Atheist Anne Rice of "Interview with the Vampire" Finds Transformation in Life and Writing Because of Christ the Lord

Anne Rice

famous for her vampire series, a couple entries of which were made into the movies Interview with the Vampire, and Queen of the Damned, just popped out an intriguing new book, surprising both her current fans and those with any interest in Christ who also own even a minute appetite for literature.

Anne Rice describes her book as the product of her life, after having grown up Catholic and abandoning her superficial faith for atheism, becoming uncomfortably fascinated with the occult, then truly finding Christ and converting to Christianity upon the culmination of years of studying the Bible and the most respected New Testament criticism and scholarship.

In the original Author's Note, she confesses,

From [the time of my husband's death] on... I have studied the New Testament period, and I continue to study. I read constantly, night and day.

I have covered an enormous amount of skeptical criticism, violent arguments, and I have read voraciously in the primary sources of Philo and Josephus which I deeply enjoy.

Having started with the skeptical critics, those who take their cue from the earliest skeptical New Testament scholars of the Enlightenment, I expected to discover that their arguments would be frighteningly strong, and that Christianity was, at heart, a kind of fraud. I'd have to end up compartmentalizing my mind with faith in one part of it, and truth in another. And what would I write about Jesus? I had no idea. But the prospects were interesting. Surely he was a liberal, married, had children, was a homosexual, and who knew what? But I must do my research before I wrote one word.

These skeptical scholars seemed very sure of themselves. They built their books on certain assertions without even examining these assertions. How could they be wrong? The Jewish scholars presented their case with such care. Certainly Jesus was simply an observant Jew or a Hasid who got crucified. End of story.

I read and I read and I read. Sometimes I thought I was walking through the valley of the shadow of Death, as I read. But I went on, ready to risk everything. I had to know who Jesus was--that is, if anyone knew, I had to know what that person knew.

Now, I couldn't read the ancient languages, but as a scholar I can certainly follow the logic of an argument; I can check the footnotes, and the bibliographical references; I can go to the biblical text in English. I can check all the translations I have and I have every one of which I know from Wycliffe to Lamsa, including the New Annotated Oxford Bible and the old Catholic translation, and every literary translation I can find. I have offbeat translations scholars don't mention, such as that by Barnstone and Schonfield. I acquired every single translation for the light it might shed on an obscure line.

What gradually became 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 no 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 by nobody and had nothing to do with the founding of Christianity and would by horrified by it if he knew about it--that whole picture which had floated in the liberal circles I frequented as an atheist 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.

Anne Rice, Christ the Lord, (New York: Ballantine Books, 2006), p. 329-330.

Rice goes on to describe the criticisms and historical scholarship she read--a large body of works on either side of the argument, to be sure. She continues to describe her very own conversion experience, and follows this all up with another note to the paperback edition.

As for the book itself, I am thoroughly enjoying it. She is a very engaging writer, capturing subtle movements of eyes and bodies and social cues, communicating the faint smells and textures of 7-year-old Jesus' experience from his own perspective as he comes to learn about how the prophecies concerning the messiah line up with his own birth and childhood. Little Jesus comedically works a few miracles by accident, weeps into Mary's bosom, perceives John's constant staring at him, holds little Salome's hand, gets excited to visit the temple, and has his little heart broken on a number of occasions. Jesus' full and complete humanity is anti-gnostically affirmed, as the fullness and completeness of his deity glimmers through this veil.

MSNBC reports on the fans of Anne's work during the isolated study that led to her conversion,

After 25 novels in 25 years, Rice, 64, hasn't published a book since 2003's "Blood Chronicle," the tenth volume of her best-selling vampire series. They may have heard she came close to death last year, when she had surgery for an intestinal blockage, and also back in 1998, when she went into a sudden diabetic coma; that same year she returned to the Roman Catholic Church, which she'd left at 18. They surely knew that Stan Rice, her husband of 41 years, died of a brain tumor in 2002. And though she'd moved out of their longtime home in New Orleans more than a year before Hurricane Katrina, she still has property there—and the deep emotional connection that led her to make the city the setting for such novels as "Interview With the Vampire." What's up with her? "For the last six months," she says, "people have been sending e-mails saying, 'What are you doing next?' And I've told them, 'You may not want what I'm doing next'." We'll know soon. In two weeks, Anne Rice, the chronicler of vampires, witches and—under the pseudonym A. N. Roquelaure—of soft-core S&M encounters, will publish "Christ the Lord: Out of Egypt," a novel about the 7-year-old Jesus, narrated by Christ himself. "I promised," she says, "that from now on I would write only for the Lord." It's the most startling public turnaround since Bob Dylan's "Slow Train Coming" announced that he'd been born again.

http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/9785289/site/newsweek/

As for Anne, she continues to study and write, planning two sequels to Christ the Lord, writing both solidly helpful and controversial Amazon book reviews, and enjoying her newfound relationship with God.