Spiritual Truths

The two most popular novels in nineteenth-century America were Lew Wallace’s Ben Hur (1880) and Charles Sheldon’s In His Steps (1896). (In fact, Sheldon’s book remained the dominant twentieth-century best-seller right up until Peyton Place overtook it in the late 1950s.) Although the first of these two books is set in ancient Palestine and the second takes place in the contemporary American Midwest, they are dominated by the same central character, Jesus. Wallace’s Judah Ben-Hur is a wealthy Jew. At first he intends to throw off the yoke of Roman domination by leading an insurrection, but when his mother and sister are healed of leprosy by Jesus, Ben Hur turns from the ways of war to the Christian promise of peace and love. The actions of Sheldon’s characters spring from a scene early in the novel in which a Midwestern minister, Henry Maxwell, pledges that before he makes any decision or takes any action, he will ask himself: “What would Jesus do?” Just as Ben Hur’s life is transformed by Jesus’ message of love, so too is the life of Maxwell’s city. Prostitution, drunkenness, and political corruption are gradually replaced by Christian faith, simplicity, and honesty.

Between them Ben Hur and In His Steps sold more than ten million copies, were translated into twenty languages, and were adapted for the stage and screen. These two novels are the most famous examples of an abundant and well-circulated literature on Jesus written in the United States during the last two centuries. Novelists, biographers, reformers, poets, and businessmen joined theologians and ministers in the attempt to explain what Jesus was really like, hoping that Christianity could be understood in modern terms. Some were sincere, others disingenuous, but they almost invariably described a Jesus sympathetic to their own concerns. Bruce Barton, a businessman, wrote that Jesus was really an early advertising genius and his disciples a group of marketing executives; Eugene Debs, the American Socialist party leader, declared that “Comrade Jesus” was a hardworking carpenter who came to the rescue of the Galilean working class; and Robert Ingersoll, the most famous self-proclaimed atheist of his day, argued that Jesus, like himself, had come to save the world from the tyranny of organized religion. Clearly, most of these self-serving portraits of Jesus tell us more about the lives and times of their American authors than they do about Palestine two thousand years ago.

It is a powerful advantage in a predominantly Christian nation to believe that Jesus approves of one’s way of life. By identifying oneself with Jesus, one stands a good chance of seizing the American moral high ground. The ambiguous character of the four Gospels made it possible for each of these authors to find the Jesus and the idealized vision of themselves that they were looking for. The Gospels are short, they sometimes contradict one another, and they leave a great deal unsaid about the life of Jesus. Two of the evangelists, Matthew and Luke, describe the miracles surrounding Jesus’ birth, but the other two start with his ministry at about the age of thirty. Apart from a single reference in Luke to Jesus as a twelve-year-old boy questioning the priests in the temple, none of the Gospels speak of his early life. But where the Gospels were silent, the American biographers of Jesus rushed in with a spectacular variety of explanations of what he was doing for all those undescribed years.

Biographers continued to differ on the significance even of those portions of Jesus’ life that are recorded in the Gospels. They disputed whether Jesus saw himself as the promised Messiah of the Old Testament and whether his greatest work was his teaching, the healing miracles, or the inspiration he provided for social reforms. The speculation continues today. In 1987 Marjorie Holmes published The Messiah, a novel about Jesus in which his greatest concern is the preservation of the family, while Hannah Wolffs Jesus the Therapist (1987) argues for his great psychological insight.

For American Christians in the colonial era, Jesus’ death and resurrection were more important than the events of his life. Jesus’ sacrifice on the cross was believed to have redeemed mankind from the sin of Adam and Eve and offered the hope of salvation and eternal life. The missing details of his life as told by the Gospels raised little concern. But in eighteenth-century Germany biblical scholars of the Enlightenment had begun to question the reliability of the Gospels as history. Hermann Reimarus, for example, tried to explain the New Testament miracle stories as naturalistic events that the evangelists had misreported.

Although German scholarship led the way in the attempt to discover the “real, historical Jesus” behind the Gospel narratives, Americans were not far behind, and a controversy over Jesus played a role in the politics of the young Republic. Tom Paine started out as one of the heroes of the American Revolution. His pamphlet Common Sense (1776) inspired the Declaration of Independence, and his magnificent exhortation in The Crisis raised morale during the war. But Paine’s popularity in America declined dramatically, first when he became involved with anticlerical radicals during the French Revolution in the early 179Os and then when his book The Age of Reason poured scorn over orthodox Christianity. The Gospel story, said Paine, “has every mark of fraud and imposition stamped upon the face of it,” starting with the Virgin’s conception: “Were any girl that is now with child to say, and even to swear it, that she was gotten with child by a ghost, and that an angel told her so, would she be believed? Certainly she would not. Why, then, are we to believe the same thing of another girl, whom we never saw, told by nobody knows who, nor when, nor where?” Paine’s principal target was the miracle stories. He praised Jesus as a good man and a moral teacher, but not as the Son of God: “He was a virtuous and an amiable man. The morality that he preached and practised was of the most benevolent kind; and though similar systems of morality had been preached by Confucius, and by some of the Greek philosophers, many years before … it has not been exceeded by any.”

To judge Jesus simply as a notable historical figure, as though he were just another man, was — and still is —a blasphemy in the eyes of many Americans, as evidenced by the controversy surrounding Martin Scorsese’s recent film The Last Temptation of Christ. Even a hundred years later Theodore Roosevelt referred to Paine as a “filthy little atheist.” When Paine returned to America from France in 1802 he was no longer a hero, and the new President, Thomas Jefferson, took a risk in greeting Paine cordially and openly.

Jefferson himself was under political attack at the time from the opposition Federalist party, which tried to undermine his political support by accusing him of infidelity to the Christian faith. In an effort to reassure his colleagues that such accusations were groundless, Jefferson wrote A Syllabus of the Merit of the Doctrines of Jesus and followed it up the next year with The Philosophy of Jesus. Rather than speculate in his own words about Jesus, Jefferson simply went through the New Testament, snipped out the passages he approved of, and glued them together in columns, binding the resulting sheets together. Like Paine, Jefferson minimized supernatural elements; he criticized the evangelists for including so much implausible material in their stories and claimed he could differentiate the true words of Jesus from the additions of later narrators.

Whereas Paine had published his notorious works widely, Jefferson kept this book and his later The Life and Morals of Jesus (1820) within a small circle of acquaintances. Despite his admiration for the man Jesus, Jefferson could hardly have allayed the suspicions of the Federalists about his orthodoxy by publishing them. He believed that Jesus’ life and its moral example were of more significance than his death and resurrection. He also shared Paine’s opinion that Jesus should be compared with the classical Greek philosophers: “Epictetus and Epicurus give us laws for governing ourselves … Jesus a supplement of the duties and charities we owe to others.”

The pace of critical study of the New Testament increased after 1835 with the publication in Germany of David Strauss’scompendious Life of Jesus. Strauss argued that the Gospels should not be considered historical documents, to be judged historically accurate or faulty. Instead they should be understood as religious myths. While Strauss wrote a heavy and indigestible book for theologians, his French contemporary Ernest Renan wrote a more approachable and romantic biography, The Life of Jesus, in 1863. It became an enormous best seller throughout Europe and America. Renan presented Jesus as a lover of nature, and he speculated lengthily on Jesus’ thoughts and feelings. The publication of Renan’s biography marked the birth of a new subgenre of religious fiction: imaginative novels and biographies of Jesus, filling in the true significance of his life.

Perhaps the earliest American novel in which Jesus plays a role is Julian: or, Scenes in Judea (1841) by William Ware. Ware, the son of a Harvard divinity professor, was a Unitarian. Julian is interesting both for its treatment of Jesus and as a precursor of Ben Hur, many of whose themes derive from Ware’s plodding narrative. Julian, the central character, is a Roman Jew who returns to Israel, where he meets his relatives, discovers his real Jewish “roots,” and becomes involved in a Jewish conspiracy against the Roman occupation. News of Jesus’ miraculous ministry diverts the course of the action and the attention of the conspirators. Ware, the coolly rational New England Unitarian,, shows Julian admiring Jesus immeasurably but is careful to avoid making Jesus divine. When, after five hundred pages of preparation, Julian finally comes face- / to-face with Jesus, he tells us: “Awe and dread … were the feelings that would have alone prevailed, were it not that, however wonderfully I felt he was united to God, I saw that the language of his countenance was not that of an angel, nor of a God, but of a man, bound like myself by the closest ties to every one of the multitudes who thronged him.”

Even at the novel’s conclusion, when Jesus has cured the leprosy of some secondary characters, Julian remains in doubt about following Jesus and holds back from the people who have begun worshiping him. The message of the novel for Ware’s own time was that the orthodox Christians had been mistaken in turning this great man, Jesus, into a god.

Books about Jesus, written by men and women with no pretensions to biblical scholarship, showed up with increasing regularity in the 186Os and 187Os. At first many authors hoped to combine full descriptions of Jesus’ life with strict historical accuracy. They regarded their books - which appear fictitious to us —as biographical. For example, Henry Ward Beecher, one of the most eminent clergymen of his day, wrote The Life of Jesus, the Christ in 1871. He said that he was worried about the scholarly controversy in Germany. Although modern New Testament studies “may lead scholars from doubt to certainty, they are likely to lead plainpeople from certainty into doubt and leave them there.”

Beecher, who came from a distinguished theological family, had been deeply influenced by reading Charles Darwin’s On the Origin of Species soon after its publication in 1859. Some ministers regarded Darwin’s evolutionary theory as a terrible threat to their faith, but Beecher welcomed it. He came to believe that religious thought was subject to the same evolutionary processes as were human beings themselves and that, accordingly, the Gospels needed to be rewritten to take advantage of recent progress: “There are reasons deeper yet why the Life of Christ should be rewritten for each and every age. The life of the Christian Church has … been a gradual unfolding and interpretation of the spiritual truths of the gospels. The knowledge of the human heart, of its yearn- ings, its failures, its sins and sorrows, has immensely increased in the progress of the centuries… .”

Beecher declared that his advantageous position down the evolutionary chain from the evangelists made it possible for his life of Jesus to be better and more illuminating than theirs. It is no surprise after this preparation to find that Beecher’s Jesus turns out to be an evolutionary theorist: ” Think not that I am come to destroy the law, or the prophets: I am not come to destroy, but to fulfil.’ Jesus would reform the world not by destroying but by developing the germs of truth already existing. He accepted whatever germs of truth and goodness had ripened through thousands of years. He would join his own work to that already accomplished, bringing to view the yet higher truths of the spiritual realm.”

By the 1870s tensions in America were becoming aggravated by the rise of the industrial cities, and Beecher’s Life of Jesus, the Christ refers to several social problems of the day, including the issue of temperance. Evangelical Christians were then at the forefront of a campaign to prohibit the sale and consumption of alcohol. What were they to do with passages in the New Testament that describe Jesus drinking wine, or the first miracle at Cana, where he changed water into wine? The Reverend William Thayer had tried to solve the problem by arguing, in Communion Wine and Bible Temperance (1869), that the Bible actually spoke of two different kinds of wine, of which Jesus drank only the type that was an unfermented grape juice. Beecher, in his narrative of Jesus’ life, spent several pages discussing the merits of Thayer’s view but finally rejected it, though he did note that the wine of Palestine was “light,” not at all the “fiery spirits” that caused such havoc in American city slums.

Turning aside for a moment from what Jesus actually did, Beecher argued: “Had Jesus, living in our time, beheld the wide waste and wretchedness arising from inordinate appetites, can any one doubt on which side he would be found? Was not his whole life a superlative giving up of his own rights, for the benefit of the fallen? Did he not teach that customs, institutions and laws must yield to the inherent sacredness of man? In his own age, he ate and drank as his countrymen did, judging it to be safe to do so. But this is not a condemnation of the course of those who, in other lands and under different circumstances, wholly abstain from wine and strong drink, for their own good and for the good of others.”

By making this argument, Beecher established one of the techniques that have persisted in the Jesus literature ever since. If Jesus did something of which an author approves, he is cited as authority for doing likewise. But if Jesus did the opposite of what the author requires, an argument about changed social context can always explain away the difficulty: Jesus would have acted this way had he been alive now.

Beecher’s sister Harriet Beecher Stowe was already one of the most famous women in America; her best seller of 1852, Uncle Tom’s Cabin, had done much to arouse antislavery sentiment in the North in the years before the Civil War. In 1877 Stowe wrote a life of Jesus, Footsteps of the Master. The degree to which Jesus was malleable in the hands of different authors becomes apparent when we find Stowe arguing that Jesus was “one of those loving, saintly mothers.” Although she doubted some of the miraculous stories in the Gospels, Stowe was determined that the virgin birth of Jesus should not be rationalized away; so long as it was preserved, Jesus remained exclusively the child of a woman, and thus more capable of sympathy toward women than any other famous man in history.

From that time on many women writing about Jesus made the same case. Elizabeth Stuart Phelps wrote, in The Story of Jesus Christ (1897), that Jesus had an unrivaled sensitivity to the needs of sick and elderly women. She described Jesus as a reforming visionary in his treatment of women as the equals of men: “He seemed almost unconscious of the social revolution of which he was laying the foundations. He went straight on with serene and beautiful indifference, always treating women with respect, always recognizing their fettered individualism, their force of character … their undeveloped powers, their terrible capacity for suffering, their superiority in spiritual vigor. He boldly took … the stand … that … men and women stood before God upon the same moral plane, and that they ought so to stand before human society.”

In the case of Phelps, an autobiographical element entered into her description of Jesus. She made a considerable fortune by writing sentimental novels, the most renowned of which, The Gates Ajar (1868), told of the Heaven to which dying Victorians could aspire. Her husband, younger than she, lived off her earnings, refused to comfort her in a long sickness, and failed to return from a yachting trip when she lay dying. Phelps’s Jesus is the sort of caring husband she would doubtless have preferred.

Phelps, Stowe, and many other women of the late nineteenth century depicted a nurturing and feminized Jesus. But all other Jesus literature of the era was overshadowed by Ben Hur, Lew Wallace’s hymn to muscular and manly Christianity. Wallace himself was a colorful man: a major general in the Union Army during the Civil War, a state senator in his home state of Indiana and later governor of the New Mexico Territory, a part-time novelist, and ultimately America’s minister to Turkey. He finished Ben Hur during his tenure at Santa Fe, breaking off at one point to pursue the Apache rebel Victorio. At first Ben Hur was not particularly well received. One San Francisco reviewer wrote: “Governor Lew Wallace is a ‘literary feller’ chiefly given to writing novels of an uncertain sort. He is following up The Fair God with Ben Hur: A Story of the Christ. I protest, as a friend of Christ, that He has been crucified enough already without having a Territorial Governor after Him.” After a slow start Ben Hur’s popularity and sales began to soar, and translations and adaptation for the stage soon followed. After reading an Italian translation, Pope Leo XIH commended Wallace for his contributions to Christian understanding.

Ben Hur, for all its fame, has many of the faults of its predecessor Julian: its melodramatic Victorian plot is full of unexplained gaps, and the story advances with the help of a series of wildly improbable coincidences and strokes of good fortune. Of these, perhaps the most noteworthy is that the hero, Judah Ben-Hur, has an unrivaled talent for acquiring wealth without working. He survives five years as a Roman galley slave, rescues his admiral in the heat of battle, and receives a fortune as a reward. He then travels to Antioch, where he discovers that the richest man in the world, Simonides, is none other than an old family slave. Moreover, Simonides has made the money not for himself but for his “young master,” and he begs to be allowed to serve as slave to the house of Hur once again, as does his comely daughter Esther (who ends the book as Mrs. Hur).

Wallace mixed high adventure with Christianity by having his chief character act as an alter ego to Jesus. Jesus makes contact with Ben Hur at crucial turning points in the book, once to save the hero from despair as he trudges to the galleys, later to cure Ben Hur’s mother and sister of their hideous leprosy, and finally at the crucifixion, when Ben Hur realizes that Jesus is dying in order that he and all other mortals might live. Between these brief but crucial appearances of Jesus, Ben Hur leads a vigorous and unreflective life. He wins a chariot race against his archenemy Messala, plots the overthrow of Rome by secretly training an army of Jewish malcontents, and almost falls into the clutches of a beautiful but treacherous Egyptian temptress.

While the ostensible theme of the book is that the temptation of worldly affairs is overcome in Christianity, Wallace actually revels in the worldly adventures of Ben Hur. His device for linking the stories of Ben Hur and Jesus together is to have Balthasar, one of the three wise men, appear throughout, giving voice to his religious speculations about the coming Messiah, who will teach a religious lesson that can unite the world. Wallace was not willing to take the chance that anyone might miss his didactic point, and after 250 pages of adventure tales, he paused to remind the reader of his religious purpose: “Our tale begins in point of date not less than fact, to trench close upon the opening of the ministry of the Son of Mary, whom we have seen but once since this same Balthasar left him worshipfully in his mother’s lap in the cave by Bethlehem. Henceforth to the end the mysterious Child will be a subject of continual reference; and slowly though surely the current of events with which we are dealing will bring us nearer and nearer to him, until finally we see a man —we would like, if armed contrariety of opinion would permit it, to add —A MAN WHOM THE WORLD COULD NOT DO WITHOUT…. Before His time and since, there have been men indispensable to particular people and periods, but his indispensability was to the whole race, and for all time —a respect in which it is unique, solitary, divine.”

Some Americans of the 188Os still regarded novels as morally corrupting and refused to permit them into their homes. But as the reputation of Ben Hur spread, this book, with its blending of fiction and religious uplift, was admitted to homes previously free of novels. Wallace, in later years, said that the idea of making his novel a vindication of Christianity came to him after a chance encounter on a train with Robert Ingersoll, whose lecture tours in the late nineteenth century delighted freethinkers and scandalized the orthodox. It is remarkable to find that the atheist Ingersoll, no less than his Christian contemporaries, had a great deal to say about Jesus and that, like them, he found a Jesus rather like himself: “For the man Christ 1 have infinite respect … [and] to that great and serene man I gladly pay … the tribute of my admiration and my tears. He was a reformer in his time. He was regarded as a blasphemer and his life was destroyed by hypocrites, who have in all ages done what they could to trample freedom and manhood out of the human mind. Had I lived at that time, I would have been his friend, and should he come again he will not find a better friend than 1 will be.” Ingersoll recognized that it was not enough simply to discount the traditional religious interpretation of Jesus. Rather, in a society where Jesus was almost universally honored, he had to show how closely his own views and those of Jesus agreed. He, no less than his Christian rivals, was trying to lay claim to “the real Jesus.”

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