Before it evolved into a stage or movie spectacle in the twentieth century Ben-Hur: A Tale of the Christ had already become a popular phenomenon in its original incarnation as Lew Wallace’s 1880 bestseller, the only American novel of the nineteenth century to rival Uncle Tom’s Cabin in its sales and impact on popular culture in the United States and Europe. However, over time Wallace’s story lost some of the elements that, this paper argues, made it so meaningful to readers in Gilded Age America. The key aspects largely missing from later versions can be briefly encapsulated under the rubrics of religion and masculinity. While Ben-Hur in all of its manifestations has drawn on a fascination with the origins of Christianity, only in the original novel can we see author and audience directly engaged in the era’s quest for the historical Jesus. Even more strikingly for a novel that readers affirmed as a spiritual experience, Wallace’s novel was shaped by the deistic ecumenism that in a little over a decade would lead to the World’s Parliament of Religions at the Columbian Exposition in Chicago in 1893. The apparent paradox finds at least partial resolution in the novel’s treatment of another preoccupation of the age – the nature of masculinity amidst the “feminization of American culture.” The original Ben-Hur was a Bildungsroman in which the protagonist achieves through his experiences and his encounters with Jesus a new understanding of the meaning of Christ’s mission and to his own role and responsibilities as an adult self-disciplined male.

• Donald C. Bellomy(Honam U)