Why God loves you but won't lift a finger to help. | Christ

Enlightening Look at Christ's Life and Times | Christ | Jack Miles

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	• Christ Jack Miles Arrow Books Ltd, 2003 - 288 pages average customer review:based on 29 reviews view larger image
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highly recommended

Look at Christ through fresh eyes

Jack Miles really explored Jesus Christ as a person in a fresh and interesting way in this book. I believe both Christians and unbelievers can read this book with an open mind and come away having investigated a real Jesus not caught up in the dogmatic religious views as if Jesus never lived in a real time and place and had human experiences both bad and good. Miles does a great job breaking down the scriptures and examining them for what took place and eaximing Jesus as a real flesh and blood person in great detail.He uses the gospels as if they were 100% true to examine Christ as literary character. It was an enlightening read.

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Why God loves you but won't lift a finger to help.

Except to grant you the courage to endure whatever atrocities lie in wait, and prepare your place in heaven. Forget about help from God here on earth. Whether collectively, such as freeing his enslaved nation, or righting wrongs perpetrated by evildoers in power--much less answering prayers for personal trivia such as good health or a good job.

A good job?

" Blessed are the Poo-BoY. "

Courage, yes. Hope? No way, Jacob.

Like his previous work 'God: A Biography' in which the author takes the Tanakh, or Old Testament, under scrutiny as a work of literature, without asserting or denying the objective truth of what is written, but focusing on the narrative drama to see where The Character is going as He changes from act to act; The author has a free hand to indulge in back door theology. After all, he's just examining a work of art for its own sake. And Jack Miles does so brilliantly. This is a first rate work of--well, all sorts of things, backdoor theology not excluded.

Here's the Prologue: In the original Tanakh, the order of the books which have come to be known to Christianity as 'The Old Testament' was different: The Book of Job was towards the end.
After Job, God in effect, shuts up. ( See 'Answer to Job ' by C.G Jung which Miles, somewhat naughtily, fails to credit) God never appears on stage again. He's quoted, but that's about it.
The Israelites make do with their own sagacity in The Book of Ruth but God is nowhere to be found. That's one clue.

More important, as the new play begins with God Incarnate, around 30 years old, making his first public appearance--

---God has failed to keep His promise.

Once upon a time, He delivered his chosen people out of Egypt--wiping out a lot of Egyptians in the process--the start of His career as warrior. A few centuries later, however, his chosen suffer utter defeat at the hands of Assyria and Babylon.

Nevertheless he tells them via Jeremiah, Isaiah, Daniel and co. that they were being punished for their sins ( Assyria and Babylon being merely His instruments) but then, to quote Miles:

" Soon, he said, he would wreak havoc against their new enemies, the same spectacular havoc that he had wreaked in Egypt, ravishing the landscape, laying waste to the flaura and fauna, decimating the human population and so forth. They would be victorious, and grateful, and--a matter obsessively on his mind--the world would know beyond doubt that he was Lord. "

Didn't happen. In fact, sitting at the feet of John the Baptist, and elsewhere, Israel's "prisoners of hope" must now contend that in fact, NOTHING has happenned for 500 years.

Other than Israel being handed down as a war prize to the Persians, then The Greeks of Alexander, and now, to the worst oppresor of all--The Romans.

So God decides to become fully human, without ceasing to be The Lord, and, knowing full well the disaster that will destroy Jerusalem and kill over a million Jews in the revolts of 70 and 135 A.D (C.E for the politically correct) decides He must get Himself crucified and triumph over death itself--a terrible curse which He had pronounced on mankind for a minor offence. Miles agrees with Albert Camus: God had to suffer because He knew that He Himself was not altogether innocent.

A spectacular read which is, to use Miles favorite adjective, ironic.

It's ironic that this book is, in so many essentials, thouroughly "orthodox." Yes, of course, Jesus is God. This is a work of art and The Gospel of John wouldn't make dramatic sense, let alone stand as a masterpiece of irony, unless one accepts that this pacifist, this Lamb, is the same Being who punished Israelites complaining of hunger with a plague of snakes which killed thousands and ordered genocide against the Amalekites.

An awesome tale.
Ironically, (sorry, Jack) the author has created his own literary work of art.

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Enlightening Look at Christ's Life and Times

I appreciated Jack Miles writing about the life of Christ, especially how he places it in the context of the times and places of Christ. Miles provides a keen perspective on Christ that sees and hears as if from the audiences Christ spoke to and the culture in which he lived.

Miles' vast knowledge of all things Biblical certainly offers readers a panorama of the Jewish history and religion into which Christ was born. This provides great background for the gospel story that Miles narrates throughout this book.

Miles' opinions provide perspective that I didn't always agree with and occasionally, though rarely, his tone seems to be cynical of the gospels; however, I was comfortable and pleased with the overall way he treats the gospel narrative and explains and connects events. He often digresses to discussing Old Testament or Jewish history and relating it to the gospels. This is interesting although he sometimes seems to get off track before returning to the life of Christ.

I think he successfully emphasizes and conveys the radical message that Christ preached and lived and how it seems to conflict with the Jewish expectations for Messiah. Miles shows why Jesus did what he did and the outcome of his death and resurrection on Jews and Gentiles for all time.

I think those interested in the Bible and the life of Christ will enjoy and appreciate this book.
Shakespeare On Spirituality: Life-Changing Wisdom from Shakespeare's Plays

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Conclusive

After reading this monumental epic one can only come to the conclusion that Christianity is a lie.
The fairy tale is exposed beautifully here, Jack Miles has done a wonderful job of picking apart the lie, who could possibly believe in the resurection after reading this essay?
This should be required reading in public schools.

Some very good parts

Jack Miles won a Pulitzer Prize for his book God: A Biography, so he has to be taken seriously as a writer. And his Ph.D. in NE languages from Harvard indicates he's no dummy either. Yet maybe it's his years as a Jesuit that impinge on this text and suggest that it's an impartial historical look at the life of Jesus. We get a clue as early as page 18 when he asks the question: "...why God the Father saw fit to proceed in this way, choosing to experience human death as God the Son." OK. So it's going to be a very religious look at the historical Jesus. I can live with that. But Miles seems to have invented his own theology as well. Here's some examples...

"All four of the Gospels initially began with Jesus, as a grown man, being baptized in the Jordan River by John the Baptist (p. 18)." - Duh! Matthew and Luke begin with birth narratives. You don't get to John in Matthew and Luke until the third chapter. Moreover, in the Gospel of John, John the Baptist does not baptise Jesus.

"...on Christmas Day in the year One, God became a Jew (p. 84)." By this, Miles claims that Jesus was born on Christmas Day in 1 AD. In fact, 6 BC is a better date and Christmas Day is simply the Christian theft of the birth date of the pagan Sun God Mithra.

Putting these errors aside, Miles does have some interesting things to say. His discussion of the meaning of illness and the use of sacrifice are very informative. There are paragraphs and pages which are truly unsurpassed in biblical studies, such as when he questions the differences between Yahweh and Jesus in their self-definition, or when he notices Jesus' apparent goal-less wandering through towns, healing whomever encounters him, taking disciples from whomever he runs into, etc.

Yet the work as a whole suffers from Miles tendency to float from one gospel to another (mostly John and Luke) as if they were telling the same story, often without pause to refer back to his references. Moreover, he fails to deal with the issue of redaction, which surely must make any interpretation of the Gospel of John radically different from the Gospel of Mark. Moreover, Miles makes interesting and profound points, but they seem to be isolated to a particular issue, and rarely does he attempt to go further than mere elucidation. Of course, this he does at a level that far exceeds the efforts of others, so perhaps he should be forgiven his trespasses.

Another problem with this book is that rather than a focus on Jesus, the author often reverts back to the discussion of God which was the subject of his first book. By making Jesus "God Incarnate", Miles has opened to door to keep discussing the theme from his first book. And this discussion is not without its flaws. Miles' thesis is that the OT God has decided to change the nature of his agreement with the Jews to now extend to all peoples (again the Jesuit in Miles is surfacing here), and in doing so, he decides to suffer (as Jesus) since he is aware that his new covenant will bring suffering to his old believers (the Jews). His theory seems to revolve around the OT God's inability to keep up, and hence the new covenant is easier on God, even if it means a little suffering for his faithful Jews. Yet the reader has to wonder what finite God is this who breaks all the old rules for the sake of convenience.

This book is not an easy read, and beginning students who plod their way through it will find a reward, however high the price to be paid. But for scholars, this is a veritable gold mine, with large nuggests at every depth.

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Five years after his everywhere?acclaimed, brilliantly successful, Pulitzer Prize?winning book about God as portrayed in the Old Testament?God: A Biography?Jack Miles gives us his striking consideration of Christ. He presents Christ as a hero of literature based only in part on the historical Jesus, asking us to take the idea of Christ as God Incarnate not as a dogma of religion but as the premise of a work of art, the New Testament.

As this story begins, God has not kept his promise to end the five-hundred-year-long oppression of the Children of Israel and return them to greatness. Under Rome, their latest oppressor, the Jews face a holocaust. This is God?s supreme crisis. Astonishingly, God resolves the dilemma by becoming a Jew himself, Christ, inflicting upon himself in advance the very agony his people will suffer, revising in the process the meaning of victory and defeat. By dying and rising as Christ, God not only swallows up the historical defeat of the Jews but also offers the promise of a cosmic victory that will ?wipe away every tear? for all mankind.

In telling this remarkable tale, Miles offers the shock of the familiar reframed and reimagined:

--When Christ undergoes a baptism of repentance at the Jordan, it is God who is repenting.

--Since no one can kill God, the Crucifixion is actually a sacred suicide.

--When after preaching ?turn the other cheek? Christ refuses to defend himself against his own enemies, what he means to say is that God will never again come militarily to any nation?s rescue.

The story ends in joy. Having assigned himself the role of Passover lamb, Christ, God Incarnate, expands God?s covenant with Israel?the covenant of the original Passover?to include all the children of Adam and Eve. In the final scene of the New Testament, this covenant becomes a marriage in heaven.

A writer of exceptional eloquence and imagination, profound literary sensibility, Jack Miles has captured once again the lost, fierce, ecstatic power of the greatest work in our literature.

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