We had a great crowd last night for Dr. Howard Miller’s lecture “Religious Conversion in Ben-Hur and in the Life of Lew Wallace.” We also streamed the lecture on Facebook Live, which was a popular option for those who couldn’t be with us in person.

If you were unable to join us or watch the live video, you can now watch the entire lecture and Q&A session here!

Lew Wallace spoke frequently about the conversation with Robert Green Ingersoll that led him to write Ben-Hur, and he maintained throughout his life that the experience of writing the novel led him gradually to accept the basic tenets of the Christian gospel.

Recent scholarly discoveries have called into question the talk with Ingersoll and we can never know one way or another if writing the novel converted the General to Christianity. But it is unquestionably true that Wallace’s “Tale of the Christ” contains several accounts of religious conversion, including the conversion of Judah Ben-Hur.

Religious conversion, of course, comes in many varieties and the experiences that Wallace describes differ widely. We will look at those conversion experiences and suggest ways in which they might enable us to evaluate more sensitively the General’s claim to have himself been converted by the experience of writing Ben-Hur. More generally, we will look at the novel as a way of better understanding the nature of Wallace’s Christianity.

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3 thoughts on “Religious Conversion in Ben-Hur – Lecture Video”

Carl Burkart
August 14, 2019, 5:41 pm

Does anyone have an idea why Lew Wallace never mentioned Christ’s resurrection in Ben Hur?

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- Stephanie Cain Post author
  August 21, 2019, 12:30 pm
  
  Hi Carl!
  
  I consulted with Dr. Miller, who provided a wonderful response to this question. He writes:
  
  The first thing I would say to the inquirer is that, while it does not describe the event in any detail, the novel actually does mention the resurrection, at least once. On p. 503 of the Oxford study edition of Ben-Hur, which is p. 589 of the Study edition, Wallace describes Judah’s indecision about whether or not to come to Jesus’ aid after the Nazarene’s arrest.
  
  “A confusion fell upon him; he knew not how, though afterwards he attributed it to the Nazarene; for when the Nazarene was risen, he understood the death was necessary to faith in the resurrection, without which Christianity was but an empty husk.”
  
  However, Judah clearly was converted to belief in the Christ not by his resurrection but by the manner of his death: by Jesus’ superhuman forbearance in the face of torture and ridicule; by the selfless way in which Jesus asked The Father to forgive his persecutors; and, most important, by the fact that Jesus witnessed first-hand the Son speaking to the Father in the moment of his death.
  
  I’m sure that the General would not appreciate my saying what follows because he always insisted that the novel, and especially the stage play, was not a “passion play,” which he always said with something of an implied anti-Catholic snarl. But the fact is that Wallace’s account of the trial and crucifixion carefully follows the Roman Catholic “Passion Play” tradition, which always concluded not with the resurrection on Easter Sunday but with the crucifixion and entombment on Good Friday. In that Catholic tradition, then, there would be no coverage of the resurrection.
  
  Finally, let me suggest that the novel does, in fact, conclude with “a” resurrection, if not “the” resurrection. As you know, the last chapter of Ben-Hur is something of an epilogue and occurs five years after the crucifixion of Jesus. In the last page of the novel, Simonides urges Judah to use all of his enormous fortune to create a sanctuary for the persecuted Christians in Rome in the Catacomb of San Calixto. And what is the concluding sentence of the novel? “Out of that vast tomb Christianity issued to supersede the Caesars.” It is not Jesus of Nazareth but Christianity, which has been saved from death in part by the wealth of Judah Ben-Hur, that emerges from a “vast tomb.”
  
  I hope that answers your question! By the way, it was nice talking with you in person last week. :)
  
  Reply
Thomas J. Riley
April 2, 2021, 12:29 pm

What an excellent lecture! I wish there were more academics talking about Ben-Hur.

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Religious Conversion in Ben-Hur – Lecture Video

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3 thoughts on “Religious Conversion in Ben-Hur – Lecture Video”

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