Christ the Lord, for you

Took a bit out of my morning, went down to B&N, and read through Anne Rice's novel, Christ the Lord: Out of Egypt.

Caveat: I've never read any of Rice's previous work, but I have followed her life and career over the past five years.

The most interesting, even fascinating part of the book is the "Author's Note," in which Rice explains why she wrote the novel and how she went about it. Her motivations are movingly related, as she characterizes her earlier work in a spiritual context, her reasons for leaving the Church at 18, and her return decades later. Christianity caught her interest again, paradoxically (or not) enough, because of another mystery: "I stumbled upon a mystery without a solution...the mystery was the survival of the Jews..." (309). Her obsession with this question led to a renewed interest in Jesus, a desire to understand him, and finally to this novel.

It's when Rice addresses contemporary Scripture scholarship that things really get cracking. It's fascinating and instructive to see an "outsider" to the field of Scripture scholarship look at it with wide-open, frankly innocent eyes, and be 1)appalled at the shoddy nature of much of what's out there and 2)even more appalled and mystified by the animus some of these scholars have for their subject. In short, she discovered, Many of these scholars who apparently devoted their lives to New Testament scholarship disliked Jesus Christ. Period.

She contrasts this with other fields and says that one would simply not find this. She drills much of what she found: Some books were no more than assumptions piled on assumptions...arguments against the historicity of the NT were not made: Not only was it not made, I discovered in this field some of the worst and most biased scholarship I'd ever read

In contrast, she holds up others whom she's discovered, giving her highest props to our man N.T. Wright. Natch.

Now...for the novel.

Well.....It's odd. It's told first person by the seven-year old Jesus, whom we first meet in Egypt with his family. Most of the book follows them back to Nazareth, describing the horrors of Roman persecution they encounter along the way. Alongside all of this is Jesus' slowly evolving sense of who he is, moved along mostly by his questions, and everyone's refusal to answer them. The issue is basically "power." The novel opens with the account from the infancy gospel of St. Thomas, of Jesus killing a little boy and bringing him back to life. At other points in the novel, Jesus prays for snow, and it snows, etc. There are flashes he describes of being surrounded by angels, by power, of seeing through the veil of reality to greater reality and so on. So by the end, he has had the whole story told to him, and submitted himself to the Father (this is the first in a trilogy).

I didn't find the book very interesting. Rice is clearly fascinated by the social, cultural and political milieu, and really puts all of that center stage. Since the narrator is a child, even though he's, you know, God, the language is simple and stilted. There are some nice moments, mostly involving Mary. Those of you irritated by Rice's contention that Luke meant it when he said that Jesus grew in wisdom might find solace in the fact that every aspect of Jesus' family life she describes is consistent with ancient traditional Christian understanding - Mary's perpetual virginity, James as the son of Joseph from a previous marriage, per the Eastern tradition, and so on.

It's time for me to head to Mass at the Cathedral, but I'll post more when I get back. It's a big risk to write a novel from the perspective of Jesus, and Rice's motivations for doing so are admirable - she wants to understand. But in the end, I really don't see the point. Nothing is really illuminated, and, in fact, since Rice is human like the rest of us, she selects out the parts of the Jesus story that appeal to her the most and leaves us with a picture that is, even as it attempts to fill in gaps, incomplete.