William Holman Hunt's The Finding of the Saviour in the Temple (1854-1860, Birmingham Museum and Art Gallery) is the most commercially successful religious painting in Victorian British history, and the story of its making is a parable of the Pre-Raphaelite conviction that authentic sacred art required authentic historical knowledge.
Hunt had become convinced that the failure of European religious painting was, at its root, a failure of research. The Italian and Flemish masters had set the Gospel story in medieval European settings - the architecture of Italian churches, the clothing of Flemish merchants, the faces of Florentine patrons - and in doing so had domesticated the scandal of the Incarnation into something safely familiar. If Jesus was actually Jewish, actually a first-century Palestinian, actually embedded in the particular culture and religion of his time and place, then painting him as a European nobleman was not devotional but falsifying. Hunt resolved to go and see.
He made three extended journeys to Palestine and Egypt between 1854 and 1860, accumulating the historical and ethnographic knowledge that went into every detail of the painting. The Temple precinct is reconstructed from careful study of ancient sources. The scribes' clothing - phylacteries, fringes, prayer shawls - follows the descriptions in contemporary historical records. The faces of the elderly rabbis are portraits of actual Jewish men whom Hunt encountered and persuaded to sit for him. The Hebrew inscriptions are correct. The architecture is as archaeologically accurate as 19th-century knowledge could make it.
The scene depicted is Luke 2:46-49: the twelve-year-old Jesus is found by his frantic parents in the Temple after three days' searching, 'sitting among the teachers, listening to them and asking them questions. Everyone who heard him was amazed at his understanding and his answers.' Mary's expression of mingled relief, reproach, and bewilderment - Luke 2:48's 'your father and I have been anxiously searching for you' - is rendered with a psychological specificity that made Victorian audiences feel they were witnessing rather than viewing.
Hunt treated the tour of the completed painting through Britain and America explicitly as a form of evangelism - charging admission, providing a detailed catalogue explaining the symbolic content of every element, and using the painting as an occasion for public theological discussion. By 1865 the painting had been seen by more than half a million people and had generated revenues that allowed Hunt to fund future journeys to Palestine. No other Victorian painting was so aggressively deployed as a tool of religious outreach.
The painting's insistence on the Jewishness of Jesus - an insistence that, in the context of Victorian Christian culture's often unexamined assumption of a European Christ, was quietly radical - anticipates the 20th century's 'Jesus the Jew' scholarship by fifty years. Hunt was not making a theological argument about Jewish-Christian relations; he was making an argument about historical honesty. But historical honesty, in this case, had theological consequences: the Jesus of Luke 2 is a Jewish boy in a Jewish Temple, astonishing Jewish scholars with his knowledge of the Jewish scriptures. That is who Hunt painted.