Uncertain, Fugitive, Half-fabulous

[Cross-posted on my blog, with bonus Robert-Graves-Looking-Crazy!]
When the words "KING JESUS" in huge letters peek out at you from the bookshelves of a weird used bookstore, you notice. Or at least, I do, especially when it’s the weekend before Christmas. Even though I’ve never been a Christian. But it was the perfect kind of pre-Christmas day. Coldly sunny outside, warm and welcoming in the bookstore/café, and there were actual carolers doing a little performance. A really good one!

So they sang, and I sat at a table and cracked open King Jesus, in part just because. What I got, much to my surprise, in those first few pages was an introduction to how very steeped in Judaism early Christianity was, that then turned into a sort of mini-treatise on early Judaism, the Pagan ideas that formed it, and its break away from goddess ideas and matriarchy.

That’s when I decided to actually look up this Robert Graves guy on my phone, and realized that he was the author of [b:I, Claudius|18765|I, Claudius (Claudius, #1)|Robert Graves|http://d.gr-assets.com/books/1348245799s/18765.jpg|4232388]. So there was some real historical muscle behind this book, and I’ve always found early Christianity and the Jesus story itself fascinating. I read on, and came to the passage that really sold me on it:

"Jesus denouncing the Pharisees indeed! It is as though Socrates were represented as having denounced philosophers in general because he had found flaws in the arguments of particular sophists."

Gold!

So, now having finished it: what a great and frustrating piece of work. It’s strange when you come out of a book not loving it, having some real issues with it, including long stretches that were a slog, but still very much looking forward to reading more by that author. In the case of King Jesus and Robert Graves, that has a lot to do with the parts of the book that work.

So let’s just get this out of the way: most of the best parts of the book are the parts without Jesus. I’ll get to why, but what this means is that the book is front-loaded with a lot of great stuff, as the whole first part is mostly buildup to his birth. That chunk of the book is all crazy political intrigue, back-stabbing, and a religion trying to assert itself amongst all of the old ways that still permeate everything. Herod is shown as an amazingly evil and wily king who often figures out ingenious ways to bump off his own sons, and poor Antipater seems like the nicest, dumbest prospective king in the world.

More importantly, the early part of the book paints an extremely rich picture of the time, and of the way people thought in Jerusalem in the last century BC (or at least a very convincing possibility for how they thought). I felt like I was learning something new in every paragraph. This goes on through most of the book, but later on it begins to seem so intent on showing off all the research Graves did that it loses track of the story. Historical research requires an author to really remember that whole "tip of the iceberg" thing. But whenever the narrator actually shows up to speak a little more in his own voice (which was nowhere near often enough), he is delightfully catty and fun -- often more fun than the people he talks about.

That whole first section, with political/religious intrigue and history about Jerusalem is wonderful, and I would gladly have read a whole novel about that. It's telling, then, that the best parts after Jesus is born fall into three headings:

1) Scenes about Jesus the young boy. Having no biblical analogues to either follow or discredit, these parts are much freer than most of the stuff actually about Jesus. Specifically, there's an amazing passage about what it was like when Jesus was playing with other children that was one of the most wonderful things I'd ever read.

2) Scenes in which our catty narrator debunks shit. Much like that bit about the Pharisees that I quoted, our narrator continues, now and again, to take us out of the story and just talk shit about the crazy ways that Jesus' story has been interpreted. These are a fun way for Graves to show off his theorizing and/or research, without it feeling useless.

3) Scenes with Pontius Pilate. This is why I want to read I, Claudius so badly, because when Graves stops worrying about having his characters be ponderous and serious and talk in flowery, almost biblical language (and it's strange that he does worry about that, considering how the book's point is largely to be un-biblical), he's able to have a silly, excessive, asshole of a Roman character, which is a lot more fun. Since Claudius is pretty much all that, I can see why it's the more popular novel.

Much of the rest of the book, which actually deals with Jesus wandering about and preaching, works sporadically and then doesn't. Graves has to jump through so many hoops to address almost everything that happens in the gospels, but to make all of it new, and Jesus himself doesn't come across as the most consistent character this way. What's more, the whole point of the book is to show how a non-divine, human Christ might have been... but then there are still scenes that can't be explained without at least the existence of magic and demons, if not a divine son of God.

The non-divine version of Jesus, like many things in here, seems like an idea that Graves came to, liked, and then halfway through realized that he didn't know where to go with it. See also: Jesus being, by jumping through a lot of genealogical hoops, the rightful king of Israel (hence the title); as well as the stuff about Judaism, and Jesus himself, trying to undo matriarchal religion. We end up with a version of Jesus of Nazareth who isn't divine, doesn't actually get anything out of his royal blood, derives many of his ideas about peace and love directly from Jewish thought and specifically from Hillel (as the real gospels do), and is rather obsessed with keeping women in their exalted, but still lesser, place. And the problem with all this is that we never get an idea of how we, or Graves, or Graves' narrator, are supposed to regard him -- which would be fine if one ever got the feeling that Graves was trying to leave things open for the reader. Instead, it feels like, again, halfway through he kinda gave up and just had a buncha stuff happen.

The book finally picks up again when we get near the end, and the way that Jesus' death, in this version, all comes from a botched attempt at fulfilling a prophecy he had running through his head -- a nice little callback to the weird stuff that Herod was trying to do in the first part, showing them to be a little similar. Still, while it gets good when actual storytelling is going on, one has to slog through a hard middle section to get there.

Also: for some reason the ancient Israelites are constantly eating corn? How the fuck does that work? Is it a weird translation for a food they had that we don't have an English word for?

Anyway, the good parts of King Jesus are really good, but the bad parts can be pretty bad, and not even in a "failing spectacularly" sort of way. Graves clearly had more interest in certain parts of the book than in others, which is why I came away from it liking it, but still can't really wholeheartedly recommend it. If you're interested in this history, and interested in seeing the ways in which Jesus, or whoever came up with those ideas, was a direct evolution of Jewish thought at the time, then you should probably read it. But it's far from perfect.

Yet and still, I came out of it really liking Robert Graves. How does that work?

P.S. There is a character in one scene who is an "ass-surgeon." This is mentioned many times in his short scene. I find it hilarious because I am not an adult.