From Vampires to Jesus

I know nothing of God or the Devil. I have never seen a vision nor learned a secret that would damn or save my soul. A quote from one of Anne Rice's main characters in Interview with a Vampire. This movie was a favorite of my youth. Was it Brad Pitt and Tom Cruise in one movie or the existential search for meaning?

Anne an atheist for 30 years now pens stories of another supernatural being, Christ the Lord. You might wander what journey brought this women from devout atheism back to devout Catholicism. A new found podcast reminded me of the fascinating conversion Anne underwent that suddenly transformed her main character from a vampire to Jesus.

The Whitehorse Inn a delightful podcast that interviews many leading thinkers and answers difficult questions recently interviewed Anne Rice (Listen Here). Anne discusses her return to Christianity, as well as, the reliability of some New Testament scholarship.

Anne grew up in a strict Roman Catholic home in New Orleans. She left the church and her faith upon entering college where she describes, "No personal event precipitated this loss of faith...there was the world itself, without Catholicism, filled with good people and people who read books that were strictly speaking forbidden to me. I wanted to read Kierkegaard, Sartre, and Camus. I wanted to know why so many seemingly good people didn't believe in any organized religion yet cared passionately about their behaviors and the values of their lives..." (Read more here.)

So Anne threw herself into her work, embracing atheism, and began publishing many best selling books (50 million plus). Anne's novels have always tried for complete historical accuracy, whether it be the 18th and 19th century for her Vampire Chronicles or the 1st Century for recounting the life of Jesus. Fascinatingly, she does not use an editor for any rewrites and brings each work to perfection herself.

In fact it was her own research into the first century and Roman culture that brought her to the questions--How did Christianity actually 'happen'? Why did Rome actually fall? The mystery she couldn't explain was the survival of the Jews. This set into motion the idea that there might be a God. She returned to the church in 1998. She read the Bible now with a state of utter amazement at its variety, poetry, and startling portraits of women. She posed herself to exhaustively research Jesus and how Christianity emerged.

Anne did much research into New Testament scholarship. She first looked at the skeptical New Testament scholars of the Enlightenment. To her surprise, she did not find strong, well examined arguments, but incoherent, inelegant assumptions and conjectures that reached absurd conclusions on the basis of little or no data at all.

In summary Anne found--"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 be horrified by it if he knew about it-that whole picture 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 had never seen such kind of emotion in any other field of research. Luckily she came across other scholars who took seriously the words of the Gospel and presented their individual authorship and unique coherence. Among those include A.T. Robinson, N.T. Wright who addressed that Christianity achieved what it did in fact because Jesus rose from the dead. It was this fact that sent the apostles out into the world with the force necessary to create Christianity, nothing else would have done that.

Given these two directions in scholarship, Anne was confronted with how to write her novels about Jesus. Anne has accepted that challenge and chosen to write about the Jesus of the Gospels! So with that I am encouraged to read her work and happy to know I will not find the ill researched, poorly presented history of someone like Dan Brown.

Please let me know if you have read her work and your thoughts.


Thought for the Day: If God were to make reasonable promises: a spiritual high, a tax break, then a secular age might credit the word of the Almighty. But God promises a new nature, physical resurrection, a new heaven and earth, and eternal life.