Junior Jesus

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Christ the Lord is, as any retelling of Jesus' life must be, cleft: it's both a work of devotion and a work of fiction, and one reads it with a divided mind. The religious reader wants it to hew closely to the known facts and spirit of Jesus' life, to show respect and be plausible. The novel reader wants drama and action. Seven-year-old Jesus is largely the good little kid you would expect, and he makes the novel reader in you a teeny bit impatient. When Jesus bumps into Satan in a fever dream, Satan says to him, mockingly, "I'm watching you, angel child! I'm waiting to see what you mean to do." It's hard not to have a little sympathy for the devil.

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