Jennifer Stevens. The Historical Jesus and the Literary Imagination, 1860-1920. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2010. Price: US$95.00

The past two decades have witnessed a resurgence of scholarly attention to the historical Jesus along with numerous novels that have taken advantage of this work in re-imagining the life of Jesus of Nazareth. Bart Ehrman’s many popularizations present the most conspicuous academic example of this trend. In works such as Jesus, Interrupted (2009), he has undertaken to remind readers of the rich scholarly tradition, which climaxed in the mid-nineteenth century, which aggressively queried the discrepancies among the four canonical gospels and sought to generate both specific textual tactics for critiquing their historical validity and larger theories that might explain their complicated affiliations and chronological ordering. The Jesus Project, with its elaborate color-coded voting procedures for adjudicating the authentic and the spurious in the gospels, is the most notorious instance of this cultural phenomenon, while major novelists and minor, from Norman Mailer and the Nobel-prize winning José Saramago to Anne Rice of vampire fame, have been churning out bestselling fictional lives of Jesus. To top it all off, Dan Brown’s DaVinci Code (2003) and Mel Gibson’s The Passion of the Christ (2004) earned enormous profits and generated heated controversy by spectacularly exploiting the seemingly inexhaustible appeal of this subject matter. One inadvertent attraction of Jennifer Stevens’s impressively meticulous study of a previous era of scholarly interest, fictional productivity, and cultural debate over the historical Jesus is the assurance that our fad, too, will pass. Though The Historical Jesus and the Literary Imagination, 1860-1920 runs well into the twentieth century, though it quotes authorities already weary of new books on the subject as early as 1872, and though in its own analysis this earlier phase arguably peaked as late as 1916 with George Moore’s The Brook Kerith, a novel centered upon Joseph of Arimathea, Jesus, and Paul, still her study documents a clear sense of a rise beginning in the 1860s followed by steady decline by the 1890s. Stevens’s book is a welcome documentary survey of the Victorian era’s deep interest in the historical Jesus, both in scholarly and fictional forms. Though in insight or brilliance it hardly compares to Albert Schweitzer’s magisterial The Quest of the Historical Jesus (1910), it is nonetheless worthy to be set beside Schweitzer’s study as a reliable and long overdue resource for anyone interested in this phenomenon’s major English exemplars. Schweitzer’s book is notoriously light on English contributions to this project—focusing, rightly, on what was fundamentally a German tradition in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries till that dominance was upended by the unprecedented popular success of Renan’s La Vie de Jésus (1863). Nonetheless Stevens shows that the English were avidly reading and responding to what the Germans and French were doing, although with largely orthodox and defensive biographical treatments of Jesus and later with somewhat more daring fictional ones. Thus, her study is a partial corrective and a valuable resource for anyone, whether scholar or layman, interested in the nineteenth-century English dimension of this widespread and controversial cultural phenomenon. There is no better book for relatively brief, well-contextualized (in terms of Stevens’s close attention to the contemporary reception of each of these works), and authoritative overviews of the main figures from biographers such as J.R. Seeley, F.W. Farrar, Cunningham Geikie, and Alfred Edersheim to novelists such as Samuel Butler, Edwin Abbot, Joseph Jacobs, Marie Corelli, Frank Harris, and George Moore. Stevens’s survey duly begins by acknowledging the predominant role of German and French scholarship. She is too swift, however, in presenting the all-important German contribution. Of course, it would be pointless to attempt to substitute for Schweitzer here, but Stevens’s account, by focusing solely …