Late to the party!

I finally read one of the best selling and most iconic books in American history, albeit it was published in 1880, but what is a hundred years between friends?  I saw a really bad Canadian movie of 'Ben-Hur' last year and recently we listened to the Focus on the Family audio drama, but I had never read the book, along with all the other snippets and cultural references that were still present in my own girlhood: an episode call 'Ben-Hog' in the animated Garfield series of the late 1980s, Anne of Green Gables getting in trouble for reading it during geometry...  I think I have even seen the classic movie, but I have never read the book!

Overall I found it an excellent read, the author's attention to detail is exquisite and is the next best thing to a trip to the Holy Land.  It kept me interested, characters, plot, language, pacing, even though I vaguely knew the plot, were all very well done.  The only thing that really annoyed me was the author's insistence on placing Christ's birth on December 25th and making Jesus and His mother's physical appearance identical to all those romanticized, Caucasian Jesus pictures, where He looks like a well groomed hippy!  For a guy who did so much research and paid such attention to every other detail, it was a little irksome, if he hadn't bothered with such painstaking detail elsewhere, I would have let it pass, but it is obvious he's only trying to avoid angering his readers by enlightening them to the real facts of the matter that Jesus most likely did not have blue eyes and that we don't really know the exact day of His birth, though it is likely around lambing time.

Jesus wasn't physically pretty, Isaiah tells us that, 'He had no beauty or majesty to attract us to him, nothing in his appearance that we should desire him,' in the 53rd Chapter predicting the Messiah and His suffering for humanity's sin.  So boy band Jesus is a figment of our imaginings.  I understand why he wrote that way, but it clashes with the rest of the novel, which is otherwise so precise in every minute detail, which is ironic as a major theme of the book is people realizing that the Messiah did not come as a physical King or a military conqueror to overthrow the Romans, but rather to save the souls of men.  While the author wanted to open the eyes of his characters to the true nature of the Son of God, he was willing to allow his readers to persist in their cultural naiveté as to the birth date and physical appearance of their Savior, not that those are major issues, but it is amusingly ironic!

I also find it interesting the vast differences in the movies and audio dramas and other spin offs from the original.  Many of them miss the entire point of the book, and it is not the chariot race.  Just for that you should read the book, and even if you've seen all the movies, etc., you might be rather surprised by the plot!  Overall, it is a very good read, especially if you are curious about the subtitle, which most of the spin-offs seem to forget, 'A tale of the Christ.'  Enjoy!