King Jesus

Robert Graves – 1946

“Do you ever relax from your monomania of holiness?” - Pontius Pilate to Jesus

I don’t think I’ve ever been as happily captivated by a novel from beginning to end as I was while reading Robert Graves’ King Jesus. I loved it so much that I felt like it was written especially for me. How Graves was able to present his enormous knowledge of antiquity, blended with his own theories and observations, filtered through his somehow poetic and completely accessible writing style, is nothing short of miraculous in my opinion. Equally remarkable is his ability to tell the story of the life of Christ from secular and pagan perspectives while also displaying due admiration for Jesus himself. The fictional historian who guides us takes the position that most of Jesus’ reported miracles were misunderstood or exaggerated in the retelling, but that Jesus was not only a genuinely gifted holy man with sharp human ethics, and who was legitimately entitled to be known as the King of the Jews as well. I was hooked from the very first page, on which Graves describes the antagonistic relationship between Judaism and “mother goddess” cults in the ancient Levant. This connects to Graves’ other major work of the 1940s, his nonfiction study of paganism and poetry, The White Goddess. The scholar/historian narrator in King Jesus asserts that the great secret of ancient Judaism is that the right of kingship is actually passed through the female line, not the patriarchal. The Biblical characters Hannah (Anna), Elizabeth, Miriam (Mary), the mother of Jesus, and Mary of Cleophas all belong to a parallel or interior sect within Judaism that maintains the ways of the older cults devoted to the mother goddess. “In the name of the Mother,” is a password phrase recognized by them all. Graves suggests that Jesus’ birth was engineered by a clever, farsighted high priest who arranged a surreptitious marriage between Mary, the last in the royal matriarchal line, and Antipater, King Herod’s eldest son and heir, giving their offspring indisputable claims to the Judean throne through both parents. Herod spoils these plans when he condemns Antipater to death as an Abrahamic sacrifice intended to help cure him of the mysterious festering diseases that would claim his life soon after Jesus’ birth, forcing Mary to seek out an arranged second marriage with the carpenter Joseph and to flee to Egypt to protect the infant from the murderous Herod. One of the running themes of the novel is the misogyny that Graves seems to consider inherent in Judaism. The Israelites dread being on the sea, identifying it with the Female, i.e. female sexual power, the lust that corrupts and distracts holy men from their holy business. The great rarely-spoken-of enemy of the Jewish tribes is the mother goddess embodied by the apocryphal Lilith, “the first Eve,” and her fellow priestesses down through the ages. Lucifer/Satan/the Devil is never even mentioned, but it is stated that Jesus’ mission is to personally “destroy the works of the Female.” There is a remarkable and heady chapter in which a type of doctrinal wizards duel takes place between Jesus and Mary of Cleophas (Clopas), a prostitute ringleader and high priestess of the goddess cult, which climaxes with an agreement between the two of them to marry in order to fulfill messianic prophecies that both of them have vested interest in, although the actual marriage, to Mary’s chagrin, is to remain unconsummated. Jesus’ many recorded miracles are explained as either misunderstandings or exaggerated by word of mouth, and in some cases, the result of the power of suggestion. Jesus is careful not to attempt healing anyone who is blatantly incurable. A crippled man is able to stand because Jesus relieves him of his debilitating guilt. The changing of water into wine is just a metaphor, not an actual phenomenon. It is told that Lazarus, a cousin of Jesus’ witch wife Mary, was cursed by her with a condition resembling death in order to lure Jesus home, and that Jesus is somehow able to remove the trance, allowing Lazarus to seemingly rise from the dead. There are unexplained miracles too, however, which the author seems to accept, having no rational explanation, including Jesus’ resurrection. After exiting his tomb, he is last seen disappearing into the mist over a hill in the companionship of three women; Mary, his mother, Mary, his queen, and a third, unidentified woman. As in Frazer’s The Golden Bough, it is observed that crucifixion is an ancient tradition in many cultures, starting as a propitiatory ritual requiring kings themselves to be killed, and degenerating over time into a punishment for lowly criminals. As such, Jesus ends up accidentally fulfilling the pagan “dying god/dying king” prophecy, which he could have averted if he had accepted Pontius Pilate’s help, who clearly accepted that Jesus was King Herod’s grandson, even noting the facial resemblance. Just after his tortuous execution, Jesus’ wife/queen Mary comments to observers that her husband’s actual crime was not against the Pharisees or Rome but “the Female,” whose prophecies cannot be rushed into fruition, not even by someone of Jesus’ great gifts and genius. In losing his battle against the great mother goddess, fervently praying to his Father god to his last breath, Jesus is discredited and condemned. We are left to discern the meaning of his resurrection ourselves, as Graves’ narrator appears to run out of theories in the book’s final pages, but the implication could be that the Female’s, the Triple Goddess’ magic has won out over the Israelites’ slight-of-hand miracles and superstitions, as the three mysterious women on the foggy hill, like Macbeth’s trio of witches, lead the healed and resurrected Son of David off to his true destiny. King Jesus is a truly unique, beautiful, challenging and satisfying work of literature by one of the great English author/scholars.