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

Joseph Jacobs’s As Others Saw Him (1895): fictionalizing the Jewish Jesus
The fictionalizing of the Gospel records was to undergo another notable development before the nineteenth century was out in the form of Joseph Jacobs’s As Others Saw Him: A Retrospect A. D. 54. At first glance, As Others Saw Him seems to follow Abbott’s novel in its use of the autobiographical narrator and its presentation of key Gospel episodes in their first-century religious context. Furthermore, Jacobs, like Abbott, seems to insist on the semi-fictional nature of the work in his provision of sporadic footnotes to identify the provenance of some of Christ’s non-canonical sayings. Yet whereas Philochristus is written from the viewpoint of a convert to Christianity, As Others Saw Him is told from the perspective of one who remains unconvinced by Jesus’s teachings. The ‘other’ of Jacobs’s novel is Meshullam Ben Zadok, a Jewish scribe, who recounts his witness of Christ and his ministry to a fictional addressee, Aglaphonos, a Greek physician. Though positioned as ‘other’ in relation to the work’s implied Christian reader, as a former member of the Sanhedrin, and one of those who voted for Christ’s execution, Meshullam is very much part of the community he describes. While Abbott’s Philochristus recounts his youthful quest for religious truth, and his eventual conversion to Christianity, Jacobs’s Meshullam never wavers from his strict observance of the Judaic law, his use of the plural possessive pronoun throughout the novel emphasizing his unswerving adherence to ‘our custom’, ‘our nation’ and ‘our way of thinking’. Telling his story at a time when Paul’s missionary activities were beginning to make an impact, the novel’s narrator is compelled to counter the apostle’s good news of the resurrection with an alternative version of Jesus’s life, ministry and ‘shameful death’.²¹⁰

As Others Saw Him is Jacobs’s only work of fiction in a writing career encompassing the disciplines of history, literature and science.²¹¹ A folklorist of some renown, he published collections of English, Celtic and Indian fairytales, and held the post of Honorary Secretary of the International Folklore Council. His literary endeavours included editing works by authors such as Goldsmith, Austen and Thackeray, and publishing studies of Tennyson, Browning and George Eliot. But it was in the field of Jewish history and culture that Jacobs was best known. As President of the Jewish Historical Society of England, editor of the Jewish Year Book, and revising editor of the Jewish Encyclopaedia, Jacobs made an immense contribution to Jewish studies. His work in this area included sociological and anthropological research into the Jewish race, the recovery of documents relating to Spanish Jewry, and a letter-campaign in The Times, protesting against the persecution of Jews in Russia.²¹² Placed in the context of Jacobs’s prolific range of publications, there has been a tendency for As Others Saw Him to be overlooked; it is scarcely mentioned by his obituarists, and Anne J. Kershen’s entry on Jacobs in the Oxford Dictionary of National Biography goes no further than listing it without comment.²¹³ But it is the work which, according to the Jewish scholar, Israel Abrahams, Jacobs considered to be his finest composition.²¹⁴ Uniting as it does his interests in literature, and Jewish religious and cultural history, it is clear why the author might have regarded it as a significant achievement.

Jacobs’s interest in the depiction of the Jew in fiction is evident as early as 1877, when he published an impassioned defence of George Eliot’s Daniel Deronda in Macmillan’s Magazine. In this, Jacobs attributes the hostility of reviewers to the Jewish elements of the novel to a ‘lack of sympathy and want of knowledge on the part of the critics’, applauding the character of Mordecai as ‘the finest representative of [his] race and religion in all literature’.²¹⁵ In the year following the publication of As Others Saw Him, Jacobs noted the impact of Daniel Deronda on his own work:

When it appeared I was just at that stage in the intellectual life of every Jew…when he emerges from the Ghetto, both social and intellectual, in which he was brought up…George Eliot’s influence on me counterbalanced that of Spinoza, by directing my attention, henceforth, to the historic development of Judaism.²¹⁶
Eliot’s success in presenting an authentic portrait of Judaism to the English may well have convinced Jacobs that fiction was one way to bridge the gap in understanding between Christian and Jew. In the ‘Afterwards’ of an American edition of As Others Saw Him, Jacobs explains how his novel ‘may be regarded as a sort of Apologia of the Jewish people for their so-called “rejection” of Jesus’, a statement which clearly designates the addressee as Christian.²¹⁷ Indeed, the very title of the work seems to indicate that it is mainly intended for non-Jews: the British Christian majority, rather than the Semitic ‘others’. Jacobs’s choice of form also seems aimed at the type of Christian reader accustomed to Lives of Jesus and novels set in the times of the Early Church. Both these genres and their authors were familiar to Jacobs: he was acquainted with J. R. Seeley, attending some of his courses while at Cambridge, and later writing an appraisal of Ecce Homo;²¹⁸ and it is highly probable that he knew Seeley’s friend and co-author, Edwin A. Abbott, who worked and socialized in the same North West London circles as he did.²¹⁹ In choosing the Early Christian novel over the biography to present the Jewish Jesus, Jacobs is true to his conviction that ‘the highest truth can only be expressed in art’ and to his belief that the current tendency of the public was to ‘fly for relaxation to the Something-other-than-the-Here-and-Now’.²²⁰

Jacobs’s combining of a familiar form of religious fiction with a relatively unfamiliar perspective lends the work a radical edge, making it read in places like a counterblast to a great number of the Lives of Jesus which antedated it. Jacobs seems determined to break down the anti-Semitic dichotomy built up in Christian Lives of Jesus whereby Christ is sweet-natured and unfeasibly gentile in appearance and attitude, and the Jews are untrustworthy, cruel and hook-nosed. Judging these distortions to have originated with the Gospel records, Jacobs aims to set the record straight. The Christian stereotyping of the Jewish nation as bloodthirsty and vengeful, for example, is challenged throughout the novel. Relating Jesus’s encounter with the woman taken in adultery to his Greek correspondent, Meshullam presents a very different version of events from that found in John. He explains that ‘for a long time among us there has been an increasing horror of inflicting the death penalty’ (60-1), adding that ‘No Jewish woman in my time has been stoned as the Law commands for this sin’(61); similarly, the Christianized figure of a merciful Pontius Pilate, forced into killing Christ by a Jewish mob demanding blood, is countered by Meshullam’s vivid memory of the Roman procurator’s slaying ‘of wanton cruelty, certain Galileans, even while they were making sacrifices’(172) (a detail mentioned only briefly in the Gospel of Luke); and it is the Sanhedrin’s fear of the consequences of Pilate’s wrath should Jesus lead an abortive uprising against the Romans, which prompts them to press for the rebel’s arraignment.²²¹ The story of the villainous Barabbas, released in preference to the sinless Jesus, is also given an alternative slant in Jacobs’s retelling. From Meshullam’s point of view, the choice is not an example of the fickleness of the Jewish mob, but one which is entirely rational:

And shortly afterwards there came forward the man Jesus Bar Abbas of Jerusalem…Now he had been very popular among the folk, and had lost his liberty in a rising against the Romans…And there stood the two Jesuses - the one that had risen against the Romans, and the one that had told the people they should pay tribute to their Roman lords. (194)
Not only does Jacobs invite readers to reconsider the events of the New Testament from a Judaic perspective, he also immerses them fully in the everyday life of the Jew. The feast at the house of one of the leading Pharisees is captured in precise detail from the start of the meal when the host ‘saw that each of the guests had a piece of bread dipped in salt’ (97), to the ‘last course of salted olives, lettuces, and radishes’ (98). In addition to this domestic verisimilitude, Jacobs endeavours to educate the Christian reader in first-century Judaic thought and practice, and in so doing, correct some of the distortions of the four-fold Gospel. The story of the Good Samaritan, for example, becomes the story of the Good Israelite, a shift in emphasis which corrects the Christian assumption that the moral centre of Christ’s parables could never be found in orthodox Jewry. In supplementary notes to an American edition of the work Jacobs explains:

Jewish society was divided into three castes, Priests, Levites, and the ordinary Israelites, and the distinction is kept up even to the present day…There would be no point in referring to two of the castes if they were not to be contrasted with the third, the ordinary Israelite of the time. The point of the parable is against the sacerdotal classes, who were indeed Jesus’ chief opponents and ultimately brought about his execution.²²²

Jacobs also tempers the Evangelists’ depiction of the Pharisees as religious pedants determined to destroy any who stand to oppose them. Meshullam insists that ‘Jesus had seemed to incline more to the sect of the Pharisees than to any other section of the house of Israel’ and, while he accepts that some of them were undoubtedly hypocritical, asks ‘of what man can it be said that all his acts and words go together?’(148). ²²³

Given the complexity of Jewish attitudes regarding the historical Jesus and how he should be positioned within Judaism, Jacobs’s novel was quite a formidable undertaking. Talmudic literature had relatively little to offer in the way of description or opinion about Jesus, and polemical writings such as the Toledat Jeshu, which emerged in the Middle Ages as a defence against Christian anti-Semitism, presented far too harsh and scurrilous a view of the subject for it to form the basis of a work intended to engage both Jews and Christians.²²⁴ However, Jacobs’s choice of the fictional method enabled him to weave together various strands of Christian and Jewish literature with his own surmises, and to steer a course mid-way between the two belief systems. A case in point is the dramatic opening of the story, where Jacobs blends Gospel narrative and elements of Jewish folklore together with his own imaginative insights. After scourging the money-lenders of the Temple, an irate Jesus is hounded by a crowd shouting ‘“Mamzer! Mamzer!” which…signifieth one born out of wedlock’(4), an incident which echoes the Toledot Jeshu, where Christ is presented as a man stigmatised by his status as a bastard.²²⁵ Readers of the Secularist press may have encountered this source text in a translation edited by G. M. Foote and J. M. Wheeler, under the title The Jewish Life of Jesus, published with the intention of impugning the veracity of the Gospels.²²⁶ But for those unfamiliar with the notion of Jesus as a figure reviled for the sexual improprieties of his parents, Jacobs’s introduction to his subject must have proved disquieting; as one reviewer pointed out ‘On the birth of Jesus he is compelled to write in a manner which, though indirect, is perfectly frank, even at the risk of wounding the religious susceptibilities of most of his readers at the very outset’.²²⁷ As the novel unfolds, the ‘susceptible’ reader encounters several other threats to his equilibrium. Jesus is not here an innocent victim of a malign and vengeful Jewish community, but a man entirely responsible for what Meshullam terms a ‘sublime suicide’ (213). From the outset, Meshullam makes clear that Jesus does not behave in a manner likely to endear him to his fellow Jews. Haughty, and capable of an anger which leaves ‘the vein throbbing on his left temple’ (99), he speaks harshly to all but his disciples. In the final week of his life, his ‘stubborn conduct’(183) at the trial, and his refusal ‘with words of menace, to take the draught of myrrh and wine which the ladies of Jerusalem…prepare for all men condemned to capital punishment’(198), cause the people to lose all sympathy for him. Nor is he any more conciliatory towards his own relatives. Where Christian Lives of Jesus had presented a variety of arguments to exonerate Jesus from the charge of being unaffectionate towards his family, Meshullam attempts no such defence, stating simply that he has ‘heard things told of this Jesus which seem to show some harshness in his treatment of them, and even of his mother’(18).

Jacobs’s task of portraying an authentically Jewish Jesus to correct the Europeanized image which had evolved over centuries of Christianity required more than a revision of his subject’s character. If non-Jewish readers were to appreciate the complexities of why Jesus was put to death, an educated and knowledgeable narrator was required. As a member of the Sanhedrin, Meshullam has the rank and background to enable him to present an overview of the community in which Christ moved, unlike the disciples, whose vision of their leader is inevitably restricted by their lack of education and limited experience of the political world. Meshullam is able to articulate the diverse expectations his society had of Jesus:

Most of the lower orders were hoping for a rising against the Romans to be led by this Jesus. Shrewder ones among the Better thought that the man was about to initiate a change in the spiritual government of our people. Some thought he would depose the Sadducees, and place the Pharisees in their stead. Others feared that he would carry into practice the ideals of the Ebionim, and raise the Poor against the Rich. Others said, “Why did he not enter by the gate of the Essenes, for he holdeth with them?”(126-7)
With such conflicting interpretations of Jesus and his role, the novel suggests, it was inevitable that a great number of his followers would be disappointed and would refuse to take his part against the authorities when he was eventually brought to trial. Showing a regard for the rhythms of fiction, Jacobs chooses just one event to dramatize the people turning away from Christ: that which culminates in his command to ‘Render to Caesar the things that are Caesar’s’ (159). Here, Jacobs captures the reaction to Jesus’s subtle reasoning by creating a striking contrast between the noisy jubilation of the Jewish crowd as they anticipate an insurrectionary response from a potential rebel leader, and the ‘deep silence of mortification’(160) which falls upon them on hearing what they consider to be a wholly compliant answer. That the reader should identify this episode as the turning point in Christ’s ministry is clear, not only from Meshullam’s evocation of the scene, but also from the illustration of two Roman coins on the front cover of the novel’s first edition, super-inscribed with the quotation ‘They say unto him, “Caesar’s”’. Jacobs continued to insist on the significance of the coin incident in his scholarly writings, commenting in an entry on ‘Jesus of Nazareth’ in the Jewish Encyclopaedia: ‘It is only this incident which accounts historically for the contrast between the acclamations of Palm Sunday and the repudiation on the succeeding Friday.’²²⁸ Unfolding the New Testament narratives from an entirely Jewish perspective also obliged Jacobs to overturn what was axiomatic for the majority of Christians: that Jesus was divine, and that he brought into the world a religious order which was entirely new. Meshullam describes the profound distaste with which he and his fellow Jews responded to the idea of an incarnate deity:

Alone among the nations of men we refuse to make an image of our God. We alone never regarded any man as God Incarnate. Those among us who have been nearest to the Divine have only claimed to be…messengers of the most High. Yet here stood this man …claiming to be the Very God, and all my Jewish feeling rose against the claim. (113-4)

It is in the light of this idea that Jacobs asks his Christian readers to think themselves into the mind of a Jew: to appreciate blasphemy from the other side of the religious divide. Indeed, one Jewish critic considered this brief moment in the novel to be ‘a healthy sign of a real Other’ in a novel otherwise too disposed to seek out the via media.²²⁹

In spite of its resolutely Jewish standpoint, As Others Saw Him refrains from offending all but the most orthodox Christians. The figure of Christ is represented as charismatic enough to attract a highly educated and intelligent man such as Meshullam, who is thrilled by his voice, and who admits that ‘He looked and spake as a king among men’(110). So strong is the impact of Jesus on the narrator, he experiences visions of him while studying the Torah, and is entranced by his eyes which ‘shone forth as if with tenderness and pity’(90). In allowing his narrator visionary moments, Jacobs is also fictionalizing - and endorsing - one of the commonest explanations for the resurrection: that the appearance of Christ after his crucifixion was no more than an hallucination on the part of his followers, a natural consequence of a heightened emotional state. Yet if Jesus has the power to move Meshullam in the same way that he moved his disciples, he fails, ultimately, to persuade him away from his Judaic roots. The reader experiences one moment of suspense as Meshullam hesitates to vote for the deliverance of Jesus to the authorities, and seems set to follow in the footsteps of Abbott’s Philochristus. But the suspense is short-lived: Meshullam shows no further signs of doubt, and remains confident that Jesus was ‘the best of …Sages’ (209), and no more.

The novel closes with an impassioned apostrophe to Christ:

But Israel is greater than any of his sons, and the day will come when he will know thee as his greatest. And in that day he will say unto thee, ‘My sons have slain thee, O my son, and thou hast shared our guilt’. (215)

It is a conclusion which seems determined at forging a link between Judaism and early Christianity, capturing the prevailing spirit of the work. Some of Jacobs’s Jewish readers were disturbed by such religious tolerance, one of his obituarists observing that ‘at times it…seemed that, in order not to show any Jewish bias, he went too far in his effort to understand the Church and its representations in their treatment of the Jews’.²³⁰ A similar reservation was expressed by a reviewer who regarded Meshullam as coming dangerously close to being a convert to Christianity, and wondered why ‘his editor took the trouble at all to publish his account and did not at once refer us to the narrative of the Gospels, or rather to some modern réchauffée of it, as the “Philo-Christus” or some other semi-rational life of Christ’.²³¹ That Jacobs’s religious fiction appeared much like Abbott’s to its Jewish readers is not entirely unexpected, given that its representation of Jesus is, in most respects, respectful and admiring. Indeed, a review of the novel which appeared in the Athenaeum demonstrated next to no awareness that this anonymous work had been written by anyone other than a believer in Christ. Rather, it considered the author’s depiction of Jesus to be in no sense ‘hostile, or even critical’ and that he was ‘brought the nearer as a pattern and example’.²³² The Athenaeum review confirmed Jacobs’s potential as a novelist, commending his ‘lively imagination’ and his ‘remarkable gift for romance’, and though such praise was a little too generous -Jacobs was a regular contributor to the journal and likely to be looked upon favourably - it was not entirely unmerited. ²³³ Jacobs’s novel presents an impressive amount of erudite material in a relatively unobtrusive fashion, recreating Jesus’s authentic environment in a way which both engages the imagination of the reader and makes clear to him the essential Jewishness of the founder of Christianity. Hitherto, such contextual details had congregated in the dense footnotes of Lives of Jesus, or had been employed by Christian writers (some with but a feeble knowledge of the first-century Judaic world) to lend their work some Middle Eastern charm. In addition, as the Jewish scholar Israel Abrahams points out in his Preface to the novel, ‘The charm of Jacobs’s presentation derives from his admiration of Jesus on the one hand and, on the other hand, his appreciation of what Jesus owed to his Jewish ancestors and contemporaries’, a balance that ensured it received equal amounts of praise and criticism from Jewish and Christian readers.²³⁴ If nothing else, As Others Saw Him attempted, and to a great extent succeeded, in bringing the Old Testament and New Testament faiths a little closer.

Biblical fiction at the close of the century: Marie Corelli’s reign of orthodoxy
Butler, Abbott and Jacobs all endeavoured to present contemporary theological and historical studies of the Gospels through their fiction and, while their literary imaginations and religious motivations may have differed, they were as one in promoting scientific enquiry into the sacred past. Yet, by the close of the century, despite their best efforts, religious fiction was dominated by conventional Christian authors, writing to silence the very ideas that these three writers had endeavoured to publicize. One such writer, Marie Corelli, had even succeeded in bestowing the seal of orthodoxy on fiction dealing directly with the figure of Christ.²³⁵ If the religious temperaments of the authors discussed above were highly complex, Corelli’s was quite the reverse. In an article entitled ‘A Question of Faith’, she outlines the tenets of her belief in terms closely aligned with the Apostles’ Creed:

If you are a Christian, your religion is to believe that Christ was a human Incarnation or Manifestation of an Eternal God, born miraculously of the Virgin Mary; that he was crucified in the flesh as a criminal, died, was buried, rose again from the dead, and ascended to heaven as God and Man in one…Remember, that if you believe this, you believe in the PURELY SUPERNATURAL. [Corelli’s capitalization] ²³⁶

And it is these items of faith which Corelli insists on spelling out in her religious novels. Strongly hostile to all liberal thinking about Christianity and its texts, Corelli pursued her fiction writing with a kind of missionary zeal: her prose would revivify and endorse the Scriptures, which she believed to have been ‘very much mis-read…and even in the Churches…only gabbled’.²³⁷ Furthermore, her work would counteract the ‘constant output of decadent and atheistical literature’ which, she declared in a lecture to the Philosophical Society of Edinburgh, was returning the nation to a state of heresy and ignorance.²³⁸

Corelli’s most significant - and most controversial - contribution to the fight against unbelief was Barabbas: A Dream of the World’s Tragedy. Published in 1893, in three volumes, the novel adapts the Gospel accounts of Christ’s trial, crucifixion and resurrection, filling more than seven hundred pages, a dilation achieved by the addition of numerous extra-Biblical flights of fancy. Corelli takes far more liberties with the sacred texts than had any of the ‘atheistical’ writers she so reviled. The role of the eponymous hero, for example - summed up in a few sentences in the Gospels - is built into one which runs through the entire novel. Unworried by the discrepant accounts of Barabbas in the New Testament, Corelli lists all four of them on the page following the novel’s frontispiece: a defiant declaration of her disregard for theological scepticism. In keeping with the tone of her fiction, she goes on to combine these four Scriptural verses to model a more sensational figure than one single version could provide. Under Corelli’s authorial control, Barabbas becomes at once a robber, a murderer and an insurrectionist, a depth of criminality which renders his eventual rehabilitation through the power of Christ all the more miraculous. Judas, too, undergoes a form of redemption, as Corelli traces his sins back to their female origins, in true Old Testament style. It is Judith and not Judas Iscariot who carries the burden of guilt for Christ’s arrest and crucifixion, having been persuaded by her lover, Caiaphas, to use her brother’s influence to trap the Messianic troublemaker.²³⁹ While other authors of Biblical fiction and drama had settled on Mary Magdalene as the central figure in their invented tales of sexual intrigue, Corelli is keen to keep Christ’s most loyal female disciple clear of any hint of concupiscence.²⁴⁰ Instead, she transfers all sexual wrongdoing to Judith, whose aversion to all that is good and embracing of all that is evil mark her out as the real villain of the piece. The figure of Judith is eroticized throughout the novel, with even her intense hatred of Christ being presented in sexual terms: the reader is told how, as she looks up at Jesus hanging on the cross, ‘her jewelled vest rose and fell lightly with the gradual excited quickening of her breath’.²⁴¹ Such violations of female decorum do not go unpunished.²⁴² In a scene reminiscent of the death of Emily Brontë’s Heathcliff, Judith suffers the horrific sight of her brother’s corpse:

Such fixed impenetrable eyes! - they gave her wondering stare for stare, - and as she stooped down close, and closer yet, her warm red lips went nigh to touch those livid purple ones, which were drawn back tightly just above the teeth in the ghastly semblance of a smile. (II, 172) ²⁴³
Subsequently haunted by a vision of a ‘Cross of light, deep red and dazzling as fire’ (II, 201), Judith falls into a state of madness, singing ‘broken scraps of melody, sweet and solemn and wild’ (III, 129), recalling, somewhat inappropriately, the final hours of Shakespeare’s grief-maddened Ophelia.

Corelli’s portrayal of Jesus contrasts starkly with the novel’s earthy tales of sexual liaisons and endemic venality. If writers of Lives of Jesus had tended to stress Christ’s humanity, Corelli insists on his otherworldliness. Jesus appears as ‘an angelic white Figure’ which shines with ‘a thousand radiations of lightening-like glory!’ (I, 44), seemingly charged with the electric force featured in her first novel, A Romance of Two Worlds, in which ‘God’s Cable is laid between us and His Heaven in the person of Christ’.²⁴⁴ Closer to a Greek god than a mere human, he is likened to ‘a crowned Apollo’ (I, 98) and bears a ‘mighty muscular force as would have befitted a Hercules’ (I, 37-8). And he is no more lifelike in his speech, than he is in his physical appearance. Just as Lew Wallace, American author of Ben Hur: A Tale of the Christ (1880), had been ‘religiously careful that every word He uttered should be a literal quotation from one of His sainted biographers’, so Corelli’s Jesus speaks only in Gospel verses, clearly indicated in italics.²⁴⁵ Such reverential treatment of the hero’s speech contrasts strongly with Corelli’s prodigal use of melodramatic dialogue, resulting in an incongruity of tone which makes Jesus appear, in the words of one critic, like ‘a puppet among raving women and moonstruck men’.²⁴⁶ Yet Corelli does not create a Christ so superhuman that he does not bleed, and her description of the physical torments he endures during his last days on earth is anything but respectful. One episode, built up from John’s brief statement ‘Then Pilate took Jesus and scourged him’ (19:1),²⁴⁷ is recounted in an especially gruesome manner:

…he turned away his eyes and,…lifted the lash. It dropped heavily with a stinging hiss on the tender flesh,- again and again it rose…again and again it fell,…till the bright blood sprang from beneath its iron points and splashed in red drops on the marble pavement. [Corelli’s ellipses] (I, 109)
Here, Corelli’s evocation of ‘tender flesh’, ‘bright blood’ and the undulating rhythm of the prose, suggest a lurid, even erotic fascination with the body of Christ; and the transferred epithet in the subsequent description of how ‘the scourge caught in its cruel prongs a strand of the Captive’s gold-glistening hair’(I, 110), adds a final rousing touch.²⁴⁸ Even the author’s hagiographers struggled to find coherence in the Christ of Barabbas; the co-authors of Marie Corelli: the Writer and the Woman explained in somewhat hesitant prose, how he embodies ‘much of the human - the human that is divinely magnetic, almost, if not quite, indefinable, yet not exclusive, not idolatrous, but simply and gently human.’²⁴⁹ To those less well disposed to Corelli and her fiction, he must have appeared an absurd anachronism, a last-ditch attempt at defying the decades of scholarship which had placed Christ firmly in his Judaic context. Endowed as he is with the ‘bronze-gold’ (I, 53) hair of the European and, according to the novel’s Joseph of Arimathea, born to a non-Jewish mother from Egypt (II, 129), Corelli’s Christ seems to antedate all scholarly enquiry into the historical Jesus.

Inevitably, given the novel’s sensitive subject and Corelli’s distinctive prose style, Barabbas provoked strong reactions, and views on its religious and aesthetic value tended to polarize. It found favour among certain of the more orthodox clergy: Canon Wilberforce praised its author for her ‘high-minded and very powerful effort to revivify…a time-honoured history’,²⁵⁰ and the Dean of Westminster read out its resurrection scene as part of his Easter Sunday sermon.²⁵¹ As far as the critics were concerned, however, it was a novel which would have been better left unwritten. The Saturday Review deemed it a ‘blunder’, wondering why Corelli did not ‘regard her descriptions, her interpolations, her fantastic embroideries, her pretentious inventions as irreverent’.²⁵² Several reviewers seized upon Corelli’s errors in scholarship, some of which remained in the critical consciousness well into the twentieth century. Writing in 1906, one commentator enumerated what he terms the ‘serious blunders’ of Barabbas:

There is no Roman name Galbus,…Volpian is not antique, and is rather more modern Italian than Roman. The vocative case of Peter could never be Petrus, and Pilate’s wife would never have addressed him as Pontius. Her name, Justitia, is impossible, for it is an abstract noun. Judith Iscariot is a misnomer, and Miss Corelli is touchingly simple in believing that the Hebrews had family names like Brown or Robinson, and that Iscariot was one of them.²⁵³
While Corelli defended herself with characteristic arrogance and pugnacity on the final point, it was clear that she had little interest in historical accuracy.²⁵⁴ Disregarding all academic research into the Judaic context of Christ’s life, Corelli panders instead to views which are unashamedly anti-Semitic and which belong to the kind of Christian mindset Joseph Jacobs endeavoured to enlighten through As Others Saw Him. The crowd is described as having a ‘morbid engrossment in the work of cruel torture and blood-shedding’(I, 235), and the Jewish Caiaphas, with his hunger for revenge and unremitting carnality, is placed in contradistinction to the Roman Pontius Pilate, who ends up an early convert to Christianity.

Despite its many detractors, Corelli’s first and only Biblical fiction enjoyed huge commercial success, establishing its author as one of the best-selling novelists of her age. Sales of Barabbas were no doubt encouraged by the newsworthy controversies surrounding its publication. Its gaudy sensationalism prompted Ealing Public Library to ban it and all other works by Corelli;²⁵⁵ and the editor of the Nineteenth Century, after refusing to publish a review of Barabbas by Canon Wilberforce, vowed never again to mention Corelli or her work in the journal.²⁵⁶ Yet vulgar curiosity alone is not enough to account for the cult status which the author had acquired by the close of the century, nor can it explain a readership which extended throughout all social classes. Writing retrospectively, Q. D. Leavis outlines how far Corelli managed to permeate the national consciousness:

She was not merely the idol of the man in the street; Tennyson, Theodore Watts-Dunton, Queen Victoria, and the Prince of Wales were equally enraptured…the Dean of Gloucester wrote expressing his admiration, Dean Wilberforce and Dean Farrar testified that her works made for sweetness and light…²⁵⁷

Corelli’s appeal at the end of a century that had witnessed the overturning of the inerrancy of the Scriptures, the demise of organized religion, and the steady growth of scientific technology, lay in her creation of fictions which refused to acknowledge that Christianity had been in any way compromised by such developments.

Corelli’s decision to turn down one publisher’s invitation for her to write an account of Christ’s life was an astute one: she had a canny instinct for the popular taste, and was no doubt fully aware that the Life of Jesus genre had had its day, and that her true métier lay in fiction-writing.²⁵⁸ The popularity of Barabbas was overwhelming proof that the general public and a fair number of clergy had accepted that, if sensational works of fervid religiosity were the most effective way of seizing the attention of doubters, any charge of irreverence could be waived aside. Meanwhile, the literary world scoffed at the aesthetic and academic failings of Barabbas, and those of a sensitive religious disposition recoiled at the glaring disparity between Corelli’s sensationalist prose and the sonority of her source text. Ultimately, the nineteenth century had failed to produce a writer who could transform academic studies of the historical Jesus into a compelling and aesthetically appealing literary form, allowing Biblical fiction to be dominated by ‘Silly Novels by Lady Novelists’.

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CHAPTER THREE
OSCAR WILDE AND THE FIFTH GOSPEL

In the last decade or so of the nineteenth century, religious fiction came to be dominated by two female novelists of very different beliefs, intentions and abilities: Marie Corelli and Mrs Humphry Ward. The former served the needs of conservative Christians with a taste for the sensational, while the latter provided fiction which appealed to those of a more serious and scholarly bent. Yet, despite their record-breaking sales, neither author could be judged to have produced work of remarkable literary value or innovation. One writer who was particularly exercised by the aesthetic shortcomings of the prevailing religious fictions of his day was Oscar Wilde. A self-professed arbiter of aesthetics, Wilde found the populist prose of Corelli and the earnest theorizing of Ward equally unpalatable, making his feelings about them plain through characteristically piercing wit.²⁵⁹ In Men and Memories, William Rothenstein recalls Wilde telling him of how, on being asked his opinion of Corelli while in jail, he retorted that ‘from the way she writes she ought to be here’.²⁶⁰ And his low opinion of Ward’s best-selling novel, Robert Elsmere, is set down in ‘The Decay of Lying’, where Vivian hails it with comic bathos as ‘a masterpiece of the genre ennuyeux, the one form of literature that the English people seems thoroughly to enjoy’.²⁶¹ Yet, however caustic Wilde’s criticisms of his fellow writers might appear, he was generally more disposed to hate the sin than the sinner. In 1888, reviewing an especially unhappy attempt at versifying the Gospel narratives, Wilde remarks how ‘the worst work is always done with the best intentions’,²⁶² an aperçu he would reiterate almost a decade later in De Profundis.²⁶³ Working as a critic for the Pall Mall Gazette between 1885 and 1890, Wilde encountered abundant examples of well-meaning religious fiction and verse, the majority of which he dismissed as trite, ugly and anachronistic, and it was perhaps lamentable specimens such as these which encouraged him to take up the challenge of breathing new life into Biblical subjects.

Even the most cursory examination of Wilde’s oeuvre demonstrates his abiding fascination with Christianity and its texts, whether it be located in the decadent, often derivative, religious imagery of the early Poems (1881), the symbolist re-imagining of the Gospels in Salomé (1893), the mockery of the established church in The Importance of Being Earnest (1895), or the expression of more conventional Christian values in The Ballad of Reading Gaol (1898).²⁶⁴ There is also ample evidence in early biographical studies of Wilde, and in his own non-fiction writings, that, from the late 1880s onwards, he was preoccupied with the idea of composing his own evangel. Coulson Kernahan, for example, records in his memoirs how Wilde had plans to write what he termed the ‘Epic of the Cross, the Iliad of Christianity’, a phrase which seems in exact accord with his inclination towards iconoclasm and the merging of the sacred and the secular.²⁶⁵ If England provided Wilde with a plethora of examples of how not to refashion the New Testament narratives, France - his second literary home in the early 1890s - offered him a more aesthetically interesting range of Biblical transformations.²⁶⁶ Wilde’s biographer, Richard Ellmann, pinpoints Flaubert’s Trois Contes as the likely inspiration for his agnostic revisions of Gospel stories, though his more immediate literary circle is at least as credible an influence.²⁶⁷ Wilde was acquainted with the poet and novelist, Catulle Mendès, whose Contes Évangéliques were published in L’Echo de Paris in 1894.²⁶⁸ Anatole France, another prominent literary figure in Wilde’s Paris circle, experimented with recreating Biblical texts in his two volumes of short stories, Balthasar (1889), and L’Étui de Nacre (1892). More significant, perhaps, was Wilde’s friendship with André Gide, whom he first encountered in 1891. This relationship afforded Wilde the opportunity to rehearse a number of his heterodox New Testament parables, several of which were later transcribed by the French writer. Gide, though, was more than just an auditor: like Wilde, he had an extensive knowledge of the Bible and appreciated its potential as a foundation for fiction. Engaged with the idea of writing his drama Saul as early as 1894, he is another likely influence on Wilde’s plans for revising the New Testament narratives. Paris, then, provided Wilde with a literary milieu in which his ideas for re-working the Scriptures for a more sceptical age were stimulated and refined.