BOOK
BITES
CHRIST THE LORD OUT OF EGYPT: A Novel by Anne Rice. NY: Alfred A. Knopf. 2005. Pp. 322 (PS3568.1265.C48 2005)
USA TODAY headlined a review of this book with these words: “Rice takes leap of faith from vampires to ‘Christ.’” To move from her past as a popular author of darkness, in THE VAMPIRE CHRONICLES, to a new life as a person, a new faith and a new literary genre is a giant leap. The author left the Roman Catholic Church filled with doubt and returned to the Church full of faith.
CHRIST…OUT OF EGYPT is Jesus telling his experience as a seven year old boy in the first person in Alexandria, Egypt. As a young boy Jesus leaves his home in Alexandria with his family to travel to Nazareth via the Jordan River. You can feel the splash of Jordan’s waters; you can sense danger from bandits. Rice has done her homework. She has studied anthropology, history and the Scriptures, and extra-biblical writings.
In the final chapter, Rice says: This is a book I offer 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…I offer this book to those who know nothing of Jesus Christ in the hope that you will see him in these pages in some form.” Pp. 320-321.
…The Library Committee