Confessions of God’s Extreme Biographer

Imagine that at the front of every Christian church the icon in the stained glass or cast in bronze showed a lynched figure, “the body of the victim swollen and distorted, his head hanging askew above a broken neck,” writes Jack Miles. Then imagine that the victim was God. That’s the horror implicit in the Crucifixion, he says. Seen afresh, it is a shocking image, and Miles knows it.

To explain it, he proposes a theory that’s equally shocking: God is a sinner who decides to repent. And for penance, he takes his own life.

This troubling vision has turned Miles into God’s extreme biographer. Using the Hebrew Bible (the Old Testament) and the New Testament as literature, he has written two volumes on his subject: “God: A Biography” (Knopf, 1995), and the just-released “Christ: A Crisis in the Life of God” (Knopf). What he found is a protagonist to satisfy the most ambivalent of believers, starting with himself.

In the first book, Miles put his magnifying glass to the Tanach, the Hebrew Bible. God, as Miles sees it, is like the protagonist in a Eugene O’Neill play, raging and violent one day, kind and protective the next. In the end God withdraws from the scene, leaving his people to wonder when he will ever come back.

The new book introduces Jesus, God made man. Humbled, and ready to make up for past inflictions, from plagues and homelessness to war and oppression, he returns to his chosen people. This time he is one of them, a Galilean Jew, born to prove his love for them and everyone else.

Miles picks up the story where he left off in his first installment. God has failed to make good on his promise to save the Israelites from their enemies and give them their promised land. Romans occupy their country as the New Testament opens. But now, God has a new promise, which Jesus delivers. He has opened the gates of heaven that were closed after Adam and Eve, the first man and woman, were expelled from paradise. Life there is eternal and it is not only for the Israelites but for everyone.

Jesus says that he is God, but he doesn’t act that way. Instead of defeating the Roman army that occupies Israel, he tells people to love their enemies. Instead of driving out the invaders the way he said he would, in the end they kill him. For Miles, these events lead to a harsh reckoning. God chose to suffer a brutal death by crucifixion as his way of atoning for his own sins against his people. That, and to show them he will not defeat their enemies after all. In fact, Miles reasons, he is not able to defeat them. God has his limits.

A Portrait That’s

Warm Yet Detached

The workroom where this book was written faces a backyard filled with leafy trees on a quiet street in Pasadena. The shelves are lined with classics in philosophy, art and fiction. Brain waves generated during the project still seem to charge the air. When he started the work six years ago, Miles, 59, had salt-and-pepper hair. Now it is white.

For inspiration he relied on classical music and master artworks more than academics. (He is the senior advisor to the Getty Trust’s president, Barry Munitz, and took advantage of the museum’s collections for his research.) “The book had two starting places,” Miles says. “One is warm and emotional, the other is extreme cold detachment.”

What is warm in this literary portrait of Jesus came to Miles as he listened to Johann Sebastian Bach’s “St. Matthew Passion,” whose Crucifixion scene, the Agnus Dei, conveys a near supernatural compassion. “For God to end in that condition calls on the emotions--there’s nothing analytical about it, “ says Miles, who is a churchgoing Episcopalian.

But there is also Miles the former Jesuit, with a doctorate in biblical languages and a career that includes college professor, journalist and editorial writer for the Los Angeles Times. That side of Miles can’t help but pick things apart and analyze them.

“Let’s consider our God as if he was another, as if he was Zeus,” he says. That was the second starting point for the book. “We don’t feel any obligation to make Zeus come out good. I felt no obligation to make God come out holy. I wasn’t going to skip anything in the story to try and make that happen.”

Reviewers have had mixed reactions to the new book. The New York Times called it “less persuasive” than its Pulitzer Prize-winning predecessor, which it described as “glorious.” America, a progressive Jesuit magazine, called the book, “splendid” for the way it broaches sensitive topics, such as describing how the death of the Messiah was a deliberate choice by Jesus, something Miles refers to as redemptive suicide.

“It’s a bold example of how to speak of the death of Jesus,” he says. “But Jesus says, in the Gospel of John, ‘I give my life of my own accord.’ To call it ‘martyrdom’ is not the right word. A martyr testifies to his relation to God. When you are God, you don’t need to testify to yourself.”

The book moves from one such jolt to the next. “The purpose is not to render something shocking that ought not to be seen that way,” Miles says. “The purpose is to recover the original shock that has been softened by being repeated for generations.”

God’s repentance and suicide are the book’s most jarring themes, but there are others. Miles refers readers to the Gospel of John, in which a Samaritan woman meets Jesus at the town well. The Samaritans had broken away from the Israelites, but resentments persisted. Jesus was not even supposed to be talking to this woman, yet he announced to her, of all people, that he is the son of God.

As Miles reads it, “Jesus is being promiscuous, as God. Samaritans are not Jews, and God has promised fidelity to the Jews. Suddenly the Messiah is engaged in saving a non-Jew. This was shocking at the time.”

‘The Notion That God

Repents Is Unorthodox’

In touring the country to promote his new book, Miles has heard one comment repeatedly from people who read his earlier book. They said they remembered disturbing things about the Bible, from childhood, that they had quickly buried. “Finally, they got out of the habit of asking the difficult questions,” Miles says. “I wanted to answer the questions.”

Readers’ first reaction to his new book has been, “How dare you?” he says. “But then, they tried to identify with what is inspiring in it. The notion that God repents is unorthodox. But in the gospel, when Jesus is baptized at the Jordan River, he goes through the ritual of repentance. If at first people say, ‘How dare you,’ they then say, ‘Can’t we be inspired by a God who does repent?’”

Some readers are already so strong in their faith that any new interpretation of God can’t make a dent. Others, however, will find Miles’ vision a challenge, perhaps even an insult. In the end, his two-part biography says as much about his personal struggle with faith as it says about the Bible.

In a conversation with the staff at Alfred Knopf, Miles traced the beginnings of his doubts and questions. “The deepest personal root of this pair of books lies in a chronic anxiety about warfare and violence that goes back beyond my earliest memories,” he said.

As a boy during World War II, he was struck by a newspaper account about the Bataan Death March of 1942. Japanese soldiers forced war prisoners to walk dozens of miles from Mariveles, in the Philippines, to San Fernando. Thousands died. He also remembers reading in the gospel about children slaughtered by Roman soldiers. He couldn’t distance himself from either event and feared that Japanese soldiers would come to his family’s house in Chicago, or that Roman soldiers might demand that his family turn over the baby, Miles’ younger brother.

“These and other experiences seem to have left me hyperaware of the violence God inflicts in the Old Testament, and the matching violence he suffers in the New Testament,” he explains. Somehow, Miles remains a committed Christian. He says he has staked his life on his belief in the promises of the New Testament, but then, he narrows his terms. “As a Christian I am a practitioner more than a believer. I’d describe myself as someone who is trying to live as Christ did. He was a model of goodness.”

He has written magazine essays about living in an age of limits and how that affects people’s faith and beliefs. We might not trust politicians, but we vote. We might doubt that marriage is a workable partnership, but we marry. “If we don’t demand perfection in other areas of our life, why demand it of religion?” he wonders.

He sees the Bible not as the last word from God but the first in a dialogue that still continues. “Once you tame the religion and belief questions, you can move on to more practical matters,” Miles says. “For me, participation in religion means community, art, music, poetry, a way to mark life’s passages.”

Despite the shocks, disappointments and reevaluations he has gone through along the way, he recommends it. “The practice of religion,” he says, “brings peace.”