The Nazarene Gospel Restored

The Nazarene Gospel Restored is Robert Graves’s major work on the life of Jesus, written in collaboration with the distinguished Hebrew scholar Joshua Podro. The research and writing occupied them for over ten years, in a working relationship compounded, in John W. Presley’s phrase, ‘of argument, scholarship and mutual respect’, in which the imaginative writer and the Hebraist drew on their vast knowledge of the ancient world to reveal an extraordinary new, ‘true’ story of Jesus. The result is, as Graves wrote to T.S. Eliot, ‘a very long, very readable, very strange book’, and one that Presley argues is as central to Graves’s thought as The White Goddess. The Nazarene Gospel Restored was controversial when first published: the Church Times refused to advertise it, reviews were hostile, and Graves twice sued for libel. In the twenty-first century it is possible to read it in the context of a continuing engagement with the historical Jesus, both scholarly and popular. In this new edition, John W. Presley gives a detailed account of the composition and reception of the book, setting it in the context of Graves’s writing and of biblical scholarship. The inclusion of Graves’s Foreword and annotations for a project revised edition make this an indispensable resource.

About the Author :
Robert Graves (1895-1985), poet, classical scholar, novelist, and critic, was one of the greatest writers of the 20th Century. Athough he produced over 100 books he is perhaps best known for the novel I, Claudius (1934),The White Goddess (1948) and Greek Myths (1955). Robert Graves was born in Wimbledon, South London. His father, Alfred Percival Graves, was a school inspector, and his mother, Amalie von Ranke Graves, was a great-niece of the German historian Leopold von Ranke (1795-1866). He was educated at Charterhouse, and awarded a B.Litt by St. John's College, Oxford after his return from World war I, where he served alsongside Siegfried Sassoon. Robert Graves died in 1985 in Deja, the Majorcan village he had made his home (with the exception of the Spanish Civil War and the Second World War) since 1929. Joshua Podro was born Joshua Podrushnik in Russia. After serving in the First World War and working as a journalist in New York he emigrated to England where he ran a press-cuttings agency. In 1936 he was elected one of the secretaries of the British section of the World Jewish Congress and in 1937 was a member of the Zionist Organisation Executive at the Twentieth Zionist Congress in Geneva. Joshua Podro was a distinguished scholar of Hebrew and Aramaic. After his death, his large library of Judaica was donated to Leo Baeck College. Joshua Podro was an expert on the Hebrao-Aramaic aspects of primitive Christianity. He also co-authored with Graves Jesus in Rome: a historical conjecture (1957). John W. Presley is Vice President for Academic Affairs and Provost, Professor of English at Illinois State University.He has published almost forty pieces of scholarship on Robert Graves, beginning with his 1976 book The Robert Graves Manuscripts and Letters at Southern Illinois University. His main areas of interest are Graves’s poetry and prose, his techniques of revision and composition, bibliographic issues, the reception of Graves’sideas and his popular works.