A Literary Critic's View of Christ. . - Reviews - Christ: A Crisis in the Life of God - book review

Contemporary Review, August, 2002 by R.D. Kernohan

Christ: A Crisis in the Life of God. Jack Miles. William Heinemann, [pounds sterling]18.99. 384 pages. ISBN 0-434-00737-4.

Jack Miles is a former Jesuit, now a 'public intellectual', Getty Trust adviser, and highbrow journalist. He says he writes about Christ neither as theologian nor historian but as a literary critic. A similar formula -- a 'biography of God' -- won a Pulitzer prize. The new book is presented as a dramatic finale to the previous story, and might earn a chair in rhetoric and verbal fireworks. It is as rhetorical an exposition of unconventional Christianity as anything since Milton wrote Paradise Lost and Paradise Regained, which Dr Miles calls an unsurpassed four-word summary of the Bible.

The book's approach to the New Testament is to consider it 'rather as if it were a stained-glass window', to be appreciated as a work of art rather than seen through in an attempt 'to discern the historical events that lie behind it'. This might seem a reversion to some late Victorian notions of presenting the Bible 'to be read as literature' but it comes with enough commentary, exposition, and presentational devices to suggest that the format conceals a book of sermons. However readers may still at times be uncertain whether they are encountering the Christ of a literary epic, the Second Person of a Trinitarian theology, or a new search for the 'historical Jesus', as reinterpreted in an age which is post-Freudian as well as post-Christian.

The encounter with the Samaritan woman is presented in such sexual terms that it almost seems as fanciful a flight (though in an opposite direction) as the old-fashioned insistence that the Song of Solomon is a bridal song for the Church. And even more seems to be made of the castrated condition of the Ethiopian eunuch in Acts 8 than of his baptism, which is hardly what Saint Luke intended when writing the book or the Apostle Philip did in providing the source material. Yet the account of Christ's prayer at Gethsemane is preceded by a suggestion, almost in an aside, that 'the event itself is fictional'. But the literary critic delights in the way the story draws on Psalm 59 or matches it, 'unconcerned that real and feigned history may be mingling'.

But if this is the New Testament as a work of art -- with the Old Testament tattooed all over it, as the author says -- it is certainly a work of religious art, none the worse for that. 'The historical criticism of the New Testament has, in sum, all the kick of non-alcoholic beer', claims Dr Miles, though his tendency to stretch a metaphor too far makes him add that 'some who were once intoxicated by it have awakened with a sobriety hangover'.

There are some problems inherent in this attempt to synthesise the historical record with theological development, spiritual experience, and literary or artistic interpretation. The historical sceptic or rationalist can argue, unemotionally, that this or that event was distorted or invented, treating the Gospels as campaign biographies. He can suggest why St. Paul wrote as he did without worrying too much about the cosmic theology of the letters. He can apply his post-Freudian mind to the imagery of Revelation.

But there are problems for those who combine, as Dr Miles seems to do, the more sweeping forms of historical criticism with a 'literary' criticism which appears more like a rather intellectual religious ecstasy. Even if one accepts his possibly overstated emphasis on the New Testament as a creation of the Jewish diaspora and not of Palestinian and Galilean Jews, problems remain when their work is presented as so brilliantly contrived. It might seem easier to argue that sources and even editors had simpler skills and motives, pursued in the style and mind of their times but inspired by the impact at first hand or at one remove of an astonishing and powerful personality. Dr Miles may not be too far from that more traditional view, even when he calls Jesus 'the astonishing literary character who stands at the heart of the New Testament'.

But this is dangerous territory. Those who find the New Testament and its chief character so inspiring are surely on a slippery slope that leads to a doctrine of biblical inspiration. The next stages are to define what inspiration means and find words for the force that seems to lie behind it. It is odd that Dr Miles, ready to invoke Auden or assess Schweitzer at length, leaves Barth unmentioned in his main text, with only a passing mention in his notes.