Novelists who tackle the life of Jesus — think Nikos Kazantzakis' "The Last Temptation of Christ" or Robert Graves' "King Jesus" — tend to steer clear of the supernatural. Wonders may occur, but however strange, they're somehow always natural. Oddly, the effect of this is not to diminish the wonders themselves, but the wonder-worker. So Kazantzakis' Jesus seems a little meshuga, and Graves' has in him a touch of the fanatic.

In "Christ the Lord: Out of Egypt," Anne Rice tries an altogether different tactic and scores a direct hit: By embracing the miraculous, she manages to give us a Jesus who is divinely human. This should come as no surprise. Years of chronicling the adventures of the vampire Lestat have made Rice adept at lending plausibility to the supernatural.

As a matter of fact, the Prince of Darkness himself does make an appearance here in a dream, and Rice conjures him with her usual panache. But he seems less impressive intimidating a child, even if the child is the son of God.

The most unusual thing about "Christ the Lord" is that the narrator is Jesus himself. The story of a year in the life of a child told in a child's voice might not have worked — and may not for some. But it did for me. That may simply be because Rice and I are co-religionists, though I think there's more to it than that. That child-voice, which Rice pulls off with remarkable consistency — abandoning a tendency in her recent work toward overly ornate prose — serves to underscore the book's theme, which is Jesus' gradual discovery of who he is.

Those who attended parochial school in the '40s and '50s, as Rice did, were taught that at 7 we reach the "age of reason," the age at which we become capable of moral choice. Jesus has heard rumors that as a toddler he had made birds out of clay and brought them to life (this is one of the legends, popular in the Middle Ages, related in one of the apocryphal Gospels that are among Rice's many sources). He does not, of course, remember this. But the book opens with him learning something that may have bearing on it.

As a bully rushes toward him, Jesus shouts, "You'll never get where you're going." He doesn't. For, at the very moment Jesus speaks those words, he feels "the power go out of me," and the bully falls to the ground dead.

Not surprisingly, this causes a ruckus in the neighborhood. Eventually, Jesus bends over the child, whose name is Eleazer. He lays his hand on Eleazer's forehead and tells him to wake up. Again, "the power went out." Eleazer awakens — and proceeds to attack Jesus all over again.

This incident, which takes place in Alexandria, is what prompts Joseph to take the family back to Nazareth. It is an extended family, and includes James, Joseph's son by a previous marriage, and Cleopas, the brother of Jesus' mother (a fascinating figure, muttering and chuckling to himself almost continuously), as well as some cousins, aunts and uncles. They had all fled to Egypt to escape the tyrannous rule of Herod the Great. Joseph (who has learned it in a dream) tells them he has heard that Herod has died.

The story line is thrice-familiar, even to those who don't know the Gospels that well. So the interest lies not in what Jesus learns, but in how he goes about discovering it, and how he reacts to it. Moreover, Jesus serves as a perspective figure throughout. Not only are Mary, Joseph and the others seen at middle-distance, as it were, but so also are the often turbulent events going on around them — the rebellion against Herod Archilaus, the fractious disputes among the Jewish factions, the cold efficiency of the Romans in restoring order to the province.

Reaction to this novel will probably break along lines comparable to those drawn in response to Mel Gibson's film "The Passion": Believers will find their faith affirmed, skeptics their doubts confirmed. Those in between may simply discover at the core of the work a strange emotional gravitas.

After they arrive in Nazareth, Jesus goes "as soon as I could out into the woods. ... I wanted to walk in the open and climb the slopes under the trees." He lies down on the grass and "the earth was a bed under me. ... I felt so good here." But then he sees a man approaching — Joseph, come to fetch him.

"I didn't have sense to know it," he reflects, "but these moments on the grass had been the first time in my whole life that I'd ever been alone."

"Christ the Lord: Out of Egypt" by Anne Rice; Knopf, $25.95.