"Hate keeps a man alive."
Those famous words do not actually appear in the original 1880 novel
Ben-Hur by General Lew Wallace. Karl Tunberg, or more likely
Christopher Fry or Gore Vidal (there was a dispute over the
screenplay credit), gave that line to Roman patrician Quintus Arrius
as he confronted the magnificent, nearly-naked galley slave Judah
Ben-Hur, played by Charlton Heston, in the 1959 Hollywood
blockbuster. The film cost MGM $15 million to make, won the studio a
record eleven Oscars, and was seen by ninety-eight million people in
cinemas across the United States. It was the only Hollywood movie to
make the Vatican's official list of approved religious films, and,
like clockwork, it is rebroadcast on network television every Easter.
And yet the movie's acclaim still does not compare to the waves of
religious ecstasy that followed the publication of the novel, which
is the most influential Christian book written in the nineteenth century.
Since its first publication, Ben-Hur: A Tale of the Christ has never
been out of print. It outsold every book except the Bible until Gone
With the Wind came out in 1936, and resurged to the top of the list
again in the 1960s. By 1900 it had been printed in thirty-six
English-language editions and translated into twenty others,
including Indonesian and Braille.
The novel intertwines the life of Jesus with that of a fictional
protagonist, the young Jewish prince named Judah Ben-Hur, who suffers
betrayal, injustice, and brutality, and longs for a Jewish king to
vanquish Rome. It has the appeal of a rollicking historical adventure
combined with a sincere Christian message of redemption.
<http://www.neh.gov/news/humanities/2009-11/BenHur.html>Link
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Posted By johannes to
<http://www.monochrom.at/english/2009/11/ben-hur-book-that-shook-world.htm>monochrom
at 11/19/2009 04:53:00 PM
