Christ the Lord: The Road to Cana (Christ the Lord) | Anne Rice

Christ the Lord: The Road to Cana (Christ the Lord) | Anne Rice | Amazing Story

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Christ the Lord: T...

	Christ the Lord: The Road to Cana (Christ the Lord) Anne Rice Knopf, 2008 - 256 pages average customer review:based on 66 reviews view larger image
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highly recommended

A Soul-Stirring Reminder

When Anne Rice first announced her intentions to tell the story of Christ the Lord, she was met with a barrage of questions, criticism, and support. Her storytelling to date had given only subtle hints of her desire to stir the soul toward things of God, and in fact some blamed her for quite the opposite. With great skepticism, readers on both sides of spiritual lines awaited the release of "Out of Egypt." I found the book to be intriguing, elegantly understated, yet a bit dry.

"The Road to Cana" takes a big chronological leap forward, and the storytelling seems to reflect the maturation of her subject. Yeshua bar Joseph (Jesus of Nazareth) is now a man on the brink of embracing his identity and his purpose. He's God in the flesh, as he himself knows, but he also struggles with the human desires for companionship, family, and acceptance. His relatives and the local villagers sometimes call him Yeshua, the Sinless.

From the opening pages of this book, there are layers of meaning and beauty. Rice's story meets every expectation in this, her second christological novel, and I was swept up in the drama of village life, relational conflicts, and restrained divinity. Rice, through Yeshua's eyes, lets us in for peeks at the heart of God, as it relates to the human struggle. This culminates in Yeshua's face-off with Satan in the wilderness, during forty days of fasting--a masterpiece of textured prose--and in the following incident with Mary of Magdala. From there, Rice shifts her story from conflict into beauty, as Yeshua verbalizes his purpose to his new followers and his family.

I am not moved often to tears by books, but "The Road to Cana" touched me in deep ways, reminding me again of the honesty and integrity of Christ the Lord. This is soul-stirring fiction that brushes up with the truth and power of the Gospel. This is more than I could've imagined coming from the pen of Anne Rice. It's a book to be read, enjoyed, experienced--and to be brought to life in the hearts of readers everywhere.

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Amazing Story

I have never read a book about Jesus before reading Anne's Christ the Lord series. But I have to say that I am absolutely loving Anne's stories! I couldn't put this book down, I found it beautifully and artistically discriptive, a true masterpiece.
I recommend it to anyone who enjoys reading and to be swept by the power of the written word. I felt like I knew the characters personally, but they lived 2000 years before my time! Great job Anne, I can't wait till you write the next book.

Another Amazing Writing About Our Lord

Anne Rice has given us another amazing book about Jesus. The story was wonderfully written, presenting a vivid picture of Christ in an historically accurate setting. It was so engaging that I couldn't put it down and I was disappointed when it ended. I eagerly look forward to her next "Christ The Lord" writing.

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Anne Rice has done it again

In her second book in the Christ the Lord series, Rice has again skillfully created a historical novel of the life of Jesus that is engaging, historically connected, and true to the image of Jesus in the Gospels. Christ the Lord: The Road to Cana captured my imagination and fueled my devotion with its earthy depiction of an adult Jesus (referred to in the book by his Hebrew name "Yeshua" or "Yeshua bar Joesph"). Rice has continued with her masterful way of balancing the true humanity and true divinity of Jesus in The Road to Cana with vivid description. With Jesus as the narrator, Rice gives the reader another look into Jesus' inner life, his thoughts, his anxieties, and his longings.

(WARNING: The following may contain plot spoilers. If you don't want me to ruin the plot then order the book here.)

Rice has wisely chosen not to fill in too many gaps between Jesus in the temple at age 12 and his baptism at approximately age 30. The Road to Cana begins during the winter before Jesus' baptism. We see less of his interaction between his mother, his father, and Uncle Cleopas and more of his interaction with his older brother James. There is a reference to his brother James being the son of another woman and not Mary, the mother of Jesus. Also there is a reference to Jesus calling his cousins his "brothers and sisters." This classification is in harmony with the Catholic tradition that Mary remained a virgin and had no other children. Protestants may disagree, but this theological determination regarding Jesus' family in no way takes away from the power of the story.

One of the triumphs of the book is Rice's ability to portray Jesus' romantic feelings in a pure, noble, and historically true way. Jesus' temptation in this regard is completely free of the trashy, 20th century, sex-obsessed descriptions of his romantic feelings as seen in other contemporary stories of Jesus. Jesus is enraptured with a young woman named Avigail. She is a fictions character, but she could have very well been in Jesus' life in first century Israel. I don't want to give away too much of the plot, but Avigail plays an import role in The Road to Cana. Jesus' love for her is very holy and very real. Rice does a wonderful job describing the pressure Jesus was under to take Avigail as his bride. The temptation was not unbridled lust, but the temptation to marry according to cultural standards. Jesus longs to make Avigail his bride, but he knows this is not his call. The interactions between Jesus and Avigail are wonderfully written.

The first half of the book sets the historical and personal context of the life of Jesus leading up to the Gospel accounts of his baptism, his temptation, and the beginning of his miracle ministry, including the miracle at Cana. Rice describes Jesus' baptism and subsequent temptation in the wilderness with magical imagery and direct quotations from Scripture. She remains faithful to the gospel narrative and fills in the biblical text with wonderful color and texture.

In the front of the book she has a quote from Karl Rahner: The truth of faith can be preserved only by doing a theology of Jesus Christ, and by redoing it over and over again.

Anne Rice has used her gifts as a writer to do just that, redoing a theology of Jesus Christ on the canvass of biblical and historical orthodoxy...a historical-fiction-kind-of-theology that has great benefit for those of us on the journey of knowing, loving, and following Jesus.

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A disappointing, intermediate book

When I read Christ the Lord: OOE it overwhelmed me. I couldn't get it out of my head. The historical setting, the description of his family and the Jewish faith, the Romans, everything seemed to breathe fresh air. I looked for clues on the Internet, but nowhere did it say if and when there was going to be a sequel, so I thought, fair enough, maybe it's meant to be a standalone story of the youth of Jesus, and the best there is, too. Finding and reading the sequel Christ the Lord: TRTC sobered me a bit. Development of the central character has become poor: Jesus is already 30y old, we do not learn what motivates him to stop being a carpenter and become a "fisher of souls", except that it coincides with his baptism by John. The love story between him and Avigail leaves me at a loss: when and how did he learn to know her well enough to fall in love with her? Or is it all just a romantic fantasy? It cannot, given he was a man, and a man of 30 too, have been the first love of his life, can it really? In the stoning of the two boys accused of homosexual acts, he remains strangely detached. We learn more about the reaction of the elders ("there should have been a proper court decision") than of him. The strongest characters are not Jesus, it is Hananel of Cana and also Jesus' foster brother James: both are utterly disappointed by Jesus, knowing of the wonders foretold at his birth, and then living to see him become an ordinary carpenter. Hananel says accusingly that all of Jesus' previous promise has now been "swallowed by the world". This discrepancy really lies at the heart of contemporary discussions of the historical Jesus: from which context did he emerge so late at the age of 30? was he a really a carpenter as Mark tells us? Or was he rather Rabbi? Was he influenced by the Essenes? In the book, Jesus reaction to Hananel's accusation is rather weak: he says he still finds time to study the Torah besides his carpenter job, and that his duty is to live in the world of man. But when did he learn that, and how could he cope with it, the knowledge-eager child we met in OOE? That would have been the interesting story. Large parts of the plot are then taken straight out of the gospels, and that makes me fear for the next book - there now must be one, since this is obviously just an intermediate. Yet the gospels are much more informative about Jesus' subsequent preaching and the miracles. Given that already in TRTC the author took pains not to deviate from the gospels and not to add significant ideas on Jesus' character of her own, how is all this going to become a "novel" in the literal sense of the word, and not a flat contemporary retelling of it, something we all have done in religious class? I would like to see her with new ideas, even flat inventions, and not afraid - as obviously in TRTC - of painting a new, a very personal Jesus, one we did not know before. There would be nothing wrong with that, every Sunday sermon aspires the same thing.

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