SOURCE: Lee, David C. J. “Fiction Christ.” In Ernest Renan: In the Shadow of Faith, pp. 187-206. London: Duckworth, 1996.

In the following excerpt, Lee asserts that Renan structured Vie de Jésus in accordance with the conventions of the novel genre.

L'humanité … veut un Dieu-homme. Elle se satisfera.

Drames philosophiques, Oeuvres complètes III, 559.

There can scarcely be a sense in which Vie de Jésus does not mark a crossroads. The book's publication in June 1863 led to Renan's first serious encounter with international celebrity. Of all his works it perhaps represents his one authentic brush with immortality. If so, its appearance was timely, for in the February before Vie de Jésus came off the presses, its author reached the age of forty, that frontier of reassessment and recollection induced by first intimations of life's finitude. Indeed, researching his subject in Syria in 1861, Renan had, as he...