The British Jesus, 1850–1970, by Meredith Veldman

This ambitious and important interdisciplinary study spans religious, intellectual and cultural history. Meredith Veldman weaves together the story of how Jesus was understood, described and depicted over more than a century by British biblical critics and artists, and in popular culture. It is a project that has not been previously attempted. It is a substantial read—around 200,000 words—with detailed endnotes guiding the reader to further information and sources. Readers might be tempted to plunder the book for the chapters which relate to their particular interests, and the inclusion of a bibliography of secondary sources at the end of each chapter perhaps encourages that approach. That would be a shame, however, as Veldman develops her argument through connected chapters, and a reader who works through the text from beginning to end will learn much, particularly if they have been previously siloed in historical theology, art history or the social history of religion. For those who are new to these topics, the book should be fairly accessible. Veldman does not assume detailed prior knowledge, and she is careful to explain the more technical aspects of biblical studies.

The context for The British Jesus is a Britain that was becoming de-Protestantised. Five themes build the overall argument. First, there is the interaction between British New Testament scholarship and that deriving from the Continent, and particularly Germany. Veldman argues persuasively for the emergence of a distinctively British approach. Secondly, there is the tradition of British empiricism, which encouraged scholars to think that, if done properly, New Testament scholarship would shore up, rather than undermine, Christianity’s intellectual credibility, cultural potency and spiritual appeal. Thirdly, there is the perceived threat of secularisation, leading to the fourth theme, the need to respond by making Christianity more ‘popular.’ This culminates in the fifth theme, the need to get Jesus ‘right’ in popular culture, in particular by focusing on his gender to make him appear less feminine. This thematic movement from biblical scholarship to popular culture, and then back again, holds the book together. The shifting locus of Jesus’s popular appeal shapes Veldman’s decisions about where to focus. She discusses nineteenth-century art, with substantial chapters on Holman Hunt and other popular artists, but does not include mid-twentieth-century art, arguing that by this time, religious painting had become more of an elite interest, and that popular images of Jesus were found in material produced for children, on the radio, on television and in film.

The book moves chronologically as well as thematically. The first three chapters outline the state of Jesus scholarship around the middle of the nineteenth century, with the particularly fertile decade of the 1860s followed by the enthusiasm for visiting, writing about and painting Palestine. New ideas about Jesus were mediated into popular culture in works such as F.W. Farrar’s Life of Christ (1874) and Thomas Hughes’s Manliness of Christ (1879). The next three chapters switch to the visual representations of Jesus, with particular attention given to Pre-Raphaelite artists, and to the popular biblical painters, such as Gustave Doré and James Tissot. Holman Hunt’s Light of the World, which was the nineteenth century’s most viewed and reproduced artwork, receives detailed treatment. Veldman argues that the very popularity of this painting signalled a shifting ‘downward mobility’ in the status of Jesus, and was a sign of the inability to sustain and strengthen Christianity’s hold on popular culture. She suggests that the Jesus that Hunt painted was a ‘fairyland’ figure, and that painting him in a ‘no place’ Surrey night-time allowed the artist to evade the issue of Jesus’s first-century Jewish identity. This criticism seems a little unfair, as the original painting was made in the early 1850s, before Hunt had had the opportunity to travel to Palestine, and his later work was sometimes criticised for placing a ‘brown’ Jesus in an overtly Jewish setting. Nevertheless, Veldman suggests that the Jesus that Hunt had painted in a priestly robe became Jesus in ‘a white nightie’, a feminised image that placed him in the childish sphere. She returns to this in the final chapters, arguing that it was the ‘milky’ Light of the World Christ that unshakeably took root in British popular culture, despite the efforts of scholars to dislodge it. In Chapters Seven and Eight she introduces these scholars. They were, among others, the ‘Cambridge Three’, B.F. Westcott, J.B. Lightfoot and F.J.A. Hort, who began the specifically British quest for the historical Jesus. Subsequent generations carried the task forward, responding to the apocalyptic Jesus portrayed by Albert Schweitzer. They included F.C. Burkitt, and the ‘Northern Three’, C.H. Dodd, T.W. Manson and Vincent Taylor, who were Free Church scholars from the north of Britain. Chapter Nine considers the Jesus promulgated in Sunday schools, as British encounters with Jesus became increasingly confined to childhood years. Chapter Ten traces the development of religious broadcasting, and the ways in which Jesus could and could not be portrayed on radio and television. Particularly interesting is the way in which Manson and Dodd sought to influence religious broadcasting, and especially programmes used in schools, in order to present a version of Jesus that aligned with their scholarship. Their ambition to educate school radio audiences was impressive, as they sought to show Jesus in the context of Palestinian Judaism, and to introduce pupils to various textual considerations. Among other things, it shows their forceful belief that accurate scholarship was a bulwark against secularism. Ultimately, Veldman argues, they failed. It was the ‘Jesus in a white nightie’ that triumphed, and with it came his eclipse in British popular culture.

Readers may quibble with aspects of Veldman’s interpretation, but the fact that The British Jesus has been written at all is a triumph of longue durée interdisciplinary scholarship. It is fascinating, readable and, at £36 in paperback, good value for money.