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



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Faith, fiction and the historical Jesus: theological revisionism and its influence on fictional representations of the Gospels (c. 1860-1920)


CONTENTS

Introduction

THE VICTORIANS AND THE BIBLE 4

The Bible as truth 6


The Bible as fiction 12

The Bible as literature 16

The Bible in fiction 25




Chapter One



IN SEARCH OF THE HISTORICAL JESUS: NINETEENTH-CENTURY

LIVES OF CHRIST 30

D. F. Strauss’s Leben Jesu (1834) and the frontiers of fact and fiction 31

Ernest Renan’s imaginative reconstruction of the life of Christ 35

J. R. Seeley: the English Renan? 47

British Lives of Jesus and the exploitation of the fictional mode 51

Alternative Lives of Christ 63

Chapter Two

THEOLOGY INTO FICTION: THE HISTORICAL JESUS AND THE


RELIGIOUS NOVEL 67

Fictionalizing the Higher Criticism: Samuel Butler’s The Fair Haven (1873) 70

Philochristus: Edwin Abbott Abbott’s ‘Disciple of the Lord’ (1878) 81

Joseph Jacobs’s As Others Saw Him (1895): fictionalizing the Jewish Jesus 94

Biblical fiction at the close of the century: Marie Corelli’s reign of orthodoxy 105
Chapter Three
OSCAR WILDE AND THE FIFTH GOSPEL 114
Wilde, theology and the ‘fifth Gospel’ 117

Poems in Prose (1894) 121

Le Chant du Cygne: Wilde’s spoken Gospel 125

Re-imagining Jesus in a scientific age 132

De Profundis and its place in Wilde’s Christology 147

Chapter Four
THE AFTERLIFE OF WILDE’S ORAL TALES IN THE

WRITINGS OF HIS CONTEMPORARIES 154
The triumph of faith over science: When it was Dark (1903) 155

Bringing Wilde back to faith: Coulson Kernahan’s dream visions 159

Second-hand tales: Unpath’d Waters by Frank Harris 164



Harris and the fifth Gospel 169

‘The Miracle of the Stigmata’ 172


Chapter Five
A PECULIAR PROTESTANT: THE BIBLE ACCORDING TO GEORGE

MOORE 185
The shaping of a Protestant identity: Moore’s entry into theology 185

Reading the Bible for the first time 189

Finding a form: the challenge of Biblical drama in the early twentieth

century 197

Strange meeting: Jesus and Paul on stage 201

The Apostle and The Brook Kerith 207


Chapter Six
THE BROOK KERITH: GEORGE MOORE’S LIFE OF CHRIST 212
The novel in its time 213

Learning lessons: Moore’s preparations for The Brook Kerith 217

Transforming Biblical scholarship into prose fiction 219

Recasting Jesus and Paul for modern times 229

Moore’s quest for the perfect style 242


Conclusion 249


Bibliography 255

INTRODUCTION



THE VICTORIANS AND THE BIBLE

All expression has a limit; the only language which may not be unworthy of divine things is silence. But human nature does not resign itself to this…it prefers to talk imperfectly about God to remaining silent.1

Over the centuries, countless visual and literary artists have taken up the challenge of what the French philosopher and theologian, Ernest Renan, described as talking ‘imperfectly about God’. This study focuses on one specific area and period of the long and complex history of expressing the sacred through the arts: fictional depictions of Jesus from the mid-nineteenth century to the early 1920s. It charts how developments in theological scholarship, coterminous with rapid scientific advance, contributed to the erosion of traditional reverence for the Bible, and interacted with the ever-increasing popularity of fiction to create new ways of treating Biblical text. Interest in the historical Christ grew rapidly from the 1840s onwards, moving the theological spotlight away from Jesus’s divinity and onto his humanity. It was a shift which radically challenged the boundaries of Christian representation in an era of increasing religious doubt. By the close of the century, none but the most fervent evangelical reader was disturbed by the imaginative descriptions of Christ’s person to be found in the plethora of Lives of Jesus in print, and church congregations were growing more and more accustomed to hearing extracts from religious novels read out, and commended, from the pulpit.2 Creative embellishments of the Gospel stories which would have seemed daring, even profane, by mid-century standards, had taken on a certain orthodoxy by the 1890s. Consequently, literary artists who sought to recreate the Bible for a more religiously diverse and sophisticated community of readers had to treat the Scriptural hypotext even more venturesomely. By the early years of the twentieth century, the very trajectory of the New Testament narratives would be disordered, as alternative versions of Jesus’s life and death were explored in fictional form.

As imaginative treatments of both the Old and the New Testaments grew more commonplace, so questions concerning the moral dimensions of fiction were raised by clergy and laity alike. The ongoing debates about the nature of fiction and its relationship to the Bible were highly complex, often contradictory, and, when examined retrospectively, resist straightforward categorization. It is, however, possible to discern three distinct tendencies of thought and attitude which emerged from them. At one end of the spectrum, staunch fundamentalists argued that all fiction was potentially harmful and contrary to the promotion of a healthy Christian life, insisting on the absolute inerrancy of the Bible. ‘Fiction’ for them was not a semantically unstable term: its meaning was quite securely synonymous with ‘falsehood’. At the other end of the spectrum, atheists and freethinkers protested that the Bible was itself an egregious example of fiction, whose sacred status had been upheld by centuries of ecclesiastical dogma and authoritarianism. The via media was held by liberal theologians and critics who contended that the Bible should be read as any other literary work: neither regarded as a repository of divine revelation and truth, nor positioned sui generis. There were, of course, some viewpoints which did not fit neatly into any one of these categories, and there were various points of intersection where two polarized parties shared common ground. Such anomalies attest to the complexities of belief and unbelief which inhered in Victorian society in the second half of the nineteenth century.


The Bible as truth

Up until the middle of the nineteenth century, challenges to the traditional belief in the literal truth of the Bible had not reached far into the public domain. This state of religious innocence, enjoyed by the majority of Christians, is succinctly expressed by the narrator of Samuel Butler’s semi-autobiographical novel, The Way of All Flesh, as he reflects on the beliefs of his godson’s clergyman father:

In those days people believed with a simple downrightness which I do not observe among educated men and women now. It had never so much as crossed Theobald’s mind to doubt the literal accuracy of any syllable in the Bible. He had never seen any book in which this was disputed, nor met with anyone who doubted it. True, there was just a little scare about geology, but there was nothing in it.3


Such complacency was, however, to come under sustained attack throughout the second half of the century. Theological revisionism could no longer be ignored by ‘educated men and women’ when, in 1846, George Eliot’s translation of David Friedrich Strauss’s seminal work, Das Leben Jesu, became readily available; and the publication of Charles Darwin’s Origin of Species in 1859 caused more than ‘a little scare’ for orthodox Christians. By the 1860s, the miraculous elements of the Gospels, Christ’s divinity, and the authenticity of the Evangelists’ testaments had all come under rigorous scrutiny, and those who were unwilling, or unable, to follow the twists and turns of scholarly argument could find a more readable and lyrical exposition of heterodox ideas in Ernest Renan’s Life of Jesus, a work eminently suited to a novel-reading public.4 As might be anticipated, devout Christians put up a spirited defence of their faith and the sacred texts which underpinned it. This resistance took several different forms, reflecting the multiplicity of religious attitudes and practices to be found in mid-Victorian Britain.5 One area which was particularly called into question in the fight against unbelief was that of fiction. In some respects, fiction was a safer target than modernist theology which, with its emphasis on the contradictoriness and instability of the Biblical texts, was better left unnoticed and unprovoked. Generally speaking, the majority of Anglicans were willing to accept the developing role played by fiction in reaching those whose faith was wavering, or in converting those who had yet to find it, and the 1860s saw the demise of the religious tract and the rise of religious prose fiction.6 This embracing of the fictional or semi-fictional mode for Christian ends did not meet with the approval of some of the more traditional elements of the clergy. In 1864, The Christian Advocate and Review carried an article entitled ‘Fiction and Faith’ which insisted that the popularity of prose fiction was one of the major contributors to the ‘present epidemic of unbelief’.7 Its opening sentence avers that ‘the last new book of sceptical theology runs a race for popularity with the latest sensation novel’, a clear allusion to Ernest Renan’s Vie de Jésus, the first English translation of which had been published that same year.8 And, indeed, as the author’s choice of comparison suggests, Renan’s theology had more than a touch of fictional flair. Renan presents - and softens - heterodox religious ideas in an alluringly poetic manner, blending together two of the fundamentalists’ greatest enemies: revisionist theology and imaginative prose. Very much on the defensive, the contributor to the Christian journal argues that reading fiction is a time-wasting and frivolous occupation, leading ineluctably to passivity, indolence, and ‘a growing feebleness in the grasp of truth.’9 Fiction is condemned as insidious, manipulative and deceptive; emotions are aroused by what is essentially illusory: a narrative ‘couched in the form of truth’ which promotes the ‘habit to be moved and not to act.’10 The writer reveals a profound distaste for any pleasure that might be gained from reading stories other than those found in the Bible and regards those who engage in the reading of fiction as weak, decadent, and destined for doubt and damnation. Throughout his polemic, he insists on regarding the Bible as fact, in stark contradistinction to fiction; where the sacred text is truthful, historically-grounded and edifying, imaginative prose is seductive, pleasurable and offers nothing in the way of self-improvement. Paradoxically, however, the overall effect of the article is to draw attention to the attractiveness of the novel and short story, with their boundless capacity to create a compelling verisimilitude. Fiction emerges as a powerful modern force, while the writer’s somewhat intemperate tone emits a sense of hopelessness, of protesting too much.

Yet opponents of fiction continued to swim against the tide in voicing their discontent. A few years after the Christian Advocate’s anathematizing of all that fiction could provide, the Reverend George William Butler, in a tract entitled ‘Is it True?’, proclaimed: ‘Entirely different from the principle of the fiction is that of the Bible’.11 Butler takes his main title from the Introduction to Favell Lee Bevan’s The Night of Toil: A familiar account of the labours of the first missionaries in the South Sea Islands, published in the late 1830s:

No attempt has been made by the slightest exaggeration to heighten the interest of this narrative. It is hoped that its adherence to facts will be strong recommendation in the eyes of youth, who, while they much prefer narrative to didactic writing, show, by the earnest and oft-repeated inquiry, ‘Is it true?’ that they value truth above fiction.12
In full accordance with Bevan’s point of view, Butler asserts that the young need fact and not fiction, deeming the fairy tale an ‘unmixed evil’, liable to pervert the child’s natural taste for the truth.13 In looking back to a text published three decades earlier, Butler is typical of those clergy who resisted all pressure to move with the times. The thirty years or so which separate Bevan’s missionary tale and Butler’s invective had seen a significant shift in the public’s perception of the novel. Having risen in literary status and respectability thanks to the works of authors such as Dickens, George Eliot and Thackeray, the novel had shaken off its former reputation as a debased and meretricious form. Yet while Butler concedes that the novels of Dickens and Harriet Beecher-Stowe have helped the cause of the poor and the enslaved, he nevertheless regards the majority of fiction as a ‘snare’, and exhorts his readers to ‘give heed, first and foremost, to their Bibles; and after their Bibles, to solid studies.’14 Certain strands of Butler’s argument against fiction are particularly extreme for the time; his condemnation of the tract societies for allowing fiction into their lists, for example, proving the exception to Richard Altick’s rule that ‘the disapproval of fiction never extended to narratives specially written to convey some useful moral or religious lesson’.15

The Higher Criticism posed an especially grave threat to the Protestant faith, with its distinctive tradition of regular Bible readings. While the Roman Catholic Church could look to its doctrines and dogma to support and protect the faith of its members, the more evangelical Protestants had less to fall back on once the sacred texts were interrogated and found wanting. Indeed, some orthodox Christians, while asserting the primacy of God’s word as represented in the Bible, simultaneously expressed regret that such a collection of documents existed at all. A case in point is the Congregational minister, Joseph Parker, whose Ecce Deus, a reply to J. R. Seeley’s ground-breaking and controversial study of Jesus, Ecce Homo, foregrounds the inadequacy of language to express ‘what is deepest in the soul’.16 Parker states that ‘Wisely, Christ wrote nothing, for written language is more difficult of interpretation than spoken language…The moment that the grammar and the lexicon are called in, strife begins, and logomachy deposes wisdom.’17 For believers like Parker, then, the Gospel records of Christ’s life and teachings in the Gospels were a mixed blessing: though central to the development and the perpetuation of the Christian faith, their very textuality laid them open to more and more forensic examination with every new age of scholars.

By the final decade of the nineteenth century, there remained a small but significant body of Anglicans who, along with the more fundamentalist Dissenters, continued to proclaim their faith in the infallibility of the Scriptures. In December 1891, The Times published a letter in its news section under the heading The Bible and Modern Criticism, containing ‘A Declaration of the Truth of the Holy Scriptures’. Countersigned by thirty-eight Anglicans from various ranks of the clergy, styling themselves ‘messengers, watchmen and stewards of the Lord’, the declaration read:

We …solemnly profess and declare our unfeigned belief in all the canonical Scriptures of the Old and New Testaments as handed down to us by the undivided Church in the original languages. We believe that they are inspired by the Holy Ghost; that they are what they profess to be, that they mean what they say; and that they declare incontrovertibly the actual truth in all records, both of past events and of the delivery of predictions to be thereafter fulfilled.18


An entirely defensive document, the letter attempts to repair the damage inflicted by at least half a century’s remorseless attack on the Bible by ‘modern criticism’. Moreover, it demonstrates the extent to which some conservatives wilfully ignored the evidence of translators, theologians and historians, in order to maintain belief both in the Scriptures as the direct words of God, and in a typological mode of understanding them. In the four or so weeks following the publication of the declaration by Anglican clergy a series of letters, expressing a variety of responses to it, appeared in The Times. Although there were a few respondents who applauded the declaration, the majority of them were vehemently opposed to it. Joseph Parker, though a well-known evangelical, and a passionate advocate of Scriptural exposition, accused the signatories of making the Bible a ‘kind of idol’,19 and the Archdeacon of Manchester, James M. Wilson, regretted their ‘theological arrogance’, asserting that ‘no such theory of inspiration as theirs is recognized by the Church of England’.20 It would appear from this correspondence, then, that the Church of England and more liberal Dissenters, such as Joseph Parker, were moving away from a literalist interpretation of the Bible by the close of the century.

While some fundamentalist Protestants would continue to uphold the literal truth of the Bible and to inveigh against the iniquities of fiction well into the next century, such uncompromising voices grew increasingly subdued as theology grew ever more complex and nuanced. Fiction of the 1880s and 1890s presented the Biblical literalist as a naïve figure from a bygone age. In Hale White’s The Autobiography of Mark Rutherford, the Dissenting church deacon, Mr Catford, is characterized as ‘a plain, honest man, very kind, very ignorant, never reading any book except the Bible’;21 in the posthumously published, Father and Son, Edmund Gosse describes how his Plymouth Brethren mother ‘had a remarkable…impression that to “tell a story”, that is, to compose fictitious narrative of any kind, was a sin’;22 and the Reverend Clare, in Thomas Hardy’s Tess of the D’Urbervilles, is representative of a ‘clergyman of a type which…has wellnigh dropped out of contemporary life’, a somewhat marginalized member of the established church in his strict adherence to Biblical truth.23 And it was not only liberal-minded authors who regarded such fundamentalists as a dying breed. The unimpeachably orthodox clergyman, Frederic William Farrar, roundly defended his best-selling biography of Jesus against the criticism of, in his own words, an ‘aged dissenting minister who was positively shocked and horrified at the mere title “The Life of Christ”’.24 By the century’s close, the Bible’s claim to absolute truth had been severely undermined and those clergy who persisted in upholding it were in an ever-dwindling minority. As literalists lost their hold on Biblical interpretation, so increasing numbers of creative writers would attempt to revivify the life of Jesus by a process of imaginative reconfigurations, and some evangelicals must have regarded their erstwhile warnings about the evils of fiction as both prescient and entirely vindicated.


The Bible as fiction

Diametrically opposed to the Biblical literalists were the Secularists and freethinkers, who promoted the atheist cause as part of a crusade to reform a society which they believed to be repressed and exploited by State and Church alike. Yet, as is often the case when antithetical viewpoints are juxtaposed, certain similarities emerge: extreme Secularists and extreme Protestants overlapped in their focus on the Bible as a means of promoting their causes, and both groups chose to use the word ‘fiction’ as a term of opprobrium, albeit in contrasting contexts. For the evangelicals, the Scriptures were truth and ‘fiction’ was untruth; for the Secularists, it was the Scriptures that were entirely fictitious. The first major figure to draw attention to the fictional nature of the Bible was D. F. Strauss in Das Leben Jesu and, while he insisted that the imaginative elements of the Gospels stemmed from a particular mode of perception and thinking, specific to a distinct time in history, rather than from wilful deception, he nevertheless opened up a field of enquiry which aimed at laying bare the inconsistencies of the four-fold Gospel. Following on from Strauss, in the second half of the century, more and more readers of the Bible began to question its authenticity and, consequently, its sacredness. In the 1870s, the explorer and writer, Winwood Reade, expounded his atheist views in The Martyrdom of Man, a history of the world which, in its closing chapter, rails against Christianity and relegates the Bible to the genre of historical biography, putting it on a par with the Lives produced by the first-century Greek writer, Plutarch.25 But even the biographical value of the Gospels was in the process of being undermined. Writing under the pseudonym ‘Sylva’ and declaring himself an ‘ultra-Unitarian’ the author of Ecce Veritas (one in a series of responses to Seeley’s Ecce Homo) insists that ‘most of those who have tried to write a life of Jesus based on the four evangels, have been compelled honestly to admit the impossibility of any true biographical arrangement.’26

Throughout the final forty years of the nineteenth century, prominent figures in the Secularist movement such as Charles Bradlaugh, Annie Besant, Charles Watts and G. W. Foote, strove to expose the fictive nature of both Testaments through a variety of means.27 Perhaps the most energetic and memorable of these was Bradlaugh, whose hatred of the Bible was articulated stridently in lecture halls up and down Britain. In a pamphlet of 1861, writing under the pseudonym ‘Iconoclast’, he posited that ‘Perhaps there was a man who really lived and performed some special actions attracting popular attention, but beyond this Jesus Christ is a fiction.’28 And Bradlaugh’s close associate, Annie Besant, would underline the fictional elements of the life of Christ in works such as The Myth of the Resurrection in which the Passion narratives are treated as ‘the hysterical and conflicting babble of an indefinite number of terrified and superstitious women’.29 As the movement gathered momentum, periodicals such as the National Reformer, the Freethinker, the Secular Review and the Agnostic Journal assisted the dissemination of Secularist views of the Bible by printing pamphlets, lectures, and debates concerning the Higher Criticism. Charles Watts played a particularly significant part in developing Secularist publishing, founding in 1885 the Literary Guide, which listed and reviewed seminal works, past and present, by liberal authors from Britain and abroad. Additionally, Watts went some way to making these heterodox writings easily available through the Rationalist Press Association, which he helped to launch in the early 1890s.

The Secularist who did most to undermine the veracity of the Bible narratives and to drive home their fictitious status was G. W. Foote. Founding the Freethinker in 1881, Foote used this populist and militantly atheistic journal, and related publications, to overturn any surviving notions of the Gospels as sacrosanct. In A Bible Handbook, for example, he declares - tongue firmly in cheek - that the Bible is made up of ‘self-contradictions, absurdities, immoralities, indecencies and brutalities’ and proceeds to exemplify his contention through some highly impious exegesis of the supposedly sacred text.30 A Nietzschean avant la lettre, he characterizes Christ as ‘a tame, effeminate, shrinking figure’, in opposition to the majority of agnostics who still clung to the image of Jesus as a pattern of perfection for all men to follow.31 Foote subjected both Old and New Testament texts to a variety of generic transformations: Bible stories appeared in the form of cartoons, salacious poems and jokes, and perhaps most memorably, in the grotesque outlines of comic woodcuts.32 Exuberantly vulgar, Foote’s recreation of the Scriptures stripped away all gravity and portentousness. The apocalyptic visions of the book of Revelation, for example, are reduced to a dream-vision of a terminally ill Jehovah, taking his son to task for only recruiting ‘weak, slavish, flabby souls’, while Satan manages to attract the ‘best workers and thinkers’.33 One particularly audacious venture of Foote’s was his investigation of the ‘missing years’ of Jesus’s youth through an epistolary format. In Letters to Jesus Christ, Foote employs relentless comic bathos to mock the very concept of divinity. In these pithily colloquial letters, Jesus is asked to reflect on his early years and answer questions such as ‘Did God howl when he was pricked by a nasty pin?’ and ‘Did God play at marbles and make mud-pies?’34



A kind of secular Wyclif of his day, Foote disrupted the familiar cadences of the Authorized Version and replaced them with an earthy vernacular. By offering up the Bible’s master narratives in different fictional forms, he insisted on their essentially fictitious nature, opening them up to future heterodox treatments. Considering himself a literary man, he used his knowledge of writers such as Blake and Shakespeare, and a range of contemporary novelists, to promote his cause, declaring freethought to be ‘an omnipresent active force in the English literature of to-day.’35 However, Foote’s animus towards Christianity constantly occluded his sense of aesthetics, and his iconoclastic treatment of the Scriptures could in no way be considered worthy contributions to the literature of the day. Nevertheless, his writings represent a significant assault on a sacred text still revered by both orthodox and agnostic readers. At the same time, their publication went some way to underlining the need for more thoughtful and subtle re-imaginings of the Gospels.
The Bible as literature

Allowing the Bible to be preserved in aspic by Protestant fundamentalists, or to be torn asunder by the derision of the Secularists, were options which held little appeal for a significant number of mid-Victorians who, while they could not accept its literal truth, were still strongly attached to its language and morality. Consequently, alongside these uncompromising modes of reading the Scriptures, a more moderate approach developed, which encouraged the reading of the text as literature, in a spirit of intellectual openness. Such an approach had already been advocated in the early part of the nineteenth century by Samuel Taylor Coleridge, whose theological and literary sophistication prevented him from accepting both what he termed the ‘Bibliolatry’ of the low church, and the rationalism of the newly emergent historical criticism.36 He proposed instead that the Christian reader should take up the sacred text ‘as he would any other body of ancient writings’; far from placing the Bible on the same level as the pagan authors, however, he insisted that this way of reading the text would only serve to reinforce ‘its superiority to all other books.’37 As the century progressed and religious faith declined, Coleridge’s vision of the Bible as a work of great poetic imagination took on more and more appeal for liberal-minded Christians. A prominent advocate of this school of interpretation was the Reverend Benjamin Jowett of Balliol College whose essay, On the Interpretation of the Scriptures, formed a major contribution to the controversial Essays and Reviews, published in 1860.38 Jowett argues for an intrinsic method of reading the Bible to be achieved by stripping away ‘the remains of dogmas, systems, controversies…encrusted upon them’; this kind of reading set out to reveal the original language in all its freshness ‘as of a picture which is restored after many ages to its original state’.39 Such an ambitious exfoliation of the text was, of course, a tall order. A diachronic study of the Bible narratives through the painstaking discipline of translation, and evaluating the accretions of successive generations, each with their own cultural specificity, posed an immense challenge to those Christians accustomed to viewing the Scriptures as the immutable and authentic words of God, protected by the seal of inspiration. Jowett’s contentions that ‘If words have more than one meaning, they may have any meaning’ and that ‘the unchangeable word of God…is changed by each age and each generation in accordance with its passing fancy’, undermined any such assumption of textual stability.40 However, if his ideas about Biblical language may have seemed deeply threatening to the more conservative Christians, they offered an alternative route for the more open-minded believer, disenchanted with the extrinsic methods of Biblical criticism which held sway at the time. Nineteenth-century investigations into the Scriptures had tended to focus on the context in which they were written and understood, with all the attendant difficulties of historical distance and cultural relativism. Jowett’s method of reading, though still requiring a scholarly excavation of the text, placed emphasis on its literary qualities, grounding it more firmly in the experience of the reader.

Jowett’s writings on Biblical interpretation had considerable influence in the later decades of the nineteenth century. Reviewing the theologian’s work retrospectively in Watts’s Literary Guide in 1889, the freethinking critic, Mirabeau Brown, selects his most controversial statement about reading the Bible as any other work, and predicts that though ‘The maxim is simple…its consequences will be portentous.’41 In some respects, this prediction had already been fulfilled in the religious prose works of Matthew Arnold, whose advocacy of reading the Scriptures as supreme examples of literary writing had made a considerable impact on contemporary debates about faith and the Bible in the 1860s and 1870s. A parallel reading of Jowett’s and Arnold’s discussions of Scriptural interpretation reveals a significant number of shared ideas.42 Like Jowett, Arnold considers the ‘notion that every syllable and letter of the Bible is the direct utterance of the Most High’ to be outmoded and highly misleading.43 He expounds this belief in Culture and Anarchy (1869), drawing parallels between Catholic and Protestant temperaments:

…the attitude of mind of Protestantism towards the Bible in no respect differs

from the attitude of mind of Catholicism towards the Church. The mental habit of him who imagines that Balaam’s ass spoke, in no respect differs from the mental habit of him who imagines that a Madonna of wood or stone winked…44


For both Jowett and Arnold, such rigid views of the text encouraged narrowness of mind, superstition, and intolerance, and failed to take account of the nature of language itself. Arnold went on to explore Jowett’s contention that the meaning of a word was inherently unstable, in the Preface to Literature and Dogma (1873). Here he insists that the ‘language of the Bible is fluid, passing, and literary, not rigid, fixed and scientific’;45 underlying this definition is the author’s mistrust of revisionist theology, a mistrust which further aligns him with Jowett. Arnold continued to protest against the Higher Criticism in God and the Bible (1875):

Even while acknowledging the learning, talents, and services of these critics, I insist upon their radical faults; because, as our traditional theology breaks up, German criticism of the Bible is likely to be studied here more and more, and to the untrained reader its vigorous and rigorous theories are, in my opinion, a real danger.46


The salient word here is ‘untrained’. Arnold’s main concern is that those who lack the subtlety of intellect to read the German school in an informed and questioning manner, will be seduced by the novelty of its theories and may end up abandoning the Scriptures altogether. Arnold found the prospect of a wholesale rejection of the Bible greatly disquieting. Just as Jowett believed strongly that the Bible ‘supplies a common language to the educated and uneducated, in which the best and highest thoughts of both are expressed’,47 so Arnold believed it was the ‘great inspirer’, the glue which held society together. 48

Yet while Arnold followed Jowett in several respects, he departed from him significantly in others. For the poet Arnold, religion was inseparable from culture, the cultural and devotional value of reading the Bible being interdependent; for Jowett, on the other hand, the literary appreciation of the Scriptures was always of secondary importance. While Jowett feared that German criticism would destroy faith in Christ and his teachings, Arnold’s concerns were primarily for the deadening effects it would have on the human mind and its sensitivities to the written word. The clergyman takes the reader back to the text in order to wipe it clean of extra-Biblical accretions and reveal its truth; the poet takes the reader back to the text to keep alive Christianity’s ‘charm for the heart, mind and imagination of man’.49 For Arnold, the importance of the Bible lay not in any finite truths expressed within it, but in the power of its expression: poetry would always hold a superior position over the scientific language of the Higher Critics and the dogma of organized religion. As he explains in the essay ‘On Poetry’:



The reign of religion as morality touched with emotion is indeed indestructible. But religion as men commonly conceive it - religion depending on its historicalness of certain facts, on the authority of certain received traditions, on the validity of certain accredited dogmas - how much of this religion can be deemed unalterably secure? Not a dogma that does not threaten to dissolve, not a tradition that is not shaken, not a fact which has its historical character free from question. Compare the stability of Shakespeare with the stability of the Thirty-Nine Articles! ...The strongest part of our religion to-day is its unconscious poetry.50
Arnold’s religious epistemology had considerable influence on how the Bible would be read, discussed, and rewritten in the decades covered in this study, not least in his insistence on the moral force of literary language. It offered a means of demythologising the Scriptures without giving up a sense of the numinous; previously hallowed narratives, such as the Nativity and the Passion, could still be appreciated for their symbolic and poetic qualities, irrespective of their literal truth. G. W. Foote could not have been more wrong in his contention that ‘Freethought teachers among the masses of the people…only put into homlier [sic] English and publish in a cheaper form the sentiments and ideas which Mr Arnold expresses for the educated classes at a higher price and in a loftier style.’51 While Foote is certainly justified in drawing attention to the question of social class in the discourse of religious controversy, his assertion that Arnold and hard-line freethinkers shared a common goal is misleading. Arnold’s religious writings were ultimately conservative; the Secularists’ entirely destructive. Indeed, Arnold might have been describing the likes of Foote when he criticized the ‘hard-headed people’ who treat the Bible ‘as either an imposture, or a fairy-tale.’52

Arnold’s mixing of religion and culture led to his being accused of aestheticism by his own generation and those to come.53 Yet, in foregrounding the literary appeal of the Bible, Arnold was merely making explicit one of its most abiding and powerful features. That many orthodox Christians had a strongly aesthetic appreciation of their sacred text is nowhere more evident than in the controversies which raged over the revision of the Authorised Version of 1611. One of those wary of relinquishing the King James translation was Christopher Wordsworth, Bishop of Lincoln, who warned the revisers to ‘Beware lest by altering the text of the authorized version of the Bible, you shake the faith of many, and especially of the poor.’54 Here, the established Church meets Arnold in its appreciation of the attractiveness which inhered in the sonorous cadences of the King James Bible: to disrupt the rhythms of this seventeenth-century prose, so familiar and reassuring to countless generations, was to risk disturbing a simple and unquestioning faith. While some Secularists no doubt hailed the publication of the Revised Version (1881-5) as yet another nail in the coffin of orthodoxy, the majority of Christians, both liberal and traditional, seemed to regard it as a regrettable diminution of a great work.55 That readers had long recognized and celebrated the King James Bible as a literary masterpiece is evident in the way it was (and still is) frequently yoked with, and compared to, the works of Shakespeare. Writing in the early 1840s, Thomas Carlyle portrays Shakespeare as having almost divine status; he is ‘a Prophet in his way’, and ‘there is actually a kind of sacredness in the fact of such a man being sent into this Earth.’56 Three decades or so later, the Scottish Episcopal Bishop, Charles Wordsworth, described Shakespeare’s writings in a similar vein as ‘saturated with Divine Wisdom’ and saw it as no coincidence that the nation’s greatest poet ‘and our translators of the Bible lived and flourished at the same time, and under the same reign.’57 It is clear from this that the Authorized Version and the works of Shakespeare were inextricably linked in the hearts and minds of the educated classes. Though such a link was made by unquestionably orthodox Christians, it was, first and foremost, founded on aesthetic sensibilities and judgements. As in the present day, when Shakespeare is appropriated to support the views of both left-wing and right-wing ideologues, so, in the nineteenth century, all but the most extreme Dissenters invoked the words of the Bard to uphold their religious - or irreligious - convictions. From the 1860s to the end of the century, devout Lives of Jesus were liberally scattered with quotations from Shakespeare’s drama and poetry, while at the other extreme, an article in Foote’s Secular Almanack rooted the playwright ‘In the front rank of the Freethinkers’, citing Hamlet’s dying words - ‘The rest is silence’ - as proof of their author’s profound scepticism.58

In the early 1860s, the theologically orthodox writer, Isaac Taylor, would observe of the title of his work, Spirit of the Hebrew Poetry:

The mere use of any such phrase as this - The Hebrew Poetry, or the speaking of the Prophets as Poets - is likely to give alarm to Bible readers of a certain class, who will think that, in bringing the inspired writers under any such treatment as that which these phrases seem to imply, we are forgetting their higher claims, and thus disparage them as the Bearers of a message immediately from God to men.59
Taylor’s phrase ‘Bible readers of a certain class’ refers, in all likelihood, to the more puritanical Dissenting denominations. However, even some relatively moderate Christians remained uneasy with an aesthetic approach to the Scriptures. One such was William Henry Fremantle, a liberal theologian and acolyte of Jowett. In a published sermon, he put forward a way of combining a literary appreciation of the Bible with a belief in its inspiration:

The Gospels…have a great literary charm in their simplicity, in their freshness and naïveté. But who can say that their form is independent of their subject matter? Much more truly we may say that the writers were dealing with a subject so divine and yet so simple that gives the divine simplicity to their form. The spirit of Christ is the form as well as the matter, in the grace, in the chasteness, in the reticence,…in the naturalness and directness of the style.60


Fremantle, then, manages to marry inspiration and aesthetics by insisting on the dependence of form on content: without the grace of God, there would be no ‘literary charm’. Other Christians fell back on established historicist approaches to the text to detract from the vogue of reading the Bible as literature. Writing in the first decade of the twentieth century, Bernard Lucas, an active member of the London Missionary Society, explains the main purpose behind his championing of Pauline writings:

In the present day, when the Gospels are being more and more regarded as literary compositions, rather than as historical records in the strictest sense, it is of supreme importance that we should have some very definite conception of what constitutes a sufficient historical basis for the Christianity which has come down to us.61


Yet, in 1907, the same year that Lucas’s work on Saint Paul was published, the theologian William Sanday, writing in The Life of Christ in Recent Research, insisted that all ‘study of the Gospels must really be founded upon close literary analysis’. While too much on the side of orthodoxy to surrender the Gospel texts to a purely literary reading, Sanday’s vast experience and knowledge of contemporary theology had no doubt convinced him that the historical method was not in itself sufficient to deal with texts that were essentially literary in nature. Notwithstanding the views of theologians as eminent as Sanday, the majority of Biblical scholars would continue to regard literary readings of the Scriptures as secondary to the more established historical critical methods.62 Outside the world of theology, however, many Christians found the aesthetic pleasures of the Biblical text a comforting alternative to unbelief or literalism.
The Bible in fiction

From the early centuries of Christianity, the documents which came together to form the Bible, underwent frequent and extensive rewritings. The linguistic choices of translators, the editing and sequencing of Gospel harmonists, and the expurgations of those writing versions of the Scriptures for children or, indeed, delicate-minded adults, all involved some degree of imaginative reworking.63 All these forms of textual revision, and the processes they involved, came under increasing scrutiny with the growth of theological revisionism and its assault on the reliability and stability of the Scriptures. Coeval with these developments in Biblical criticism was a rapid rise in the popularity of the novel. In an article entitled ‘On the Admission of Fiction in Free Public Libraries’, published in the late 1870s, Peter Cowell, the chief librarian of the Free Public Library in Liverpool remarked:

Years ago, I observed, in making up the statistics of the Liverpool lending libraries, that the issue of novels has about 75 per cent. of the whole issue. It forms that proportion still. I have not observed much variation from that in other free lending libraries in our own country.64
A late-twentieth-century article in the Journal of Librarianship and Information Science (1992) confirms Cowell’s estimate of fiction-lending as typical of the whole country, and affirms that ‘Throughout the period, fiction remained the overwhelming first choice in lending libraries’.65 Yet while the public appetite for fiction was beyond doubt, its desirability was still very much in question. The popularity of prose fiction seems to have disturbed the educated classes, who were perhaps sceptical about the quality of a genre produced and consumed in such quantities. The vast majority of those who objected to the mass consumption of novels and short stories regarded them as intellectually unchallenging and dangerously seductive for those of an indolent frame of mind; in an age when self-improvement was a cardinal virtue, the reading of fiction was judged as a time-wasting act of self-indulgence. Various theories were advanced to account for popular reading habits. In his review of one of the century’s best-selling religious novels, Mrs Humphry Ward’s Robert Elsmere (1888), William Gladstone puts forward his own explanation for the growth of fiction:

The increasing seriousness and strain of our present life may have had the effect of bringing about the large preference, which I understand to be exhibited in local public libraries, for works of fiction.66


It is a form of reasoning which places fiction within the context of a rapidly evolving industrial society, with its increased leisure time and, even more significantly, its expanding rates of literacy. It also betrays a strong mistrust of imaginative writing. By fulfilling the need for light relief, for a change from the ‘seriousness and strain’ of quotidian existence, fiction becomes associated with what is trivial and undemanding. Just as disturbing for the moral majority was the ready availability of novels in public libraries; free lending meant that the influence of fiction could permeate the most economically deprived sectors of the community, generally regarded to be most in need of improvement through edifying works of non-fiction. As Cowell explained in his report on fiction-reading in the late 1870s:

Free libraries were primarily intended to carry on the education of our schools and to enable the poorer classes to develop any latent talent or ability they might possess…and so make it profitable to themselves and others.67

For all the theories which circulated about fiction’s effect on the moral and educational welfare of society, they made little impact on practice. In his Autobiography of 1883, Anthony Trollope comments on how ‘Novels are read right and left, above stairs and below, in town houses and in country parsonages, by young countesses and by farmers’ daughters, by old lawyers and by young students.’68 Viewed from Trollope’s perspective, the novel emerges as a democratizing agent, and it was no doubt this aspect of the genre which proved threatening to the more traditional elements of society. Yet the novel’s ubiquity and accessibility also lent it great educative potential and it is this aspect of prose fiction which seems to have helped it gain respectability. While Cowell, and many like him, considered prose fiction to ‘unfit the mind for close and attentive reading and study’, others considered it the most direct and efficient means of informing the popular mind.69 An early exponent of fiction’s instructive potential was the eminent Scottish judge, Lord Charles Neaves. In a lecture delivered in 1869, he argued that teaching through fiction was ‘lawful and laudable…proved by the fact that it is freely resorted to in Scripture. Our Saviour’s parables are unrivalled compositions.’70 This image of Christ as the supreme storyteller, popularized by Renan’s Life of Jesus, though still fiercely opposed by some evangelicals, continued to provide one of the most persuasive arguments for the virtues of fiction.71 If Jesus could use fictional methods to instruct, so the argument went, the novel was a perfectly legitimate means of education in an increasingly complex and text-dependent age.

The role of the novel in discussing and, indeed, forming opinions about contemporary issues was already well developed by the mid-century. David Masson, Professor of English Language and Literature at University College London, in a survey of British fiction published in 1859, reported that ‘Hardly a question or doctrine of the last ten years can be pointed out that has not had a novel framed in its interest, positively or negatively. To a great extent tales or novels now serve the purpose of pamphlets.’72 For the Victorians, prose fiction would become one of the most important means of debating theological controversies, and the second half of the nineteenth century saw a formidable outpouring of religious novels.73 Every shade of Christian belief - and dissent - was explored through fiction, as religious tracts were replaced by imaginative prose. The Reverend George Butler complained: ‘Religious story-books…are as plentiful as flowers in summer’, and lamented that ‘our two great Tract Societies have admitted such a vast amount of fiction into their lists of books.’74 And this supplanting of religious ‘fact’ with religious fiction was to grow apace. A comparison of the publications catalogues produced by the high-church Society for Promoting Christian Knowledge in 1874, with those of 1890, demonstrates the rapid increase in the number of fictional works deemed suitable for a devout Christian reader. In the earlier catalogue, the section headed ‘Stories and Tales’ takes up a meagre seven pages, whereas sixty-five pages are devoted to tracts, sermons and meditations. In contrast, the 1890 edition includes a section of just twenty-four pages headed ‘Tracts’, and one of over fifty pages entitled simply ‘Books’. Under this broad category, non-fiction and fiction works are listed together alphabetically, so that Martyrs and Saints of the first Twelve Centuries rubs shoulders with the edifying Mary and Willy: A Tale for Easter Sunday.75

With such an abundance of religious fiction, it was perhaps inevitable that aesthetic quality would be compromised. In the late 1880s, Andrew Lang, one of the most influential journalists and authors of his day, declared that ‘any novel written to make a theological point, to advocate theological ideas, is a tract.’76 For critics like Lang, the religious novel had not replaced the tract, it had become one. This study deals primarily with the relatively few authors who endeavoured to explore contemporary religious ideas in prose which would not read like a tract, a polemic or a theological treatise and who, by so doing, challenged the boundaries of religious fiction established in the second half of the nineteenth century.

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