The Bible: fact and fiction

Up until the middle of the nineteenth century, challenges to the traditional belief in the literal truth of the Bible had not reached far into the public domain. This state of religious innocence, enjoyed by the majority of Christians, is succinctly expressed by the narrator of Samuel Butler's semi-autobiographical novel The Way of All Flesh, as he reflects on the beliefs of his godson's clergyman father:

Such complacency was, however, to come under sustained attack throughout the second half of the century. Biblical infallibility could no longer be taken as an indisputable truth by ‘educated men and women’ when, in 1846, George Eliot's translation of David Friedrich Strauss's seminal work Das Leben Jesu (1835) became public enough to make regular appearances in the Classified Advertisements section of The Times. The same year saw the founding of T. & T. Clark's Foreign Theological Library, its guiding principle being to publish translations of German authors defending the orthodox position; in practice, however, it served only to make more familiar the heterodox ideas its authors sought to kill off. With the publication of Essays and Reviews – just one year after Charles Darwin's Origin of Species had caused more than ‘a little scare’ for orthodox Christians – there was no longer any question of the Higher Criticism staying firmly on the other side of the Channel. Resolutely Broad Church in outlook, the volume sought to bring theological scholarship in Britain up to speed with that which had been thriving in Germany for several decades. Though the brief foreword to the work insisted that the essays were ‘written in entire independence from each other’, the impact of collecting the work of ‘the Seven against Christ’, as the authors became known, would be felt throughout the century.