Ben-Hur is a fictional character created by General Lewis Wallace, who had served in the Union army during the American Civil War. Wallace’s 1880 novel titled Ben-Hur: A Tale of the Christ was the best-selling novel of the 19th century. The book was turned into a play (1925), a silent movie (1925), and then a famous Hollywood movie starring Charlton Heston in 1959 (the movie was later remade again in 2016).
Anno Domini: the seventh year of Augustus Caesar's reign. In the Roman province of Judea, Jews return to the city of their birth for the census. A bright star in the night over Bethlehem marks the birth of Jesus Christ. Years later, Roman commander Messala (Stephen Boyd), who was brought up in Judea, takes command of the Roman garrison in Jerusalem. His Jewish boyhood friend Judah Ben-Hur (Charlton Heston) greets him. Messala is delighted. But when Judah refuses to name Jewish patriots, Messala sentences him to the slave galleys and imprisons his mother, Miriam (Martha Scott), and sister, Tirzah (Cathy O'Donnell). Judah vows revenge.
Wallace’s story is about a young Jewish nobleman named Judah Ben-Hur, who overcomes injustice, prejudice, hatred, and racial superiority after an encounter with Jesus the Christ, who wholly transforms his life. Through the power and compassion of Christ, Ben-Hur gives up his quest for vengeance and finds all that had been broken in his life is restored. As a work of historical fiction, Ben-Hur does a good job balancing the historical with the fictional. Ben-Hur’s interactions with Jesus are infrequent, do not speculate too much on what Jesus might have done in extrabiblical situations. The result is a believable account of life in the first-century world. But the story is fiction, and its main character, Ben-Hur in this account, is not found in the Bible.