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

Wilde, theology and the ‘fifth Gospel’

In his introduction to the second part of Le Chant du Cygne, a collection of Wilde’s oral tales, Guillot de Saix states how ‘Oscar Wilde se plaisait à dire: “Je suis le treizième apôtre du Christ, et je dois écrire le Cinquième Évangile”’.²⁶⁹ Such a declaration strikes us now as typical of its speaker, combining as it does a certain audacity with a spirit of playfulness; yet to Wilde’s original audience, the ‘fifth Gospel’ would have been a familiar phrase, having been initiated and popularized through Renan’s Life of Jesus. In the Introduction to this seminal work the author evaluates the significance of his extensive travels in Palestine for the presentation of his subject:

I have traversed, in all directions, the country of the Gospels; I have visited Jerusalem, Hebron, and Samaria…All this history, which at a distance seems to float in the clouds of an unreal world, thus took a form, a solidity which astonished me. The striking agreement of the texts with the places, the marvellous harmony of the Gospel ideal with the country which served it as a framework, were like a revelation to me. I had before my eyes a fifth Gospel, torn, but still legible, and henceforward, through the recitals of Matthew and Mark, in place of an abstract being…I saw living and moving an admirable human figure.²⁷⁰
Renan’s conviction that witnessing the Holy Land first-hand could reveal a hitherto ‘unread’ testament to Jesus’s life, a ‘fifth Gospel’ as he terms it, was one that would be shared by numerous biographers after him. A fervent admirer of Renan’s, it is his life of Jesus which Wilde reveres in De Profundis as ‘that gracious Fifth Gospel, the Gospel according to St Thomas’.²⁷¹ For him, Renan had established a doubter’s testament, which liberated the Scriptures from the accretions of ecclesiastical dogma, and the figure of Jesus from the supernatural trappings of divinity.

Interest in a fifth Gospel was not, however, limited to Renan’s original conception of the term. In an effort to counter the attacks on the historical accuracy of the Evangelists’ accounts of Jesus which had driven so much of nineteenth-century theology, some orthodox Christian writers argued for the establishment of a Pauline fifth Gospel. One such author, Bernard Lucas, writing in The Fifth Gospel: being the Pauline Interpretation of the Christ, insisted that:

The Gospel according to Paul is the earliest Gospel which has come down to us, and the one whose historicity is practically beyond question. Its right to the title of Gospel is based upon the fact that, although it was not an attempt to record the life and ministry of Jesus, it was and is the fullest attempt which we possess to explain the significance of that life and ministry.²⁷²
And it was not only established New Testament writings which provided scope for an additional evangel. Archaeology’s transformation from a crude method of plundering foreign treasures into a scientific study of antiquities opened up the possibility of uncovering Scriptures hitherto unread. In 1886, for example, French archaeologists uncovered fragments of a manuscript purporting to have been written by the apostle Peter. While theologians were quick to dismiss these writings as, at best, a supplement to the New Testament, their discovery signalled that the canon might not be definitive.²⁷³ Indeed, this spirit of discovery which prevailed in both Britain and the United States seems to have tempted one prominent New England minister and translator, Dr James Freeman Clarke, to pass off his fictional fifth Gospel, The Legend of Thomas Didymus: the Jewish Sceptic, as a translation of a recently unearthed Syriac manuscript. An unfinished preface to the work, not brought to light until the 1940s, revealed the author’s intention to publish fiction as fact, and to proffer the additional testimony of Jesus’s most sceptical disciple in the hope of strengthening the case for the authority of the established four.²⁷⁴ Yet, if by the 1890s the appellation ‘fifth Gospel’ was being applied to a diverse range of religious writings, its familiarity did not ensure its acceptability.²⁷⁵ J. M. P. Otts’s decision to incorporate the term into the title of his thoroughly devout work, The Fifth Gospel: The Land Where Jesus Lived (1892), attracted controversy, as he makes clear in his Preface: ‘Objection has been raised against our title, The Fifth Gospel, as implying, or suggesting, a thought that is irreverent and almost sacreligious [sic]’.²⁷⁶

While the term ‘fifth Gospel’ continued to provoke debate, the ambition to actually write one came to be shared by writers of all shades of the religious spectrum. Marie Corelli’s conviction that ‘the “divine spirit” of the Christian Religion should be set forth in “a new vehicle and vesture” to keep pace with the advancing enquiry and research of man’ [Corelli’s italics], expressed here through the voice of her fictional alter ego, Theos Alwyn, ²⁷⁷ did not differ substantially from Wilde’s view that ‘If Theology desires to move us, she must re-write her formulas’.²⁷⁸ However, where the majority of authors of religious fiction were motivated by a need to refute or promote the ideas of the Higher Criticism, Wilde, constitutionally averse to didactic literature, had no such ambition.²⁷⁹ The historicism which had dominated New Testament studies throughout the Victorian period seems to have held little appeal for Wilde, its insistence on placing Christ in his religious, social, and historical contexts being perhaps too close to the literary realism he so disliked. For Wilde, the narrative force of the Scriptures would always prevail over the vexed question of their provenance, as demonstrated in his comment to Robert Sherard: ‘How beautifully artistic the little stories are…one pauses to consider how it all came to be written’.²⁸⁰ Theological questions of textual authorship and composition were, then, only worthy of a brief pause in the process of appreciating the aesthetics of the text, and the contempt expressed in ‘The Critic as Artist’ for the ‘sordid and stupid quarrels of…third-rate theologians’ would seem to be as much Wilde’s as Gilbert’s.²⁸¹ This is not to say, however, that Wilde was uninformed about the Biblical scholarship produced by some of the leading theologians of the day.²⁸² The works by Wilde discussed in this chapter demonstrate an acute awareness of contemporary theology, and his selection of writings by authors such as F. W. Farrar, Henry Hart Milman, Cardinal Newman, and Ernest Renan for his prison reading, indicates his interest in exploring a diversity of religious views.²⁸³ Wilde’s openness to spiritual ideas and his familiarity with a range of theological writings are both important factors to bear in mind when examining both his spoken and written attempts at creating a fifth Gospel.²⁸⁴

Poems in Prose (1894)

In 1894, a small collection of Wilde’s prose poems was published in the Fortnightly Review. Two of these ‘The Doer of Good’ and ‘The Master’ were recreations of New Testament narratives and stand as increments towards Wilde’s proposed fifth Gospel.²⁸⁵ Wilde’s choice of the prose poem form is a telling one in that it underlines how strongly he inclined towards French literary style at this point in his career.²⁸⁶ Charles Baudelaire, whose influence weaves its way through so much of Wilde’s work, was the foremost exponent of this putative genre, and the first to use the phrase ‘poème en prose’.²⁸⁷ Though not the first writer to experiment with this hybrid form, his fifty prose poems, first published together in the collection Le Spleen de Paris: Petits Poèmes en prose (1869), placed it on the literary map.²⁸⁸ J.-K. Huysmans, another important influence on Wilde’s art, imitated Baudelaire’s prose poems in his first published work, Le Drageoir à épices,²⁸⁹ and elaborated on the merits of this literary innovation through the persona of Des Esseintes in À Rebours:

Bien souvent, des Esseintes avait médité sur cet inquiétant problème, écrire un roman concentré en quelques phrases qui contiendraient le suc cohobé des centaines de pages toujours employées à établir le milieu, à dessiner les caractères, à entasser à l’appui les observations et les menus faits…En un mot, le poème en prose représentait, pour des Esseintes, le suc concret, l’osmazome de la littérature, l’huile essentielle de l’art. ²⁹⁰
Wilde’s choice of the prose poem for rewriting the Scriptures is especially interesting in the light of Des Esseintes’s definition. The latter half of the nineteenth century had seen fiction writers inflate the Gospel narratives, so that one or two Biblical episodes could provide the basis for a novel of several hundred pages. Determined to revivify the words of the New Testament in a striking and original manner, Wilde must have found the oxymoronic form of the prose poem immensely appealing, offering as it did both a means to work against the verbosity of contemporary rewritings of the Scriptures, and a way of avoiding the stanzaic and metrical restraints of what Wilde labelled ‘the Tate and Brady school of poetry’.²⁹¹

Ever the creative borrower, Wilde’s employment of the Baudelairean model was far from a slavish imitation: where the French poet had taken the modern city as the subject to be distilled into prose poem form, his successor took a sacred text.²⁹² Wilde was no doubt pleased by the frisson generated by couching agnostic ideas in a prose that emulated the diction and cadences of Biblical versification.²⁹³ Such a contradictory fusion of style and content mirrors Wilde’s own contradictory feelings towards the Gospels. On one hand, he was a great admirer of the language of the King James Bible, greeting the prose of the Revised Version with contempt;²⁹⁴ he was also thrilled by the idea that, when he was reading his Greek Testament, he was receiving the ‘ipsissima verba, used by Christ’.²⁹⁵ On the other hand, he was disapproving of the ‘uncritical admiration of the Bible’ which he identified in the English, deeming it a barrier to artistic experimentation.²⁹⁶ Certainly, Wilde’s aesthetic appreciation of the Scriptures did not inhibit his desire to rewrite them, convinced as he was that they had become ‘wearisome and meaningless through repetition’.²⁹⁷ However, the exiguous number of prose poems fixed in print, suggests that Wilde was not at ease with the results of his experiments with the form; indeed, the six pieces have held a somewhat uncertain place in Wilde’s oeuvre. His contemporaries clearly thought of the collection as more prose than poetry: they were published first in book form in 1908 in Lord Arthur Savile’s Crime and Other Prose Pieces, appearing a year later in the volume titled Essays and Reviews in Ross’s edition of Wilde’s collected writings, rather than the poetry volume of the same series.²⁹⁸ Only in the most recent edition of Wilde’s collected work are the prose poems awarded the same status as the verse poems, being placed in chronological order of composition and included in the title of the volume.²⁹⁹

However slight a presence the prose poems might be considered to hold in Wilde’s complete works, they are highly significant in what they reveal about his conception of transforming the Scriptures into secular literature. Departing radically from the mainstream of Victorian ‘fifth Gospels’ with their embroideries of invented narrative detail and topographical colour, ‘The Doer of Good’ revisits the New Testament to imagine the trajectories of its characters’ lives after the miraculous moments have passed.³⁰⁰ It follows through the stories of those who had benefited from Christ’s healing powers to unremittingly bleak conclusions: the former leper has become a man mired in sloth and gluttony, whose ‘lips were red with wine’; the man whose sight has been restored has given himself up to lechery, the object of his lust being the woman taken in adultery whom Jesus had previously saved from a death by stoning; and the resuscitated Lazarus is living a life of despair, seemingly tormented by the prospect of looking death in the face for a second time.³⁰¹ A prime example of Wilde’s taste for paradox, the title of this prose poem becomes increasingly ironic with each fallen character’s encounter with Christ, inviting the reader to conclude that his miracles created more harm than good in a world where the frailties of human nature will always prevail.

It was a conclusion that some orthodox Christians found deeply offensive. Writing in the second of his two studies of Wilde, Leonard Cresswell Ingleby, a devout Catholic, while acknowledging the prose poem’s artistic merit, condemns it as ‘blasphemous and horrible’.³⁰² Wilde’s other New Testament prose poem, ‘The Master’, was equally shocking for the traditional Christian. Just as ‘The Doer of Good’ envisaged the ‘aftermath’ of Christ’s time on earth, urging readers to take their imaginations beyond the New Testament narratives so familiar to them, so ‘The Master’ asks them to contemplate a type of encounter which might have taken place and gone unrecorded. It pictures a meeting between Joseph of Arimathea and a young man who, in a kind of subversive imitatio Christi, ‘had wounded his body with thorns and on his hair…set ashes as a crown’ and who complains, ‘they have not crucified me.’ In this spare parable is contained some of the defining features of Wilde’s perception of the Gospels, not least his refusal to conform to any one theological stance. ‘The Master’ is resolutely unorthodox in its suggestion that Jesus’s death on the cross was more a matter of chance than divine preordination: given different timing and circumstances, the weeping young man could have hung in his place. Yet, at the same time, it demonstrates Wilde’s enduring resistance to a straightforwardly rationalist view of the miraculous, the young man’s ability to work the miracles attributed to Christ going entirely unquestioned.³⁰³ Also in evidence here is his inclination to aestheticize the life and person of Jesus: Christ’s life is a work of art because of its narrative perfection; without the crucifixion, the young man’s actions are as nothing, and his life remains artistically incomplete. Ultimately both prose poems testify to Wilde’s increasingly original conception of Jesus which, in written form at least, would reach its apogee in De Profundis.

Le Chant du Cygne: Wilde’s spoken Gospel

Wilde’s contemporaries were generally unimpressed by Poems in Prose. Arthur Symons, himself an exponent of the prose poem form, compared them to ‘a shallow pool, trying to look as if it had some deep meaning’,³⁰⁴ and Corelli dismissed them as ‘ludicrously bad’, no doubt offended by their unorthodox sentiments.³⁰⁵ Both of the New Testament prose poems had started their creative lives as oral tales and fixing them in writing would certainly have restricted their impact.³⁰⁶ It was inevitable that Wilde’s primary audience, used to hearing the tales from his own mouth, crafted to suit the individual listener, and accompanied by inflections and gestures impossible to capture in writing, would find their published equivalents wanting.³⁰⁷ W. B. Yeats’s response to the written version of ‘The Doer of Good’ is a case in point: ‘Wilde published that story a little later, but spoiled it with the verbal decoration of his epoch, and I have to repeat it to myself as I first heard it, before I can see its terrible beauty.’³⁰⁸ Protean in their oral form, likely to be modified not only on the whim of the teller, but in the context of every new listener, the ever-changing dynamics of the spoken narrative inevitably suited Wilde’s sense of playfulness and his love of performance.³⁰⁹ His reputation as a skilled raconteur was, after all, central to his persona and Gide’s remark to him that ‘Le meilleur de vous, vous le parler’ epitomizes the tendency, both then and now, to regard him as a better talker than writer.³¹⁰ Wilde himself appears to have encouraged this appraisal of his artistry, once declaring to Richard Le Gallienne that he ‘gave only his talent to his writings, and kept his genius for his conversation.’³¹¹ Wilde’s oral fluency also chimed with contemporary notions of Irishness. Deirdre Toomey argues in a recent article entitled ‘The Story-Teller at Fault: Oscar Wilde and Orality’ that Ireland is ‘the most oral culture in Western Europe’, a phenomenon brought very much to the fore in the latter part of the nineteenth century through the gathering together of Irish folklore by nationalists such as Sir William Wilde, W. B. Yeats, Lady Augusta Gregory and Douglas Hyde.³¹²

Wilde had a wide and varied repertoire of oral tales, a substantial number of which were assembled into one volume by the author and translator, Guillot de Saix, under the title Le Chant du Cygne. Of course, a collection of this nature raises questions regarding the provenance of each tale, the authenticity and quality of the French in which they are recorded, and how far the versions selected for publication are ‘definitive’.³¹³ Guillot de Saix goes some way to answering these concerns by supplying details of the contexts in which each tale was delivered, and appending a section entitled ‘Le jeu des variantes’. Inevitably, though, the uncertain nature of such a collection has led to differences of opinion regarding their suitability for critical attention. Fong and Beckson, in their edition of Wilde’s poetry, include them in an appendix headed ‘Questionable Texts’;³¹⁴ and Ian Small classifies them as ‘apocrypha and dubia’, casting doubt on the methodologies of literary scholars such as Toomey, who uses them to illustrate the vital role played by the oral mode in the Wildean aesthetic.³¹⁵ However, one distinguished Wilde scholar, John Stokes, makes a case for paying the spoken tales serious attention, not least for the light they may cast on the inter-relatedness of the author’s speech and writing:

There are stories that Wilde never wrote, but most certainly told. There is an oral Wilde, who is at least as well known as the written Wilde, and who even conditions the way we read him now. So there’s an aural Wilde as well. ³¹⁶

Recorded memories of Wilde’s talk provide plenty of evidence to support the texts published by Guillot de Saix, and to ignore such a substantial portion of his work - albeit one not securely extant - is to allow textual scrupulousness to preclude many areas of fruitful investigation, not least in the area of his fifth Gospel ambitions. Wilde’s Biblical re-workings are grouped together by Guillot de Saix under the heading ‘L’Évangile de Minuit’, an organization which allows the reader to appreciate them as a complete work.³¹⁷ Immediately striking is how effectively the transcriptions capture the oral qualities of the tales: through their iterative phrasings, colloquial dialogue, and memorable punch-lines, the reader is able to sense the modulations of tone, the appropriations of different voices and accents, and the carefully managed pauses which would have lent full impact to their transgressive qualities. ‘Simon le Cyrénéen’, for example, contrasts the quiet, bemused tone of Simon with the hectoring strains of his wife as she berates him for missing out on the opportunity of becoming ‘gardien à la porte du Temple!’ Concluding the tale with what the wife intends as a rhetorical question, ‘Mais toi, vieux benêt radoteur…tu passeras vite à l’oubli, car qui donc jamais quand tu seras mort, qui entendra parler de Simon de Cyrène?’, the listener is left to savour its comic irony.³¹⁸ Moreover, the transcribed versions of the tales convey a vivid sense of the literariness and polish of the spoken originals, as reported by auditors such as Yeats:

I noticed…that the impression of artificiality that I think all Wilde’s listeners

have recorded came from the perfect rounding of the sentences and from the deliberation that made it possible.³¹⁹
If the style of the transcriptions helps the reader recreate the original performance of the tales, so their contents suggest their original auditors. The intertextuality of Wilde’s versions of the Gospel narratives indicates that his listeners were au courant with the theological debates of the day, and the different channels through which they were conducted. Issues that had preoccupied the writers of Lives of Jesus, such as the nature of the Gospel miracles, Christ’s relationship with his mother, and the motivations of Judas, are viewed from Wilde’s own irreverent perspective. Where Christ’s biographers had tended to present one ‘true’ interpretation of the Gospel stories, in keeping with their particular religious standpoint, Wilde seems to embrace their indeterminacy. We are invited in ‘Jean et Judas’ to consider the view that Judas’s betrayal is born out of the torturous jealousy he feels when John becomes ‘le préféré’ of the disciples;³²⁰ whereas, in ‘Les Trente Deniers’, we have a traitor more motivated by money than love, who hangs himself not from shame, but from the despair he experiences on discovering that his blood-money is counterfeit.³²¹ And it is not only the scholarly or devout Lives of Jesus that Wilde seems to have had in mind when playing to his audience. Some of the more colloquially phrased apologues, such as ‘Simon le Cyrénéen’ and ‘Les Trente Deniers’ bear a striking resemblance in tone to G. W. Foote’s Bible burlesques and the closely associated La Bible Amusante of Léo Taxil, and seem particularly well suited to Wilde’s predominantly male coterie.

Several of Wilde’s spoken parables feature New Testament episodes which had recently undergone literary treatment.³²² A case in point is ‘Le Ressuscité’, a retelling of the raising of Lazarus, in which the imaginary dialogue between the revenant and his saviour fills the silence which Tennyson identifies in John’s account of the miracle:

Behold a man raised up by Christ!

The rest remaineth unreveal’d

He told it not; or something sealed

The lips of that Evangelist.³²³

In Wilde’s tale, Lazarus responds to Jesus’s questioning about what lies beyond the grave, with the blunt response: ‘Rabbi, il n’y a rien’. The miracle generally regarded as anticipating the resurrection which will confirm the meaning of Christ, becomes in Wilde’s version a means of affirming the absence of any such meaning.³²⁴ Yet no doubt is cast on the miracle itself; while rationalist theologians had proffered various explanations of how the raising of Lazarus was faked, Wilde’s version of the story has the deception lie in a Jesus who knows there is no afterlife. The story of Salome is another example of a New Testament text which had already undergone extensive literary and artistic reworking before coming under Wilde’s imaginative control. The contemporary fascination with the Biblical figure of Salome is accordingly well represented in Guillot de Saix’s volume, which includes three different treatments of this relatively minor Gospel figure.³²⁵ Not only are these tales interesting as possible ur-texts of Wilde’s 1891 drama, Salomé, they also testify to his fascination with the legends which had grown out of the four-fold Gospel. One of the three Salome stories Wilde is reported as telling has the princess banished to the desert by Herod as punishment for her kissing of the Baptist’s head; after years of exile, living on locusts and wild honey, she witnesses and recognizes Jesus as the Messiah, only to have her mission to spread the news cut short when she falls through the ice of a frozen lake, resulting in her decapitation.³²⁶ To a modern reader, this tale seems typically Wildean in its multiple ironies and dramatic treatment of the heroine but, as Wilde reminds his listeners, its origins lie in the writings of ‘Nicéphore, le vénérable Patriache de Byzance’: an ancient version of the Salome story which may well have been familiar to Wilde’s 1890s’ audience.³²⁷ Here then, the story of the princess takes on the quality of a palimpsest, as Wilde overwrites a tale which is in itself a reworking of the original.

Yet, if the success of Wilde’s oral tales depended to some extent on their being heard in their immediate cultural and literary contexts, they nevertheless amount to more than just creative borrowing and allusiveness. These spoken parables demonstrate Wilde putting into practice his theory that, if art is to express the complexities of modern life, it must adopt ‘strange perspectives’.³²⁸ Each one sees him marry the familiar with the strange, obliging the listener, or reader, to reach imaginatively beyond the Gospel accounts and to consider what might have transpired after recorded events had taken place, as in the case of Lazarus or Simon of Cyrene; or to consider for the first time the possibility that the Jewish women crying out for Christ to be crucified are simply afraid to acknowledge his Messiahship lest they lose entirely ‘le merveilleux espoir de porter dans ses flancs Celui-là qui doit nâitre’.³²⁹ Certainly, Wilde’s desire, as expressed to Coulson Kernahan, to recast the story of Christ ‘with new and divine vision, free from the accretions of cant which the centuries have gathered around it’ seems at the heart of these tales, embodying as they do the agnostic spirit of the age.³³⁰ Nowhere is this spirit so perfectly captured as in Wilde’s version of the story of Thomas: ‘La Puissance du Doute’. In this, Wilde takes the idea of Thomas’s twin-hood (mentioned only in the fourth Gospel) and expands it to explore notions of doubleness. Thomas’s habit of mind looks forward to the religious dilemmas of the nineteenth century:

C’est que vous tous, toi, Pierre, avec Nathanaël, et le frère de Zébédée, et les autres disciples, vous croyez simplement que Jésus est le fils de Dieu, mais moi je dois me dépenser doublement, et doublement souffrir, parce que je crois qu’il est peut-être le Fils de Dieu.³³¹
Wilde’s interest in the division of the self, so memorably worked out in The Picture of Dorian Gray and in the ‘Bunburying’ motif of The Importance of Being Earnest, expresses itself here in Thomas’s being ‘in two minds’, a permanent state of uncertainty. Through a typically Wildean inversion ‘la puissance aveugle de la foi’ is transformed into ‘la puissance du doute’ and the vacillations of the doubter, traditionally perceived as weakness, take on associations of strength and power.