by Jack Miles
EPILOGUE
On Writing the Lives of God
Aliterary reading of the Bible may take any of a variety of forms. Of these, one is a discussion of God as the protagonist, the central character, of this classic of world literature. In an earlier book entitled God: A Biography, I attempted such a discussion for the God of Judaism’s Bible, the Tanakh, a collection of sacred scripture that coincides largely but not entirely with Christianity’s Old Testament. In this book, I have attempted the same sort of discussion for the God of Christianity’s Bible, comprising both the Old Testament and the New.
The interpretive strategy in God: A Biography had two simple rules, based on two premises:
The first rule was that conflict in the divine character as it is found on the pages of the Tanakh should be regarded as real for the purposes of literary discussion rather than, after the manner of historical criticism, explained away by reference to the various human authors of the Tanakh and their historically differing views. The premise behind this rule was a literary appropriation—rather like a transposition from one musical key to another—of the age-old Jewish belief that “the Lord is our God, the Lord alone” (Deut. 6:4). The effect that God produces on the page owes much to tension among his mutually contradictory character traits, but the condition for this tension is that the character be always the same character. When historical criticism dissolves the dynamic tension of monotheism by tracing different character traits to different ancient sources, one may understand better how the composite character came into existence, but the character himself is gone, dissolved into a polytheism of component parts.
The second rule was that conflict in the divine character, rather than being described or analyzed systematically, as in theology, should emerge in the course of the narrative. The premise behind this procedure was that internal complexity in the character of God could be shown to develop over time in response to vicissitudes in God’s long-running relationship with mankind and, in particular, with the nation of Israel. In this way, though there would be no birth or death, there could be a coherent passage from God’s first words and deeds on the page to his last. There could be character development and, in a word, biography.
In Christianity’s edition of the Jewish scriptures that it inherited, a revised conclusion, the New Testament, radically revises the meaning of God’s life as a whole. I have attempted, in this second book, to read that revised meaning from the revised conclusion. Once again, God has been taken neither as the object of religious belief nor as a topic in ancient history but as the central character in a work of literature. Once again, the interpretive strategy has had two premises and two matching rules.
Just as the first premise of God: A Biography was a literary appropriation or transposition of the core Jewish belief that “the Lord is our God, the Lord alone,” so the belief appropriated or transposed here has been the classic Christian belief that “Jesus is Lord” (Rom. 10:9)—the dogma, foreshadowed in the New Testament and formally defined at the first ecumenical councils, that Jesus Christ was and is God Incarnate, God in the flesh. The interpretive rule that follows from this premise is that everything that Jesus says, does, or suffers in the New Testament should be regarded as said, done, or suffered by God. Moreover, tension within the character of Jesus—beginning with the troublesome fact that he speaks sometimes as God and sometimes as a man—should not be relaxed, as in historical criticism, by referring different Jesuses to different ancient writers and their different constituencies. For literary as distinct from historical purposes, there should be only one Jesus, and he should always be both divine and human.
The second rule, matching the second rule of God: A Biography, has been that the complexity of this character, with his double identity, rather than being described or analyzed systematically, as in theology, should again emerge in the course of the narrative. Having become human as Jesus of Nazareth, God lays claim—not all at once but gradually as the New Testament unfolds—to every function that he ever discharged through a human intermediary. He is Adam, the image and likeness of himself and the firstborn of a new creation. He is Moses, revealing a new torah, a new teaching, for all of mankind. He is David, inaugurating a new kingdom “not of this world.” He is Elijah, resolving all disputes with miraculous insight and foretelling all history until the end of time. Once God spoke his Word through others; now his Word “has become flesh.” Once he adopted Solomon so as, through him, to become the adoptive father of all Israel; now he has become his own son—“I and the Father are one,” Jesus says (RSV; John 10:30)—and is prepared, through him, to adopt the whole world. The character who results from this multiplication of identities is full of swirling tensions that are resolved only when the traumatic death of Jesus resolves a much deeper, prior conflict in the character of God. The second premise, then, of this reading of the New Testament has been that this fusion in one man of all God’s prior interactions with mankind could be shown to emerge—this emergence being quintessentially the art of the New Testament—in the narrative of Jesus’ interactions with his fellow men during his life and even after his death.
What difference does it make, page by page, to read the New Testament as the continuation of the biography of God to a revised conclusion in which, at the end of his already extraordinary career, he becomes a human being?
In the first place, when one reads in this way, many vivid scenes are recovered for the characterization of the protagonist that, because they did not happen, historical criticism must read as the self-characterization of an author. Did a heavenly host of angels sing praise at Jesus’ birth as Luke reports? For historical purposes, the answer must be no: Angels have no place in secular history. For literary purposes, however, even secular literary purposes, the answer may and indeed must be yes. For the historian, the angels’ unhistorical song tells you something about an ancient author, whom you may call Luke if you wish, but nothing about the historical Jesus. For the literary critic, the song of the heavenly host, no matter that it is unhistorical, enhances the angel messenger’s characterization of the newborn Jesus as “a savior who is Messiah and Lord” (Luke 2:11). What matters for the literary effect is not that the account cannot be verified (a laughable notion) but that it wakes echoes of a dozen exultant Psalms, among them Psalm 148:1–2:
Praise the Lord from the heavens,
praise him in the heights above.
Praise him, all you angels,
praise him, you heavenly hosts.
And as for Jesus’ birth, so also for the rest of his life as God in the flesh. Did he raise the dead, walk on water, still the storm, and converse on a mountaintop with Moses and Elijah? After his resurrection, did he ascend bodily into heaven before the wondering eyes of his disciples? Once returned to heaven, did he, as the enthroned Lamb of God, open a scroll revealing the course of all history until the end of time? And did the Lamb then marry? Since “the historical Jesus” did none of this, historical criticism must turn the wine of such conduct—God Incarnate’s dramatic self-characterization on the page—back into the grape juice of the supposed historical agenda of one (postulated) author or another. Literary criticism is free to drink the wine. This is the first difference.
The second difference, and a more important one, is that when one takes the protagonist of the Gospels to be God Incarnate, his every interaction has behind it not just the prior life of Jesus of Nazareth but also the prior life of the Lord God with his chosen people, everything that he has done to them and they to him during the course of (his image for it) their long and difficult marriage. As God the Son, Jesus incurs all the old debts of God the Father. Every hope the Father ever kindled in the Jews becomes the Son’s to extinguish or inflame. The stakes are high for him as well as for them.
On the page, as a result, the Incarnation can seem, at any given moment, almost like a reincarnation. A characterological doubling takes place because God has been here before. Now that he is back, every place he goes, every remark he m
akes or hears, is charged with ancient memories and associations, and many episodes are charged as well with dramatic irony because of God’s own broken promises.
There is no single necessary or correct way to read the New Testament, as there is no single necessary or correct way to read any great literary classic; but when the divinity of Christ the Lord is embraced as a literary opportunity rather than resisted as a theological imposition, the protagonist of this work can seem illumined from within. The classic Christian view, first expressed in the prologue to the Gospel of John and in the Letter to the Hebrews, has long been that though God spoke many words through the prophets, Jesus is his last word, his Word in person. But the corollary to this view is that, Jesus being God Incarnate, all of God’s earlier words were Jesus’ words as well and may—indeed, must—be taken into account as evidence about his character. An interpretation that takes those words seriously as God’s words and, at the same time, takes him seriously as God Incarnate is forced to entertain the hypothesis that an ironic transformation of the divine character must have been in progress of which he is the unlikely late expression and the result.
Irony—because it deals in double meanings and reversals of meaning, because it talks behind people’s backs and over their heads, because it pretends to be sincere, then pretends to be insincere, because it half-expects not to be understood and will not stoop to explanation—seems to have no place in religious literature. But when long-standing expectations about the very premise of a religion are suddenly reversed, there is indeed a place for irony in religion. The famous literary critic who said that it is absurd to imagine Abraham as either sincere or insincere was only half-right: It may be absurd to imagine Abraham as simply insincere, but it is not absurd at all to imagine him as ironic. What is true of Abraham is true, in a similar but denser and more tangled way, of Jesus. Because nearly everything that Jesus says recalls something else, nearly everything he says has more than one meaning. And therein lies much of his mysterious appeal.
God: A Biography asserts that the life story of God comes to a fully satisfying conclusion in the Tanakh. Its sequel does not retract that assertion, yet a text can permit what it does not require. That the New Testament is, in literary terms, unnecessary does not make it uninteresting. Christianity rearranged the canon that it had inherited from Judaism by moving the prophets to the end and by appending to that arrangement a radically revisionist final chapter to the life of God. The result is, in critic Harold Bloom’s sense of the phrase, a strong misreading or “poetic misprision” of the Jewish edition and, as such, is right in a way that does not make its predecessor wrong.
Charles Gounod wrote his “Ave Maria” as a melody above the harmony of the first prelude in J. S. Bach’s Well-Tempered Clavier. Some may dislike what Gounod wrote, regarding it simply as an adulteration of Bach’s work. But even those who admire the “Ave Maria” do not believe that it negates or supersedes Bach’s composition—as if Bach uncompleted by Gounod could no longer be performed—but only that it realizes a melodic possibility that would have been there awaiting realization whether or not Gounod had ever lived. Jesus of Nazareth, in a similar way, realizes a possibility in the character of God that would have been there whether or not Jesus had ever lived. Bach’s composition is still itself after Gounod. The Tanakh is still itself after the New Testament. But in either case, something that was only potential has been made actual.
The autonomy of the Tanakh aside, there are two ways to take up the question Why does the New Testament exist at all? Historical criticism typically rephrases that question as some version of Who wrote the New Testament? The motive behind the New Testament, the reason it exists, is then stated as the sum of the temporally and locally conditioned motives of the authors of the New Testament and their several ancient audiences. Literary criticism as I have attempted it here prefers to remain within the assumptions of the story and to rephrase the question as Why does God do it? Why does he become a man?
Why does he do it? And why, if he has to become a man at all, does he choose to become the unlikely man he becomes? When the lion behaves like a lamb, there is certainly every reason for incredulity. God’s power was such that, in his prime, he annihilated in minutes the mightiest army in the world. More than once, he compared himself to a great marauding beast. Why does he become a defenseless peasant who, when the authorities sentence him to death, offers no resistance and ends his life as a convicted criminal? Does the Incarnation not begin to seem, as Nietzsche might have put it, the greatest misfortune ever to befall the Lord God of Hosts? Rather than a further development of God’s character, does Jesus, the Lamb of God, not seem its terminal collapse?
Yes, he does, and the condition for a literary appreciation of the New Testament is a willingness on the part of the reader to see this ending as a horrifying or ludicrous surprise. God the Son is not at all the kind of man one would expect God the Father to become. Jesus’ own first followers are appalled to discover that their leader, alongside all the other roles he has been assuming, intends to assume the role of sacrificial animal. But the strangeness of the New Testament is the key to why there is a New Testament in the first place. As merely a grand reprise of the Tanakh, the New Testament would surely be superfluous. What makes the surprise subjectively urgent as well as logically possible for God, given his previous life, is that he has something appalling to say that he can say only by humiliating himself.
The Lord of All the Earth, to use the grandest of all his Old Testament titles, arranges to have himself put to death as the King of the Jews not to destroy hope as he destroys himself but only to replace a vain hope with one that can still be realized. The old hope predicated on invincible military power must yield to a new hope predicated on the inevitability of military defeat but anticipating the kind of victory that arms cannot win. Christ’s double nature makes it possible for him to use his own death demonstratively and instrumentally as no other human being can and as God himself could not unless he had first become a human being. As God he cannot cease to exist, but as man he can undergo the ordeal of a human death so as to dramatize a message too violent for words alone to convey. Defeated by Rome, God thus accomplishes what he tried and failed to accomplish when defeated by Babylonia: He turns the defeat into a triumph, the humiliation into an exaltation. As he is led off to die, he says, to recall his words one last time, “Take heart, I have conquered the world” (REB; John 16:33).
Historical criticism is free to object that Jesus of Nazareth did not interpret his own death beforehand in these words, that others put them into his mouth after his death, and so it well may have been. But the writer who dared to put such radical words into the mouth of the Creator was a great writer, and his words stayed where he put them, defining for all time the astonishing literary character who stands at the heart of the New Testament.
There has been something Promethean about the critical labor of turning Christ the Lord back into Jesus of Nazareth, but the transgressive daring of the historical critique must not eclipse the enormity of the original literary offense itself. And that offense, that effrontery, cannot be appreciated unless the God of Israel has first been confronted in all his untamed and terrifying intensity. That of all gods this god should be imagined to have become of all men this man; and that, repudiating everything he had always seemed to be, he should have had himself put to death by the enemy of his chosen people—this is a reversal so stunning that it changes everything back to the beginning. The Rock of Ages cannot die as God; but as God Incarnate, the Rock can be cleft. God, shattered, can descend to death; and when he rises to eternal life, he can lift his human creatures up with him. Victory is postponed in the Christian revision of the Jewish epic no less than in the Jewish original. Yet because that victory is assured, even the poor, even the meek, even the grief-stricken and scorned who in this world must hunger and thirst for justice may count themselves blessed. Theirs, because he made himself one of them, is the kingdom of heaven.
&nbs
p; Appendices
APPENDIX I: ONE BIBLE FROM MANY SCRIPTURES
How it happened
Why it matters
APPENDIX II: THE BIBLE AS ROSE WINDOW (OR, HOW NOT TO SEE THROUGH THE BIBLE)
Why New Testament criticism strains to see through stained glass
The secular alternatives: church history and literary appreciation
Learning how not to see through the Bible
The art of contradiction
Gospel as a mixed genre
What the sea would say
Appendix I
ONE BIBLE FROM MANY SCRIPTURES (HOW IT HAPPENED AND WHY IT MATTERS)
How it happened
Unlike most other literary classics, the Tanakh—the sacred scripture of the Jews—is written in not one but two original languages. Ancient Israel’s first language was Hebrew; but when Israel was reduced to Yahud, a province of the Persian empire, in the sixth century B.C.E., Aramaic, the business language of the empire, became the second language of the Jews even for the writing of sacred scripture. Parts of the latest books in the Tanakh are written in Aramaic, and the Aramaic alphabet replaced the original Hebrew alphabet for the writing of Hebrew itself.
Later, in the fourth century B.C.E., when Yahud became Ioudaia, a province within the set of culturally Greek sister-empires that succeeded the Persian empire, Greek, the language of the new empires, came into use alongside Hebrew and Aramaic, again for sacred as well as for secular purposes. As a part of this process, a Greek edition of Jewish scriptures was produced in the second century B.C.E. for the Greek-speaking Jews of Egypt. This edition, called the Septuagint, included not just translations of Hebrew and Aramaic works (including a few that were later excluded from the still fluid collection in Palestine itself) but also a few works written originally in Greek. These works—whose inclusion in the Greek Bible was analogous to the inclusion of untranslated Aramaic works in the emerging “Hebrew” Bible—make the literary autonomy of the collection clear. It was an edition, not just a translation, and it reflected the evolution of Judean Jewry during the Hellenistic period into a world Jewry in which many more Jews spoke Greek than spoke either Hebrew or Aramaic.1
