‘He has rewritten the story of the Gospels. The result is remarkable and would be more startling had we not become used to being startled by Mr Graves.’
So reads part of the review from the Times Literary Supplement on Graves’s King Jesus, which was first published by Creative Age Press in 1946.
Written through the mouthpiece of Agabus the Decapolitan (fl. AD 93), this life of Christ was Graves at his imaginative best. And to aid the creative process was Graves’s notion of analeptic thought, the kind of associative thought by which solutions could be found to historical, religious, moral and poetic problems that could not be solved by reason alone.
The first English edition of 12,000 copies sold out within the first week of publication.