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Audiobook - This morning I started listening to Anne Rice's second book in her Christ the Lord trilogy. The first one "Out of Egypt" chronicled Jesus as a young boy moving back from Egypt to his home in Israel. In this just released followup the novel starts before the Baptism of John and leads up to the wedding at Cana.

In each of these books Anne blends a lot of research into the history of that era with a theoretical first person view of being Jesus "discovering" who He is. Theologians have often debated about the twin natures of Jesus, His humanity and His divinity, and the integration between the two. While on one hand Jesus was God Incarnate, He did not talk just seconds after birth. He had to experience all of our humanity and that includes our own growth, maturing, and self discovery.

In this book Jesus is in his late twenties prior to starting His public ministry. Among the threads of the story, Anne brings up an interesting point. Jesus is almost thirty and yet is not married. For someone in His position at that time, this is pretty unusual. His older step brother James is strongly encouraging Him to marry, in particular an attractive young woman within their little community named Abigail. We get the sense that Jesus has all of the human desires of affection towards her, yet He is controlling His desires so that they don't get the best of Him. While He doesn't seem to know all of the details of what His future entails, He "knows" that eventually where He goes, a wife will not be able to follow. He "knows" a wife (and later children) is out of the question even if His humanity would desire the consolation of a good wife. Out of His filial love for Abigail, He actually recommends Abigail consider a friend of Jesus who would like to marry her.

So far I'm just a third through the book. There's far more to it than this one plot line, but I found it the most intriguing so far. As with the first novel, there are still the rumors floating around about the incidents that occurred near Jesus' birth. There are still the struggles with the Roman authority and the Jews' dissatisfaction with being under their control. We see the relationship between Jesus and His mother Mary and His father Joseph. We see the culture of that time and some of the ways that it contrasts with our own.

So now that I finished The Dolorous Passion of Our Lord Jesus Christ last Friday, this is the novel I'll be working my way through over the next week or two of my long commutes to the office. It is a work of historical fiction. I don't take it as authoritative, but as a fun thought experiment of what it might have been like to be Jesus at that time.