A Letter from the Author

Dear Reader,

When does a series of questions become an obsession? When does an obsession become a vocation? Perhaps, we writers are blessed that our questions, no matter how simple or complex, inevitably become our day in and day out obsessions; and our writing about them, in whatever form, isn't a profession but a calling. It's something we do because life becomes intolerable if we don't do it. Life has no meaning until we're struggling full force with a novel in which all our crucial questions are engaged.

For over ten years I've wanted to do this book—Jesus in his own words. For five years I've been obsessed with how to do it, and for the last three years I've been consumed with nothing else.

The ultimate questions, the ones distilled from a thousand others were so obvious as to be frightening. What did it feel like to be Jesus? What did it feel like to be God and Man as a child? If we take these gospels seriously for any reason—artistic, religious, historical, you name it—we're arguing that Jesus was born of a Virgin, laid in a manger, visited by shepherds who saw angels, and worshipped by wise men from the east who brought gifts. And yet this is the same Jesus who lived in obedience to Joseph and Mary in the village of Nazareth and "increased in wisdom and stature and in favor with God and man." (Luke.2: 52.).

In all my career, I don't think I've ever faced such a daunting task. And there were moments when I came near to giving up. I prayed. I asked for guidance. I scrapped hundreds of pages. At moments, I was on the verge of accepting that perhaps I couldn't do what had to be done here.

But the odd thing was—I had the voice of my character. He was alive for me almost from the start. I heard his voice in the Scriptures, both Old and New.

No matter how discouraged I was, I kept at it, and I heard the voices of Sepphoris, Jerusalem, Nazareth. And finally that grand act of organization that makes a novel, that giant step from shapeless storytelling to coherent narrative, that step was completed.

For the first time in more than three years, I felt a kind of peace. And then there came a new set of questions, that couldn't be avoided.

Will He be real to people who never thought about Him before? Will He come to life for those who know nothing about Him and what He came to do or how He did it? Will He be in the company of people, maybe because it's a good story, at least for a little while?

I'm not a priest. I can't be one. I'll never be able to go to the altar of the Lord and say the words of consecration at Mass, "This is my body. This is my blood." No, I can't work that magnificent Eucharistic miracle. But in humility, I have attempted something transformative which we writers dare to call a miracle in the imperfect human idiom we possess. It's to bring Him here in the form of a story, and that story is Christ The Lord.

Sincerely,

Anne Rice