The Mythistory of Lew Wallace and Ben Hur?📖🎥🎬

I never knew that Ben Hur was a novel well before the Charlton Heston 1959 motion picture came to the screen, until I stumbled across the entry in '1001 Books That You Must Read Before You Die' this year ... the same year that Charlton Heston would have turned 100 if he was still on this mortal coil. 

And his movie 'Soylent Green' turns 50 years old this year also -

A World Full of Pricks?

1001 Books You Must Read Before You Die

I hadn't even watched the 1959 movie Ben Hur until last week, and I never knew there was a silent 1925 version until this year, either.

Ben-Hur:
A Tale of the Christ

I was going to skip reading Lewis Wallace's book, but the idea of a mythical figure like Ben Hur interacting with what some would say was the mythical/historical Jesus seemed rather an amusing concept to me.

I recently started watching 'The Great Courses' 24-part lecture series 'How Jesus Became God', which shows just how vague history can be.

There are plenty of other lectures about the origins of Christianity on 'The Great Courses' streaming channel I am yet to watch, which also look worth viewing.   

Bart Ehrman gets it
wrong, again?

But never mind about the conflicting views about the historical Jesus, reading about just who the real Lew Wallace was is also hard to get a handle on when you read the Wikipedia page about him.

What I found interesting about the Ben Hur novel was that it came out around the same time Tolstoy's 'Anna Karenina' came out and Tolstoy was a Russian Orthodox Christian, as you would realize by reading his novels.

In Our Time: Tolstoy?⏰💀👻

I'm glad I didn't skip reading Ben Hur and eventually watching the Ben Hur movies, as they've all had a big cultural influence on modern society.

How come the Ben Hur book and
movies aren't mentioned?

Plus, the book and movies made me look into just what leprosy is as a disease, going back through history.
As Bart Denton Ehrman points out in his lecture 'How Jesus Became God', the whole of modern world was affected by the mythistory of Jesus as God.

I think Lew's book is well worth a read to ponder over the stories we are told about the world we live in today.