The historal jesus and the literary imagination, 1860 -1920

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the rise of the fictional jesus

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(who was not a Jew) said to Him “your own Nation, the Jews, and your own Priests have delivered you to me. What have you done?” Finding that He had done no harm, Pilate went out and told the Jews so…’. See The Life of Our Lord (London: Associated Newspapers, 1934), p. 100. For a succinct and authoritative account of the Christianizing of Pontius Pilate, see Paul Winter, On the Trial of Jesus (Berlin: Walter de Gruyter, 2nd edn, 1974), pp. 70–89. 70 Jesus: As Others Saw Him, p. 226. 71 Hostile views of the Pharisees were perpetuated by popular works such as Renan’s Life of Jesus. The freethinker J. M. Robertson pointed out in Ernest Renan (London: Watts, 1924): ‘Renan, instead of trying […] to save Jesus from the discredit of the wholesale vilification of Scribes and Pharisees, undertook to demonstrate that these were in the mass as black as they are painted’ (p. 54). 72 For a detailed discussion of Jewish attitudes to Jesus, see Thomas Walker, Jewish Views of Jesus (London: G. Allen & Unwin, 1931). 73 The conviction that the historical Jesus would have been taunted for his illegitimacy is still held by some modern Jewish scholars. Gerd Lüdemann, for example, asserts that ‘From the very first, people in his home town of Nazareth bombarded him with comments that he was a bastard without a proper father. Hence the taunt “son of Mary”.’ See Jesus After Two Thousand Years (London: SCM Press, 2000), p. 688. 74 The Jewish Life of Christ, ed. G. W. Foote and J. M. Wheeler (London: Progressive Publishing Company, 1885). 75 Athenaeum, 22 June 1895, p. 797. 76 Joseph Jacobs, ‘Jesus of Nazareth’, The Jewish Encyclopaedia, ed. Isidore Singer, 12 vols (New York and London: Funk and Wagnalls, 1904), VII, p. 165. 77 S. Schechter, ‘As Others Saw Him’, in Studies in Judaism, 3rd Series (Philadelphia: The Jewish Publication Society of America, 1924), p. 45. This review first appeared in the Jewish Chronicle of London, 10–17 May 1895. 78 Jesus: As Others Saw Him, p. v. 79 Essays in Jewish Biography, ed. Alexander Marx (Philadelphia: The Jewish Publication Society of America, 1948), p. 252. 80 Schechter, ‘As Others Saw Him’, p. 31. 81 Athenaeum, 22 June 1895, p. 797. 82 Athenaeum, 22 June 1895, p. 797. 83 Jesus: As Others Saw Him, p. iii. 84 Marie Corelli, Free Opinions (London: Archibald Constable, 1905), p. 40. 85 Corelli, Free Opinions, p. 46. 86 Marie Corelli, ‘The Vanishing Gift’: An Address on the Decay of the Imagination (Edinburgh: The Philosophical Institution, 1901), p. 14. 87 Quoted in Annette R. Federico, Idol of Suburbia (Charlottesville, VA, and London: University Press of Virginia, 2000), p. 130. 88 Marie Corelli, Barabbas: a Dream of the World’s Tragedy, 3 vols (London: Methuen, 1893), III, p. 227. Hereafter cited in the text as B. 89 Saturday Review, 76 (November 1893), p. 546. 90 Marie Corelli, A Romance of Two Worlds, 2 vols (London: Richard Bentley and Son, 1886), II, p. 128. In a chapter entitled ‘The Electric Creed’, Corelli expounds the theory that Jesus was electrified, a quality that enabled him to carry out mira-


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