From the late 1830s to the end of the nineteenth century, scholarly preoccupation with the historicity of the Gospels generated a form of biblical literature generically classified as ‘Lives of Jesus’. In The Quest of the Historical Jesus (1906), the first comprehensive survey of over a century of critical enquiry into the life and teachings of Christ, Albert Schweitzer states that ‘Not all the Lives of Jesus could be cited. It would take a whole book simply to list them’, a claim not to be dismissed as mere hyperbole. More recent studies in the field estimate that 60,000 or so such works were published in Europe and the USA in the mid-to-late nineteenth century. Reaching the peak of its popularity in the early 1870s, the genre was undeniably jaded by the century's end, the varieties of different angles on the Gospel narratives being all but exhausted. The American author Elizabeth Stuart Phelps, anxious to signal the novelty of her own late contribution to the Lives tradition, The Story of Jesus Christ (1897), provides a succinct account of the forerunners she is attempting to leave behind:

Though this catalogue of negations refers most directly to American Lives, it equally well categorizes British ones. Some of these took the form of published sermons; some presented the conservative counterargument to the Higher Criticism; others situated their picture of Jesus in his ‘authentic’ geographical, cultural and religious contexts; and most aligned themselves firmly with a doctrinal position, most usually orthodox. For the most part undistinguished in style and unremarkable in content, these British Lives were characterized by pious, often sententious, prefaces, highly sentimental depictions of the Gospel narratives, and a doughty determination to beat off Continental infidelity.