The movie is more suitable for Easter, but Lew Wallace’s novel is more about the Incarnation and people’s responses to it.
The movie is more suitable for Easter, but Lew Wallace’s novel is more about the Incarnation and people’s responses to it.
T he 1959 movie Ben-Hur, starring Charlton Heston, is often shown on television for the Easter season. Its moving depiction of Jesus’s crucifixion at the end of the film makes it an obvious choice for programmers. The 1880 novel on which the movie is based, however, is more of a Christmas story than an Easter one.
Ben-Hur: A Tale of the Christ is the full title of Lew Wallace’s masterpiece. Despite that title, the book, like the movie, barely depicts Christ, and the plot is occupied with the trials and adventures of the other title character, Jewish prince Judah Ben-Hur. But Wallace’s book is much more about the Incarnation than it is about the Resurrection.
The novel begins with a long scene in the middle of a barren desert. As Wallace puts the reader in the ancient Middle East with his vivid descriptions of the scenery, he follows a man riding a camel, identity initially unknown. The man stops and sets up his tent, where he is met by two other men. As they talk, the reader eventually figures out these are the wise men who are on their way to visit the baby Jesus.
The biblical account of the wise men in Matthew 2:1-12 is light on details. Contrary to their common depiction in nativity scenes, the wise men visited the Holy Family at a house after Jesus was born, not at the manger. The Bible never says how many wise men there were, only that they gave three gifts. It never says where they came from, except “from the east.” And after saying they returned to their unidentified home country by a different route to evade Herod, the Bible never mentions them again.
Wallace’s fictionalized account of their desert meeting and subsequent worship of Jesus is a thought-provoking illumination of these biblical supporting characters. He posits three wise men who came from Egypt, Greece, and India, respectively. He depicts them as men of deep faith and emphasizes the difficulty they had acting on it.
The difficulty of long-distance travel 2,000 years ago meant the likelihood of dying on the way, either due to the climate, lack of food or water, or violence, was relatively high. Today, we have the Bible, available in nearly every language, conveniently assembled into a single volume and accessible for free online. We have 2,000 years of Christian tradition and witness, and pastors and teachers who can help us understand it. The wise men had nothing but a star, yet they dropped everything in their high-status lives in pagan societies and went on a long trip from which they might not return to see a baby in a minor city of a third-rate Roman province.
When they set out, they probably didn’t know others had been similarly called. The Bible says they arrived in Jerusalem together, making Wallace’s pre-Jerusalem desert meeting plausible, but they probably each began the trip alone. The joy at finding others making the same trip through the desert to see the same baby must have been so validating; the faith it took to leave home must have been so strong.
The wise men came before the Great Commission was given, ordering the Christian faith to be spread to all nations. They came before the Holy Spirit descended at Pentecost and Peter gave the first sermon to people from around the world. They came before Paul’s missionary journeys to preach to the Gentiles. Hebrews 11:1 says faith is “confidence in what we hope for and assurance about what we do not see.” They were hoping for God and had few ways of seeing Him, yet they mounted their camels with confidence and assurance of the Savior’s birth.
The Egyptian wise man, whom Wallace names Balthasar in accordance with some Christian traditions, remains a significant character throughout the book, much more so than in the movie. Ben-Hur is actually part of a love triangle with Balthasar’s daughter and Esther, the Jewish woman he ends up marrying. It is through that experience that Ben-Hur comes to realize the true nature of the baby the wise men understood right away.
Ben-Hur is focused on revenge for his family and is motivated by anger toward Rome, for understandable reasons. While watching a parade of Romans through Jerusalem from the roof of his family’s home, he had accidentally nudged a stone that fell on the Roman governor’s head. His boyhood friend, Messala, now an up-and-comer in the Roman hierarchy, immediately turns on him. His mother and sister are imprisoned in Jerusalem, and Ben-Hur becomes a slave.
Later on, he hears rumors about the King of the Jews and thinks this is the man he has been waiting for: a leader for an uprising to overthrow Roman oppression. Now trained in Roman warfare, Ben-Hur wants to be a leader in that rebellion and begins recruiting fighting men. Balthasar’s daughter, Iras, has a different misconception: that the King of the Jews must be rich like the other kings of the earth.
As Ben-Hur’s faith gradually grows, he begins to see through Iras’s beauty and realizes her shallowness. They break off their relationship after Iras mockingly expresses her disappointment that the King of the Jews is “a man with a woman’s face and hair, riding an ass’s colt, and in tears.” Yet Ben-Hur is still disappointed that he isn’t going to be part of a rebellion after all.
Wallace’s narration emphasizes the meekness of Jesus in its descriptions. It also emphasizes the size of the crowds that are following him. Wallace puts Balthasar in that throng at the Crucifixion and imagines that the other two wise men might have been present as well. Balthasar, by this time a very old man, dies immediately after Jesus does, having seen the culmination of the life of the baby he had been called to welcome to the world.
If the movie seems more suitable for Easter, that’s because most of the details from the novel recounted in this article were cut from the plot. The questions more central in the novel are about what it means for God to become man and how people respond to that world-changing event. The book does not even mention the Resurrection, and Ben-Hur comes to believe in Christ based on the Crucifixion alone.
“The best way, after all, to reach an understanding of the divine is by study of the human,” the narrator of Ben-Hur says. Nowhere is that truer than at Christmastime, when the human born in the manger in Bethlehem tells us everything about the divine.