The Historical Jesus and the Literary Imagination 1860-1920

Front matter

The Historical Jesus and the Literary Imagination, 1860-1920

ENGLISH ASSOCIATION STUDIES, 3

JENNIFER STEVENS

Contents

Acknowledgements vil Author’s Note viil Introduction I 1 The Victorians and the Bible 9 2 Nineteenth-Century Lives of Jesus 34 3 The Rise of the Fictional Jesus 84 4 The Fifth Gospel of Oscar Wilde 139 5 The Afterlife of Oscar Wilde’s Oral Tales 183 6 A Peculiar Protestant: The Gospels According to

George Moore 217 7 George Moore’s Life of Jesus 247 Conclusion 282 Bibliography 291

Index 304

Introduction

Jesus of Nazareth [...] a symbol of quite perennial, infinite character; whose significance will ever demand to be anew inquired into,

and anew made manifest.

Thomas Carlyle, Sartor Resartus

For centuries now countless visual and literary artists have felt compelled to represent the figure of Jesus ‘anew’ for their own age. The first decade of the new millennium has already produced numerous re-imaginings of the New Testament narratives from all areas of the creative arts. The Gospels have been recreated by airport novelists such as Dan Brown and Jeffrey Archer, as well as by literary authors such as C. K. Stead and Jim Crace. On stage, the figure of Christ has been portrayed by writers as well established as Edwin Morgan and by absolute newcomers such as Kate Betts, whose play, On the Third Day, won first prize in a reality TV show for aspiring dramatists. Film and television have been equally busy bringing Jesus to a wide and varied audience. In the last few years, those with a taste for the controversial and possessed of a strong stomach for violence could take in Mel Gibson’s highly successful film The Passion of the Christ, while those of a more traditionalist inclination could enjoy the BBC’s rather more sedate drama The Passion, which ran nightly on British television through Holy Week in 2008. Such examples provide the merest snapshot of the many modern versions of the story of Jesus available to today’s readers and audiences, all produced in a period that has seen declining church attendance, waning religious instruction in schools and, as some would have it, the rise of fundamentalist atheism.

For many of today’s generation, a reading or viewing of a biblical adaptation is likely to be their first encounter with the Scriptures.

Indeed, they may well be more able to recite the Beatitudes according to Monty Python’s Brian, or to outline the creation story as depicted in Robert Crumb’s cartoon version of Genesis, than to recall their originals. Nowadays, then, the newly updated version of the Bible is dominant by dint of coming first, just as images of Hamlet contemplating suicide in television adverts or political cartoons are likely to come before any direct encounter their audience might have with the soliloquy on page or stage. The former Poet Laureate and selfconfessed unbeliever Andrew Motion has recently expressed grave concerns about the Bible’s reversal of fortunes and the consequences for today’s English students. How, he wonders, can readers with little or no acquaintance with biblical texts ever hope to understand, let alone appreciate, ‘a whole raft of literary work, from John Milton to T. S. Eliot’.! It is indeed an important question, especially for university English departments, yet it is also an entirely rhetorical one. There has undoubtedly been a profound shift in the public’s relationship with the Scriptures in the last fifty years or so, and no course in Bible studies, delivered in any sector of the education system, is likely to reverse it. While the generations that feature in this study called on literature to supplement, revivify or even replace the all-too-familiar Scriptures, the present one seeks out the Bible to enable it to make sense of canonical works of literature. What was once the master narrative has become for many no more than a work of reference. This was certainly not the case for the writers featured in this study, all of whom had in common a secure knowledge of the Bible, regardless of their own religious convictions and personal perspectives on the Scriptures. For the Victorians and the Edwardians, biblical fiction was an adaptation of an entirely familiar text encountered through the everyday discourse of home, school, church and community. Indeed, D. H. Lawrence’s statement, ‘I was brought up on the Bible, and seem to have it in my bones’, articulates a state of being shared by most writers and readers of his own and earlier generations.’

Why biblical fiction should continue to flourish at a time when the source text itself is so little known is thanks in part to the strength of its foundations. The mid-nineteenth century saw the beginning of what is now a deeply engrained habit of fictionalizing the Scriptures in both Europe and the United States. In the sixty or so years covered by this study, the story of Jesus would be told ina variety of radical, often highly inventive, modes of imaginative writing, providing templates for later New Testament novels and drama. However, the significance

INTRODUCTION 3 of these early works has often gone unacknowledged in modern studies of Gospel transformations, with more recent works winning unwarranted praise for originality. Such a state of affairs is hardly surprising, given that so many of the Victorian and Edwardian fictions are out of print and only accessible in research libraries, or in quite expensive reprint editions such as those offered by Kessinger Publishing. Yet the effort of acquiring them is richly repaid. A survey of British biblical fiction that begins as far back as the 1860s, rather than the more usual starting point of the 1930s or 1940s, provides an invaluable insight into the changing attitudes towards Christianity and its texts from the early days of agnosticism. Moreover, it underlines how from the outset the genre pushed against the boundaries of acceptability, a characteristic that continues to hold true, even in a climate that is, from a Euro-American perspective at least, predominantly secular. The profound changes in moral outlook, especially in respect to sexuality, that emerged from the early 1960s onwards helped bring about the relaxation of censorship and blasphemy laws, affording today’s writers of New Testament fictions a freedom undreamt of by their forebears. All the same, it is rare to find them employing a narrative viewpoint, theological theory or structuring agent that has not already been tried out — albeit in a rather more cautious manner — a century or more earlier. Today’s Christian conspiracy page-turner, Gospel science fiction, newly discovered evangel or multiple-perspectival novel about the life of Jesus all have their late-nineteenth or early twentieth-century ancestors.

The Victorians and Edwardians produced a wealth of imaginative writing founded on the Gospel narratives, far too plentiful to be adequately covered in one study. Such an embarrassment of riches has necessitated a rigorous, at times quirky, process of selection which has imposed a shape and order on what is, in reality, a highly amorphous topic. There is no question that, had an alternative strategy been applied, a quite different picture of biblical fiction and its significance might have emerged. As it stands, however, the main focus of this book is the historical Jesus as presented in British works of fiction. Such a choice was taken with a mind to supplementing existing works such as Theodore Ziolkowski’s Fictional Transfigurations of Jesus (1972), which focuses on European and American fiction dealing with what the author describes as the ‘kerygmatic Christ of faith’ as opposed to the figure of history, and Daniel Pals’ The Victorian ‘Lives’ of Jesus (1982), which treats only a semi-fictional mode of representation.> The choice of prose fiction over drama and poetry was in most respects a straightforward one. During the period covered in this study, theatre censorship in Britain prevented any biblical play from being staged (in any mainstream public arena at least) and any attempts at New Testament drama tended to be penned with an optimistic sense of futurity: a sub-genre waiting in the wings. By way of contrast, poetry based on the Scriptures was in plentiful supply and enjoyed a wide readership, its very abundance placing it beyond the scope of the present work. This book’s focus on the novel and short story is by no means entirely pragmatic, however. As the youngest literary genre, prose fiction held the greatest appeal for those aspiring to modernize and revitalize the Scriptures; it was also best fitted for retelling source narratives that belong essentially to a realistic mode. While there can be no real certainty about how the evangels were conceived and received, it is certain that they have been read for several hundred years now as linear narratives, not far removed from the novel and short-story form. The creative transformation from sacred source to prose fiction was, therefore, a relatively smooth one, and one that offered both a high degree of artistic flexibility and a wide potential readership.

Yet, while settling to focus on the historical Jesus as presented through British fiction might seem to hold the scope of this book firmly in place, there are still points where the topic — rather like a balloon filled with water — is compelled to change shape and character. In some of the studied works, for example, Jesus is usurped by other New Testament personages such as the Magdalene, Judas or St Paul in order to provide the author with an arresting or intriguing perspective on the main hero of the piece. And while the focus on fiction is maintained more or less throughout, there are times when it is perhaps a rather approximate generic term, covering literary modes that defy easy categorization: the oral parable, the dream vision, the biblical play written only to be read. Geographical boundaries are also breached in places to examine the crucial influences of Continental theology and the influence of American and European biblical fictions on their British counterparts. Though neat and precise in their titular brackets, dates, too, take on a somewhat elastic quality at certain points in the book, underscoring the difficulties that inhere in sealing up any body of writing in a specific time period.

Notwithstanding such difficulties of containment, the book seeks to highlight the essential differences between past and present imagin-

INTRODUCTION 5 ings of the Gospels, by way of looking back at some of the founding models of biblical transformations. Inevitably, given the passage of time, stark contrasts are to be found in intention. While there are still today a substantial number of creative artists for whom the reworking of the Scriptures is a project of great intellectual challenge and, in some cases, of serious spiritual enquiry, they are probably in the minority. For many others the biblical text is merely a convenient cultural reference point, lending itself particularly well to the postmodernist penchant for parody, generic hybridity and the splicing of low and high culture. Unsurprisingly, the situation was quite the reverse in the Victorian era. Though it was possible to find some highly irreverent Bible satires (usually imported from the Continent), composed with no more serious intention than shaking up polite society, the vast majority of authors engaged in writing biblical fiction was very much in earnest. As both the Old and the New Testaments came under increasing pressure from science and radical theology, so the more forward-thinking among the faithful realized that, if the Bible were to continue to hold any sway, it needed to be defamiliarized. Fictionalizing the Gospels offered a means of doing just this, exploiting as it did the gap between the linguistic securities of the Authorized Version and the boldness or elaborations of contemporary re-workings. So, while the text would remain ‘in the bones’, as Lawrence put it, it would not ossify.

The opening chapter of this study examines how the Bible was read, interpreted and valued in the mid-to-late nineteenth century and explores its often troubled relationship with the fictive. It follows the rapid development of interest in the historical Jesus and how it moved the theological spotlight away from Christ’s divinity and onto his humanity, rendering him in the eyes of some creative writers a fitting, even urgent, subject for fiction. As imaginative treatments of both the Old and the New Testaments grew more commonplace, so questions concerning the moral dimensions of fiction came to preoccupy 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. Nonetheless, some distinct tendencies of thought and attitude emerge quite clearly 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 those more liberal theologians and critics who contended that the Bible should be read as any other literary work: neither regarded as an infallible repository of divine revelation and truth, nor positioned sui generis. There were, of course, some viewpoints that 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 shades and permutations attest to the complexities of belief and unbelief to be found in Victorian Britain in the second half of the nineteenth century, and serve to remind us of the need for caution when considering a society whose religious preoccupations grow more and more remote, even alien, with each passing decade.

One of the most pressing concerns of the Victorian period was the impact of the Higher Criticism on Christian thought and belief. With this in mind, Chapters 2 and 3 assess the role played by imaginative writing in introducing and promulgating the ideas of modernist theology to the general reading public or, indeed, in refuting them. Chapter 2 examines the enormous popularity of the semi-fictional biographies commonly known as ‘Lives of Jesus’, which either supported or took up arms against this new critical approach, and which increasingly exploited the fictive mode. Chapter 3 then traces the emerging trend of fully fictional prose works that developed out of the Life of Jesus tradition, some of which paid it homage, with others responding to its perceived inadequacies. During the period covered by this book, the accepted parameters of fictional representations of Christ were pushed against with ever-increasing pressure. By the close of the Victorian era, none but the most fervent evangelical reader was disturbed by the imaginative depictions 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 their virtues extolled — from the pulpit. Creative embellishments of the Gospel stories that would have seemed daring, even profane, by mid-century standards had by now taken on a new orthodoxy, prompting the more avantgarde writers of scriptural fiction to increasingly bold adaptations of their hypotext. By the early years of the twentieth century, the very

INTRODUCTION 7 trajectory of the New Testament narratives would be disordered, as numerous alternative versions of Jesus’s life and death were explored through a variety of fictional forms.

The final three chapters concentrate on some of the most venturesome transformations of the Gospels and, most especially, their treatment of the theory that Jesus survived the cross and returned to his everyday life. While somewhat superannuated as a theological position by the late nineteenth century, it was nonetheless a scenario that held great imaginative potential and seemed to chime well with contemporary advances in the fields of archaeology, anatomy and psychology, all of which promised to throw light on the consequences of surviving a crucifixion. Chapter 4 deals with Oscar Wilde’s religious imagination and, in particular, his protean oral tales based on the New Testament, several of which engage with speculations about the resurrection in a playful and provocative manner. This is followed in Chapter 5 by a discussion of a range of authors who drew on Wilde’s fictional experiments with the Gospels to produce their own imaginative versions of the life (and death) of Jesus, several of which enjoyed considerable success. George Moore’s biblical dramas and fictions are also considered by some to derive from Wilde’s spoken apologues, yet the final two chapters of the book make a case for their independence. Chapter 6 focuses on the germ of an idea that developed throughout the final twenty years of Moore’s life: a meeting between St Paul and Jesus. The final chapter then explores The Brook Kerith, the most significant work to emerge from this scenario, and one of the best-selling novels of the First World War years.

The conclusion of this book engages with two enduringly contentious issues: literary value and the relations between literature and theology. In addressing the first, it endeavours to allow for the passage of time and the consequent change in literary taste, giving credit to fiction that, though not always of any intrinsic literary merit, nonetheless contributed to the genre’s development and well-being. As concerns the second, it attempts to be even-handed in evaluating both the gains and losses brought about by mixing fiction and theology, and by transforming the shadowy Jesus of historical record into the often compelling, sometimes bathetic, Jesus of the imagination. Ultimately it concurs with Frank Kermode’s view that ‘Fictions are for finding things out, and they change as the needs of sense-making change.” Regardless of what the fictions featured in this book offered — perhaps still offer — in terms of aesthetic or theological merit, there is no doubt that they helped their readers make sense of some rapid and profound changes in Christian thought, feeling and practice.

t Quoted from an interview in the Guardian (education news and features), 17 February, 2009, p. 1.

2 D. H. Lawrence, “The Dragon of the Apocalypse’, reprinted in Selected Literary Criticism, ed. Anthony Beal (London: Heinemann, 1967), p. 164.

3 Theodore Ziolkowski, Fictional Transfigurations of Jesus (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1972), p. 10.

4 Frank Kermode, The Sense of an Ending: Studies in the Theory of Fiction, with a New Epilogue (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000), p. 39.

CHAPTER I Matthew and Mark and Luke and holy John Evanished all and gone!

Arthur Hugh Clough, Epi-Strauss-inm

The Bible: fact and fiction

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.!

Such complacency was, however, to come under sustained attack throughout the second half of the century. Biblical infallibility could no longer be taken as an indisputable truth by ‘educated men and women’ when, in 1846, George Eliot’s translation of David Friedrich Strauss’s seminal work Das Leben Jesu (1835) became public enough to make regular appearances in the Classified Advertisements section of The Times. The same year saw the founding of T. & T. Clark’s Foreign Theological Library, its guiding principle being to publish

IO THE HISTORICAL JESUS AND THE LITERARY IMAGINATION translations of German authors defending the orthodox position; in practice, however, it served only to make more familiar the heterodox ideas its authors sought to kill off. With the publication of Essays and Reviews — just one year after Charles Darwin’s Origin of Species had caused more than “a little scare’ for orthodox Christians — there was no longer any question of the Higher Criticism staying firmly on the other side of the Channel.” Resolutely Broad Church in outlook, the volume sought to bring theological scholarship in Britain up to speed with that which had been thriving in Germany for several decades. Though the brief foreword to the work insisted that the essays were ‘written in entire independence from each other’, the impact of collecting the work of ‘the Seven against Christ’, as the authors became known, would be felt throughout the century.

By the 1860s, the miraculous elements of the Gospels, Christ’s divinity, the relationship between the Old and New Testaments and the authenticity of the Evangelists’ testaments had all come under rigorous scrutiny. Unsurprisingly, such a forensic examination and revision of the Scriptures provoked fierce controversy, as what was still a very considerable body of traditional Christians put up a spirited defence of their faith and the sacred texts that underpinned it. The Higher Criticism posed an especially grave threat to the Protestant faith, predicated as it was on the word of the Scriptures and with its distinctive tradition of regular Bible readings. As one Roman Catholic, writing in 1874, points out, ‘the [Catholic] Church existed before the New Testament’ and could look to its doctrines and dogma to support and protect the faith of its members; Protestants had less to fall back on once the sacred texts were interrogated and found wanting. In a recent discussion of religious fundamentalism, Terry Eagleton contends that “Meaning which has been written down is unhygienic. It is also promiscuous, ready to lend itself to whoever happens along. That the text is, as Eagleton describes, inherently vulnerable to infection by outside forces had already been realized by some nineteenth-century Christians who, while asserting the primacy of God’s word as set down in the Bible, simultaneously expressed regret that such a collection of documents existed at all. A case in point is the Congregational minister and well-known preacher Joseph Parker, whose Ecce Deus, a response to J. R. Seeley’s ground-breaking and controversial study of Jesus, Ecce Homo, foregrounds the inadequacy of language to encapsulate ‘what is deepest in the soul’. Parker states that “Wisely [...] Christ wrote nothing, for written language is

THE VICTORIANS AND THE BIBLE II more difficult of interpretation than spoken language [...] The moment that the grammar and the lexicon are called in, strife begins, and logomachy deposes wisdom.” For believers like Parker, then, the 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 rendered them ‘unhygienic’, laying them open to more and more forensic examination with every new generation of scholars.

Belief in the infallibility of the Scriptures did not only endure in the more extreme regions of fundamentalist dissent. A small but significant body of Anglicans also insisted on the incontestability of the Bible’s authority. In December 1891, The Times published a letter in its news section under the heading “The Bible and Modern Criticism’, featuring a ‘declaration on the truth of Holy Scripture’. Countersigned by 38 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.‘

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 method of interpreting them. In the four weeks or so that followed the publication of the declaration, The Times carried a series of letters in response to it. Although there were a few respondents who applauded the declaration, the majority were vehemently opposed to it. The aforementioned Joseph Parker, though a well-known evangelical and a passionate advocate of Scriptural exposition, took a somewhat Coleridgean stance, accusing the signatories of making the Bible a ‘kind of idol’; while 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’.’

Notwithstanding however many column inches of The Times the conservative elements of the Anglican clergy managed to occupy, their uncompromising voices were destined to grow increasingly subdued as theology became ever more complex and nuanced and, perhaps as importantly, increasingly available in print. The steady decline and marginalization of the biblical literalist is memorably represented in some of the finest prose fiction of the 1880s and 1890s. Depicting the most extreme end of biblical fundamentalism in the posthumously published Father and Son, Edmund Gosse describes how his Plymouth Brethren parents cultivated a rigid and iconoclastic literalness, obliging them to ‘read injunctions to the Corinthian converts without any suspicion that what was apposite in dealing with halfbreed Achaian colonists of the first century might not exactly apply to respectable English men and women of the nineteenth’.! 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’;? and in Thomas Hardy’s Tess of the D’Urbervilles, the Reverend Clare, in his strict adherence to biblical infallibility, is deemed ‘a clergyman of a type which [...] has wellnigh dropped out of contemporary life’.'° And it was not only liberal-minded authors who regarded such believers as a dying breed. The unimpeachably orthodox clergyman and author 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”’."!

Holding fast to a belief in the revealed truth of the Scriptures became increasingly difficult as revisionist theology continued to demonstrate that the biblical facts of centuries past were looking more and more like a form of biblical fiction. The first major figure to cast serious doubt on the historical realities of the Bible was David Friedrich Strauss in what would come to be regarded as a cornerstone of the Higher Criticism: Das Leben Jesu. The author insisted that the Gospels were dominated by imaginative thought and developed out of a mythopoeic process. According to Strauss, the fictive elements that he uncovered in the New Testament texts stemmed from a particular mode of perception, bounded by its own historical specificity and innocent of any will to deceive. The work opened up a field of enquiry aimed at laying bare the inconsistencies of the four-fold Gospel and separating what might have been an historical event from what was certainly an act of the imagination. As the century moved into its second half, more and more readers of the Bible began to follow Strauss’s lead in questioning its authenticity and, consequently, its sui generis status. One such, the explorer and author Winwood Reade, writing in his much-quoted history of the world The Martyrdom of Man, relegates the New Testament from sacred text to historical biography, putting it on a par with Plutarch’s Lives, both texts having in common the ‘absurdity of the miracles’.!? Some Bible commentators refused even to classify it as biography. Writing under the pseudonym ‘Sylva’, and declaring himself an ‘ultra-Unitarian’, the author of Ecce Veritas (one in a series of responses to John Robert Seeley’s Ecce Homo) insists that ‘most of those who have attempted to write a life of Jesus based on the four evangels, have been compelled honestly to admit the impossibility of any true biographical arrangement.”

Especially extreme in their attack on the Bible’s supremacy were the Secularists. The arch-enemies of biblical literalists — though considerably fewer in number — the Secularists promoted the atheist cause as part of a crusade to reform a society that they believed to be repressed and exploited by State and Church alike. If, as it is sometimes averred, there is little nowadays to separate the zeal of the campaigning evangelical groups such as the Christian Voice from that of so-called ‘secular fundamentalists’ such as Richard Dawkins, so it was in some respects with their Victorian predecessors. Secularists and extreme Protestants were equally fixed 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 its antonym; for the Secularists, it was the Scriptures that were entirely fictitious and guilty of untruths.

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.'* Perhaps the most energetic and memorable of these was Bradlaugh, whose profound hatred of the Bible was stridently articulated 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.’ And Bradlaugh’s close associate, Annie Besant, would underline the unhistorical 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’.'® 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. Particularly prominent in the development of Secularist publishing was Charles Watts, founding in 1885 the Watts 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 sceptical writings easily available through the Rationalist Press Association, which he helped to launch in the early 1890s.