Day 25. October 30, 2006
Movement 2. Solus Jesus
Lecture 11. Jesus in Victorian America (Part 3)
Lecture 12. Jesus and Muscular Christianity (Part 1)
The legitimacy evangelicals accorded the appearance of Jesus in literature in Victorian America was a turning point not only in religious attitudes toward novels and literature but in the use of new technologies more generally to market Jesus and spread the Word. Several Victorian literary lives of Jesus are especially noteworthy. Frenchman Ernst Renen's The Life of Jesus (1863) combined historical authenticity with literary imagination. New Englander Henry Ward Beecher created a meditative and conversational Life of Jesus Christ (1871) that sought to connect readers to Jesus' interior life by inviting them to "imagine" their own Gospel. Soon after, in 1875, Beecher's publisher brought out Edward Eggleston's Christ in Art, a pictorial harmonization and authentication of the Gospels through historical imagery that exemplified Victorian spirituality as it decorated middle class Victorian parlors. In the aftermath of the Civil War, literature provided also a vehicle for a new muscular Christianity to challenge Victorian feminization of Jesus. The YMCA arose in this period to guide, employ, socialize, and exercise urban young men. And in 1880, in General Lew Wallace's Ben Hur: A Tale of the Christ, Jesus offered redemption for the man's man.