The Hungarian Jewish novelist György Spiró’s Captivity tells the tale of a Roman Jew named Uri who travels to Jerusalem as part of an official delegation. To Wesley Hill, the novel lacks literary sophistication but makes up for this deficiency with large doses of historical erudition and excitement—and a deftly executed appearance by Jesus, with whom the protagonist briefly shares a cell in Pontius Pilate’s prison:
Uri is less a three-dimensional person than a vehicle for Spiró to demonstrate his dizzying knowledge of 1st-century Jewish life and his knack for narrative cliffhangers. Uri’s trek from Rome to Jerusalem and Alexandria and back to Rome is a curio cabinet displaying Bildungsromanische baubles. . . .
At times, Spiró’s improbably broad reading seems to serve cliché: Uri encounters multiple luminaries of the ancient world, arriving at historical hinge points just long enough for Spiró’s lens to render a cameo. These cameos provide little new insight into any of the famed Jewish or Greco-Roman personages who cross paths with Uri at multiple junctures—with perhaps one exception. . . .
[B]y having Uri articulate [his rejection of Christianity] only after his return to Rome—after his tour through the pluriform Jewish communities of Judea, after his exposure to the shimmer of Alexandria’s temples and the treasures of its library, and after his eyewitness experience of that city’s frenzied pogrom in 38 CE—Spiró makes clear that his “Jesus novel” is something subtler than a picaresque with cameos. Spiró has plotted a kind of not-“Jesus novel,” in which Jesus is one more all-too-human victim of the world’s insatiable need to make messiahs of its heroes and of the world’s concomitant, relentless persecution of the Jews. To boot, it’s the most enjoyable swashbuckling-Jews-with-swords and not-“Jesus novel” likely to be written for a very long time.
More about: ancient Judaism, Ancient Rome, Arts & Culture, Fiction, Jesus
