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Christ the Lord: Out of Egypt

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The latest cultural and literary news is that Anne Rice has found Jesus, that she's become a Christian, and that she now wants her writing to reflect her newfound faith and how it's impacted her life. I don't think it's a marketing scheme - she doesn't need the help, quite frankly, and it's not really the demographic her Lestat novels have traditionally been drawing. What has happened, instead, is that a storyteller has found a new story to share, and a new story in which to participate.

Her first novel of a new series is Christ the Lord - Out of Egypt and as an avid reader but not previously a fan, I was pleasantly surprised. In the past, I've tried to read the opening chapters of a few of her other novels, but found it a chore to try to become involved emotionally with characters I ultimately had no love for. This was different, because this book tells a story with which we're already very intimately involved.

The basic premise is this: Jesus and His family have been in Egypt for seven years, sent there to escape Herod's bloody pride (Matthew 2:13-18). The story opens first person, the young Messiah telling His own story of His family's return to Galilee. The Christian reader will most probably have to get over the notion that there's nothing worthwhile to a story like this since it's not in and of itself "scriptural". Rather, because of her writing style and attention to storytelling and detail, the reader can catch a glimpse of something beyond the text - there was some untold story, some unwritten adventure, that Jesus lived out during His formative years.

As I was reading and being introduced to Jesus' extended family - all the cousins and aunts and uncles traveling with Mary and Joseph to Egypt and then back to the Promised Land - I got the distinct impression that Jesus was a Judean John Boy Walton, sharing the adventures and insights that come from having a big family, everyone having a voice and a role to play in the story. The years of relationship, the secrets of the adults kept from the innocence of the children, the interaction of the different generations, the realities of evil and good and everything that comes with sleeping and eating and living in tight quarters - those are the things that become vivid and real for the reader.

I was especially drawn into the first person narration of Jesus - where there's no gospel, nothing else written of Christ's life except His own quotes and parables as recalled by others, I felt like this liberty taken was justified. Did Jesus get sick? Did He have ultimate knowledge from the first, or did He have to learn some things like the rest of us? Did He feel revenge or fear or confusion? What kinds of questions did Jesus ask the teachers that prepared Him for His own questions and stories later on? There might be some issues to be taken doctrinally, but I think it misses the point to make this a theological exercise more than an artistic one. Rice has written her story, sharing her vision perhaps of what Jesus' story was like, even as she's now entered into it with her own talents and weaknesses, all of which probably pour out of this text in an entertaining and enlightening way.

The novel is quite a tour de force. Here are some initial impressions. Your mileage of course may vary.

1) Anne Rice has carefully done her homework. I read her Author's Note first (starting page 305), mostly because I wanted to know how she wrote this novel. I'm embarrassed to admit it, but there's a bunch of background information I should have known but didn't. For example, I didn't know anything -- or maybe I've forgotten, I'm nearly 50 -- about Herod Archelaus except that he was Herod's son. But being a wise technical writer, I did a Google search and found a great website that satisfied nearly every niggling historical question I could think of.

[...]

3) I liked how slowly the story of Jesus unfolded as a seven year old boy. In one sense, the entire novel is an extended meditation on St Luke's wondrous words: "And Jesus increased in wisdom and in stature, and in favor with God and man." (Luke 2:52)

Anne Rice demonstrates a certain apophatic restraint in how the young Jesus comes to understand Who He Is. Eastern Orthodox readers who can appreciate mystery ("I will not speak of Your mystery to Your enemies") will certainly appreciate how certain characters (for example, Elizabeth, the mother of John the Forerunner) only discloses certain revelations when it's appropriate to do so. Characters just don't blabber out profound mysteries. Holy mysteries are treated with respect.

Some quirks emerge in Rice's novel. Maybe it just shows how wacko I have become that I loved them. I didn't mind Elizabeth sending John to live out with the Essences after she dies. I didn't mind Joseph, the BVM, and Jesus living in Alexandria and meeting Philo the famous Jewish philosopher! Later, Cleopas, one of the uncles of Jesus, even gives two manuscripts of Philo to a rabbi in Nazareth as a problem. I was charmed. Finally, I didn't mind Jesus performing certain miracles when he was a kid. They really do make sense in the context of the novel. If I can swallow the Protoevangelium of St James, a couple of pseudepigraphical miracles (from the Infancy Gospel of Thomas) shouldn't give me theological indigestion. It wasn't that long ago stories like that gave me The Willies. Maybe this is proof positive that I'm not a Fundamentalist Bible Banger anymore after all!?!?!?

I must admit that it took me nearly 121 pages before I could fully suspend my disbelief. But then Anne Rice snagged me hook-line-and-sinker.

4) What I liked best about the novel is just how Jewish Jesus is. The Jewishness of Jesus in Anne Rice's writing is carefully depicted, right down to some of the gentle humor. (But don't expect any Woody Allen or Mel Brooks jokes!) The character of Jesus is molded in the context of living first-century Judaism. This is where Anne Rice's historical research paid off in spades. For example, Jesus is certainly trilingual, and maybe even quadri-lingual. He knows Greek, Aramaic, Hebrew, and perhaps even a smattering of Latin.

Chapter 17 especially enchanted me. Rice describes the young Jesus meeting three rabbis in the Nazareth synagogue for the first time. The oldest rabbi throws out a series of trick questions to the young Jesus, to test His knowledge of the Law and the Prophets. The Q+A scene is wonderful. Immediately I thought of young Reuven Malter before Reb Saunders in Chaim Potok's magnificent novel, The Chosen. Anne Rice really did a great job of emphasizing the sheer Jewishness of Jesus. The young Jesus she depicts could have been Danny Saunders or David Lurie, other characters out of the novels of Chaim Potok (of blessed memory).

5) In Anne Rice's novel, the young Jesus comes to realize He shouldn't make it snow or stop raining willy-nilly. He understands at an early age that He must only do what the Father wills. Admittedly, this is a very difficult truth to hear and do. Like Jesus, we should seek to give up our opinions and deliberations. Perfect freedom is only in obedience to the will of the Father. All else is slavery to the forces of darkness.

The process of self-discovery is hard enough for any young adult. What must it have been like for the Son of the Living God? Anne Rice attempts to get inside the head of the seven year-old Jesus as he gradually learns about the circumstances of his birth and their implications on the meaning of his life.

The dual nature of Christ is the mystery of mysteries. How would Jesus, fully human and fully divine, think and act? Writing in the first person, Rice portrays a boy with questions, worries, and doubts; but also with an inner calm and wisdom just strong enough to suggest the divine. But her young Jesus speaks and thinks with the vocabulary and simplicity of a child (more like a fifteen year-old, actually). This results in a narrative that is somewhat flat and repetitive. Compounding the problem is the plot itself. The story begins with the Holy Family returning to Nazareth from Egypt, with Jesus trying to learn more about the mysteries of his birth he is vaguely aware of. Since we all know the answers, the process of discovery which consumes the whole book becomes rather tedious; I found myself thinking, "come on, tell him already!".

Still, Rice paints an extraordinarily detailed, believable and beautiful portrait of Christ. The book is incredibly well researched. (In fact, the afterword in which Rice discusses her research and her return to the Catholic Church is almost as interesting as the novel itself.) The reader sees the daily life and society of the Jews under Roman occupation in all its beauty and ugliness. One element of the novel I particulary enjoyed was how Rice rehabilitates Joseph. A often neglected or ignored figure in theology and history, Joseph stands out here as a model of fatherhood-- courageous, wise, steady, firm, loving, almost heroic. He is the Father of Our Lord writ small, as it should be.

If you are expecting a page-turner like one of her vampire books, you will be disappointed. If you are looking for a real glimpse of Jesus and the genesis of Christianity, you will not be!

Anne Rice. Christ the Lord. Out of Egypt. New York, Toronto: Knopf, 2005. 322 pages. $25.95. ISBN 0-676-97768-5

Witches and vampires--those are the kinds of characters most readers associate with the name of Anne Rice. Since her first novel appeared in 1974, Rice has attracted a loyal and large following of readers. But these carefully researched tales are often dark--full of demons and other unsavory characters. Who would have guessed that these twenty-one books--one of which was made into a successful Broadway play--would culminate in a book about Jesus? Christ The Lord is her latest book, and a very sympathetic account of Jesus at that. She employs her considerable story-telling skills to present a year in Jesus' early life told by the boy himself. What did Jesus know about himself and when did he come to know it? How and when did he become aware of his "divine powers?" How did he discover his "history," why his parents treated them the ways they did, and why James was jealous of him? Rice invites her readers to raise such questions in this very engaging novel.

In an "Author's Note" at the end, Anne Rice describes the genesis of this book. It began in 1998 with a conversion and return to the Catholic faith she had abandoned at age eighteen. Thereafter she embarked on an intense search into the question of Jesus, eventually "reading the Bible constantly" and then devouring all the scholarly works of the prominent Jesus researchers. She started with the "skeptical critics" presuming their arguments would be compelling, but she eventually found their solutions to the historical problems unconvincing and lacking coherence. More compelling and satisfying were writers such as J.A.T. Robinson (on the early dates for the NT documents), Richard Bauckham, Martin Hengel, Jacob Neusner, Luke Timothy Johnson, Raymond Brown, John Meier, Larry Hurtado, Craig Blomberg, and Craig Keener, just to cite a few that she mentions. She gives most credit to N.T. Wright (especially his The Resurrection of the Son of God) for crucial insights in shaping her understanding of Jesus and his place in the world into which he was born.

The novel takes the form of a first-person narrative told by Jesus when he was seven to eight years old. In other words, it portrays Jesus during a period we refer to as the "silent years." Of course the gospels provide some minimal data from which to draw some broad strokes. According to their accounts, Joseph married the pregnant virgin Mary while they resided in Nazareth in Galilee. Jesus was born in Bethlehem. The family fled to Egypt when Jesus was an infant to escape the evil designs of Herod the Great. The family returned, not to Judea, but to Nazareth shortly after Herod's death. Mary and Joseph eventually had other children.

Rice novelizes one slice of Jesus' life within this minimal framework. She incorporates a wealth of research into Jewish life under Roman occupation during this period. While profiting from insights by both Protestant and Catholic scholars, she is constrained by the affirmations of her Catholic faith (e.g., Mary remains a virgin so others within Mary and Joseph's household were cousins or siblings--no blood relatives of Jesus). Rice also draws upon some incidents from the apocryphal Gospel of Thomas and the Protevangelium of James, as well as other sources for other events to include during these biblically silent years: e.g., the revolt of Judas the Galilean and the sacking of Sepphoris. Since this is a novel, Rice feels free to revise the Gospels' presentations of events and data while incorporating some of the fancifulness of the apocryphal stories. So Jesus does turn clay birds into real ones that fly away. In Rice's novel James is older than Jesus--Joseph's son of a prior marriage not Jesus' younger brother--in contrast to what the Gospels suggest. The family leaves Egypt when Jesus is seven, not immediately after Herod's death as the gospels report. Judas' revolt occurred when the holy family was returning to Palestine, not in AD 6, the more likely date. The sacking of Sepphoris surely occurred well after the time Rice locates it.

Interestingly Rice merely invents intriguing details that may be, though probably are not, historical: that the holy family resided in Alexandria; that Jesus studied with the famous Jew Philo; and that John the Baptist was sent by his mother to live with the Qumran covenanters. And then there are the speculative revelations that come to Jesus, sometimes almost accidentally, as when he wishes it would stop raining and it does, or he heals or harms by his words alone. Joseph and Mary know who he really is--as do some of the other relatives whom Rice locates under Joseph's roof--but only gradually does Jesus learn pieces of his own story. Finally, Mary fills in all the remaining details for him.

Readers seeking historical accuracy will object to many incidents in the novel, and identify them as erroneous, unlikely, or perhaps merely fanciful speculation. That's fine; as many people have said about The Da Vinci Code, "it's only a novel." On the other hand, the book raises crucial historical and interesting theological questions that make it worth reading. First, it's a sympathetic account of Jesus--unlike so many of the "Jesuses" created by scholars beginning in the nineteenth century and continuing to this day. Here is a Jesus who is supernatural and human, not a stripped-down peasant-teacher embellished by early church devotion.

Second, Christ the Lord invites us to consider what that creedal combination--fully God and fully man--might have looked like in the boy Jesus, and how he came to reflect on his identity. Was he as emotional as Rice portrays him? Was he fearful as he learned of his powers? Did he ever consider misusing them? Did the devil tempt him in his dreams? Like other children, did he need the love and support of his parents? How did the reactions of his siblings affect him? Was he puzzled by their reactions? Did he only gradually come to understand his identity and mission? What role did his parents, cultural milieu, and religious commitments play in his emerging self-understanding? Rice helps us imagine what a truly human Jesus might be like--without the demythologizing impetus to diminish or deny his deity.

Third the book is worth reading because of its portrayal of Jewish life, culture, and religion within the Roman world. Rice's extensive research pays the readers rich dividends here in simply understanding Jesus' world. He is truly Jewish and lives in the Jewish world with all its cultural features prominently depicted. Religion occupies no private sphere; it is all-encompassing. Joseph even has a mikvah in his own house. We see Jesus' family celebrating all the Jewish festivals and rituals both within the family and in the community in Nazareth. At the same time, the Romans are truly bad guys, ruthless in their desire to control their subjects. The clashes between the occupied and the occupiers were often gruesome (think of the Nazis occupying France or the Americans in Iraq).

Anne Rice is simply a good writer: the narrative is engaging, the characters are well rounded and interesting, and the plot moves convincingly. Virtually everyone will enjoy the story, and it certainly gives us much to ponder about the miracle of the incarnation and as we worship the God who sent Christ the Lord into the world. And on another note, it is encouraging to read her account of her personal return to faith and her search for a Jesus to believe in.

William W. Klein, Ph.D.
Professor of New Testament
June 2006

At seven years of age Jesus was living on the Street of Carpenters in Alexandria Egypt, an ordinary child who played and learned the studies all Jewish boys must know. The fact that he turned clay pigeons into real birds and that he struck dead a child who bullied him and then brought him back to life didn't really impinge on his consciousness although Mary and Joseph know who he is and why he was born to the Virgin Mary. An angel tells Joseph it is time for them to return to Israel so they travel to their homeland.

They stop at the Temple in Jerusalem but a riot breaks out between the rebels and Herod's troops. They journey to Nazareth, but on the way Jesus stops to heal his Uncle in the river Jordan. A curious child, he listens to the hints about his birth and wants to know what was so special about it. Neither Mary nor Joseph feel he is ready to know these things but when Jesus heals a blind man, he knows he must find out the truth including why his mother says he was born not of man.

Anne Rice's portrayal of Jesus as a young child shows him as both divine and human though he is not aware yet of his origins or his purpose in life. The character gradually comes to realize he is not like other children and wants to know why, something any curious seven-year old would try and find out if they were in his shoes. Perhaps the most beautiful trait Anne Rice's Jesus possesses is a wisdom that belies his years and comes out at the most inopportune times. Though well-written, reader bias will either laud Ms. Rice's latest work or condemn her interpretation of the boy destined to become the Savior.

Harriet Klausner

[...]

Listen, this is not a Chesterson or Lewis masterpiece. But it is a very creative way to narrate a story of Jesus ('a story', not necessarily 'the story'). Who pays attention to the childhood of Christ? What an interesting concept and what a creative way to look at the life of Jesus.

There is more to the story of Christ than the Bible. It is a constant exploration, and Anne Rice is attempting her little part. If you are interested in Christianity, and the life of this very real person, who lead a very real life, with joy, pain, family, love, fear etc; I think you will find it a worthwhile read.

I fell in love with the works of novelist Anne Rice a few years ago when I took my first Independent Study course in horror fiction. The previous summer I had read Stephen King's The Shining and recognized in the genre the incredible potential for stories about redemption, a theme very strong in Rice's work. Her latest novel, Christ the Lord: Out of Egypt, feels like the culmination of the long and frightening journey I began when I began reading Rice's Vampire Chronicles.

My senior thesis paper was titled "Even the Damned Can Learn: The Moral Transformation of the Vampire Lestat." In it I traced Lestat's moral development throughout Rice's epic series leading from his skepticism to, I predicted, his ultimate redemption. Another student was writing a philosophy paper on the sublime in which he was attempting to show how monsters, specifically the vampires of Rice's Chronicles, are beyond morality. One complication in our writing, however, was that the series was not finished; in fact, the final book was released a month before our paper's were due. I was thrilled when I read Lestat's opening line: "I want to be a saint." Throughout the novel, Lestat seeks the redemption and love that he found after an encounter with the incarnate God in Memnoch the Devil, and the novel ends with an act of unselfish love, something Lestat would have been incapable of in previous novels. I was able to finish the paper as I had planned; the other student abandoned his.

Lestat's development has often paralleled Rice's own spiritual journey. She wrote Interview with the Vampire after leaving the Catholic faith she was raised in. "The novel reflected my guilt and my misery in being cut off from God and from salvation," says Rice, "my being lost in a world without light." While Rice's own feelings are expressed by Louis in Interview, she speaks through Lestat throughout the rest of the series. "When I wrote the first book, I was Louis," says Rice. "When I wrote the second one, I was Lestat." The Vampire Lestat reveals Lestat as a being lost in world he doesn't understand, without direction and without hope, but rather than become a nihilist, Lestat creates a morality based on aesthetics.

In Tale of the Body Thief and Memnoch the Devil, Lestat encounters nuns, devils, and even God incarnate, all of whom challenge what he has always believed about the world. At the end of Memnoch, Lestat refuses to be the Devil's assistant, but his experiences have so shattered him that he becomes catatonic for the next few novels.

When Rice wrote Interview, she did not believe in God. When she wrote Memnoch, she was not sure, just as Lestat was unsure whether what Memnoch was showing him was real or some sort of manipulation; the interpretation is left open. But at the conclusion of the series, Rice said, "I believe there is a God."

In response to this newly regained belief, Rice returned to the Catholic Church. "My return to the Catholic Church was a very emotional one," she said. "It happened in 1998 after 30 years of being away. It was gradual. I was observing people around me here in New Orleans and some Catholics. I was back in the milieu where Catholicism was a reality rather than something eccentric." The catalyst for Rice's return was her desire for communion, a desire no doubt felt as she wrote Memnoch. "I wanted to receive the Lord," Rice says, "and I believed that the miracle took place when the priest said the words 'this is my body; this is my blood.' And I wanted to partake again, so I went back to the church."

Rice wrote Blood Canticle, the conclusion to the Vampire Chronicles, after this return to faith. In this novel, Lestat declares his desire to be a saint and says, "I want to save souls by the millions. I want to do good far and wide. I want to fight evil!" Rice herself has made a similar profession, declaring that now she writes only for God, and having concluded both her series of vampires and witches, Rice is working on a trilogy about the life of Christ.

The first novel, Christ the Lord: Out of Egypt, is the first-person account of the life of the seven-year-old Jesus. Raised in a Jewish ghetto in Alexandria, Jesus studies under the Jewish philosopher Philo until Joseph, his mother's husband and patriarch of quite a large extended family, declares that they will return to Nazareth. Through the eyes of this first century Jewish boy, readers see the violent tension that existed at the time. On their way home, the family stops in Jerusalem to celebrate Passover at the temple, but Roman soldiers are quelling an uprising, and the boy Jesus sees his countrymen slain by their oppressors. He overhears his family and the men of Israel complaining about Herod Archelaus, whom the Romans have set up as King of the Jews, and Caesar, who has declared himself the Son of God.

While trying to make sense of these issues of cultural importance, Jesus also begins to learn about his own history. His mother warns him that they will face ridicule at home, and when he first visits the synagogue, he is almost denied entry. When he asks his family why they had to go to Egypt, they all become mysteriously silent and afraid.

Rice has always devoted herself to historical accuracy in her novels, and Christ the Lord is no exception. Rice read skeptics and theologians and every translation of the Bible she could find. I was especially excited to read that she studied extensively the works of N.T. Wright, another of my favorite authors. "Wright is one of the most brilliant writers I've ever read," says Rice, "and his generosity in embracing the skeptics and commenting on their arguments is an inspiration. His faith is immense and his knowledge vast."

Rice says that Wright's latest tome, The Resurrection of the Son of God, "answers the question that has haunted me all of my lif e Christianity achieved what it did... because Jesus rose from the dead." Rice says, "It was the fact of the resurrection that sent the apostles out into the world with the force necessary to create Christianity, Nothing else would have done it but that."

This revelation led Rice to write the novel as she did, to capture in fiction the Jesus of the Gospels. "Anybody could write about a rebel Jesus, a married Jesus, a gay Jesus, a Jesus who was a rebel," Rice says. "The true challenge was... to take the Jesus of the Gospels, and try to get inside him and imagine what he felt."

Not that Rice is attempting to be objective. She embraces her tradition and her Catholic beliefs are evident in Mary's perpetual virginity, with James as the son of Joseph from a previous marriage and the rest of Jesus' brothers interpreted as cousins. Rice also includes apocryphal myths about Jesus, such as killing a bully and bringing him back to life and creating pigeons out of clay which then become real. "They were fanciful, some of them humorous, extreme to be sure, but they had lived on into the Middle Ages, and beyond. I couldn't get these legends out of my mind" Rice says. "Ultimately, I chose to embrace this material.... I felt there was a deep truth in it, and I wanted to preserve that truth as it spoke to me." The canon is always the authority, however. "I am certainly trying to be true to Paul when he said our Lord emptied himself for us," Rice says, "in that my character has emptied himself of his divine awareness in order to suffer as a human being."

Rice offers her book to all Christians - "to the fundamentalists, to the Roman Catholics, to the most liberal Christians in the hope that my embrace of more conservative doctrines will have some coherence for them in the here and now of the book. I offer it to scholars in the hope that they will perhaps enjoy seeing the evidence of the research that's gone into it, and of course I offer it to those whom I so greatly admire who have been my teachers though I've never met them and probably never will."

Rice also offers the book to those "who know nothing of Jesus Christ in the hope that [they] will see him in these pages in some form. I offer this novel with love to my readers who've followed me through one strange turn after another in the hope that Jesus will be as real to you as any other character I've launched into the world we now share."

Whether you are new to Rice's works or a longtime reader, whether you're a Jesus Freak or an agnostic, anyone who enjoys a well-written story with a sympathetic and human protagonist will enjoy Christ the Lord: Out of Egypt.

I shouldn't be surprised by the negative reviews. I just hope that they don't prevent the curious from trying this book. Periodically, I view the reviews before trying a new author. This is my first venture into Anne Rice' imagination. As an "Evangelical", I haven't spent a lot of energy contemplating the childhood of Jesus. If you are offended by the concept of a Divine Jesus, then it is likely that you will be offended by this book. It is not an "apologetic". It is a reverent speculation on the emerging awareness of divinity in Jesus' childhood. I'm amazed, and a bit skeptical of the number of people writing negative reviews in almost a "talking points" method. "The book is boring, juvenile, inaccurate, yada, yada, yada." There are millions of books. If I find a book boring (unless it is of critical importance) I put it down. I don't take the time to write a review. Someone said that the book is already on the discount rack. On November 20, the book is #50 on Amazon's list. This can't be too bad for a book that may likely scare off vampire fans (I mean, it is about Jesus) and Christians may wonder where Ms. Rice is headed with her speculation.

Ms. Rice spent a period of years immersed in historical and theological literature related to this person and period. She has produced a beautiful speculation on the childhood of Jesus. The visual images continue to play in my head. I enjoyed the characters of Mary, Joseph, James, Little Salome, and especially Cleopas. The foreshadowing of later events in the life and ministry of Jesus were elegant. I'm not sure that a rating of 4 stars is fair. I have read 2 other books narrated by a child (Peace Like a River, and A Painted House). Both were wonderful. Its so different when the child is Jesus. The power of his narration is such a bold mission for the author. I can't imagine how it could have been done better.

This will probably be the most important book I have read this year. I think it is fair to compare this book (on a smaller scale) to "The Passion of the Christ". There is no way to espouse the divinity of Christ without earning criticism from both believers and skeptics. Differences of opinions related to historical events and theological interpretations should not disqualify this excellent book. Christmas will be richer for me this year as I continue to meditate on the childhood of Jesus.

Anne Rice lends a voice to the Christ-child in her novel, Christ the Lord: Out of Egypt. Through the eyes of a very young Jesus, the reader learns about the return of the holy family from Egypt, as well as Jewish culture, and how Jesus learned his true identity.

Obviously, this novel is quite a departure for Anne Rice. I do not have an issue with the subject matter, nor do I take issue with any minor historical inaccurracies. My problem with this novel was how truly boring it was. Rice is capable of spellbinding her reader through vivid description and crafting an intriguing tale. Unfortunately, she did neither of those things here. The plot, if you will, was extremely dry. The reader learned more about the surroundings of the characters than about the characters themselves. Her narrative tone was flat and unimaginative.

The bottom line is that I was very disappointed with this book. It was not at all what I expected. I cannot honestly say I would recommend it.

Reading the 17-page Author's Note at the end of Anne Rice's new novel, it becomes clear that Anne and Jesus have had a head-on collision and she is still reeling. Reading the rest of the book, it becomes clear that she is reeling with love.

Not since Norman Mailer's 1997 (bizarre yet oddly compelling) The Gospel According to the Son has a novelist of such stature attempted to write a work of fiction about Jesus, narrated by the Son himself. In Christ the Lord - Out of Egypt, a very young Jesus recounts the events Rice imagines might have taken place in his seventh year.

Over the course of that year, Jesus and his family make the journey out of Egypt and back to Nazareth. Jesus doesn't live only with Mary and Joseph; in this account, he has a vast crowd of kin, including uncles, aunts, cousins, and his stepbrother, James. (Rice is Catholic, after all!-the perpetual virginity of The Holy Mother is a given.) The warmth and affection with which the boy narrator portrays his huge-and very Jewish-clan plants him firmly in his humanness. He is part of something extraordinarily human: a family...different personalities, old conflicts, everyday struggles, and fierce loyalty.

But Jesus is not solely human. There is something different about him, and he knows it. The mystery of Out of Egypt is one of identity...Jesus feels driven to answer the ancient question of all humanity: Who am I?

Though she can only guess at the events between Jesus' birth and the start of his ministry, through extensive research-over three years studying a broad and deep cross-section of anthropologists, archeologists, and New Testament theologians and historians-Rice builds a convincing scenario of his early years that takes its cues from the character of Christ painted in the Gospels. While the writing style may feel choppy and overly-vulnerable at first, Rice's raw, spare prose (a departure from her usual lush writing) creates a voice for the Son at seven years old that sounds very like the Man he will become. Highly recommended.