as a person persisted well into the new century. The freethinker and scourge of the established churches, Joseph McCabe, might have claimed that ‘Christ is dissolving year by year’, but there were still many who laboured to hold his image firmly in place.¹⁴¹ As late as 1917, T. R. Glover’s work, The Jesus of History, would continue the tradition of liberal Lives of Jesus, with its clear, readable prose and its appended ‘Suggestions for Study Circle Discussions’. Outlined in this appendix are questions such as ‘Was Jesus fond of life and Nature?’, ‘Had Jesus a sense of humour?’, and ‘What do you imagine Jesus looked like?’, answers to which could have been found by looking back to the works of Farrar et al.¹⁴²

In The Quest of the Historical Jesus, Schweitzer comes to the conclusion that ‘There is nothing more negative than the result of the critical study of the Life of Jesus’ and that ‘the historical Jesus will be to our time a stranger and an enigma’.¹⁴³ It is a somewhat bleak, if ultimately judicious, appraisal of the several decades spent attempting to draw the figure of Christ closer to the popular mind. Rather than providing a more realistic portrayal of Jesus, attempts to fill in what James Stalker termed the ‘folds and wrinkles’ left by the Evangelists’ testimonies had developed into a form of Biblical fiction, with only the authors’ intentions and critical paraphernalia anchoring the work within the bounds of non-fiction.¹⁴⁴ In this respect, Lives of Jesus, whatever their theological shortcomings, loosened ethical restraints on the imaginative treatment of the Gospel narratives, preparing the ground for entirely fictional representations of Christ.

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CHAPTER TWO