Jesus: The Sequel

Did you hear the joke about Carl Jung, Rene Girard and Jacques Derrida going into a bar, downing five bottles of Byron Reserve Pinot Noir and proceeding to rewrite the four Gospels? Jung keeps pounding the bar as he insists that God be both good and evil. “In the New Testament plot, the violent, vengeful God of the Old Testament repents of his maltreatment of Israel and turns into a merciful God, who sacrifices himself for his people.” Girard interjects, “But keep the sacred violence. Violence sells. Let the violent God become his own scapegoat. That should be twisted enough even for you, Carl.” All the while, Derrida smiles a Gallic smile as he watches the text of each Gospel slowly dissolving along with the contours of the bar. The bartender, an immigrant named Marcion, mutters, “Oh, bite the bullet and make the Old Testament bastard a completely different God from the New Testament pussycat.” “No,” screams Jung, “I’m tired of being called an anti-Semite.” Marcion looks nonplused: “You mean your version isn’t anti-Semitic?”

The punch line of this joke is not a one-liner but a 354-page book by Jack Miles. Continuing the story he began with his wildly successful “God: A Biography,” Miles professes to be reading the Gospels from an artistic, aesthetic, literary point of view, freed of the cumbersome baggage of historical criticism and theology. Taken as a whole, says Miles, the Old and New Testaments tell the story of a God all too prone to anger, a God who must learn self-mastery and repentance. Overreacting to the primordial sin of Adam and Eve, God gives in to a desire for revenge and punishes all humanity with a curse. Throughout the Old Testament, this original mistake of God’s mushrooms into ever more disastrous mistakes, as God keeps trying to extricate himself from the mess he has created. He forms a chosen people, Israel, and struggles to save them from their enemies by means brutal and bloody. Israel, however, constantly displeases this dyspeptic God, and so the spiral of violence spins out of control. By the end of the Old Testament, a sadder and wiser God realizes that Satan has won, and he has lost the game of molding an obedient humanity by mindless violence.

Hence, as the New Testament opens, God admits his guilt, confesses his sin against humanity and atones for it by becoming human himself in the person of Jesus. God expiates his original sin in the Garden of Eden by making himself the object of his own wrath. This cathartic self-redemption puts an end to all the bloodletting, both military and ritual. A loving God and a healed humanity are reconciled, giving the old sad story a new happy ending. All this, Miles insists, is a literary, not a historical or theological, reading of the Bible. Therefore, it is not open to irrelevant charges of historical or doctrinal error.

Somehow Miles thinks this literary cover will shield him from charges of Gnosticism, Patripassianism and a host of other jolly heresies in which this book revels. His clever defense notwithstanding, historical and theological observations keep rearing their ugly heads throughout his amusing and imaginative tour de force. Miles doth protest too much. He is actually doing theology from a literary and psychoanalytical perspective, with tidbits of history and anthropology tossed in to give his mulligan stew some spice and substance.

Oddly, in Appendix II of the book, Miles spends a great deal of time spinning out his aesthetic theory of the Bible as art, only to violate it on a regular basis in the body of the work. For all the talk about method, Miles’ reading is quirky and arbitrary, with no consistent method regulating the inventive jazz riffs that he plays on the various events of Jesus’ life. Miles decides to view Christ’s life mainly through the prism of John’s Gospel, with its unique cosmic sweep that encompasses Christ’s preexistence, incarnation, self-revelation in signs and sermons, death and final glorification. Into this maverick Gospel Miles inserts at various points the well-known stories from Mark, Matthew and Luke that are absent in John.

The problem here is that sacred violence is being done not to Christ but to the text. Any literary critic worth his or her salt must begin the interpretive task by respecting the text as it stands. Miles does not. Does John’s Gospel omit the baptism of Jesus because John’s unique vision of Christ as the divine Word demands the deletion of his embarrassing subordination to the Baptist? Yes, but no matter. By sleight of hand Miles quietly inserts the baptism story from Mark’s Gospel into John’s so that we get (courtesy of Mark) the baptism of Jesus, who is (courtesy of John) the sinless Lamb of God. Miles can thus comment with literary acumen on a text that exists nowhere outside of his imagination. (One can hear Marcion muttering, “Tatian did it better.”) Do all the versions of the story of Jesus in the New Testament require that God the Father be a distinct person from Jesus the Son, since the essence of the drama is that the Father sends his beloved Son on a mission and that the Son obeys the Father’s mandate, even to the point of undergoing a brutal death he would rather avoid? Yes, but no matter. Mix together a shot of Jung with an ounce of Gnosticism and voila! God the Father is God the Son, committing battery on himself instead of Israel. A masochistic God is obviously preferable to a sadistic God, provided that the reader is not God.

Though the Gospels are the major victims of this literary, if not sacred, violence, other books of the New Testament suffer as well. For instance, nowhere in Luke’s Acts of the Apostles is Christ ever said to be “divine.” Indeed, in Luke’s view of things, Jesus often seems to be little more than a supremely good man endowed with the spirit of God. Once this innocent man has passed through his God-ordained sufferings on the cross, he is duly elevated to a place of honor in heaven. Despite this relatively “low” portrait of Christ by Luke, Miles blithely claims that Acts identifies the suffering servant prophesied by Isaiah with the “divine Christ.” Apparently the “high” picture of Jesus in John’s Gospel, which constantly stresses his divinity, may be read at will into any other book of the New Testament, no matter how awkward the fit.

Miles’ sleight of hand is not restricted to heady literary martinis of Mark, Luke and John (shaken, not stirred). His artful dodging can be detected as well when he translates or paraphrases the Greek text of the Gospels into English. At times, Miles’ “creative” translations cross the border from inspired creation into wishful invention. All too often the English translation says what the Greek original does not. For example, at the very beginning of the book, in his prologue, Miles cites the end of the Book of Revelation to show that God’s last word in the Bible is “Come!” A quick glance at the text of Revelation will show that this final cry is uttered not by God or Christ but first by the audience and then by the author of Revelation.

Miles’ creativity also extends to reading political messages into texts that are--to the politically engaged modern reader--woefully innocent of them. Concern about Rome’s imperial power oppressing the subject populations of Palestine is projected into the Gospels in a way that accurately mirrors neither the world of the text nor the world of 1st century political realities. In a modest aside, Miles avers that he never had even an undergraduate course in the New Testament. I believe him.

In sum, this book is a perfect articulation of either postmodernism or Humpty Dumpty. The text means whatever Miles wants it to mean at any given moment. We need not be surprised that at the end of Miles’ version of Christ’s life, Jesus the suffering priest leaves his painful ministry to ascend to a better existence and get married--namely, at the marriage of the Lamb to his bride, the Church, at the end of the Book of Revelation. (Conveniently, all the sacred violence inflicted by a vengeful God on his rebellious creation in the Book of Revelation is passed over in silence.) Somewhere Derrida is smiling into the mirror above the bar and wondering whether this book should be entitled “Christ: A Crisis in the Life of Miles” or (better) “Miles: A Crisis in the Life of God.” Either way, postmodernism has produced another book dripping in its own solvent, an intellectual romp that is deeply superficial and profoundly silly. Cheers!

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John P. Meier is a professor of the New Testament at the University of Notre Dame and author of the four-volume series “A Marginal Jew: Rethinking the Historical Jesus.” He has been both president of the Catholic Biblical Assn. and the general editor of the Catholic Biblical Quarterly.