BEN HUR:A Tale of the Christ……. helped Wallace sort out his own beliefs about God and Christ, and has inspired others to do the same. A TLC BOOKS favorite. A must read! 435 Pages in print! A Christian novel!
• This volume includes a “Detailed Biography” of our author, Lew Wallace.
In plot the story is simple enough. Ben Hur has been wrongly convicted of an attempt to kill the Roman Governor of Judea and sentenced to death on the Roman galleys. His fortune has been stolen and his family locked away in a dungeon. Ben Hur survives the galleys and defeats his enemy in the now famous chariot race at the Circus at Antioch.
If this were the end of Wallace's story we would have been left with a decent story of revenge and nothing more. However, Wallace incorporates into his story (bookends it really) with the story of the Passion of Jesus.
Wallace uses the coming of Jesus to examine the issues of his own faith. To analyze the dual nature of Jesus as King and Redeemer. To Ben Hur and the fiercely nationalist Jews of his time the world was waiting for a King to come to overthrow the power of Rome. Ben Hur sees this king as an element of his revenge against Rome and uses his restored fortune to build an army in support of the king.
By the end of the novel Ben Hur realizes that the King was not to come to overthrow Rome but to be a Redeemer of souls. That the kingdom to be created was not to be one of this world.
To date, Ben-Hur is still the greatest Christian novel ever written, as well as one of the all-time great classics. Men still struggle with the question of whether Christ is an earthly King or a Savior of souls. To find out, we must all take similar journeys to Ben-Hur and Balthasar, and be hindered along the way by various Messalas. Not many of us will be like Balthasar and "get" it so quickly. Most of us will be more like Ben-Hur: accept what life throws at us with defiance, deal with it as best we can, struggle, realize we can't do it on our own, accept God's salvation, transcend our troubles through faith, and be transformed into someone new, someone Christ-like. Ben-Hur isn't just about Lew Wallace's journey from failure to freedom; like Pilgrim's Progress, it reflects the common journey all Christians must take.
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