Ian Hesketh, Victorian Jesus: J. R. Seeley, Religion, and the Cultural Significance of Anonymity

Abstract

Ecce Homo! pronounces Pilate in the Vulgate Fourth Gospel, exhibiting his prisoner. In 1866, Professor John Seeley, who held a Latin Chair at UCL, wrote an admiring sketch of Jesus’s personality under the title Ecce Homo, picturing him as the founder of a ‘society’ (i.e. Christianity) bound together by a common ‘enthusiasm’ for humanity. The book proved unexpectedly controversial. The seven Broad Church essays collected under the title Essays and Reviews had come out as recently as 1861. Darwin’s Origin of Species had appeared in 1859. Seeley’s short, eloquent book has, in truth, little to say on the authority of the scriptures, ducks the issue of miracles, and avoids evolution. Yet many powerful voices, both conservative and liberal, heard in it echoes of Liberal Theologians like Strauss, Renan, and the ‘[Thomas] Arnold school.’ They saw in it marks of a deflated faith, pumping up Christ’s charisma by way of concession, like a Unitarian. Lord Shaftesbury, a belligerent evangelical, was sure of it: for him, it was ‘the most pestilential book ever vomited from the jaws of hell’.