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

THEOLOGY INTO FICTION: THE HISTORICAL JESUS AND THE RELIGIOUS NOVEL
In the middle decades of the nineteenth century, the rapid growth of the Lives of Jesus genre was more than matched by that of the religious novel. One of the first critics to survey the entire body of Victorian religious fiction, Margaret Maison, remarks that: ‘Its very abundance is…a drawback, for the reader is presented with such an overwhelming embarras de richesse’.¹⁴⁵ Whether written from the standpoint of, say, the Broad churchman, the Tractarian, the Evangelical or the atheist, religious novels responded, with varying degrees of directness, to the contemporary theological and scientific debates which threatened to overturn Christian orthodoxy. Furthermore, they allowed the layman to engage with religious controversies more usually confined to the clergyman or the academic, in a form of discourse hitherto associated with the secular and, to some minds, the profane. Arguments concerning the morality and aesthetics of the religious novel were underway as early as the 1840s. In the prefatory dedication to Sir Roland Ashton: A Tale of the Times (1844), the author, Lady Catharine Long, opines:

I know there are many…excellent people who do not approve of religious sentiments being brought forward through the medium of fiction, and who think that works of that nature are not calculated to produce good effects. But my experience has taught me decidedly the contrary, for not only have they often been instrumental in awakening and exalting spiritual feelings, but in some instances they have been the means, in God’s hands, of conveying vital truth to the soul.¹⁴⁶

Long’s notion of novel-writing being ‘in God’s hands’, with the author as a form of amanuensis, was one which became increasingly familiar as the century wore on, and the once vilified medium of fiction became one of the traditionalists’ most potent weapons in the fight against unbelief. Indeed, by the final decade of the century, there were few voices raised in protest against the fictionalizing of religious issues. Even prominent Anglican churchmen, such as Frederic William Farrar, were looking to the novel as the most effective medium for expressing religious views, albeit with a degree of caution. In the Preface to his first religious novel, Darkness and Dawn (1891), a story set in Nero’s Rome, Farrar is anxious to impress on the reader that ‘the fiction is throughout controlled and dominated by historic facts’, and that his ‘deviations’ from precise chronology are ‘very trivial in comparison with those…permitted to others’.¹⁴⁷ He goes on to insist: ‘the book is not a novel, nor is it to be judged as a novel’, explaining that ‘the outline has been imperatively decided…by the exigencies of fact, not by the rules of art.’¹⁴⁸ And in the Preface to his second religious novel, The Gathering Clouds (1895), a tale set in the days of the Byzantine Empire, Farrar admits that the historic scene he depicts is one ‘in which fiction has been allowed free play’, but only ‘as regards matters which do not affect the important facts’.¹⁴⁹ It would seem from Farrar’s defensiveness that, while acknowledging the novel to be the most expedient route to a wide audience, he is still keenly aware of fiction’s former associations with deception and impiety.

As the role of novelist was taken on ever more frequently by the likes of Farrar, so those sensitive to the aesthetics of prose fiction grew increasingly perturbed. The sheer volume of religious novels produced in the second half of the nineteenth century clearly indicates that there was something of a fiction ‘bandwagon’, with writers of diverse denominations eager to jump on it. The speed at which such works were produced militated against experimentation or time-consuming redrafting, and literary quality was inevitably compromised. Moreover, a large majority of those penning religious fiction were decidedly amateurish, convinced that the importance and urgency of what they had to convey would more than make up for any limitations they might have as writers. Just two years after the publication of Sir Roland Ashton, George Eliot launched a scathing attack on such works in an article published in the Westminster Review under the waspish title ‘Silly Novels by Lady Novelists’. Categorizing contemporary religious novels by women writers under the facetious labels of ‘oracular’ (High Church) or ‘white neck-cloth’ (Low Church), Eliot regrets that ‘in novel-writing there are no barriers for incapacity to stumble against, no external criteria to prevent a writer from mistaking foolish facility for mastery.’¹⁵⁰ Later in the century, the anthropologist and historian Andrew Lang joined George Eliot in bemoaning the fact that: ‘writers, not gifted with skill in narrative, or with that skill not fully developed, are driven into attempting narrative. They must preach in fiction, or preach to empty pews’.¹⁵¹ As well as regretting the use of poor quality fiction to strengthen faith, Lang also deplored the late nineteenth-century tendency to explain theological scholarship through didactic novels, declaring in his Introduction to Cuthbert Lennox’s life of George Douglas Brown, that he preferred to take his ‘Higher Criticism “neat”, and from the fountain heads’.¹⁵² Though Eliot and Lang were undoubtedly justified in regarding the bulk of religious novels as formulaic and uninspiring, there were a few writers who attempted to break with the conventions of the genre, most notably in their direct handling of the New Testament narratives. This chapter considers the work of three such authors: Samuel Butler, Edwin Abbott Abbott, and Joseph Jacobs.

Fictionalizing the Higher Criticism: Samuel Butler’s The Fair Haven (1873)
In a decade when religious novels of all persuasions were flooding the literary market place, one which stood out from the rest was Samuel Butler’s The Fair Haven, the first sustained attempt at arguing Higher Critical ideas through the medium of fiction. Butler employs the narrative voices of two fictional brothers. The first fifth of the book is a ‘Memoir of The Late John Pickard Owen’, written by William Bickersteth Owen, the subject’s younger brother, and a devout member of the Church of England. This ‘Memoir’ recounts the elder brother’s journey through the orthodoxy of his youth, the heterodoxy of his early adulthood, to the faith he finds just prior to a somewhat premature death; it concludes with William’s revelation that a collection of his brother’s papers had been discovered after his death, and extracts from these go to form the remainder of the novel. Leaving behind the familiar novelistic style of the ‘Memoir’, the work moves into the autobiographical voice of John Pickard Owen, recounting his arduous quest for truth and, in the process, engaging the reader in the religious controversies of the day. As John puts the case for Christian orthodoxy, he draws on the ideas of theologians such as William Paley, D. F. Strauss, and Dean Henry Alford, interpolating lengthy passages from their writings into his own text. To this disconcerting blend of theology and autobiography, Butler adds what his long-standing friend and critic, Eliza Mary Ann Savage, termed a ‘“sanglant” irony’, achieved primarily through John’s unconscious undermining of his own arguments.¹⁵³

Butler’s engagement with theological revisionism, and with the writings of D. F. Strauss in particular, can be traced back to the mid-1860s, when he published a pamphlet entitled The Evidence for the Resurrection of Jesus Christ as Given by the Four Evangelists, Critically Examined.¹⁵⁴ Coinciding with the publication of the first English translation of Strauss’s A New Life of Jesus (an event which revived interest in the original work) Butler’s pamphlet examines - and finds wanting - the German theologian’s theory that belief in Christ’s resurrection came about through the hallucinatory visions of his disciples. Just as a decade or so later Butler would fly in the face of expert opinion in asserting the superiority of the evolutionary theories of Lamarck over the later theories of Darwin, so he chooses here to promote the ideas of early theological rationalism over the mythopoeic explanations of Strauss. Butler argues that Jesus did not die on the cross but, having fallen into a cataleptic trance, was assumed dead and taken away for burial by Joseph of Arimathea and Nicodemus who, on discovering their mistake, kept secret the real nature of Christ’s ‘resurrection’. This hypothesis, commonly known as the ‘swoon theory’, was by no means new, as Butler himself admits in the pamphlet’s Preface:

I have no doubt that the line of argument taken in the following pages is a very old one, and familiar to all who have extended their reading on the subject of Christianity beyond the common English books. I do not wish to lay claim to any originality whatsoever.¹⁵⁵
Yet, as Butler goes on to explain in justification of his writing of the pamphlet, such ideas were not generally to be found in English works.¹⁵⁶ To encounter the ‘swoon theory’ the lay reader would have to undertake a thorough study of major works such as Strauss’s Life of Jesus and A New Life of Jesus where it is outlined for the sole purpose of being discredited.¹⁵⁷

The Evidence for the Resurrection made little impact, yet Butler’s eagerness to promulgate his heterodox views to a wider public held firm. It is evident from his correspondence with Miss Savage, that he was by no means clear about the best way of achieving such an ambition. In a letter dated June 1872, he wrote:

But I am very doubtful about a novel at all; I know I should regard it as I did

Erewhon, i.e., as a mere peg on which to hang anything that I had in mind to say…the only question is whether after all, that matters much, provided the things said are such as the reader will recognize as expressions of his own feelings, and as awakening an echo within himself, instead of being written to show off the cleverness of the writer…¹⁵⁸
It is clear here that Butler considers aesthetic concerns secondary to the promotion of his views on the New Testament narratives. Still endeavouring in the early 1870s to make his mark as a painter there is, indeed, nothing to suggest that Butler had any ambitions at this time to contribute to the development of religious fiction. Nonetheless, he was certainly aware of the genre’s shortcomings. He wrote to Miss Savage that he hated Eliza Lynn Linton’s immensely popular religious novel The True History of Joshua Davidson,¹⁵⁹ and he appears to parody its hero’s progress through various stages of belief and unbelief in the life of his own John Pickard Owen:

He…joined the Baptists and was immersed in a pond near Dorking. With the Baptists he remained quiet about three months, and then began to quarrel with his instructors as to their doctrine of predestination. Shortly afterwards he came accidentally upon a fascinating stranger…who turned out to be a Roman Catholic missionary, landed him in the Church of Rome, where he felt sure that he had found rest for his soul. But here, too, he was mistaken; after about two years he rebelled against the stifling of all free inquiry…and he was soon battling with unbelief.¹⁶⁰

Yet it is evident from Butler’s correspondence with Miss Savage that he was not above experimenting with conventional fictional forms. In a letter of 1872, he comments on an initial novel-scenario that he had been devising to carry his argument:

By the way, I did not mean the hero to be sentimental towards the old flirt, but I meant the old flirt in the end to be sentimental about the hero, and to wind up a long theological argument during which her attention has evidently been wandering, by flinging her arms about his neck and saying she would do anything for him if he would only love his saviour.¹⁶¹

It is difficult to imagine Butler’s heretical ideas being placed within the confines of this type of religious romance, though his eagerness to introduce them to a wider readership (he wrote to Miss Savage that he was writing The Fair Haven because he was ‘bursting with it’) may well have led him to consider it.¹⁶²

In the Introduction to the New Edition of The Fair Haven, Richard Streatfeild, Butler’s literary executor, asserts that the author ‘provided an ironical framework for his arguments merely that he might render them more effective than they had been in the pamphlet of 1865.’¹⁶³ And, indeed, any reader unacquainted with mid-century Biblical scholarship would find several key ideas - albeit in abridged form - in Butler’s satire. Moreover, the individual voices of the fictional brothers were an effective means of conveying such ideas to those more accustomed to the language of the novelist than that of the theologian. John Pickard Owen appears to state the view of his creator in his introductory commentary:

We are bound to adapt our means to our ends, and shall have a better chance of gaining the ear of our adversaries if we can offer them a short and pregnant book…We have to bring the Christian religion to men who will look at no book which cannot be read in a railway train, or in an arm-chair. (FH 4)
The ‘Memoir’ introduces the reader to some of the major debates surrounding the historicity of the New Testament narratives and offers the elder brother’s often risible resolutions to the questions they raise. The inconsistencies in the Evangelists’ accounts of Christ’s life, for example, are transformed into virtues ‘inasmuch as the true spiritual conception in the mind of man could be indirectly more certainly engendered by a strife, a warring, a clashing…of versions…than directly by the most absolutely correct impression which human language could convey’ (M 26). And in the autobiographical account of John Pickard Owen’s spiritual journey from doubt to certainty which follows, the reader encounters a discussion, followed by an ineffectual refutation, of current theological thinking on issues such as the veracity of Christ’s death and resurrection, the ecclesiastical glosses imposed upon the early accounts of his life, and the aesthetics of Biblical texts. The satirical edge of the work comes from Butler’s invention of a character capable of presenting the ideas of writers such as Strauss, Jowett, and Arnold in a detailed and convincing manner, but signally incapable of putting up a convincing counter-argument on behalf of the devout. The reader is left to infer that John’s explanations of revisionist theology are clear and persuasive because of their validity and, conversely, that the arguments of the traditionalists are indefensible because they are fundamentally flawed.

To lend authenticity to his fictional persona’s discourse on the Gospels Butler quotes at length from well-known theologians; he also gives the more steadfastly Christian brother, William Bickersteth Owen, a middle name associating him in some readers’ minds with the Reverend Edward Henry Bickersteth, a popular contemporary writer of devotional literature.¹⁶⁴ Through the voice of John Pickard Owen, Butler takes the reader through the labyrinthine twists and turns of the arguments put forward to explain the mysteries of the resurrection. For this purpose Butler draws on the writings of the notorious Strauss and the orthodox Dean Alford, as well as his own pamphlet on the resurrection. John engages most frequently with the works of Henry Alford, Dean of Canterbury, whose Greek Testament, and Old and New Testament commentaries, had earned him a reputation as a Biblical scholar. Alford represents the numerous ecclesiastics who, usually through extensive Lives of Jesus, endeavoured to defend the Church’s position against the attacks of the New Theology. Lengthy citations from Alford’s New Testament for English Readers are examined and deemed inadequate by Butler’s fictional narrator.¹⁶⁵ Having summarized Alford’s views on the much debated account in the Fourth Gospel of the sword piercing Christ’s side, Owen comments:

With this climax of presumptuous assertion these disgraceful notes are ended. They have shewn clearly that the wound does not in itself prove the death: they show no less clearly that the Dean does not consider that the death is proved beyond possibility of doubt without the wound; what therefore should be the legitimate conclusion? Surely that we have no proof of the completeness of Christ’s death upon the Cross - or in other words no proof of His having died at all! Couple this with the notes upon the Resurrection considered above, and we feel rather as though we were in the hands of some Jesuitical unbeliever, who was trying to undermine our faith in our most precious convictions under the guise of defending them…(FH 121-2)

Here, Butler’s satirical method becomes clear as he states his own heretical belief that Christ survived the cross, through the voice of a believer even more orthodox than Dean Alford, the simple insertion of the exclamation mark after the crucial statement fusing two voices: that of the author and that of the authored. In a similar vein, Butler concludes the book’s wordy examination of the resurrection narratives by stating his own heterodox convictions through the anguished voice of the orthodox Christian:

The case, therefore, of our adversaries will rest thus: - that there is not only no sufficient reason for believing that Christ died upon the Cross, but that there are the strongest conceivable reasons for believing that He did not die; that the shortness of time which He remained upon the Cross, the immediate delivery of the body to friends, and, above all, the subsequent reappearance alive, are ample grounds at arriving at such a conclusion. (FH 186)
The distinction between satirist and satirized is not always so confidently drawn. John’s attempt to show the ‘futility and irrelevancy’ (FH 187) of the Higher Criticism, for example, seems at one with the opinions of the aspiring painter-author:

We ought not therefore to have expected scientific accuracy from the Gospel records - much less should we be required to believe that such accuracy exists. Does any great artist ever dream of aiming directly at imitation? He aims at representation - not at imitation. In order to attain true mastery here, he must spend years in learning how not to see…Take Turner for example. Who conveys so living an impression of the face of nature? (FH 205)

However, in keeping with the book’s constantly shifting narrative viewpoint, John’s repeated insistence that ‘ideals gain by vagueness’ (FH 207), builds into an obvious mockery of those Christians who look away when presented with challenges to their belief system, and the satirical voice is established once more. John continues his celebration of the ‘value of vagueness’ (FH 211) in the penultimate chapter of The Fair Haven, entitled ‘The Christ-Ideal’. Here he explains how the ‘blurring of no small portions of the external evidences whereby the Divine origin of the ideal was established’ has lent an irrevocable indistinctness to the figure of Christ, allowing it to be moulded to suit any man in any epoch. Butler’s satire in this final stage of the novel seems to be directed at thinkers like Renan and John Stuart Mill who, while denying Jesus’s divinity, continued to esteem him as the pattern of all humanity, and at those contemporary novelists who bent the image of Christ to suit their own ideological stance, be it Christian Socialist, High Church, or Unitarian. In addition, he ridicules those who, like Matthew Arnold, ‘regarded the whole New Testament as a work of art, a poem, a pure fiction from beginning to end, and who revered it for its intrinsic beauty’ (FH 212-3), and who, like the fictional John Pickard Owen, believed that an aesthetic appreciation of the story of Christ might eventually lead to ‘a belief in his Divinity’ (FH 213).¹⁶⁶

Given the multi-layered and polyphonic nature of the narrative, it is unsurprising that The Fair Haven met with diametrically opposed responses from readers, and that it lured some of its less sophisticated reviewers into accepting it as an entirely orthodox work by a devout Christian. The agnostic Butler revelled in such misinterpretations, quoting them verbatim in a mischievous Preface written for the novel’s second edition. In this, Butler continues the satirical voice of the main work, putting himself forward as ‘the champion of orthodoxy’ (P iv), and feigning surprise that his work had ever ‘been suspected of a satirical purpose’ (P vi). Respondents to Butler’s text did not divide neatly into those clever enough to perceive its irony, and those who were not: some of the best contemporary minds were left perplexed by its quirky manner of presenting religious controversy. Charles Darwin, for example, having received a copy of The Fair Haven from Butler, wrote to him that, if he had not known him personally, he would ‘never have suspected that the author was not orthodox’.¹⁶⁷ And even a literary critic as experienced and perceptive as Edmund Gosse absolved those taken in by Butler’s book from all charges of credulity, placing the blame for such misunderstandings firmly at the feet of the author:

His religious polemic was even more disagreeable than his scientific, and the lumbering sarcasm of the attack on Christianity, called The Fair Haven, is an epitome of all that is most unpleasing in the attitude of Butler. Unctuous sarcasm so sustained as to deceive the very elect…¹⁶⁸
Butler’s ambition to communicate his resurrection theories to a wide audience was to remain unfulfilled. According to the author’s own estimate, only 442 copies of The Fair Haven were sold, a paltry number after the success of Erewhon, which had sold almost ten times this number.¹⁶⁹ Butler’s disappointment is evident from his correspondence with his friend and fellow writer, Edward Clodd. In one letter Butler writes: ‘I venture to send you…one of the many unsold copies of The Fair Haven’, and in another he quips: ‘If you know any one else who you think would like a Fair Haven he can have it… I ought to pay any one for taking it.’¹⁷⁰ The Fair Haven’s failure to engage the Victorian reader could be put down to a number of reasons, the most compelling one being its author’s insistence on parodying the religious discourse of his time, with its circumlocutions, repetitions and involved grammatical phrasing; Charles Darwin remarked with tactful meiosis that it ‘was not light reading’.¹⁷¹ Butler was quick to realise that the most successful element of his work was its ‘Memoir’, advising Clodd to confine his reading to this section in the hope that this, if not the rest, would ‘amuse’ him.¹⁷² It was, in fact, the energy and pace of the ‘Memoir’ which made the satire that followed all the more heavy-going in comparison. Partly based on his own family experiences, the ‘Memoir’ takes the reader through the early life of John Pickard Owen with comic brio. John’s first awakenings of religious doubt, for example, come not from a text or a sermon, but from spying on his mother’s friend undressing, and realising, as she peels away numerous undergarments, that she is not ‘“all solid woman”’ (M 8), from which he extrapolates: ‘The world itself was hollow, made up of shams and delusions’ (M 9). That readers were gripped by the ‘Memoir’ and bemused by what followed is clear from the responses of some of Butler’s correspondents, who encouraged him to drop the theology and concentrate on the human interest. Darwin detected a ‘dramatic power’ in the early stages of The Fair Haven, advising its author to ‘write a really good novel’;¹⁷³ Miss Savage felt similarly, telling Butler: ‘I am sure you would write such a beautiful novel’.¹⁷⁴ The wisdom of such friendly advice would not become fully apparent until 1903, when Butler’s finest fiction, The Way of All Flesh, was posthumously published. In this most iconoclastic of Victorian novels, Butler built on the autobiographical fragments of the ‘Memoir’ to produce the controlled and pungent satire which had eluded him in The Fair Haven.

While numerous commentators, from Henry Festing Jones in the early twentieth century, to Peter Raby in the 1990s, have remarked on the autobiographical elements of the ‘Memoir’, and its significance as a prototype of The Way of All Flesh, not enough attention has been paid to the equally self-referential nature of the remaining portion of the novel.¹⁷⁵ Retrospective knowledge of Butler’s religious upbringing, and his subsequent breaking away from its indoctrinations, unveils The Fair Haven as a psychologically complex example of Victorian autobiography. Careful reading of the work, alongside Butler’s Note-books, reveals more than just superficial affinities between John Pickard Owen and his creator. The contradictoriness of John’s narrative, often blamed for impeding the clarity of the satire, is also an expression of Butler’s own confliction. While his primary motivation in writing The Fair Haven may have come from an attraction to rationalism, there is also a part of him which reserves judgement. He writes in his Note-books:

…the attempt to symbolise the unknown is certain to involve inconsistencies and absurdities of all kinds and it is childish to complain of their existence unless one is prepared to advocate the stifling of all religious sentiment, and this is like trying to stifle hunger or thirst. To be at all is to be religious more or less.¹⁷⁶

For Butler, then, the road to apostasy was not a straightforward one, and uncertainty and the unknowable were inescapable elements of human existence. If the evangelical narrator of the ‘Memoir’, William, serves as Butler’s superego, so his elder brother, John, serves as his alter ego. John travels Butler’s own spiritual journey from evangelicalism to unbelief but, unlike his creator, returns to the orthodoxy of his youth, and at great cost. John’s eagerness to record his tempestuous spiritual journey leads him into a state of exhaustion and ‘religious melancholy’, resulting in his death ‘on the fifteenth of March, 1872, aged 40’ (M 69). Looking beyond the immediate facetiousness of the actual date (the Ides of March), Butler’s decision to kill his fictional counterpart at the same time that The Fair Haven is being written, and at much the same age as he himself, confirms his inability to return to the securities of religious orthodoxy. For Butler, the rekindling of Christian faith was an idea he could only countenance in fictional terms.

The Fair Haven is an intriguing anomaly amongst the religious fiction of its time, often defined by what it fails to be: a successful satire, an engrossing novel, a coherent account of contemporary Biblical scholarship. Nonetheless, it remains an important contribution to the genre. As an autobiographical work, it gives an insight into the experience of living through a period of fervent debate over questions of faith and the Bible, in a manner which eschews the didacticism of some of the more traditional religious fictions. As a work of theology, it championed a rationalist theory that would provide the foundation for several imaginative treatments of the Gospels in the early twentieth century. As a work of fiction, it was a brave if ultimately unsuccessful attempt to bring continental scholarship to a Victorian audience without recourse to voluminous Lives of Jesus, or tract-like novels.
Philochristus: Edwin Abbott Abbott’s ‘Disciple of the Lord’ (1878)
One of several readers to be perplexed by The Fair Haven was Edwin Abbott Abbott, a contemporary of Butler’s at St John’s, Cambridge. Recalling their reunion in London, some years after leaving the University, Butler writes:

By and by he asked me to dinner and I went. I found him a dull fellow…and a dull, pedagogical fellow into the bargain. There was a man named Seeley there, who had written Ecce Homo - trash which Mr Gladstone had had a fit over…Then I wrote The Fair Haven and was asked again. Abbott was a good deal pained, and would not believe I did not really mean all I had said in the Christ-Ideal chapters.¹⁷⁷

Allowing for Butler’s characteristically splenetic idiom, it is easy to imagine why he might have felt somewhat uneasy at such a dinner table. Abbott and Seeley had a close friendship, dating back to their time as fellow pupils at the City of London School, of which Abbott was now headmaster; both were commonly acknowledged as Broad churchmen, but of a devout religious temperament incompatible with ‘the more advanced wing of the English Broad Church’ of which Butler declared himself a member.¹⁷⁸ A priest of the Church of England, it is not surprising that Abbott was discomforted by Butler’s sneering at the idea of Christ as a pattern for all humanity, nor is it surprising that Butler, always fond of sweeping, iconoclastic statements, should find the erudite and meticulous Abbott rather ‘dull’. What does give pause for thought, however, is that Butler does not mention that his host was about to publish the first full-length British religious fiction featuring Christ as one of its central characters.

Philochristus: Memoirs of a Disciple of the Lord retells the New Testament narratives from the viewpoint of a fictional disciple of Jesus who, fearing that the second coming of Christ might not occur in his lifetime, feels an urgent need to chronicle his recollections of living with Jesus and his followers.¹⁷⁹ Abbott’s correspondence with Macmillan, the publishers of Philochristus, provides an illuminating narrative of the author’s troubled relationship with his imaginative fifth Gospel.¹⁸⁰ Four years before the publication of Philochristus, Abbott wrote a lengthy letter to Macmillan, where the involved syntax and frequent parentheses betray his nervousness at the prospect of the novel’s going public. In a paragraph underlined as ‘private’, he explains:

I shall publish it anonymously: but shall carefully let it be known that I am the author: for there are reasons why (though I may not like to be abused by name in the religious papers) I have no right to shirk the odium of heterodoxy, for the book is heterodox.¹⁸¹

And, three years on, Abbott’s anxieties had by no means abated. Fearing that the book might cost him his post at the City of London School, his financial negotiations with Macmillan took full account of such an eventuality:

If I do not lose my present position I shall be quite willing…that the book should be published on our usual terms: half profits, you taking the risk…But if I lose my post I shall have next to nothing to live on…Now of course I could not be turned out of my post for this book, without attracting a great deal of attention to the book and making it commercially a great success. Therefore…I will take the risk, pay all bills, and receive all profits, paying you the usual commission.¹⁸²

Clearly, Abbott’s apprehensiveness about the reception of his New Testament treatment was more than mere rhetoric, his close friendship with Seeley no doubt having impressed upon him just how extreme the orthodox could be in their responses to works dealing directly with Christ.¹⁸³ Moreover, he must also have been acutely aware of the challenges which inhered in transposing the Gospels into the realms of fiction in the mid-1870s.

Abbott certainly possessed a literary sensibility equal to such a challenge. One of the features of his distinguished career as Headmaster of the City of London School was his introduction of English Literature to the curriculum in all years, including the compulsory study of one Shakespeare play each term for sixth-formers. Furthermore, he published several works on literary subjects, including A Shakespearean Grammar (1869) and English Lessons for English People (1871), co-authored with Seeley.¹⁸⁴ Yet Abbott was uneasy about accepting the identity of novelist, preferring to classify Philochristus as ‘half fiction, half religious’.¹⁸⁵ His insistence on maintaining such a borderline might be explained by the fact that, up until this point, British novels dealing with the Christian past had dealt with the first five centuries or so after the crucifixion and not with the actual life and times of Jesus.¹⁸⁶ Writing in the early 1840s, Carlyle had pronounced Christ to be beyond the bounds of the literary: ‘The greatest of all Heroes is One - whom we do not name here! Let sacred silence meditate that sacred matter.’¹⁸⁷ The ‘silence’ was of course soon broken as numerous Lives of Jesus embroidered the Gospels’ spare records of Christ’s person and character more and more elaborately. Yet such works presented their imaginative versions of Jesus through the conjectural grammar of the biographer: the more direct mimetic structures of fiction were, inevitably, more contentious.

In imagining the life of Jesus through the eyes of one of his contemporaries, Abbott was venturing on a form of fiction already well established in the United States. Here, fictional versions of the Gospels had started to replace narratives of Christian martyrdom a good twenty years in advance of Britain.¹⁸⁸ One particularly popular American New Testament fiction was The Prince of the House of David (1855), written by Joseph Holt Ingraham, an Episcopalian minister from Mobile, Alabama.¹⁸⁹ An epistolary religious romance, the novel relates the life of Christ through a series of letters written by Adina, a young Jewess, to her father in Alexandria. While Ingraham’s writing differs starkly from Abbott’s in its lack of erudition and unremittingly purple prose, he shares with him the technique of presenting Jesus from the point of view of a fictional eye-witness, referring to it in the Preface as ‘a new aspect…a new point of view.’¹⁹⁰ And, if Abbott feared the wrath of the faithful on the publication of Philochristus, so Ingraham, two decades before him, had felt moved to introduce his work with the defensive statement: ‘There can be no charge of irreverence where none is intended’.¹⁹¹

Abbott may well have sensed that the time was ripe for bringing British representations of the Gospels into line with those being published in America, as the fashion for Lives of Jesus appeared to reach its peak. Nevertheless, he continued to define his work in relation to the biographical studies which predated it. Abbott wrote to Macmillan in early 1874 to advise them that he had completed Philochristus, adding that he had ‘carefully compared it with Ecce Homo’; in addition, he pointed out that the publication of Farrar’s The Life of Christ, that same year, was a compelling reason to delay the launch of his own version of the Gospels. Publishing a work by a relatively unknown author concurrently with that of the celebrated Dean Farrar, and on the same topic would, of course, have made little commercial sense; it is also likely that Abbott feared his text would appear somewhat heterodox alongside the work of someone as devout as Farrar. Unlike Butler, Abbott was not a controversialist and he makes clear from the outset of Philochristus that he is on the side of the angels. In introducing his memoir, Philochristus (appearing to articulate the opinion of his creator) explains the difficulty of depicting ‘an image of the Lord Jesus as should be at once according to the truth, and yet not altogether too bright for the mortal eye to look upon’ (viii), a sentiment commonly expressed in prefaces to Lives of Jesus.

Abbott introduces the figure of Christ into the text in a tentative manner. Philochristus announces that he will portray Jesus through his own life story ‘as in a mirror…seen as by reflexion’ (viii), a technique which guarantees a seemly distance is maintained between reader and subject. His first direct reference to Christ is as ‘the stranger’(38), whose compassionate treatment of a young boy possessed by spirits leaves a lasting impression upon him; but this stranger is not identified as Jesus until almost a fifth of the way through the novel. And even when Philochristus lives amidst Jesus and his disciples, the reader is only allowed to glimpse the master from a distance. Not counted among the chosen twelve, Philochristus is usually positioned on the peripheries of significant events. When Jesus addresses the people of Bethsaida, for example, Philochristus recalls how he ‘could not come nigh unto him for the press’(171); and even when he manages to catch the actual words of his leader, on one of the many occasions when he heals the sick, he ‘could not see the countenance of Jesus’(152). Whereas Farrar’s Life of Christ speculates about the colour and texture of Jesus’s hair and Renan’s Life suggests his mood swings, Abbott avoids such worldly realities. Philochristus’ memories of Jesus are phrased in the language of the preternatural: he recalls being ‘drawn towards him as by an enchantment’ (98), his mien described in increasingly beatific terms until, just before his arrest, he takes on the ‘countenance of an angel’ (368).

In representing Christ in this idealized manner, Abbott appears keen to avoid those areas which had previously proved sites of controversy for the likes of Renan, Seeley and Farrar. While insisting on the humanity of Jesus through his narrator’s yearning for ‘a man, or some similitude of a man’(69) on which to focus his religious passion, Abbott omits events or details that place his subject in a less than perfect light. Recalling, perhaps, the opprobrium heaped on Renan for depicting Christ’s increasingly morose temper in the final stages of his ministry, he ensures that his Jesus remains ‘meek and mild’. Abbott chooses to put Luke’s parabolic rendition of the story of the barren fig tree (13:6-9) into the mouth of his narrator (342), rather than the accounts given by Matthew (21:18-23) and Mark (11:12-14), which tell of Christ’s actual cursing of the tree and the resulting physical damage.¹⁹² Abbott also steers clear of making any references to Jesus’s sexuality. He excludes John’s story of the woman taken in adultery, no doubt aware of the controversy sparked by Seeley’s portrayal of the sexual embarrassment experienced by Jesus when brought face to face with a female sinner.¹⁹³ And where Renan dared to suggest that Jesus must have reflected on the sexual life he had sacrificed for his ministry, Abbott goes no further than hinting that he might regret his childless state when, after hearing the proverb that ‘they that die and leave no children…die indeed’, he is left ‘strangely moved’(204). Abbott’s reticence is also evident in his handling of Christ’s physical sufferings on the cross:

…a deep silence fell on the crowd; and I could hear the blows of the hammer upon the nails; and every man held his breath, if perchance there might come the sound of a shriek or a groan. But no such sound came to the place where we stood. (386)
Here, Abbott’s use of a single narrator enables him to offer a muted, though still evocative, account of the crucifixion. Unable to see the face of Jesus ‘for his head was bowed forward and his hair, hanging over his forehead, hid his eyes’ (386), and oppressed by the baying of the crowd, Philochristus flees from the scene. Returning only to witness the crucified man’s final moment, Philochristus (and the reader) is spared the long agony on the cross, and its grisly physical realities. Yet while some readers must have welcomed Abbott’s restraint after the imaginative excesses of some Lives of Jesus, his portrait of Jesus leaves no lasting impression. Indeed, Abbott’s novel fails to prove the exception to one reviewer’s rule that it is:

…beyond the reach of human and Christian art, that the introduction of our Lord in a work of fiction should be so managed as not to create disappointment and a sense of inadequacy in the minds of readers of the Gospels.¹⁹⁴

If Abbott sought consciously in Philochristus to distinguish his portrayal of Jesus from those in the most popular Lives of Jesus, so he sought to break away from the genre in his employment of a fictional narrator. Through the observations of his eponymous hero, Abbott informs the reader about contemporary debates concerning the Gospel records and their various discrepancies and contradictions. Frequently absent from key events, Philochristus is obliged to rely on the chosen few to tell him, for example, about how Jesus ‘girded himself as a servant, and would wash the feet of all the disciples’(325), thus emphasizing the likelihood that New Testament sources were often only secondary. That any account of Christ’s life is, unavoidably, partial and fragmentary, is also underlined in the ‘Scholia’ which append the work. In this final section, Abbott follows current Lives of Jesus in providing end-notes to the work, whilst still keeping them within its fictional framework. An unnamed editor of Philochristus’s memoir notes:

…the writer (as it seemeth to me, having diligently compared this history with the Gospels of the holy Evangelists Matthew and Mark and Luke) maketh mention of all such miracles as are found in all three Gospels…but if any miracle is found in one or two Gospels only, concerning that he is silent. And this he seemeth to do not by chance, but of set purpose, as if he were minded to speak of those miracles only which are common to the first three Gospels. But Anchinous the son of Alethes maketh conjecture that Philochristus had in his mind a certain Original Gospel…of exceeding antiquity; whence also the holy Evangelists drew that part of their several relations which is common to the first three Gospels. (437)

Here, the fictional commentator on the fictional memoir conveys Abbott’s own liberal theological concerns about the relationship between the Evangelists’ testaments and their possible use of a common source, concerns which he would later treat in far greater detail in his non-fiction writings.¹⁹⁵

Philochristus’s often self-conscious unreliability is a narrative means to a theological end, and not, as could have been the case with a more adventurous writer, an exploration of the complexity of memory, perception, and storytelling. Likewise, his exploitation of the dialogic potential of the novel is mainly for scholarly purposes and contributes little to its appeal for readers. Out of the twelve disciples, Judas and Nathanael are selected to stand for two diametrically opposed interpretations of Christ’s words. Judas is the literalist who regards Jesus as the conqueror of the Romans and who turns against him on realising his ‘kingdom’ has nothing to do with ‘war, nor vengeance, nor military matters’ (203). Nathanael, by way of contrast, has ‘a discerning Spirit’ (176), and offers to Philochristus a more spiritual explication of Jesus’s teaching. Appearing only in the Fourth Gospel, it is fitting that Nathanael’s understanding of Christ’s mission is strongly Johannine as, indeed, was Abbott’s. He explains to Philochristus that ‘All men have within themselves some portion of the spirit of God’ (179), a belief echoed in Abbott’s Apologia (1907), a defence of his theological views, wherein he states:

I believe all the higher human nature to be in some sense ‘divine’, having been ‘begotten’ not only as the eternal Son ‘in the beginning’, but also by a unique congenital act on earth, so that whereas in us there is a portion, in Him there was ‘the fulness’ of the Holy Spirit.¹⁹⁶
Perhaps fearing that representing the diversity of first-century Judaisms solely through the apostles would stretch the bounds of credibility (the disciples, it was commonly agreed, were not men of intellect or philosophy), Abbott moves beyond the Gospel records to include the historical figure of Philo of Alexandria. The most significant representative of the Greco-Judaic tradition which flourished at the time of Christ, Philo appears fleetingly in the novel when Philochristus visits him to talk over his religious doubts and confusions. In an episode which takes up most of Chapter 5, and which belongs more to the lecture hall than to the novel, Philochristus listens to his teacher’s explanation of the Logos, that ‘all men have in themselves a ray of light from the archetypal Light, the Word of the Supreme Being’(67). For the theologically well-informed, these references to the ‘Word’ and the ‘Light’ would suggest the ongoing debate over John’s Gospel and its Hellenistic underpinnings; and Abbott continues to explore these through the character of Quartus, whose very name associates him with the Fourth Gospel.¹⁹⁷ An Alexandrine merchant, he represents the dual influences of the Hellenic and Judaic worlds, having a Greek father who ‘had caused him to be trained in the Greek learning and philosophy’(117), and a Jewish mother who had ensured that her son was circumcised and ‘conformed himself to the worship of Israel’(117). Quartus is the comparative philosopher of the novel, through whose insights Philochristus is able to judge Jesus’s doctrines. As the novel progresses, Abbott’s imaginary disciple has to evaluate the competing philosophies of the Pharisaic-Rabbinic tradition embodied in Eliezer, son of Arak, with his insistence on the primacy of ‘the Law, whereby was created all that is’(115), alongside those of Judas and Quartus. It is to the detriment of the novel’s narrative appeal that this search for religious truth is never expressed through the inner life of Philochristus. The memoir is too crowded with the direct speech of its numerous mouthpieces to allow time for a more interiorized form of storytelling, and Philochristus remains little more than a device for bringing together the various strands of first-century thought about Jesus and demonstrating current Biblical criticism.

J. Llewelyn Davies considered Philochristus ‘a work which ranks rather with “Ecce Homo” than with Canon Farrar’s “Life of Christ”’, and there is no doubt that Abbott’s prose style bears more resemblance to the measured tones of Seeley than it does to the hyperbole of Farrar.¹⁹⁸ Yet, one significant departure which Abbott makes from the work of Seeley and others is to be found in his treatment of miracles. Unlike Seeley, who omits any debate over the truth or otherwise of miracles, and Renan, who dismisses them as ‘tediously enumerated’ illusions, Abbott deals extensively with the relationship between faith and the miraculous.¹⁹⁹ In Apologia (1907), he outlines his stance on Biblical miracles:

…having examined all the ‘signs’, ‘wonders’, ‘miracles’, or ‘mighty works’ mentioned in the Bible, I have been led to the conclusion that some are literally true, but in accordance with what are called laws of nature; others are not literally true, but are metaphorical or poetical traditions erroneously taken as literal; others are visions that have been taken as non-visionary facts.²⁰⁰
It is a categorization of the miraculous already in evidence in Philochristus. Christ’s healing of the sick is seen as the result of a mutual act of faith, within the laws of nature; the feeding of the four thousand and the five thousand is related only in terms of its figurative significance, the bread having a purely symbolic existence; and the transfiguration is presented as a vision witnessed by disciples in between sleep and waking, the story of which is passed around the community, with the implication that it will vary with each retelling. While never doubting the veracity of Christ’s miraculous works, Philochristus comes to understand that he ‘was not drawn unto Jesus by his signs and wonders, but by reason of…love for him and trust in him’(247), a conclusion in keeping with Abbott’s view that ‘a belief in miracles ought not to be regarded as necessary for the worship of Christ’.²⁰¹ J. Llewelyn Davies was perplexed by Abbott’s approach to the miraculous, pointing out that ‘whilst he goes thus far with the naturalizing critics, he believes heartily and frankly in Christ as the Word and Son of the Father’.²⁰² It was, certainly, a somewhat inconsistent stance, but it was one which Abbott would go on to defend in some detail, both in his non-fiction writing and in his other two Early Christian novels: Onesimus: Memoirs of a Disciple of Paul (1882) and Silanus the Christian (1906). His fascination with the idea of illusion and the miraculous also found expression in Flatland: A Romance of Many Dimensions (1884), a slim volume which operates both as a satire on Victorian society and an introduction to the geometry of higher dimensions, and which has proved to be the most popular and enduring of all his writings.²⁰³

The reader of Philochristus is left with a clear understanding of Abbott’s theological stance, not only on the nature of miracles, but on subjects as diverse as the place of women in God’s kingdom, the psychology of Judas and the influence of Jewish eschatological beliefs on the followers of Christ. And while none of his views on these issues offers any significant advance on those in contemporary Lives of Jesus, they are put forward with considerable force and conviction. But if the work succeeds in its religious aims, it fails as fiction. Matthew Arnold’s verdict was that it had ‘the defect of being neither quite a work of art, nor quite a direct treatment of its subject’, an observation which seems particularly apt in the case of Abbott’s prose style.²⁰⁴ Resisting the challenge of inventing a vulgaris eloquentia, Abbott took the direct speech of Jesus straight from the Authorised Version, supplementing it with a few sentences which, he informs the reader in a footnote, are traditional sayings, approved by the venerated theologian, F. B. Westcott, as ‘in a more or less altered form, traces of words of our Lord’(437, n1). As a consequence, Abbott had to create a style which would blend unobtrusively with these Biblical quotations; the result of his efforts is a somewhat stilted prose, weighed down by awkward syntactical inversions, archaic pronouns, and iterative phrases such as ‘it came to pass’ and ‘methinks’. Perhaps aware of the need to compensate for these stylistic inadequacies, Abbott weaves familiar lines from Shakespeare’s major tragedies into his own prose. Philochristus takes up the language of Hamlet in defining his pre-Christian vision of the world as ‘flat and unprofitable’(52) and his Greek friend, Xanthias, echoes Desdemona’s response to Othello’s exotic past, in his response to Christ’s teaching: ‘it was strange, it was passing strange’(228).²⁰⁵ Defined by The Times as ‘Elizabethan English’, the prose of Philochristus is, indeed, more redolent of the late sixteenth century than any earlier age.²⁰⁶ In a letter to Macmillan of 1912, concerning a possible reissue of the novel, Abbott writes: ‘I should not like to reprint it without some attempt to improve it, not as to the theological views which I retain unaltered and strengthened, but as to the literary form and expression’²⁰⁷ While Abbott does not go on to explain how he might improve the novel’s ‘form and expression’, it is likely that he had in mind changing its diction. Writing in the Preface to Silanus the Christian, Abbott states that ‘No attempt has been made to give the impression of an archaic or Latin style’, suggesting that he had come to realise through the process of writing his first two novels that refining a prose style to successfully capture the spirit of the early Christian period was nigh on impossible.

Abbott’s attempts to recreate the much-loved rhythms of the King James Bible and the verse of Shakespeare may, however, have served to prevent the traditionalist reader from taking offence at the novel’s treatment of a divine subject. The work caused little or no controversy, leaving Abbott bemused, perhaps even disappointed, by the public’s indifference to his rewriting of the Scriptures.²⁰⁸ The novel he thought might cause him to lose his post as headmaster was eventually republished in 1916, in response to a female schoolteacher’s request to use it as a teaching text.²⁰⁹ That Philochristus had acquired such respectability by 1916 is not surprising, given developments in the public’s attitude to the religious novel over half a century or so; yet even by the standards of the 1870s, its representation of Christ was fairly tame. Abbott’s later religious novels, Onesimus and Silanus were even more cautious, set as they were in post-crucifixion times. The aesthetic failings of Philochristus serve to highlight the nature of the challenge awaiting those writers who hoped to push through the boundaries of Lives of Jesus, and the Early Church novel, into the relatively uncharted territory of New Testament fiction.