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throughout the countryside around Galilee, and recruits some disciples. A
few years later, probably in the year ad 30, Jesus enters the city of Jerusalem
before the springtime celebration of Passover, where, according to the
four Gospels, he becomes involved in religious and political controversy,
is arrested, and tried. On the subject of the crucifixion, the four Gospels
are in essential agreement, with some variation in the Gospel of John.
Jesus is remanded to Pilate, the Roman prefect of Judaea, who consigns
him to the jurisdiction of Herod Antipas, the tetrarch of Galilee. When
Herod declines to render judgment, Pilate condemns Jesus to be crucified,
a standard Roman form of execution in this period. Jesus is crucified at
Golgotha, along with two other malefactors, and dies later that day. The
Gospels record various utterances of Jesus from the cross, including
“Father, forgive them, for they know not what they do” (Luke 23:34). All
four Gospels relate that an inscription (titulus) was affixed to Jesus’ cross,
proclaiming him “King of the Jews,” thereby defining his crime as a messianic
challenge to Roman rule.
Background to the Film
In 1880, General Lew Wallace (1827–1905), a Civil War hero and later
Governor of the Territory of New Mexico, published his historicalreligious
novel Ben-Hur: A Tale of the Christ. The novel quickly became an
enormous popular sensation, and was undeniably the most widely read
and commercially successful of the nineteenth-century toga novels, coming
in second only to the Bible on the bestseller lists for almost fifty years,
until the publication of Margaret Mitchell’s Gone With the Wind (1936).
A lawyer by trade in his native Indiana, Wallace had a career of extraordinary
military and judicial achievement that drew the attention of
politicians in Washington. In 1878, Wallace was appointed Governor of
the Territory of New Mexico by President Rutherford B. Hayes. Wallace
wrote the novel Ben-Hur while trying to keep the peace in New Mexico
during the infamous Lincoln County range wars of 1878–81, a volatile
and deadly conflict between native Spanish-Mexican landowners and
immigrant white-Anglo ranchers. While settling disputes between rival
parties, dispensing justice for criminal acts, and constantly sending urgent
requests to Washington for auxiliaries, Wallace was personally threatened
by the outlaw William Bonney, the notorious “Billy the Kid,” whose rampages
through the Territory are still legendary. This real-life Wild West
setting, with its many ethnic cultures vying for their rights in the rocky
68 BEN-HUR (1959)