-Caveat Lector-
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When God went global
(Filed: 22/12/2001)
Tom Payne hails an enlightened lesson in how to read the Bible
The joke "How do you know Christ was Jewish?" has a handful of
punchlines, and my favourite one is, "He took over His father's
business and turned it into a multinational." Jack Miles's book
examines how Christ did it, and why.
Miles approaches the Bible as a literary critic. But as literary
critics go, he is in an odd position. In his earlier book, God: a
Biography (1995), he compared himself to the theatre-goer who wonders
what Hamlet is like off-stage as well as on. Miles presented us with
a literary hero who could not make up his mind. He charted the Lord's
mood swings through the Tanakh - the Jewish scriptures - and aimed to
account for the career of this rounded if unbalanced individual.
Christ is the sequel: in it the author uses the same techniques to
account for the biggest change of mind God ever had - the moment when
he told his chosen people that he was going to go global. This leads
Miles to deal with the Bible's own biggest conflict, which is between
Christianity's Old and New Testaments. He writes: "The Incarnation is
Christianity's breathtaking addition to Judaism's already long list
of divine self-contradiction
s."
A biography of the Hebrew God is hardly going to throw up the sort of fellow who would
become a man and allow Himself to be crucified by Israel's conquerors. And Miles is at
pains to show God in His incarnate form as the
exact opposite of a divine warrior come to save the Jews from their oppressors. The
author doesn't even flinch from the thought that God might be breaking His promises to
His beloved people. He sees Christ's teaching that
we should love our neighbour and turn the other cheek (a phrase he analyses
sensitively) as part of His - God's - strategy. God's new plan to defeat His enemies
is to decide not to have any. This is an especially canny p
loy when the enemy is imperial Rome and there is no magic potion to be had in
Jerusalem.
The argument as summarised here sounds casuistic; but Miles puts his case with
virtuosity and vigour (sometimes too much vigour, as when he quotes the odd verse of
scripture in italics, tells us he added the italics, and
on one occasion even enjoins us to "note the italicised phrase"). He is persuasive
because of his approach to the text. Every detail in it, he says, is relevant. The
Gospel writers tell us only what they want us to know;
and throughout all their writing there are knowing allusions to Jewish scripture, for
those who have ears to hear. Seen in this light, the New Testament appears crafted to
fit in literary context with the Old.
This gives the author the right - which he claims eagerly - to dispense with any need
to ask if the Bible relates to things that actually happened. And yet his argument
further benefits from the historical context into wh
ich he puts it - the imminent destruction of Jerusalem, the massacre of 1.1 million
Jews (according to Josephus) and the widespread dispersal of the survivors. It is as
though some bits of history are part of the text. An
d he discusses the cultural background surrounding the text fascinatingly, such as the
status of Samaritans and Galileans in Palestine at the time, or the horror of being a
woman there taken in adultery. It is as though h
e can't help showing us the world Christ came to change.
Still, if a historian's job is to look at the world after the text and ask whether the
former affected the latter, it is surely up to a literary critic to ask, of the text,
is it any good? The reader of Christ can be safe
in the knowledge that Miles is not coming to the Bible as Anthony Powell came to the
Koran (he read it with "considerable skipping" and called it "repetitive, lacking in
narrative powers, in short not a patch on the Bibl
e"). Miles looks at how the contents of the Bible hold together (sometimes literally -
his discussion of the move from scrolls to codices has interesting implications).
Needless to say, he gives it a rave.
So should we give Christ a rave? Just about. It brims with ideas, and Miles has a
teacher's urge to find a profusion of ways to explain those ideas. I didn't always
find his use of the Tanakh convincing. Observant Jews mi
ght reasonably object to him calling the acts of penance described in the Torah
"unimaginably wild and primitive". Devout Christians would argue that the virgin birth
of Jesus is more extraordinary than the post-menopausa
l parturitions of the Old Testament Miles offers as equivalents. And while we're at
it, the work is laughably edited. One page alone has three misprints; a note repeats
much of the text it comments on; and another note, o
n a discussion of Christ's celibacy, gives us "celibracy" and "celibrate". Is this the
new gay?
But this isn't the Bible. It's a lesson in how to read it. And when Miles concludes
that "the biblical rule and, for that matter, the postbiblical rule, both Jewish and
Christian . . . was not the rule of deference to ori
ginal intent but the rule of creative re-use", I say, let all great religious texts
have such enlightened readers.
Previous story: The older the better
Next story: Who can transcend illusion?
Title
Christ: a Crisis in the Life of God
Author
Jack Miles
Category
Religion
Reviewer
Tom Payne
Date Reviewed
22 December 2001
Publisher
384pp, Heinemann, �18.99
Date Published
04 October 2001
Format
Hardback
ISBN
0434007374
Buy this book
� Copyright of Telegraph Group Limited 2001.
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"Do not believe in anything simply because you have heard it. Do not believe
simply because it has been handed down for many generations. Do not
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not believe in anything simply because it is written in Holy Scriptures. Do not
believe in anything merely on the authority of Teachers, elders or wise men.
Believe only after careful observation and analysis, when you find that it
agrees with reason and is conducive to the good and benefit of one and all.
Then accept it and live up to it."
The Buddha on Belief, from the Kalama Sutta
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A merely fallen enemy may rise again, but the reconciled
one is truly vanquished. -Johann Christoph Schiller,
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"Everyone has the right...to seek, receive and impart
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Universal Declaration of Human Rights
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