Books: Old Heresy, New Version

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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."