Traditional and critical orthodoxies

The eponymous hero of Mary Ward's Robert Elsmere (1888) is fascinated by accounts of the Higher Criticism that he hears from his learned neighbour, the anti-Christian squire Wendover, who knows Renan personally, and whose wonderful library contains ‘early editions of the Leben Jesu, with some corrections from Strauss's hand’ (ch. 14). In order to protect his faith, however, the rector draws the line at a discussion on St John:

Subsequently, as Elsmere agonizes over the prospect of ‘a purely human Christ’ and his faith crumbles (ch. 24), one of the ‘test points’ on which he pounces feverishly is ‘the Gospel of St. John’ (ch. 25).

Matthew Arnold – Mary Ward's ‘Uncle Matt’ – had written extensively on the ‘literary difficulties’ raised by the Higher Criticism in the previous decade, in works such as Literature and Dogma (1873), which provided the intellectual matrix for Robert Elsmere. In God and the Bible (1875), Arnold responded to objections to Literature and Dogma and replied to Walter Richard Cassels's best-selling Supernatural religion (1874). Arnold argued in God and the Bible that some of the statements (logia) of Jesus recorded in the fourth gospel were probably based on fact, and that some of the stories that are unique to John, such as the raising of Lazarus, probably grew up around those statements for illustrative purposes. The writer, he suggests, ‘is not so much at home among the incidents of his story; but then they lend themselves all the better on that account to his main purpose, which is to plant his logia.’