by Wallace, Lew
Table of Contents
Title Page
Copyright Page
Introduction
Epigraph
BOOK FIRST
CHAPTER I
CHAPTER II
CHAPTER III
CHAPTER IV
CHAPTER V
CHAPTER VI
CHAPTER VII
CHAPTER VIII
CHAPTER IX
CHAPTER X
CHAPTER XI
CHAPTER XII
CHAPTER XIII
CHAPTER XIV
BOOK SECOND
CHAPTER I
CHAPTER II
CHAPTER III
CHAPTER IV
CHAPTER V
CHAPTER VI
CHAPTER VII
BOOK THIRD
CHAPTER I
CHAPTER II
CHAPTER III
CHAPTER IV
CHAPTER V
CHAPTER VI
BOOK FOURTH
CHAPTER I
CHAPTER II
CHAPTER III
CHAPTER IV
CHAPTER V
CHAPTER VI
CHAPTER VII
CHAPTER VIII
CHAPTER IX
CHAPTER X
CHAPTER XI
CHAPTER XII
CHAPTER XIII
CHAPTER XIV
CHAPTER XV
CHAPTER XVI
CHAPTER XVII
BOOK FIFTH
CHAPTER I
CHAPTER II
CHAPTER III
CHAPTER IV
CHAPTER V
CHAPTER VI
CHAPTER VII
CHAPTER VIII
CHAPTER IX
CHAPTER X
CHAPTER XI
CHAPTER XII
CHAPTER XIII
CHAPTER XIV
CHAPTER XV
CHAPTER XVI
BOOK SIXTH
CHAPTER I
CHAPTER II
CHAPTER III
CHAPTER IV
CHAPTER V
CHAPTER VI
BOOK SEVENTH
CHAPTER I
CHAPTER II
CHAPTER III
CHAPTER IV
CHAPTER V
BOOK EIGHTH
CHAPTER I
CHAPTER II
CHAPTER III
CHAPTER IV
CHAPTER V
CHAPTER VI
CHAPTER VII
CHAPTER VIII
CHAPTER IX
CHAPTER X
Lew. Wallace (1827-1905) was born to the future governor of Indiana and the daughter of the state’s first con gressman. After leaving school at the age of sixteen, he assisted in his father’s law firm. Upon the outbreak of the Mexican War, Wallace joined the fighting as a second lieutenant in the First Regiment of Indiana Volunteers. After the war, Wallace was admitted to the Indiana Bar and elected to the state senate. During the Civil War, he became the youngest man to hold the rank of major general. Wallace also served on the military commission responsible for trying and sentencing those involved in the assassination of President Lincoln, and aided Benito Juarez in trying to establish a constitutional government in Mexico. In the course of his three-year tenure as the territorial governor of New Mexico, he wrote Ben-Hur (1880). The publication of lesser literary efforts and his appointment as minister to Turkey followed.
Dr. Tim LaHaye is an author, minister, and Christian educator with more than sixty million books in print. He is the author of fifty nonfiction books, nine of which are bestsellers, and also the coauthor of the phenomenally bestselling Left Behind series and of an entire children’s series. He lives with his wife in Southern California.
SIGNET CLASSIC
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INTRODUCTION
YOU are about to read one of the finest novels ever written. Even after more than a hundred years in print, it is still a worldwide bestseller, read and reread by millions. At one time it outsold all other books in the world except the Bible, and during one decade it even outsold the Bible. It has been estimated that there are more than four hundred editions of the six million copies published in numerous foreign languages. Some say it is the most influential book written in the nineteenth century; I would venture that, except for the Bible, particularly in its many modern translations and paraphrases, Ben-Hur was the most influential book of the twentieth century as well.
The very availability of this one-hundred-twenty-two-year-old book in a popular mass market edition early in the twenty-first century proves it has an enduring quality that few books ever enjoy. What accounts for such appeal? Certainly it has to do with the strong character displayed in the person of Ben-Hur—a bigger than life-size hero of strength, determination, and integrity. But the author also ingeniously weaves parts of what Fulton Orsler called “the greatest story ever told,” the life of Jesus Christ, into this masterpiece. How could one miss with a combination of the most influential person who has ever lived, a colorful hero, and a plot that combines suspense, adventure, political intrigue, family drama, romance . . . and a chariot race that for excitement is in a category by itself?
If you’re getting the impression that I think this book is an all-time classic, you’re right. It is an exhilarating, intriguing, emotionally stimulating book that has inspired many people to read it more than once. What other book, twenty-five years after its publication, had been made into a stage play that ran more than six thousand performances for an audience of an estimated twenty million people? What other book has been made into three classic movies, two silents, in 1907 and 1925, and the magnificent 1959 Technicolor version starring Charlton Heston? (I have seen it four times and still love it!) The most expensive film made to that point in time, its production threatened to bankrupt the studio. But on the contrary, it won unprecedented critical acclaim and swept the Oscars.
So we have a thrilling, timeless story—one that encompasses, I should add, the most important three-and-a-half years in world history: the public ministry of Jesus Christ, A.D. 30-33. But we should not forget the skill with which the book was written. For it was ingeniously constructed by a painstaking author who spent years reading books on the Holy Land, talking to people who had been there, studying maps, and poring over correspondence. In the end he produced a more meticulously accurate description of the time and place than almost any published before him.
No wonder the book was acclaimed a classic and the author a genius by the literary crit
ics of his day. For it is still considered a classic, and he must truly have been a genius.
THE MAN
Lew. Wallace had one of the most profound effects on American literature of any author in this country’s history. Born in 1827, in Brookville, Indiana (his father would later become governor), Wallace as a youth had little interest in school, but he was an avid reader who became a truly self-educated man. At sixteen he began his first job, copying legal documents in the county clerk’s office for the handsome sum of eighteen dollars a week. This position educated him in the field of law, and he eventually was admitted to the bar and became a lawyer.
The Mexican War, which broke out in 1846, appealed to his love of adventure, and he recruited a group of men to form the First Regiment of Indiana Volunteers. Although he didn’t get to see the military action he desired, the experience did prepare him to write his first novel, The Fair God, about Cortez’s invasion of Mexico; he eventually published this book in 1873. Even in this first effort he proves himself adept at writing exciting battle scenes. After the war he practiced law and served in the state senate, until President Abraham Lincoln requested that he recruit an even larger group of Indiana volunteers to fight in the Civil War.
This provided him the action he sought, and he distinguished himself on the battlefield to such a degree that he quickly rose to the rank of major general. Among his many exploits as a military officer was his defense of Washington, D.C., against a superior force of Confederates in 1864. Had he not been successful, it could have changed the outcome of the war and led to the breakup of the United States. At the very least, a defeat at that point would have protracted the tragic conflict.
In 1878, he was appointed governor of the New Mexico Territory; and upon completion of that assignment in 1881, he was appointed U.S. minister to Turkey by President Garfield.
Although he began writing Ben-Hur in 1875, it was not completed until his tenure in New Mexico. The book’s first printing in 1880 by Harper was a healthy sixteen thousand copies; sales were slow at first, but soon began to soar. Enormously successful, Wallace became a public figure in great demand as a lecturer and spoke to overflow audiences all over the country.
AN EVENT THAT CHANGED HIS LIFE
The book’s amazing success gave rise to a tale that plagued Wallace much of the rest of his life. Two prominent authors of the day had undergone dramatic conversions, and their experiences seem to have been repeatedly and mistakenly transferred to Wallace.
Robert Greenlief, an atheistic English lawyer, set out to disprove Christianity and the credibility of the Bible during a special year of studies in the Holy Land. His research so authenticated the Bible and the resurrection of Jesus Christ that he returned to England a converted man. Similarly, William Albright, the famed archaeologist, went to the Holy Land to prove scientifically that the Bible was unreliable. Instead he was so overwhelmed by the accuracy of Dr. Luke, the author of the gospel that bears his name as well as of the book of Acts, that he too became a believer in Christ and wrote a number of books on the archaeological evidence for the divine authorship of the Scriptures.
Somehow, the story circulated that Lew. Wallace was an unbeliever who went to the Holy Land simply to gather background material for his novel. During that time he supposedly had an epiphany that Jesus Christ really was the Son of God, and returned home a changed man. Wallace repeatedly denied the story and said that he had never been an atheist, but rather uninterested in and uninformed about religion. Furthermore, prior to writing Ben-Hur, he had never visited the Holy Land.
However, even if not an atheist, he did undergo a kind of conversion. The experience that changed his life occurred in 1876 on a train bound for Indianapolis, where he was to attend the Republican convention as well as a gathering of veterans. By chance he happened to pause at the door of the compartment of Colonel Robert Ingersoll, the nineteenth century’s most notorious agnostic and lecturer. No one could dispute Jesus Christ and Christianity more eloquently than Robert Ingersoll.
Wallace himself related the story in the New York Journal & Advertiser: “I passed the state-room . . . someone called my name.
“ ‘Was it you who called me, Colonel?’
“ ‘Yes,’ he said, ‘Come in, I feel like talking.’
“I leaned against the cheek of the door, and said, ‘Well, if you let me dictate the subject, I will come in.’
“ ‘Certainly, that’s exactly what I want.’
“I took a seat by him and began, ‘Is there a God?’
“Quick as a flash, he replied, ‘I don’t know. Do you?’ ”
General Wallace followed with such questions as “Is there a Devil?” “Is there a Heaven?” “Is there a Hell?” “Is there a Hereafter?” To all of these questions Ingersoll responded, “I don’t know. Do you?”
Then Wallace finished by saying, “There, Colonel, you have the texts. Now go.”
“And he did. . . . His manner of putting things was marvelous, and as the Wedding Guest was held by the glittering eye of the ancient Mariner, I sat spellbound, listening to a medley of argument, wit, satire, audacity, irreverence, poetry, brilliant antitheses, and pungent ex coriation of believers in God, Christ, and Heaven, the like of which I had never heard. He surpassed himself, and that is saying a great deal.”
The rest of the story goes on to describe how this performance left Wallace in such confusion that, when they arrived at the station in Indianapolis, he declined to ride the streetcar, but decided to walk in the cool of the night so he could reflect on what he had heard. He then confesses that “my attitude with respect to religion had been one of absolute indifference. I had heard it argued times innumerable. . . . I had read the sermons of great preachers . . . but always for the surpassing charm of their rhetoric.” How perplexing that it took the opposite—“the most outright denials of all human knowledge of God”—to awaken in him a desire to study this religion he had ignored. “It only remains to say that I did as resolved, with results—first, the book Ben-Hur, and second, a conviction amounting to absolute belief in God and the Divinity of Christ.”
Thus the two hours that Robert Ingersoll spent with General Lew. Wallace did more to advance the Christian faith than Ingersoll’s entire lifetime of campaigning against God, Christianity, and the supernatural did to destroy it. This illustrates the power of a single book with a message.
To this day it is still transforming the lives of countless readers. Lee Scott Theisen, for example, in an article on the book for the Journal of Popular Culture, listed some of these life transformations. “Some men, such as Albert L. Shelton, became missionaries after reading the novel. Others were inspired to translate it into different languages. One man wrote Wallace and declared that the book saved his life. ‘On the fifth day of July, 1885,’ he wrote, ‘I was a drunkard . . . bound to a bad end. . . . Everything was black and growing blacker [then] Sunday morning your book Ben-Hur came into my hands and I read it. It brought Christ home to me as nothing else could. . . . I stood up . . . and was a man.’
“In 1959, Life Magazine called Ben-Hur ‘among the most important books ever written in America.’ ” It is indeed difficult to overstate the influence this novel has had on literature in general. Until that time, fiction was generally regarded as “mere” entertainment, inferior to nonfiction and more frequently morally questionable than morally instructive. Ben-Hur, with its painstaking attention to historical and religious detail, proved that good fiction could be entertaining and educational at the same time. Ben-Hur is superbly written fiction that conveys a message that makes the time reading well spent.
In fact, I am going to make a confession. This is the book that made me realize that fiction could be used to send a message that is even more important than the story. For Ben-Hur helped to inspire me to conceive what eventually came to be known as the Left Behind series, a fictional account of what life might be like on this earth after the rapture, when all Christians will be taken to Heaven (John 14:1-3). Jerry B
. Jenkins and I have tried to create believable characters living out exciting stories full of adventure and suspense, while being faithful to the details of biblical prophecy. By now you will recognize Ben-Hur as my role model. We could only wish our series would have the lasting impact on the reading public that Lew. Wallace’s classic has had.
For the impact of his story is as fresh today as when it was written. Recently I was invited to speak at a banquet of four hundred Christians in Hollywood who were completing a conference for those seeking to make a difference in the movie industry by producing faith-based movies. At the close of my address I challenged them to be “unashamedly Christian” in their scriptwrit ing, acting, and producing, as Jerry and I have done in our series. Then I gave the best illustration of that type of entertainment with a message of which I know, citing the classic Ben-Hur—the book that inspired stage plays and the movies. “Remember the way the movie producers artfully communicated Lew. Wallace’s personal faith in the deity of Jesus Christ?” I asked the audience, and then briefly described the scene where the blood of the crucified Christ flowed down His body to the ground, was carried by the rain to a rivulet in the ground to a creek, then to a river and eventually to the whole world, dynamically portraying the forgiving grace of God going out to the whole world.
It was a moving experience even for me. But then it got better. A young movie producer in the audience silently slipped out to his truck, where he had a copy of the Ben-Hur movie. He quickly rolled the tape forward, and by the time I had finished my prayer, the house lights were dimmed and the projectionist rolled that very scene! It had an awesome effect on the audience. There was hardly a dry eye in the house, which proved again to me that fiction is still a powerful vehicle for communicating the greatest story ever told.