"SUICIDE-BY-EXECUTION TO CLEAN UP HIS MESS"

God is a learn-as-he-goes-along deity. It appears he’s omnipotent except in the thinking department. His many missteps in the Old/Hebrew Testament eventually have the Big Kahuna deciding he needs to cure the world’s afflictions that he also caused. Enter the New Testament. Like Mr. Miles Pulitzer-Prize-winning book ‘God: A Biography,’ my average-thinking brain found ‘Christ’ to be a challenging work to read. I needed to consume large portions of it in one sitting instead of small bits at a time. As the author did with the Old Testament, he analyzes the New Testament as a piece of imaginative literature and not as ancient history of actual events. In other words, the author is explaining the New Testament as art. That was fine with me because I was raised Catholic but have been agnostic for over three decades now. I don’t buy into my gonads will be roasting over the open fires of Hell when I die because I don’t accept a likely fictional God as my Lord and Savior.

Mr. Miles asks probing questions and posits thought-provoking ideas while treating the topic with respect. The author specializes in religion, politics, and culture. ‘Christ’ covers such subjects as the meaning of sacrificing animals such as lambs to expiate sins; the importance of believing in an immortal soul; Jesus’s demeanor during his travels; God taking on a mortal form through his son; Jesus’s sexuality and the biblical contradictions about intercourse; the virgin birth and Jesus being ignorant of who he really was until he reached the age of 12; and how God did a complete 180 by going from the Hebrew/Old Testament “I will smite you and the next four generations of your family” to the New Testament “Whoa, dude, chill. Turn the other cheek, man.” Mr. Miles also explains that the Romans’ harsh treatment of Jews during Jesus’s time was comparable to the Nazi’s actions; how the cultural attitudes about suicide back then are different than today’s mindset; the appeal and justification of religious martyrdom; why the bread signifies the Lord’s body and the wine his blood; the chaos and confusion Jesus created for Romans and Jews by publicly contradicting the Hebrew/Old Testament; why being ridiculed for our religious beliefs is viewed as a badge of honor; and the significance of his crucifixion and rising from the dead. The book’s two appendix chapters are lengthy but interesting. They address the different languages used while creating the Bible and the conflict between approaching the Bible as a historical work to be dissected or simply an influential piece of art.

The author adds some important historical context to help clarify why certain stories are important. One nice thing I found about the book ‘Christ’ compared to the book ‘God’ is the King of Kings is a lot more chill in the New Testament compared to his major bi-polar personality in the Hebrew/Old Testament. While reading the book I kept trying to visualize how present-day people would react to some stranger strutting around saying he was the actual son of God, displaying a handful of limited miracles (Well, raising Lazarus from the dead was a big deal), and contradicting many things the faithful took as unchangeable from the Old/Hebrew Testament. Today’s reactions would very likely mimic what happened back when Jesus was alive. The populace would be confused and wondering if the guy was truly the Messiah, a prophet, a scam artist, possessed by a demon, or his brain was a few figs short of a dozen.

Last year I read Mr. Miles’s ‘God’ and would not have understood ‘Christ’ as well if I had not read his 1996 Pultizer-Prize-winning book beforehand. While both books were interesting, it felt like homework. ‘Christ’ does a very good job of explaining the adult Jesus’s journeys that eventually led to his crucifixion. It helped clarify many holes my Catholic patchwork education failed to adequately explain. The author stresses that everything written in the Bible had significance. None of the text was filler. If you have an acute interest in understanding Christ’s story, you will likely find Mr. Miles’s book quite illuminating. However, if your reading diet always hovers around Stephen King or Jacqueline Susann territory, you’ll likely find passing through the eye of a needle easier than reading ‘Christ.’

(P.S. If you find the second appendix interesting, I suggest the late historian Daniel J. Boorstin’s excellent ‘The Seekers: The Story of Man’s Continuing Quest to Understand His World’ for a broader understanding how humans expanded their perspectives.)

I liked this book just as much as the Pulitzer winner that preceded it. And like its predecessor, this work approaches the Bible from a purely literary perspective. This approach doesn’t preclude its own criticism, but it should negate some of the harsher critics who still insist on arguing from a historic or theological basis. Much like was done with the character of God, looking at Christ as a literary character is a worthwhile exercise for the religious and secular alike; it inspires a wide range of contemplative study, revealing powerful thematic elements that may have been less evident or otherwise overlooked. After all, as noted by the author, “an unintended effect is a real effect, which may be welcomed without prejudice to intended effects.”

The most controversial idea that’s being explored is the very heart of the work: the notion that God is experiencing a crisis and must in effect, “change his mind.” He was once the warrior god who saved his people from oppression and ensured militaristic victories, and the coming of a prophesied messiah was expected to fulfill that role as well. In Christ, however, God would now propose new terms for divine intervention. Instead of defeating Caesar as he had once defeated Pharaoh, it would now be the Devil who’s defeated. Instead of ending the oppression of Rome like he once ended bondage to Egypt, it would now be bondage to sin that’s ended. Instead of the conquest of a promised land, the conquest would now be eternal life. Instead of a messiah who would be prophet and king, he would now be God Incarnate.

It’s powerful stuff, and it’s certainly a literary progression that develops from the Old to New Testaments, but I wonder if the literary criticism just as strongly serves to express the same development, not necessarily as a crisis in the character of God - not so much a changing of his mind - but the necessary and intended progression for a constantly failing people. Perhaps the fickleness was not that of the Father, but of his faithless children. It may be less the story of a changing God, and more the story of an evolving, but ever-failing, man. Man who is destined for death, and whose only hope for recourse is in redemption through a loving, self-sacrificing God.

Conceptually very interesting, but it was a very heavy read and I don't enjoy having to continually put books down to let them "breathe". I'm glad I made notes so I can look back and know I didn't imagine how bogged down I felt when I first read this.

I think my opinion of this book could be best summarized by simply taking the first word of the title and adding an ellipse.

Books like this are the reason why nobody takes humanities scholarship seriously anymore. It's a very, very dense, pedantic, and breathless interpretation of what the author thinks of the Bible, presented in a way that makes it obvious that Miles thinks his interpretation of disjointed, rapid-fire Bible passages is unique when in reality he's mostly stating the obvious to any halfway-observant Christian. The author also uses the word "ironically" way too often, (e.g. a chapter entitled "The Messiah, Ironically"), in a way that was overdone in 2002 and in 2014 really just makes me very unironically think of the image of Jesus wearing hipster glasses sipping a PBR. The author makes some very good points along the way, but they're too packed together into a dense blur of self-importance for me to be able to remember what they are, and the whole exercise rings of so much self-important falsehood that I can't really be bothered to care.

In that sense, this book, ironically, (there's that word again!) reminds me of Martin Heidegger's Being and Time. Even though their arguments are more or less opposite, they both share the characteristic of having been produced by a certain type of nigh-unreadable egomaniac who thinks himself God's gift to philosophy even though he's really just rehashing commonly accepted knowledge as his own shiny "new" contribution and taking all the credit. In the meantime, I personally can't take seriously anyone who claims to be an authority on Christianity, yet who says in his introduction - apparently completely without irony - "The world is a crime and someone must be punished for it", then goes on to imply on a regular basis that his own Catholic interpretation of Christianity is the only valid one as a matter of course. In a religion based so heavily on the concept of forgiveness and tolerance of others, the fact that Miles is so unable to even conceive that his personal provincialism needs to be questioned when writing broadly on such an important topic makes him uniquely unqualified to write a book on it, and makes me entirely indifferent to the idea of spending any more time acknowledging that book.

I have read about four kabillion books about Jesus, so it was nice to read one with a little bit of a twist -- it wasn't about the historical Jesus, but it approached Christ from a literary, philosophical perspective. I think it's super important to consider Christianity in this way, because ... that's what Christianity is. The Bible is not a literal account of our history, it is a reflection of our history. This book tries to answer the question: why did this part of the story, this Jesus stuff, need to happen? What purpose did it serve the first Christians to have God Incarnate come to earth as man and die for our sins? Miles has an interesting idea -- that God needed to act because he could not fulfill his covenant promise, and to do this he needed to punish himself with death. I liked it. He does a good job explaining it. Although I do think his writing is a bit wordy and overly complicated.

Another problem is how he approached Jesus' life story. He wrote about it as if there were 1 Gospel, and there are not. He refers to 4. And that in fact is very important! The changes that those Gospels went through contributed to our history, the story, perhaps more than the actual Gospels, because they showed us the thought paths of the first Christians. So to ignore that is pretty simplistic. It's also distracting.

He also made basically no difference between Jesus and God, which was different... and sometimes confusing. I almost felt as if it was a cop-out. Like he was trying to draw in the stuff from his other book, God, while trying to make it directly relevant to Jesus. There was a LOT about God. I was thinking while reading, 'I want more Jesus stuff. I'll read his other book to learn about God.'

I probably will read his other book, because this one was pretty good.

It's my good fortune to have spent about a year in India over the course of the last three years, and I've often hosted first time visitors. Conversations invariably move to an overview of Hinduism, a religion that is quite foreign to Westerners. Almost without fail my guests have voiced the belief that Hinduism is all myth, and not to be taken very seriously. I've taken to asking these folks what makes Hinduism more a myth, or fiction, or literary construct than Christianity, and, to no surprise, they've failed to come up with an answer. I'm sure if any of these folks had been dyed in the wool Christians I would have heard something about the revealed word of God, etc., etc., but they've been open-minded enough to ponder the questions and the implications of judging another's belief system based on their own.
With both, "God, a Biography," and "Christ: A Crisis in the Life of God," Jack Miles has opened the field of discourse by presenting the Primogenitor as a literary character rather than a factual being; and Christ as the same, regardless of his historical reality. He has asked Christians to look at their God in much the same way we look at "foreign" Gods. Was Krishna born on July 19, 3228 BCE, in Gokula, India? Will he return at the end of the current age to usher in a time of peacefulness? Was Jesus born on December 25th, 1 CE. Will he return to judge the living and the dead? To Hindu's Krishna walked, talked, made love, performed miracles. To Christians Christ did the same (except, perhaps, made love.) How much credence we give to any story depends on our orientation, but regardless of belief, the stories themselves are wonderful.

One reason they're wonderful is they are rich in metaphor, and it's the metaphor that Mr. Miles explores to great effect. Who can deny the beauty of an infant, and the idea of an infant knowingly giving love? Who can deny the power in the story of God admitting an error and sacrificing himself in an attempt at rectification?

Mr. Miles's success is that he opens the metaphor, and forces us to think.

Although I'm not a huge fan of Mr. Miles literary style - in fact, I find it a bit stilted - what he has to say more than adequately compensates for the difficulty style presents.

Highly Recommended.

Divine #meta

Totally not what I expected.
"a literary reading of the new testament" is quite a misleading description of the book. It reads more analytically but from the literary perspective.

Decent

Interesting, if a bit tedious at times. Taking the New Testament, in particular the Gospels as literature and the character of Jesus as a continuation of the character of God in the Old and exploring the changes that take place in him and why these changes were necessary. In the end, some of the interpretations are somewhat suspect, as all character studies are, but it makes a convincing argument that the significant change from a powerful, militaristic, god to one of peace and meekness was a necessity vis a vis the reality of the descendants of Abraham as a people under the rule of Rome.

A nice follow to Miles' literary analysis of the Old Testament. I like the exploration of Jesus' varied NT roles. I still believe the image of God/Jesus as bridegroom/husband invites abuse and rationalization, though. Can't we just be friends? Both of Miles' books will merit re-reading.

I have decided to use this book as a reference rather than rate it.