May 26, 2008
Roles don't come a whole lot juicier than playing Jesus, so James Naughton hit the jackpot when he got to read Rice's first-person account of the life of Jesus—or Yeshua, as Rice has it. Naughton has a booming baritone—the voice of a born leader. As Jesus, he offers quiet strength and a touching sense of compassion. If the material is overly familiar, for obvious reasons, Naughton handles it well. His pronunciation of the Hebrew terms with which Rice studs the text is nimble, and his reading is hushed without being overly sappy or faux spiritual. Simultaneous release with the Knopf hardcover (Reviews, Feb. 4).
Starred review from March 3, 2008
In the New Testament, the miracle at the wedding at Cana\x97where Jesus turned water into wine\x97marks the commencement of his tumultuous three-year ministry. In Rice's beautifully observed novel, a sequel to 2005's Christ the Lord: Out of Egypt, however, the wedding miracle is in fact the culmination of an intimate family saga of love, sorrow and misunderstanding. As the novel opens, Yeshua (Jesus) struggles with a sense of restlessness of purpose and a deep love for a comely kinswoman. Waves of isolation sweep over him as he comes to understand that serving the Lord's will takes precedence over the desires of his own heart. Whereas the first novel in this series hewed so closely to Scripture and to the author's meticulous research as to be somewhat arid as fiction, this book, imagining the \x93lost\x94 young adulthood of Jesus, offers wise and haunting speculation where the Bible is silent. And the final chapters, which pick up the story with the New Testament's accounts of Jesus' baptism, temptation and early miracles, manage to be soulfully insightful even while faithfully tracking the Gospels. Rice undertakes a delicate balance: if it is possible to create a character that is simultaneously fully human and fully divine, as ancient Christian creeds assert, then Rice succeeds.