On Christ the Lord Out of Egypt

I just finished reading an interesting book called Christ the Lord Out of Egypt by Anne Rice. This is her first book since coming back to Christianity and well, it's a very captivating story. She's an incredibly smart and well researched author. I liked the book, but I expected to as I am a fan of her writing.

What I wasn't expecting, however, was the impact that her afterword had on me. Wow. It makes the whole thing worth reading. In fact, it some of the most well written thoughts on faith and the Gospels that I've read in a long time. I've decided to share some of my favourite parts:

What gradually came clear to me was that many of the skeptical arguments -- arguments that insisted most of the Gospels were suspect, for instance, or written too late to be eyewitness accounts -- lacked coherence. They were not elegant. Arguments about Jesus himself were full of conjecture. Some books were not more than assumptions piled upon assumptions. Absurd conclusions were reached on the basis of little or no data at all.

In sum, the whole case for the nondivine Jesus who stumbled into Jerusalem and somehow got crucified and had nothing to do with the founding of Christianity and would be horrified by it if he knew about it -- that whole pciture which floated in the liberal circles I frequented for thirty years-- that case was not made. Not only was it not made, I discovered in this field some of the worst and most biased scholarship I'd ever read.

I saw almost no skeptical scholarship that was convincing, and the Gospels, shredded by critics, lost all intensity when reconstructed by various theorists. They were in no way compelling when treated as composites and records of later "communities".

I was unconvinced by the wild postulations of those who claimed to be children of Enlightenment. And I had also sensed something else. Many of these scholars, scholars who apparently devoted their life to New Testament scholarship, disliked Jesus Christ. Some pitied him as a helpless failure. Other sneered at him, and some felt an outright contempt. This came between the lines of the books. This emerged in the personality of the texts.

I'd never come across this kind of emotion in any other field of research, at least not to this extent. It was puzzling.

The people who go into Elizabethan studies don't seek out to prove that Queen Elizabeth I was a fool. They don't personally dislike her. They don't make snickering remarks about her, or spend their careers trying to pick apart her historical reputation. They approach her in other ways. They don't even apply this sort of dislike or suspicion or contempt to other Elizabethan figures. If they do, the person is usually not the focus of the study. Occasionally a scholar studies a villain, yes. But even then, the author generally ends up arguing for the good points of a villain or for his or her place in history, or for some mitigating circumstance, that redeems the study itself. People studying disasters in history may be highly critical of the rulers or the milieu at the time, yes. But in general scholars don't spend their lives in the company of historical figures whom they openly despise.

But there are New Testament scholars who detest and despise Jesus Christ.

[...]

Now somewhere during my journey through all of this, as I became disillusioned with the skeptics and with the flimsy evidence for their conclusions, I realized something about my book.

It was this. The challenge was to write about the Jesus of the Gospels, of course!

Anybody could write about a liberal Jesus, a married Jesus, a gay Jesus, a Jesus who was a rebel. The "Quest for the Historical Jesus" had become a joke because of all the many definitions it has ascribed to jesus.

The true challenge was to take the Jesus of the Gospels, the Gospels which were becoming ever more coherent to me , the Gospels, which appealed to me as elegant first-person witness, dictated to scribes no doubt, but definately early, the Gospels produced before Jerusalem fell-- to take the Jesus of the Gospels, and try to get inside of him and imagine what he felt.

- written by Anne Rice, February 24, 2005