Books: Old Heresy, New Version

KING JESUS (424 pp.)—Robert Graves —Creative Age ($3).

The story of Jesus Christ, told once & for all in the Gospels, has never since been altered, diminished or improved. Few have felt themselves competent to try;* none has succeeded. The latest attempter is Robert Graves, good poet, practical literary workman and mighty leaper-to-conclusions.

It was almost bound to happen. Graves has been interested for years in the Imperial Roman period and the Near East into which Jesus Christ was born. Graves has written ingeniously learned novels about Rome (I, Claudius), Byzantium (Count Belisarius), the mythic age of Greece (Hercules, My Shipmate). His friend, the late great T. E. Lawrence, who spent the best years of his life between the Nile and the Promised Land, once amused himself by mapping the probable route of the Israelites in the Sinai desert. Graves’s latest job is in the same line but not so modest.

In his historical writings Graves uses his sources, ancient and modern, in a way peculiar to him: not, as other historical novelists do, merely as supports for stories, but as clues to reality. In each case Graves appears to believe that he has actually conjured up out of the past, by a kind of detective work of the imagination, real events—or as good as real events—which no one before him has really been able to fathom. Thomas Mann, in his wisdom, makes no such claim for his great and subtle Biblical Joseph and His Brothers. But in King Jesus Robert Graves, bright and solemn as a Quiz Kid, again implies that he has at last discovered the “valid explanation”—this time of the New Testament story.

Like all of Graves’s historical novels, this one is told through a contemporary or nearly contemporary mouthpiece. The mouthpiece in King Jesus is one “Agabus the Decapolitan,” writing at Alexandria near the end of the 1st Century A.D. Agabus-Graves’s information on religious and political matters in ancient Palestine greatly exceeds anything the 20th Century possesses. He loses no time in flatly telling the 20th Century reader a number of things he never heard before.

Exercise In Genealogy. The “wonder worker Jesus,” he has discovered after patient inquiry, was actually the rightful heir to the throne of Israel. He was, in short, the legitimate but unacknowledged son of Prince Antipater, grandson of Herod the Great. This secret, known to few people during Jesus’ life, became known to Pontius Pilate, the Roman Governor General of Judaea. That was why Pilate granted Jesus a private interview and that, of course, accounted for the inscription Pilate wrote for the cross: “Jesus of Nazareth, the King of the Jews.”

Agabus-Graves’s account of Jesus’ identity is not half so strange as his interpretation of Jesus’ role. His royalty, as scion of both the House of David and the Herodian line, carried with it the mythical attributes of a “sacred king”—of Tammuz, the Babylonian Adonis, who annually died and rose again, whose festival occurred at the same time of year as the Jewish Passover. Jesus (says Agabus-Graves) was endowed with supernatural powers of mind and will, and he did in fact conquer death. But, far from ascending into Heaven after the Resurrection, Jesus was condemned to expiate his sins (of blasphemous pride) by becoming a ghost, an “earthbound spirit.”

Jesus’ real mission, explains Agabus-Graves, was to “destroy the power of the Female”—i.e., of Jehovah’s predecessor, rival and unacknowledged consort, the Great Mother Goddess or Triple Moon Goddess, known in the Eastern Mediterranean lands by various names, including Hecate and Astarte. She had ruled Canaan before the Israelites came; her worship included ritual prostitution, and Jesus’ mother Miriam (Mary in the English Scriptures) had actually been born, so the High Priest said, “under the old dispensation,” as a result of a dreamlike unmarital incident in a garden during the Feast of Tabernacles. Jesus’ losing struggle with the Female was the drama of his public life. In the Gospel according to Agabus-Graves:

¶ Jesus overcomes the Goddess’ chief priestess, Mary the Hairdresser (Mary Magdalene) in a tremendous spiritual combat in her “House of Spirals,” casting out Mary’s seven devils.

¶ Jesus takes Mary the sister of Lazarus as his Queen at the ancient rite during which his cultist followers lame him and anoint himKing; but to everyone’s dismay he announces his New Law of chastity.

¶ Mary, thus deprived of a son, demands that Jesus give her her due by restoring Lazarus to life; and Jesus, recognizing his defeat, consents to do so by pronouncing the holy name of God, though he knows that for this act he must give his own life in exchange.

¶ At the Last Supper Jesus’ words “one of you shall betray me” are not a prophecy but a command—and interpreted as such by Judas, the only one of the apostles who understands the choice Jesus has made. Jesus, knowing that Judas understands, gives him the sop to confirm it.

This crossword puzzle is all worked out very suavely by one of the most workmanlike of narrative puzzle-makers. Graves’s account of Jesus’ childhood in Egypt is written with simplicity and reverence; his accounts of ancient ritual surpass anything in The Golden Bough; his reporting of ancient theological discussions is sometimes dull but often absorbing, for Graves is a writer of practiced lucidity. If it could be read in the same spirit as the Claudius books, King Jesus would be fair enough reading.

Exercise in Obscurity. But it was not written, and cannot be read, in precisely that spirit. There are indications that one at least of Robert Graves’s motives in writing it was to devise a maze and a headache for the reader. Some of his learning may enlighten the unscholarly reader, particularly on Jewish religious tradition, but Graves’s purpose does not seem to be enlightenment in any usual sense of the word. He has evaluated the evidence, no matter how tenuous, strictly as it suited him.

The Jewish Talmud—rabbinical writings, in which there are a few scattered notes of what one rabbi said to another in the 2nd and 3rd Centuries when the subject of Christianity came up—has apparently been mined by Graves for clues to the true tradition. This is a little like relying on Confederate cartoons rather than the memoirs of John Hay for the truth about President Lincoln. Graves has likewise used as he pleased the mass of speculation and fable, the “apocrypha,” rejected by the early church. Apparently he went on the premise that the more recondite the source and the more far-fetched the hypothesis the better; he neglected to work into his context quite a few incidents and sayings of the New Testament.

Graves’s puzzle-solving air will appeal to people who do not know much about the subject and are happy to hear from anyone who seems to. What King Jesus revives is the old argument that what Christ taught was not a universal and simple religion which, “going into all nations,” his apostles would bring “to the uttermost ends of the earth,” but a local, highly esoteric and special one.

Many a reader may conclude that this book is a work of fundamental perversity. The perversity may not be conscious, but in a writer of Graves’s intelligence that is unlikely. The historical commentary he appends contains signs of defensiveness unusual in a writer as bland as Graves—e.g., “I write without any wish to offend orthodox Catholics. . . .” The author cannot have much doubt that he, or at least Agabus the Decapolitan, is going to be taken apart by readers to whom Christ is much more than a subject for a cleverly contrived novel.

And most readers will have no doubt whatever that their descendants will still be reading, marking and inwardly digesting the Gospel story long after such a literary curiosity as King Jesus has gone the way of Ignatius Donnelly (who spent his life trying to prove that Bacon wrote Shakespeare) and the “lost continent of Mu.”

*Among the best: Ernest Renan (Life of Christ, 1863); George Moore (The Brook Kerith, 1916); Sholem Asch (The Nazarene, 1939); Henri Barbusse (Jesus, 1927).