King Jesus.

Robert Graves was one of the most versatile English men of letters of the twentieth century, a poet, classicist, and novelist best known for his historical novels I, Claudius and Claudius the God and for his wartime memoir Goodbye to All That. King Jesus (1946) is his audacious historical novel of the life of Jesus, whom Graves portrays not as a carpenter’s son but as the legitimate heir to the throne of Israel, grandson of Herod the Great through a secret marriage, and a learned contender for the kingship of his people. Dense with the mythology, ritual, and scholarship that preoccupied Graves, the novel is closely bound up with the ideas he set out two years later in The White Goddess, and it remains among the most ambitious and controversial of his many reworkings of the ancient world.