Ben-Hur: A Tale of the Christ was written by Lewis Wallace. Wallace (1827-1905) was a Major-General in the Union Army during the American Civil War, serving with distinction at Monocacy River in 1864 but making a costly mistake at the Battle of Shiloh. Wallace helped rig the trial of Henry Wirtz, Camp Commander of Andersonville, the infamous Confederate POW camp, and the trials of the men and women alleged to have plotted to kill President Lincoln. Wallace was a failed governor of New Mexico and a Resident-Minister to the court of Sultan Abdul-Hamid II, where he became the Sultan’s friend. Though a classic expression of nineteenth century American Christianity, Ben-Hur has aged badly.

Ben-Hur is a Jew alive during the years of Christ’s life. Ben-Hur is of the renowned house of Hur, and is a “prince of Jerusalem”¹ who can trace his bloodline back to David himself. In his early years Ben-Hur does not know what to do with himself, but after breaking with his childhood friend Messala, who went to Rome a decent enough chap and returned a real rotter, Ben-Hur accidentally drops a tile on the head of a Roman commander. For this Ben-Hur is sentenced to life on a galley while his estates are confiscated and his mother and sister are condemned to spend life in a leper’s prison. Ben-Hur spends a few years on a galley, getting into excellent physical condition, and then saves the life of the galley owner. The grateful man adopts Ben-Hur as his son, which allows Ben-Hur to train at arms, to travel, and to learn how to drive a chariot. Eventually Ben-Hur returns to Jerusalem, befriends his father’s servant Simonides and his father’s Arab friend Ilderim, and enters himself into a major chariot race against Messala. Ben-Hur wins, crippling Messala and enriching himself in the process. Ben-Hur then begins searching for his mother and sister, who meanwhile are let out of prison (they were sent there as punishment for Ben-Hur’s dropping the tile on the head of the Roman) and suffer for a while as lepers before Christ heals them. They are reunited with Ben-Hur and convert to Christianity. Christ is crucified, but Ben-Hur lives happily ever after with Esther, his wife.

Wallace uses Ben-Hur as a platform from which to preach about the glories of Christianity. The first eighth of the novel has nothing to do with Ben-Hur, but instead describes the lives of Balthasar, Gaspar, and Melchior, the Three Wise Men, and shows how they discover the Christ child. Wallace spends many pages, through his mouthpiece characters, lecturing the reader about how Christianity has superseded Judaism in God’s eyes. This is a raw version of the antisemitic myth of supersessionism,

namely that with the emergence of Christianity, Judaism has served its providential purpose, is obsolete, and is slated to disappear¼that myth has long been the controlling assumption of Christian scholars and theologians, and over the centuries it has justified persecution of Jews by Christians who sought to implement heaven's supposed command.²

The presence of supersessionism in Ben-Hur, and the justification and glorification of it in the novel, will in all likelihood temper and diminish what enjoyment the modern reader might take from Ben-Hur.

Wallace writes in a dated style, using a formal style of diction: “By Pallas, thou art beautiful! Beware Apollo mistake thee not for his lost love.”³ This will have a distancing effect on most readers and will make it more difficult to see the characters as real. Unlike Dumas père and other writers who use this more formal style, Wallace lacks the talent to draw the reader in to his fictional world despite the language barrier. Before Ben-Hur finds Christ he is realistically drawn, and his enmity toward Messala has some real passion to it. But when Wallace inserts the religious element of Ben-Hur into the story, his preaching and didactic impulse overwhelm his storytelling sensibilities, as happened to Charles Kingsley in parts of Westward Ho!. Wallace unsuccessfully strains after affect, trying far too hard to evoke emotions in the reader. And there is a general prolixity to the novel, which Wallace’s style is unable to make interesting. Ben-Hur, though beloved by Christians for well over a century, is an underwhelming read.

All that being said, however, the impact and influence of Ben-Hur should not be underestimated.

Within twenty years of publication, Ben-Hur: A Tale of the Christ stood second only to the Bible as the best-selling book in America. It might be argued that if Harriet Beecher Stowe’s Uncle Tom’s Cabin (1852) had helped to divide the Union in the 1850s, Wallace’s Ben-Hur helped to reunite the nation in the years following Reconstruction. The novel resonated with some of the most significant issues in late Victorian culture: gender and family; slavery and freedom; ethnicity and empire; and nationhood and citizenship—all of which emerge from the crucial relationship of Wallace’s two protagonists: one of them exemplifying action, striving, and revenge; the other absolute, sacrificial love and redemption.⁴

Ben-Hur quickly became accepted as a legitimate and truthful recounting of the New Testament, and was used as “an instrument of conversion¼others were inspired by reading the novel to become foreign missionaries, and some of those were among the first to translate Ben-Hur into other languages.”⁵ As a testament of the Christian faith, Ben-Hur proved to be a powerful tool for believers, a tool given even greater force by the extremely popular and successful 1925 and 1959 films of the novel.

Sadly, the novel isn’t as good as the movies, and contains a marked amount of antisemitism as well. Readers are advised to avoid it.

(It is worth noting that some editions of Ben-Hur, such as the 1892 Garfield edition, have lovely black-and-white ink drawings [by William Martin Johnson [1862-?], who was well-known in his time as a book illustrator] along the borders of every page, with no duplication of drawings on the over 800 pages of the novel. These editions are worth perusing or acquiring simply for the art).

Print: Lew Wallace, Ben-Hur: A Tale of the Christ. Mineola, NY: Dover Press, 2015.

Howard Miller, “The Charioteer and the Christ: Ben-Hur in America from the Gilded Age to the Culture Wars,” Indiana Magazine of History no. 104 (June, 2008): 153-175.

¹ Lew Wallace, Ben-Hur, A Tale of the Christ (New York: Harper and Brothers, 1899), 115.

² Marvin Perry and Frederick M. Schweitzer, Antisemitism: Myth and Hate from Antiquity to the Present (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2002), 23.

³ Wallace, Ben-Hur, 221.

⁴ Howard Miller, “The Charioteer and the Christ: Ben-Hur in America from the Gilded Age to the Culture Wars,” Indiana Magazine of History no. 104 (June, 2008): 155-156.

⁵ Miller, “The Charioteer and the Christ,” 161.