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

A PECULIAR PROTESTANT: THE BIBLE ACCORDING TO GEORGE MOORE
George Moore’s The Apostle: A Drama in Three Acts was published in 1911, just one year after Frank Harris’s short story, ‘The Miracle of the Stigmata’, had appeared in The English Review. Regarded as a minor work in the canon of Moore’s writings, The Apostle is treated only fleetingly by his critics and biographers. Yet, though the drama has never been performed, it marks the genesis of one of the twentieth century’s most significant fictional representations of Jesus: The Brook Kerith: A Syrian Story (1916). The Anglo-Irish writer’s decision to follow both Wilde and Harris in writing an imaginative treatment of the theory that Christ survived crucifixion is entirely consistent with his interests and personality. A brief survey of Moore’s oeuvre up to this point in his career reveals an engagement with a variety of literary movements and causes, and yet, whether in the grip of Naturalism, writing a polemic against the three-volume novel, or experimenting with literary Wagnerism, his interest in the religious temperament is ever-present. Moore was also a compulsive controversialist, never happier than when causing offence to some form of authority or another. Writing a heterodox fifth Gospel offered Moore the opportunity to engage with his life-long fascination with the religious temperament and to satisfy his instinct for troublemaking.
The shaping of a Protestant identity: Moore’s entry into theology
In the first twenty years or so of Moore’s literary career, his interest in religion manifested itself largely through individual characters in his novels and short stories. His early writings concentrate on the female religious temperament: A Modern Lover (1883), A Mummer’s Wife (1885) and Esther Waters (1894) all feature heroines who struggle to come to terms with the conflict between their religious upbringings and their natural desires. From out of this early exploration of women’s spirituality developed a more specific preoccupation with conventual life explored through A Drama in Muslin (1886), Celibates (1895), Evelyn Innes (1898), and Sister Teresa (1901). It is not, however, until The Lake (1905) that we see the first clear indications that Moore’s religious interests had widened to include Biblical criticism. A few years prior to the novel’s publication, the writer and critic Edouard Dujardin, to whom The Lake was dedicated, had turned his attentions to Biblical exegesis, his researches being published in La Source du fleuve chrétien (1904), a volume which served to quicken Moore’s interest in theology.⁵⁰⁸ Dujardin, along with his book, appears in The Lake in fictional form as the theologian Walter Poole, and it is through this character that the author is able to debate issues such as the debt theology owes to history, the authorship of the Gospels, and the relationship between the teachings of Christ and those of Paul, all of which were to preoccupy Moore throughout the next ten years or so. Not for nothing did Moore bestow on Dujardin the epithet ‘my master in exegesis’.⁵⁰⁹ In addition to serving as one of Moore’s major sources of knowledge about the Bible, Jewish and Roman history, and the Higher Criticism, Dujardin introduced him to several writers engaged in Biblical studies who would influence his future fictionalizing of the Gospels. Moore encountered the work of the French modernist theologian Alfred Loisy in 1904, when he translated Dujardin’s article on his influential study Les évangiles synoptiques.⁵¹⁰ While it cannot be assumed that Moore went on to read Loisy’s work in its entirety, there is no doubt that he would have been drawn to a writer who strongly believed that ‘the adaptation of the gospel to the changing conditions of humanity is as pressing a need to-day as it ever was and ever will be’, and who had been excommunicated by the Roman Catholic church Moore so despised.⁵¹¹ It was also through Dujardin that Moore was to make the acquaintance of the freethinker, Joseph McCabe, the translator of La Source du fleuve chrétien, and a prolific writer on subjects as diverse as the history of flagellation, existentialism and the writings of Edward Clodd.⁵¹² In a letter to Dujardin, Moore recounts his first meeting with McCabe in May 1911, describing his new friend as ‘a very pleasant fellow, very much alive, keen and a great scholar.’⁵¹³ It was perhaps this final quality which held most attraction for Moore in a year when he had set out to apprise himself of the latest thinking on Christianity: not only had McCabe been responsible for the translation of Dujardin’s recent work, he had also translated highly esteemed studies by modernist theologians such as Albert Kalthoff and Arthur Drews.⁵¹⁴

The first two decades of the twentieth century was an exciting time to be considering the figure of Jesus, as Moore no doubt realised. In The Life of Christ in Recent Research, William Sanday expressed his belief that ‘the year 1906 may be said to mark the turning down of one page in the history of English theology and the opening of another’.⁵¹⁵ It was no coincidence that this was the same year that Albert Schweitzer’s ground-breaking work The Quest of the Historical Jesus was published, an event that may well have contributed to Sanday’s view that a profound shift was happening in the study of the Gospel narratives. And it was not only theology which would introduce new perspectives on the figure of Christ and Christianity. By the time The Apostle was in progress, Nietzschean philosophy was very much of the moment and works such as The Antichrist offered a harsh reappraisal of the principal characters in Moore’s play. Anthropology offered even more dramatic possibilities concerning the origins of Christianity, most especially in Sir James Frazer’s highly influential study of primitive rites and belief systems: The Golden Bough. First published in 1890, this vast undertaking included one particularly contentious chapter entitled ‘Killing the God’, which drew parallels between Christ’s crucifixion and pagan and Semitic rituals, and which was developed more fully in the Second Edition of 1900.⁵¹⁶ And so, in setting out on his own exploration of the figure of Jesus, Moore was responding to the intellectual climate of the early twentieth century, as well as to the interests and preoccupations of his immediate circle of friends and acquaintances.

At the same time as responding to the spirit of the age, Moore was also picking up creative threads from earlier in his career. As a young writer in Paris, he had embarked on a quest to set the theatrical world alight with a dramatic representation of a great Protestant hero. The verse drama, Martin Luther, was co-written with the French author, Bernard Lopèz, and its gestation is outlined in a sequence of stilted, highly artificial letters which form its Preface. Shavian in length, if not in intellect, this correspondence between co-authors reveals Moore’s utter lack of dramaturgical know-how and his jejune belief that a French audience would be shocked by a theatrical depiction of a Protestant hero.⁵¹⁷ The finished play-script was published in 1878 but, luckily for theatre-goers, never produced.⁵¹⁸ Its contorted blank verse and melodramatic scenes would prove profoundly embarrassing to Moore in future years; nevertheless, its significance for his later work should not be underestimated.⁵¹⁹ Martin Luther contains the first signs of Moore’s predilection for mixing historical fact with fiction and looks forward to his treatment of major religious figures; it also exhibits the pungent anti-clericalism and fascination with the issue of celibacy which would surface in sequent works. There are plainly discernible links between Martin Luther and The Apostle, not least in their dramatizing of Moore’s typological vision: Paul is the type of true Protestantism and Luther the antitype who would deliver Christians from the dogmatic grip of Catholicism.⁵²⁰
Reading the Bible for the first time
Moore’s decision to return to a Protestant theme was doubtless connected to his conversion to the faith in 1904, an event dismissed by his friend, John Eglinton, as ‘a piece of play-acting which impressed no one.’⁵²¹ In a similar vein, Joseph McCabe commented that Moore professed ‘genially to be a “Protestant” - solely because he hates Catholicism’ and, indeed, his antipathy towards his native religion is beyond doubt.⁵²² Responding to news of the engagement of his brother Maurice to a Catholic, Moore wrote to his younger brother Julian: ‘my hatred for Catholocism [sic] is limitless, it is the strongest fiber [sic] in my body.’⁵²³ It was an aversion which Moore would express time and time again with the same degree of vituperation, and McCabe is doubtless right in suggesting that his embracing of Protestantism was no more than a means of rejecting the faith of his birth. Moore formed his own notion of Protestant doctrine by effecting a crude reversal of what he deemed to be Catholic thought and practice, whereby ‘Protestants and Catholics are…two eternal attitudes of the human mind.’⁵²⁴ Protestantism, Moore avows in Hail and Farewell, ‘leaves the mind free, or very nearly’, and this freedom of mind is considered to stem mainly from the unrestricted reading of the Bible and the religious discussion it generates.⁵²⁵ Moore claimed that his own reading of the Scriptures began when, already in middle-age, he received a Bible from Mary Hunter, the dedicatee of The Brook Kerith, which he claimed led him ‘into the society of scholars.’⁵²⁶ Verging on the solipsistic, his interpretation of Protestantism overlooked the literal-mindedness of certain Protestant readers of the Bible, such as those chronicled in Father and Son, the autobiography of his friend, Edmund Gosse.⁵²⁷ Moore shaped his new faith to match his own self-image so that it became synonymous with free-thinking, scepticism and, most importantly, great literature. In ‘Epistle to the Cymry’ Moore explains how ‘every Protestant invents a religion out of the Bible for himself, and that is one of the reasons why Protestants are more literary than Catholics’.⁵²⁸ To support his somewhat questionable generalizations, Moore supplied some highly dubious statistics. In the first edition of Salve, the second volume of his autobiographical trilogy, Hail and Farewell!, he relates a conversation with George Russell regarding the connection between faith and literary talent, in which he insists that ‘ninety and five per cent. of the world’s literature was written by Protestants and agnostics.’⁵²⁹ Through asserting what he believed to be his innate Protestantism, Moore convinced himself that he was also taking on the spirit of great writers and The Apostle was no doubt his way of paying homage to his newly-acquired faith.

The Apostle started out as a brief ‘Prefatory Note’ published in The English Review in June 1910.⁵³⁰ Moore introduces what amounts to work in progress - a deposit for the published drama a year later - by explaining his main reason for publishing such rudimentary writing; namely, to claim ownership of an idea:

The story of “The Apostle” is one of those striking stories that one is tempted to relate to amuse one’s friends after dinner, and I have related it sufficiently often to invite collaboration…our friends have their friends, and a story wanders far like thistle-down, and somebody hearing it…might unexpectedly feel himself called upon to write it.⁵³¹

And, certainly, the idea of fictionalizing a meeting between Jesus and his apostle was already being contemplated by Frank Harris. Joseph Hone, Moore’s first biographer, recalls how Moore and Harris were both ‘on the trail of the same subject - a post-Crucifixion meeting between Jesus and St. Paul’.⁵³² It was a state of affairs which developed into what Samuel Roth described as Harris’s ‘famous disagreement with George Moore’ and one which is well documented in the writings of the two opponents, and those of their friends and enemies.⁵³³ Harris puts on record what he believed to be the origin of Moore’s Jesus-and-Paul scenario in an article wryly entitled ‘George Moore and Jesus’:

“Please tell me before you go,” he persisted, “where you got the idea that Jesus didn’t die on the cross. That interests me enormously…”.

“Jesus is said to have died in a few hours,” I said. “That astonished even Pilate and so I thought - ”

“Oh,” cried Moore, disappointed. “It’s only a guess of yours; but why take him to Cæsarea? Why bring Paul there? Why…?”

I knew he was merely informing himself in his usual dexterous way, so I tried to cut him short.

“An early tradition,” I cried; “my dear fellow, an early tradition”, and ever since Moore has talked about this ‘early tradition’, though it would puzzle him to say where it’s to be found.⁵³⁴

Moore’s version of finding inspiration for his New Testament fiction is, as might be expected, somewhat at odds with Harris’s. It is detailed in ‘A Prefatory Letter on Reading the Bible for the First Time’, first published in The English Review in February 1911, and later forming the introduction to The Apostle.⁵³⁵ In this letter Moore recalls meeting his friend, John Eglinton, then a librarian of the National Library of Ireland, and hearing from him about a French work on Jesus which put forward the view that ‘it was some cataleptic swoon that Christ had suffered, and not death on the Cross.’⁵³⁶ Recorded once again in Moore’s Preface to the 1921 edition of The Brook Kerith, this was evidently a memorable meeting for the author, and it is intriguing that the title of the book under discussion is not mentioned. In all likelihood, the study which Moore encountered was Jésus de Nazareth: Au Point de Vue Historique, Scientifique et Social, by Paul Régla.⁵³⁷ The main thesis of this work is that Jesus was educated in an Essene community and that his life and ministry were driven by Essenian ideals and religious teachings. A medical doctor, Régla spends several pages speculating on the anatomical details of Christ’s supposed death on the cross before concluding that ‘Joseph d’Arimathie, Nicodème, et leurs serviteurs pénétrèrent dans la grotte, après en avoir déplacé la pierre, prirent Jésus, et le conduisirent dans une maison voisine, où tout avait été préparé pour assurer le succés de l’entreprise.’⁵³⁸ However, after affording the library incident a certain significance by including it in the Prefatory Letter, Moore goes on to insist that the French work had done no more than jog his memory, and that he was already acquainted with the theory that Christ survived the cross and that ‘he had been supposed by many to be an Essene monk.’⁵³⁹ And it was Moore’s decision to fictionalize this Essene theory which gave his play - and the novel which grew from it - a claim to originality.⁵⁴⁰

The Prefatory Letter to The Apostle serves as a declaration of Moore’s newly awakened interest in the Bible and modernist theology, as well as an admission of his fledgling knowledge of both. Additionally, it functions as an autobiographical frame through which the play can be read and interpreted.⁵⁴¹ What is immediately evident from the letter is that the playwright’s response to the Gospel narratives is almost entirely literary. The New Testament authors are likened to established writers or characters from their fictions: Mark is the Maupassant of the Evangelists and Paul is Don Quixote to Peter’s Sancho Panza.⁵⁴² These allusions to literary artists recall the intertextuality of Victorian liberal Lives of Jesus, where words from Shakespeare and Milton would frequently interweave, unattributed, with those of Christ: a likeness which sits rather oddly with Moore’s avowedly heterodox intentions. But Moore’ s foregrounding of the literary aspects of the Gospels and his decision to ‘put the man of letters in front of the Biblical critic’ comes more from necessity than choice.⁵⁴³ Joseph Hone states emphatically in his biography that his subject was, at this time, ‘without scholarship’, an observation that several of his compatriots took pleasure in pointing out in their writings about the author and his work.⁵⁴⁴ At one point in the Prefatory Letter, Moore challenges the theological experts to sneer at his lack of learning, in a manner illustrative of Virginia Woolf’s analysis of him as ‘at once diffident and self-assertive’:⁵⁴⁵

If this prefatory note should fall into the hands of…learned German

critics I will ask him [sic] to smile indulgently at the criticism of a man of letters who reads the Bible for the first time, and who, through no fault of his own, has been committed to record his impressions. But why should the fear of writing something silly or commonplace stay my pen? ⁵⁴⁶

The theological observations made by Moore at this time are, indeed, ‘commonplace’, gleaned as he readily admits, from erudite friends rather than his own reading, and he would have to work hard in the five years between the publication of The Apostle and The Brook Kerith, to make good his scholarly shortcomings.⁵⁴⁷

About half of the Prefatory Letter is devoted to Paul and his writings. Moore’s discussion of the apostle, like his discussion of the Evangelists, is unquestionably thin on theology and heavy on personal interpretation. In his analysis of Paul, Moore brings together three of his most abiding interests: the Protestant temperament, sexuality, and literary style. The apostle is the archetypal Protestant because he holds that ‘it is in ourselves that we must seek salvation and not in ritual’, unlike Peter, who is defined as a pious Jew, dependent on religious ritual and dogma and, therefore, the pattern of the first Catholic temperament.⁵⁴⁸ Whereas Peter represents all that is outmoded and backward-looking, Paul ‘talks to us about the very things we are debating to-day, what the newspapers call sex problems.’⁵⁴⁹ Borrowing rather inaptly from the final act of Shakespeare’s Othello, Moore warms to the human frailties of the apostle who ‘loved St. Eunice not wisely but too well’, arguing that Paul’s ‘thorn in the flesh’ lent the sufferer an invaluable insight into the human condition and, as a consequence, endowed him with the power of a great writer.⁵⁵⁰ In Moore’s view, the Pauline Epistles are the ‘most natural literature in the world’ and ‘in none other do we hear the voice of a man so clearly.’⁵⁵¹ He describes how the author ‘flashes across his page perceptions that elude the words of every other writer’, imagery which conjures up a picture of Paul as more an inspired man of letters, than an itinerant preacher.⁵⁵² In his later writings, Moore would attempt to define the power of Paul’s prose: it was a quality which came from personal passion and which was ‘not eloquence, nor rhetoric, nor vehemence, but heat.’⁵⁵³ This ‘literary heat’, Moore believed, would go on to influence great writers, a theory which harmonized conveniently with his claim that only those of the Protestant spirit could produce fine literature.

It is characteristic of Moore that he interprets such a famously complex figure with absolute certainty, perceiving no grey between the black and the white. He remained unconcerned by the highly contradictory nature of the Pauline Epistles and uninterested in the theological problems which Biblical exegetes had worried away at for decades such as Paul’s attitude to the Judaic Law and its place in the new religious order. Instead, Moore created an apostle in his own image: an innate Protestant, a gifted writer, and a man susceptible to the female. Reading the Prefatory Letter alongside The Apostle reveals how Moore believed his literary sensibilities gave him insights into Biblical texts which were denied to mere scholars. While acknowledging that he is a newcomer to Pauline writings, he nevertheless has the confidence as a creative artist to go against the theological grain and pronounce that ‘a very considerable portion of the Acts must have been written by Paul himself.’ ⁵⁵⁴ Writing to Dujardin he boasted that the Prefatory Letter had procured him ‘a little renown for exegesis’ and, though it is tempting to dismiss this as wishful thinking on the part of an author prone to self-aggrandisement, it appears to have had some substance.⁵⁵⁵ In the Introduction to the 1916 edition of F. W. H. Myers’s popular poem, St Paul, E. J. Watson names Moore as a Pauline expert, paraphrasing words

from the author’s Prefatory Letter in his declaration that the Epistles ‘portray a human soul more vividly than ever a human soul has been portrayed in literature’.⁵⁵⁶

Finding a form: the challenge of Biblical drama in the early twentieth century
In his article, ‘George Moore and Jesus’, Frank Harris recalls how Moore had had trouble deciding whether to write his scenario of Paul and Jesus in the form of prose fiction or drama.⁵⁵⁷ The public nature of the play must have held particular appeal for an iconoclast like Moore, the physical representation of Christ on stage making for a more irreverent and shocking rejection of his divinity than could be achieved through the more private media of poetry and prose.⁵⁵⁸ But any ambitions Moore might have had to stage The Apostle were held firmly at bay by the rigid adherence of successive Examiners of Plays to the Theatres Act of 1843, which prohibited dramas adapted from the Scriptures and which placed an outright ban on the depiction of Christ or the Deity on stage.⁵⁵⁹ In the first decade or so of the twentieth century, religious dramatists sought various means of circumventing the Censor. One of these was to revive the mystery and morality plays which had enjoyed great popularity from the thirteenth century to the Reformation, and which were exempt from the 1843 Theatres Act. But this was also to renounce all ambition to innovate a style of Biblical drama for the modern age. One other option was to set dramas in the era of the Primitive Church, thereby avoiding the depiction of New Testament figures on stage; but this was already a worn-out theatrical genre, usually associated with sensationalist religious melodramas produced by the likes of Wilson Barrett.⁵⁶⁰ A more artistically satisfying way round the problem was the establishment of private theatre societies, which did not require stage licences to mount productions; however, such companies were also prohibited from taking any form of financial reward from performances: a state of affairs both commercially unattractive and, for the majority of playwrights, economically impossible.⁵⁶¹

In the Edwardian period, then, the restrictions placed upon the performance of religious plays were both highly inconsistent and highly frustrating for those with ambitions to stage Biblical drama. On 27 October 1907 seventy-one authors signed a letter to The Times protesting against the prevailing climate of stage censorship.⁵⁶² Two years later, a Joint Select Committee was set up to examine the Theatres Act of 1843 and to gauge its suitability for the new century.⁵⁶³ With the publication of the Committee’s report, following three months’ consideration and consultation, it was clear that few concessions would be afforded to the anti-censorship lobby. With regard to the dramatization of religious subjects, the Committee recommended that the strict regulations concerning the representation of Scriptural characters should be relaxed, at the same time advising that dramas should not ‘do violence to the sentiment of religious reverence’. In the light of such a caveat, Moore’s scenario, which featured a resuscitated Christ being struck down dead by St Paul, was most unlikely to escape the blue pencil.⁵⁶⁴

Moore was obliged to settle for contributing to a somewhat unsatisfactory literary sub-genre: the Biblical play constructed with the stage in mind but, given the laws of censorship, in all likelihood destined solely for the private reader. One example of this hybrid form was George Barlow’s verse drama, Jesus of Nazareth, published in 1896.⁵⁶⁵ In its ample Preface, Barlow acknowledges that his play is unlikely to be performed in 1890s’ England, yet he also insists that he has ‘been careful to throw it into an actable form’ in an attempt to counteract ‘the irreparable harm…done to the stage and to literature by the complete divorce which has for some time existed between the plays which are written to be acted and the plays which are written to be read’.⁵⁶⁶ In his writing of The Apostle, Moore seems to have been aware that he was writing within this somewhat limiting genre. Its lengthy Prefatory Letter is aimed more at the reader than a theatre director, and the relatively slight play script which follows is by no means in what Barlow terms ‘actable form’. Placed between speeches are several blocks of expository prose, hovering in a kind of theatrical limbo between dialogue and stage directions. Indeed, the play opens with just such a passage:

It was the practice among the Essenes that an elder monk should read the Scripture and interpret obscure or difficult passages. We gather from the talk between two monks, Manahem and Sadduc, who enter, that they have left their brethren still engaged in disputation. “May we,” asks Manahem, “regard the passages in Scripture in which God is described with human attributes as allegorical?”⁵⁶⁷

Even while it contains a rudimentary stage direction indicating that the play should open in medias res, followed by Manahem’s opening line, if removed from its context, this extract could easily be mistaken for prose fiction. What is clear from this introductory passage is that Moore was exercised as to how to dramatize the rather basic theology he had at his disposal, and he continues to wrestle with this difficulty throughout the three acts of the piece. Conveying Pauline theology on stage proves particularly challenging: the apostle is burdened with speeches so prolix they would be beyond the range of even the most charismatic of players, and which leave the other actors on stage with little option but to remain still and listen.

Yet, however provisional and ill-crafted the script appears, Moore seems to have worked on it with some hope of performance. Shortly before completing the scenario, he wrote to Dujardin: ‘The play will not be produced here on account of the Censor, but in Paris it would certainly be a success…Could you not find someone to undertake the translation?’⁵⁶⁸ But The Apostle never found its way onto the French stage, joining the already substantial list of Moore’s stage plays never to be performed.⁵⁶⁹ Notwithstanding these failures, Moore’s choice of the dramatic form for his first attempt at fictionalizing the Gospels suggests that he had not abandoned the theatrical ambition expressed in his verse drama, Martin Luther. In the fifteenth letter of the Preface to Moore’s first ever theatrical piece, the author inserts a poem he has penned entitled ‘The Dream’, which describes how Shakespeare appeared to him in a vision, bemoaning the parlous state of the English stage. The dream progresses in a manner reminiscent of Charles Dickens’s A Christmas Carol, with Shakespeare taking Moore to the Adelphi Theatre to see an unconscionably dull nineteenth-century play. It concludes with Shakespeare’s despairing verdict that ‘the drama no longer exists in England’, and elects Moore as the saviour of the English theatre.⁵⁷⁰ In the 1890s, as a rather more mature writer, Moore had entered into ongoing debates about the ‘New Drama’, penning a number of articles and essays about the future of the theatre in England. In ‘On the Necessity of an English Théâtre Libre’, he defined the type of plays that needed to be written and produced if the English drama were to develop:

Plays in which the characters, although true to nature, are not what are known as ‘sympathetic characters’, plays in which there are no comic love-scenes - plays which contain no comic relief - plays which deal with religious and moral problems in such ways as would not command the instantaneous and unanimous approval of a large audience drawn from all classes of society - plays in which there is no love-interest, plays composed entirely of male or entirely of female characters…⁵⁷¹
The Apostle fulfils most of these artistic criteria. It deals with serious religious questions, attempts to depict Biblical figures in a realistic, flesh-and-blood manner, and steers clear of any romance or comedy. However, stage censorship would prevent it from ever having the opportunity to provoke the displeasure or otherwise of a large audience, and the slight critical attention it received from readers was mildly disapproving, rather than outraged.⁵⁷²
Strange meeting: Jesus and Paul on stage

In The Apostle, we have a meeting of opposites as Paul’s vociferousness and enormous physical energy are contrasted with Jesus’s self-effacement and quiet resignation. Differing as noticeably in their vision of God and the religious life, the only belief they hold in common is that Peter was ‘a parcel of ancient rudiments’ (94). Moore seeks to exploit these striking disparities for theatrical effect. The clash of Paul’s passionate preaching of the resurrection with the material proof of its falsity gives rise to a sequence of dramatic ironies. Inevitably, given the extreme nature of Moore’s revision of the New Testament story, there are several points in the play when the ironies appear crassly obvious. Towards the end of the second act, for example, Paul defines his Saviour in a speech redolent of the Apostles’ Creed:

Son of the living God, that took on the beggarly raiment of human flesh at Nazareth, was baptized by John in the Jordan, thereafter preached in Galilee, went up to Jerusalem, and, that the Scriptures might be fulfilled, was crucified by order of Pilate between two thieves on Mount Calvary; the third day he rose from the dead - (68)
This fervent declaration of faith is cut short by Manahem’s disclosure that a member of the brotherhood has lived the same life, suffered the same fate, and has survived to tell the tale. From this point in the play, Paul is confronted with material evidence that the Essenian Jesus is one and the same as his ‘risen’ Christ. In Frank Harris’s short story, ‘The Miracle of the Stigmata’, Paul is only brought into the presence of Jesus after he has died of natural causes. With Jesus incapable of contradicting Paul’s version of events, his crucifixion scars are laid bare for all to witness and the apostle is able to pronounce him the first stigmatic and to continue unchallenged in his belief in the resurrection. Moore pushes the scenario one step further by keeping Jesus alive and capable of refuting Paul’s story with the evidence of his own body. The moment when the marks of the cross are exhibited to the incredulous Paul is captured in some of the play’s most detailed stage directions:

Taking Jesus’ hands he looks at them and finds the marks of the nails, and looking upon his brow he finds traces of where the crown of thorns had been placed; so he is taken by a great fear and raves incoherently and dashes about and seems to lose his senses, and would strike Christ down, but at that moment falls on to a seat overcome. (71)
To conjure such a scene in the imagination is one thing, to put it on stage quite another. Moore’s insufficiencies as a playwright are nowhere more evident than at this moment of crisis, when Paul’s reactions are dramatized in a manner which threatens to tip the drama over into melodrama, even farce. With the apostle’s obdurate refusal to believe that his Saviour has survived the cross, the drama takes on a cruel and mocking trajectory, with Jesus forced to ‘go to Jerusalem to save the world from crimes that will be committed in the name of Jesus of Nazareth’ (99). Christ’s ministry seems destined to go into reverse. Whereas once he sought to convince the people of his divine purpose, he now seeks to convince them that he is merely human. Jesus’s threatening to announce his survival to those newly filled with the glorious news of the resurrection, prompts Paul to violent defensive action. In an audacious final scene, he strikes Christ down with a heavy blow, at the same time declaring that he does so in the name of Jesus of Nazareth, Moore’s ultimate touch - or hammer blow - of irony.⁵⁷³

In suggesting that Paul’s faith in the resurrection was so strong that he was ready to murder the man who threatened to destroy it, Moore pushes the paradox of the play’s central idea beyond the limits of credibility. Indeed, Moore’s belief that Paul’s conviction lent him heroic stature, and justified casting him as the main player of the piece, seems to have obscured his aesthetic judgement. Nonetheless, Moore’s personal admiration for the apostle was still in tune with the contemporary theological climate. Humbert Wolfe points out in his study of Moore, ‘Paul and not Jesus was the Christ of Victorianism’, and this interest in the apostle endured well into the twentieth century.⁵⁷⁴ F. W. Farrar would choose Paul as the obvious subject for a sequel to The Life of Christ and, ⁵⁷⁵ moving into the twentieth century, the more controversial theologian, Albert Schweitzer, would follow his Quest of the Historical Jesus with a study of Paul and his commentators.⁵⁷⁶ John Eglinton believed that ‘Paul surely never had a stranger champion than Moore’, an understandable view considering the author’s rabid anti-clericalism and frequent vows of allegiance to paganism, and it is perhaps the passion with which Moore champions his hero that is partly responsible for the artistic shortcomings of his dramatic scenario.⁵⁷⁷ Moore demonstrates his veneration of the Epistles by weaving quotations from them into Paul’s speeches. Verses from Romans, Galatians, and I and II Corinthians are paraphrased or, less frequently, rendered verbatim by the fictional apostle, and this transtextuality constantly undermines the credibility of his spoken presence. Moore’s attempts to insert familiar Pauline verses into the invented dialogue prove unsuccessful, the seams between textual quotation and fictional language being left exposed. Paul’s speeches are verbose, contorted, and unnatural, one reviewer likening them to ‘the sermonizings of a Salvation Army convert’.⁵⁷⁸ Equally unsuccessful is Moore’s endeavour to bring Paul to life on stage by emphasizing his corporeality. He is conceived as ‘a thick-set man, of rugged appearance, hairy in the face and with a belly’(51), a description to which Frank Harris took particular exception, accusing Moore of ‘travestying’ his own portrait of Paul in ‘The Miracle of the Stigmata’.⁵⁷⁹ It is a physicality writ large when Paul delivers the death blow to Jesus. However, the quality of immediacy derived from this emphasis on Paul’s fleshiness is counteracted by the unnatural sound of his speech, laden as it is with cumbersome Scriptural citation and pseudo-archaisms.

Where Moore’s personal attachment to Paul seems to lead him into theatrical excess, his rather more detached attitude to Jesus allows for a marginally more successful stage presence. In contrast to the detailed description of Paul’s physical features, we are told nothing of Christ’s appearance, a surprising omission considering the play’s insistence on his mere humanity. Another writer might have withheld this information out of a sense of respect or reverence, but this is highly unlikely in the case of Moore, who had no qualms about shocking his public. It is possible, though, that he wanted to avoid at all cost what he described as the ‘ringleted, unctuous, almost delightful’ Christ of Gallic persuasion, and had not yet settled on the alternative physical image he would present in The Brook Kerith.⁵⁸⁰ Jesus’s stage movements are entirely consistent with his rather shadowy physical presence: he chooses to sleep in ‘an obscure corner of the room’ (51) and his calm demeanour is highlighted by the ‘doves who flutter round him, lighting on his shoulder’ in a manner reminiscent of Francis of Assisi (45). Yet if Moore seems to be uncharacteristically sentimental in creating this image of Jesus at peace with himself and the world around him, it is only a means to an end. Such a picture of tranquillity makes the impact of Paul’s arrival all the more unnerving, exposing as it does the pain of the suppressed memories which lie at the core of Christ’s passivity. Moore’s Jesus figure does not conform to the nineteenth-century stereotypes of the charismatic teacher, the social reformer, or the great poet. Flying in the face of such conventions, he presents a traumatized, mentally complex figure, more in line with the psychiatric studies of Jesus, which had emerged in the early 1900s.⁵⁸¹ Several of these studies attempted to prove that Christ had been of unsound mind and a variety of mental conditions were put forward to explain how he ended up on the cross: paranoia, megalomania and delusional psychosis being the most common. Albert Schweitzer took the authors of such works to task in The Psychiatric Study of Jesus, first translated into English by W. Montgomery in 1913, under the title ‘The Sanity of the Eschatological Jesus’. In it, Schweitzer refutes some of the best-known psychopathological studies of Jesus, exposing their poor grasp of theology and, in particular, the historical life of Jesus. While Moore is unlikely to have encountered these, he would certainly have been aware of the emerging discipline of psychiatry. Not bound by the exigencies of scientific or theological method, Moore is free to explore the mind of Jesus through imaginative means, his extra-Biblical story of the fate of a crucifixion survivor providing a particularly interesting psychiatric case. The assertive physicality and confidence of Paul contrast emphatically with Jesus’s damaged, reclusive nature.⁵⁸² The more the apostle persists in his deluded notions of a resurrected Saviour, the more Jesus’s mental reserves are stripped away, and traumatic memories return to him. In addition to this burden, he is faced with the fear of a second crucifixion as he sets out for Jerusalem to deny his own divinity and ‘to save the world from crimes that will be committed in the name of Jesus of Nazareth’(99).

The Apostle and The Brook Kerith

Moore’s imaginative leap from the ‘swoon theory’ to an actual meeting between Paul and Jesus delivered up a dramatic situation beyond his - and most dramatists’ - theatrical capabilities.⁵⁸³ As a play script, The Apostle is an abject failure and Moore realised this before the ink was dry on the manuscript. While he put a brave face on it in his correspondence with Dujardin, claiming that he had ‘never had less trouble in writing anything’, he had given a very different version of the play’s gestation to John Eglinton just a month earlier.⁵⁸⁴ In a letter of April 1911, Moore writes to his friend:

I am much obliged to you for looking through the proofs. But your letter leaves me perplexed and wondering if I am to interpret your silence regarding the dialogue as a condemnation…It would be necessary to spend three months on it, reading the while Plotinus and the New Testament. One of these days I shall try to work up each scene, but it may be that I shall not be able to do this. In prose narrative I know I could, but to press all the subtleties with which the subject is replete into dialogue seems to me a little beyond my talent. ⁵⁸⁵

It is a rare moment of artistic humility on Moore’s part, and one which suggests that his writing of the Biblical scenario had been a salutary experience. Indeed, Jean C. Noël’s opinion that ‘Le Brook Kerith [sic] ne doit guère à The Apostle que l’hypothèse du sommeil léthargique de Jésus sur la croix et l’hypothèse essénienne’ underestimates the significance of the play as a basis for the novel.⁵⁸⁶ Drafting the drama would surely have brought Moore to realise that, if he hoped to take on the challenge of exploring the inner turmoil of a failed Messiah, he would need the narrative freedom of the novel form. Such freedom would assist him in animating the quotidian existence of the Essene brotherhood more subtly than had been possible in The Apostle. Moore’s theatrical treatment of the sect amounts to little more than dressing its members in white linen and giving them otiose speeches outlining the community’s belief systems and daily routines, such as when Jesus tells his fellow monks: ‘I was happy all the morning while washing the clothes which the brethren of our Order wear, and which it is my duty to purify for them’ (49).

Moore’s struggles with his Biblical drama seem to have helped him decide which New Testament figures to include and which to leave out of his prose version. The omission of the character of Mary Magdalene is especially interesting, given the prominence afforded her character in late nineteenth-century and early twentieth-century Biblical poetry, prose fiction and verse drama, in which she is often the source of erotic interest. In Alexandra von Herder’s play, Jesus of Nazareth (1913), she is the mistress of the high priest Kaiaphas;⁵⁸⁷ in Edgar Saltus’s novel, Mary of Magdala (1891), she proves a fatal attraction for Judas who, jealous of her love for Jesus, betrays him to the authorities, hanging himself shortly afterwards as an act of repentance.⁵⁸⁸ Even more daring are those works which present her as sexually desirous of Christ himself. Robert Buchanan’s The Ballad of Mary the Mother (1897), features a Magdalen who exclaims ‘O would that I were the Queen o’the King,/ Or even his concubine!’;⁵⁸⁹ and in an even more profane scenario, George Barlow’s verse drama concludes with Mary Magdalene and a resuscitated Christ leaving the dangers of Jerusalem behind and heading for connubial happiness in the North.

Prevented from following the established mode of depicting the Magdalen as a femme fatale by a twenty-five-year time gap, Moore chooses instead to show her colourful past in a faded retrospect. The Magdalen appears in but one brief scene in The Apostle when she is brought to the Essene monastery by Paul to bear witness to the Resurrection. Mary’s reunion with Jesus is surprisingly subdued in dramatic tenor. Turned away from the threshold of the monastery on account of her sex, she later encounters the master she has not seen in two decades. In stark contrast to Paul, she is unperturbed by Christ’s explanation of how he was nursed back to health at the house of Joseph of Arimathea. Far from denying him, she implores him to return with her to Galilee where his words are still remembered and his teaching sadly missed. Moore remains true to his conviction that ‘women are natural pagans and have never been Christianized’, showing the Magdalen as more disturbed at Jesus witnessing her faded physical beauty, than by the revelation that her Lord has not risen.⁵⁹⁰ Moore presents an aged Mary Magdalene, her bodily deterioration detailed not in stage directions, but through her own description of herself as ‘an old woman withered and wan, unsightly in all eyes’ (90), who has ‘rags only enough to cover her deformities’ (91). In this respect, Moore’s stage character bears a strong resemblance to Donatello’s carved wooden figure of the Magdalen, described by Lord Balcarres in the first English study of the artist and his work:

She stands upright, a mass of tattered rags, haggard, emaciated, almost

toothless. Her matted hair falls down in thick knots; all feminine softness has gone from the limbs, and nothing but the drawn muscles remain. It is a thin wasted form, piteous in expression, painful in all its ascetic excess.⁵⁹¹
But if the stark realism of Donatello’s Magdalen evokes the paradox of ‘ascetic excess’, Moore’s age-ravaged creature suggests a woman entirely defined by her sexuality and devoid of any higher spirituality. Far from curbing Moore’s tendency to treat sexuality in a somewhat prurient manner, the confrontation of the ageing Magdalen and Christ is presented in a particularly tawdry light. Mary’s speech recalling the wiping of Christ’s feet is an example of Moore at his most indelicate:

Draw nearer, master, for I would touch the feet over which my hair descended like a mantle - soft and silky my hair was then. That thou shouldst remember its softness as it flowed about thy feet is a great joy that must remain in my heart… Look not on me, master, but remember me as I was when I knelt at thy feet. (91-2)

His decision to remove Mary Magdalene from The Brook Kerith, and the two subsequent stage adaptations, was certainly wise. Insinuating an ageing Magdalen into an all-male environment posed artistic challenges which were unlikely to have been repaid by the end result. Moore might also have felt that the foregrounding of Mary Magdalene in fictional re-castings of the Gospels had become too commonplace - as indeed they had - and that Paul should take her place as the apostola apostolorum.

Regardless of Moore’s avowed Protestantism, The Apostle is an entirely secular and iconoclastic work, pushing hard against the boundaries of Biblical drama. Yet these boundaries continued to hold fast, despite a period of sustained campaigning for the relaxation of stage censorship. The authors of Jesus in the Nineteenth Century and After applauded the kind of caution which would keep such restrictions in place well into the twentieth century:

If…dramatists have refrained from bringing Jesus himself on the stage, they have nevertheless felt keenly that to let him speak requires a greatness of achievement and demands a courage that one can attempt in a novel better than in a play, where the imitation of life on the stage must show up every imperfection.⁵⁹²
While Moore could not be accused of lacking the courage to take on such a challenge, the process of writing The Apostle must have impressed upon him the difficulties which inhered in composing New Testament drama. Moreover, his decision to rework the scenario into a prose fiction was no doubt prompted by the knowledge that it would, in this form at least, reach a wide public.