56 of 65 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
Well-written heresy, December 4, 2001
This review is from: Christ: A Crisis in the Life of God (Hardcover)
Miles' book attempts to interpret the Gospels through formal literary criticism. Rather than attaching historical study to the Gospels' message, Miles treats Jesus and his message purely through the text, and comes to a startling conclusion -- that Jesus' death was necessary because God failed to deliver on God's promise to the Israelites, and needed a way to triumph on a metaphysical level.
Whether or not one agrees with Miles' premise, he writes brilliantly and understandably. Recent Biblical scholarship gets bogged down in dry-as-dust unintelligible "academicese." Miles understands the principles of clear and succint writing while still advancing complicated theories. I recommend this one for anyone seeking to stretch their understanding of what we have received as Scripture, as well as those interested in literature and how it relates to the Bible. Like him or not, read Miles to get your brain working.
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25 of 29 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
Literary criticism of the Bible at its best!, May 16, 2002
This review is from: Christ: A Crisis in the Life of God (Hardcover)
Jack Miles, author of the Pulitzer Prize - winning *God -a Biogaphy* has written an excellent literary analysis of Christ in the New Testament.
What is the "crisis" referred to in the title? The crisis is that God has not delivered his Chosen People from 500 years of oppression. How does God solve this problem? Answer: God/Christ commits sacred suicide. This is Miles' provocative conclusion from his stirictly literary analysis the Christian Bible. How does Miles arrive at the conclusion? You, dear reader, should read the book in order to appreciate how he develops his plot and arrives at his conclusion. And believe me, there is a plot!
A caution is in order. Miles writes and studies Christ from a strictly literary point of view. He is not interested in the historical Jesus. If one reads this only to learn about the fundamentalist Jesus, the traditional Christian Jesus, or the historical Jesus, then this book will not satisfy! If on the other hand, you want to experience a great Biblical reading adventure, then buy and read this book!
I also would recommend that a reader, who is unfamiliar with literary critism and postmodernism, study and read Miles' appendices. "Appendix I" deals with the biblical canon and "Appendix II" deals with the history of critcal analysis of the Bible (e.g. historical criticism, canonical criticism, literary critcism)and how to appreciate the Bible as art.
I did not always agree with the author, but I enjoyed how he told the story of Christ. As a postmodern Christian, I will not privilege my reading over his.
Have fun reading *Christ: a Crisis in the Life of God*!
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16 of 18 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
Saint Jack's Passion: the Gospels as literature, November 25, 2003
By Miles' own admission, his approach is strictly literary and he has even coined the term "theography" to more properly describe his approach. Miles attempted in his first book to view the character of God in the Tanakh (the Jewish version of the Old Testament, which is in a different order than in the Bible that Christians use) as one would view a character in any literary work. God goes through doubt, conflict, remorse, even depression in Miles' reading of the Jewish scriptures, ending in an uneasy peace and a centuries-long silence. It is almost as if God is trying to figure out what the hell he's going to do next.
In the "sequel," Christ: A Crisis in the Life of God, God breaks his silence. God had promised his chosen nation, Israel, that he would return them to their homeland out of exile and demolish their enemies with glorious military victory. This was the currency of the day for gods, and Jehovah was not one to be one-upped. However, the crisis in the title deals with the fact that God does not keep his promise. Being the creator of the universe, one does not suspect that he can not keep it, so the only other option is that he chooses not to. Indeed, a Nazi-equivalent holocaust will soon strike his people and his nation. God not only will go back on his promise--he will do so in spades. But why? The answer to this question is to be found in reading the whole book, and a synopsis cannot do it justice, but in a phrase: he has thought of a better way.
God comes to earth, in the form of a baby, turning his sublime Self into the ridiculous humiliation of an infant being born with all that blood and pain, entering the world to the smell of manger droppings -- the Lord of Hosts, completely dependent on the world just to stay alive. And it is just that dependence that is the point God (and Miles) is trying to make. God doesn't just want to kick military butt for his people, he wants to win a greater victory--he wants to conquer Satan, which means he wants to conquer pain, sorrow, shame and, ultimately, death itself. God wants to identify with his people by becoming a person. And not only that, he wants to suffer the most horrific, humiliating death imaginable so that he can relate to all of his children, not just Israel.
Miles does Christians an immense favor by starting his book with the reminder that the Crucifixion is supposed to be one of the most disgusting scenes imaginable. While it has been sanitized in most popular religious artwork (even to the point of calling the day we commemorate it "Good" Friday), the truth of the matter is that God is butchered like a lamb who, unlike a lamb, walks into his death with full knowledge of what is happening to him. The French subtitle of the work is "The Suicide of the Son of God" drawing attention to what some recent French theologians in an Appendix call Suicide Theology. The purpose again is to shock, not for the sake of shocking, but to re-create what the disciples must have been going through to see their God going through the death of a criminal.
Speaking of the Jews of the time, much attention is given these days to what is called "the Historical Jesus." While much of this scholarship and research may be valuable, the more and more we try to track this misty figure down, the more diminishing seem the returns. One wonders what the actual effect would be if we were to have a documentary of the life of Christ filmed in living Technicolor. Would it increase our faith? Or would it disappoint? The reactionary reaction to the radical re-thinking of Jesus of History is to focus on the Christ of faith. Whereas conjecture and history are the guides of the former, the church and tradition are the guides of the latter. Doctrine and dogma, rule and questions are eschewed in exchange for the comfort of faith. This is the Christianity that most people are familiar with, yet, as Jaroslav Pelikan in Jesus Through The Centuries has shown so cogently, there is no one Christianity that you can point to; no Christ of faith that exists, but many Christs. No matter on either side of the debate, Miles says, what we have is a book (a series of books, actually) that shows a third way (as genius often does), leaving the two bickering schools in his literary dust.
In an Appendix to his work, Miles compares the two schools to people who try to see through a rose window in a cathedral, one school trying to remove the stain, the other trying to stain everything. Miles prefers to look at the window: the Gospel story, taken as a whole. The work of art this is the Bible is, after all, what captured the imagination of the world. Neither the Jesus of History nor the Christ of Faith is nearly as worthy of our attention as the character Jesus Christ of the Bible.
Miles writes that he was first inspired to write his two books by Bach's brilliant masterwork St. Matthew's Passion. Which brings us back to the half-facetious title of this review. Is Jack a saint? Perhaps. Perhaps not, but he is, in my estimation, performing as important a translation job as did St. Jerome back a thousand and a half years ago. By bringing the story (and both of the contending schools must remember that this faith has always been based on storytelling) of Jesus Christ back into focus, Miles has given us a Newer Testament: something fresh, despite the age of the story, something creative despite the re-hashing of familiar scenes, something that can truly bring the Spirit of God as close to us as our breath.
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