Over the weekend, I read Anne Rice‘s new book Christ the Lord: Out of Egypt. Not being much of a fan of goth-horror, I hadn’t read a novel of hers since having read some of The Witching Hour many moons ago. Since reports of her reversion to Catholicism started filling the press, I’ve been eager to read this new book.
The book is not an easy read. Rice tries to write from the point of view of a seven-year-old who just happens to be God Almighty, so between the seven-year-old’s voice and trying to juggle the different modes of Christ’s knowledge, the book is not a spine-tingling page-turner. I give Rice high points for working hard to be orthodox, but I think she would have had an easier time accomplishing her task if she had not attempted to tell the story in the first-person point of view of Christ himself. Perhaps it would have been simpler to have written from the point of view of James, our Lord’s "brother" and depicted here as a thirteen-year-old, either in the first- or third-person.
Rice draws liberally on apocryphal stories told of Christ’s childhood struggles with his divinity. Mentioned are the apocryphal gospels tales of Christ bringing to life clay birds and resurrecting a child he had accidentally killed through his childish inability to control his divine power. While the incidents in the apocrypha are apocryphal, I appreciated Rice’s attempt to show Christ as fully God and fully human. Fully God in that he had divine power; fully human in that he was a child who may, in his childhood, have had to learn how to control it.
Whatever you make of the theological implications and whether Rice was completely theologically-correct, she asks interesting "What if?" questions while still trying to remain faithful to orthodoxy. I would much rather read an honest fictional imagining of our Lord that leaves open the possibility of an orthodox Christian understanding of him than a clearly anti-Christian screed like Dan Brown’s The DaVinci Code.
Rice does make some interesting small choices within her story. She uses the older tradition of Joseph being an older (but not elderly) widower who is James’ father by his first marriage, but incorporates the later tradition of extended relations among the Lord’s "brothers" by making the other "brothers" and "sisters" Jesus’ cousins. As a personal preference, not a matter of doctrine, I prefer the later idea of a virginal Joseph because it makes the Holy Family an earthly, human image of the divine reality of the Trinity, but Rice’s picture is just as possible and within legitimate Catholic opinion.
One of the smaller choices I disliked was the idea that Jesus was taught to call Joseph by his name, rather than to call him "Father." Rice presumably chooses this for theological reasons and for dramatic purpose, and it is within the realm of acceptable opinion. Still, I prefer to believe that Jesus called Joseph Abba. It seems to me to fit better within the Catholic understanding of the sacramental understanding of creation. Human beings, because they are made in the image and likeness of God, can be physical, tangible images of divine reality.
All told, I’m glad I read this book. It’s not perfect by any means, either theologically or as fiction, but it is a solid piece of work that goes far in furthering Rice’s goal to take on the challenge of writing a novel about the Jesus of the Gospels instead of a Jesus of popular agenda. I hope that this book is the start in a series about Christ’s life. I would like to see how Rice’s development of Christ’s story matures.
