In 1876, during a train journey, a
former general and failed attorney named Lew Wallace was humiliated.
While debating religion with the
famed agnostic author Robert G. Ingersoll, Wallace realized that he knew next
to nothing about his own Christian faith.
Wallace devoted three years to
studying the Bible and researching Christianity, and the result was an
adventure novel, Ben-Hur: A Tale of the Christ,
which eventually outsold every book in the United States except the Bible.
I was fascinated to learn that the
first dramatic adaptation of the story was not
the silent film version, but a six-act, three-and-a-half-hour 1899 Broadway
play which boasted spectacular lighting, large onstage crowds and, as biographer
Andre Soares noted, “…two horse-drawn chariots darting at full speed on
parallel treadmills, with a Circus Maximus backdrop revolving behind them.”
Half a million people saw the play on Broadway, and more than 20 million saw it
on tour throughout the world.
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