Robert PRIEST (Royal Holloway, University of London) : « The Reception of Vie de Jésus in Protestant Europe »
Robert D. Priest is Lecturer in Modern European History at Royal Holloway, University of London. He studied at University College London and the University of Oxford, and was a Research Fellow at the University of Cambridge. He is the author of The Gospel According to Renan: Reading, Writing, and Religion in Nineteenth-Century France (Oxford 2015), as well as various articles and chapters on nineteenth-century cultural and intellectual history, including several on Ernest Renan’s religious and racial views. He is currently writing a transnational history of the Oberammergau Passion Play.
In the eyes of many French commentators, Renan’s Vie de Jésus constituted the importation of a Protestant approach to biblical criticism from across the Rhine. In reality, Protestant theological scholarship was just one of a vast range of influences on Renan’s aims and methods in the book, and French Protestants tended to be sceptical about the book’s achievements. In this paper I draw on responses from scholars in Britain and Germany in order to reconstruct an important element of the transnational reception of Vie de Jésus in the 1860s. It will ask how far leading German biblical critics considered Vie de Jésus to be furthering their own field, and also how far national differences inflected perspectives on Renan’s work.
