King Jesus by Robert Graves

First published: 1946

Type of work: Historical novel

Time of work: The first century c.e.

Locale: Palestine

Principal Characters:

• Jesus, the unacknowledged son of Prince Antipater, anointed by John the Baptist as King of the Jews
• Mary, Jesus’ mother, heiress of Michal, formerly a temple virgin
• Herod, King of the Jews, under the protection of the Romans
• Antipater, Herod’s eldest son, the crown prince, secretly married to Mary
• Simon, the High Priest, who officiated at the secret marriage
• Mary the Hairdresser, the queen of the harlots (modeled on Mary Magdalene)

The Novel

A first century Roman tells the story of the wonder-worker Jesus, born to Mary, a temple virgin and an “Heiress of Michal” (King David’s wife). In ancient times, according to Simon, the High Priest, title to the land passed down from mother to youngest daughter by ultimogeniture. Thus David unified Israel by marrying the heiresses of the twelve tribes, and pharaohs of Egypt married their sisters. Therefore, Simon, in order to assure the claim to the throne of Prince Antipater, over his treacherous brothers, secretly marries Antipater to Mary. To protect the pregnant Mary from the dangerous intrigue of the unstable King Herod and his ambitious family, Simon announces her betrothal to Joseph, a kind and pious old man, instructing him to retain a small part of the bride price, without which the contract is not yet legal. Joseph assumes the role of protector, but after Herod murders his own son and seeks the child reportedly born in Bethlehem, Joseph pays the rest of the bride price to Simon and flees with Mary and the child Jesus into Egypt.

This novel creates a new legend of Jesus, his birth, ministry, and death, using much of Graves’s knowledge, intuition, and speculation about Hebrew and pagan mythology, especially the cult of the Great Goddess. Here the goddess is Jesus’ most important adversary. According to Clement of Alexandria, quoting from The Gospel according to the Egyptians (on the flyleaf), the Savior said, “I have come to destroy the works of the Female.”

The novel has three sections, each containing unorthodox reinterpretations of the biblical story. The second section, for example, includes a ritual marriage to the second Mary, sister of Martha and Lazarus, though Jesus refuses to consummate the marriage. It also involves his strange relationship to Mary the Hairdresser, Queen of the Harlots. She is High Priestess of the love goddess, but Jesus exorcises her of the seven deadly sins.

The third section concerns the events leading to Jesus’ death. Because he has refused his wife’s right, under Jewish law, to a child, maintaining the celibacy he adopted among the Essenes, he feels obligated, in response to her plea, to bring her brother Lazarus back from the dead. This occult power demanded that a life be forfeited for the life regained. Unwilling to cause another’s death, he accepts the forfeit of his own life. He decides to adopt the role of the Suffering Servant, prophesied by Isaiah, who takes upon himself the sins of the people. Such a person must be struck down by one close to him. Judas Iscariot is the unlucky disciple chosen for that role. Judas betrays him to the Romans, however, thinking that it will prevent Jesus from thus arranging his own death. Surely they would not execute him, since Jesus had no revolutionary political aspirations and spoke eloquently of a spiritual kingdom, not a secular one. Judas does not anticipate the terrible miscarriage of justice that occurs when Jesus refuses to defend himself before Pilate. In despair, Judas hangs himself in an attempt to ransom the life of Jesus.

Jesus is mourned at the cross by the three Marys, the implied representatives of the Triple Goddess who loved him: Mary the mother, Mary the bride, and Mary the Hairdresser, who is the layer-out (in death) of the sacred hero. Mary the Hairdresser says to Shelom the midwife, “His fault was this: that he tried to force the hour of doom by declaring war upon the Female. But the Female abides and cannot be hastened.”

The Characters

Although Graves takes unusual liberties with biblical texts, he does not trivialize Jesus, or entirely demythologize his significance. While his birth is explained in more naturalistic terms and his temptation in the desert as ancient ritual with the aged Simon taking the part of the Devil’s advocate, he is still the chosen sacred king, devoted to saving the world from sin and death. Some of his followers undoubtedly thought of this in political, revolutionary terms, casting the Romans as their adversaries, but Jesus is not interested in a secular kingdom.

The novel reveals both the high-minded dedication of Jesus as a man of innate vision trained by the austere Essenes and his essential humanity as a man of sorrows. The large gap in biblical records about his early life, for example, is partially explained as being the result of a psychic blow to his self-image. The elders of the synagogue discovered the discrepancy in time between his birth and Joseph’s paying the bride price. They came to the obvious, logical conclusion that he was illegitimate. Bastards, no matter how precocious in wisdom, were denied access to the inner temple. The introspective, sensitive Jesus does not reveal his predicament to his mother, for fear of hurting her. Much later, Mary explains to him the unusual circumstances of his birth, not realizing that he has needlessly suffered the eclipse of his youthful dreams. This accounts plausibly for his relatively late emergence as a religious leader, especially since he is assumed to have spent several years among the Essenes.

Mary the Hairdresser is patterned after the biblical Mary Magdalene, but Graves has made her more than a simple harlot. She is representative of a more ancient religious orientation, in which worship focuses on the neolithic triple goddess of moon, earth, and underworld, controller of birth, love, and death. She and Jesus debate the significance of certain images in a religious shrine. Jesus interprets the pictures as scenes from the Hebrew Old Testament. Mary interprets them by the more ancient myth of Mother Eve bearing twin sons, who contend with each other for the love of the Second Eve, until sacrificed by the Third Eve.

Jesus cannot convert Mary the Hairdresser from her devotion to the pagan fertility goddess. At last turning to magic to exorcise her sins, however, he enlists at least her sympathy and devotion to his spiritual purposes. She is not misled, however, about Jesus’ chances for replacing the law of nature with a spiritual kingdom defined by his masculine god Jahweh. “Nevertheless, Lord,” she warns, “the end is not yet, and when the Mother summons me to my duty, I will not fail her.” That duty is partly the traditional role of old women to prepare the dead body for burial, but it has mythological overtones of ritual acceptance of the sacrifice of the sacred king, which assures his immortality. Thus Jesus, in his high-minded devotion to a spiritual revolution that was to cancel out the material laws of nature, with their inexorable cycle of birth, copulation, and death, involuntarily reenacts the ancient drama of sacrificial death characteristic of pagan vegetation gods subservient to the goddess.

Critical Context

This is probably the most daring and imaginative treatment of Christian myth that contemporary fiction has to offer. It is destined to fascinate and possibly shock readers for many years to come. D. H. Lawrence’s defiant The Man Who Died (1931), which tried somewhat ineffectually to tie the crucified, but not dead, Jesus to a rejuvenation through sex with a priestess of Isis, pales in comparison with this complex novel so steeped in ancient lore of both pagan and Hebrew cults.

Even Graves’s more fantastic imaginings have some correlation to rumor or legends of the period. Graves and Joshua Podro in The Nazarene Gospel Restored (1953) suggest that the idea of Jesus being spiritually begotten by God would have been greeted with horror in Palestine by Jews and ridicule by worldly Romans and Greeks, who would conclude that Jesus was a bastard. Some, however, took the epithet “King of the Jews” literally as indicating that he was Antipater’s son.

One can hardly understand the dynamics of King Jesus without knowing something of Graves’s obsessive fascination with what he called the White Goddess of ancient preclassical myth and cult. Though Graves insisted that this goddess is the poet’s muse, the only appropriate object of the poet’s devotion, this novel shows her more relentless aspect as the source of man’s bondage to matter and the senses, and thus to sin and death. Jesus was in metaphysical revolt, on behalf of men and women too, against the bondage of the mind and spirit to material nature.

Graves and Podro wrote in Jesus in Rome: A Historical Conjecture (1957) that Jesus, like his fellow Apocalyptics, expected the world to end during his lifetime in a series of catastrophes, after which the Kingdom of Heaven would reign on earth for a thousand years. That was one reason Jesus insisted on celibacy and advised it for his disciples. Sexual intercourse made one ritually unclean for three days, and one needed to be constantly ready for God’s imminent coming in glory. Both Jesus and all subsequent millenarians continue to be disappointed in this prophecy, for as Mary the Hairdresser so wisely pronounces, “the Female abides,” in spite of all attempts to supplant the natural order with a supernatural one.

Graves read James Frazer and other anthropologists who have explored the similarities between Hebrew, Christian, and pagan traditions. He adds his own touch, however, to the obvious similarity of the Last Supper to certain well-known pagan rituals of symbolically eating the sacrificed god and drinking his blood. He makes a plausible case for Judas, as an educated and devout Hebrew, seeing this ceremony as deliberate blasphemy, a technique by which Jesus incriminates himself and therefore deserves the scapegoat death that he is determined to enact, a combination of Zechariah’s “Worthless Shepherd” and Isaiah’s “Suffering Servant.” That subsequent Christians would accept this pagan rite, possibly originating in cannibalism, as a sacrament, probably pleased Graves’s well-developed sense of irony. So, too, would the trick of making Judas, the Western world’s quintessential traitor, the most misunderstood man in history.

Bibliography

Cohen, J. M. Robert Graves, 1960.

Graves, Robert, and Joshua Podro. Jesus in Rome: A Historical Conjecture, 1957.

Graves, Robert, and Joshua Podro. The Nazarene Gospel Restored, 1953.

Kernowski, Frank L. The Early Poetry of Robert Graves: The Goddess Beckons. 2002.

Seymour-Smith, Martin. Robert Graves, 1956.

Snipes, Katherine. Robert Graves, 1979.

Stade, George. Robert Graves, 1967.

Vickery, John B. Robert Graves and the White Goddess, 1972.

Ziolkowski, Theodore. Fictional Transfigurations of Jesus, 1972.