The Nazarene Gospel Restored

A response to an email inquiry about Robert Graves book 'The Nazarene Gospel Restored'. It dates from November 1999, and has been missing from the web for several years. The book has been reissued by Carcanet (2010), and edited by John Presley, though it is not currently available from them. However the reissue means that it is a little easier to find than it was. Its page is at: https://www.carcanet.co.uk/cgi-bin/indexer?product=9781857546675. There is a review of this edition by Peter Costello from 2011, at: https://www.carcanet.co.uk/cgi-bin/scribe?showdoc=1184;doctype=review



Thomas Yaeger, November 20, 2020.





Subject: The Nazarene Gospel Restored

Date: Wed, 10 Nov 1999 22:01:29 +0100
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>I'm interested in finding "The Nazarene Gospel Restored"
>which I have been searching for a long time.
>I think it is part of a trilogy he wrote along
>with "King Jesus" and "Jesus in Rome". So far my
>search has been unsuccessful. I'd appreciate
>any information about this book.

The Nazarene Gospel Restored (published by Cassell, London, 1953; and Doubleday in New York, 1954) is one of the most difficult (but not *the* most difficult) of Graves' works to find. Estimates as to how many were printed vary: the largest estimate I have come across is 5,000 copies in all. I have seen only two copies for sale, one in Oxford, and the other in London, and I now own one of those. You may eventually find a copy through one of the specialist book dealers listed on the appropriate page of the Robert Graves Archive, or you may find it by pure chance (as I did). However, the book is available in academic libraries (there is a copy in the Mocatta Library at University College, London, for example), and it is also scheduled for republication in the Carcanet 'Robert Graves Programme' series in a couple of years.

It is not, as you suggest, part of a formal trilogy. The book deals with much of the same New Testament material, but it was written significantly later than King Jesus (which was published in 1946 by Cassell), and with the assistance of his co-author, Joshua Podro, a skilled Hebraicist and Biblical scholar. King Jesus by contrast leans heavily in the direction of the researches which produced The White Goddess: there is a good deal in the novel about Graves' ideas of the sacred king, and also the tree alphabet, for example, which does not reappear in The Nazarene Gospel Restored, though Graves had made the aquaintance of Joshua Podro by the time he came to write King Jesus.

Jesus in Rome is, like The Nazarene Gospel Restored, not a work of fiction, and also co-authored with Joshua Podro (published by Cassell in 1957). It might be regarded as an extended addendum to the earlier study of the Gospels.

One of the most interesting of the speakers at the August 1995 Centenary Conference in Oxford was Hyam Maccoby. He was there principally to acknowledge his indebtedness to Graves' work in the area of New Testament studies. Maccoby contributed a paper to the first issue of Gravesiana (June 1996) which was based on what he had to say at the 1995 conference, titled: 'Robert Graves and the Nazarene Gospel Restored'.Maccoby explains that:

In King Jesus, the main preoccupation of Jesus is to combat the Goddess. His death is the revenge of the Goddess, whose reign he has challenged in the name of Jehovah, the patriarchal God. All this has disappeared in The Nazarene Gospel Restored. Instead, Jesus is simply an apocalyptic Jew, whose aim is to fulfil the prophecies of the Old Testament about the coming of a human liberating Messiah, and thereby [to] release his people from slavery to Rome. His death comes about not in combat with the Goddess, but with the imperial power of Rome.

Maccoby also throws light on the poor reception accorded to The Nazarene Gospel Restored, pointing out that

From the standpoint of New Testament scholarship, The Nazarene Gospel Restored belongs to ... the Tuebingen school founded by F. C. Baur. This school of thought builds on the insight that the early Christian Church was split into two warring factions, the Jerusalem Church (sometimes called the Petrine Church) and the Pauline, or Gentile Church. ....The Jewish-Christians of the Jerusalem Church, on this view, regarded themselves as part of the general Jewish community, not as a new religion. They saw Jesus as a human Messiah... who never claimed divinity.... The Pauline Church on the other hand, had turned Jesus from a Jewish messiah into a Hellenistic saviour-god, substituting mystical identification with the death of the god for the Jewish belief in the revelation on Mount Sinai.. 

.

The Tuebingen theory was strongly opposed at the time. Maccoby argues that 'part of the opposition to The Nazarene Gospel Restored arose from the indignant conviction that Graves and Podro do were reverting to dangerous theories that had been safely scotched.' Maccoby also indicates that more recent scholars have brought new evidence to bear, showing that the split between Paul and Peter has a real basis, and mentions in particular S.G.F. Brandon.

The implication of the Tuebingen argument is that important political aspects of the life of Jesus and the activities of the various religious groups mentioned in the gospels have been downplayed, distorted, or even removed from the texts. Graves view was that 'many of the incidents in the Gospels have to be "despiritualised" in order to arrive at their historical meaning'. Paul made Jesus acceptable to Rome by depoliticising his life, and avoiding 'all awareness of Jesus as a claimant to the Jewish throne'.

The book is also short on the kind of scholarly apparatus one might expect in a work of New Testament exegesis. This has led some readers of the book to doubt that Graves worked from a base of thorough knowledge of his sources. Maccoby argues that the contrary is true, a fact which was shown by the libel action taken out against the Times Literary Supplement, which had published a hostile anonymous review. This review 'was followed by a correspondence in which the reviewer accused Graves of deliberately falsifying the Greek of a New Testament text. Graves was able to show that his textual scholarship was far superior to that of the reviewer, who had failed to take into account some important textual variations. The TLS eventually published an apololgy and the libel action was never taken to court'. Original sources are cited fully, but Graves was reluctant to become involved in dull exchanges with the views of other scholars: the consequence is that it has been too easy for scholars to dismiss the importance of the book.

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Page first mounted 13 November 1999.