The Nazarene Gospel Restored E-Book

Robert Graves

• Herausgeber: Carcanet Classics
• Kategorie: Religion und Spiritualität
• Sprache: Englisch
• Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2023

Seitenzahl: 2392

Beschreibung

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.

Leseprobe

ROBERT GRAVES & JOSHUA PODRO

The Nazarene Gospel Restored

Robert Graves Programme

General Editor: Patrick J.M. Quinn

Centenary Selected Poems

edited by Patrick J.M. Quinn

Collected Writings on Poetry

edited by Paul O’Prey

Complete Short Stories

edited by Lucia Graves

Complete Poems I

edited by Beryl Graves and Dunstan Ward

Complete Poems II

edited by Beryl Graves and Dunstan Ward

Complete Poems III

edited by Beryl Graves and Dunstan Ward

The Complete Poems in One Volume

edited by Beryl Graves and Dunstan Ward

The White Goddess: A Historical Grammar of Poetic Myth

edited by Grevel Lindop

I, Claudius and Claudius the God

edited by Richard Francis

Sergeant Lamb of the Ninth and Proceed, Sergeant Lamb

edited by Caroline Zilboorg

Some Speculations on Literature, History and Religion

edited by Patrick J.M. Quinn

The Greek Myths

edited by Michel Pharand

Homer’s Daughter and The Anger of Achilles

edited by Neil Powell

The Story of Marie Powell, Wife to Mr Milton and The Islands of Unwisdom

edited by Simon Brittan

‘Antigua, Penny, Puce’ and They Hanged My Saintly Billy

edited by Ian McCormick

The Golden Fleece and Seven Days in New Crete

edited by Patrick J.M. Quinn

Count Belisarius and Lawrence and the Arabs

edited by Scott Ashley

King Jesus and My Head! My Head!

edited by Robert A. Davis

(with Raphael Patai) Hebrew Myths: The Book of Genesis

edited by Robert A. Davis

(with Alan Hodge) The Long Weekend and The Reader Over Your Shoulder

edited by Jane Aiken Hodge

Good-bye to All That and Other Great War Writings

edited by Steven Trout

Translating Rome

edited by Robert Cummings

Acknowledgement

The editor would like to thank the Graves family for their generosity in making available to him Graves’s 1970 Foreword and his annotated copy of The Nazarene Gospel Restored.

Contents

Introduction by John W. Presley

Note on the Text

Works Consulted

THE NAZARENE GOSPEL RESTORED

Foreword

Foreword to the Proposed Revised Edition

PART ONE

INTRODUCTION I, II, III, IV

PART TWO

I

THE NATIVITY

II

THE GENEALOGY

III

THE INFANCY

IV

JOHN’S BIRTH

V

JOHN’S PREACHING

VI

THE ACCLAMATION

VII

THE ANNUNCIATION

VIII

THE CORONATION

IX

THE ADDRESS

X

THE WATER POTS

XI

THE PRECIOUS OINTMENT

XII

THE MEN OF THE LAND

XIII

FEIGNED PHARISEES

XIV

UNPROFITABLE SERVANTS

XV

THE YOKE OF THE LAW

XVI

THE BARREN FIG TREE

XVII

FISHERS OF MEN

XVIII

THE PRODIGAL SON

XIX

PUBLICANS AND SINNERS

XX

BLIND GUIDES

XXI

ON CHASTITY

XXII

ON MURDER

XXIII

ON OATHS

XXIV

ON LIGHT

XXV

EARS TO HEAR

XXVI

JUDGE NOT!

XXVII

ON PRAYER AND FASTING

XXVIII

ON LOVE AND LENDING

XXIX

ON DEBTORS

XXX

THE WATCHERS

XXXI

THE DEAF MAN

XXXII

THE TEN LEPERS

XXXIII

THE CENTURION’S SERVANT

XXXIV

BEELZEBUB

XXXV

THE PALSIED MAN

XXXVI

JAIRUS’S DAUGHTER

XXXVII

JESUS IN NAZARA

XXXVIII

THE WIDOW OF NAIN

XXXIX

JOHN SENDS TO JESUS

XL

THE BLIND AND THE LAME

XLI

JOHN IS TAKEN

XLII

THE UNCLEAN SPIRIT

XLIII

THE STRAIT GATE

XLIV

ON LEAVEN

XLV

THE MUSTARD SEED

XLVI

ON GUESTS

XLVII

TREE, ROCK, AND PEARLS

XLVIII

THE HALF-SHEKEL

XLIX

THE TABERNACLES

L

TWO SPARROWS

LI

SILOAM

LII

THE TALENTS

LIII

THE HIRE OF A HARLOT

LIV

THE VINE

LV

ON ABUNDANCE

LVI

THE TWELVE

LVII

THE MISSION

LVIII

THE VINEYARD

LIX

WOE TO CHORAZIN

LX

LITTLE CHILDREN

LXI

ON SALT

LXII

PRECEDENCE

LXIII

THE DEMONIAC

LXIV

ON IMPORTUNITY

LXV

TAKE NO THOUGHT

LXVI

THE SOWER

LXVII

THE RICH FOOL

LXVIII

ON MAMMON

LXIX

MASTER, MASTER!

LXX

JESUS IN SAMARIA

LXXI

THE PLUCK-RIGHT

LXXII

BREAD FROM HEAVEN

LXXIII

WALKING ON WATER

LXXIV

SABBATH HEALING

LXXV

THE STORM STILLED

LXXVI

JOHN IS BEHEADED

LXXVII

THE REVELATION

LXXVIII

THE TEMPTATION

LXXIX

THE TRANSFIGURATION

LXXX

A DAUGHTER’S INHERITANCE

LXXXI

THE GRECIANS

LXXXII

THE RICH YOUTH

LXXXIII

NICODEMUS

LXXXIV

THE DEDICATION

LXXXV

FOLLOW ME!

LXXXVI

COUNTING THE COST

LXXXVII

LAZARUS

LXXXVIII

THE LAST DAYS

LXXXIX

THE ENTRY

XC

THE MONEY-CHANGERS

XCI

SIGNS FROM HEAVEN

XCII

THE WIDOW’S MITES

XCIII

THE TRIBUTE PENNY

XCIV

BY WHAT AUTHORITY?

XCV

SONS OF ABRAHAM

XCVI

THE KING’S SON

XCVII

O JERUSALEM, JERUSALEM!

XCVIII

THE LITTLE APOCALYPSE

XCIX

TWO OR THREE GRAPES

C

THE REJECTED STONE

CI

THE IMMINENT END

CII

THE WORTHLESS SHEPHERD

CIII

THE BARKED FIG TREE

CIV

THE KINSMEN

CV

THE SOP

CVI

THE LAST SUPPER

CVII

THE ARREST

CVIII

BARABBAS

CIX

BEFORE CAIAPHAS

CX

BEFORE PILATE

CXI

THE SUPERSCRIPTION

CXII

THE DEATH OF JUDAS

CXIII

THE CRUCIFIXION

CXIV

THE BURIAL

CXV

THE RESURRECTION

CXVI

THE RETURN FROM EMMAUS

CXVII

THE GOODBYE

CXVIII

THE ROAD TO DAMASCUS

CXIX

ALL THINGS TO ALL MEN

PART THREE

SUMMARY OF CRITICAL PRINCIPLES

PROLEGOMENA TO THE NAZARENE GOSPEL

I

THE NATIVITY OF JESUS

II

THE PREACHING OF JOHN THE BAPTIST

III

HOW JESUS WAS CHOSEN TO BE KING

IV

HOW HE WAS CROWNED

V

THE MARRIAGE OF THE LAMB

VI

CONCERNING THE PHARISEES

VII

HOW JESUS PREACHED BY THE LAKE

VIII

HOW HE HEALED DIVERS SICK AND GAVE WATER FOR WINE

IX

HOW HE CALLED MATTHEW THE PUBLICAN

X

HIS EXHORTATIONS TO CHASTITY

XI

HOW HE EXPOUNDED CERTAIN OF THE TEN COMMANDMENTS

XII

HIS EXHORTATIONS TO MERCY

XIII

HIS DISCOURSES UPON JUDGEMENT

XIV

HOW HE HEALED OTHER SICK AND ANSWERED JOHN’S DISCIPLES

XV

HOW HE PERFORMED A CURE ON THE SABBATH AND REPROACHED THE MEN OF NAZARA

XVI

HOW HE PREACHED REPENTANCE

XVII

HOW HE WENT TO KEEP THE PASSOVER

XVIII

HOW HE BADE THE PEOPLE WATCH

XIX

HOW HE BADE THEM TAKE NO THOUGHT FOR THE MORROW.

XX

HOW HE TAUGHT HIS DISCIPLES TO PRAY

XXI

HOW HE SENT FORTH THE TWELVE

XXII

HOW HE DISCLOSED CERTAIN MYSTERIES

XXIII

HOW HE KEPT THE FEAST OF TABERNACLES

XXIV

HOW HE ORDERED THE YEAR

XXV

HOW HE MOURNED FOR JOHN AND HEALED A DEMONIAC

XXVI

HOW HE REVEALED HIMSELF TO THE TWELVE

XXVII

HOW HE FORETOLD HIS DEATH

XXVIII

HOW HE PREACHED IN SAMARIA

XXIX

HOW HE KEPT THE FEAST OF THE DEDICATION

XXX

HOW HE ADMONISHED BUNNI SON OF GORION

XXXI

HOW HE REJECTED THE GRECIANS

XXXII

HOW HE PREACHED BEYOND JORDAN

XXXIII

HOW HE COULD NOT RAISE ELIEZER

XXXIV

HOW HE RODE INTO JERUSALEM

XXXV

HOW HE PURGED THE TEMPLE

XXXVI

HOW HE DISPUTED WITH THE CHIEF PRIESTS

XXXVII

HOW HE CONFOUNDED THE CAPTAIN OF THE TEMPLE

XXXVIII

HOW HE WEPT FOR JERUSALEM

XXXIX

HOW HE FORETOLD THE LAST DAYS

XL

HOW HE FULFILLED THE PROPHECY OF THE SHEPHERD

XLI

HOW HE WAS BETRAYED BY JUDAS

XLII

HOW HE PROVOKED THE OTHER DISCIPLES

XLIII

HOW HE WAS TAKEN AT GETHSEMANE

XLIV

HOW PETER WAS JUDGED OF THE CHIEF PRIESTS

XLV

HOW THE CHIEF PRIESTS DELIVERED JESUS TO PILATE

XLVI

HOW HEROD ANTIPAS CONDEMNED HIM TO DEATH

XLVII

HOW JESUS WAS CRUCIFIED

XLVIII

HOW HE WAS BURIED

XLIX

HOW HE ROSE AGAIN FROM THE DEAD

L

HOW HE RETURNED UNTO HIS DISCIPLES

LI

HOW HE DEPARTED UNTO THE LAND OF NOD

LII

HOW THE DISCIPLES FOLLOWED IN HIS WAY

LIII

HOW HE WAS SEEN AGAIN OF SAUL

EPILEGOMENA BY JAMES THE JUST UNTO THE FAITHFUL

CHAPTER INDEX

Appendix: Graves’s notes for a proposed 1970 revised edition of The Nazarene Gospel Restored

Introduction

Robert Graves expected that his massive book of scholarship, The Nazarene Gospel Restored, written in collaboration with the eminent Hebrew scholar Joshua Podro, would have an equally massive effect on the Christian Church, much the same effect that is currently being exerted by a large and growing body of new scholarship on the life of Jesus.

Graves perhaps most clearly delineated his hopes for the reception of The Nazarene Gospel Restored in a March 1952 letter to Podro:

As to the general reception of the book – which is on the point of going into production – it will ‘rend the veil’ of the Protestant temple from top to bottom. The Catholics will say as little as possible. The Jews who can afford to do so (but that is a limited category) will be delighted. The ordinary agnostic will accept it as the solution he has so long been waiting for, heave a sigh of relief, and support us staunchly; glad to know the story is a real one, that Jesus was not a charlatan, and that the ecclesiastics have been dishonest (O’Prey, Between Moon and Moon, 106).

In an earlier context, Graves had said he expected that his and Podro’s version of the gospels would ‘lead the Anglican Church to Christianity.’ But, in a huge disappointment to Robert Graves, the book did not meet his expectations. Sales were many fewer than expected, and the critical reception was remarkably hostile. Nonetheless, the scholarship that informed The Nazarene Gospel Restored anticipated much of the scholarship more recently brought to bear on the ‘meaning of Jesus’ in the past six decades.

*

Toward the end of the twentieth century, in February of 1996, nine hours of theological lectures on ‘Jesus at 2000’ were sold out – not only the 1,110 seats at Oregon State University, but also at 310 closed circuit television sites around the United States. Even as the year 2000 has now receded by a decade, the question ‘Why did Jesus become the single most important person in the history of Western culture?’ clearly continues to fascinate scholars, along with a huge lay audience. Recent scholarship explains Jesus in terms of his Cynic philosophy, his apocalyptic prophecy, his zealotry; he was a rabbi, a Pharisee, a feminist, a radical egalitarian, a post-modern social critic.

Marcus Borg, Professor of Religion and Culture at Oregon State University, focused on what he called ‘the historical Jesus’ or the ‘human, pre-Easter Jesus’ and the ‘hearty hunger for such material, however controversial it has become among conservative and some more moderate Christian denominations,’ as Paul Galloway, a religion writer for the Chicago Tribune, described the ‘Jesus at 2000’ phenomenon. ‘There has never been a period when so many gifted scholars have been so preoccupied with the debate about who Jesus was,’ said Harvey Cox, Professor of Divinity at Harvard. Cox illustrated the breadth of this scholarly interest, this ‘renaissance of interest in Jesus,’ by pointing out that Jewish scholars such as Alan Segal of Columbia – also a participant in ‘Jesus at 2000’ – are also now writing about the early Christian religion.

The new scholarship on Jesus is characterized by cross-cultural anthropological perspectives, by the use of archaeology and history, and by the study of both canonical and extra-canonical writings. This has produced the now-common understanding that the most important episodes of the Christian faith are probably presented in metaphorical imagery and in symbolism, as early writers created myth to universalize their message and to surround the story of Jesus with ‘mythic proportions.’

And these methods also characterize Robert Graves’s work on the historical – and textual – Jesus, beginning with the novel King Jesus and leading to his collaboration with Joshua Podro to produce The Nazarene Gospel Restored. Graves had long been fascinated with Biblical allusions (as are, of course, many poets): witness the many Biblical references in his poetry to such moments as Christ’s meeting with a scapegoat in the desert. But Graves’s fascination was informed by careful reading, by his religious upbringing, and by serious scholarship such as that which underlay his short novel My Head! My Head!, published in 1925. Martin Seymour-Smith identifies My Head! My Head! as the first of Graves’s ‘unorthodox biblical exegeses.’ Graves explained it as ‘an ingenious attempt to repair the important omissions in the biblical story’ of Elisha and the Shunamite women in II Kings. Seymour-Smith writes that My Head! My Head! exemplifies Graves’s ‘lifelong fascination with the Bible – his passion for “restoring” ancient and sacred texts, the more eminent the better, along matriarchal rather than patriarchal lines; and his conviction that the key to truth lies in Woman and her mysteries’. Graves had, as early as 1925, been ‘reading deeply’ in James Frazer and had been ‘studying the early history of the Jews, especially in Frazer’s 1918 Folklore in the Old Testament’ (Seymour-Smith, 111).

King Jesus was written almost twenty-five years later, during the same rush of creativity that produced the first draft and the subsequent elaborations of The White Goddess. Graves first went to work on the life of Jesus armed with what he called ‘a key which unlocks a succession of doors in Roman and Greek religion and (because the Jewish religion was a Semite one grafted on a Celtic stock) also unlocks the most obstinate door of all – the story of the Nativity and Crucifixion’ (Graves to Lynette Roberts, in Paul O’Prey, In Broken Images).

In King Jesus, this key told Graves how to resolve the ‘four main cruces in the Gospels.’ Regarding the riddle of the Nativity: Jesus is the son of Herod Antipater and a temple virgin descended matrilineally from King David’s wife Michael. Jesus’s baptism by John the Baptist is simply one scene from a coronation sequence specified for the ancient kings of Israel. Jesus’s paradoxical behavior in the last forty-eight hours before the Crucifixion is explained by Jesus’s attempt to fulfill the Worthless Shepherd prophecies of Zechariah. (The Angry Shepherd was the working title of King Jesus.) The Resurrection crux is easily solved: Jesus did not die on the cross, but lapsed into a coma, and was revived in the Tomb. All these posited ‘facts’ are presented in King Jesus in the new Gravesian context of the struggle between paternal and maternal religions and deities.

King Jesus, as one might expect from this short summary, was not universally well-received. Joshua Podro was in fact one of the people who were critical; Graves found his criticisms and his methods intriguing, and, after a very respectful correspondence and subsequent meeting, they agreed to create a version of the Gospels together, one which would winnow out the errors Graves had noted while working on King Jesus and would reconcile Podro’s encyclopedic knowledge of early Judaism with Graves’s Roman and early Christian expertise.

Martin Seymour-Smith, whose description of the collaboration between Graves and Podro seems both well balanced and grounded by his presence in the Graves circle at the time, says that Podro’s emphatic belief in the ‘Jewish Jesus thesis’ and ‘that the Pharisees had been gravely libeled in the Gospels’ convinced Graves. Interestingly, Seymour-Smith claims that ‘Podro’s contribution was crucial’ for a very incisive reason, I think. ‘His caution acted as a brake on Graves’s natural bent towards the idiosyncratic – and The Nazarene Gospel Restored is thus his least idiosyncratic book.’ Seymour-Smith allows that it may be ‘the hardest going’ of all Graves’s books, since ‘Jewish law, as embodied in the Talmud, could not be made light reading by any writer. But, though very specialized, it is one of the most interesting. Its interpretations of some of the parables are extremely ingenious’ (Seymour-Smith, 417–19).

Robert Graves, as an English expatriate, had fled Mallorca in August 1936, when the Spanish Civil War had made the island dangerous for all but the fascist sympathizers. Eventually, Graves decided to spend the war years in the village of Galmpton, in Devon. There are varying accounts of Graves’s first meeting with Podro during this period, but importantly, they became close friends. Miranda Seymour describes Graves’s friendship with Podro as ‘the only friendship in Devon [in early 1940] which provided Graves the mental stimulus on which he thrived.’ Graves met Podro, Seymour says, through a distant von Ranke relative. Podro was ‘an intellectual who had devoted all of his spare time to study of the rabbinical aspects of Jesus’s teaching.’ Podro’s Hebraica collections, and his expertise in the subject, along with what Seymour calls his ‘open mind,’ were well known to academics. As Graves was working on King Jesus in 1943, Podro was able to convince him, according to Seymour, that the Pharisees were more than likely not the villains portrayed in the Gospels (Seymour, 289–90).

Seymour’s biography allows Joshua Podro – ‘the only Hebrew scholar’ Graves knew – much earlier, and much greater, influence over Graves’s ideas in King Jesus than do Graves’s other biographers. She points out that the two began discussing the Hebrew context of the Gospels in the summer of 1943, and Graves began writing King Jesus in the summer of 1944. Seymour quotes a Graves letter to Tom Matthews reporting that Podro has been ‘an angel of revelation ... a sort of Uriel,’ convincing Graves that Jesus was, above all, Hebrew, ‘uncompromising and difficult,’ with ‘almost nothing in common with the Christian figure presented in the Gospels’ (Seymour, 315). By the time the book appeared and some critics (such as the reviewer for The Listener) hoped for a more detailed analysis than might have been suitable in fiction, Graves and Podro were corresponding about ideas for the commentary that would later become The Nazarene Gospel Restored (ibid., 316).

In a letter of 12 June 1944 to Alan Hodge, Graves wrote ‘As you know, Jesus was lamed and I have a wonderful Hebrew and Aramaic scholar here who is helping me find out how and where the laming was done’ (O’Prey, In Broken Images, 324). Later, he more fully described Podro in another letter to Hodge:

I have written the three introductory chapters for the Jesus book and had them vetted by Joshua Podro, a marvelous little Hebrew and Aramaic scholar who manages a press-cutting bureau at Paignton [International Press Cutting Bureau] and has all God’s words in his lefthand coat pocket, and all the comments in his overcoat and trouser pockets (326).

Working directly with the Podro family, Miranda Seymour discovered that there were at least occasional ‘bitter disputes’ between the collaborators. Podro was not in favor of including the coronation sequence, complete with the ritual leg-breaking, even though ‘Graves cited the respected Hebrew scholar Raphael Patai as his source.’ Podro so enjoyed the work with Graves, however, that he eventually relented and ‘agreed to stop trying to give Graves lessons in Hebrew’ (Seymour, 329–30).

Their ‘reconciled edition’ of King Jesus eventually became The Nazarene Gospel Restored. Here a second and relatively different version of Jesus is presented: Jesus is a member of the ‘Watchers for the Kingdom,’ or Zophim, a small Levite group of Free Essenes, and a devout Jew, as Graves insists in the Foreword:

He took the contemporary Pharisaic attitude towards the Mosaic Law, making only minor reservations,. . . . never equated himself with God and, though he performed certain faith cures in God’s name, neither did nor suffered anything that lay outside the sphere of natural human experience (xii).

Almost all Graves’s collaboration with Podro was done by correspondence. These letters show just how scholarly was Graves’s knowledge of the Gospels and the allied religious and historical texts. To others, such as Lynette Roberts, Graves wrote that he had discovered the primary reason for Gospel inconsistency:

I’ve found out from a 2nd century chap called Irenaeus how it was done – by trying to make a chronological sequence of a collection of sayings and acts under subject headings, and running them together (O’Prey, Between Moon and Moon, 72).

Earlier, Graves had written to Podro, ‘Once one hits on the principle of distortion it’s easy as shelling peas’ (ibid., 69). Removing these distortions and reordering the sections allowed Graves and Podro to return to the original, ‘Nazarene,’ ideas of Jesus and his followers. Graves even felt that he could identify one of the first Gospel editors responsible for this distortion as a Samaritan, and by 12 September 1949 he wrote Podro that he could identify this editor specifically as Simon Magus, ‘a liar, a Pauline, a crook, and a Samaritan, like the Gospel editor we have in mind, and [who] worked very early, at the textual sources of both the Synoptics and John’ (ibid., 64).

The working correspondence between Graves and Podro is illustrated by the samples in Paul O’Prey’s Between Moon and Moon. As the letter of 23 September 1949 to Podro illustrates, Graves would send drafts of chapters to Podro, keeping copies himself to incorporate Podro’s additions and corrections later. While cautioning Podro that ‘the great thing is to write as dispassionately as possible; our resentment of Paul and Simon Magus will show through our careful sentences, I’ve no doubt,’ Graves also carefully noted ‘Please: nothing is final (Graves’s italics) in my contribution. I’m always ready to change my view for one more in keeping with the known facts’ (ibid., 68–9).

For at least the early parts of the manuscript, Graves would work on a topic or section of the Gospels of his choosing, Podro on another of his own choosing. Each would carefully leave space for the contribution of the other.

It doesn’t really matter what part of the Gospels you work at and what I work at; the work can be harmonized,. . . . though here and there we may have to record alternative explanations if the evidence is delicately balanced (ibid.).

Graves did, however, have a role in mind for Podro’s contributions. ‘I’d like you to comment on the more difficult Jewish problems, such as the Sabbath and ritual cleanliness and divorce, where I’m not so well educated as you’ (ibid.). For example, in a single week in September 1949, one can infer from the letters that Graves wrote a draft of the introduction, and in a later week drafted both ‘Incident of the Greeks’ and ‘Incident of the Lepers,’ leaving room for Podro’s comments. At the same time, Podro had been drafting his section on the Crucifixion (ibid.). Correspondence may have slowed the process – Graves writes Podro on 4 October 1949, ‘I am constantly wishing you were here to ask for information on small points’ – but a huge amount of information was exchanged successfully in these letters. ‘But of course you’ll get my work in a form in which I hope you’ll be able to supplement easily where I leave lacunae’ (ibid.).

The correspondence with Podro that furthers the collaboration is filled with questions such as the following example from October 1949: ‘For example, what quotations (if any) are there in the Lord’s Prayer from the synagogue Liturgy?’ The correspondence is also frequently devoted to argument and to reassurance. In one undated letter, while advancing his argument that Pilate did, in fact, ‘give Jesus an interview,’ Graves soothes ‘But please rid yourself of the idea that I consider the Crucifixion to have been a Jewish affair [Graves’s italics]’ (ibid., 70).

This mix of argument, scholarship, and mutual respect makes the Graves–Podro letters fascinating. In a letter of 25 March 1951, Graves argues ‘Your quotation from Jerome 22, 10 is magnificently apt. But it must have been spoken to Mary after the Crucifixion, when he had decided to be the Wandering Jew’ (ibid., 91). This off-hand bit of argument is preceded by an equally off-hand, almost naïve request from Graves, about one of his favorite Biblical stories, the account in Deuteronomy 23, 18 of the High Priests’ lavatory, and its teaching that the Temple treasurers should not accept money that had been immorally earned, whatever its eventual use:

If you can send me the remark that Gamaliel I (or was it another Pharisee?) made about getting into trouble because James told him of Jesus’s witty answer about the High Priests’ lavatory, that will be a great help in getting the sequence of incidents straight (ibid.).

Both argument and question precede Graves’s graceful expression of gratitude: ‘I bless you every time I find a neat Talmudic comment in your handwriting; which fits with a sigh of satisfaction into the argument I deduce from the Greek’ (ibid.).

For five years, Graves and Podro attempted to collate the Gospels and reconcile them with their knowledge of the ancient world. They solved the problem, for example, of the cold relations between John the Baptist and Jesus: ‘by ancient tradition the prophet who crowned the King never saw him again and often behaved like a personal enemy’ (ibid., 66). Some of the other contradictions they dealt with included:

– the two genealogies of Jesus in Matthew and Luke

– the earliest historical mention of the Resurrection (in Corinthians 15, not the Gospels)

– Jesus’s appearance to ‘above 500 brethren at once’ when according to Acts there were only 120 followers at the time

– Jesus’s saving the adulteress from stoning

– the Coptic tradition that a sword, not a lance, was used at the Crucifixion

– and, of course, the lavatory of the High Priest in the Temple (Graves’s favorite of these contradictions, and one to which he returns repeatedly in the letters).

In the margin of a letter to T.S. Eliot on 14 May 1950, describing The Nazarene Gospel Restored as ‘a very long, very readable, very strange book,’ Graves admitted: ‘I have had to abandon a good deal of what I wrote in King Jesus, which was a novel not a historical work’ (ibid., 73). But he further claimed in that same letter that he and Podro had ‘solved on sound historical lines, with every sentence documented, all the outstanding Gospel cruces.’ Nevertheless, Eliot’s house, Faber, passed on the chance to publish the book. But Cassell published a British edition of 2,981 copies (not the 5,000 number sometimes cited) on 27 October 1953. On 15 July 1954, Doubleday published The Nazarene Gospel Restored in the United States, in a run of 5,000 copies. This first American edition is shorter by some forty pages, with a new font and a different order for the front matter. Graves insisted that the American edition had to be a new offset edition. He had been advised, by his agent William Watt among others, that only if the American edition were printed and bound within the borders of the United States would his American copyright be secure, and Graves was very worried that editions of the book – especially the text of the Gospel itself – would be pirated. He believed that the book would be a gigantic seller, even if the first reactions from critics were negative. Importantly for scholars, this Doubleday edition includes a fair number of revisions by Graves, which he noted for Doubleday’s editors in his copy of the British first edition (inscribed ‘Robert Graves/Library Copy/1953’).

There have been several rumors about the mass purchase and withdrawal of all copies by this or that interested religious ‘faction,’ none of which is apparently or probably true (since there are many copies in American and British libraries, as well as in private hands). But the critical reception in both countries was as bad as Graves had come to fear. As Paul O’Prey summarizes,

the reviews ... were, with few exceptions, very hostile, some to the point of hysteria. Reviewers on the whole paid little attention to textual details and avoided serious analysis of the argument, content to denounce the book as ‘a farrago of rubbish’ (Church Times) or complain that Graves and Podro ‘reduced the story to the plane of pure history’ (Observer). The reviewers were mostly members of the clergy... and each one was answered by Graves (ibid., 134–5).

Graves enjoyed the precision of these battles. The Manchester Guardian was forced to pay legal costs and print an apology for libel in its review of The Nazarene Gospel Restored. Graves proceeded against the Times Literary Supplement for libel once the TLS had closed the correspondence between Graves and M.J.C. Hodgart, who had accused Graves and Podro of ‘unethically camouflaging the true text of Galatians 4, 14’ (quoted in O’Prey, Between Moon and Moon, 135; in fact, Graves and Podro were using a source older than the one quoted by Hodgart.) There were many battles between Graves and reviewers. In the holdings of Carl Hahn, the eminent Graves collector and bibliographer, there are at least six sets of clippings, all reviews and answers from Graves, that are unmentioned by the biographers and undescribed in Higginson. The list of some of the publications in which these reviews appeared, each followed by retorts, includes newspapers and magazines of wide circulation, alongside publications aimed at the religious: Time, Picture Post, Synagogue Review, The Yorkshire Post, and Time and Tide.

Podro’s joy in the collaboration did not extend past publication, however; for the less experienced author, it was ‘dismaying’ to wait six months for review. Podro and Graves had written E.S. Harper by 7 December 1953, ‘complaining of the absence of reviews,’ and Harper answered with a list of ten journals in which advertisements for The Nazarene Gospel Restored had appeared and ten in which reviews had appeared (the original letter is in the Carl Hahn collection). That Mr. Harper may have been having difficulty marketing the text is indicated by his citing the price (‘63/-’) and by Cassell’s having sent an ‘extensive prospectus’ to a rather exhaustive list of ‘potentially interested members of the Church.’ Most telling, though, is Harper’s explanation of why the book cannot be advertised in the Church Times: ‘I am afraid that this is impossible as the Church Times [sic] refused to accept our original announcement of the book.’

Moreover, when the generally very hostile reviews began to appear – the reviewer for the Manchester Guardian called Podro ‘a renegade Jew’– Podro was ‘distressed by the experience of public contempt.’ Even though Graves was quite successful in defending himself and his collaborator, according to Martin Seymour-Smith, ‘Podro never recovered from the strain’ (Seymour-Smith, 344–5). In fact, Richard P. Graves’s later biography does not devote much attention to Joshua Podro. Perhaps this is a result of his conviction, one I partially share, that The Nazarene Gospel Restored was the greatest single miscalculation of Graves’s long writing career, as well as his greatest disappointment. From Graves’s and Podro’s first meeting in 1943, ten years of very detailed work researching and writing a thousand-page combination of text and scholarship – with only a disappointing few copies sold in England when it was finally published in 1953 – resulted in hostile reviews and, of course, no effect whatsoever on ‘The Protestant Temple,’ at least in the observable short run for Graves. Consuming so much of what were his most productive years, this investment of artistic time and effort must have seemed very ill-considered at times, and he must have questioned the wisdom of his fascination with correcting the Gospel records. But despite this failure of the book to sell in large numbers or to engage leaders of the clergy in any real dialogue, Graves later maintained, certainly to his family, that The Nazarene Gospel Restored was his most important book.

In fact, in America, the larger market, sales exceeded those in England. Doubleday sold all or certainly most of their 1954 first American edition, and issued an undated second American edition, which one might more accurately call ‘the American issue of the first British edition.’ This is a version of the Cassell edition for which Cassell bound, under a Doubleday title page, the remaining Cassell sheets. It is important to note that this ‘American issue’ of the Cassell text did not incorporate any of the revisions Graves had made for the Doubleday first American edition. One might speculate that Doubleday found that a book the size of The Nazarene Gospel Restored would be too expensive for a reprint (in fact, Doubleday had originally planned, for their first American edition, simply to bind the extra Cassell sheets). Once Doubleday had secured Graves’s American copyright with a new version printed in America and discovered that Cassell had in storage something like another 2,000 sets of sheets (here I might speculate that the 5,000 figure often cited for the Cassell edition may have included these sheets), the costs of producing such a small print run became a priority again. Higginson’s and Williams’s 1987 note on what is known as the ‘partial edition’, that ‘Doubleday was permitted to import copies of this edition into the United States as late as 1972’, may in fact refer to this second Doubleday edition of the entire volume, given what we know from private collections. There are several copies of this ‘American issue of the Cassell edition’ in private collections, including that of Carl Hahn (and I am indebted to him for most of the printing history included here, and for his corrections to the Higginson bibliography).

The Nazarene Gospel Restored was certainly no bestseller, but sales of the ‘partial edition’ of 756 copies issued by Cassell on 25 February 1955 (which included only Part III, the text of the restored Gospel itself and carried the shorter title The Nazarene Gospel) were at least slightly more substantial than has frequently been reported in Graves biographies.

Even with sales that may not have matched his expectations, Graves clearly viewed the Herculean effort of producing the various editions as a heroic achievement, both intellectually and, possibly, spiritually. As his notations for the proposed 1970 revised edition show clearly, these were ideas that on his own he continued to flesh out and to develop for another decade and a half.

But Podro’s convictions regarding Jesus as a Jew were central to the conception of the book. In the ‘Summary of Critical Principles’ in The Nazarene Gospel Restored, Graves and Podro point out that Jesus (in Matthew 23) exhorted his disciples to follow the Pharisees’ interpretation of the Law. ‘He regarded the Mosaic Law as immutable... and avoided all contact with ritually unclean Gentiles.’ Graves and Podro also point out that the disciples, though some were learned men, did not write down his sayings, and probably memorized them in Pharisaic style. The first written versions of Jesus’s sayings were probably ‘surreptitiously jotted down’ by Greek converts. But a vast schism came to separate the Church of Jerusalem and the Gentile Churches; the converts, ignorant of Jewish culture and law, introduced many errors, and they ‘were anxious, for political as well as doctrinal reasons, to dissociate themselves from the Jew’ (NGR, 831).

Some of Graves’s views about Jesus remained unchanged by Podro’s emphasis in The Nazarene Gospel Restored:

He was set apart from his contemporaries because John the Baptist had acclaimed him as the Saviour of his nation; was crowned King with all the ancient rites; ceremonially re-born from a Levite virgin, and made an honorary High Priest, though physically descended from the royal House of David. Thereafter, as the King-Messiah, he had to follow a rule of conduct laid down by the Prophets and hagiographers ... Jesus never identified himself with God, or even with the transcendental Son of Man. His title ‘Son of God’ was an ancient religious one, acquired at the Coronation (832–3).

As a member of an Apocalyptic sect (an idea that came from Podro), this Jesus is different in at least one major way from the figure in King Jesus:

Jesus expected the present world to end during his lifetime in a series of catastrophes known as the ‘Pangs of the Messiah’. The Kingdom of Heaven, which would then be inaugurated and last for a thousand years, with Jerusalem for its capital, was to be a heaven on earth, peopled partly by resurrected saints, partly by a few living saints who would not die until the world ended ... In his view, the imminence of the Pangs was manifested by many signs of the times (ibid.).

Graves’s and Podro’s Jesus of The Nazarene Gospel Restored preaches that people seeking salvation must ‘cease to live a normal life, observe strict chastity, and avoid every kind of pollution.’ This latter Jesus ‘decided that the time had come to offer himself as a royal sacrifice for them.’ This Jesus indeed conformed his last acts before the crucifixion to the ‘Worthless Shepherd’ prophecies of Zechariah.

[He] neither preached to the Gentiles, nor encouraged his apostles to do so, nor showed any concern for their fate; and ... he hourly expected the literal fulfilment of eschatological prophecies (833).

In a footnote to the Foreword of The Nazarene Gospel Restored, Graves explains the reasons for the differences between King Jesus and the Graves–Podro text:

In 1946, I published a historical novel, King Jesus, written from the standpoint of Agabus, an Alexandrian scholar, in the year 98 A.D. Agabus made no claim to be an authority on Pharisaic law, believed in the supernatural and relied in part on already falsified texts; so that his viewpoint does not correspond with ours [Graves’s and Podro’s] on many points, particularly on the question of the Nativity.

I used the fictional device of letting the story be told by a Greek subject of the Emperor Domitian, in order to emphasize the paradox of Christianity: namely, that the ancient Cyprian Goddess on whom Jesus declared war in the name of Israelite Jehovah. . . . met his challenge and gained a partial victory. Jesus was hanged on a tree, as her sacred king had been hanged in ancient times. . . . and Christianity became a strange compound of laughter-loving Mediterranean Goddess-worship, Gothic sword-worship, Greek speculative philosophy and ascetic Jewish monotheism (xii).

Paragraph two of this note is the only mention, in The Nazarene Gospel Restored, of the ‘Cyprian Goddess’ so central to King Jesus.

Graves and Podro argue that ‘When all first-and-second-century changes and interpolations are removed from the Canon, what is left amounts to no more than an exceptionally dramatic incident in Jewish sectarian history’ (xvi). Yet the Nazarenes believed that the Messiah had appeared as Jesus (and thus the Kingdom of God was ‘hourly imminent’); Paul believed that Jesus’s works ‘marked a new epoch of emancipation’ from Mosaic Law, a view welcomed by the Gentile Christians and by the ‘Grecians’ of Alexandria. Each of these, and especially ‘a small but influential body of Samaritan converts,’ distorted the Nazarene tradition to suit their needs (xvi).

‘Our findings are consistent with, and not greatly in advance of, contemporary Biblical criticism ...’ (xvi). If one accepts the manifold premises on which Graves and Podro proceed to sift the Gospels – most difficult may be their extremely harsh view of Paul and their insistence that one editor, Simon Magus, is responsible for much of the anti-Pharisee tone of the Gospels – then indeed the process is nearly mechanical, yielding a more consistent, and much simplified, text. The recovery of the Nazarene Gospel becomes a matter of peeling away error and inappropriate context, a huge – if simple – task. Graves and Podro provide a catalog of the ways error was introduced into the Gospels, with occasional examples: editorial carelessness, doctrinal piety or perversity, polemical shrewdness, misdirection against the genuine Pharisees of denunciations intended for the feigned Pharisees (xiii-xiv). (This list, from the Foreword, is illustrated by almost twenty examples.) Graves also advanced another argument familiar from King Jesus: iconotropy is another source of error in the existing Gospels – this misinterpretation is specifically responsible, Graves believes, for much of the apparent supernatural or miraculous element.

By ‘iconotropy’ Graves refers to the misinterpretation process by which a later, or competing, religion interprets the icons of an earlier religion in such a way as to confirm its own ideas or to disprove the ideas of the earlier (rather an intellectual defacing of statues, rather than physically damaging them). In the ‘Historical Commentary’ to King Jesus, Graves argued that this was, for example, how the Greeks illustrated the Olympian myths ‘at the expense of the Minoan ones which they superseded’ or how ‘the well known scene in which Isis and Nephthys mourn at the bier of the ithyphallic recumbent Osiris’ became ‘the unpleasant story of the seduction of Lot by his two daughters’ (King Jesus, 423). In fact, Chapter 19 of King Jesus offers a long textbook of iconotropic reinterpretations, in the form of an extended dialogue regarding the competing ideologies of Jesus and Mary.

Graves is quite specific – and insistent – in the Foreword to The Nazarene Gospel Restored, arguing ‘that many fictitious events, derived in good faith from a misreading of sacred pictures, have been incorporated into the Canonical Gospels,’ an explanation that he and Podro write ‘has not, so far as we know, been made before’ (xiv). Thus, generalizing from, say, the frescoes in the Great Synagogue of Doura-Europos, might Jesus’s harrowing of Hell been based on Ezekiel’s vision of the dry bones, or Jesus’s raising of the widow’s son at Nain been based on Elijah’s raising of the widow’s son at Sarepta, or Jesus’s visit by the Syro-Phoenician woman been based on Elijah’s reception by the Sarepta widow. More simply, Jesus’s symbolic acts might have been recast as miracles to make him the equal of Moses, Elisha, or Apollonius of Tyana (xiii, xv).

The nativity and lineage of Jesus show the greatest differences between The Nazarene Gospel Restored and King Jesus. At first Graves merely restates his earlier position, but advances it only as a straw man, arguing that Jesus may have laid legitimate claim to be King of the Jews:

Pilate, John records, did not contradict Jesus and found no fault in him. But the Hasmonean dynasty was extinct and to be ‘King of the Jews’ could have meant only one thing in Roman Law, namely to be the lost heir-at-law to the only Jewish throne recognized at Rome – the Herodian. It follows, therefore, unless they were talking at cross-purposes, that Jesus admitted Pilate’s information to be correct; he had been legitimately fathered on Mary by King Antipater, the eldest son of King Herod and a Roman army officer (56).

‘It is at first reading a plausible view.’ If Antipater were his father, then Jesus would be the sole heir of Herod, who had made a will in Antipater’s favor. This lineage would also explain the Flight, the Massacre of the Innocents, the registration of the House of David. ‘However, this engaging view, though given verisimilitude by a partial concealment under the Hellenistic doctrine of the Virgin Birth, and by Origen’s hints at “state secrets” of the Christian faith ... cannot stand careful historical scrutiny’ (57).

Graves’s own earlier thesis from King Jesus cannot bear up under his and Podro’s later scrutiny for several reasons: first, it ‘is based on John’s account of the interview with Pilate, which has clearly been re-written to propitiate the Romans and to lay the blame for Jesus’s judicial murder on the Jews; and Jesus’s “Thou sayest that I am King,” which in Greek means “yes,” has an altogether different meaning in Aramaic’ (57). The role of Joshua Podro’s expertise in providing a new context for interpretation here is obvious. ‘Besides, it is impossible that John the Baptist would have acclaimed and annointed a Roman citizen, a scion of the usurping and pagan House of Herod, whose death was proclaimed a festival in the Jewish calendar; nor is the Massacre of Bethlehem recorded in any other document, either non-Jewish or Jewish’ (57).

Graves’s explanation of the nativity and lineage of Jesus now, with Podro’s help, turns on precisely the same sorts of distortions they had found throughout the Gospels:

The confused Gospel account of Jesus’s nativity, in fact, is composed of several unrelated elements: the secret tradition of his ritual re-birth at the Coronation, the Cyrus legend, the Horus legend, the Philonian metaphor of divine seed, the tradition that he was born at Bethlehem on the occasion of the Davidic registration, and the tradition that Herod destroyed the genealogical records [of the House of David] as ruthlessly as he had destroyed three of his own children ... (58).

Further, the traditions of the Nativity were blurred by iconotropy: ‘It seems, further, that the confusion was prompted by a misreading of Jewish synagogue murals’ (ibid.). In addition, Jesus was given details of nativity and lineage which link him to Isaiah’s prophecies. And, ‘[if] in the original Nazarene tradition, Isaiah’s prophecy had been explained as thus referring to Herod and Antipater, that would account for the Alexandrian view, later suppressed, that Jesus was Antipater’s son by a secret marriage to Mary’ (62). But, now writing with Podro, Graves has clearly lost his enthusiasm for what he now advances only as a suppressed Alexandrian view.

In 1957, Graves and Podro published another jointly authored book, Jesus in Rome, in which they summarized the elements of the Nazarene Gospel, admitting that The Nazarene Gospel Restored may have been a bit expensive (the first American edition sold $ 10 and the American issue of the Cassell sheets for $12.50), and by 1957, even rare. One reason for their writing Jesus in Rome may well have been the chance to claim the last word in the controversy which surrounded the reception of the earlier book. After characterizing that reception as ‘abuse, misrepresentation, and a scornful rejection of our scholarly credentials,’ Graves and Podro describe their reaction:

It is an accepted rule throughout the lay press in English-speaking countries that, although nine readers out of every ten may be Christian merely in name, all books on Christian subjects must be reviewed by orthodox critics; the believing minority being so well organized that any offence offered them may cause a serious loss of circulation. Most subeditors managed to excise positively libellous comments from the copy which their clerical reviewers of our book sent in; but by an oversight the ex-missionary critic of the leading English Liberal daily was allowed to call us ‘a renegade Jew and a renegade Protestant’; and the anonymous reviewer of the leading English literary weekly to suggest, among other things, that we had unethically manipulated the text of Galatians iv. 14. We took legal advice and demanded retractions of these damaging statements. The Liberal daily printed theirs within the month; but our case against the literary weekly had already reached the High Court, when the editor realized that ‘P. 46,’ the Greek papyrus text on which we based our argument, was a hundred years older than the earliest of the uncial and cursive manuscripts containing the text favoured by his reviewer. A retraction was duly made, and spoilt only by a disastrous reprint (Jesus in Rome, 1–2).

Few authors can use their next book to do such a thorough post-mortem examination (or explanation) of their previous book. Graves and Podro sum up the state of the attempts to refute The Nazarene Gospel Restored:

Though our coherent, if unorthodox, theory of Gospel origins has been loosely described by professional theologians as based on a complex of historical errors, nobody has yet succeeded in isolating and identifying any of these; and until someone does, and offers an even more coherent theory, we are entitled to refer readers of this Epilogue to the book itself for points argued there in detail. The recently published Dead Sea Scrolls have, in some instances, strengthened our arguments and nowhere weakened them (ibid., 2).

But by early 1970, Graves was convinced that the time was right for a corrected edition of The Nazarene Gospel Restored. With a cover letter of 26 February 1970, to Bryan Gentry, who had been Graves’s editor at Cassell in the 1960s and was by 1970 one of five directors at Cassell, Graves transmitted ‘the job I was asked to do for the editors and printers of The Nazarene Gospel Restored. I found a great many new alterations in my library copy dating from Joshua Podro’s days; + have incorporated them.’ Graves understood that

It will, as you explained, entail a photographic text of the original, with the emendations not made in the text but gathered together at the end with numbers [after] corresponding with marginal numbers added to the text.

Further, Graves suggested – ‘since Doubleday won’t play’ – that the photographed text might better be the Doubleday text, since Doubleday ‘printed the chapter numbers on top of the page and Cassell did not; which makes it very difficult for the reader to refer back or forward in search of a text’ (RG to Bryan Gentry, William Graves collection). Nonetheless, Graves entered chapter headings in pencil at the top margins of the Cassell first British edition that was his ‘setting copy for revision,’ as he labeled it.

In this setting copy – Graves’s privately owned copy of The Nazarene Gospel Restored – there are handwritten notations on some 252 pages, referred to by Graves as ‘add-ins’. They range from a pencil notation to replace the list of Graves’s publications and to add the note ‘REVISED EDITION’ to the front matter and the ‘FOREWORD TO REVISED EDITION’ after the original Foreword on the Contents page (these notes are in pencil). Other notes are in green ink, suggesting that Graves revised his copy of The Nazarene Gospel Restored over some length of time, with at least two passes, and frequently, the green ink is obviously added over, and correcting, the original penciled instructions for the ‘add-ins’.

Typical notes in the text include, in pencil, reminders of the running header (as in fact used in the Doubleday first American edition) which Graves wanted in his proposed 1970 revised edition. As mentioned, Graves’s ‘setting copy’ was his British Cassell edition, so on odd pages (or on the first odd page of each chapter) Graves indicates this running head by noting, in pencil, a roman numeral in brackets, corresponding to the number of the chapter. (Atypically, on p. 237 of the setting copy, a green ink notation is cancelled in blue ink, suggesting at least a partial third pass through the text).

By the end of Chapter IV, the locations of the add-ins begin to appear, noted in green ink, with penciled additions. The first of these penciled additions is a note to add the word ‘FIRST’ to the title ‘HYMN’ on p. 78. These additions were collected by Graves into a typed list. From a carbon of this list, with more annotations in now-brown ink in Graves’s hand, the list of add-ins included on pp. 1023–45 of this edition was produced. The page numbers at the right originally were added in Graves’s hand to the carbon typescript. The list provided here incorporates Graves’s emendations, which he made in blue and in black ink, on the carbon typescript.

Some notations made in Graves’s setting copy of the Cassell text do not appear in the list of add-ins. For example:

– on p. 163, line 3, a faulty font is circled and a marginal note added to delete it, in pencil

– on p. 853, line 25, a notation to delete the quotation mark is in pencil

– on p. 859, a penciled notation has no corresponding add-in in the typescript

Other notations, usually in green ink – but sometimes in pencil – appear both in the setting copy and in the typed list of add-ins. These tend to be shorter additions, rather than emendations, possibly made on the spur of the moment, such as the added phrase ‘and originally comes from Ecclesiasticus xxxiv. 23’ on p. 427 and ‘the Son of Sirach saith’ on p. 428 (this latter is a phrase that was in fact added in the Doubleday first American edition, making it quite clear that Graves was incorporating at least some of his earlier Doubleday revisions for this proposed 1970 edition). But some of these notations are in the later blue ink, as on p. 428, where the phrase ‘as the Preacher,’ is added to ‘the Son of Sirach saith.’ On the typed list of 1970 add-ins, this later phrase is added in there, too, also in blue ink – giving us a clue to the nature of Graves’s iterative process of editing this complex text, with its complicated printing history.

The add-ins Graves prepared for the projected revised 1970 edition are a mix of simple corrections and longer, more thoughtful additions. They clearly indicate that well after publication of The Nazarene Gospel Restored, he continued to think (and read) about the issues he and Podro had dealt with earlier. Consider that by far the most significant source for these addins was the Gospel according to Thomas, which had not become available in an English translation until 1959. There are some twenty citations to Thomas which Graves prepared for his revised edition – proving Graves’s continuing commitment to Gospel scholarship – but an equal number of minor corrections, further speculations, and additional new sources show just how thorough and wide-ranging Graves’s continuing interest in the Gospels remained. For example, in three preliminary notes, Graves adds a second hymn to the account of John the Baptist’s birth, and provides a summary of scholarship dating the hymn from ‘the time of the Maccabees’ as a ‘prayer for Israel’s victory over her Seleucid enemies.’ He also adds the text of a prophecy of John’s role, as delivered by Zacharias.

Graves adds a note to ‘Before Caiaphas’ speculating that it may in fact have been Judas who ‘corrected the report that Jesus had threatened to destroy the Temple,’ after noting that in none of the Canonical Gospels is Judas listed as ‘among the hostile witnesses.’

Graves also makes minor corrections to the original text in his list of add-ins. In ‘On Chastity,’ he makes this very fine point: ‘two sayings quoted by Tertullian (On Baptism 20 and Didascalia ii 8)’ is to be changed to ‘a saying quoted by Tertullian (On Baptism 20) and supplemented by Didascalia ii 8.’ In ‘On Oaths,’ a citation of Sifra Leviticus is to be changed to Sifra Kedoshim, and in ‘Judge Not!’ a citation from Aboth ii is to be amended to ‘Aboth ii 4.’ Ascribing the Letter of Aristeas to ‘an Alexandrian Greek’ is revised to ‘an Alexandrian Greek Jew.’ At one point in the commentary of ‘Jesus in Nazara,’ in discussing the insult, ‘Physician, heal thyself!’ Graves will add the rather offhand, even superfluous ‘Medicine in those days was largely a matter of faith-healing.’

Some of these small changes in diction, in fact, are clearly provoked by Graves’s study of the Gospel according to Thomas and by the authority he grants to what was then a recently discovered Gospel. Changing ‘A prophet is not acceptable in his own country’ to ‘in his own city’ comes from noting Thomas’s use of ‘village’ in this context as ‘acceptably substituted’ in another of the add-ins.

In ‘The Twelve’ Graves would add, from Thomas, Simon Peter’s request that Mary not accompany the disciples. In Thomas’s Gospel, Jesus answers that if she be ‘like unto a man’ she may enter the Kingdom of Heaven. Graves speculates that this reply was deleted from the Canonical Gospels in order to keep the priesthood all male.

Graves is willing to reconsider extensive scholarly discourses from the original text in the light of the Gospel according to Thomas, even deleting some of his own previously impressive work. From the section ‘Take No Thought’ Graves proposes deleting the Oxyrhynchus Papyrus as a source, and adding verses from Luke and Thomas. Graves would then delete the original paragraph in which he supplied a restoration of the damaged papyrus verses and followed with brief mentions of the ‘somewhat different restorations’ of ‘Evelyn Whyte and Lagrange.’ In the analysis Graves wants inserted, he provides the full text of the restoration by ‘Dr. Evelyn Whyte,’ which begins with the assumption that the question had been asked by Judas. ‘Dr. Lagrange’s restoration was similar,’ Graves says, ‘even to the guess at Judas’s name; which shows how untrustworthy the guesses of scholars often are.’ Thus Graves corrects these two scholars with the text from Thomas, wishing to make his point so powerfully that he deletes his own restoration of the papyrus – which followed the scholarship very closely, frankly. Thomas is now seen as a more final authority than Whyte, Lagrange, or even Graves himself. (Though in another note, for ‘The Pluck-Right,’ he prefers, admittedly, the Oxyrhynchus Papyrus wording, in this case more complete, to that of Thomas.)

Since Graves considered ‘the order in Luke xiv. 26 to hate one’s father and mother for Jesus’s sake’ to be ‘one of the grossest forgeries in the Gospels’ (648) it must have been with a ‘sigh of satisfaction’ that he could propose Thomas 101 as a new source verse for the section ‘The Kinsmen.’ Graves thought Thomas’s language made the order both softer and clearer: ‘in my way’ instead of ‘for my sake.’ Moreover, Graves argues, Thomas’s language seems to allude to the Coronation, at which God was to have become Jesus’s Father and the Holy Spirit his mother.

But the Gospel according to Thomas is not the only source of Graves’s additions for the proposed revised edition of The Nazarene Gospel Restored. For the section ‘On Chastity’ Graves adds a source from Thomas and a source from Clement of Alexandria. He clearly continued to read widely in the source texts he had used for the first edition of his and Podro’s work on the Nazarene Gospel.

For example, Graves points out that calling ‘the poor to thy table’ is a ‘sentiment’ that is ‘anticipated’ in the Odyssey, when Telemachus protects a lame beggar at the banquet. Similarly, his continuing reading of Byzantine ecclesiastical tradition convinced him that ‘pearls’ were ‘crumbs of sacramental bread,’ or vegetable sacrifices; therefore it was ‘crumbs of the showbread’ which should not be cast before the swine. Similarly, he points out that Oecumenius’s ‘One building, another pulling down’ originally comes from Ecclesiasticus xxxiv. 23, and modifies the verses to include ‘the Preacher, the Son of Sirach.’

Graves inserts a final verse from Amos, for example, into the prophecy of the young man fleeing Gethsemane naked, without which the prophecy is incoherent. He corrects a citation of the Oxyrhynchus Papyrus, corrects a citation of the Sifra Leviticus to Sifra Ahre, and corrects the date of the battle at Kadesh from 1335 B.C. to 1296 B.C. He corrects the spelling of the Hebrew word for the sun, Shamash, and corrects an incorrect reference to the Fifth Commandment, as well as correcting numbers for cited verses and chapters.

Graves adds another verse from John to the source texts for ‘By What Authority,’ which may indicate little more than tinkering. But, in the commentary sections for those verses he proposes this addition – clearly based on his further consideration and his further reading of source materials:

Whether John was Elijah and thus capable of anointing the Messiah was still hotly debated in Justin’s mid-second-century Dialogue with Tryphon (see xiii a para 2). Its difficulty was that it presupposed reincarnation, which was not a Hebrew belief at any period.

A citation to the apocryphal Gospel of Peter is added to ‘The Superscription,’ citing this Gospel as the only source blaming Herod (and his wife Herodias) for the crucifixion of Jesus.

The list of add-ins ends with three new notes, one of which continues fleshing out Graves’s hostility to Paul, even suggesting that Paul’s career was revenge on Jesus and Peter for preventing Paul’s marriage into the ‘rich and influential House of Boethius.’ Another of these final notes ‘suggests a claim’ that Jesus had visited Paul ‘in the flesh’ at Damascus, prompting Paul’s claim to have been ‘personally instructed by Jesus’ – Graves cannot resist accusing Paul of identifying himself with ‘the Spirit of Divine Wisdom which speaks in the heart.’ And the final note refers the reader to Jesus in Rome for a ‘sketchily reconstructed’ account of Jesus’s wanderings after leaving the disciples. And here, Graves even corrects the record of Jesus in Rome. To fulfill a Messianic prophecy (and inadvertently to prompt ‘Claudius’ expulsion of Jews from the city’), Jesus sat outside the Praenestine Gate of Rome, not the Pincian Gate, as Graves and Podro had speculated in Jesus in Rome.