The ‘Death of God’ in New Testament Biofiction

Chapter 3 examines the interwar revival and transformation of a genre that had a Rationalist agenda inbuilt: New Testament biofiction or, in Graham Holderness’s words, the Jesus-novel. Following in the wake of Higher Criticism, this enormously popular genre mixed biography and fiction in its retelling of the life and death of Jesus, a process that often reduced Christ to man rather than god, and the Gospels to literature rather than scripture. This chapter emphasizes the influence of George Moore’s The Brook Kerith (1916) on later versions of the Jesus-novel by D. H. Lawrence, H.D., Mary Borden, and Iwan Nashiwin. Moore’s version emphasizes the virtues of oral presentation as a means of getting the story straight; his vernacular approach sought to cut through the rhetorical tricks and literary seductions that disguised the truth of Jesus’s life and death on the cross. Lawrence and H.D. adopt a more heavily symbolic and stylized prose in their New Testament stories but do so with similar ends in mind. In engaging with the events of Jesus’s life, and especially those connected to the crucifixion and resurrection, these authors foreground questions of belief in a way that stories based on other historical and mythological lives do not. More pointedly, this chapter argues, they counter the popular view of unbelief as a recent or modern development by locating its origins at the very beginnings of Christianity itself.