Posted by Helen on: 08.28.2008 /
I listened to the audiobook of Christ the Lord: Out of Egypt a couple of years ago.
I got it out of the library because I was looking for any audiobook in their small collection I was remotely interested in. I wasn’t at all sure I’d really want to listen to it.
I started it one day when I was bored. I found myself very much drawn into the story and unexpectedly moved by it. It was a story about Jesus as a child when he was beginning to sense he was different from others, without fully knowing why. I thought the author portrayed the loneliness of being different very well. And the historical context. And it was a well-written novel in general. This is what I wrote about the book at the time
The other day I was in a bookstore and started looking at the second book in the series, Christ the Lord: The Road to Cana. That interested me enough to check it out of the library and read it.
I liked the beginning part of this book a lot. It’s exciting and the author continues to depict the loneliness for Jesus of being different well. And now he has the stigma of being an unmarried 30 year old male. Evidently he is aware he shouldn’t marry. Which causes him pain because were that not so he knows exactly who he would marry.
When the book reached the time period of the first stories about adult Jesus that are in the Bible I was less interested. The book seemed to get more two dimensional then. It seemed like the author moved too quickly from Jesus who felt different and felt the weight of destiny on him but didn’t know much about why, to Jesus who ‘knew he was God’. And then he seemed less human to me, and less interesting.
Until this point I felt Anne Rice was following NT Wright in depicting Jesus’ self-knowledge and I liked that. Here she seems to depart from his picture of Jesus and give Jesus self-knowledge that conservative Christians often assume he had, but NT Wright is careful not to assume. NT Wright depicts Jesus as sure God was acting through him in a unique way but not entirely sure ‘what that meant’. I like that Jesus better than the “I am God” Jesus. And I think it fits the Bible because Jesus never actually says “I am God”. When he hints at it maybe that’s because that’s as close as he had got too.
Anyway I liked the Jesus who didn’t know yet felt different and alone and destined to ‘something’ better than the supernatural Jesus who knew who he was. Too much was resolved too quickly by Jesus coming to know and for me Jesus then became less human.
Have you read either of the Christ the Lord books? Would you read a novel about Jesus?