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Christ the Lord: The Road to Cana
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Item Description...
Overview
A second volume in the author's series of novels chronicling the life of Christ begins prior to his baptism in the Jordan River and concludes with the miracle at Cana, as he leaves his everyday life in Nazareth to confront his destiny, the Devil's temptations, and the call to be Israel's liberator from Roman occupation. 500,000 first printing.
Publishers Description
Anne Rice's second book in her hugely ambitious and courageous life of Christ begins during his last winter before his baptism in the Jordan and concludes with the miracle at Cana.
It is a novel in which we see Jesus—he is called Yeshua bar Joseph—during a winter of no rain, endless dust, and talk of trouble in Judea.
Legends of a Virgin birth have long surrounded Yeshua, yet for decades he has lived as one among many who come to the synagogue on the Sabbath. All who know and love him find themselves waiting for some sign of the path he will eventually take.
And at last we see him emerge from his baptism to confront his destiny—and the Devil. We see what happens when he takes the water of six great limestone jars, transforms it into cool red wine, is recognized as the anointed one, and urged to call all Israel to take up arms against Rome and follow him as the prophets have foretold.
As with Out of Egypt, the opening novel, The Road to Cana is based on the Gospels and on the most respected New Testament scholarship. The book's power derives from the profound feeling its author brings to the writing and the way in which she summons up the presence of Jesus.
“A masterful book written by an extraordinary writer at the height of her powers. It deserves to be read for that reason alone. But it also deserves to be read to better understand the most dynamic and important person in human history—Christ the Lord.”
—David Kuo, All Things Considered
“Convincing and compelling. Another winner.”
—Kirkus Reviews (starred)
“[A] beautifully observed novel . . . Rice undertakes a delicate balance here: if it is possible to create a character that is simultaneously fully human and fully divine, as ancient Christian creeds assert, then Rice succeeds.”
—Publishers Weekly (starred)
“Anne Rice knows how to make that old story come alive for her readers.”
—Susan Larson, The Times-Picayune
“A powerful account of Christ's humanity while staying true to orthodox Christianity. Her well-drawn, believable supporting characters add to a vivid captivating story . . . a novel that both religious and secular audiences can appreciate and enjoy; highly recommended for all fiction collections.”
—Library Journal (starred)
“Rice, whose books have sold more than 75 million copies, couples her writing talents with the zeal of a recent convert and a passion for historical research in Christ the Lord: The Road to Cana, an intriguing followup to Out of Egypt . . . Remarkable for Rice's prose and rich sensory detail.”
—Cindy Crosby, Christianity Today
“[The Road to Cana] succeeds in treating Yeshua's humanity as an essential part of his divinity . . . And Ms. Rice can deliver hypnotic, incantatory prose that celebrates Yeshua's ascension. . . . Many readers will be lured by the promise of simply rendered holiness to The Road to Cana.”
—Janet Maslin, The New York Times
Anne Rice is the author of twenty-seven books. She lives in Rancho Mirage, California.
1. In the Christian New Testament, the Gospel of John records that Jesus' first miracle happened at the wedding feast of Cana, where water was changed into wine. Also in the Christian New Testament, the Gospel of Matthew states that, before performing any miracles, Jesus first entered the desert, where he was tempted by the Devil. Rice's first title for this book was The Temptation. Why do you think she changed the title to The Road to Cana? 2. Rice has customarily written in the first person, which offers the reader a particular insight into the inner life of the protagonist. In The Road to Cana, does the first-person narration give us insight into the inner life of Jesus? Is the intent of God elucidated? Discuss how revelations of Jesus' personal life are meaningful for contemporary Christians. 3. In The Road to Cana, Jesus says, "What I must know, I know. And what I must learn, I learn."Thomas Aquinas explicated Jesus' human intellect as having a threefold font of knowledge: divine knowledge, infused knowledge, and experiential knowledge. With regard to Jesus' experiential knowledge specifically, how does Avigail contribute to Jesus' experience and knowledge of love? Does he learn about human love? Discuss whether experience and knowledge can help one to love more humanely. 4. Discuss the divine power that Jesus demonstrates as God's son in The Road to Cana. In chapter 22, how does Jesus overpower Satan? 5. The New York Times Book Review of Christ the Lord: Out of Egypt states: "Ms. Rice retains her obsessions with ritual and purification. . . . She writes this book in a simpler, leaner style, giving it the slow but inexorable rhythm of an incantation." Are the Christ the Lord books a prayer for Rice? Discuss instances in The Road to Cana where Rice has written rituals of purification and incantation. 6. Which of the four Christian gospels most influenced The Road to Cana? Which gospel stories are distinctly portrayed? Discuss whether these gospel stories inspire rites of maturity for all Christian faiths today. 7. First-century Jewish women worshiped in the Ezrat Nashim—the Women's Courtyard—which was located beside or behind the men's place of worship. How does Rice's scholarship and penchant for historical authenticity enable her to accurately depict the role of Jewish women in first-century Palestine? In The Road to Cana, does Jesus criticize, whether by word or by deed, this masculine/feminine segregation? Discuss how new understandings of masculinity and femininity have influenced today's religious practices. 8. The Gospel of John is the only biblical source that mentions the wedding feast at Cana. In John's account, Jesus' mother, Mary, informs him at the wedding feast that the wine has run out. It is Jesus' reply to her that has mystified many throughout the centuries. In the final chapter of The Road to Cana, Rice quotes this reply: "Woman? . . . What has this to do with you and me?" Catholic saints, Christian biblical scholars, and homilists have attempted to explain this seemingly callous rejoinder, but their explications vary. How does The Road to Cana treat the mystery behind this dialogue between mother and son? Discuss whether Rice lends a mother's tenderness to the scene. 9. Mel Gibson's film The Passion of the Christ (2004) focuses on the suffering and death of Jesus. In what ways does Rice's Jesus differ from Gibson's? Specifically, when does Jesus, as depicted in The Road to Cana, show real human passion? 10. In an essay posted on her Web site, Rice says of her own writing career: "[My earlier novels] are not immoral works. They are not Satanic works. They are not demonic works. . . . The one thing which unites [my works] is the theme of the moral and spiritual quest. A second theme, key to most of them, is the quest of the outcast for a context of meaning." Is The Road to Cana Rice's attempt to show Jesus' spiritual quest? 11. Jesus, the narrator of The Road to Cana, begins by positing a solitary question: Who is Christ the Lord? Discuss whether this question has been answered by the end of the novel. If not, will this question ever be answered?
Who is Christ the Lord?Angels sang at his birth. Magi from the East brought gifts: gold, frankincense, and myrrh. They gave these gifts to him, and to his mother, Mary, and the man, Joseph, who claimed to be his father.In the Temple, an old man gathered the babe in his arms. The old man said to the Lord, as he held the babe, “A light for revelation to the Gentiles, and glory for your people Israel.”My mother told me those stories.That was years and years ago.Is it possible that Christ the Lord is a carpenter in the town of Nazareth, a man past thirty years of age, and one of a family of carpenters, a family of men and women and children that fill ten rooms of an ancient house, and, that in this winter of no rain, of endless dust, of talk of trouble in Judea, Christ the Lord sleeps in a worn woolen robe, in a room with other men, beside a smoking brazier? Is it possible that in that room, asleep, he dreams?Yes. I know it's possible. I am Christ the Lord. I know. What I must know, I know. And what I must learn, I learn.And in this skin, I live and sweat and breathe and groan. My shoulders ache. My eyes are dry from these dreadful rainless days–from the long walks to Sepphoris through the gray fields in which the seeds burn under the dim winter sun because the rains don't come.I am Christ the Lord. I know. Others know, but what they know they often forget. My mother hasn't spoken a word on it for years. My foster father, Joseph, is old now, white haired, and given to dreaming.I never forget.And as I fall asleep, sometimes I'm afraid–because my dreams are not my friends. My dreams are wild like bracken or sudden hot winds that sweep down into the parched valleys of Galilee.But I do dream, as all men dream.And so this night, beside the brazier, hands and feet cold, under my cloak, I dreamed.I dreamed of a woman, close, a woman, mine, a woman who became a maiden who became in the easy tumult of dreams my Avigail.I woke. I sat up in the dark. All the others lay sleeping still, with open mouths, and the coals in the brazier were ashes.Go away, beloved girl. This is not for me to know, and Christ the Lord will not know what he does not want to know–or what he would know only by the shape of its absence.She wouldn't go–not this, the Avigail of dreams with hair tumbled down loose over my hands, as if the Lord had made her for me in the Garden of Eden.No. Perhaps the Lord made dreams for such knowing– or so it seemed for Christ the Lord.I climbed up off the mat, and quietly as I could, I put more coals into the brazier. My brothers and my nephews didn't stir. James was off with his wife tonight in the room they shared. Little Judas and Little Joseph, fathers both, slept here tonight away from little ones huddled around their wives. And there lay the sons of James–Menachim, Isaac, and Shabi, tumbled together like puppies.I stepped over one after another and took a clean robe from the chest, the wool smelling of the sunshine in which it had been dried. Everything in that chest was clean.I took the robe and went out of the house. Blast of cold air in the empty courtyard. Crunch of broken leaves.And for a moment in the hard pebbly street I stopped and looked up at the great sweep of glittering stars beyond the huddled rooftops.Cloudless, this cold sky, and so filled with these infinitesimal lights, it seemed for a moment beautiful. My heart hurt. It seemed to be looking at me, enfolding me–a thing of kindness and witness–an immense web flung out by a single hand–rather than the vast inevitable hollow of the night above the tiny slumbering town that spilled like a hundred others down a slope between distant caves of bones and thirsting fields, and groves of olive trees.I was alone.Somewhere far down the hill, near the sometime marketplace, a man sang in a low drunken voice and a spark of light shone there, in the doorway of the sometime tavern. Echo of laughter.But all the rest was quiet, without a torch to light the way.The house of Avigail across from ours was shut up like any other. Inside, Avigail, my young kinswoman, slept with Silent Hannah, her sweet companion, and the two old women who served her and the bitter man, Shemayah, who was her father.Nazareth did not always have a beauty. I'd seen generations of young maidens grow up, each fresh and lovely to behold as any flower in the wild. Fathers did not want their daughters to be beauties. But Nazareth had a beauty now, and it was Avigail. She'd refused two suitors of late, or so her father had done on her behalf, and there was a real question in the minds of the women of our house as to whether Avigail herself even knew the suitors had come calling.It fell hard on me suddenly that I would sometime very soon be standing among the torchbearers at her wedding. Avigail was fifteen. She might have been married a year ago, but Shemayah kept her close. Shemayah was a rich man who had but one thing and one thing alone that made him happy, and that was his daughter, Avigail.I walked up the hill and over the top. I knew every family behind every door. I knew the few strangers who came and went, one huddled in a courtyard outside the Rabbi's house, and the other on the roof above where so many slept, even in winter. It was a town of day-to-day quiet, and seemingly not a single secret.I walked down the other side of the slope until I came to the spring, the dust rising with every step I took, until I was coughing from it.Dust and dust and dust.Thank You, Father of the Universe, that this night is not so cold, no, not as cold as it might be, and send us the rain in Your own good time because You know that we need it.Passing the synagogue, I could hear the spring before I saw it.The spring was drying up, but for now it still ran, and it filled the two large rock-cut basins in the side of the hill, and spilled down in glistening streaks to the rocky bed it followed off and away into the distant forest.The grass grew soft here and fragrant.I knew that in less than an hour, the women would be coming, some to fill jugs, others, the poorer women, to wash their clothes here as best they could and beat them on the rocks.But for now the spring was mine.I stripped off the old robe and flung it down into the creek bed where the water soon filled it up and darkened it to where I couldn't see it. I set the clean robe aside and approached the basin. With my cupped hands I bathed in the cold water, drenching my hair, my face, my chest, letting it run down my back and my legs. Yes, cast away the dreams like the old robe, and bathe them away. The dream woman has no name now and no voice, and what it was, that painful flicker when she laughed or reached out, well, that was gone, fading, like the night itself was fading, and gone too was the dust for this moment, the suffocating dust. There was only cold. There was only water.I lay down on the far bank, opposite the synagogue. The birds had begun, and as always I'd missed the exact moment. It was a game I played, trying to hear the very first of the birds, the birds that knew the sun was coming when no one else did.I could see the big thick palm trees around the synagogue emerging from the clump of shapeless shadows. Palms could grow in a drought. Palms didn't care if the dust coated every branch. Palms went on as if made for all seasons.The cold was outside me. I think my beating heart kept me warm. Then the first light seeped up over the distant bluff, and I picked up the fresh robe, and slipped it over my head. So good, this, this luxuriously clean cloth, this fresh-smelling cloth.I lay back down again and my thoughts drifted. I felt the breeze before I heard the trees sigh with it.Far up the hill was an old olive grove to which I loved to go at times to be alone. I thought of it now. How good it would be to lie in that soft bed of dead leaf and sleep the day away.But there was no chance of it, not now with the tasks that had to be done, and with the village charged with new worries and new talk over a new Roman Governor come to Judea, who, until he settled in as every other Governor had done, would trouble the land from one end to the other.The land. When I say the land, I mean Judea and Galilee as well. I mean the Holy Land, the Land of Israel, the Land of God. It was no matter that this man didn't govern us. He governed Judea and the Holy City where the Temple stood, and so he might as well have been our King instead of Herod Antipas. They worked together, these two, Herod Antipas, the ruler of Galilee, and this new man, Pontius Pilate, whom men feared, and beyond Jordan Herod Philip ruled and worked with them as well. And so the land had been carved up for a long, long time, and Antipas and Philip we knew, but Pontius Pilate we didn't know and the reports were already evil.What could a carpenter in Nazareth do about it? Nothing, but when there was no rain, when men were restive and angry and full of fear, when people spoke of the curse of Heaven on the withering grass, and Roman slights, and an anxious Emperor gone into exile in mourning for a son poisoned, when all the world seemed filled with the pressure to put one's shoulder to it and push, well, in such a time, I didn't go off to the grove of trees to sleep the day away.It was getting light.A figure broke from the dark shapes of the houses of the village, hurrying downhill towards me, one hand upraised. My brother James. Older brother–son of Joseph and Joseph's first wife who died before Joseph married my mother. No mistaking James, for his long hair, knotted at the back of his neck and streaming down his back, and his narrow anxious shoulders and the speed with which he came, James the Nazirite, James, the captain of our band of workers, James, who now in Joseph's old age was head of the family.He stopped at the far side of the little spring, mostly a broad swatch of dry stones now with the glittering ribbon of water gurgling through the center of it, and I could plainly make out his face as he stared at me. He stepped on one big stone after another as he came across the creek to me. I had sat up and now I climbed to my feet, a common enough courtesy for my older brother. “What are you doing out here?” he demanded. “What's the matter with you? Why do you always worry me?”I didn't say anything.He threw up his hands and looked to the trees and the fields for an explanation.“When will you take a wife?” he asked. “No, don't stop me, don't put up your hand to me to silence me. I will not be silenced. When will you take a wife? Are you wed to this miserable creek, to this cold water? What will you do when it runs dry, and it will this year, you know.”I laughed under my breath.He went right on.“There are two men as old as you in this town who've never married. One is crippled. The other's an idiot, and everyone knows this.”He was right. I was past thirty and not married.“How many times have we talked about this, James?” I asked.It was a beautiful thing to watch the growing light, to see the color coming to the palms clustered around the synagogue. I thought I heard shouting in the distance. But perhaps it was just the usual noises of a town tearing off its blankets.“Tell me what's really eating at you this morning?” I asked. I picked up the wet robe from the stream and spread it out on the grass where it would dry. “Every year you come to look more like your father,” I said, “but you never have your father's face really. You never have his peace of mind.”“I was born worried,” he confessed with a shrug. He was looking anxiously towards the village. “Do you hear that?”“I hear something,” I said.“This is the worst dry spell we've ever had,” he said, glancing up at the sky. “And cold as it is, it's not cold enough. You know the cisterns are almost empty. The mikvah's almost empty. And you, you are a constant worry to me, Yeshua, a constant worry. You come out here in the dark to the creek. You go off to that grove where no one dares to go. . . .”“They're wrong about that grove,” I said. “Those old stones mean nothing.” That was a village superstition, that something pagan and dreadful had once taken place in that grove. But it was the mere ruins of an old olive press in there, stones that went way back to the years before Nazareth had been Nazareth. “I tell you this once a year, don't I? But I don't want to worry you, James.” |
Item Specifications...
Pages 256
Dimensions: Length: 1" Width: 6.5" Height: 9.5"
Weight: 1.05 lbs.
Binding Hardcover
Release Date Mar 4, 2008
Publisher Knopf
ISBN 1400043522
EAN 9781400043521
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Availability 3 units.
Availability accurate as of May 24, 2012 04:48.
Usually ships within one to two business days from La Vergne, TN.
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About this Author/Artist Anne Rice is the author of twenty-six books. She lives in La Jolla, California.
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Reviews - What do our customers think?
 | Christ the Lord: The Road to Cana Mar 31, 2010 |
I am not finished reading this, but it is proving to be as interesting to me as the first in this series from Anne Rice. The depth of historical and theological research is astounding.
Well done, once again, Mrs. Rice. | | |  | The Road to Canna Mar 8, 2010 |
| I thoroughly enjoy reading this book. It fascinates me how Anne Rice portrays Jesus feelings and thoughts - interrelating passages from the Bible. | | | | An excellent 2nd book! Mar 4, 2010 |
| This is an excellent second entry in a story I thought I knew. These 2 books have filled in the majority of what the life of Christ could have been like, not just an open mystery. Yes, it is fiction, but Ann Rice puts everything she has into keeping this story as historicly and humanly acurate as is possible and has given me much to ponder. Anne Rice's writing gets better with each and every story she tells. Quite greedely, I pray for her a long and satisfying life. | | | | Christ The Lord The Road to Cana Feb 18, 2010 |
| I really liked this book. It makes the Bible come alive. You can imagine how people lived in those times. Anne Rice is such a good storyteller, she can weave a story, so you think you were there.Its easy to read and her story flows from the beginning to the end. If you like biblical novels, this book is a great read. | | |  | Christ The Robot Feb 17, 2010 |
"GOOD LORD," - How Contrived!
I've endured her lack of proper punctuation for decades, even enjoyed the surreal effects she's had on my brains hemispheres in running two disparate sentences together sans semi-colons (I think she's used TWO of them in toto, in ALL of her previous books LOL) but if she gets any sloppier it will pass from merely disjointed into the realm of unintelligible entirely.
She is clearly an idolater at heart, spinning shiny-shiny bling images, and merely categorical idols, together in previously-interesting mental Mosaics, but in these books on Jesus Christ she goes FAR too far in so-doing.
Her "Jesus" constantly refers to His First Person self as "Christ The Lord," a redundancy if ever there was one, for the Christ means merely The Messiah... He thus only self identifies as "The Messiah, The Lord." Why not keep going, then? As: "The Messiah, The Lord, The Greatest, The Etcetera...!?"
;-)
I'm afraid she has simply taken Catholic-Church-approved and vetted lists of "facts" and strung them all together... her robotic version of Christ acts as a somnambulist, whose empty head serves merely as an echo-chamber for the thoughts of others; a hologram image of Christ derived from centuries of wary and self-flagellating committee-thinking.
I 'Believe' it's merely an evasive way for her to cover up and obscure her own true self, to avoid some navel-gazing sense of "guilt," to avoid censure and blame, in case of missing some niggling, sacred 'detail,' in the odious way of ritualization; some sort of myopically self-entranced, hop-scotch stations of the cross re-enactment.
She is inflicting some sort of internalized, delusive and masochistic penance on herself, in writing these wooden books... and we, her loyal admirers, are thus-forced to suffer along with her, albeit not in precisely the same way.
And it reflects so-poorly upon her; her writing has become laboured and boring. Her own inserted self's ex-machina 'Bruria' character, still merely speaks in the same tired voice of her ancient L'estat. The Ego has Landed, shot down by Time.
Moi? I so-miss the 'real' Anne Rice, whose earliest work actually inspired me to better see myself in the mirror, as the blonde and not the Blasco; I had given her such kudos in killing the old ennui, that to see her own mind dessicate like this is a real Tragedy of Error - what she no-doubt would still-regard as 'Sin.'
Has she herself become merely an empty-minded husk, drained of her great and apparently now merely previous potential, a tired, dust-filled puppet mummer of the Company line of the millenniae of time-worn and soon-irrelevant religious self- Salesmen?
And the back cover actually disengeneously states that: "The book's power derives from the profound feeling the author brings to the writing and the way in which she summons up the presence of Jesus."
*This* book's "Power?!" ...and... "Feeling...?" ...and...
"Summons UP?!" What a put-Down!
;-(
I snap my fingers: Anne! Come back to us! Awaken!
We - all - so-miss... the real you!
Your own Dear, Friend,
~Uncle Vladdi~
;-) | | | Write your own review about Christ the Lord: The Road to Cana
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