Excerpt from The Life of Jesus Christ: With a History of the First Propagation of the Christian Religion, and the Lives of the Most Eminent Persons Mentioned in the New Testament II. The Logos, whether translated word or reason, existed in the beginning at the time of the creation. Here is an a parent allusion to the first verse in Genesis, where it is said, i iat In the beginning God created the heavens and the earth. The doctrine here advanced, is agreeable to what our Saviour is described as saying to John, in the first chapter of Revelation, I am the Alpha and the Omega, the first and the last. About the Publisher Forgotten Books publishes hundreds of thousands of rare and classic books. Find more at www.forgottenbooks.com This book is a reproduction of an important historical work. Forgotten Books uses state-of-the-art technology to digitally reconstruct the work, preserving the original format whilst repairing imperfections present in the aged copy. In rare cases, an imperfection in the original, such as a blemish or missing page, may be replicated in our edition. We do, however, repair the vast majority of imperfections successfully; any imperfections that remain are intentionally left to preserve the state of such historical works.

The Gospel according to St John, often regarded as the most important of the gospels in the account it gives of Jesus' life and divinity, received close attention from nineteenth-century biblical scholars and prompted a significant response in the arts. This original interdisciplinary study of the cultural afterlife of John in Victorian Britain places literature, the visual arts and music in their religious context. Discussion of the Evangelist, the Gospel and its famous prologue is followed by an examination of particular episodes that are unique to John. Michael Wheeler's research reveals the depth of biblical influence on British culture and on individuals such as Ruskin, Holman Hunt and Tennyson. He makes a significant contribution to the understanding of culture, religion and scholarship in the period.

‘This figure I see in the foreground, this me. How monstrous am I? What does it mean to be a monster? From Latin monstrum, meaning an abomination … grotesque, hideous, ugly, ghastly, gruesome, horrible … ‘I was born as part of a monstrous structure — the grotesque, hideous, ugly, ghastly, gruesome, horrible relations of power that constituted colonial Britain. A structure that shaped me, that shapes the very language that I speak and use and love. I am the daughter of an empire that declared itself the natural order of the world.’ From award-winning writer and critic Alison Croggon, Monsters is a hybrid of memoir and essay that takes as its point of departure the painful breakdown of a relationship between two sisters. It explores how our attitudes are shaped by the persisting myths that underpin colonialism and patriarchy, how the structures we are raised within splinter and distort the possibilities of our lives and the lives of others. Monsters asks how we maintain the fictions that we create about ourselves, what we will sacrifice to maintain these fictions — and what we have to gain by confronting them.