Ben-Hur: A Tale of the Christ: Free Audiobook and Listening Guide

Ben-Hur: A Tale of the Christ, credited to Lew Wallace, is available as a LibriVox volunteer audiobook. This guide identifies the recording, its source summary and its audio tracks.

About the work

The LibriVox catalogue summary, preserved with the recording, reads:

LibriVox recording of Ben-Hur: A Tale of the Christ. Read by Mark F. Smith. Ben-Hur is a story of two very different heroes. Judah Ben-Hur, a prince of Jerusalem, is involved in an accident to the Roman procurator which is taken to be intentional. He is seized and sent to the fleet as a galley-slave, while his family is imprisoned and the family goods confiscated. When Ben-Hur saves the fleet captain from drowning after his ship is sunk in a fight with pirates, that officer adopts him as son and heir. With Roman training, Ben-Hur distinguishes himself in the arena and the palistrae and appears to be on the way to high military command. With the help of a faithful family retainer and a generous Arab sheik, Ben-Hur is enabled to take part in a widely touted chariot race, where one of the other charioteers is the boyhood friend who connived to punish him for the accident and split his estate. That rival is crippled, financially and bodily, in a no-holds-barred race (memorable from the 1959 movie with Charlton Heston). Ben-Hur turns his attention to the prophesied King of the Jews, when through the sheik he meets Balthasar, one of the Three Wise Men, and hears of the child born years ago. Will Ben-Hur be the general who brings victories to the King, and finally liberates Israel from the oppressive Roman yoke? In his quest for the answer, Ben-Hur seeks out the Nazarene, now rumored to be The Messiah. THAT hero needs no introduction. Curious about the lack of kingly trappings and ambitions about this man, Ben-Hur begins to suspect that his kingdom is not of this world. And with him, we receive a gut-wrenching eye-witness view of Jesus’ arrest, humiliation, and crucifixion.

Recording facts

• Recording title: Ben-Hur: A Tale of the Christ
• Author credits: Lew Wallace
• Language: English
• Original MP3 tracks: 81
• Listed recording duration: 23:22:09

Catalogue topics

• fiction
• historical fiction
• benhur
• ben-hur
• chariots

Opening tracks: first 24 of 81

1. 1-01 — 11:50
2. 1-02 — 12:39
3. 1-03 — 9:05
4. 1-04 — 13:11
5. 1-05 — 26:06
6. 1-06 — 9:38
7. 1-07 — 13:45
8. 1-08 — 13:20
9. 1-09 — 23:19
10. 1-10 — 3:50
11. 1-11 — 16:44
12. 1-12 — 7:45
13. 1-13 — 26:35
14. 1-14 — 6:08
15. 2-01 — 9:26
16. 2-02 — 26:40
17. 2-03 — 13:15
18. 2-04 — 19:12
19. 2-05 — 21:16
20. 2-06 — 31:36
21. 2-07 — 8:32
22. 3-01 — 17:44
23. 3-02 — 16:36
24. 3-03 — 19:33

Listen to this recording

Open the complete recording and player on Internet Archive. The player includes the full track list and available download formats.

Source and rights

This is a record from LibriVox's official Internet Archive collection, with a public-domain licence recorded in its metadata. LibriVox's policy includes its catalogue summaries as well as its recordings. Its public-domain assessment follows United States law; copyright status can differ elsewhere. The summary and track facts are reproduced and reformatted from that record. Dates attached to the archive upload are not treated as original book publication dates.