Behind the straightforward title of Meredith Veldman's very valuable survey and analysis of representations of Jesus is a complex history of British religious, cultural, and intellectual changes and challenges, often in engagement with Continental debates and developments. Drawing on a wealth of careful research, Veldman guides the reader through this history, skillfully explaining its significance to British Protestantism in particular and British culture more generally. The British Jesus will be a valuable resource for scholars of British religion, gender, culture, and intellectual history.

Veldman's monograph builds on and connects the arguments in two of her earlier articles. “From Dutiful Daughter to All-Boy: Jesus, Gender and the Secularization of Victorian Society” (Nineteenth-Century Studies 11 [1997]: 1–24) analyzes how the shift from the judgmental Jesus of the Atonement to the approachable Jesus of the Incarnation resulted in a more feminized Jesus, and “Dressed in an Angel's Nightshirt”: Jesus and the BBC (Journal of British Studies 56 [2017]: 117–37) details how the efforts of religious scholars to craft a more masculine Jesus were derailed by popular audiences who preferred the Incarnational Jesus. In this monograph, she focuses on the period 1850–1970 to show the changes in British religious culture by analyzing how Protestants engaged with Continental scholarship, empiricism, and secularism to shape a more conventionally masculine Jesus, and the irrelevance of that attempt with the decline of a shared Christian language by the 1960s and 1970s.

The title's implication of a single image of Jesus is, as Veldman acknowledges in the introduction, belied by the multiple overlapping and competing images of Jesus in the period under discussion. There was the Jesus of higher criticism, who was merely human although perhaps with delusions of divinity; the conventionally masculine Jesus who embodied middle-class values, including independence, self-control, and dignity, and who was a family man in spite of his celibacy; the Jesus who always knew he was divine and the Jesus who grew to understand his divinity; the “fairy Christ” (196) of Holman Hunt's The Light of the World (1851–1854); and the apocalyptic Jesus of the first half of the twentieth century. Some commonalities united these diverse figures. Jesus was almost always depicted as a conventionally masculine adult; as a Protestant, especially in the Victorian era; wearing white clothing, to make him stand apart; and with Western or Hellenic features, so as not to identify him with the stereotype of Jews as corrupt, decadent, effeminate, and otherwise unattractive.

These Jesuses were developed as theologians, clerics, writers, artists, filmmakers, and broadcasters sought to understand Jesus as a Jew (but distinct from his Jewish contemporaries) in first-century Palestine, as the Messiah, and as a figure both human and divine. This process was partly a quest for authenticity, as these (mostly) men aimed to depict a historically accurate Jesus. This was an international endeavor, occurring in a British-Continental, and more specifically a British-German-French, context. From the introduction of higher criticism through the works of David Friedrich Strauss and Ernest Renan to the influence of the Nazarenes on the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood to the popularity of the paintings of Gustav Doré and James Tissot to the No Quest movement, Britons were engaged with and resistant to French and German influences as they struggled to shape a specifically British methodology that would help them discover a British Protestant image of Jesus. The British Jesus of the title, then, was not only multiple Jesuses but also an international Jesus.

These Jesus figures were created by scholars and clerics who searched for authenticity and historicity. Influenced by and often reacting against German higher criticism, clerics and theologians pored over Scriptural texts in search of the historical Jesus who was the Messiah. Over the course of The British Jesus, we see how scholars came to understand the writing of the Gospels, moving from belief in a coherent narrative to one that was more fragmented. At the same time, artists and writers journeyed to the Holy Land in search of authenticity, which they translated to their works by describing in detail a landscape they imagined to be unchanged, by using Jewish models, and by depicting garments from the period or those they had purchased on their trips. Although few British Christians believed in the inerrancy of Scripture during this time, depictions of the Gospel stories as literally true continued to resonate with the public, as the success of Tissot's series Life of Our Lord Jesus Christ shows. Veldman underscores the complexity of the search for a historically and theologically correct, popular Jesus as she traces how these images of a man and his environment almost two millennia earlier were broadly disseminated thanks to new technologies, from end block wood engravings and magic lantern shows to, in the twentieth century, movies and radio and television broadcasts.

In a work with such a capacious title as The British Jesus, not everything can be covered. Still, some omissions are surprising: major Victorian figures including Charles Kingsley, John Henry Newman, William Booth, and Charles Spurgeon are mentioned in passing or not at all. There is little engagement with secondary works on masculinity or cultural history, and no acknowledgment of the long history of changing representations of Jesus, as can be found in Jaroslav Pelikan's Jesus through the Centuries: His Place in the History of Culture (1999). Nor is there any reference to major theological debates related to Jesus, including the debates over the Lord's Supper (which coincide with Veldman's period) or over baptism. These omissions mean that the British Jesuses seem to be the result of very specific theological and religious concerns, rather than coming out of the nexus of a long Christian history and a chronologically specific British religious and cultural context. They also lead to the casting of this history as one of the failure of theologians and clerics to develop an image of Jesus that was historically grounded, theologically correct, and popular. None of these criticisms is meant to detract from the major accomplishment that is The British Jesus; they merely point to possibilities for future research.