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the historical jesus and the literary imagination
Jesus Christ is a fiction.’15 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’.16 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. The Secularist who did most to undermine the veracity of the Bible narratives and to drive home their fictitiousness was G. W. Foote. Founding the Freethinker in 1881, Foote used this populist and militantly atheistic journal, and related publications, to overturn any surviving notions of the Gospels as sacrosanct. In The Bible Handbook, for example, he declares – tongue firmly in cheek – that the Bible is made up of ‘immoralities, indecencies and brutalities’ and proceeds to exemplify his contention through some highly impious exegesis of the text.17 A kind of secular Wyclif of his day, Foote disrupted the familiar cadences of the Authorized Version and replaced them with an earthy vernacular. By transposing the Bible’s master narratives into a range of fictional genres, he insisted on their essentially fictitious nature, opening them up for future heterodox treatments. Considering himself a literary man, he used his knowledge of writers such as Blake and Shakespeare, and a range of contemporary novelists, to promote his cause, declaring freethought to be ‘an omnipresent active force in the English literature of to-day’.18 It needs to be said, however, that Foote’s animus towards Christianity constantly occluded any sense of literary style or taste, and his iconoclastic treatments of the Scriptures made little or no contribution to the development of radical biblical fiction. Nevertheless, his writings represent a significant assault on a sacred text still revered by orthodox and agnostic alike, while their crassness no doubt underlined the need for more thoughtful and subtle re-imaginings of the Gospels.