This chapter explores the fascination that the biblical apocrypha held for Montague Rhodes James (1862-1936) and explains his relationship to contemporary Cambridge scholarship that pioneered the study of those texts in the context of New Testament scholarship. It places MRJ’s work on the biblical apocrypha within his wider fascination for ‘old stories’, and considers the similarities between his scholarly work on Greek apocrypha and pseudepigrapha and his activities as a medievalist and codicologist, with particular reference both to manuscript studies and to his interpretation of the sculpture in the Lady Chapel at Ely Cathedral.

The Fine Arts Department of the Manchester Jubilee Exhibition of 1887 set out to provide a comprehensive exhibition of art made in Britain during Queen Victoria’s reign. This was the first ever exhibition of ‘Victorian art’; it marks a significant moment in the formation of a national ‘school’ of art in Britain, and in the presentation of this national story to a mass audience. The exhibition was avowedly commercial, concerned with progress and manufacture. Yet it was images of the past – and the biblical and classical pasts in particular – which dominated the Central Hall of the Fine Arts Department in this apparently ‘modern’ display. These pasts also appeared prominently throughout the rest of the Fine Arts Department. This chapter explores the relationships between the Bible, classical antiquity, and the mass audiences for art who thronged to look at the nineteenth-century oil painting and sculpture on display at Manchester. What role did the Bible and antiquity play in the invention of Victorian art at the Manchester Jubilee Exhibition? And what can responses to the exhibition at Manchester tell us about Victorian understandings of biblical and classical works?

In 1882, the eldest sons of the Prince of Wales visited Palestine and Syria as they neared the end of a voyage around the globe. This chapter uses the written record of their journey on board HMS Bacchante to argue that it signalled important changes in the religious profile of the British monarchy. John Neale Dalton, the tutor to the princes, misrepresented his unintellectual pupils as keen students of the religions of the world in his voluminous two-volume journal of their tour. As British monarchs now headed an empire which its admirers argued was unprecedented in its extent, they prepared to rule it by travelling to encounter the many religions of their future subjects. Dalton’s princes journeyed through time as well as space, capitalising on British power and their royal standing to meet philologists and archaeologists who explained to them the ancient faiths of Japan, China and Egypt. In this global context, their visit to the Holy Land was no longer just a pilgrimage to the origins of Christianity and of elite culture, but a journey of discovery which connected the biblical to other, hitherto alien pasts.

This chapter pitches Arnold’s theory of how we should read against his reading practice. It uncovers how secular the practice of literary criticism really is. Arnold’s legacy, the idea of reading as moral formation, will remain confused as long as we neglect practice in favour of theory. Beginning with an overview of Arnold’s approach to reading the Bible in Literature and Dogma (1873), I explore how Arnold’s biblical hermeneutics works in practice, arguing that his preparation of a version of Isaiah for schoolchildren replaces established typological practice with a new method which he calls ‘employing parallels’. It is the genre and apparatus of the Bible ‘version’ which registers and enables his radical position. In Arnold’s method, the intellectus spiritualis is replaced by a secular method of imaginative engagement which has far-reaching consequences for how the reader finds themselves positioned: as a result, a secular intellectus culturae or cultural ‘tact’ comes to replace the traditional method of reading scripture. Throughout I am concerned with reading as a practice which is constitutive of concepts including faith and doubt.

The major fault-line in Victorian engagement with the Bible and antiquity lay between believers and unbelievers, across a wide array of perspectives. Something of this is traced here, from the rationalistic legacy of Bentham to Pusey’s consciously reactionary repudiation of his own early immersion in German scholarship.Consequently, literature about the Bible and antiquity could be polemical, but solvents could be found, not least ones that were associational and personal. Most importantly, friendship could provide such a bond: this chapter traces that which began at Charterhouse School between George Grote and Connop Thirlwall and which ended only with their deaths. Grote is now much better remembered than Thirlwall, but both wrote important histories of ancient Greece that would be translated into German, a great tribute given their own indebtedness to German scholarship. In a review of Curtius’s history of ancient Greece, Arnold criticised both Grote and Thirlwall for failing to reach the new standards set by more recent German scholarship. Within a year of the death of Thirlwall, Anglo-German classical scholarship was being written in an altogether new key.

This chapter shows how the material and ritual legacies of apostolic Rome provoked debate among Protestant travellers and called attention to the intertwined legacies of early Christianity and imperial Rome. We demonstrate how one site (St Peter’s Basilica) became a battleground for sectarian readings of the apostolic past. Previous scholarship has demonstrated how anglophone travellers constructed their modernity in opposition to an imagined archaic Italian Other. Yet critics have paid insufficient attention to how religious difference and sectarian identity shaped such attitudes. Catholics had a special commitment to validating the early history of the Roman Church, but Protestants also had an active interest in apostolic legacies. By demonstrating that the earliest Christians practised a simple and earnest form of worship – anathema to the splendour of medieval Catholicism – Protestant commentators vindicated their faith as a return to apostolic authenticity. Yet if British and American travellers wanted to put Catholicism in its place, some Catholics sought to win over Protestant sceptics by appealing to a shared antiquarian epistemology, combining the aesthetic appeal of Catholic ritual with an historicizing emphasis on the material legacies of apostolic antiquity.

By no means has it always been the case that European readers have always believed, as did Voltaire, that the main purpose of Herodotus’ Histories was to tell the story of the clash of eastern and western ‘civilizations’.Indeed, from at least the later seventeenth century through the mid-nineteenth century, the first four books of the Histories were widely used by Christian scholars to verify sacred history with profane data.For this very large scholarly faction, Herodotus offered the earliest, and most checkable, ‘oriental’ facts, useful in combatting rationalist and pyrrhonist arguments about the untrustworthiness of ancient histories that could not be otherwise verified.Only in the later nineteenth century, when decipherments and excavations began to provide more direct and concrete testimony of the probable historical accuracy of the Hebrew Bible did Herodotus begin to lose his function as, in the words of one eighteenth-century Jesuit advocate, ‘historian of the Hebrew people, without knowing it’.

This chapter looks at how Victorians constructed a genealogical relation to antiquity and the Bible, forming both as a cultural, intellectual and spiritual origin for modernity. It shows how philology was the discipline which linked theology and classics as disciplines, and how historiography and archaeology were mobilized to understand the present as the outcome of the past. In particular, it looks at how William Gladstone, Matthew Arnold, Brooke Foss Westcott, Charles Kingsley, and Henry Montagu Butle, used translation, Homeric studies, historical fiction and cultural history to forge a contentious and contested relation between the biblical and classical pasts and modernity.