In addition to depriving her of the opportunity to write the first and only contemporaneous gospel, removing Ana from the main action destroys the novel’s momentum.Ī daring concept not so daringly developed.Ī flabby, fervid melodrama of a high-strung Southern family from Conroy ( The Great Santini, The Lords of Discipline), whose penchant for overwriting once again obscures a genuine talent. A structural problem is posed when Jesus’ active ministry begins-what will Ana’s role be? Problem avoided when, notified by Judas that Antipas is seeking her arrest, she and Yaltha journey to Alexandria in search of Chaya. Kidd skirts the issue of miracles, portraying Jesus as a fully human and, for the period, accepting husband-after a stillbirth, he condones Ana’s practice of herbal birth control.
There, poverty, not sexism, prohibits her from continuing her writing-office supplies are expensive. She marries Jesus and moves into his widowed mother’s humble compound in Nazareth, accompanied by Yaltha. When Nathanial dies after his betrothal to Ana but before their marriage, Ana is shunned for insufficiently mourning him-and after refusing to become Antipas’ concubine, she is about to be stoned until Jesus defuses the situation with that famous admonition. Their connection deepens after she encounters Jesus in the cave where she is concealing her writings about oppressed women. On the very day Ana, age 14, meets her prospective betrothed, the repellent Nathanial, in the town market, she also encounters Jesus, a young tradesman, to whom she’s instantly drawn. Her adopted brother, Judas-yes, that Judas-is soon disowned for his nonconformity-plotting against Antipas.
As Ana reaches puberty, parental tolerance of her nonconformity wanes, outweighed by the imperative to marry her off. Yaltha was also forced to give up her daughter, Chaya, for adoption. Her mother disapproves, but her aunt, Yaltha, mentors Ana in the ways of the enlightened women of Alexandria, from whence Yaltha, suspected of murdering her brutal husband, was exiled years before. She demonstrates an exceptional aptitude for writing, and Matthias, for a time, indulges her with reed pens, papyri, and other 16 C.E. In Kidd’s ( The Invention of Wings, 2014, etc.) feminist take on the New Testament, Jesus has a wife whose fondest longing is to write.Īna is the daughter of Matthias, head scribe to Herod Antipas, tetrarch of Galilee.
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