Religion & Ethics NewsWeekly . INTERVIEW . Jack Miles . November 16, 2001

In 1996, Jack Miles won the Pulitzer Prize for GOD: A BIOGRAPHY, his book about conflict and development in the character of God in the Hebrew Bible. Miles, a former Jesuit who studied in Rome, in Jerusalem, and at Harvard, has had a distinguished career as a journalist, editor, lecturer, scholar, and writer. He was for many years the literary editor of the LOS ANGELES TIMES, and today he serves as senior advisor to the president at the J. Paul Getty Trust in Los Angeles. He has just published Jack Miles

CHRIST: A CRISIS IN THE LIFE OF GOD (Alfred A. Knopf), an audacious new book that is at once a fresh interpretation of the classic Christian belief that Jesus is God and a moving meditation on the problem of evil. Miles reads the New Testament as the continuation of God's life story, in which He becomes a man and dies on a Roman cross, and begins his new book by asking the startlingly simple question, "What was God thinking?"

Miles spoke recently in Washington, D.C. with RELIGION & ETHICS NEWSWEEKLY.

Q: After so many years away from biblical scholarship, what drew you back to writing two books on the Bible?

JM: I hadn't really thought that I would write on the Bible, and then one evening I listened to a recording of Bach's "St. Matthew Passion," in which the images of the bridegroom and the lamb are juxtaposed. Jesus never married, so in some conventional sense Jesus cannot be a bridegroom. The bridegroom then must be God, the bridegroom of Israel. And the lamb is that bridegroom reduced to the condition of a sacrificial animal.

The horror of this transformation hit me with new force, and something close to horror is what I hear in the opening strains of that music. It certainly is a blend of grief and fear -- that deep-held note [in the opening chorus] bespeaks something close to fear or terror, as would be expected if you understand yourself in the condition of Israel -- losing its great protector, its champion, the God who had destroyed the army of Pharaoh and who was the ultimate guarantor of the safety and survival of the nation. If He could be reduced to this condition, then what hope was there for His people? As Jesus himself says to the weeping women who see him being led off to die, "Weep not for me, weep rather for your children. Blessed is the womb that hath never borne and the breast that has never suckled. If this is done in the green wood, what will be done in the dry?" Jesus is speaking what have to be their own thoughts, and if they didn't see him as God Incarnate, subsequent Christian tradition has.

I'm making this far, far more articulate than it was for me as the music washed over me. The words, which are so very brief, simply say, "Look at him. Look at who? Look at the bridegroom. How is he? He is like a lamb." That's it. But that in its starkness is so affecting.

Then it became a matter of approaching the character of God Incarnate as you would approach any human character who surprises you by doing something that seems wholly out of character. You look into his past life. You say, "There must be something about him I didn't know." In this case, that meant looking into the Hebrew scriptures, which are [about] God's early and middle life. I intended to go on from that exercise to talk about the story told in the Gospels, but I made the fateful decision to read the Hebrew scriptures in the Jewish order, and realized that there was here an editorial hand that was bringing the collection to a close, so I had to stop.

Q: So the two books were really one book?

JM: They are two books reflecting the two editions in which we in the West have our sacred scripture. We have a Jewish edition, and we all have it. The Jews don't just have it. They may once have been the only ones who had it, but Christians now have it, too. They all know about it. And we have the Christian edition, which once seemed to be the only edition -- to Christians. Jews always knew about it, too. There's been a kind of double life all along. Jews and Christians have created western culture together, and so there are definitely two books here, but the two had a single genesis.

Q: You were inspired by listening to the Passion according to St. Matthew, yet you wrote a book that's very dependent on the Gospel according to St. John.

JM: Well, that's true. Though the Passion narrative proper comes from St. Matthew, there's very much in the oratorio that does not come from Matthew. And that is true of all of Bach's other passion compositions. The bridegroom and lamb images come straight from John. In fact, they also come straight from John the Baptist. It is he who speaks of Jesus as bridegroom on one occasion and as lamb on another.

I gave a lecture at the Getty Museum in which I joined the St. Matthew Passion to another German masterpiece of religious art, Matthias Grünewald's crucifixion -- the "Eisenheim Altarpiece." In that scene, you have Mary and John and Mary Magdalene grieving on one side of the cross, and then on the other side you have John the Baptist pointing triumphantly at the cross. He is not grieving. (John the Baptist, of course, did not attend the crucifixion. He was dead by that time. He had been beheaded.) And there's a little lamb at the bottom bleeding into a chalice and holding a staff -- obviously a highly interpreted, syncretistic picture of the Crucifixion, in which one Gospel is used to interpret another.

Q: Why is Christ a crisis in the life of God?

JM: The crisis in God's life is that He has broken his promise. He said that what appeared to be Babylon's victory over Jerusalem was really God punishing Jerusalem for the sins of the Jews, but that this punishment would not last. Soon Babylon would fall, and then Jerusalem would rise again in glory as under King David.

But it didn't happen. A temple was rebuilt, but it was a paltry thing. At its dedication, as many people wept as cheered. And the Persians didn't last very long. They were succeeded by the Greeks, who were much more oppressive, and by the Romans, who were the most oppressive of all. And God knows, because He knows the future, that a few decades hence there will come the great Roman Shoah -- the slaughter of the Jews and the attempt to end national Jewish life -- whose equal never came again until Hitler. And God is not going to do anything about it.

How can He continue to be God under those circumstances? Breaking His own promise. Not defending His own people. He had already said repeatedly that they had suffered enough. It was time for them to be comforted. But He is not comforting them. This is a crisis.

Q: God made an enormous mistake; God failed; God is only human. Isn't there a long tradition of understanding God this way in ancient biblical commentary? Aren't there many places in the Talmud, for example, where the rabbis speak about God changing His mind, failing, repenting, exhibiting the kinds of fallible human qualities you talk about?

JM: I do think that there could be assembled quite a remarkable collection of statements from places like the Midrash to Lamentations and other rabbinic texts. … But I decided I wasn't going to do that. My claim has been that I'm writing about God, and now about God Incarnate, as literary characters, and that my warrant for doing this is that these works have already achieved that position. They are in the literary canon of the West. The rabbinic literature, brilliant as it is and astounding as it can be in its daring, does not have that status, and it is certainly not in any dialogue with the New Testament, interesting as that could be.

You could find [these observations]. What I sometimes think occupies the place of the Talmud in Christianity is, in fact, the canon of literary and artistic works inspired by the New Testament. You can find it in Milton, in Matthias Grünewald, in Bach.

What does the average child think, looking at this man Jesus being tortured? "What did he do? He must have been very bad." I begin the book speaking of a Japanese artist who expressed her shock at seeing a corpse displayed as a religious icon. Jesus appears to be suffering punishment. And in some way that spectacle leaps past all theological and philosophical rationalizations of it and says to your most basic imaginative stratum, "He is being punished. He did do something wrong." Then you look for what it might be and what he might be doing about it.

I'm really quite astonished at the thought that Jesus undergoes a ritual of repentance, but he does. He's baptized at the Jordan River, going through what for everyone else who went through it was an admission of sin and a promise to reform. What sin had he committed? As Jesus, perhaps none that we can point to, but as God there was His having blighted all of His own creation with the curse of death.

Q: But did God bring suffering into the world? The conventional interpretation of the story of the Garden of Eden is that Adam fell; you are saying that God fell.

JM: I'm saying that they fell together and that they rise together. The Jews are about to suffer a horrendous defeat by Rome, and God is failing to come to their rescue. He rescues himself and saves His own identity as God by swallowing up that defeat in a larger victory -- the victory that corrects that earlier mistake He made by overreacting to the sin of His first human creatures. They did disobey. But was it necessary for Him to inflict capital punishment upon them because of their sin, and if upon them then also upon their children, and their children's children, not just to the thousandth generation but for all time? Having done that, could He look at the world and say that it is good? It doesn't appear so, because He looked at it shortly before the Flood and said, "I'm sorry that I made them" and came within one family of wiping them out completely. So He had done some damage to His own work. Yes, their sin provoked Him to it, but He needn't have gone as far as He did.

Q: God wasn't forgiving enough?

JM: He wasn't forgiving enough, indeed. He becomes more forgiving in the course of His story, and if there is any motif that occurs again and again in the career of Jesus, it is forgiveness.

So Jesus dies, and his death tricks the devil. The devil thinks that he has won again. But Jesus rises, and the devil is defeated, because before dying and rising Jesus has created this blood-drinking ritual, obscene and shocking in itself, that enables his followers to unite themselves to him so that they can die symbolically and rise symbolically when he does. This is his tikkun olam. This is how God saves the world in the Christian version.
There's another version, the Jewish version. The Torah is given for everybody in Judaism. It's not just given for the Jews. The whole world eventually will be saved. The story is about the whole world and Christianity as well, and the final victory doesn't come until the end of time, so both groups end up still in a posture of waiting. But in the Christian story there is the consoling belief that the definitive victory has been won.

Q: The last few pages and paragraphs of the book read almost like a grand sermon. They really preach to the reader, in a way.

JM: You're not alone in feeling this. A review in AMERICA magazine refers to the conclusion of the book as "frankly homiletic." I keep announcing that I'm writing about [the Bible] as secular literature. I mean to write about God as though in somebody else's sacred literature and to simply see how He functions within this work of art. Nonetheless, my appreciation of this work of art becomes so warm that it seems as if only a preacher could be behind it, and who knows? This is the sort of thing that a writer probably has to have pointed out to him that he can't understand fully about himself.

Q: What do you say to those who feel that treating God as a literary character diminishes God? That a sacred book becomes "just literature"?

JM: I really don't disagree with those people. I do think that literature is less powerful and less important than religion. Religion provides people with a guide to life. Religion changes the course of history. Literature doesn't do either of those things. I quite consciously intended to lower the stakes by writing about God and now about Jesus as literary characters. And I wanted to write in the first place for people who could only, or had never done other than, accept these characters as that or nothing.

But I don't think that literature and religion are mutually exclusive. Having concluded a long and intense literary appreciation of this character as that and that only, you may find that there is some reverberation in your religious appreciation of him.

I think it's a great gain that we can play the game either way in our culture. It creates a space in which believers and unbelievers or people from different kinds of belief, different religious traditions, can safely and peacefully come together. And it is refreshing, it is mysteriously instructive to look at your own religion as if you were an adherent of no religion or of some other religion -- to look at Christianity as if you were a Hindu. That's what I meant when I said that it's hard to put into words, but it's what you learn when you go to a foreign country and find yourself taking on its view of who the Americans are. You certainly see them in a new way. ... Maybe that's not philosophy of the greatest profundity, but I call it at least refreshing.

Q: Perhaps the most provocative part of the book is the claim that God committed suicide on the cross. To explain this you put to great use the works of Albert Camus and John Donne, and what they wrote about the philosophical question of suicide.

JM: Camus is first and last a moralist. He wrote fiction, but his fiction always has a certain problematic core. He was concerned with the justice of the world (or the injustice of the world) in a way that, if he had been a conventional believer, we would say was theodicy -- the justification of the ways of God to man. That is the animating concern here. How can God still be God, having done what He has done? Entertaining the thought that this was a problem for God Himself makes God Himself responsible for His own justification.

This book is the kind of novel of ideas that, if Camus had been more Christian, he might have written. If Camus is a kind of secular saint, then this is a kind of sanctified secularism that I'm offering.

As for Donne, great metaphysical poet that he was, he was always playing with daring ideas and trying things on for size. BIATHANATOS, the book in which he talks about suicide, was published only posthumously. I think he realized that this was an idea that in those days might have gotten you burned at the stake, so he kept it to himself. But in our day, we're done fighting religious wars in the West. We fought the worst the world has ever seen, I think, in the early 17th century. What the Thirty Years War did to Germany is simply beyond belief, even now. The result was that within only some decades more, Europe hadn't become a peaceful place, but it had learned that it wasn't going to go to war again over religion. I do think that's true about Europe. And we are that in intensified form in this country.

Q: How have you thought about the book in the aftermath of September 11?

JM: The great Arabist and Orientalist Louis Massignon said that the Arab-Muslim world has had the industrial revolution but not the scriptural revolution. Muslims by and large have not grown accustomed to or comfortable with applying the canons of secular history to their sacred scripture. We have done that and have come to the end of that. Not that the last word has been said; historical questions are in principle unresolvable, and many of them will be discussed forever. But we have realized what history can do for us and what it can't do, so we're no longer either terrified of it or unrealistically hopeful in respect to it. I hope that something like that might happen in the Muslim world. There are surely those who are ready and willing to begin doing something like that with their own tradition, and on the far side of it might lie artistic, impressionistic, highly personal books like mine. But between where they are now and the writing of any such book must come the whole enterprise of historical scholarship.

Another thought since September 11 is a rather more historical one, perhaps, and it gets back to the discussion of suicide. No one can take God's life from Him. He says, "No one takes my life from me. I lay it down of my own accord. I have the power to lay it down. I have the power to take it up again." The word "suicide" is not used, but the concept is surely there in those lines. But it's a notion that comes from Hellenistic Judaism. It's the notion of the noble death -- noble because voluntary, because in the interests of others, because heroic.

Judaism, Christianity, and Islam are all heirs to that tradition. All have their form of a tradition of martyrdom. Martyrdom and suicide were for centuries imperfectly distinguished. So the suicide bombers are all called "martyr" or "witness" bombers. The words in Arabic come from the same root as the word that gives us the Muslim declaration, "There is no God but Allah, and Mohammed is his Prophet." That public testimony turns the non-Muslim into a Muslim. ... Unfortunately, these suicide bombers are also killing at the same time. But I don't think it is beside the point or insulting or crude to recognize that the resources that produce that kind of act are present in our own traditions, Judaism and Christianity, and that we use them in a different way. We would willingly call someone a martyr who died for our country fighting in Afghanistan. A general might send a soldier into battle knowing that the likelihood was about 50 percent that he would die. The soldier might go in knowing that, too. The line [between suicide and martyrdom] grows a little blurry.

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