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.