Christ by Jack Miles

First published: New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2001

Genre(s): Nonfiction

Subgenre(s): Biblical studies; biography

Core issue(s): The Deity; Incarnation; Jesus Christ

Overview

In 1996, Jack Miles wrote a Pulitzer Prize-winning work entitled God: A Biography. In that work, he constructed a character analysis of God, based strictly upon a literary study of the Hebrew Bible. He gleaned from the text of the Bible a dynamic and complex deity, and his literary analysis of God’s character, because it shunned dogmatic concerns of Judaism and Christianity, proved provocative. In Christ: A Crisis in the Life of God, Miles turns to the New Testament and the character of Jesus. As he did in God: A Biography, Miles analyzes the character of Jesus, based on the New Testament texts alone. The sequel forms a continuity with the first work, however, because Miles takes seriously the claim that Jesus was God incarnate. Therefore, the complexity of God’s character in the Hebrew Bible is brought forward in toto, into the person of Jesus as well.

The book divides into four chapters—“The Messiah, Ironically,” “A Prophet Against the Promise,” “The Lord of Blasphemy,” and “The Lamb of God”—presented in roughly chronological sequence, each chapter focusing on a particular characteristic of Jesus Christ. Although he refers to many New Testament books, Miles primarily uses Gospel passages. Because the Gospel of John is the Gospel most emphatic about Jesus as the incarnation of God, it functions as the outline for most of Miles’s work.

In his first chapter, “The Messiah, Ironically,” Miles highlights passages from the early chapters of the Gospels, especially John. In these passages, Jesus and others make claims for his status as messiah, but their understanding of “messiah” is so strange that it becomes an ironic title. For instance, John the Baptist calls Jesus the “Lamb of God,” and Jesus himself uses the image of a bronze serpent to expound on his status. The second image, drawn from Numbers, was an object used to heal the people of Israel from an attack of poisonous snakes sent by God himself. These two animal symbols demonstrate that God has dramatically and voluntarily altered the power he exerted in the Hebrew Bible. God has chosen sacrificial animals as metaphors for his life and death, symbols that point to him as the means of forgiveness, but a forgiveness of a curse that he himself caused.

In chapter 2, Miles calls Jesus the “prophet against the promise” because so much of Jesus’ words and actions invert God’s actions in the Hebrew Bible. Instead of expressing a concern for justice that includes reward and punishment, Jesus proclaims that “he is no longer a head-smashing kind of God.” While he had previously announced himself as a mighty warrior, now the Lord opts for nonviolence. The strict distinction between Jew and Gentile that defined God’s relationship to humanity is made obsolete by Jesus’ preaching to his hometown. In all these instances, God in the form of Jesus contradicts his prior acts. Moreover, Miles asserts, the actions of God incarnate change so dramatically because Jesus makes a virtue out of necessity. God found that he could no longer live up to the covenant of the Hebrew Bible, so he altered its rules to make it a covenant of unconditional love.

When, in the third chapter, Miles addresses the blasphemous aspects of Jesus, he looks primarily at Jesus’ speech. At the center of Jesus’ blasphemy is his unequivocal claim, made in John 8:56-58, that he and God are the same. Nothing could be more blasphemous than making oneself equal to God, and when his audience hears Jesus say this, they attempt to stone him (as God in the Hebrew Bible commands them to do). This blasphemy, however, goes beyond hubris. Jesus exalts himself to the level of God, and, concurrently, brings God down to the level of humanity. The crisis that the incarnation solves is a crisis of God’s failing to live up to his own assertions about himself. The incarnation obliterates this failure by making a new assertion—namely, that Jesus’ victory over death takes the place of the triumph of God’s chosen people over their flesh-and-blood enemies.

In the final chapter, Miles treats the passion, death, and resurrection of Jesus. The passion narratives of the Gospels finalize the reversal of expectations that Jesus has been enacting in his public ministry. Jesus’ (God’s) death on the cross and his subsequent resurrection are the ultimate revisionist acts. God’s grandeur and power are exchanged for helplessness and shame. Through the passion, God announces that he “is no longer a warrior prepared to rescue the Jews from foreign oppression but, rather, a savior who has chosen to rescue all mankind from death.” Appropriately, Miles closes this chapter with references to Revelation, the book of the New Testament that most graphically depicts the dual nature of God as victim and conqueror when it presents a lamb with its throat slit as the most powerful being in Heaven.

At the end of his book, Miles includes an epilogue and two appendixes that explain his procedure and put his work in conversation with the academic field of New Testament studies.

Christian Themes

Miles’s investigation of Jesus startles the reader by making strange (what literary critics call defamiliarizing) the doctrine of the incarnation. Although Christian dogmas have long seen Jesus as a human incarnation of God, elaboration of Trinitarian doctrine usually keeps God and Jesus separate as well. Miles does not. Everything that God has thought, said, or done carries forward into the consciousness of Jesus, and Jesus acts and speaks as if he were reacting to his previous manifestations in the Hebrew Bible. As Miles puts it:

Jesus being God Incarnate, all of God’s earlier words were Jesus’ words as well and may—indeed, must—be taken into account as evidence about his character.

Because Miles understands Jesus as arriving on earth with a pre-formed consciousness and memory, he engages aspects of Jesus’ character that do not often appear in Christian theology. Among these, for instance, is the question of whether the Crucifixion is tantamount to God’s committing suicide. If Jesus/God had the power over life and death, as he claims in John 10, then his death must be self-inflicted. It matters little what the Romans or Jesus’ fellow Jews intended; God can do what God wishes. This suicide/deicide starkly points to the central feature of Miles’s work, a feature captured in the “crisis” of the title. The New Testament story of Jesus functions as a narrative of inner conflict in which God is forced, either by himself or by external events, to reformulate his patterns of behavior.

By examining the New Testament only through the lens of the character of God, Miles necessarily omits many facets of the New Testament that Christians hold dear. He has no interest in personal application of the text or its meaning for a religious congregation. The book, therefore, ignores Jesus’ teaching on these matters. Shorn of its theological qualities, the canon looks strikingly different and even distorted. This distortion, however, allows Miles to sidestep some of the distracting issues that historical and theological interpretations often present as blinders to reading the text. Miles has made plain that the concept of “the Word become flesh” (John 1:14) provides the framework—consciously or unconsciously—for almost all subsequent readings of the New Testament, and his literary acumen delves into the incarnation with a keen perceptiveness that complements theology and history.

Sources for Further Study

Madsen, Catherine. “Jesus Saves Face.” CrossCurrents 52, no. 1 (2002): 131-136. A review that focuses on Miles’s treatment of irony.

Wood, James. “God, Interrupted: Revisiting the Life of Christ.” New Yorker 77, no. 35 (November 12, 2001): 122-125. Explores the book as a study of theodicy.

Wood, Michael. “Nobody’s Perfect.” The New York Times Book Review, December 23, 2001, p. 8. A critique of Miles’s literary reading, centering on Miles’s lack of attention to authorial presence.