Messala is a Roman by birth and has become cruel and arrogant in his time away, mocking Ben-Hur’s country and religion, and Ben-Hur rejects him. Ben-Hur is meeting an old friend of his, Messala, who has been away in Rome for the past five years. There, Mary gives birth to the baby Jesus, whose arrival is heralded by angels and the visiting Magi from the East.īen-Hur is born roughly at the same time as Christ, but the reader first encounters Ben-Hur when he is about 15 or 16 years old. In labor, and refused from an inn, they resort to a cave in a nearby hillside, surrounded by shepherds watching their flocks.

The novel begins with the story of the birth of Jesus as outlined in the Gospels of Matthew and Luke: Three Magi following a bright star come to Nazareth, where Mary and Joseph have stopped on their way to Bethlehem. The narrative is divided into eight books, or parts, each with their own sub-chapters, and the unfolding of Ben-Hur’s story runs parallel to Jesus’ story. As Ben-Hur’s life intersects with that of the Biblical Jesus, compassion overrides Ben-Hur’s thirst for revenge against the merciless Romans who left his life in ruins. Sent to the galleys as punishment, his mother and sister, Tirzah, are caught up in his fate, jailed, contract leprosy, and are stripped of their family’s wealth and possessions. The story traces the life of the fictional main character Judah Ben-Hur, a Jewish nobleman from Jerusalem whose future is upended when he is falsely accused of attempting to assassinate Roman governor, Valerius Gratus. From Roman tax collectors and charioteers, to lepers, fishermen, Pharisees, shepherds, John the Baptist, and Pontius Pilate, Ben-Hur offers a narrative arc of redemption through piety. A classic story of redemption and forgiveness, Lew Wallace’s Ben-Hur: A Tale of the Christ is one of the most influential Christian novels of the 19th century, as it tells the stories of many peripheral Biblical figures in addition to that of Jesus himself.

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