Ben Hur, the novel, part 19

We’re up to Book VII and things are going quickly because I’m skimming to find something that I need to comment on in this novel.

It is Tishri the year that Pilate robbed the temple treasury to pay for civic improvements. Judah has led a group of Galileans in attacking Romans. If you were going to write a more vraisemblable work about these times, this is what you should prepare Judah for from the start of the book: joining or starting the Sicarii, a group of Jewish rebels against Rome.

In fact, if Judah had been a real person, here’s how the story would go. At some point, he would become known as Judah the Sicarius. He probably knew a number of people named Joshua and he would have tried to recruit one or more for this band. Word would get out, the Romans might use one of them as a lure to capture Judah. It would fail and the Romans would crucify Joshua as an example to the Sicarii. Judah’s son Menachem would go on to be a leader of the Masada uprising.

Everybody who knew Judah’s Joshua would deny that he was a rebel. Then you would get the “he was a good boy” narrative we hear from mothers of so many suspects. There were a lot of people running around at this time preaching or prophesying the overthrow of Rome. Some of them had the reputation of miracle-workers.

Oral traditions studies show that characters in two narratives may be confused with each other over time, leading to fusion of stories about them. The preachers or miracle workers didn’t have to all be named Joshua, for their activities to be loaded onto the story of the good Joshua who was crucified for no reason, except that he knew Judah the Sicarius.

It doesn’t take long for these shifts to happen. It took two or three months for a GOP narrative about a (non-existent) whistleblower “proving” that Trump did nothing worth FBI investigation, to become a MAGA narrative about a hero hiding evidence that the FBI would try to exploit against Trump. Both narratives tar the FBI, which was tracking down the January 6 insurrectionists. In 1911, a rumor that a murder victim’s corpse was rolled up in a carpet in a Kyiv city apartment, took two years to morph into the corpse being stored in the apartment for three days (the number three shows up in dozens of oral narratives the world over).

So a hundred years after Judah the Sicarius, not only can Joshua the non-rebel turn into a miracle-worker persecuted by the Romans, but people with a good Greek education are promoting him to other people like themselves. Writing the first Christian scriptures in Greek would be a no-brainer. Latin works appeared as it became less dangerous to communicate with Romans.

I’m not saying this is how it happened. I’m not saying that Christian writings have everything wrong. I’m saying that they admit to the beginning of their faith in a low-income and probably low-literacy environment, and when you share information by word of mouth, it follows AxelOlrik’s principles of development. And what I have outlined above is exactly what Olrik says happens in word-of-mouth communications.