SOURCE: Chadbourne, Richard M. “Comedy of History.” In Ernest Renan, pp. 65-84. New York: Twayne Publishers, 1968.

I THE GALILEAN REALITY

The first paragraph of Chapter One of Vie de Jésus (“The Place of Jesus in World History”) states three ideas that will govern the entire Origines du christianisme: first, the “revolution” of Christianity is “the principal event in the history of the world”; second, this revolution required almost a thousand years to be achieved, that is, seven centuries to emerge from its Jewish antecedents and almost three centuries to establish itself as a “new religion”; and third, its immediate origins date from the reigns of Augustus and Tiberius, its founder being “a superior person” (une personne supérieure).

For the historical fact supporting this third idea Renan relies on the Synoptic Gospels and, to a lesser extent, on the Fourth Gospel.¹ Much less of a skeptic in this respect than Strauss or the liberal French Protestant exegetes, he believes that the Gospels have some historical validity; his narrative is based on an attempt to disengage history from legend in these sources. Under the heading of “legend” he classifies all the “miracles,” on the a priori ground that the “miracle,” understood as the specific intervention of a superhuman power in the operation of nature, is an impossibility. Jesus is “miraculous” only in the sense that he is governed by a fresh and powerful religious instinct, a primitive psychology with laws of its own, befitting the “childhood of humanity” and lost to modern men in a reflective and analytical age. But strangely different though his nature may be from ours, he remains bound by nature; he is a miracle psychologique.²

Traditional Catholic “lives” of Jesus had tended to be long on dogma and apologetics, and short on history. In fact, to term them “lives” at all may be a misnomer: the Protestant religious historian, Maurice Goguel, calls Renan's “the first Vie de Jésus to appear in a Catholic country.”³ Renan's Jesus is rooted in his race, his country, and his time, very much like the Racine or Byron of Taine's literary criticism; the difference lies in his degree of greatness and influence. He is a Jew, the perfect fruit of a long race of Jewish prophets, but his vision of goodness is shaped by the gentle pastoral beauty of the Galilean landscape, in contrast with the harsh landscape of Jerusalem. Galilee and Jerusalem are the positive and negative poles of this biography. The Vie de Jésus, unique in this way among all the books of the Judeo-Christian cycle, is cast as a pure idyll or pastoral. Serenity and joyousness, even gaiety, prevail. The sadness and suffering of Holy Week come as a kind of surprise, jarring with all that precedes. It has been said that Renan's Jesus has the flaw of being a mirror of Renan, and there is some truth in the charge. Yet in a number of important respects there is sharp dissimilarity between the historian and his subject, most strikingly in the fact that Jesus, unlike his historian, is not a learned man (un savant). To have ascribed to Jesus the limited knowledge, indeed the errors, of his age was perhaps Renan's most audacious stroke.⁴

The greatness of Jesus, for Renan, lies in his having given perfect, definitive expression to the age-old Hebrew dream of a universal religion of the spirit, without rites, doctrine, or external forms. He is the supreme ébionite, or believer in the brotherhood and moral equality of all men, including the poor and the lowly. Politically conservative (a feature his disciples will perpetuate), he is, in his preaching against the rich and respectable, socially revolutionary, in fact anarchistic. But above all—these are the epithets that recur most often—he is gentle (doux), delightful (délicieux), charming (charmant, ravissant). Renan has been ridiculed for his excessive use, if not abuse, of the adjective charmant applied to the Saviour. However, his use of this word is less absurd if we recall the full force of its etymological meaning, most probably the sense in which he intended it, namely, “enchanting,” “bewitching,” characterized by magic power over others. A modern historian might be inclined to say “charismatic.”⁵

II DEIFICATION

The life of Jesus ends, for Renan, with his death on the cross. But this event merely gives further impetus to a process already begun during his lifetime: his deification. Renan had attempted to explain the “miracles” of Jesus as pious inventions of his disciples, or thaumaturgical acts exaggerated out of all proportion. In a manner consistent with this interpretation, he considers the greatest “miracle” attributed to Jesus—his own resurrection—as a legend arising from the understandable enthusiasm of his disciples (initially, from the “hysteria” of Mary Magdalene), who could not accept his mortality, who must, out of their love for him, “do violence to reality.” Jesus, he claims, did not believe he was God, but allowed his disciples so to believe.

The transformation of a great religious leader into a God is, for Renan, a recurring pattern of religious history, having almost the force of a law. His pages on the psychology behind the creation of such divine legends are, of course, vital to his argument. The terms he uses (“pious fraud,” etc.) are really inadequate, for they still suggest, despite all his careful qualifications, trickery or deceit—the very Voltairian argument he is in fact rejecting. But, although his vocabulary may fail him here, Renan's intentions are clear: the error and proneness to illusion he ascribes to Jesus' disciples are part of that “primitive psychology” for which L'Avenir de la science and the earlier philological works have already prepared us, a concrete application of his theory, by now familiar to us, of “humanity's childhood.” Falsification of reality on the part of these sublime idealists becomes a kind of creative ignorance, an “illness” raised to the level where “the words healthy and ill are completely relative”—a generous interpretation to which, one need hardly add, Voltaire would not have subscribed.⁶

No life of Christ will ever satisfy everyone. Subjective feeling comes into play in this field, at least for those raised in Judeo-Christian traditions, with a power that it never has, say, when one judges a history of transportation or a history of the sonnet. For all those readers who find Renan's Vie de Jésus superficial, distasteful, or shocking, if not blasphemous, there will be as many who find it moving and its portion of truth substantial. The author himself, as he states in his final chapter, firmly believed that his critical approach, by “humanizing” Jesus, restored to him a greater dignity. It seems unfair to dismiss this opening volume of his historical cycle, as many have done, as merely a “novel” or a “poem.” Once allowance has been made for the paucity and fragility of the historical sources available and for the probably insuperable difficulties involved in what Albert Schweitzer calls “the quest for the historical Jesus,” Renan is essentially attempting in this work no more and no less than what any good historian attempts: to create an image of the past in which he can believe. And Renan can accept a Jesus who is “divine” only in the sense that he brought humanity closer than ever before to the “concept of the divine.” The true flaw of his Vie de Jésus is not that it is “unhistorical” but that it is partial and one-sided. One wonders, above all, how such a gentle dreamer managed to end up on Calvary.

Notes

1. For Renan's position on the Fourth Gospel, see Préface, 13th edition, Vie de Jésus (IV, 19-21), and Appendix to same edition, “On the Use Which It Is Appropriate to Make of the Fourth Gospel in Writing the Life of Jesus.” Renan retracts his belief that John authored this Gospel but continues to claim some historical value for its narrative portions.

2. Renan had already outlined this concept while still at Saint-Sulpice, in his “Essai psychologique sur Jésus-Christ” (May 1845), first published by Jean Pommier in Revue de Paris, Sept. 15, 1920. See also, “Les Historiens critiques de Jésus,” Etudes d'histoire religieuse.

3. The Life of Jesus (trans. Olive Wyon, 1933), p. 50. Goguel is severe in his judgment of the work, but admits that Renan did achieve one thing: “He brought forward the problem of the life of Jesus in such a way that henceforward it was impossible to withdraw it from this leading position” (p. 52).

4. An interesting feature of Ch. III (“Education de Jésus”), in light of the discovery of the Dead Sea Scrolls, is Renan's belief that the Essenians represented a movement parallel to that of Jesus, but with no influence upon him (IV, 106-107). In The Scrolls from the Dead Sea, (1955), Ch. V, “What Would Renan Have Said?”, Edmund Wilson reports his interview with A. Dupont-Sommer, professor of Hebrew at the Sorbonne and present director of the Corpus Inscriptionum Semiticarum founded by Renan, and a scholar “conscious of carrying on what may be called the Renanian tradition” (p. 100).

5. Erwin Goodenough, in The Church in the Roman Empire (1931), p. 13, speaks of Jesus' “powerful personal magnetism.”

6. Vie de Jésus, IV, 367: “Which of us, pygmies that we are, could do what has been accomplished by the foolish Saint Francis of Assisi, the hysterical Saint Theresa of Avila? … Les mots de sain et de malade sont tout relatifs.”

Selected Bibliography

Primary Sources

Original Editions

(Place of publication is Paris)

Etudes d'histoire religieuse. Michel Lévy, 1857.

Vie de Jésus. Michel Lévy, 1863. First vol. of Origines. Revised edition (13th), 1864. Abridged or popular edition, 1864.

Daniel L. Pals (excerpt date 1982)

SOURCE: Pals, Daniel L. “The Earlier Tradition in Britain: Lives from the Reformation to the 1860s.” In The Victorian “Lives” of Jesus, pp. 19-58. San Antonio: Trinity University Press, 1982.

[In the following excerpt, Pals describes the importance of The Life of Jesus, arguing that its immense popularity was due as much to Renan's imaginative literary style as the scandal his book's arguments provoked.]

[Ernest Renan's celebrated Vie de Jesus] appeared in France in the middle of 1863, scored an astounding popular success, was translated immediately into the neighboring languages, and came out in Britain before the end of the year. The Vie was unquestionably a work of literary genius. Its sentimental charm and imaginative effects captivated the reading public, if not the scholarly community, of Europe. It passed swiftly through countless editions and new printings, earned its author celebrity status, and became beyond its age a literary classic, a book that, in the words of Stephen Neill, “will have readers until the world's end.”¹ The author, Joseph Ernest Renan, was an Orientalist at the College de France who once intended to be a priest but lost his faith by reading German critical theology.² He was one of those rare men whose natural gifts included both the aptitude for patient, tedious scholarly investigation and the ability to put the results of his study into lucid, elegant, expressive prose. A biography of Christ aimed at the masses was the perfect showcase for such talents, and Renan applied them brilliantly to produce his alluring and unsettling book.

A sceptic and elitist, Renan held aloof from conventional beliefs and dismissed out of hand the traditional supernaturalist view of the scriptures. Like [David Friedrich] Strauss he believed that miracles did not occur; he felt the New Testament evangelists were not exempt from error, confusion, and the limitations of the age in which they lived. If they were inspired, this was only in the sense that the breath of genius has fallen on other human writers both before and after them. Thus, although it was certainly not errorless, the gospel record was in a real measure historical. Unlike Strauss, who [in his life of Jesus] reduced the substrate of fact in the gospels to a bare minimum, Renan believed the historian could recover a good deal of authentic data on the life of Christ. One could detect the basic thread of his ministry, his personal and religious motives, something of his travels and confrontations, and certainly the rare spiritual impact he made on those he met.

Jesus of Nazareth was born to poor parents who, despite the legends later associated with them, had no connection with the royal line of David. As a boy he was raised in the idyllic province of Galilee in the North, a region whose natural beauties contributed much to his disposition. He knew little of the Greeks and Romans, of Jewish sects, or the world outside his native province, though he had studied the Old Testament, especially the Psalms and the book of Daniel, and was acquainted with the maxims of the rabbi Hillel. His temperament was religious. Conscious of a close relation to God, he began as a young man to move about Galilee preaching a simple message of piety and love. He taught that men must understand God as Father and treat others as they would themselves. He spoke often of charity, and of the Galilean landscape, whose every hill and flower seemed to him a revelation of God's design. Men were moved by such words coming from the lips of a young, gentle, winning teacher. Jesus acquired a band of devoted followers.

But shortly he fell under the influence of John the Baptist—a more ascetic teacher who preached a message of judgment, repentance, and imminent world catastrophe. John drew Jesus into the steaming world of Jewish politico-religious passions. Although he at first sought to combine his gentler ideas with John's, Jesus' thinking came gradually to be dominated by the new and harsher conceptions. He meditated on the apocalypse. He began to think of himself as Judaism's long-awaited Messiah, the Son of God who at his final coming would signal the destruction of the present world and the advent of a new one. He came to Jerusalem with these ideas and was not well received, a turn of events which left him disillusioned with Jewish tradition and convinced that the law must be abolished. He then began to entertain the idea of self-sacrifice: the Messiah must be a suffering servant who by his death might bring about the sudden convulsion of the world and the end of days. Almost in spite of himself, Jesus was becoming a fanatic. He encouraged the credulous to believe he worked miracles, and he bitterly attacked the traditions of temple and law. When at length he came again to Jerusalem, his doom was imminent. The rulers had decided it better that he die than that the masses succumb to his delusions. During Passover week they had him seized by night in his favorite garden and carried off to a secret trial. Condemned to death for blasphemy, he was brought to the Roman governor who, alarmed by the crowd and the fanatical hatreds Jesus aroused, allowed him to be executed. He was crucified outside the city, a martyr to the fabrications of his own restless, ever more fanatical mind. His pathetic cry, “My God, my God, why hast thou forsaken me?,” fell from the cross unanswered, a sad witness to the fate of a gentle teacher betrayed by the cruelty of men and his own overexcited dreams.

Such were the life and death of Christ. As for the resurrection and rise of Christianity, Renan left these for another work, though not without hinting at the explanation to come.

Let us say, however, that the vivid imagination of Mary Magdalen played in this circumstance an essential part. Divine power of love! Sacred moments, in which the illusion of an impassioned woman gave to the world a deity risen from the grave!³

It was Jesus' immediate followers—the women and disciples—who, refusing to accept his death, began to proclaim the supernatural Christ and the dogmas that built the Christian church.

The discussion of Renan's continental impact may be left to others.⁴ Even before the English translation appeared, the British press began printing reviews, extended serial assessments, and brief appraisals. Virtually without exception, they were negative, ranging from outrage and invective to serious, heavy-handed refutation and amused sarcasm. As with Strauss, it seemed to be the denial of miracle that offended most. “Like its German predecessor,” wrote John Tulloch, one of the more impartial critics,

the “Vie de Jesus” marks the spring-tide of an advancing wave of thought inimical to Christianity. As the former was the result of Hegelian speculation, and of the crisis reached by rationalistic criticism, the natural consummation of the anti-Christian activity of the German intellect through many years; so the work of M. Renan is the result, and, it may be hoped, the consummation, of the course of materialistic thought—known as Positivism—which since then has been active, not only in France, but in England, Germany, and elsewhere, and of an historical criticism divorced from all faith and true reverence.⁵

Wrote another, “It is his principles which are incompatible with belief, in the ordinary sense of the word. It is the premises which are responsible for the conclusion … The first is a remarkable specimen of pure scientific dogmatism, viz. that there neither is, nor can be, any such thing as a miracle.”⁶

Though Renan was less sceptical than Strauss, he still did not hesitate to consign much in the gospels to the shadowy realm of legend, or to argue that the synoptics “long remained in a pliant condition” and grew up by a slow process of accumulation and revision of sayings and events.⁷ To this the critic in Blackwood's Magazine retorted that “of all modes of producing a picture full of such divine unity, this is about the last which could be supposed successful.”⁸

Renan also took a peculiar view of the gospel of John, contending that its sequence of events was accurate while its discourses placed in the mouth of Jesus were fictitious. This was a weak position, which succeeded in producing a rare instance of agreement between the Catholic Dublin Review and the rationalist Westminster, both of which attacked it as inconsistent and highly improbable.⁹ Most repugnant of all, however, was Renan's suggestion that Jesus deceived men into believing he did miracles, then became victim of his own deceptions. The Methodist London Quarterly, a strident voice of orthodoxy, was incensed:

The moral contradictions of this imaginary life are the most palpable and confounding … In the Vie de Jesus we find, however glozed over by fine words, duplicity, popular tact, self-seeking, higher than imperial ambition, moral weakness and cowardice in adopting opinions and conniving at practices which revolted him, falsehood, nefarious sorcery, rage in disappointment, ferocious invective at his enemies, the convulsions of insanity, and a wild clutch at death as the release from his desperate entanglements.¹⁰

Comments like this might be adduced from nearly the entire spectrum of religious opinion in Britain. “I trust that the sense of truth and reality … will reject the dream of one who pretended to establish a kingdom of God, who cheated men into the belief of it by exhibitions of imaginary power,” wrote F. D. Maurice in Macmillan's Magazine.¹¹ “Infantile, ridiculous, ignorant, and off-hand” were the adjectives of the Literary Churchman.¹² R. W. Church, Richard Holt Hutton, and H. P. Liddon may be cited as only a few leaders of opinion who expressed similar, if less graphic, disapproval.¹³

There is, incidentally, a revealing side effect to be noted here. In its curious, negative way the menace of the new critical tradition as it first appeared on the British scene uncovered a certain underlying unity among religious factions which had been quarreling fiercely and publicly for decades. The infidelities of Strauss and Renan could be observed drawing various parties of British Christianity into a rather tight circle of defense around the dogmatic articles all regarded as the core of Christian belief. Protestant and Catholic, Church and dissent, High Church and Low, Ritualists and their opponents all seemed agreed that a traditional supernaturalist Christianity was crucial. Though there came to be some spokesmen for it, particularly in the mid-century Broad Church, a wholly naturalistic, liberal Christianity which stressed ethics and the moral teaching of Jesus never got the footing it acquired in Germany. Nor did it produce a Ritschl or Harnack. Instead, leaders from all the existing parties joined hands to attack the new criticism. Church and Liddon were High Churchmen, influenced by the Oxford movement; Tulloch was a Scottish Presbyterian; Maurice a mystical Broad Churchman; the London Quarterly spoke for conservative Methodism; the Dublin Review for literate Catholicism. Yet all came together in their opposition to the proposals of infidel critics. All held strongly to the inspiration of scripture, belief in miracles, the deity of Christ, the vicarious atonement, resurrection, and eternal life.¹⁴

Over against this conventional orthodoxy Britain had of course always had its intellectual rebels. There was the coterie of London rationalists whose roots went back to Deism and Tom Paine. As in the case of Hennell, the religious establishment did not feel greatly threatened by this group, particularly since the Evangelical and Oxford revivals of religion early in the century. Since the days of Joseph Butler, orthodoxy had produced apologists equal to the task. Even without such, the churches' entrenched position in the social order allowed them to argue from silence and ignore the gadflies. But the present circumstance was different; native rationalism was acquiring formidable foreign allies whose arguments drew their strength from the new historical science. Hence the urge to join arms against the foreign critics. It would be false to say that Strauss and Renan realigned the parties of British Christianity, but their threat did awaken a sense of shared tradition and disclosed a bond that, however temporarily, transcended disagreements over ritualism, legal disabilities, and even the age-old problem of popery.

The chief complaints against Renan focused upon his critical assumptions, which seemed arbitrary and unconvincing. While some of the attacks merely vented basic ideological differences, others disclosed the real problems with the book. There certainly was truth in G. K. Chesterton's verdict, uttered much later, that the Vie “discredits supernatural stories that have some foundation, simply by telling natural stories that have no foundation.”¹⁵ Serious New Testament scholars in France and Germany were unimpressed by the Vie, whatever its popular success.¹⁶ Schweitzer's criticisms in the Quest bordered on ridicule.¹⁷

The narrative of the Vie, however, was more difficult to fault. There was something so striking, so vivid and imaginative in its execution that even the most embittered critics were forced into grudging compliments. There was in the first place Renan's elegant style, which even a fierce opponent like Liddon conceded to be the Vie's “one and only excellence.”¹⁸ Even in translation its fluid grace was apparent, as in this passage on Jesus' early ministry:

Every one believed that at any moment the kingdom so much desired might appear. … No one, during the course of this magic apparition, measured time any more than we measure a dream. Duration was suspended; a week was as an age. But, whether it filled years or months, the dream was so beautiful that humanity has lived upon it ever since, and it is still our consolation to inhale its diluted fragrance. Never did so much joy expand the heart of man. For one moment, in the most vigorous effort she ever made to rise above the world, humanity forgot the leaden weight which fastens her to earth, and the sorrows of the life below. Happy he who could see with his own eyes this divine unfolding, and share, though but for a day, this unexampled vision.¹⁹

Imagery of this sort seldom wears well; to contemporary ears it seems slightly excessive and overdrawn. In its day, however, it had appeal, particularly when applied to a subject like the life of Christ, which had so often endured the dry prose of the harmonist.

More important, what Renan conveyed through this language was precisely that sense of romance and Oriental realism which writers like Lant Carpenter and Milman had been hinting at decades earlier. Most of the Vie de Jesus had been written in 1860-61, while Renan and his sisters traveled in Palestine with a party exploring ancient Phoenicia. In the Introduction he recorded the powerful effect of this landscape upon his thinking:

I have traversed, in every sense of the term, the Gospel region; I have visited Jerusalem, Hebron, and Samaria; scarcely any important locality in the history of Jesus has escaped me. All this history, which seems at a distance to float in the clouds of an unreal world, took thus a form, a solidity, which astonished me. The striking agreement of the texts and the places, the marvellous harmony of the Gospel idea with the country which served it as a framework, were to me a revelation. Before my eyes I had a fifth Gospel, torn but still legible; and from that time, through the narratives of Matthew and Mark, I saw, instead of an abstract being who might be said never to have existed, an admirable human figure living and moving.²⁰

As much as anything, it was this “fifth gospel,” this aspect of ancient time and place, of Jewish customs and character and social life which added fresh color and a novel look to Renan's work. To be sure, he achieved some of this effect by artifice, as when he gave biblical characters Hebrew names rather than their customary Western Christian equivalents. As the Dublin Review's critic shrewdly observed,

A good half of the effect of M. Renan's book would be destroyed if he were made to use the common established names for persons and things. We have heard before of the Children of Israel, with their Law and their Prophets; but we bow down with awe before the Beni-Israel, the Thora, and the Nabis. Annas and Caiaphas, Judas Iscariot, Bartholemew, Joseph of Arimathea—we have known them from our childhood: but they have quite a new look as Hanan and Kaiapha, Judas of Kerioth, Nathanael Bar-Tolmai, and Joseph of Haramathaim.²¹

Still, the peculiar texture of the Vie arose from more than clever verbalisms. Renan was suitably equipped for his task. He was a Hebraist, well-grounded in Talmudic learning, and intimately acquainted with the social and physical landscape of ancient Judaism. His success throughout Europe was no accident.

More precisely, what were the effects of the Vie in Britain? They were several—and significant. First, there was the impact of its style. Since the gospel story is as old as Christendom, it faces the perennial hazard of becoming stale through familiarity. Sermons, moral exhortations, pious meditations must return with numbing frequency to the same incidents, the same discourses, the same miracles, the same narrative of passion and death. With Renan the story passed to a hand with the novelist's touch, a writer whose sketches of character and scenes had a living quality. For all the controversy it aroused, Strauss's Life was obscure and unread; it made its mark, like many German books, by reputation. Renan's book was different. It could be read, and it was very interesting. If it was scandalous, so much the better; people seemed to read it both because of the outrageous views and in spite of them. After the Vie, it may be said, a fresh, attractive, novelistic style comes to be a virtual prerequisite for a successful Life of Christ.

Second, Renan had mastered the art of what we may call historical romance. His evocations of the ancient scenes drawn from visits to the Holy Land did indeed function as a fifth gospel, for readers as well as the author. Granted that some of this effect was achieved by such contrivances as the strange spelling of proper names. For readers it was nonetheless a pleasing experience to gain from the Vie the distinct “feeling” for ancient Galilee that one got from Walter Scott for medieval Rotherwood forest, or from Carlyle for Paris under the Reign of Terror. Just how “religious” this romantic sentiment was is perhaps open to question. Yet there was little doubt that it seemed to further religious ends. Richard Holt Hutton of the Spectator confessed the paradox of the book: “I have never read a professedly sceptical book that tended more powerfully to strengthen the faith it struggles to supplant.”²² Renan's graphic style and historical romance had cleared a path for the kind of Life that transcended dry debates of the harmonists and the conventional style of the devotionists. Future writers could not ignore his work and still hope to succeed.

The Vie also taught a negative lesson, however. No matter how good the historical and stylistic innovations, no Life could be truly successful if it were wedded to such unequivocal anti-Christian scepticism. Success achieved on these terms could only be the success of scandal. The writer of Britain's definitive Life needed an orthodox voice.

Notes

1. Neill, Stephen. The Interpretation of the New Testament, 1861-1961. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1964. p. 193.

2. Schweitzer, Albert. The Quest for the Historical Jesus. Trans. W. Montgomery. London: A. and C. Black 1910, 1922. p. 180.

3. Ernest Renan, Life of Jesus, tr. and rev. from the twenty-third ed. (Boston: Little, Brown, and Co., 1917) 402. The Vie was the first volume of a projected series on the “Origines du Christianisme”; it was in the second volume, “Les Apótres,” that Renan traced the rise of the dogmatic Christ of Paul and the apostles. For the sake of brevity, references to specific passages of the Vie have been omitted from the summary of its narrative.

4. A brief discussion of Renan's impact on the continent may be found in Maurice Goguel, The Life of Jesus, tr. Olive Wyon (1932; New York: Macmillan, 1944) 50-53; p. 53 n. 3 provides a list of some of the numerous responses to Renan in France and Germany.

5. John Tulloch, The Christ of the Gospels and the Christ of Modern Criticism: Lectures on M. Renan's “Vie de Jesus” (London: Macmillan and Co., 1864) 3-4.

6. “Renan's Life of Jesus,” Edinburgh Review 119 (April 1864) 578.

7. Renan, Introduction to the Life of Jesus, 44: “That the Gospels are in part legendary is quite evident, inasmuch as they are full of miracles and of the supernatural.”

8. “The Life of Jesus,” Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine 96 (October 1864) 428.

9. “Renan's ‘Vie de Jesus,’” Dublin Review, n.s. 2 (April 1864) 406-10; “Contemporary Literature: Theology and Philosophy,” Westminster Review, n. s. 24 (October 1863) 540.

10. “Renan's Life of Jesus,” London Quarterly Review 22 (April 1864) 296.

11. F. D. Maurice, “Christmas Thoughts on Renan's Vie de Jesus,” Macmillan's Magazine 9 (January 1864) 196.

12. “Ernest Renan,” The Literary Churchman and Critical Record of Current Literature, 1 October 1863. This was the second in a series of chapter by chapter reviews of the Vie de Jesus which ran into 1864. The Literary Churchman also gave extensive coverage to French replies to Renan.

13. Church reviewed the Vie de Jesus unfavorably in the Guardian, 9 September 1863; his essay is reprinted in R. W. Church, Occasional Papers, 2 vols. (London: Macmillan and Co., 1897) 190-204; Hutton's review, “M. Renan's ‘Christ,’” appeared in the Spectator and is reprinted in Richard Holt Hutton, Theological Essays, 3d ed. rev. (London: Macmillan & Co., 1888). Liddon had severe words for Renan in a note on “Lives of our Lord” appended to the published version of his Bampton Lectures for 1866; see H. P. Liddon, The Divinity of Our Lord and Savior Jesus Christ, 7th ed. (London: Rivingtons, 1875) 506-7. A register of pamphlets and book-length replies may be found in the Brit. Mus. Catalogue, s.v. “Renan, Joseph Ernest.”

14. Tulloch was somewhat of an exception since he did not hold as keenly to traditional doctrines, and he grew more open to new views as time passed. See chapter three (p. 113 below) on his support for the Theological Translation Fund.

15. G. K. Chesterton, Orthodoxy (1908; Garden City, New York: Image Books, 1959) 43.

16. Goguel, Life of Jesus, 50-53, records the disillusionment of Eduard Reuss and the Strasbourg scholars when they opened the Vie.

17. Pp. 180-92.

18. Liddon, Divinity of Our Lord, 506.

19. Renan, Life of Jesus, 218-19.

20. Ibid., 72.

21. “Renan's Vie de Jesus,” 396. The author, according to the Wellesley Index to Victorian Periodicals, ed. Walter Houghton, 2 vols. (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1966, 1972), s.v. “Dublin Review,” was Father Henry James Coleridge, S. J., who was later to contribute much to British Catholic literature on the life of Christ.

22. “M. Renan's ‘Christ,’” 306-7.