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images of Christ during and after the French Revolution, and the other one from without, namely the influential German debate in which Strauss was a partici- pant.25 “This was the first life of Jesus for the Catholic world which had hardly been touched – the Latin people least of all – by the two and a half generations of critical study which had been devoted to the subject”, writes Schweitzer, adding that “Renan’s work marked an epoch, not for the Catholic world only, but for general literature”. He continued, He offered his readers a Jesus who was alive, whom he, with his artistic imagination, had met under the blue heaven of Galilee, and whose lineaments his inspired pencil had seized. Men’s attention was arrested, and they thought to see Jesus, because Renan had the skill to make them see blue skies, seas of waving corns, distant moun- tains, gleaming lilies, in a landscape with the lake of Gennasereth for its centre, and to hear with him in the whispering of the reeds the eternal melody of the Sermon on the Mount.26 And yet Schweitzer’s evaluation of Renan’s work is dismissive and negative, in line with many German critical reviews of the time. However, he caught some of Renan’s powerful style, which enabled the book to be read and criticized as a work of fiction.27 Renan’s Jesus was cherished by a public prepared by his previous work and provoked a national and international debate. Many translations appeared, es- pecially in Italy, where Renan was destined to become a national hero.28 Renan deployed in his research a combination of modern disciplines and made exten- sive use of fieldwork notes from his journey to Syria and Palestine, where he wrote the book. The impressions and sensations he gathered while visiting the places and locations where Jesus had lived, preached and died are very rele- vant also for the visual imagery used by artists and filmmakers. For Renan the topography of the Gospels proved to be a powerful source of imagination and emotional experience. He called the Holy Land the “fifth Gospel”.29 Focusing on Jesus’ humanity, Renan created a representation of Jesus and his environment that was historically plausible and functioned as an evocative icon. His powerful and yet controversial image of Jesus did not stir reactions exclusively among Roman Catholics and Protestants, for it also attracted the attention of Jewish scholars and intellectuals who felt challenged and were at- tracted by the theme of the human and Jewish Jesus. Jews possessed a long 25 Menozzi 1979; Bowmann 1987. 26 Schweitzer 2005, 139. 27 Priest 2015. 28 Labanca 1900; Labanca 1903. 29 Priest 2015, 75. See also Richard 2015. For a more critical appraisal of Renan’s notion of religion: Moxnes 2012; Facchini 2014 with references to Said 1978 and Olender 2009. The Historical Jesus and the Christ of Early Cinema | 75www.jrfm.eu 2019, 5/1