Michael Wheeler's book begins with the ubiquitous yet ‘enigmatic’ portrayals of St John in the stained glass windows of Victorian churches (p. 28). The gentle, even androgynous figure who looked down on Victorian congregations was faithful to ‘received ideas of Christian art’ (p. 24) but in tension both with British culture's distrust of ‘effeminate’ piety and with the insistence of contemporary biblical scholars that John had been a fiery, rather macho ‘Son of Thunder’. This tension is the key to Wheeler's book: it discusses how critics and theologians in nineteenth-century Britain studied the Gospel, while also charting how poets, artists and novelists drew upon their researches while also transforming or even defying them. The first three chapters survey scholarly thinking on the writer of the Fourth Gospel, its literary character and its central doctrine of incarnation. They do not offer a connected account of higher criticism's questions about the authorship of the Gospel. Higher criticism shrinks here to a few totemic writers – Strauss, Baur and Renan – who perturb without shaking the faith of the British public. Wheeler is more interested in exploring the ‘interpretative possibilities’ (p. 30) open to believing Christians than in rehearsing the spread of ‘doubt’ (p. xv) and his heroes are commentators such as Christopher Wordsworth and Frederic William Farrar, who put the Gospel into the pulpit rather than onto the dissecting table. In this regard, his book extends Tim Larsen's argument in A people of one book: the Bible and the Victorians (Oxford 2011) that a preoccupation with secularisation has led historians to neglect the multifarious and enduring ways in which the Victorians revered Scripture. The remaining chapters pursue this project through case studies that explore how commentators and artists understood particular incidents in the Gospel: from the miracle at Cana to Mary Magdalene and Thomas's encounters with the risen Christ. The result is a rich if jumbled history of Victorian piety, covering everything from the spiritualisation of miracles to geopiety. Wheeler has read both extensively and intensively. He can, for instance, not just add Francis Palgrave's obscure Amenophis to the list of poetic meditations on John, but tell us which lines Ellen Terry marked in her copy (p. 21). He is particularly attentive to how the works of artists not only illustrated but also commented on Scripture. Making incidents in the Gospel the organising feature of his account enables Wheeler to suspend judgement on literary value and to show how devotional cultures are woven from contrasting and often lurid textual threads: Maurice, Lightfoot and Browning thus mingle with such novels as Annie Webb-Peploe's Naomi; or, The last days of Jerusalem (1841) or Adelina Kingscote's Lazarus: a tale of the earth's great miracle (1897). Wheeler's trawl through the ocean of religious text and image can make it difficult to distinguish the weird from the authoritative, the popular from the failure among the artefacts wriggling in his net. How are we to weigh Doré's vision of the raising of Lazarus, which featured in countless illustrated Bibles, against Benjamin Haydon's oil painting of the same subject, which went unsold and is now rolled up in the warehouse of the Tate Gallery (p. 165). If this book is an erudite and sensitive map of Victorian interpretations of Scripture, then the problem with maps is that they cannot weigh what they chart. More work is needed not just to lay out Victorian interpretations of the Fourth Gospel in particular and of the Bible in general, but to determine which ones became the most important over time and why.