According to Graves

The Holy Bible, a comfort and a bulwark of doctrine for plain Christians, is a mighty challenge for serious scholars and a treasure trove for cranks. The ordinary layman reads little of the work of either--scholars are all too often unreadable, cranks are generally unpublishable. But when a crank has the reputation and writing ability of Novelist Robert (I, Claudius) Graves, publishers are glad to let him run on for page after page. The Nazarene Gospel Restored (Doubleday; $10), by Robert Graves and Joshua Podro, published last week, runs on for 982.

The Reassurance. "This book is published," write the authors, ". . . to reassure the lay public that the original Gospel stood foursquare . . ." But the layman who reads on soon finds that the "original Gospel" according to Graves and Podro is a far cry from the canonical books of the New Testament. The canonical books, "judged by Greek literary standards" say Graves & Podro ". . . are poor; by historical standards, unreliable; and their doctrine is confused and contradictory. The late-Victorian atheist (was it Bradlaugh?) may be excused for remarking that they read as though 'concocted by illiterate, half-starved visionaries in some dark corner of a Graeco-Syrian slum.' "

The foursquare Gospel discovered by Graves & Podro purports to be the Word as it was before the Gentiles began to monkey with it. Jesus, in the Graves-Podro work, was "a man of unusual learning, wit and piety," a member of a small apocalyptic sect. He was adopted by Mary Magdalene, crowned King of the Jews by John the Baptist at a ceremony that included a ritual mockery and beating. This, according to the authors, is where the mocking and scourging by the soldiers of Pilate really belongs. The Graves-Podro Jesus decided to bring on the Kingdom by his death, and appointed Judas, his "most faithful and perceptive" disciple, to betray him. Taken down from the cross, apparently dead, he revived in the tomb, met with several of his disciples, saw he had made a mistake, and went off to the "Land of Nod" to start all over again.

Paul is the villain of the Gospel-according-to-Graves-&-Podro. A "Greek-speaking adventurer" disguised as a Pharisee, and certainly no Jew, he began his subversion of the Nazarene Church after he had been converted on the road to Damascus--not by a vision but by Jesus' actual appearance, which literally scared the daylights out of him.

Advice to Protestants. Whence came the Nazarene Gospel? Simply out of the free-wheeling scholarship of Authors Graves & Podro. They do not provide their fat volume with a bibliography. The reason they give: at least 60,000 volumes would have to be listed. There is no general index. Much of the work has appeared before fictionally in Graves's novel, King Jesus (TIME, Sept. 30, 1946). But the spadework of Amateur Scholar Joshua Podro, a director of a press-clipping bureau, who suffered the threat of Christian pogroms with his devout Jewish family in Poland, has supplied much more material for Graves's imaginative method of rewriting history. "If these findings are to be accepted," write the authors, "historically-minded Protestants will conclude that only one honest course is left to them: namely, to revive Jesus' own form of Judaism and subject themselves to circumcision and the laws of ritual cleanliness in token of their sincerity."

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