Christianity was the dominant religion in nineteenth-century Britain, and central to Victorian attitudes and customs. The Church of England was the official church but Protestant denominations were also important—Methodists, Baptists and Quakers represented half the population—and Catholics, from the 1820s, were gradually permitted greater religious and institutional freedoms. Just as the new disciplines in the natural sciences influenced landscape art, archaeology and theories of evolution impacted on Christian beliefs.

For their contemporary viewers, many Pre-Raphaelite works tapped into the religious debates of the period: because they referred to earlier Christian models, the artists were negatively perceived to be aligned with Catholicism. Although most of the Pre-Raphaelites tended towards atheism, their biblical subjects were designed be recognisable to their audience. William Holman Hunt’s approach and his travels to the East were intended to bring historical accuracy to these familiar narratives. Their approach to the spiritual—combining it with realism or including modern existential, psychological and sexual themes—often prompted strong criticism of the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood.