Read it through once

‘A Death in the Desert’ appears to have been inspired by the controversies in regard to the historical foundations of Christianity, and, more especially, in regard to the character and the authorship of the Fourth Gospel--controversies which received their first great impulse from the ‘Leben Jesu’ of David Friedrich Strauss, first published in 1835. An English translation of the fourth edition, 1840, by Marian Evans (George Eliot), was published in London, in 1846.