In 1998, Rice decided to return to the church. Faith helped sustain her through a near-fatal diabetic coma in 1998, and her husband's death from a brain tumor in 2002. That same year, Rice took her fiction in a new direction. ''I said to the Lord, I'm always going to write for you,'' says Rice. ''And everything came together in my life.''
For one thing, she left New Orleans. ''I came here [to La Jolla] for a signing three years ago and I thought, This is as beautiful as Italy,'' says Rice. ''Stan was gone, there had been just so much loss. I thought, I really want to be in a new place.''
Popular art about religion — as Salman Rushdie, Mel Gibson, and others have learned — has a way of raising hackles. While Rice loved Gibson's The Passion of the Christ, she says she sees why some were offended by his portrait of Jews. ''Gibson is a genius,'' says Rice. ''But he's not a biblical scholar.'' Which raises the question, Is Rice a biblical scholar? She has no formal theological training, but she has always been obsessive about confirming the tiniest historical details in her novels, and her reading on early Christian history has been exhaustive. ''It's one thing to research 18th-century Venice,'' says editor Wilson. ''It's another to study the life of Christ. It's a minefield. But she did careful, passionate research.''
''She did her homework,'' says Rice's friend Joseph Cocucci, a Catholic priest. ''In fact, she did more than her homework. A theologian would be jealous of a library like she has.'' (In addition to thousands of religious books, Rice owns 200 Bibles.)
Of course, there is still the possibility that Christ will cause a flap. ''There are a few passages that may be of concern to some Christians,'' says Craig Stoll, merchandise manager for the Oklahoma City-based Christian retail chain Mardel. ''But as a whole, I thought the book was excellent.'' Prominent Catholics have also praised Christ, among them Philip Hannan, the retired archbishop of New Orleans, who pronounced it a ''splendid novel'' about a ''beneficial subject.''
A separate question is whether Rice devotees will be equally smitten. ''I don't think they'll be disappointed. I think they'll be surprised,'' says Rice, who nonetheless admits, ''I've seen some pretty rough remarks on the Internet from people who are furious, just furious, I've written this.'' She declines to mention the source of those remarks, but she may be referring to an exchange last spring on novelist Chuck Palahniuk's fansite, ''The Cult.'' The dialogue on the website included vituperative comments such as the following: ''I'm going to double dose on my sleeping pills because this is the most disturbing angle on religion that I've heard in my life. Anne Rice? Writing as Jesus? Would someone please commit this woman.''
Rice promptly waded into the fray. ''For me, Christ is the ultimate supernatural hero, and the ultimate outsider, and the single most influential figure in Western history,'' she replied on the site. ''Obviously this book isn't up against indifference. It's up against cynicism and misinformation.''
