Ben-Hur: A Tale of the Christ

Ben-Hur: A Tale of the Christ is a historical novel by the American writer and Civil War general Lew Wallace, first published on 12 November 1880. Set in the first century AD, it follows Judah Ben-Hur, a wealthy young Jewish prince of Jerusalem who is falsely accused of attempting to assassinate a Roman governor by his former friend Messala, and is stripped of his family and property and condemned to the Roman galleys as a slave; after years at sea he wins his freedom, is adopted by a Roman official, and masters the art of chariot racing, which he uses to publicly defeat and ruin Messala in a celebrated race. Throughout the novel Judah's path repeatedly crosses that of Jesus of Nazareth, and the story gradually moves him away from his initial hunger for personal revenge toward the recognition that Christ offers a spiritual rather than a worldly kind of triumph, so that by the time of the Crucifixion Judah has converted to Christianity and devoted his fortune to supporting the early church. Praised in its own time as the most influential Christian book of the nineteenth century and blessed by Pope Leo XIII, the first novel ever to receive such recognition, it outsold every other American novel until Gone with the Wind overtook it in 1936, and its own 1959 film adaptation went on to win a then-record eleven Academy Awards, renewing the novel's popularity for a new generation of readers.