The Gospel According to Renan

Upon its publication in 1863, Ernest Renan’s Vie de Jésus was an immediate literary sensation. Applauded and reviled in equal measure, the book became the touchstone for a wider debate about the place of religious belief in a modern educated nation. Yet scholarly interest in the Vie de Jésus has lagged in comparison to Renan’s other writings, notably his famous lecture ‘What is a nation?’. Robert D. Priest puts the focus squarely on Renan’s most popular and most controversial work. In particular, he argues that the book ‘enraged and entranced’ a generation of French readers because it ‘presented a new Jesus for the nineteenth century’ (p. 3). One of the great strengths of Priest’s book is the manner in which he attacks his subject from a variety of angles. There are five sections: ‘The Author’, ‘The Book’, ‘The Debate’, ‘The Audience’ and ‘The Legacy’. The first traces the intellectual trajectory of a man born, like the hero of his narrative, into humble origins. From the fishing and cathedral town of Tréguier in Brittany, Renan won a scholarship to a Paris seminary, where he began the training in languages and biblical criticism that would serve as the basis for his life of Jesus. Frustrated with clerical life, Renan sought to make his mark in the intellectual world of the Second Empire. His chosen discipline was comparative philology. Through a close study of language, Renan found the key to deciphering past societies—a breakthrough which became the basis for his theory of the origins of Christianity. Jesus, in Renan’s account, emerged from, and yet transcended, his Semitic roots, forging a religion that, unlike Judaism, was uniquely universal

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