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

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CHAPTER SIX

THE BROOK KERITH: GEORGE MOORE’S LIFE OF CHRIST

Published in 1916, The Brook Kerith proved to be one of Moore’s most popular and critically acclaimed works. It was no doubt the immediate success of the novel which gave Moore the confidence to describe his creation as ‘the only prose epic in the English language’,⁵⁹³ and which ensured that it would not end up on the author’s list of books best forgotten: the writings of ‘Amico Moorini’.⁵⁹⁴ Yet while Moore, understandably, liked to attribute the popularity of his book to its literary qualities, he was also well aware that much of the attention it enjoyed stemmed from its controversial subject matter. A month or so after the novel’s publication, Moore wrote to John Eglinton: ‘Everybody is irritated with me for having written The Brook Kerith, and the issue of all the talk has been a large sale.’⁵⁹⁵ Here Moore is referring to the raging controversy which the novel provoked and which filled a great number of column inches in the letter pages of The Westminster Gazette and The Daily Express.⁵⁹⁶ What these indignant, often furious, attacks on Moore’ s work confirm is that, in the first quarter of the twentieth century, fictionalising the life of Christ still had the potential to shock the reading public.⁵⁹⁷ And Moore’s rendition of the New Testament narratives in The Brook Kerith held more potential to offend than any of its predecessors. While other rewritings of the Gospels had narrated events from the altitude of an omniscient narrator, or from the first-person perspective of an anonymous disciple, Moore dared to relate the story of failed Messiahship partly from Christ’s own viewpoint. It is not surprising, then, that The Brook Kerith outraged some of its more devout readers, used to rather more moderate imaginative reconstructions of their Saviour, and that its author lived up to his reputation for flying in the face of the bonne mœurs of the British public.⁵⁹⁸

The novel in its time
The First World War brought about a marked shift in the nation’s reading habits and Moore could not have anticipated the immense appeal that The Brook Kerith would hold for the wartime reader.⁵⁹⁹ Published during the Battle of the Somme, and four months after the Easter rising in Dublin, The Brook Kerith appeared at a time when the image of Christ was being recreated in a variety of forms, for quite diverse reasons.⁶⁰⁰ In Ireland the IRB leader, Patrick Pearse, found in Christ’s suffering a correlative to the sacrifice of young Irish men fighting for independence, exploiting the parallels in the rhetoric of his speeches and in his poetry.⁶⁰¹ Elsewhere in Europe, the suffering of the First World War soldier found a correlative in the iconography of the crucified Christ.⁶⁰² Evocations of Jesus featured large in the work of soldier-poets such as Wilfred Owen and Siegfried Sassoon, as well as in the writings of those who remained at home. Newspapers and periodicals carried poetry which considered the impact of wartime experience on religious faith. In the last few months of 1915, for example, Lucy Whitmell’s ‘Christ in Flanders’, appeared in the Spectator, arguing the Christian case through the voice of a soldier talking to Christ: ‘This hideous warfare seems to make things clear…You are here’;⁶⁰³ and on Christmas Eve of the same year, The Times carried Thomas Hardy’s ‘The Oxen’, a poem which draws poignantly on the Nativity to articulate the agnostic’s sense of loss, felt all the more acutely at this time of crisis.⁶⁰⁴ Perhaps in response to the multiplicity of Christ images which proliferated in imaginative writings during the war years, the highly dubious Recent Words from Christ upon This War and upon Our Coming Deliverance: Taken down by a Scribe purported to record Christ’s own pronouncements on the conflict, among them the order forbidding ‘the making of images of My Crucifixion for any Purpose whatsoever.’⁶⁰⁵

The Brook Kerith, revolving as it does around the figure of the crucified Christ, could not have appeared at a more apposite or sensitive moment. Writing in 1956, Robert Graves makes some thought-provoking observations on the timing of Moore’s novel:

It is in wartime that books about Jesus have most appeal, and The Brook Kerith first appeared some forty years ago during the Battle of the Somme, when Christ was being evoked alike by the Germans and the Allies for victory in a new sort of total war. This paradox made most of us English soldiers serving in the purgatorial trenches lose all respect for organized Pauline religion, though still feeling a sympathetic reverence for Jesus as our fellow-sufferer…Moore’s story - at the end of which Paul dramatically disowns the real Jesus…and goes off to preach the transcendent Jesus Christ of his own epileptic imagining among the Italians and Spaniards - made good cynical sense to us.⁶⁰⁶

Graves was not alone in classifying The Brook Kerith as a war book: several reviewers considered it primarily in the context of world conflict. Reviewing the novel for the Dial, Edward Garnett judged it to have captured the shift of religious sensibility brought about by the horrors of the war:

Mr George Moore’s novel…could not have been published at a more appropriate time. One thing that the Great War has settled for good, though I fear many honest people are too stupid to recognize it, is that in the life of the modern world Christianity is like a best suit of clothes worn to please ourselves and the neighbours…Mr George Moore’s careful study of the figure of Jesus of Nazareth…is therefore doubly welcome to anyone who, forced to face the atrocious facts of the most hideous war known to history, examines for himself the foundations of Christ’s teachings.⁶⁰⁷

Some involved in the armed forces took quite the opposite view, no doubt fearful of the consequences of loss of faith for men whose lives were already profoundly damaged. One such was Major-General Hardy who, in his correspondence with Moore in the Daily Express, insisted that The Brook Kerith was a ‘deadly source of infection’ and that its author should be excommunicated.⁶⁰⁸

Given its date of composition, it might be assumed that Moore intended the spiritually disenchanted and physically broken Jesus of The Brook Kerith to embody the pain and disillusionment of contemporary Europe. Taking just such a view, one recent critic, Elizabeth Grübgeld, argues that Moore’s disgust at the war accounts for the novel’s ending with ‘the assertion of a most Quakerly doctrine of the inner light’.⁶⁰⁹ It is more likely, however, that the emphasis on Jesus’s passivity at the close of the novel is motivated by artistic rather than political concerns. Christ’s resignation serves as a counterweight to Paul’s manic energy and as a means of reinforcing the work’s final philosophy that ‘God is…a possession of the mind’ (465).⁶¹⁰ Furthermore, Moore’s recorded comments on the war do not ring of political engagement; rather, they have a senescent, world-weary quality about them. In a letter to Emily Lorenz Meyer, written a few months into the conflict, Moore advises that ‘In these times of stress the wise man does not rage at the thunder-bolt or curse the rain that drenches him. He creeps into a quiet cave and reads the newspapers amused that they all say the same thing.’⁶¹¹ His evocation here of the heath scene from King Lear is in some respects meet for a man approaching old age; yet he makes clear that, in contrast to the rage of Shakespeare’s hero, his response to the adversity of the day will be entirely quiescent, and it seems unlikely that his composition of The Brook Kerith was significantly determined by the events unfolding around him.

Learning lessons: Moore’s preparations for The Brook Kerith

The Brook Kerith entered a well-established and extensive canon of non-fiction prose works about the life of Christ, and it is evident from the critical responses the novel received that it was judged within this context. One reviewer compared the novel to J. R. Seeley’s Ecce Homo;⁶¹² another pronounced that it ‘outstrips the most daring flights of Renan’.⁶¹³ Moore seems to have been both aware of and undaunted by such forefathers, declaring in a letter to Emily Lorenz Meyer that his Jesus would be ‘quite different from Renan’s young man, polite and charming.’⁶¹⁴ Yet in criticizing Renan’s portrayal of Jesus, Moore is also acknowledging its importance, if only as a model to work against. Indeed, the legacy of Renan was stronger than Moore would have liked to admit. In the early stages of preparing to write The Brook Kerith, Moore emulated the Frenchman in making a journey to Palestine for the purposes of research and, like Wilde before him, adopted his phrase ‘the Fifth Gospel’ to define his new writing enterprise.⁶¹⁵ And, while Moore may have convinced himself that he was creating a unique fictional version of the New Testament narratives, the review which suggests that he ‘relied largely on Renan and his own wit’ was not without some justification.⁶¹⁶

That is not to say, however, that Moore was unacquainted with the developments in Biblical criticism which post-dated Renan. The experience of composing his drama The Apostle had certainly brought him to realise that his grasp of contemporary theological issues was, at best, tenuous and he set about some serious research into his subject. The first stage of this study was to be a two-month excursion to Palestine where he hoped to gain first-hand knowledge, as well as inspiration, for his work. Moore’s decision to embark on what proved to be a gruelling journey for a man of his years is somewhat surprising.⁶¹⁷ As a much younger man, he had sneered at Holman Hunt’s travels in the Holy Land, deeming the verisimilitude so eagerly sought by the painter to be not only inimical to art but also impossible to achieve.⁶¹⁸ However, according to Augustus John, Moore, too, was concerned with factual accuracy, being keen to establish whether the crux of his story - Joseph of Arimathea carrying the barely conscious Jesus from the tomb to his home - was physically possible. John recalls Moore telling him that ‘he got his friend, the sculptor Prince Troubetskoy, to shoulder a medium-sized man and attempt to carry him from the site of the Cross to the alleged Tomb. Troubetskoy, being a kind of giant, just managed to perform this feat.’⁶¹⁹ Nevertheless, it was an experiment which (if it happened at all) could have been carried out in any part of the world. Moore’s sojourn seems to have sprung more from a romantic attachment to the Middle East than from a desire to investigate antiquities. In the Preface written for the 1921 edition of the novel, Moore claims his father’s tales of travelling to the East ensured that ‘Syria and stories became part and parcel of me at a very early age’.⁶²⁰ It is a reflection which, though liable to have been invented retrospectively, chimes with Eglinton’s observation that ‘he seemed to himself to understand a subject like the origin of Christianity if he could see it as a “story”.’ ⁶²¹ Palestine, then, was the site of storytelling and the journey there a creative rite of passage. Indeed, according to Moore, his story did not begin to take shape until he had ‘ridden through the hills and spent a night with the monks at Kerith.’⁶²²

Moore’s travels were supported by the rather more sedate pursuit of background reading. While he continued to assume a somewhat cynical, even superior, attitude toward theological scholarship, The Brook Kerith holds evidence that he was keen to show off his newly-acquired knowledge of first-century Jewish beliefs and customs, as well as his awareness of contemporary revisionist readings of the Gospels. Though Moore was by no means a naturally voracious reader, Eglinton maintained that he ‘took prodigious pains with the composition of The Brook Kerith, studying Philo Judaeus, Josephus and everything he could get hold of, becoming quite a doughty controversialist in matters of Biblical criticism’.⁶²³ His studies were doubtless helped along by his recently formed friendship with the philosopher and theologian, Thomas Whittaker, the director of the Rationalist Press Association, whose book The Origins of Christianity was one of the few non-German works to earn a place in Schweitzer’s Quest of the Historical Jesus. In the recorded dialogue with Whittaker which forms the Introduction to The Pastoral Loves of Daphnis and Chloë, Moore reminisces about his writing of The Brook Kerith when the two men ‘talked of the Gospels and the Epistles, of Josephus, Philo-Judaeus, and Apollonius of Tyana.’⁶²⁴ While Moore’s assertion in a letter to Frank Harris that he was ‘as well informed as Renan’ is clearly an exaggeration intended to provoke a literary rival, his course of study succeeded in making him au fait with a number of important theological issues, several of which he explored through his composition of The Brook Kerith.⁶²⁵
Transforming Biblical scholarship into prose fiction

One area of Biblical background which Moore found particularly engrossing was the anatomical realities of crucifixion, a topic which surfaces regularly in his correspondence with John Eglinton.⁶²⁶ In The Brook Kerith, the results of Moore’s research in this field are conveyed through a variety of characters. The hardened centurion, inured to watching men expire in agony on the cross, explains how ‘the first day is the worst day; afterwards the crucified sinks into unconsciousness…on the fourth day he dies’ (228); and the loyal servant, Esora, is charged with the task of nursing Jesus back to health, allowing her to dispense Moore’s newly acquired knowledge about the aftermath of crucifixion. She tells Joseph that ‘the nails may have pierced the feet and hands without breaking any [bones]’ (265), a detail which sees Moore satisfy the demands of fiction before those of historical accuracy. Two years before the publication of The Brook Kerith, he had announced to Eglinton that Jesus was not nailed to the cross but ‘crucified in the ordinary way - just tied upon the cross and left there to die of the strain of muscle and starvation…and remember there is no mention of nails in the three synoptic gospels.’⁶²⁷ The issue of the nails was to become an idée fixe which Moore would worry away at to the end of his days, convinced that he had noticed what Dujardin and Whittaker had missed: the Fourth Gospel is the only account of the Passion to mention nails, a detail rendered invalid by the document’s historical unreliability. Moore explains the discrepancy between the accounts of the Synoptists and that of John thus:

It came to pass that John, whilst reading the Gospels of his predecessors, found a passage in Luke in which Jesus appears to his disciples. The disciples cry: A phantom! and he answers, Behold my hands and my feet, that it is I myself. Jesus could not say, Behold my neck or my ears…He employed the ordinary language…John was struck by the phrase, and taking it to mean that Jesus was nailed to the cross, he introduced it into his Gospel.⁶²⁸

And so, Christ’s wounded hands and feet are reduced to a figure of speech, an act of semantic chicanery unlikely to have passed muster with the Biblical scholar.

In the course of The Brook Kerith, Moore supplies fictional answers to questions which had puzzled theologians for well over a century. In order to make Jesus’s physical recovery more feasible, the spear in his side (mentioned only in John) is explained away as an invention by the centurion to convince Pilate that Jesus was indeed dead when taken down from the cross on the orders of Joseph of Arimathea (230).⁶²⁹ And the scant reference in the Pauline Epistles to the life and teaching of Jesus is accounted for by Paul himself: ‘A teacher Jesus was and a great teacher, but far more important was the fact that God had raised him from the dead’ (453). While hardly an original explanation, it gains impact from being confirmed through the musings of the only man who could ever validate its truth or falsehood. This mixing of theology and fiction did not pass muster with Moore’s critics. Several reviewers drew attention to the flaws in his Biblical scholarship, and his cantankerous responses to their criticisms in the press laid him open to even more opprobrium. Such criticisms could not, of course, be justly levelled at a work of fiction. In his treatment of the New Testament sources Moore is more literary artist than theologian, his selection of textual detail being driven primarily by aesthetic concerns.

Just as earlier writers of Biblical harmonies had managed to combine the disparate Gospel accounts of Christ’s life into one consistent whole to uphold an orthodox Christian picture, so Moore pieced together fragments from the four Evangels to create his own heterodox version for the twentieth century. Believing the New Testament to be ‘but a collection of odds and ends…compiled from different sources’, Moore imitated its compositors in putting together his own work of bricolage.⁶³⁰ Despite being convinced - as were many others - that the Fourth Gospel was ‘merely an ecclesiastical work’, Moore borrows from it liberally to add colour to The Brook Kerith.⁶³¹ The character of Nicodemus, who appears only in John’s Gospel, is portrayed as one of Jesus’s more eccentric followers. Moore develops the spare Gospel portrait of the literal-minded Pharisee into that of an exotically attired young man ‘with a taste for the beauty of engraved swords’ (204), creating an amusing foil to the reserved and fastidious Joseph. And though Joseph makes a fleeting appearance in all four Gospel accounts, Moore chooses to base his simulacrum on Matthew’s description of him as ‘a rich man’ (Matthew 27:57). The distinction which comes from the adjective ‘rich’ generates one of the chief energies of the novel: the plight of a devoted disciple excluded on account of his wealth. Disregarding contemporary theorizing about the historical reliability of individual Gospels, Moore steers an impressionistic course through the New Testament narratives. In this way, he establishes a spirit of textual openness, allowing him to adapt his source to serve his novelistic purposes: Joseph can be presented as the sole mourner at the foot of the cross (228), and Mary and Martha can be charged with preparing Christ’s body for burial (235).

In some instances, Moore goes further than simply reconfiguring the Gospel records, adding episodes and characters entirely from his own imagination. These additions are rarely successful, frequently jarring the prevailing tone of the novel; this is certainly the case with the sub-plot concerning two young women, Ruth and Rachel, who vie for the attention of the same young man. It is a rivalry which results in the loser, Rachel, murdering the victor: a scenario more suited to a Victorian melodrama than a retelling of the life of Jesus. The story develops even more outlandishly as, just before Ruth is to be buried, Jesus raises her from the dead. Furious at being thwarted in her revenge, Rachel dashes over to her resuscitated enemy, only to be quelled by the gaze of Jesus and ‘like one overwhelmed with a great love, she cast herself at his feet’ (177). From this time forward, Rachel takes on the role of the Magdalen, renouncing her life of the flesh along with all her wealth and finery. Unable to resist the eroticism of the fallen woman worshipping a celibate master, Moore offers the reader the titillating picture of Rachel weaving her own golden comb through Jesus’s hair, a fictional analogue to Luke’s account of the sinful woman wiping Christ’s feet with her hair.

Yet, unlike the fallen woman of the Gospels, Rachel is kept very much in the background, in a novel which affords women little importance in the life of Jesus. Mary and Martha might be the first to discover the empty tomb, but they are only able to ‘babble about a young man in a white raiment’ (253) in response. Here, the verb ‘babble’ carries the full weight of a certain male disregard for the female religious temperament, and Joseph’s cynical certainty that they will go out and spread the untruth of Christ’s resurrection is entirely in keeping with his entrenched misogyny. On the relatively few occasions when women appear, they conform to a narrow range of essentially Victorian stereotypes: we have the faithful domestic servant in Esora, the scold in Simon Peter’s wife, Miriam, and the fallen woman in Rachel. In The Brook Kerith, women are on the periphery of an entirely homosocial world. Moore’s chief interest lies in the three male characters whose stories structure the novel and who will, each in turn, gravitate to the monastic seclusion of the Essene community.

Moore’s abiding preoccupation with religious orders and the celibate life is continued in The Brook Kerith through his choice of an Essene monastery for the main setting. His early works had tended to focus on the convent, presenting it as both prison and refuge. Scenes of young women escaping from convents feature in his first volume of poems, Flowers of Passion (1878), his first published play, Martin Luther (1879) and his early novel, Mike Fletcher (1889), while in A Drama in Muslin (1886) the cloister provides a sanctuary for the embittered lesbian, Cecilia.⁶³² Moore continued to explore his theme in Evelyn Innes (1898) and Sister Teresa (1901), which offer rather more thoughtful considerations of conventual life. From the mid-point of his writing career, however, he turned his attention more toward the male religious temperament, beginning with his story of the renunciation of priesthood in The Lake (1905), and moving on to examine the ‘single strictness’ of the Essene monks of The Brook Kerith.⁶³³ Several theories about the origins of Moore’s interest in the sect of the Essenes have been expounded, both by his contemporaries and more recent critics. Almost a decade after the publication of The Brook Kerith, Joseph McCabe wrote that:

Dining one night with George Moore, and discussing Jesus, I told him how I thought that Jesus was an Essenian monk. Moore…was more interested in Paul. But, like the great artist he is, he saw the value of my suggestion, and a little later appeared his literary drama, The Apostle.⁶³⁴

A more recent opinion is that his idea of associating Christ with the Essenes came to him a good deal earlier than McCabe claims, and stemmed from his reading of an essay by Thomas de Quincey, mentioned in a letter written by Moore in 1887.⁶³⁵ However, given the ubiquity of descriptions of the Essene sect in Lives of Jesus from the late eighteenth century onwards, Moore could have encountered the idea in any number of texts.⁶³⁶ Karl Venturini was the first writer to fully expound the theory that members of the Essene order had supervised Jesus from an early age and had later rehabilitated him after the trauma of crucifixion.⁶³⁷ His Natürliche Geschichte des Grossen Propheten von Nazareth was a text which, according to Albert Schweitzer, was ‘plagiarized more freely than any other life of Jesus’.⁶³⁸ Indeed, Venturini’s Essenian hypothesis appears frequently in a variety of narrative forms throughout the nineteenth century. For information about Essenian beliefs and practices Moore had to look no further than the well-publicized writings of Strauss, Hennell and Renan, and his study of the works of the first-century historian, Josephus, would also have afforded him a detailed account of the sect. Additionally, the work which Moore claimed inspired his idea for a meeting between Paul and Jesus, Paul Régla’s Jésus de Nazareth: Au Point de Vue Historique, Scientifique et Social, would have provided a wealth of information about the Essenian community.⁶³⁹ In choosing to focus on the Essenes, Moore is once again moving away from the Gospel narratives and their emphasis on the Pharisees and the Sadducees, the Kerith monastery offering a curious, if not entirely original, vantage point from which to reposition the life of Christ. The monastic community provides different forms of comfort for all three of the novel’s main characters: a celibate environment for Joseph, whose distaste for women is emphasized throughout the novel; a safe house for Jesus after his trials in Jerusalem; and physical refreshment for the apostle as he takes a rest from his strenuous missionary travels. In his choice of setting, Moore is also breaking away from previous literary versions of a resuscitated Jesus by returning him to his own kind. Where the Christ of Frank Harris’s story ‘The Miracle of the Stigmata’ is an isolated man, forced to remain silent as all around him follow the new faith preached by Paul, the Jesus of The Brook Kerith is part of a community who rejects the apostle’s preaching. Furthermore, the Essene setting allows Moore to view Christ’s life from a more oblique angle, moving the reader away from the more traditional perspectives of Mary Magdalene, Judas, and Peter which tended to dominate contemporary imaginative treatments of the Gospels.

Moore’s version of the New Testament is narrated through the perspectives of the novel’s three main characters. For the early twentieth-century reader, these three contrasting viewpoints may well have signalled the shifts in religious belief which had taken place over the previous hundred years or so. Joseph’s idealized vision of Christ in the novel’s opening section evokes the traditional image of Jesus, undisturbed by the latest in theology and science. The second stage of the novel presents Jesus through his own eyes as he is painfully brought to acknowledge the error in his claims to divinity, placing him, ironically, in the role of the sceptic. Finally, by way of contrast, we encounter Paul’s indomitable faith in the resurrection, and his refusal to accept material proof of its falsity, an obduracy which would have found its modern parallel in those early twentieth-century Christians who stuck fast to their belief in the divinity of Christ and the inerrancy of the Bible, in defiance of all proof to the contrary.

The figure of Joseph of Arimathea is conflated with that of the ‘rich young ruler’ (Matthew 19:16-22), and built up from a few Gospel verses into a complex and intriguing character.⁶⁴⁰ Joseph is of a hieratic disposition, searching from childhood for a religious philosophy which can satisfy both his natural asceticism and his sense of the numinous. Struggling to cope with the demands of his father, Dan, alongside the demands of a life devoted to Jesus, Joseph’s experiences highlight the inevitable difficulties which occur when the life of the spirit meets the life of the flesh. His devotion to his sick father incurs the wrath of Jesus, who tells him that there is ‘no place among his followers for those who could not free themselves from such ghosts as father, mother and children and wife’ (184). In exploring Jesus’s pronouncements on the insignificance of the family for true followers and, most especially, his own rather distant relationship with his mother, Moore was handling a subject that troubled even the most orthodox of Christians.⁶⁴¹ Through the finely developed relationship between Joseph and his father, Moore presses home his own conviction that such demands are unreasonable and impossible to meet, at the same time preparing the way for Jesus’s own realisation that his former teaching ‘was not less than a blasphemy against God, for God has created the world for us to live in it, and he has put love of parents into our hearts because he wishes us to love our parents’ (434). It is also through Joseph that the author considers the temperament of the natural celibate. Joseph’s aversion to marriage and his evident distaste for women add complexity to his character, conveyed through some of Moore’s most ambitious narrative:

His father desired grandchildren, and since he had partly sacrificed his life for his father’s sake, he might, it seemed to him, sacrifice himself wholly. But could he? That did not depend altogether on himself, and with the view to discovering the turn of his sex instinct he called to mind all the women he had seen, asking himself as each rose up before him if he could marry her…He had seen some Greek women, and been attracted in a way, for they were not too like their sex; but these Jewish women - the women of his race - seemed to him as gross in their minds as in their bodies…(194-5)

In this extract, Moore experiments with free indirect discourse, presenting Joseph’s question directly in the third line and suggesting his thought-processes - if not even a moment of recoil - through the parenthesis in the final sentence. However, the third-person perspective is never entirely relinquished, tag phrases such as ‘it seemed to him’ and ‘he called to mind’ serving to remind the reader of authorial narrative control. Moore may have considered such control well-suited to Joseph’s disciplined personality or he may, in this instance, have been keeping a tight rein on a subject which he realized might fall foul of the censor. While Joseph’s gynophobia would not in itself have caused offence to contemporary readers, its opening up of the possibility of his homosexuality most certainly would. In the 1927 Revised Edition of the novel, Moore seems to suggest something even more dangerous about Joseph’s sexuality: that he is attracted to the person of Jesus. While in the first edition of the novel Joseph reflects how ‘nothing interests me except Jesus’ (192), in the later version his reflection changes to ‘nothing tempts me except Jesus’, the change of verb carrying a more erotically charged meaning.⁶⁴² But, if there are hints of homoerotic desire here, they are confined to Joseph alone. Hardened controversialist though he was, Moore could not have failed to realise that depicting a homosexual Christ was going beyond the pale of Biblical fiction.⁶⁴³

Perhaps Joseph’s most crucial role in The Brook Kerith is to give fictional form to the theological theories which had congregated around the question of the risen Christ. Where Moore follows materialist theologians in asserting that Jesus never actually died, he does not share the common rationalist belief that the resurrection was an elaborate hoax. Rather, he presents it as the consequence of a combination of accident and two crucial decisions faced by Joseph: whether to leave Jesus to breathe his last in the tomb, or to nurse him back to health; and whether or not to disabuse Mary and Martha of their mistaken belief in Christ’s resurrection. When asked by the sisters if he believes that Christ has risen, Joseph replies with lawyer-like precision ‘Yes, I believe that Jesus lives’ (254), the semantic shift in the language of the response allowing for the false belief to be perpetuated, and setting in motion the mythopoeic process. Here, Joseph stands at the boundary line between the historical and the unhistorical. Entirely aware that he is presiding over a legend in the making, he observes with measured understatement as he watches Mary and Martha depart: ‘A fine story they’ll relate, one which will not grow smaller as it passes from mouth to mouth’ (254). And it is at this point that D. F. Strauss’s ideas about the creation and development of the myth of the resurrection take fictional form.

Recasting Jesus and Paul for modern times

Moore allows twenty five years for the story of the risen Christ to take root. After this passage of time, Paul arrives at the monastery preaching the new faith to a Jesus so unaware of the ongoing distortion of his life story that he needs to ask: ‘Christians…And who are they?’ (429). By this stage in the narrative, we have encountered at least three distinct images of Christ: the charismatic young preacher, the failed Messiah, and the Saviour sprung from Paul’s imagination. In presenting the reader with more than one picture of Jesus, Moore moves away from former conceptions of the Christ figure which had become embedded in the British consciousness. If for some time he had been unsure about how his Jesus would turn out, he had been quite sure of the type of characterization he wanted to avoid. Moore’s comment to Eglinton that his Jesus was ‘an independent creation, and not…an attempt to discover what the real man was from the Gospels’ is a clear assertion that he does not want to be associated with the aims of past biographers, whose Prefaces frequently declare their determination to uncover the ‘true’ Jesus.⁶⁴⁴ Moore’s success in distinguishing his Christ from those of so many of his forerunners lies in his presentation of him as entirely part of the Judaic world, a culturally conditioned figure. In doing this, Moore is challenging what was, for many, axiomatic to the Christian faith: Jesus was a figure for all time, proclaiming timeless, universal truths. He is also departing from Renan and his like, who saw Jesus as the embodiment of ‘an inexhaustible principle of moral regeneration for humanity.’⁶⁴⁵ In emphasizing Jesus’s Judaism, Moore seems to be adopting the more current views of Albert Schweitzer whose The Quest of the Historical Jesus was already well-known by the time Moore embarked on The Brook Kerith. In his History of New Testament Criticism, F. C. Conybeare opens a chapter dealing with foreign works of theology with the statement: ‘No work recently published in Germany has made a greater stir in England than Albert Schweitzer’s Von Reimarus zu Wrede…during the last hundred years.’ ⁶⁴⁶ Considering that Moore liked nothing better than ‘a stir’, it is feasible that he would have taken up Schweitzer’s ideas through his own reading of the 1910 translation of The Quest, or gleaned them second-hand from the periodical press, or from one of his well-read friends. The controversial nature of Schweitzer’s ideas lay in his viewing Jesus as an apocalyptic zealot, convinced that God would interrupt world history to usher in the new kingdom, and who subsequently attempts to bring about this divine intervention by suffering on the cross. In several respects the Jesus of The Brook Kerith reflects the Jesus conceived by Schweitzer, and the licence of fiction allows Moore to further develop the vision of a failed Messiah through an exploration of the psychological consequences of such a failure.

Persuading the reader to consider Jesus and his ministry as part of Judaic faith and tradition rather than as the schismatic instigator of an entirely new faith, required some ingenuity. Information about Jewish eschatology and the distinctive features of the three main religious sects had to be introduced deftly, if the novel was not to read like one of the many nineteenth-century Lives of Jesus which overload the reader with ‘background knowledge’. One way in which Moore strives to achieve this is through his description of the disciples. These followers of Jesus are literal-minded, slow-witted and completely incapable of grasping their master’s anti-materialist philosophy. Steeped in Jewish eschatological ideas, they expect Jesus to return ‘in a chariot of fire by the side of his Father’ (258), and grow fractious when, three days after the crucifixion, there is still no such happening. Peter is treated with particular ridicule, most probably because he was, for Moore, the cynosure of Catholicism. He is drawn as the village idiot with a ‘great head covered with frizzly hair’ (135), who can conceive of little ‘beyond his sails and the fins of a fish’ (134). In presenting the apostles in such a prosaic light, Moore was following the views of writers such as Matthew Arnold, who regarded them as imperfect reporters, limited in education and insight. Yet Moore exaggerates such views to a point verging on burlesque, and readers were not convinced by his rough-and-ready representation of the disciples. One reviewer dubbed them ‘turbulent zanies’, ⁶⁴⁷ while another considered that ‘the Apostles are made out to be stupider than there is any good reason for thinking them’.⁶⁴⁸ Nevertheless, this portrayal of what Moore himself described as a ‘scurvy lot’, aided him in his task of humanising Christ. Compared to his disciples, Jesus appears very special indeed, and that many should follow him on account of his earthly superiority, rather than for an ineffable quality of divinity, is made more plausible. Moore takes an equally realistic approach to Judas. Resisting what Strauss defined as ‘an over-strained supranaturalism’ in his depiction of Christ’s betrayer, Moore roots him firmly in the political and religious context of first-century Palestine, insisting that his act of betrayal is motivated by a genuine conviction that Christ’s belief in himself as the Messiah is profoundly blasphemous.⁶⁴⁹ And while Moore’s description of Judas’s ‘large bony nose hanging over a thin black moustache that barely covered his lips’ (224) conforms to a certain Semitic stereotype of the time, he at least resists the tradition of presenting him as the archetypal Jew and the other disciples as fair-headed gentiles.

One other means by which Moore attempts to give the reader a sense of Jesus in his time is by offering a range of different perspectives through which he might have been perceived by his contemporaries. Joseph’s father, Dan, is the staunch traditionalist; it is he who poses the Gospel question as to whether any prophet can come out of Nazareth (John 1:46), and who counter-points his son’s eager recounting of Christ’s miracles with his own highly sceptical assessment of the new leader. Further on in the narrative, Moore avoids the mawkish sentimentality with which so many Lives of Jesus handled the Passion by presenting Christ’s scourging, crucifixion, and presumed moment of death, through the dispassionate eyes of a centurion, habituated to the sight of men’s sufferings on the cross and happy to make a little money out of helping Joseph acquire his master’s corpse for burial. The reader’s vision of Christ is, therefore, fragmented as Moore shifts the narrative focus from one character to another. In this way, The Brook Kerith does not offer us any one truth about Jesus, but a number of partial truths, recreating how he might have been regarded in his own time and by members of his own community.

It is clear from Moore’s correspondence in the two years leading up to the publication of The Brook Kerith that he had thought long and hard about the aesthetic challenges of creating a figure human enough to bear no traces of divinity, and yet special enough to command the reader’s interest. In a letter to Dujardin, Moore expresses his doubts about being able to make anything out of a character whom ‘Stripped of his miracles…is a sorry wight’.⁶⁵⁰ However, writing to Eglinton a few months later, he seems to have overcome these reservations, and outlines what would form the core of his conception of Christ: ‘It seems to me that great sweetness of mind and great harshness are found in the same person; Jesus was a typical example, for we find in him constantly these two strands.’⁶⁵¹ This bifurcation is exploited in two different ways in the course of the novel: through the dramatic fluctuations of mood Jesus undergoes during his ministry, and through the contrast between his pre-crucifixion and post-crucifixion psychological states. Leading up to the crucifixion, the disciples grow increasingly nervous of their master’s black moods and, as his behaviour grows ever more violent and unpredictable, the apostle John remarks how ‘he’s a changed man; a lamb as long as you’re agreeing with him, but at a word of contradiction, he’s all claws and teeth’ (215). Jesus’s darker moods bear the imprint of Schweitzer’s conception of a deluded Messiah, consumed by apocalyptic fervour, though even Renan’s often sentimental portrait of Jesus, written four decades earlier, had indicated a similar splitting of the personality.⁶⁵² While Renan allows that Christ’s vain hopes of an apocalypse might have been the ‘errors of others rather than his own’, he too suggests that the power of such a vision might have made the gentle, poetic prophet ‘harsh and capricious’ on occasions.⁶⁵³

Writing in a letter of 1927, shortly after the publication of the Revised Edition of The Brook Kerith, Moore explained how his depiction of a disillusioned Christ was not entirely fictive, but based on Biblical text. He insists to Eglinton that the words ‘said to have been spoken by Jesus on the cross before death: “My God, my God, why hast thou forsaken me?”…forbid the continuation of the Jesus that left the brook Kerith to reform the world’, and that the phrase ‘necessitated a new Jesus, a disillusioned Jesus.’ ⁶⁵⁴ Here, Moore cites a Scriptural text which had long troubled Christian sensibilities and which was frequently invoked by those who denied Jesus’s divinity. Moore’s interpretation of the Passion narratives confirms the suspicions of the doubters: Jesus is indeed derelict on the cross, saved not by God the Father, but by Joseph of Arimathea.⁶⁵⁵ It is left to Joseph not only to nurse Jesus back to bodily strength, but also to restore his sanity. Moore’s detailing of Jesus’s mental state testifies to the rapid growth of interest in psychology in the early twentieth century. In the 1800s, liberal Lives of Jesus, such as those by J. R. Seeley and F. W. Farrar, had ventured to complete a psychological reconstruction of the subject, reading in between the lines of the Gospel accounts. In general, however, they tended to impose personality traits on their subject which conformed to a Victorian notion of the perfect human being and authors maintained a respectful distance between themselves and Christ. With the liberty that comes with fiction, Moore is able to present the thoughts and feelings of Jesus through an interior perspective, and to trace the steps in his mental recovery from a period of Messianic delusion.⁶⁵⁶

The Brook Kerith explores what would soon become a key concern of Freudian psychology: the repression of traumatic memories and its effects on the mind.⁶⁵⁷ Jesus’s refuge in the Essene monastery is a means of cutting off recollections of his painful past. The strict asceticism and self-sufficiency of the community serve to enclose and protect him from the harshness of the outside world. In this secluded society, his former image of himself as the good shepherd is realised quite literally in his tending of the monastery’s flock of sheep. However, following the logic of psychology, Moore makes the reader aware of the fragility of Jesus’s state of denial. Fearful of being attacked by robbers, the brethren erect an immense wall to keep the community safe, an obvious symbol of the mind’s defences; but its bricks and mortar are not enough to keep Jesus separate from external realities and his own inner demons. As he makes his way with his flock one day, he encounters the spectacle of three robbers hanging on crosses, one of whom implores the passing shepherd to help him escape his torturous punishment. This harrowing experience releases memories long locked away and he sees his former self rise up before him: ‘a man in a garden, in an agony of doubt’ (341). At this crucial point of the narrative, Jesus recovers the past he has kept at bay for many years:

He had lived in the ever-fleeting present for many years - how many? The question awoke him from his reverie, and he sat wondering how it was he could think so quietly of things that he had put out of his mind instinctively, till he seemed to himself to be a man detached as much from hope as from regret. (342)

Here, though the narrative is briefly focalised through Christ himself, the self-questioning underscoring the interior nature of the observations, the omniscient viewpoint is swiftly restored, and Moore stops short at exploiting a stream-of-consciousness technique. Nevertheless, he goes further than most fiction or non-fiction writers before him in presenting Christ’s inner thoughts and feelings.

Moore’s insistence that his story needed two Jesus figures, one driven by a Messianic mission, and another disillusioned and solitary, obliged him to undertake the onerous task of explaining two distinct sets of religious and philosophical ideas held by Jesus at two different times. If, in The Apostle, Moore had failed to incorporate the Scriptural exegesis of the monks and the theological discourse of Paul into the drama of the piece, the prose genre allowed him the freedom to unfold such ideas incrementally, through more naturalistic dialogue. Leading up to his crucifixion, Jesus becomes increasingly immersed in Jewish eschatological thought, citing the Book of Daniel ‘so that his disciples might have no fear that the priests of Jerusalem would have power to destroy him’ (152). And while his followers are entranced by the sheer narrative force of the story, he becomes rapt in its prophetic significance and begins to consider the kingdom of God to have arrived within himself.⁶⁵⁸ Moore continues to chart Jesus’s adoption of the Messianic role, revealing how his teachings become more and more apocalyptic, reaching their apex in his declaration that he ‘will become one with his Father, and from that moment there will be but one God’ (224). It is a pronouncement which prompts Judas’s betrayal and which illustrates Moore’s own conception of Jesus as ‘one of the most terrifying fanatics that ever lived in the world’, one who ‘out-Nietzsched Nietzsche in the awful things he says in the Gospel of Luke’.⁶⁵⁹ The arrogant, fanatical figure who enters Jerusalem with his ‘heart…swollen with pride’ (225) belongs entirely to the early twentieth century, by which time, as Schweitzer observed, ‘The liberal Jesus had given place to the Germanic Jesus’ and the influence of Nietzsche had eclipsed that of Renan.⁶⁶⁰ However, once The Brook Kerith abandons Biblical sources for a purely imaginative narrative, Moore’s Jesus breaks free of all typifications. Christ’s post-crucifixion years are spent casting off his apocalyptic delusions and defining his own philosophy of life and its creator. The initial stage of this process is generated by Joseph, who disabuses him of the notion that he has been taken from the cross by angels of God. Gradually, Jesus gathers enough strength to leave his disciple’s care and to seek the solace of the Essene monastery. Once there, he seems to regain his communion with the God that he ‘knew in Nazareth and in the hills above Jericho, and lost sight of…in the Book of Daniel’ (343). He embraces a philosophy whereby the creator is immanent in the natural world and rejects the texts and rituals of Judaism; though he lives with a religious brotherhood, he settles into an entirely secular role tending the community’s livestock and carrying out the practical chores of the monastery. The arrival of the evangelising Paul, however, forces Jesus to consider his relationship with God more deeply and he comes to the third stage of his theological reasoning, concluding that: ‘The pursuit of an incorruptible crown leads us to sin as much as the pursuit of a corruptible crown’ (465). Jesus’s final conviction is that God is an ontological phenomenon, perceptible through the consciousness of the individual alone. Unable to convince Paul that he is living proof that the resurrection never took place, Jesus prepares to ‘go to Jerusalem…to tell the people that [he] was not raised from the dead’ (438). In a spirit of cruel irony, the novel has Jesus repudiate his own divinity, and take on the disbelief of Moore’s own age. While his earlier pantheism looked back to an era before the establishment of formalized religious practice, his final rejection of all concepts of God, other than that which is perceived by the individual moral consciousness, seems to look to a more secular era.

Moore was careful, however, not to modernize Jesus to the point of anachronism. In the process of composition he changed his plans for the ending of the novel so that Jesus’s final doctrines are likened to those ‘being preached by the monks from India’ (466). In repositioning his subject in the context of Eastern philosophy, Moore was also following one of the philosophical fashions of his era. Schopenhauer and, after him, Nietzsche, both recognized contiguities between Christianity and Buddhism, and the philosophy of The Brook Kerith derives in part from Moore’s interest in these thinkers.⁶⁶¹ The influence of Schopenhauer can be detected in Jesus’s eventual realisation that seeking God makes man ‘the dupes of illusion and desire’ (356) and that the ideal state is one of contemplative freedom. And Nietzsche’s asseveration in The Antichrist that ‘Buddhism is a religion for the close and the worn-out-ness of civilization’, seems entirely appropriate for Moore’s mature Christ.⁶⁶² One other possible influence on Moore’s decision to incline Jesus’s ultimate belief system towards the East is Arthur Lillie’s The Influence of Buddhism on Primitive Christianity. This highly conjectural work makes the case for an historical Jesus which brings together, if in a rather different configuration, the major elements of The Brook Kerith: ‘Christ was an Essenian monk…Christianity was Essenism; and…Essenism was due, as Dean Mansel contended, “to the Buddhist missionaries who visited Egypt within two generations of the time of Alexander the Great”’.⁶⁶³ However, as is often the case, Moore may well have gained his ideas for a Jesus who progresses towards a form of Buddhism, from his more scholarly friends. Writing to Eglinton a few months before the publication of The Brook Kerith, he presents his insecure grasp of the tenets of Buddhism in a positive light:

…you must admit that it is reasonable to suppose that his mind must have progressed through Pantheism to the verge of Buddhism. You understand Buddhism, I don’t, and that was my luck, for if I had understood Buddhism I might have been tempted to attribute some of its doctrines to Jesus, whereas I had to invent a doctrine for him…⁶⁶⁴
Here, Moore is clearly insisting upon the originality of his creation. Yet the explicit references to the philosophy of Indian monks in the novel’s closing chapter invite the reader to envisage Jesus entering a Buddhist community, rather than his adopting an entirely independent theology. And what Moore deemed to be his invented doctrine, that God was ‘the last uncleanliness of the mind’ (357), though entirely consistent with his characteristic relish of the heretical, is also close to nineteenth-century German pessimism.

A few months prior to the publication of The Brook Kerith, Moore told Eglinton that he had ‘done better with Jesus than with Paul’ and most critics of the novel have since agreed with this self-appraisal.⁶⁶⁵ The eponymous hero of The Apostle is confined to the final quarter of The Brook Kerith and, unlike the character of Jesus, seems to have undergone little development from the drama scenario. Moore’s explanation for his relative failure with Paul is that the apostle ‘painted his own portrait and did it so thoroughly that he left…very little to add’, and there is no doubt that his attempts to integrate the Epistles into the novel are no more successful than his efforts to do so in the play.⁶⁶⁶ Paul’s account of his Damascene conversion and his subsequent evangelising spreads over thirty or so pages (391-423), interrupting what has been up to this point a generally fluent and mosaic narrative. His story, while presented as fascinating for the Essene brethren, offers little to engage the reader, being little more than a maladroit modernizing of the Epistles. Occasionally, perhaps striving to add complexity to the character, the author shifts the narrative perspective to Paul. At the crucial point where Jesus offers him incontrovertible physical evidence that he has not risen from the dead, Paul’s viewpoint is privileged:

…he [Jesus] continued talking, showing at every moment such an intimate and personal knowledge of Galilee that Paul could not doubt he was…a Nazarene. But what of that? There are hundreds of Nazarenes, many of which were called Jesus. (453)
Conveying Paul’s thoughts in his own idiom assists Moore in underlining the extent of the apostle’s self-delusion, as well as his inexhaustible resilience in the face of adversity. Jesus’s silent departure after expounding his personal conception of God to Paul is in stark contrast to the violent conclusion of their meeting in The Apostle. By removing Jesus physically from Paul’s vicinity, he allows the evangeliser to recover his equilibrium and to turn his face toward Italy. The final image of Paul in Rome speaking ‘from morning to evening’ (471) is antithetical to that of the silent, introspective Jesus making his way to India. In another sense, though, Paul’s impassioned preaching echoes that of Jesus shortly before his arrest and trial and is the last in a series of mirror images of Christ. Earlier in the novel Paul had considered whether he had been led to the Essene monastery ‘to find twelve disciples’ (384) in imitation of the Saviour and, like Jesus before him, had expressed his belief in the incarnation of the word. This paralleling of the two men is made explicit when Jesus observes to Paul ‘I can comprehend thee, for once I was thou’ (465) and demonstrates Moore’s conviction that, however secular an age may be, a strong religious temperament will continue to flourish in certain men.

If there is one aspect of Paul’s portrait in The Apostle which Moore takes particular care to develop in The Brook Kerith, it is that of his capacity for storytelling. Just as Renan considered Paul’s revelations as ‘the fruit of his own brain’, so Moore demonstrates through fictional means that the apostle’s idea of Christ is entirely from his imagination.⁶⁶⁷ Reliant from the first on the disciples’ storytelling for his knowledge of Jesus, and later on his own powers of narrative to capture the audiences he aims to convert, Paul arrives at the Essene monastery with his own life experiences already shaped by numerous retellings. It is evident to Mathias, one of the elders of the community, that Paul ‘however crude and elementary his conceptions might be…was a story in himself’ (383). The more he repeats the account of his conversion, the more he becomes ‘rapt…in the Jesus of his imagination’ (462), and the more strength he acquires to continue to promote and develop the story which will become the very foundation of the Christian church. Jesus’s resigned acceptance that ‘The world cannot be else than the world’ (463) means that he no longer feels obliged to return to Jerusalem to refute accounts of the risen Christ, and Paul’s myth-making is allowed to flourish.

In keeping with the New Testament sources and with the prevailing spirit of Modernist prose works, Moore withstands the temptation to supply a fictional resolution to the life of the apostle, the final sentence of the novel stating abruptly that ‘The rest of his story is unknown’ (471). However, he could not entirely resist speculating about Paul’s last moments on earth. In the Preface of the 1921 edition of The Brook Kerith, he outlines how Paul, sixty years old and weary from his travels, is discovered in a faint by a young shepherd. The boy, who Paul mistakes for Jesus, attempts to revive him but to no avail. After speaking his final words: ‘take thy faithful servant in thine arms and bear him into thy house, made not with hands but in the eternity of the heavens’, Paul dies and is given an obscure burial in a cavity among the rocks. Though the young boy knows nothing about the man he has buried, he is ‘conscious that something great and noble had passed out of the world.’⁶⁶⁸