outWORD by Matte Downey

The Silent Years: Jesus from Birth to Beatitude by Alan Green.  154 pages.  ebook version. This book is advertised as a "progressive Christmas novel" and heralded by some learned readers (academics) as an "imaginative reconstruction" of the first thirty years of the life of Jesus of Nazareth.  The author has concocted a tale told by Yeshua's uncle, Benaiah, by incorporating knowledge of the historical Mediterranean world (Green has a Ph.D. in History) and fusing this with loose interpretations of biblical passages. I wanted to like the book.  I really did.  Having read Anne Rice's inspiring, fictionalized accounts of the early life of Jesus ( Christ the Lord: Out of Egypt and  Christ the Lord: The Road to Cana ), I was expecting more of the same:  meticulous research, historical authenticity, believable narratives, insightful portrayal of biblical characters, and an invitation to lose one...

Last night I finished reading Anne Rice's book, Christ the Lord - Out of Egypt . For those of you unfamiliar with her, she is the author of some 27 well-researched historical fiction books with usually dark supernatural elements, her most famous one being Interview With The Vampire which was made into a movie starring Brad Pitt and Tom Cruise. Her author's note at the end of the book I just read is almost as revelatory as the story itself. After being raised a devout Catholic, then becoming an atheist for most of her adult life, she began to research the historical Jesus and was challenged to dedicate the remainder of her writing career to him. She had an epiphany that this story, this man, this God, was the one she had been looking for all along. As she says in an interview, she now lives in the light. It is a very restrained book and I took my time reading it, not wanting to race through the pages lest I miss some nuance, some fresh way of seeing things, in the telling of t...