A detailed commentary written to justify the unorthodox views contained in this book would be two to three times as long as the book itself and would take years to complete; I beg to be excused the task . . .
In King Jesus, Robert Graves takes on no less than the story and person of Jesus Christ himself. It would be a monumental task to simply mimic the basic narrative of the Gospels while also being more grounded and more, shall we say, “realistic.” Graves has set himself an even harder task, because he comes to this book with a number of revisionist agendas, mostly revolving more around the person of Christ than around the narrative, though the narrative is in for some large revisions as well.
I think you can group the major revisionist agendas pretty broadly into three categories. To some degree, you could make these subsets of one very large agenda that relates to Jesus in terms of Judaism, of course, but as I would come to moments of pretty extreme revision, I would just started to kind of organically feel these three major categories coming to the top. First of all, Graves wants to place Jesus more solidly in the context of the Jewish religion and to downplay, to some degree, the iconoclastic nature of his teachings. He wants to present Jesus as the next in a line of socially and religiously progressive rabbis, someone who takes the teachings of other rabbis and expands on them rather than being a teacher of things that are, on their face, violently opposed to the entire thrust of Judaism. This results in a Jesus who is less aggressive in his attacks on the Pharisees and less dismissive of the Mosaic Law in general. Secondly, Graves is fascinated with the conflict between what he presents as the patriarchal orthodox Judaism, driven by the Mosaic traditions, and the matriarchal, more gnostic side of Judaism, driven more by spiritual experience, more of a mystical approach. Jesus, as presented here, is very conscious of this conflict and explicitly places himself on the side of the patriarchy and sees a large part of his mission as a teacher to push back against the feminine spiritual influences, which also typically includes a lot of non-Torah mythology. This is a theme that Graves would deal with just a couple of years later in The White Goddess in a much more explicit way, exploring how monotheistic, patriarchal religions like Judaism were responsible for the downfall of goddess worship and pagan religions. This is all pretty fascinating, but it does result in the Jesus of this book coming across as more misogynistic than he does in the Gospels and it strikes me that by removing Jesus’ ire towards the religious leaders of the day and his more progressive ideas about the value of women in society that Graves has stripped away two of the elements that make Jesus, as a character, most appealing to modern irreligious society.
But I’ve saved the best/most controversial agenda for last. Graves is dedicated to a more or less “realistic” approach to this story, which obviously doesn’t bode well for the miracles. Surprisingly, Graves does allow for a few minor miracles; most of the healings Jesus performs are down to his knowledge of physiology and medicine which enables him to provide rudimentary medical care to people who’ve never received it before, but the book admits that there were cases where it seemed that the healings were indeed supernatural. But the Virgin Birth? Oh, that’s right out. In this telling of the story, the Biblical character of Simeon is a Rabbi who can read the signs of the times; the Jewish people are ready for their Messiah and Simeon is prepared to give them one. To that end, he’s able to arrange a secret marriage between Mary and Herod Antipater; Antipater then fathers Jesus and Mary is married to Joseph as a cover-up. Once Jesus is born and grows to be a man will the truth of his parentage be revealed and he will then take the throne of Israel, to which he is legally entitled, and throw off the Roman yoke. Due to Graves’ interest in this conspiracy theory, the title character doesn’t appear until probably a fourth of the way into the book, with a lot of time spent at the beginning on this conspiracy and the various players in it, as well as Herod the Great’s efforts to create a cult surrounding himself to replace Judaism. This section of the book is really strong. Graves does have some weaknesses as a writer, though most of the time they connect back to formal decisions he’s made (more on that later), and one of those is that he sometimes doesn’t really bring his characters to life. Herod Antipater is one of the best characters in this book; he wants to eventually be a better ruler than his father and genuinely loves his people and would like to see them free of the Romans, but he struggles with self-doubt and uncertainty. And he’s cursed with that most tragic of all insights, a vague insight into his own place in this narrative. The feeling of impending doom hangs over him; he knows, without knowing, that his fate is not going to be a happy one. This puts him in a good position to be manipulated by Simeon, also a fascinating character. One could argue, as Graves more or less is, that the machinations that resulted in the birth of Jesus and his placement as a possible Messiah were entirely earth-bound; Simeon would say that he is only the earthly instrument of God and that his plan is no less divinely inspired than a virgin birth would be.
But this review is becoming unwieldy in length and I haven’t even talked about the real masterstroke here, which is that Graves has created a character, not unlike Claudius, to serve as the actual narrator of this tale. This book is written in the voice of Agabus of Decapolis, a historian writing during the reign of Emperor Domitian, writing specifically to correct the mistakes and fabrications that he sees in the other histories that have been written about Jesus. This creates a nice meta layer to the book wherein the reader is never entirely sure which of Agabus’ agendas really is also Graves’. It also allows the book to be open about its revisionism and self-conscious of its controversy; Agabus knows he is writing to challenge notions about Jesus and knows his ideas will be controversial. And it also allows Graves to present this story of Jesus, not from the perspective of an omniscient, all-knowing narrator who is telling us the “truth” about Jesus and his life, but from the perspective of a writer with agendas much as the writers of the original Gospels had their own agendas as well. It places this narrative as being, in an interesting way, just another perspective on Jesus and this makes it, in my opinion, more interesting than if it was, in the conceit of the novel, the “truth.” Agabus, in fact, is, while he gives us little in the way of concrete personal details, one of the most interesting, if not the most interesting, characters in this book. It’s his beliefs, his philosophies and his motives that are key to driving this book and, as a reader, I was always conscious of Agabus as a filter; he keeps you on your toes, always watching to see where he seems inconsistent. Is Agabus, after all, that much more credible than the Gospel writers? It creates a really interesting meta experience.
Graves does a good job with the character of Jesus, in my opinion. He’s a difficult character, but sympathetic. But, of course, Graves has his entire story wrapped up in this notion of an earthly Kingdom, not a spiritual one and that leads inexorably to this story becoming a tragedy. If you don’t buy into the spiritual levels of Jesus’ death on the Cross (um . . . spoilers?), then the Crucifixion really can’t be anything else. And, in keeping with those tragic overtones, Graves has given his Jesus a fatal flaw. To use the word that Graves himself repeats several times, that flaw is “haste.” The temptation in the desert sequence in this book is, predictably, really great and it revolves around Jesus having encounters/visions with various animals, all of whom represent some dark character trait that he must master. In all the encounters, he returns to camp with the animal tamed, except for one: an encounter with a massive white bull. It’s this “white bull of haste” that drives Jesus’ ambition and leads to his downfall. His ambition is presented as a mostly selfless one, a desire to be the leader the Jewish people need and to free his people from the Romans, but it ultimately leads him to make his bid for power too soon, before the people are sufficiently prepared to follow him and his death is a failure, a tragic story of that rarest of things, a genuinely good man suited for leadership, brought low too soon. He’s something of an echo of Antipater in that way, at least the Antipater presented by Graves.
If I have anything negative to say about this book, it’s that it is definitely challenging and sometimes difficult. Graves is a really effective mimic of ancient history writing and so there are sections of this book that are a slog to get through, just as there are sections of the Bible and other histories of this period that are a slog. And Graves is often working on levels that are just over my head. There’s a section where Jesus meets a religious pilgrim and the two of them have a very detailed and granular discussion about . . . well, numerology and comparative linguistics. It goes for several pages and apparently Jesus and the pilgrim are gaining deep spiritual and philosophical insights from things like the different words their languages use to describe the same thing and how many letters are in each word and all sorts of things and I had not one clue what was going on. But there’s something kind of refreshing about reading a book where you just understand that the author is smarter than you on basically every level and you can feel that raw intelligence and yet the author isn’t condescending to you as a reader. It’s a book I read pretty slowly and at around five-hundred pages of closely-set type, it took quite a while. So, it wasn’t always fun or a page-turner, but it was ultimately very rewarding and I’m still thinking a lot about it and it’s just an incredibly rich book, as evidenced by me cranking out six paragraphs about it kind of off the top of my head and still really barely scratching the surface of, you know, the plot, which differs a lot from the Biblical narrative. Does King Jesus replace the Jesus of the Gospels? Well, not for me, and it’s not really intended to in my opinion, but as a fascinating, off-beat, idiosyncratic look at one of history’s most controversial and impactful personages, it’s a masterpiece. 4 stars.
tl;dr – revisionist, multi-layered exploration of one of the most significant people in history is compelling, challenging, incredibly rich and, ultimately, incredibly rewarding. 4 stars.