April 11th, 2008 at 9:04 pm
Like most sequels, Christ the Lord: The Road to Cana doesn’t quite match the original, but it’s still an interesting read.
Yeshua is now 30, and in first person the book takes him through four situations: he is accused of defiling a virgin, his baptism at the hands of John the Baptizer, his 40-day fast and temptation by Satan, and the wedding at Cana. The book mostly deals with Yeshua and a girl he would like to have but cannot, who ends up being the bride at Cana.
Yeshua undergoes an almost complete personality change when he is baptized, moving from a person who merely gets his prayers answered by his Father to the Son of God who commands things himself. This newly baptized Yeshua goes into the wilderness for 40 days to get used to having to hear the desires of everyone and his new command of his powers.
It is this Yeshua who gets tempted by the Devil, and Rice’s expansion of the Biblical account (Matt. 4:1-11) is a quite interesting part of the book. The author’s Satan also challenges who Jesus thinks he is, demanding how he didn’t know his father Joseph had died during Jesus’s fast, and how he can lead great armies into battle. Satan begs Jesus to stop time for all time, an interesting temptation. The formerly humble Yeshua launches into a confident tirade, how he will defeat Satan not with war but “heart by heart” and “soul by soul” — yet with no apparent foreknowledge of the cross.
The author pushes hard to make her Yeshua feel the whole gamut of emotions, including desire and heartbreak. Despite Biblical accounts like Jesus weeping at Lazarus’s death and weeping over Jerusalem, as well as the entire Song of Solomon, the Son of God desiring a girl to the point of weeping when he knows he can’t marry her may find to be less than plausible stretch for the reader. In an ironic twist he is actually accused of defiling the virgin he cannot have, and one must ask, how can this happen to a sinless person. Does reputation (much less the reputation of someone who has done nothing wrong ever) count for nothing?
The final account of the wedding is plausible and nicely done. It is almost too quick.
The book is easy to follow, but the balance between God and man maintained in the first book is more separated, more of a multiple personality than a mystical union. I can’t recommend it as much as the first.
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April 11th, 2008 at 9:19 pm
You know, one thing I have always wondered is, “what did Jesus know and when did he know it?”
Certainly he puts aside, to some (large?) extent, his divine omniscience during his state of humility. Scripture says that he “grew in knowledge”, which one would expect if he was fully human.
So, when DID he learn of the cross? When did he know who he was, and what he came to do? At 12, in the temple? As a young child? At his baptism? It’s a fascinating parlor discussion. I’m just not sure I am interested enough in Anne Rice’s answers to delve into the books.
April 12th, 2008 at 7:43 am
moving from a person who merely gets his prayers answered by his Father to the Son of God who commands things himself.
This sounds like the heretical “adoptionism” which says that Jesus “became God” at His baptism.
That and the whole “Jesus wants a woman” thing are pretty big turn offs. I may be oversensitive in this area, but I am uncomfortable with things that presume so much. Allegorical characters are OK because they aren’t supposed to be “the same” as the historical/eternal Person. But to attempt to portray the real Jesus and then go so far beyond what has been revealed by God in Holy Scripture makes me uncomfortable. Just my “thing.”
That and knowing she’s the vampire author….lol… I’ll probably pass, pietist that I am.