Christ the Lord - Out of Egypt

Christ the Lord: Out of Egypt is a novel by the American writer Anne Rice, published in 2005. It depicts the life of Jesus Christ at the age of seven to eight, loosely based on the apocryphal Infancy Gospel of Thomas.

The book is set in Israel in the first century, where a child is born to a humble Jewish family and grows up knowing that his life is not an ordinary one. The tyrannical rule of King Herod has driven the family from the Holy Land to the relative safety of cosmopolitan Alexandria, and the story opens with their return after Herod's death. The boy's childhood is an uneasy one, as he begins to come to terms with his extraordinary powers and with the whispers about his birth that follow the family wherever it goes. Rice wrote the novel after returning to the Catholic Church in 1998, and she approached the material as historical fiction rather than as fantasy, which was a different register from the books she was best known for at the time.

Rice had written both about the ancient world and about the supernatural before this book, and in this one she treated the childhood of Jesus as a subject for historical fiction.