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

Letters from George Moore to Dujardin, p. 104.

651 Letters of George Moore, With an Introduction by John Eglinton, p. 24.

652 Such speculations concerning the harsher elements of Jesus’s personality are, of course, supportable from the New Testament texts; see, for example, Matthew (17:17) and Luke (9:41) where Jesus castigates the assembled crowd for being ‘a faithless and perverse generation’.

653 Ernest Renan, The Life of Jesus, pp. 204, 226.

654 Letters of George Moore, With an Introduction by John Eglinton, p. 77.

655 Christ’s words from the cross (Matthew 27:46; Mark 15:34) echo the opening verse of Psalm 22. Some commentators have speculated that the rest of the psalm was lost amid the noise and chaos of the crucifixion scene, others that the early readers of the Gospels would have understood Christ’s words in terms of a Jewish midrash, where only the first part is quoted and the rest is allowed to go unspoken. Orthodox readers have explained Christ’s anguish as the climax of his abandonment by his countrymen, his disciples, and the crucifixion crowd, the supreme moment of pain before God’s final vindication.

656 Responding to a review of The Brook Kerith, Moore wrote: ‘Jesus’s reservation was part of the psychology of the anecdote, and it is with great care that I present him not only being unable to speak of his confusion and the idea that led up to it, but unable even to think of them’. See The Westminster Gazette, 15 September 1916, 1-2, p. 2.

657 While there is no good reason to suppose that Moore was acquainted first-hand with Freud’s writings, he would doubtless have been aware of their existence through the discussions of his contemporaries, or the newspapers and journals of the day.

658 The Book of Daniel came under increasing scrutiny as the nineteenth century wore on. Of particular interest was the relationship of Daniel’s vision of ‘one like a son of man’ (Daniel 7:13) to Christ himself.

659 Letters of George Moore, With an Introduction by John Eglinton, p. 23.

660 Albert Schweitzer, The Quest of the Historical Jesus, p. 275.

661 Moore had demonstrated his interest in Schopenhauer in a number of his works, most notably A Mere Accident (1887) and Mike Fletcher (1889). For a discussion of the influence of Schopenhauer on Moore’s fiction see Michael W. Brooks, ‘George Moore, Schopenhauer, and the origins of The Brook Kerith’, English Literature in Transition 1880-1920, 12 (November 1969), 21-31.

662 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. 268.

663 Arthur Lillie, The Influence of Buddhism on Primitive Christianity (London: Swan Sonnenschein & Co., 1893), p. v.

664 Quoted in Joseph Hone, The Life of George Moore (London: Victor Gollancz, 1936), pp. 328-9.

665 Ibid., p. 329.

666 Ibid., p. 329.

667 Ernest Renan, The Apostles, trans. unknown (London: Trübner & Co., 1869), p. 178.

668 The Brook Kerith (Edinburgh: T. Werner Laurie, 1921), p. xiv.

669 W. B. Yeats, Dramatis Personae, Autobiographies, (London: Macmillan, 1955), p. 438.

670 Letters of George Moore, With an Introduction by John Eglinton, p. 75.

671 George Moore, Celibate Lives (Leipzig: Bernhard Tauchnitz, 1927), p. 5.

672 Letters of George Moore, With an Introduction by John Eglinton, p. 25.

673 Ibid., p. 25. Like Moore, Joseph Jacobs provides a different version of this most famous of Christ’s proverbial expressions in As Others Saw Him (London: William Heinemann, 1895), p. 73. However, in the notes to a later American edition to the work, Jacobs points out that his variant (‘It is easier for an elephant to go through a needle’s eye…’) is to be found in the Talmud. See Jesus: As Others Saw Him (New York: Bernard G. Richards Co., 1925), p. 73.

674 C. K. Shorter, ‘A Literary Letter: Mr George Moore’s Romance of Syria’, Sphere, 66, 9 September 1916, p. 238.

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

676 One reviewer observed how the ferryman transporting Joseph appeared ‘to converse in the Somerset dialect’. Indeed, in The Brook Kerith, the phrasing of the boatman’s warning to his passenger that ‘there be a bit of a walk before thee’ (89) seems to invite such an opinion. See The Nation, 19, 23 September 1916, 800-801, p. 800.

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

678 W. R. Rodgers, Irish Literary Portraits, p. 92.

679 On Parnassus, pp. 330-1. Moore seems to have in mind here the traditional link between the Bible and Shakespeare, a link frequently made by writers of liberal Lives of Jesus.

680 Geraint Goodwin, Conversations with George Moore (London: Ernest Benn, 1929), p. 148.

681 In Conversations in Ebury Street Moore protests that ‘Yeats, whose business it is to set people on the wrong track, warned me against the second person singular, and…I tried to stint myself to the miserable you, which is not a word but a letter of the alphabet, at least in sound; but to weed out the yous means something more than grammatical changes; every sentence has to be recast’. See Conversations in Ebury Street (London: William Heinemann, 1924), p. 25.

682 W. B. Yeats, Dramatis Personae, Autobiographies, p. 437.

683 Moore seemed keen to pre-empt such a parallel, writing in a letter to Eglinton that ‘Joseph is very nice…despite his aversion from women, an aversion which his creator does not share’. (Letters of George Moore, With an Introduction by John Eglinton, p. 27). This reluctance to be associated with his own creation is particularly interesting in the light of n54 above.

684 The Nation, 19, 23 September 1916, p. 800.

685 George Moore on Parnassus, p. 289.

686 Letters of George Moore, With an Introduction by John Eglinton, p. 52. Moore persisted in his conviction that his Jesus and Paul scenario was Unitarian in sentiment, telling Granville-Barker that The Apostle ‘may be acted in America; America is full of unitarians [sic]’. See Conversations in Ebury Street, p. 227.

687 David Friedrich Strauss, A New Life of Jesus, Authorized Translation, 2 vols (London: Williams and Norgate, 1865), I, p. viii.

688 S. Schechter, ‘As Others Saw Him’, Studies in Judaism, 3^rd Series (Philadelphia: The Jewish Publication Society of America, 1924); this article was first published in the Jewish Chronicle, May 10-17, 1895.

689 Robert Buchanan, ‘Prose Note’, The Ballad of Mary the Mother (London: Robert Buchanan, 1897), p. 149.

690 Richard Ellmann, Golden Codgers: Biographical Speculations (New York and London: Oxford University Press, 1973), p. 118.

691 Frank Kermode, The Sense of an Ending: Studies in the Theory of Fiction with a New Epilogue (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000), p. 39.

692 Ernest Renan, Studies of Religious History, trans. by Henry F. Gibbons (London: William Heinemann, 1893), pp. 118-9.

693 Robert Graves, Occupation Writer (London: Cassell & Co., 1951), p. 171. Grave’s contribution to the New Testament fiction, King Jesus (London: Cassell & Co., 1946), remains one of the few works of the genre to successfully combine scholarship and imagination.

694 For a discussion of the Bible and broadcasting see Angela Tilby’s article, ‘The Bible and Television’, and Kenneth Wolfe’s ‘The Bible and Broadcasting’, both published in Using the Bible Today: Contemporary Interpretations of Scripture, ed. by Dan Cohn-Sherbok (London: Bellew Publishing, 1991).

695 See The Guardian, 11 January 2005, p. 8.

696 ‘Olivia at the Lyceum’ (dramatic review), 30 May 1885, reprinted in The Complete Works of Oscar Wilde, p. 955.

697 A case in point is D. H. Lawrence’s short story ‘The Escaped Cock’ (1929) which takes the figure of Christ away from his Biblical context and into the realms of Frazerian myth.