The Robe, by Lloyd C. Douglas

I was not able to get to the library as much as I wanted earlier this month, so I picked up a book I read quite a while ago. I enjoyed it then—the experience was a little different, this time.  The Robe, by Lloyd C. Douglas, is similar to Ben-Hur—fiction set in Christ’s time that extrapolates what it might have been like to live in the world as it first reacted to the shockwave of Christianity.

The story is still good. Marcellus, a young Roman Tribune is assigned to command the fort at Minoa; a shameful posting, meant to get him out of the way for angering a powerful man. While at the fort, he goes to Jerusalem during the Passover and Pilate commands him to execute a certain criminal, a man who has caused political unrest, a Galilean named Jesus. Everyone, including the Romans, knows that Jesus has done nothing to deserve an execution, especially not one as brutal as crucifixion, but Marcellus does as he is ordered and crucifies Jesus. He and his second in command gamble for Jesus’ robe and Marcellus gets the robe. His slave, Demetrius, takes the robe and finds a great sense of peace simply from touching the garment. Marcellus on the other hand, puts on the robe in drunken mockery, and is immediately struck with a malaise so deep that he can barely move for sheer despair.

Released from service, he goes home to a horrified family who wonder what has happened to their strong young son. Demetrius recommends letting Marcellus go on a trip to get him away from their family and hopefully allow him to recover. He has not been able to bring himself to destroy the robe as Marcellus commanded, but keeps it secretly. Traveling does nothing to help Marcellus, but one day he comes upon the robe and touches it again, intending to destroy it. Immediately, his health is restored.

Curious and fascinated, but rebelling against the idea of the supernatural, he goes back to Judea to interview Jesus’ friends and family and figure out who Jesus really was. Over the course of the rest of the book, Marcellus meets some of the people Jesus healed, his disciples, and the early church, and upon seeing Stephen martyred, comes to faith in Christ. Demetrius also is saved and the two of them follow Christ, even when it brings them into conflict with the most powerful man in the world, the emperor of Rome.

Now to the problems. The things that made me uncomfortable as a teenager when I read this was the Catholic-style conceit of the robe having mystical powers all on its own. Despite my dislike of Catholic attitudes towards artifacts, I was able to just get past that as a necessary catalyst for Marcellus’ and Demetrius’ change of heart, largely because the robe eventually ceases to be central to the story.

Secondly, Marcellus frequently offers natural-world explanations for Jesus’ miracles as he has difficulty believing them. It made sense to me that someone struggling to believe in the supernatural would try to find “rational” explanations, even though I don’t agree with those explanations myself. These were fairly ignorable errors, and I still enjoyed the story.

But this time through. Hoo boy. My theological problems got much bigger.

The entire crux of Marcellus’ faith is a matter of whether or not he believes Jesus did miracles. That’s the hard to swallow thing about Jesus, not his teaching that sinful people can never do enough good works to save themselves or please God. Marcellus’ doubts are about Jesus’ credibility. There is absolutely no wrestling with what Jesus said about the reality of our human condition—Marcellus’ identity as a pretty decent guy is not challenged in the slightest.  

And then when Marcellus is saved, there is no talk of being redeemed or having his sins forgiven, or of an actual relationship with the living Lord.  Marcellus believes Jesus is alive, yes, but he doesn’t personally know him. As far as he is concerned, Jesus has saved him into a New Movement, a life-changing belief, a way of kindness and charity and pacifism and thinking of others. It changes how people relate to one another, because that, according to Douglas, seems to be the crux of the human problem. There’s no acknowledgement that all our broken human relationships stem from a broken relationship with God.

So that’s a pretty glaring failure right there. But THEN—what he does with the early church! Pah! They’re just a bunch of clueless whiners. Now let me be clear, I was raised in the church and still attend church and “clueless whiners” is frequently an accurate description of us. But scripture doesn’t show us the apostles and the leaders of the church as clueless whiners after being indwelt by the Holy Spirit (another problem with the book; the Holy Spirit is completely and absolutely absent.)

Peter, at least as portrayed in Acts, doesn’t strike me as the kind of guy who sits around worrying that he set up the church wrong. Stephen didn’t take up the post of deacon out of resignation because somebody has to do the boring stuff. The implication of how Douglas describes the early church is that most of the things Peter, Paul, John wrote in our New Testament were gradually worked out through bumbling trial and error and codified as solid commands much, much later.

But the early church was not a people without Scriptural guidance, as even a cursory reading of the New Testament will show you—they had the Old Testament and more importantly, they’d had Jesus himself go through it with them and explain what it meant. They had been taught by the Master himself, face to face. They had direction. They had the Holy Spirit.

The apostles were human, certainly, I’m not saying they weren’t discouraged, and they definitely sinned. But they and the early Christians did not submit to being hung upside down or fed to lions because they’d found a philosophy that made them kind to one another. They suffered those things because they had met a living God who had rescued and redeemed them.

In the end, though it’s possible Douglas might have intended to promote Christianity, what he does is water it down to near unrecognizability. I did a brief search about his life and while I didn’t manage to find anything detailing his theological beliefs, he lived from 1877 to 1951, a time where there was a large movement towards downplaying or eradicating the supernatural in scripture, so his errors track true with the theological context he was living in. Doesn’t make them not errors, of course…

Succinctly: good story, lousy theology.