Who do men say that I am?
Jack Miles likes big celebrities. Six years ago, he wrote a biography of God. His analysis of the Great Protagonist in the Hebrew Bible won a Pulitzer Prize. Now, he's back. And this time, it's personal.
"Christ: A Crisis in the Life of God" reminds us that the story of Christianity reaches its climax with a lynching, an "improbable and appalling conjunction" of native Jewish ideas.
In the ancient story of Abraham and Isaac, animal sacrifice had dramatically replaced human sacrifice as a demonstration of devotion and repentance. But on Golgotha, the long anticipated son of David, the Messiah, plays the role of the sacrificial animal, the Lamb of God, in a radical revision of prophesy that must have struck early Jewish hearers as "not just outrageous but blasphemous."
This is a provocative study of the Gospels, particularly the book of John, lined with thorny claims that will prick anyone's comfortable sense of "the greatest story ever told."
Miles wants to approach the Bible as a literary critic, looking at it as a single story about God. At the heart of his analysis is the premise that the Gospels describe God when he took human form and allowed himself to be murdered.
In a mingling of orthodox and creative interpretations that light this book, Miles claims that God took this suicidal step for two reasons: (1) to repent for his primal sin, his ruthless curse on Adam and Eve that brought death into the world, and (2) to escape from an embarrassing scandal, his failure to save the Jews from oppression.
As you can see, Miles is an equal-opportunity offender. Textual critics will object to his conflation of the various biblical texts into a single story. Historical critics will point out that particular situations and cultures produced an assortment of myths and histories that cannot be considered as a unified whole. Fundamentalists will start collecting dry sticks.
Miles knows all these objections, but because he knows that answering them would consume his entire book, he addresses them only in the appendix. "The interpretation of the New Testament offered in this book," he claims, "is literary, rather than historical or theological."
But his insistence that Jesus is God in human form seems predetermined by his Jesuit background instead of by literary analysis. Any critic who posits that a character is, in fact, something remarkably different than he appears must not only prove that claim but effectively disarm passages that seem to contradict it. Oddly, Miles admits, "Passages that assert or strongly suggest the divinity of Christ are undeniably less frequent in the New Testament than those asserting or strongly suggesting his humanity. However, the divinity passages tint all the others the way a drop of dye tints a glass of clear water." Imagine insisting that the whale in "Moby Dick" is actually a ghost because, though it seems like a whale most of the time, its elusiveness and its whiteness suggest it's really an apparition.
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