General Lew Wallace (1827–1905)—a Civil War hero, and the Territorial Governor of New Mexico—was writing a book against Jesus Christ and in the process was converted to Christianity. This is his story.
Wallace was born April 10, 1827 in Brookeville, Indiana. By his own admission, he had always been an agnostic and denied Christianity. And Robert Ingersoll—a famous Republican orator, known as “the Great Agnostic”—was one of his most intimate friends. Ingersoll made it his life mission to shake people’s beliefs in the Bible and Christianity. He wrote such books as “The Mistakes of Moses,” “Superstition,” and “Why I Am an Agnostic.” While the two friends were riding together on a train, Ingersoll said, “See here, Wallace, you are a learned man and a thinker. Why don’t you gather material and write a book to prove the falsity concerning Jesus Christ, that no such man has ever lived, much less the author of the teachings found in the New Testament? Such a book would make you famous. It would be a masterpiece and a way of putting an end to the foolishness about the so-called Christ.”
Wallace went home and told his wife about the project. She was a member of the Methodist Church. Obviously, she did not like the idea. But Wallace began to collect material from libraries all over the world that covered the era in which Jesus Christ should have lived. He did that for several years and then began writing. According to Wallace, he was four chapters into the book, when it became clear to him that Jesus Christ was just as real a personality as Socrates, Plato, or Caesar. “The conviction became a certainty. I knew that Jesus Christ had lived because of the facts connected with the era in which he lived.”
“If Jesus was a real person,” he asked himself candidly, “was He not then also the Son of God and the Savior of the world?” Gradually Wallace realized that since Jesus Christ was a real person, in all probability He was truly the divine Being He claimed to be.
“I fell on my knees to pray for the first time in my life, and I asked God to reveal himself to me, forgive my sins, and help me to become a follower of Christ. Toward morning the light broke into my soul. I went into my bedroom, woke my wife, and told her that I had received Jesus Christ as my Lord and Savior.”
“O Lew,” she said, “I have prayed for this ever since you told me of your purpose to write this book, that you would find him while you wrote it!”
Wallace went on to write a famous book. It was the pro-Christian novel—the most influential Christian book written in the nineteenth century— “Ben-Hur: A Tale of the Christ” (1880). His popular novel intertwined the life of Jesus with that of a fictional protagonist, the young Jewish prince named Judah Ben-Hur, who suffers betrayal, injustice, and brutality, and longs for a Jewish king to vanquish Rome.
“Ben-Hur” made Lew Wallace a celebrity, sought out for speaking engagements, political endorsements, and newspaper interviews. “I would not give a tuppence for the American who has not at least tried to do one of three things,” Wallace told a New York Times reporter in 1893. “That person lacks the true American spirit who has not tried to paint a picture, write a book, or get out a patent on something.” Or, he added, “tried to play some musical instrument. There you have the genius of the true American in those four—art, literature, invention, music.”
It was by no coincidence that Wallace himself excelled at all four. Besides being a Civil War hero, the territorial governor of New Mexico, and later the US ambassador to Turkey, the Indiana native sketched and painted with skill, held eight patents for a wide array of inventions, and made and played his own violins. But it was in literature that Lew Wallace indelibly made his mark. He is the only novelist honored in the National Statuary Hall of the US Capitol. With a life full of distinctions, none of Wallace’s accomplishments made such an impression as his novel “Ben-Hur.” In its writing, Wallace’s life was forever transformed.
“Do not be conformed to this world, but be transformed by the renewal of your mind, that by testing you may discern what is the will of God, what is good and acceptable and perfect” (Romans 12:2 ESV).
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