What are some good novels about the life of Jesus?

The short answer

A handful of novels about Jesus have lasted. Ben-Hur and The Robe tell the story through men who cross his path. The Bronze Bow follows an angry young rebel in Galilee. The Last Temptation and Anne Rice’s Christ the Lord books step inside his own mind. The Nazarene tells his whole life, from Bethlehem to the empty tomb, in four books.

The problem every one of them faces

The Gospels are short. You can read Mark out loud in an afternoon. Between the four of them we get a birth in Bethlehem, one visit to the Temple at twelve, and then nothing until he walks down to the Jordan at about thirty. After that come three years of roads, boats, meals and arguments, and a cross outside the city wall.

What they leave out is almost everything a novelist looks for. They don’t tell us how his voice sounded when he laughed, who ran the shop after Joseph drops out of the story, or what the road up to Jerusalem smelled like in spring.

For about a hundred and fifty years, novelists have tried to fill that silence. Most of them solved it the same way. They kept their distance and put the camera on someone else, a Roman soldier, a Jewish prince, a teenage rebel, an imagined wife.

Ben-Hur: A Tale of the Christ, by Lew Wallace (1880)

Lew Wallace was a Union general who later governed the New Mexico Territory. On a train one night he fell into a long argument about God with Robert Ingersoll, the most famous skeptic of his day. Wallace realized he didn’t know enough to answer, so he started researching a book. He came out of it a believer.

He didn’t dare go inside Jesus’s head. He invented Judah Ben-Hur, a prince of Jerusalem betrayed by his Roman boyhood friend, chained to an oar in a warship, and back years later to beat Rome in a chariot race. Jesus barely speaks. He appears only where Judah’s road crosses his.

One of those moments stays with every reader. Judah is marched in chains through Nazareth toward the galleys. At the village well, nobody will come near the prisoner except a young carpenter, who gives him water. Even the Roman guard lets him do it.

Read it if you want a big, old-fashioned adventure where Jesus moves at the edge of the frame.

The Robe, by Lloyd C. Douglas (1942)

Douglas was a minister who didn’t publish his first novel until he was past fifty. The Robe started with a letter from a store clerk in Ohio. She asked what happened to the soldier who won Jesus’s robe at the foot of the cross.

His answer is Marcellus Gallio, a Roman tribune who commands the detail at the crucifixion, wins the robe at dice, and can’t shake what he saw. He goes back to Galilee and sits at the tables of fishermen and weavers, trying to understand why none of them act as though their friend is dead.

Read it if you want the days after the crucifixion through the eyes of a Roman who didn’t want to believe.

The Bronze Bow, by Elizabeth George Speare (1961)

Written for young readers, it won the Newbery Medal and is still read in schools and homeschools.

Daniel bar Jamin is eighteen. Roman soldiers crucified his father when he was small, and his sister Leah hasn’t left their house since. Daniel lives on one thing, hatred of Rome, and joins a band of rebels in the hills. Then he hears a carpenter from Nazareth teaching in Capernaum. At first Daniel is sure this is the leader who will drive out the legions. Instead the teacher talks about the kingdom of God, eats with tax collectors, and won’t pick up a sword. In the end Daniel has to choose between his vow and the man from Nazareth.

Read it if you want to feel what Galilee was like for a young man whose family Rome had crushed, and why so many people were angry when Jesus wouldn’t fight.

The Last Temptation, by Nikos Kazantzakis (1955)

Kazantzakis put the camera inside Jesus himself. His Jesus is a tormented young carpenter who makes crosses for the Romans, hoping God will leave him alone. On the cross, he’s tempted by a vision of the ordinary life he gave up, a wife, children and old age by the fire.

Kazantzakis wanted to show that if Jesus was truly human, that temptation had to be real. The Catholic Church put the book on its list of forbidden books, and the Greek Orthodox Church condemned it. Many readers also feel its Jesus carries the author’s anguish more than the calm of the Gospels, where he sleeps in the stern while the fishermen fight the storm.

Read it if you want fierce literary fiction about spirit and flesh, and you know going in that many Christians object to it.

Christ the Lord: Out of Egypt and The Road to Cana, by Anne Rice (2005 and 2008)

Anne Rice was famous for vampire novels before she returned to the Catholic faith of her childhood and set out to tell the life of Jesus in his own voice. In Out of Egypt, he’s seven, living in Alexandria with Mary and Joseph just before the family walks home to Nazareth. In The Road to Cana, he’s a grown carpenter in a hard winter before the wedding at Cana.

Rice did her homework, and the dust and cedar shavings are on every page. She wrote from inside traditional Catholic teaching, so Jesus’s brothers and sisters are Joseph’s children from an earlier marriage. She planned more books but never finished the series.

Read it if you want a reverent, carefully researched picture of his boyhood and his last year in Nazareth.

The Book of Longings, by Sue Monk Kidd (2020)

Kidd asks what many modern readers ask: what if Jesus had married? Her narrator is Ana, a sharp young woman from Sepphoris who longs to write the stories history leaves out. She marries Jesus and lives with his family in Nazareth.

No Gospel names a wife for Jesus. Mark names his mother, four brothers and his sisters, and says nothing of a wife. The book is Ana’s story more than his, and he stays mostly in the background.

Read it if you want a modern literary novel about a woman’s life in first-century Galilee.

Where The Nazarene fits

Most of these books make a trade. Either they keep their distance and watch Jesus through someone else’s eyes, or they come close and make him smaller or more anxious than the man in the Gospels. Almost none of them stay for the whole road.

The Nazarene, by EKO, tells his whole life in four novels. In them he goes by Yeshua, the name his family would have called him. The novels start from what the Gospels give us. His neighbors knew him as “the carpenter, the son of Mary, and brother of James, Joses, Judah, and Simon,” with sisters in the same town (Mark 6:3). Joseph drops out of the story after Jesus turns twelve. If Joseph died while the children were young, the firstborn would have picked up his father’s tools and carried the house.

EKO puts it this way: “Some Christians feel that humanizing him lessens him. To me it makes him even better, because he can understand us by going through a human experience.”

• Son of Man covers Bethlehem and the hidden years in Nazareth, Joseph’s death, and the firstborn raising his brothers and sisters.
• Far Country imagines the travels before the Jordan, from Caesarea to Alexandria, Rome, Athens and Ephesus.
• The Narrow Gate follows the public years in Galilee, from the fishermen’s boats to the feeding of the crowd, when they try to make him king.
• Third Day carries the last months, from Lazarus and the dinner at Bethany to the trial, the hill, and the garden where Mary of Magdala hears her name.

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