Novels about Jesus

On this Easter morning I have been thinking about all of the bad fiction about Jesus of Nazareth written by those who believe in him. Some of it has attained fame (Lew Wallace’s Ben-Hur, Lloyd C. Douglas’s Robe, Thomas B. Costain’s Silver Chalice), but for a reader outside the church, pretty much all of it is pretty hard to take. Have there been any good novels?

Various non-believers have come at the Gospel story from various non-Christian angles. Probably the most controversial was Nikos Kazantzakis, whose Last Temptation of Christ (1951) was placed on the Vatican’s Index Librorum Prohibitorum. George Moore was determined to leave a realistic account of the life and wrote The Brook Kerith (1916), imagining an entirely human Jesus who nevertheless survived the crucifixion. D. H. Lawrence’s last book was The Man Who Died, published the year before he died in 1930. Resurrected to become a wanderer, Jesus finds himself in an Egyptian temple and falls in love with a priestess there, who believes he is Osiris.

The Yiddish novelist Sholem Asch wrote The Nazarene in 1939, and caused a literary scandal. (He was very nearly written out of Yiddish literature, although Time magazine was quick to reassure readers that “it should not offend Christian sensibilities.”). Robert Graves wrote King Jesus (1946), one of his weakest historical novels (a recent reviewer called it “Graves’s Satanic Verses”). Norman Mailer wrote a novel in the form of Jesus’ autobiography, The Gospel According to the Son (1997), which sounds like a knockoff of Kazantzakis’s novel, if Michiko Kakutani is to be believed—quite a leap of faith in its own right.

The late Reynolds Price wrote a novella, an “apocryphal gospel,” entitled The Honest Account of a Memorable Life (1994), originally published in Theology Today. It may be more interesting as theology than fiction.

Except for Price, though, I am forced to conclude that only someone who is neither a believer nor a non-believer could possibly write a good novel about Jesus of Nazareth.

Update: A reader writes to suggest The Master and Margarita, while adding that he suspects Bulgakov was not “a believing Christian.”