MORE ON ANNE RICE'S JESUS BOOK from the Dallas Morning News (free registration required):

Queen of darkness sees the light in new book on Jesus

12:00 AM CDT on Saturday, October 22, 2005

By BENEDICTA CIPOLLA Religion News Service

The queen of darkness has seen the light.

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.

It sounds like she's done her homework, although she's taking a number of artistic liberties too:

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.

[...]

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 – the slaying of a playmate and the turning of clay sparrows into live ones – 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.

She also gets in some criticisms of NT scholarship. The charge of faddishness is not entirely unfair, but I don't know of any serious scholar who has argued that Jesus was married (there's no evidence either way) and I doubt she'll convince many scholars to redate the Gospels before 70 C.E. John Dominic Crossan is interviewed in the article as well.

I'm disappointed that there seem to be no vampires in this book, but it sounds worth a read anyhow.

Read the whole article.

UPDATE (23 October): You can read it here with no registration required.

UPDATE (24 October): More here.