The Nazarene Gospel Restored

The Nazarene Gospels 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 five 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 writing as The White Goddess. The Nazarene Gospels 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 contextof a continuing engagement with the historical Jesus, both scholarly and popular - nothing in The Da Vinci Code, Presley notes, would have surprised Graves or Podro. 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. An appendix of Graves's Foreword and annotations for a projecte drevised edition make this an indispensable resource.