Ben-Hur

by Carol Wallace

  “Wait,” Simonides broke in. “We know how this story goes. The Roman authorities have begun to hunt them down and forbid their gatherings. Perhaps even . . .”

  There was a silence. Everyone in the room remembered the brutality visited on Simonides and Judah.

  “Yes. There have been episodes . . .” He clarified, “There has been violence.”

  “Romans, violent,” spat Simonides. “Will nothing ever change?”

  Ben-Hur unrolled the scroll again, but his eyes did not see the writing. “Nero . . . he must perceive a serious threat,” he said, “to prompt the kind of measures described here. Our brethren in the capital must indeed be thriving. And they must be very strong in faith, to persist in the face of . . . But they have to have places to gather and worship. Churches have been destroyed,” he explained, twitching the scroll. “Worship services are interrupted and—”

  “Say no more,” commanded Simonides. “We understand.”

  Silence settled over the room as all four of them remembered Roman cruelty in one form or another.

  Esther watched her husband anxiously. The Romans again! Would the danger never end? Would they ever be able to forget the menace posed by the empire? Judah still dreamed of the galleys from time to time. He would wake panting and shouting and thrashing, and for days after he would have to work to control his temper. It was his faith, she thought, that kept him fundamentally kindhearted, but he would always struggle to be peaceful. He had known too much violence too early in life.

  He was tapping his fingers on the scroll as he thought. “These two pieces of news arriving together . . . ,” he said. “What if they are connected? Simonides, the oasis would fetch a sizable sum?”

  “Oh yes,” Simonides said. “A magnificent water source, so sheltered and so close to Antioch? Sizable indeed.” He peered at Ben-Hur through the darkening room. “And don’t forget, Judah. My possessions will be yours soon too.” He silenced Esther’s protest. “I leave this life happy, and I go to meet your mother, my dear. I have much to look forward to.” Esther crossed the room and stood behind his chair to kiss his cheek. His hands came up to cover the hands she rested lightly on his shoulders. “You will have more than any man needs, Judah. What will you do with it all?”

  Ben-Hur stood and picked up the slip of papyrus from the table where Esther had left it. He held the scroll in one hand, the papyrus in the other. “The Lord gives. The Lord takes away. Maybe what the Lord gives me now is the answer to a prayer. Esther and I have worked to help Jesus’ followers in Misenum. We give alms; we have built a house of worship. We have always intended and wished to do more—isn’t that true?” He turned to Esther for confirmation. She nodded. “But the sums I have come to possess are too great to disperse that way.”

  He fell silent for so long that Simonides said, “Tell us, then! What are you thinking?”

  Ben-Hur answered, “I am thinking about Rome. Standing on its hills, with its straight roads and marble buildings. Temples and shrines everywhere. And beneath the ground, catacombs, built with equal care.” He looked around the room, catching everyone’s eye one by one. “The Romans respect the dead. Their places of burial are sacred to them. Could they not also be sacred to the Roman followers of Jesus? Could Christians use the catacombs?”

  “Malluch, we need some light,” Simonides said. “No need for everyone to be as blind as me. What exactly are you saying, Judah?”

  As Esther and Malluch lit lamps, Ben-Hur explained. “Christians need to gather safely. We need to baptize, to worship, to break the bread together. This money that has come to me—perhaps it could be used for that purpose, to create safe places for the faith. These sums could pay for shovels and laborers and guards and bricks, men to draw plans and men to build tunnels.” He looked at Esther. “What do you think?”

  She came to his side. “I think it is a wonderful plan.”

  “I like it too,” said Simonides. “It gives me pleasure to think of my money and the price of Ilderim’s oasis being put to such a use on Roman soil. Underground. Beneath their very feet,” he added with a chuckle.

  Judah stood still, in the center of the room. “Yes,” he said, “it is worth pursuing. Sometimes it is so hard to know what is right.” He took a deep breath and caught Esther’s eye. “Did I ever tell you,” he asked Simonides, “about the last time I saw Jesus?” Esther smiled warmly at him.

  “We all saw him together,” said Simonides. “We saw him die.”

  “Yes. But I saw him again, afterward.”

  “And never told me?” Simonides asked, startled.

  “No. You remember how those days were. I only told Esther later. It was too strange, almost like a dream.”

  “So much was strange in those days, Judah!”

  “That is certainly true,” Judah began while Esther settled herself on the floor at his feet. “We had to bury Balthasar, and Iras had vanished, and everyone in Jerusalem was on edge.”

  Simonides was nodding. “No one felt safe,” he said.

  “All the Jews who had come for Passover scattered back to their homes,” Ben-Hur went on. “The Romans doubled their patrols in the streets, and they were watching everyone. All the same, Jesus’ disciples managed to gather. Did you ever hear the story?” he asked Simonides. “Jesus came to them in a locked room.”

  “I did hear that,” Simonides said. “And there was something more, wasn’t there? About a disciple who didn’t believe it was him?”

  “Thomas,” Esther put in. “Jesus understood. He let Thomas put his hand in the wound in his side. We tell the story often in worship. It’s such a comfort.”

  “For those who need help believing, I suppose,” Malluch suggested. “Because of course it’s impossible.”

  “Yes. We believe the impossible,” Ben-Hur agreed. “That’s a good way to put it. But it’s a hard thing to do. After a few days in Jerusalem, I wanted . . . well, I felt I needed to find the disciples. I didn’t know why exactly. But you remember, I had spent all that time creating an army. And then it was so hard to grasp that we had all misunderstood.”

  “Not Balthasar,” Esther spoke up.

  “No,” Simonides said. “But he had unusual gifts. The rest of us just saw the world as it had been, a world of power and violence, and we prepared for that. Balthasar knew from the start that it was something new.”

  “I was still thinking about weapons and military strategies,” Ben-Hur said. “Even after Gethsemane, when Jesus let himself be captured. I couldn’t help believing force might rescue him. But . . .” He sighed. “Rome had taught me to think in terms of vengeance. That was not Jesus’ lesson, though. I was slower than most to understand.”

  “Most of us have to learn his lessons over and over again,” Esther said.

  Judah nodded. “Anyway, after a few days I went to Galilee. I wanted to see how the disciples were managing. I thought I could learn something from them. Or maybe hear some of the words that the Lord had said when he appeared to them. It was evening when I got there. I went to the shore of the lake, thinking they might be there. They were fishermen. I thought they might be drawn to the water, and sure enough, when I reached the beach, there was a boat just setting out. I could recognize some of them, Peter and James and John. They were fishing. I sat on the shore and watched.

  “It was comforting. The night was beautiful. The stars were so bright! I could even see the boat, though it was out in deep water. I could tell they hadn’t caught anything. They cast and cast and cast. Nobody seemed disappointed.”

  “Sometimes merely doing the familiar is a comfort,” Simonides said.

  “And then dawn came. They were heading back to shore. And they saw someone! I could tell when they all spotted him, even though the sun hadn’t risen. He called out, ‘Any fish?’

  “They answered, ‘No, none!’

  “He said, ‘Cast the net on the right side of the boat, and you will find some,’ and of course they did. The net filled right away and they could barely lift
it into the boat. I ran over to help them when they came ashore and we struggled to manage it. They were the most beautiful fish,” Judah added.

  “The man was Jesus. We all recognized him at once. I knew the disciples felt the same way I did: we were reassured. He had come back! He loved us, all of us. Even me, though I was not one of them. And he would still lead us. Somehow.”

  Jesus eating breakfast with his disciples after his resurrection

  There was silence in the room as they waited for him to continue. “A fire had been lit and bread was there, fresh and warm. The Lord said, ‘Come and have breakfast,’ so we did. We cut open the fish and grilled them. It was a magnificent morning, I will never forget that. The breeze died down and the surface of the lake mirrored the sky. It was as if we sat in a bowl of light, above and below. Jesus served us. He spoke; he touched us. The nail wounds were still there, but he didn’t seem to be in pain. Everyone felt such comfort.”

  He took a deep breath. “And then Peter asked him the question. It’s the question we ask over and over again: What should we do now? I tell you this story because I had the answer wrong for so much of my life. But now I try to do as Jesus said, to the best of my ability. He said to Peter, and to all of us, ‘Feed my lambs. Tend my sheep. Follow me.’”

  Afterword

  April 6, 1862, was the worst day of Lew Wallace’s long, eventful life.

  It was a tragic day for thousands of American families: nearly twenty-four thousand Union and Confederate soldiers were injured or killed on a swampy battlefield in southwestern Tennessee, near a church called Shiloh.

  And it was a disastrous day for the commanders of those soldiers, who discovered just how destructive this war was going to be. Previous Civil War battles had involved smaller bodies of armed men; at Shiloh two immense forces met, wrought death and destruction on a massive scale, and limped apart, with no clear advantage to either. More soldiers died there than in all previous American battles combined. Those who had believed the War between the States could be settled with one decisive confrontation had to change their minds after Shiloh.

  Lew Wallace never lived that day down. When it dawned, he was the youngest major general in the Union Army, a dashing slim figure on a tall bay horse, commanding a reserve division of eight thousand men with verve and confidence. By nightfall, when his sodden troops finally joined the battered and diminished regiments that had fought all day, he knew that his commanding officer, Ulysses S. Grant, was angry. At 9 a.m. Grant had ordered Wallace to bring his division to reinforce the Union flank.

  And Wallace . . . well, Wallace and his men didn’t arrive until well after 6 p.m., leaving Grant’s forces exposed, exhausted, and on the verge of retreat.

  The battle lasted another day and the Union (barely) prevailed, but the casualties made headlines in North and South. How could the Union have bungled so badly?

  Grant had an answer: It was Wallace’s fault.

  Wallace had a rebuttal: His orders hadn’t been clear.

  Those were the two men’s positions after the battle, and neither one gave an inch until more than twenty years later, when new evidence turned up and Grant relented, allowing that perhaps Wallace had been right all along.

  Lew Wallace pulled up a sapling near where he’d staked his tent at Shiloh and had Tiffany & Co. make it into this inscribed walking stick.

  By then, in the mid-1880s, one might have thought Lew Wallace wouldn’t care anymore. He was rich and famous beyond anything he could ever have hoped for. But he felt to his dying day that his honor had been smirched, and he was a man who cared very deeply about this old-fashioned concept.

  In many ways, in fact, Lew was born a little bit too late, out of step with the age he lived in. Throughout his life he reached for the colorful, the exotic, the adventurous, in a period that saw American life grow ever more steady, predictable, and humdrum. In the end, Lew’s yearning for deeds of glory made his fortune, in a way he could not have predicted. So did the Shiloh episode. And maybe strangest of all, so did a chance encounter on a train.

  The last occurred in September of 1876, nearly fifteen years after Shiloh. The intervening years had been mixed for Lew. He’d been relieved of his command soon after Shiloh, and it was months before he would lead troops in battle again. And despite successes at Fort Donelson and Monocacy, he was not promoted further. (This was actually good judgment on the part of the Union command: as a soldier, Lew was inclined to be insubordinate and hotheaded.) Since he was a lawyer in civilian life, he had served on the military juries that tried the Lincoln assassins and the commandant of Andersonville, the notorious Confederate prison camp. Then there was a confusing spell when Lew went to Mexico to try to raise and train an army to rebel against the French who had occupied Mexico in a misbegotten colonial effort. Lew returned speaking Spanish but deep in debt, having been swindled over armaments and supplies for forces that never materialized.

  Finally the adventures ran out. Lew had to settle down in Crawfordsville, Indiana, to a humdrum legal practice that must have felt like failure. There he was—a man who’d run away from home at the age of twelve to join an earlier Mexican war; a man who’d raised six regiments of Indiana troops and persuaded them to drill and dress like Algerian Zouaves, in short jackets and long, loose bloomers, all in the name of military efficiency; the son of Indiana’s sixth governor and brother-in-law of the thirteenth—and he was pleading cases in stuffy small-town courtrooms in an effort to pay off substantial debts to his banker brother-in-law.

  On the plus side, he had a clever and pretty wife with a tart sense of humor, a thoughtful young son, and the best hobby ever for a man who required escape from daily life. For Lew Wallace, in his time off, wrote novels.

  In this, as in his personality, Lew was out of step with the times. The 1870s were the days of realism in American fiction. Fashionable novels immersed readers in urban poverty, the plight of immigrants, characters and dialogue you might encounter in daily life. Lew, meanwhile, had researched and written an epic about Hernán Cortés’s 1519 conquest of Mexico, complete with archaic-sounding language. The Fair God was published in 1873 and well-received, though not such a success that Lew could quit his law practice. Still, he understood clearly that his fiction habit was a constructive one, allowing him to mentally escape from the legal drudgery that paid the Wallace family bills. He enjoyed the research as much as the writing itself, and in fact he followed The Fair God with a novella about the magi. He wasn’t a religious man, but in 1870s America, everyone more or less absorbed the Gospels from the culture. Lew the voyager, the seeker of adventure, was fascinated by the three men of different faiths who set out from their far-flung homes to follow a star in search of the Redeemer of mankind. It was something he might almost have done himself.

  Lew Wallace from his time as governor of New Mexico

  Nevertheless, in 1876 Lew was almost fifty. Healthy, but definitely aging. What more could life hold? How much longer could he stand to face off in a dusty little county courtroom against a tobacco-chewing judge and a defendant with poor hygiene, pocketing his fee at the end of the day only to confront an uncomfortable trip back home and an endless string of similar days?

  No wonder he had planned to go to the Boys in Blue reunion in Indianapolis in September of that year. There would be speeches and music, possibly some drinking, and a march through the handsome downtown streets. There would be political campaigning, which interested Lew, though his own congressional campaigns in 1868 and 1870 had come to naught. He was a supporter of Rutherford B. Hayes, the Republican candidate for president, and the reunion would feature a speech from America’s most impressive orator of the era, Robert Ingersoll.

  That sounds strange today, but Robert Ingersoll was a superstar in 1876. Before television, before radio, before recorded music, live performance was a staple form of entertainment, and Americans turned out in droves to hear, believe it or not, men making speeches. It must be said, reading some of Ingersoll’s work today, that
the man had a terrific way with words. But even more than that, he had a remarkable point of view, for Ingersoll was America’s best-known agnostic.

  He was also a natural-born provocateur. One of his favorite pastimes was to engage strangers in debate about the divinity of Christ, which he denied utterly. And as it happened, Ingersoll was on Lew Wallace’s train to the Boys in Blue reunion on September 19, 1876. Ingersoll invited Lew into his private compartment, and as the train clattered along the rails toward Indianapolis, the two men started talking.

  Basically, Ingersoll took Lew apart. Did Lew believe in Christ? Yes. Why? He didn’t know. Had he read the Gospels? Um . . . some of them. Did he really believe in those miracles? Um . . . maybe. Why? Did Lew really believe Jesus had risen from the dead? All that nonsense about Lazarus, three days dead and half-decomposed—how could an educated man believe such a thing?

  Lew didn’t know. He didn’t know much, he realized. And his talk with Ingersoll embarrassed him. Faith was a vital issue in those days, and though Lew was no churchgoer, he recognized Christianity as fundamentally important. How could he, an educated, inquiring man, have reached his age without ever giving serious thought to his faith?

  And then, being Lew Wallace, he decided to look into the issue, which meant writing a book about it. In fact, as he walked through the quiet Indianapolis streets to his brother’s house that night, he realized that he had already begun it. His novella about the voyage of the magi—what else was it but the beginning of a novel about Jesus? He’d already written the Nativity section, and it would obviously have to end with the Crucifixion. The material in between would bring to life the ancient world of Jesus’ time—and Jesus himself. The challenge and the pleasure would come in inventing characters and incidents who would personify the conflicts of the ancient world. The power and grandeur of the Roman Empire at its peak would eventually be embodied in Messala, the privileged Roman youth, while the oppressed Jewish population of Judea took form in the young prince Judah Ben-Hur. The action of the novel would focus mostly on the years before and during Jesus’ active ministry, ultimately bringing Ben-Hur into the Savior’s presence.