1962: THE BRONZE BOW by Elizabeth George Speare
A boy stood on the path of the mountain overlooking the sea.
"There's two kinds of people in this world: those who get stomped on and those who do the stomping. That famous guy said it. What's his name? Uh…oh yeah, Jesus!"
-Norm MacDonald in Dirty Work
In 2006, the board governing San Rafael City Schools in California's Marin County decided to remove a forty-five-year old novel from their seventh-grade curriculum. I've written about challenges to books before, and I will again - plenty of Newbery medalists have been challenged for various reasons - and I never enjoy learning about them. I especially don’t like learning about the wave of challenges going on right now. I learn about them and just despair over the angry idiots trying to stamp out any sort of perceived deviance from their lives, to deprive their children and the children of others in their neighborhood of new perspectives and new knowledge, to do everything they can to hobble our childrens’ ability to develop compassion and understanding, in order to force-fit the world to their warped hyper-individualist borderline-fascist Christian nationalism. Book bans are a symptom of a deeply broken civil society.
But this was different. This book that San Rafael removed from the curriculum in 2006 wasn’t removed for LGBT content or critical race theory or swear words or even witchcraft. The school board removed a book because, according to the parents challenging it, it was promoting Christianity too aggressively. So at least that is a nice change of pace.
1962 medalist The Bronze Bow, the second medalist by Elizabeth George Speare, is the story of Daniel bar Jamin, a Jewish teenager in Roman-occupied first-century Palestine. His parents were murdered years earlier by Roman soldiers, and he has since taken up with a group of Jewish rebels in the mountains working to arm themselves, slowly recruit more soldiers, and eventually lead a revolution to free their country from the occupation.
Preparing for a revolution takes time, though, and in the course of his work for the rebels, Daniel eventually returns to his hometown to reconnect with his estranged sister, track down some old friends, and find blacksmith work that's a little more steady than "attack and rob whoever walks through the mountains". He continues to try and recruit other young men to the cause, including his childhood friends.
But one old friend he reconnects with is Simon, another blacksmith he grew up with, who now goes by Simon the Zealot. And he tells Daniel to come with him to the synagogue this weekend, because there's a preacher visiting from Nazareth. The preacher used to be a carpenter, and he basically got run out of Nazareth on a rail, and from what Simon's heard, there's never been anyone like this guy before.
Christians will recognize Simon the Zealot as one of Jesus’ original twelve Apostles, but the truly devout Christians will recognize Simon the Zealot as one of the few Apostles who gets his own song in the Jesus Christ Superstar musical. Jesus is entering Jerusalem, and the Jewish masses, living under Roman occupation, are just rabid for their liberator to finally arrive. And Simon is ready to start the revolution:
"Christ, what more do you need to convince you/
That you've made it and you're easily as strong/
As the filth from Rome who rape our country/
And who've terrorized our people for so long/
…Keep them yelling their devotion/
But add a touch of hate at Rome/
You will rise to a greater power/
We will win ourselves a home."
Simon is urging Jesus to pull the trigger on the big master plan to defeat the Romans. Now, if you have, I'm going to say, even a passing familiarity with the story of Jesus, you know that this didn't happen, and you probably also know that this was not what Jesus was telling people was going to happen. But Simon's view, as presented in this song, is pretty consistent with what the Gospel narratives said about how Jesus' followers saw him. Jesus' closest followers - not the authorities who would eventually execute Him, but the guys who listened to Him every day and who would eventually be entrusted with growing the church, so guys that you'd expect to have this figured out - were pretty sure that Jesus was going to lead an actual, physical revolution that would overthrow the Roman government. In the Gospel narratives, Jesus repeatedly explains what He's actually there to do, and how following Him will require a radical rethinking of what "power" actually means, and how there are more important things than powerful people stomping over whoever they want, and the Apostles are repeatedly shown not understanding this message (Jesus also chides Simon in the above show tune). Nobody gets it.
Nobody really gets it now, either. The relationship between Christianity and power, at least in America, currently appears to be "if you can use Jesus' name in a sentence, you can say or do whatever you want without any consequence no matter who else gets stomped on or crushed", which doesn't really seem to be leading us anywhere good. If I’m just making an educated guess based on, say, the past few decades of the formal participation of institutional Christianity in the American political system, things to be leading to a place where people who call themselves Christians are aligning themselves with a reactionary force that hopes to permanently run the government through minority rule enforced by violence. I suppose if I really wanted to be on the nose about it, I’d illustrate this by having the President of the United States, at the height of protests against racial injustice and police violence, tear gas a bunch of peaceful protestors so he could walk over to a church and hold a bible up in front of it, as if to say, in the dumbest way possible that avoids any attempt at understanding or nuance or deeper meaning, “yes, obviously everything I’m doing seems very bad and cruel, but I am holding a bible in front of a church so actually that makes everything I’m doing Christian”, and then immediately leave after someone got a photograph of that moment. That photograph might look something like this:
Perhaps an image like this strikes you as inconsistent with the teachings of a man who explicitly taught that material political power was not something Christians should be aggressively pursuing. And look, I'm not here to say "I've figured out how Jesus wants us to live and everyone else has gotten it wrong". I’m not getting it right either (although I think I’m getting it less wrong than the man pictured above). If I were getting it right, my life would probably look very different than it does now. I went to Catholic school for years, I got a degree in this stuff, and when it comes to understanding what Jesus actually asks of me, I am still a child. So I really enjoyed reading a story about a child who was trying to understand it in real time.
The central character arc of The Bronze Bow is Daniel's journey from assuming Jesus is a literal political revolutionary to starting to scratch the surface of Jesus's far more radical message. This is also the central arc of entire sub-disciplines of Christian theology.
Daniel spends most of the novel understandably consumed by his desire for vengeance and fantasies of fighting and defeating Roman centurions; I can't really blame him for this, given his history. But early in the novel he goes with Simon to hear Jesus preach, and is immediately struck by this charismatic man who could just be the guy he's been waiting for:
"The man’s figure was not in any way arresting. He was slight, with the knotted arms and shoulders of one who has done hard labor from childhood. He was not regal or commanding. He was dressed simply in a plain white tallith that reached to his feet. His white head covering, drawn closely over his forehead and hanging to his shoulders, hid his profile. Yet when he turned and stood before the congregation, Daniel was startled. All at once nothing in the room was distinct to him but this man’s face. A thin face, strongly cut. A vital, radiant face, lighted from within by a burning intensity of spirit. Yes! Daniel thought, his own spirit leaping up. This man is a fighter! He is one of us!"
Except He might not actually be a fighter. Because He's not saying anything at all about fighting, and by the end of Jesus's sermon, Daniel is wondering what just happened:
"He had said liberty for the oppressed. Why didn’t he call them to arms against the oppressor? Repent, he said now. Repent. As though that could rid them of the Romans. Disappointed and puzzled, Daniel leaned back. The fire that had leaped up in him died down. The man’s voice had been like a trumpet call. Yet where did the call lead?"
Jesus appears as a character a few more times throughout the novel, each time gathering a larger crowd around Him, each time leaving Daniel bewildered at what His actual message is supposed to be. And, as Daniel notes, it's not like the crowds of cripples and outcasts around Jesus are the guys who are going to win a war against the Roman empire:
"What good would it do to speak of a kingdom to these miserable wretches? What could it mean to them, when not one of them could lift a hand to fight for it? But he saw their faces, white, formless blots in the darkness, all lifted toward this man."
And so Daniel is at a loss for most of the novel. As he watches Jesus heal sick people and feed the multitudes and welcome children when others would kick them out of the crowd, he's left wondering if Jesus is ever going to pull the trigger and tell everyone to rise up. As a result, Daniel ends up completely missing Jesus' extremely explicit points about mercy:
"He told us a story about a traveler who fell among thieves who beat him and left him half dead beside the road. And a priest and a Levite came by and saw him and passed by on the other side, but a cursed Samaritan stopped and bound up his wounds and took care of him. I wish the story had been about a Jew instead. If Jesus means that Jews and Samaritans should treat each other like neighbors, that is foolish. It could never happen.”
Slowly, as Daniel reconciles with his sister, as he connects with more people in the village, as he witnesses more mercy and sacrifice among the occupied people of Galilee, he finds himself drawn again and again to Jesus, even without fully understanding what His message is. He starts to realize that maybe feeding and healing and listening to people is all Jesus is doing, but maybe that's worth following more than a desire for power, and certainly more than a desire for vengeance. Jesus even confronts him directly with this when Daniel tries to pledge his allegiance to Jesus and swear to avenge his dead friends:
“'He did not give you vengeance. He gave you love. There is no greater love than that, that a man should lay down his life for his friend. Think, Daniel, can you repay such love with hate?...Can’t you see, Daniel, it is hate that is the enemy? Not men. Hate does not die with killing. It only springs up a hundredfold. The only thing stronger than hate is love…'
'Master!' A great burst of hope almost swept him to his knees. 'I will fight for you to the end!' Jesus smiled at him gently. 'My loyal friend,' he said, 'I would ask something much harder than that. Would you love for me to the end?'”
It's a powerful statement of what Christianity is supposed to be about, even though it is, unfortunately, also nearly identical to a line the Joker says to Harley in that very bad Suicide Squad movie (that's such an incredible clip to watch with the knowledge that Jared Leto somehow has an Academy Award for acting). My point is that it takes him the entire novel, but Daniel finally starts to get it, and in the final scene, he has taken one literal and figurative step towards Jesus.
The Bronze Bow is a beautiful piece of Christian theology. Speare was a Christian who taught Sunday school in her spare time, and wrote a book for children about the idea that "a lot of people didn't understand Jesus' message about power", which appears to still be true today. As Speare herself said in her acceptance speech for the Newbery:
"I knew what I wanted to do. I was teaching a Sunday School class at the time, and I longed to lift the personality of Jesus off the flat and lifeless pages of our textbook. I wanted to give my pupils, and others like them, a glimpse of the divided and turbulent society of Palestine, an occupied country with many parallels in our own day. And I wanted to stir in them some personal sharing of what must have been the response of boys and girls who actually saw and heard the Carpenter from Nazareth."
We see Jesus through a child's eyes in this book, and that is how most if not all Christians see Him today. And Speare effectively illustrates the power of His message, and how radical it was when set against the contemporary understanding of power and expectations for what a savior was supposed to do.
What the book is not is a particularly robust piece of historical writing. Not that the book is anachronistic, but period details are clearly less of a focus for Speare than the narrative about Jesus and the power of the Christian message. Speare drew this story out of the Gospel narratives, not historical documents; the Gospels are not straight historical source documents, as the earliest canonical Gospels weren't written down until decades after Jesus' death, and all of them were written with specific (and varying) educational, evangelical, and political audiences in mind. All of that makes the novel, in my opinion, a weird choice for a seventh grade public school curriculum on the history of the Roman empire, which is what the San Rafael schools were using it for.
I'm not about to take the side of people who tried to remove a book from a school curriculum, but the fight over The Bronze Bow was definitely different than other challenges to books. For one thing, the parents organizing to remove the book from the Roman history curriculum set up their own website which is still up and looks terrible even by the standards of 2006 web design. They did acknowledge that their own arguments were pretty long-winded and offered people free ice cream for reading their entire website although they limited it to twenty people because come on they're not made of money here:
"Anyone who can demonstrate that they have read every word on this long-winded website wins a well deserved coupon for a free coffee drink at Peet's. If you are under 15 it's a cone at Double Rainbow. We warn you though there may be a stringent oral exam. Contest is limited to the first 20 winners. Applicants must be from families currently enrolled in San Rafael schools and over the age of 11. Parental permission required."
But these parents also took pains to emphasize that they didn't think the book was bad in a literary sense, and they didn't necessarily think that the book was inflammatory or offensive, but they did feel that the book promoted a specific religion, featured a grossly oversimplified portrayal of Judaism primarily as a contrast to the portrayal of Christianity (which would also be an accurate reflection of what's in the Gospel narratives), and thus was inappropriate for a public school curriculum. Further, they didn't want the book banned or removed from the school, they just didn't want it as part of the history unit; students could still, for instance, get the book in the school library.
I've said before that there are no "good" reasons to challenge a book, and I still think that, but the thing about saying "Speare wrote this book to promote Jesus and Christianity" is, well, she did. She told us she did. That was the stated purpose of the novel that she wrote for her Sunday school students. I found it well-written and engaging, but I also have read an above-average number of books about Jesus over the course of my education, and my enjoyment of the novel was certainly affected by my own background and relationship to my faith. I was honestly surprised, reading the book, that something so openly Christian, something that read primarily as a theological novel, could win an award like the Newbery. That it got into a social studies lesson is weird to me. Did it “promote Christianity”? I don’t know, but I don’t really think so; I don’t think a lot of non-Christian readers would convert because of a novel for fifth graders. But I actually do think this novel could be useful for promoting an important message to certain current Christians: believe it or not, we’re not here to stomp on people.
Newburied is a series by Tony Ginocchio on the history of the Newbery Medal and a whole bunch of other stuff related to it. You can subscribe via Substack to get future installments sent to your inbox directly. The next installment will cover the 1926 medalist, Shen Of The Sea: Chinese Stories For Children by Arthur Bowie Chrisman.