The Mind of Christ

Several people have interesting posts up regarding Anne Rice's new book, Christ the Lord.

Amy Welborn was struck by Rice's reaction to modern biblical scholarship in the afterward.

It's fascinating and instructive to see an "outsider" to the field of Scripture scholarship look at it with wide-open, frankly innocent eyes, and be 1)appalled at the shoddy nature of much of what's out there and 2)even more appalled and mystified by the animus some of these scholars have for their subject. In short, she discovered, Many of these scholars who apparently devoted their lives to New Testament scholarship disliked Jesus Christ. Period.

Speculative Catholic is struck by the difficult task that Rice has given herself: portraying Jesus as a child while at the same time maintaining his divinity. Honestly, that's what strikes me as making any fictional portrayal of Jesus difficult, and a portrayal of Him as a child doubly so. The question of what Christ's two natures would have felt like from the inside seems totally incomprehensible to me. When Luke speaks of Christ "growing in knowledge and wisdom" what exactly does he mean by that? Did Christ's human nature always understand His divine nature, or did His human nature have to 'learn' about His divine nature?

These are topics I wouldn't even try to come down on, but it sounds like Rice (who, I gather has experienced a re-conversion to the Catholic faith in recent years) has given is a moderately good try and done her best at all times to be faithful to Catholic doctrine.