an amazing novel about Jesus

I just finished reading Christ the Lord: The Road to Cana by Anne Rice. I didn't plan to read it but just stumbled on it when I went to a used book table last week. Yeshua bar Joseph was a winsome character and so was his mother, in particular. There are some fictional parts of the book, unsurprisingly, but I was pleased that the novel did what I was hoping: made Jesus easier to identify with as a human. The book finishes with Jesus' miracle at Cana, and a theme is about Jesus coming to understand his mission clearly.

"I'd always known who I really was. I was God. And I'd chosen not to know it. Well, now I knew just what it meant to be the man who knew he was God."

The happiness of everyone at the wedding leads Yeshua to muse,

"Oh, if only I could indeed stop time, stop it here, stop it forever with this great banquet, and let all the world come here to this, now, streaming, out of Time and beyond Time, and into this--to join with the dancing, to feast at these abundant tables, to laugh and sing and cry amid these smoking lamps and twinkling candles.... If only I could hold them in one great embrace?"

Jesus gains a greater and greater understanding of what he is to do with his life and sets out to do it as the novel closes. "But I did not come to stop [time].... I came to live it, to surrender to it, to endure it, to discover in it what it was I must do, and whatever it was, well, it had only begun."

Wonderful - I really enjoyed it. Rice wrote another novel called Christ the Lord: Out of Egypt about Jesus' childhood that I will look for next.