I have been trying to post this for twenty minutes and something keeps
shutting down my computer?! Must be important. I checked this story out and it
all over the internet. Best selling author of vampire books, Anne Rice, has
returned to her Catholic roots ala Mel Gibson. Her novel on Jesus and His
Divinity will no doubt touch millions of her occultic fans. She uses
extrabiblical material (Gospel of Thomas) as did Mel Gibson, so we need to
keep a discerning eye on this, but I feel that it has the potential to reach
millions for Christ as did Gibson. Already, she is being attacked on the
internet as was Gibson. People are saying that her new found religion is just
a result of her life threatening illness and the death of her husband. That
might be so but what is so wrong with that? My friends and colleagues in the
Phoenix Jewish community said the same thing about my sudden belief in Christ.
"It is only a crutch for his weakened health". So. Praise God! How could God
change the vampire lady into a Bible Believing Christian? Look at what He did
to this gnostic, new age Jew. Anything is possible with God!
Stephen
12:00 AM CDT on Saturday, October 22, 2005
The queen of darkness has seen the light.
By BENEDICTA CIPOLLA Religion News Service
In her latest book, Christ the Lord, novelist Anne Rice turns away from
the doomed souls of her best-selling tales about vampires and witches in
favor of a first-person account of the 7-year-old Jesus."I was sitting in church talking to ... [God] about it and I finally
realized there was no holding back anymore," said Ms. Rice, 64, who
returned to the Catholic Church in 1998 after a 30-year absence."I just said, 'From now on it's all going to be for you.' And the book I
felt I had to write was the life of Christ. ... When my faith was given
back to me by God, redemption became a part of the world in which I
lived. And I wasn't going to write any more books where that wasn't the
case. You do not have to be transgressive in order to achieve great
art."With a distinct emphasis on the devout Jewishness of Jesus and his
extended family, the novel â?" due out Nov. 1 with a first print run of
500,000 copies â?" depicts their first year in Nazareth after leaving
Egypt following the death of King Herod. (The Gospel of Matthew reports
that Jesus, Mary and Joseph fled to Egypt shortly after Jesus' birth to
escape a death sentence by Herod).Ms. Rice meticulously recounts the daily life of Jews in Galilee against
the backdrop of Roman occupation, detailing purification rites, Sabbath
study, construction work in the nearby city of Sepphoris, and trips to
the Temple in Jerusalem for feasts and animal sacrifices."The pious picture of the holy family in a little carpentry shop on a
hill, that's not accurate," Ms. Rice said in her first interview about
the book. She spoke from her new home in San Diego, where she moved five
months before Hurricane Katrina devastated her hometown of New Orleans."The challenge was to get some fictional verisimilitude there, to really
present this as a vibrant society in which people are working and living
together."Ms. Rice devoted much of the two and a half years she spent on the novel
delving into research, from ancient Jewish philosophers and historians
such as Philo and Josephus, to contemporary historical Jesus studies. At
times, what she found disturbed her, as she explains in an author's note
following the novel."Some of the people in New Testament scholarship don't hide their bias
at all. They're just out to prove Jesus wasn't God, but of course that's
impossible to prove," she said, taking issue as well with what she
called "trends" and "fads," such as theories that Jesus was a political
revolutionary, or married.Ms. Rice also critiques the widespread dating of the Gospels to between
about 60 and 90 A.D., and the theory that they appeared decades apart.
Instead, she believes they were produced around the same time, and all
before Romans destroyed the Temple in Jerusalem in 70 A.D. She declined
to name any scholars she found fault with, either in an interview or in
her afterword.Some biblical experts aren't sure why Ms. Rice is taking issue with
conventional scholarship."She seems to be attacking some kind of liberal, PC bogeyman," said Adam
Becker, assistant professor of classics and religious studies at New
York University. "But the majority of historical Jesus scholars are
Christian and affiliated with the church in some way. She criticizes
fashionable notions, yet she's basically saying it's fashionable to be a
Christian."Ms. Rice chooses 11 B.C. as the date of Jesus' birth. While she said she
found one scholarly precedent for doing so, she uses the earlier date
mainly to allow the 7-year-old Jesus to arrive from Egypt in time to
witness the well-documented violence that erupted in Judea and Galilee
after Herod's death in 4 B.C.That seminal event in childhood is certain to influence Jesus in Ms.
Rice's planned subsequent volumes."At the birth of Jesus the biggest story you would have heard â?" I can't
prove it was ever mentioned, but I can't imagine it wasn't â?" was about
the day the Romans came," said John Dominic Crossan, author of The
Historical Jesus. "I would have no problem with someone saying that the
constitutive challenge for Jesus growing up in that period was 'OK, what
about God, what about Rome, what about violence, what about resistance?'
"Beyond reconstructing the daily life of the times, Ms. Rice focuses on
the young Jesus discovering â?" and grappling with â?" his divinity. Her
questions are less about what would Jesus do, and more about how he
would think.Her Jesus is conflicted and confused, a dutiful son who comes to terms
with what he first only senses and then fully grasps â?" that he is the
son of God, yet fully human."You can't write a book, or at least I couldn't, from the viewpoint of
someone who knew he was God at every moment," Ms. Rice said. "But I
could write a book from the viewpoint of somebody who deliberately
separated himself from that knowledge so he could experience things as a
human being."The Gospels are almost silent on Jesus' childhood, giving Ms. Rice a
wide berth to take certain liberties with her story. In the book, Jesus
is taught in Alexandria by the Hellenistic philosopher Philo, which in
turns allows for her Jesus to be fluent in Greek, something many
historians doubt was the case.Ms. Rice also borrows two incidents â?" the slaying of a playmate and the
turning of clay sparrows into live ones â?" from the Infancy Gospel of
Thomas, a second-century work that shows Jesus learning to use his
divine powers for good. It was never accepted as part of the Christian
Scriptures.But again, biblical scholars question why Ms. Rice is devoting so much
time to Jesus' childhood, when the Gospel writers seemed to think it
unimportant."If you want to talk about the infancy of Jesus, it's perfectly valid,
but please don't say you're doing it according to the spirit of the
Gospels," said Dr. Crossan. "Only two of the Gospels even bother to talk
about Jesus' birth, and only Luke bothered to mention the infant at age
12. The other [Gospels] figure that's not important. Let's get to what
really counts, the public life."Ms. Rice said her greatest hope for people reading Christ the Lord is
that they will at least begin to think about Jesus, if not come to
believe in him. Due in part to her dismay at the damage done to the
Jewish community in the wake of Mel Gibson's The Passion of the Christ,
she plans to send copies of her novel to Jewish leaders. "Of course
they're not going to turn around and give a quote to a book called
Christ the Lord, but I want them to know that I understand Jesus is a
Jew and all his family were, and all his apostles and all the first
Christians were. ... I hope it will generate good will," she said.