How Anne Rice Created Her Christ

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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 Rice's planned subsequent volumes.

"At the birth of Jesus the biggest story you would have heard -- I can't prove it was ever mentioned but I can't imagine it wasn't -- was about the day the Romans came," said John Dominic Crossan, professor emeritus of religious studies at DePaul University and the 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, Rice focuses on the young Jesus discovering -- and grappling with -- his divinity. Her questions are less about what would Jesus do, and more about how he would think.

Rice's Jesus is conflicted and confused, a dutiful son who comes to terms with what he first only senses and then fully grasps -- 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," 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 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.

Rice also borrows two incidents -- the slaying of a playmate and the turning of clay sparrows into live ones -- from the Infancy Gospel of Thomas, a 2nd 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 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 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."

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.

Rice's ultimate goal, she said, is for readers "to think, 'Wow, maybe he did exist.' That was the challenge, to make it real. The greatest compliment people pay me when they read this book is when they say, 'I was there."'

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