King Jesus

King Jesus (1946), long out of print, is one of the most controversial historical novels of all time. In it, Robert Graves has summoned his superb narrative powers, his painstaking scholarship, his wit and unsurpassed ability to recreate the past, to produce a magnificant portrayal of the life of Christ on Planet Earth. "This is the history of the wonder-worker Jesus, rightful heir-at-law to the dominions of Herod I (King of Judea, 40-4 B.C.), who in the fifteenth year of the Emperor Tiberius was sentenced to death by Pontius Pilate. Not the least wonderful of his feats was that, though certified dead, & laid in a tomb, he returned three days later...King Jesus (for he was entitled to be so addressed) is now worshipped as a god by a sect known as the Gentile Christians." So begins Agabus, an Alexandria scholar writing toward the end of the first century A.D. [...] [Editorial Reviews]: Praise for King Jesus: "My solution to the problem of Jesus's nativity implies a rejection of the mystical Virgin Birth doctrine, which no longer has the same force in religious polemics as it had in Justin's day [Justin I and Justinian, the Great -- Byzantine Emperors of Late Antiquity and the last Roman Emperors to speak Latin as a first language in the history of the Eastern Roman Empire]; to the mass of people nowadays the choice is between a Jesus born in the ordinary course of nature and one as mythical as Perseus and Prometheus."--From the Author's Commentary // "...[T]he logic pursued by Mr. Graves in his gospel is a 'poetic' logic--that is, a rationale of accepting what is consistent with a certain effect and rejecting what is not consistent with it. I hope I have acknowledged sufficiently that the effect achieved in 'King Jesus' is quite a wonderful one...." -- Robert Fitzgerald, Nation, 10/26/1946. // "Mr. Graves is a poet; both the knowledge of a scholar and the imagination of a poet are brought to bear upon Jesus as a child, boy, and man. This book is a bold speculative adventure." -- Harold Brighouse, Manchester Guardian. ===Robert Graves (1895-1985) was a British poet, novelist, translator, and critic. His many books include the historical novels I, Claudius and Claudius the God, the autobiography Good-bye to All That, and the mythic/literary studies The White Goddess and The Greek Myths.

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