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."