2002 - miles - like father, like son

8/13/2019 2002 - Miles - Like Father, Like Son

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Monumentality, she vm tes, creates thesense of social cohesion that is central tothe consolidation of a communitybyimpressing upon people the importanceand power ofathing or a person Cen-tral to this impression of social power isthe sense of long-lastingness; the percep-tion th at th is city, building, institution , orartworkand the valuesitrepresentswill last through generations, societies,time. Thatis wellsaid, and it alertsusto acentral problem of modernism.In contrasttowhat we expectinth emonumental, the typical works of mod-ernism lookedas ifthey had been puttogether withastapler orascrewdriver.

and could be taken apart as easily. Mod-ernism suggested the temporary,theimm ediate, the satisfaction of this partic -ular need, here, now. The idea of buildingfor the ages was foreigntomodernism.Who knew w hat functions would need tobe satisfied tomorrow? I do notknowwhetherLouis Kahn'sbuildingswerebuiltfor the ages, but he tried to make themlookasif they were. In doingso,he movedfar from both the aesthetic program andthe social program of modemism . Andwehave not yet found the answ ertothe ques-tion that Kahn brilliantly asked about thelimitations of modem ism. We are still liv-ing withhisdilemma.

Like Fatlier Like Son PAULA FREDRIKSENChrist: A Crisis in th e Life of Godby Jack M iles

(Alfred A.Knopf 348pp., 26)WE THINK OF the Bibleas a book.Itbeginsatthe Beginning, withGenesis, and proceedsthroughto itsclosing(2 Chronicles for Jews, RevelationforChristians), tucked neatly between twocovers. But the ancient Greek te rmthat stands behind itsmodem Englishequivalent ta biblia, the books conveys more accurately the manifoldnatureofthis ancient text. This collec-tion comprisesamultitude of individualwritings, whose period of compositionstretches for well over a millennium. Andthe writings themselves are often com pos-ite documents, containing withintheseeming unity of their continuous prose amultiplicity of iterary genres and religiousvisions,ofcommunal and regional oraltraditions, of countless now-lost scribes,editors, and a uthors. In sh ort, the Bible isnot a book, but a library.Beyond the conventions of modem pub-lishingandancient canonization, whatunifies this collection? For theJewishcanon, the thread that binds together thishuge mass, organizing as well as coordi-nating its contents, is the idea of Israel.True, Genesis opens withGrodcreating theuniverse and all life in it, including thatPAULA FREDRI KSEN is the author, mostrecently,oi JesusofNazareth, King of heJews: A JewishLife and the Emergence ofChristianity (Knopf).

creature uniquely made in his image andlikeness, both male and female, namely,humankind. But then God himself restsan dblessesthedaythat follows his labors,the seventhdayor Sabbath,apractice anda privilege that eventually he will extendto the family of only one man, Abraham.Grodmakes the universeby divinefiat;butIsrael he createsby anunexplained choice,over time, throughapromise:Now the Lord said to Abram, Go outfrom your country and your kindredand your father's house to the Land thatI will show you. I w ill make of you agreat nation, and I will bless you andmake your name great, so that you willbe a blessing. I will bless those who blessyou, and the one who curses you I willcurse; an d in you all the families of theearth shall be blessed.

Thereafter the greatstoriesof Genesisthe saga from Abraham to Jacob, the ad-ventures of Jacob's twelvesons,most espe-ciallyof Joseph in Egyptcedetothe hugebodyoflegislation, stretching fromthemiddle of Exodus through Deuteronomy,tha t sets the terms of God's covenantvvdthIsrael. These five books of the T orah (theHebrew word means teaching ) makeup the core canon of the Jewish Bible. Itsnext sub-collection. Prophets (N evi im inHebrew), runs from Joshua to Malachi.These books tellofthe rise an d fallofIsrael's power, of the sovereignty and the

ruin of Jerusalem and its temple, of thinspired threats andvisions of Godspokesmen. Finally,thesongs and poems and thestories tha t run froPsalms to Chronicles are groupedasW rings {Ketuvi im in Hebrew). The acronyby which Jews refer to their Bib Tanakh Tbrah, iVevi'im, isTetuv i'imrecapitulates this canonical sequencwhich preserves a sense of both the manfold nature of the collection and lengthiness of its period of compositio(In narrative time, these writings covthe period from thebeginning of tuniverseby current Jewish reckonin5,762years agoto circa 533 B.C.E., tPersian co nquest of Babylon.)Taking Genesis 12:1-3, which I haquoted above,asthe promontory frowhichwecan surveythisvast textual tertory, we can see how these biblical booallexpand u pon the story of the realizatiof God's promise to Abraham. The cocanon, the Torah, ends with the childreof Israel on the east bank of the Jordapoised to come into the Land. The largcanon, containing the Prophets and thWritings, ends similarly. In the time sinMoses, centuries have passed. Israel hbecomea mighty nation, unified undDavid and h is family. It has split betweethe northern and southem kingdoms.has fallentothe Assyrians, thentotBabylonians, and finally to the PersianThe country is desolate, the temple anits city ruined, thepeople exiled. Tcovenant seems shattered, G od's promisbroken. Yet the very last sentence of tTanakh recalls Good's first words to Abrham . God stirs the spirit of Cyrus, king Persia, so that the king frees the Judeaexiles to m ake aliyah,to goup, thatisreturn. The final word in the Jewish colectionisya ahgoup ,gohome.

IN THE 1 99 0s , Jack Miles decided read the Tanakh from a novel vantagpoint. He eschewed the historical antheological approaches to the texts famiar to him from his academic work, aninstead chose to regard these anciebooks, in theirJevvdshsequence from Gesis to Chronicles, as material for a sort psychological study of their prime charater,GrodThe growth and the developmof God's personality provided th e unifyiidea for Miles's reading, which wasseconsciously, lyrically literary. The resuwas God: ABiography,which appeared1995.Miles's Grod was troub led, talentemoody, passionate, impetuous. A cosmorphan(asMiles,onth e basis of the Bibpresentation, characterized h im), parenless, childless, the only one of his kin God left to himself was incapableself-knowledge and therefore of person


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growth. His only mea ns to self-knowledgelay in his relations with the creature thathe had formed in the Beginning in hisimagethat is, humanity.Byturns creat-ing his human self-image and thendestroying it, God ultimately embarkedon his peculiar relationship with Israel.The historical vicissitudes of the peopleof Israel as presented and preserved in thehuge stretch of the biblical stories be-came, in Miles's reading, the stuff of hischaracterological study of God. ThroughIsrael, Miles's God leam ed, as best hecould, abouthimself.THE CHARACTER WHO emergedfrom this original combination ofliterary theory, developmentaland psychoanalytic psychology, and bibli-cal texts was complicated, forceful, andsurprisingly unappealing. By creatinghum ans in his image, and then by givingthem the order, and thus the power, to be fertile and increase in effect, tomake others in his image, but indepen-dently of himself God inadv ertentlytriggered an ongoing struggle v^dth man-kind over the control of human fertility.This stmggle defined their relationship,and thu s Gk)d 's development of his ownpersonality. Raging against Adam and Evefor breaking a trivial prohibition, Godcursed what he had created. Humanity'sdominion over the earth, which hehimselfhad commanded( fill the earth and sub-due it ), he now linked inexorably withhardlabor,hum an fertility with excruciat-ing pain. A nd hu ma n life itself he blightedforever with the curse of death.This conflicted relationship withhumanity in general, which reaches anadir when God destroysmo st of his cre-ation with the Flood, is re-enacted innucewith the family of Abraham , whom Godblesses, curses, redeems (most spectacu-larly from Egypt), then abuses and aban-dons (most definitively throug h Babylon).The biblical themes of God's mercy andof hisjustice, of his anger an d of his com-passion, of Israel's disobedience and oftheir steadfastness, of the moral and his-torical pull of the Land in th e story of thepeople, become in Miles's retelling theexpression of God sown highly charged,deeply fiawed character wherein resideboth good and evil, weal and woe. Inshortand little wonder, considering thehistorically and literarily manifold docu-ment thatMilesreads asahistory of a sin-gle character God has a particularlyviolent, peculiarly unresolvable multiplepersonality disorder. He cannot decidewhoheis,he cannot define whathewants,and too often he improvises, v^dth damag-ing consequences. Hideous huma n suffer-ingin particular, Israel's sufferingisthe result.

Thus th e twice-told tale of exile and re-turn that loosely shapes the Jewish canonbecomes, in this case history of God, arecursive cycle of destruction, regret, a ndunstable reconciliation. God 's mak ingman in his image means making man ashis rival; and his destroying his rivalinNoah's generation or later, in the Israelitegenerations that suffered under Assyriaand Babylonmeans regretting the loss ofhis image. In pursuit of histhem e. Milesworks his way in sequence from the fivebooks of the Torah through th e Prophets.Here God, definitely shattering hiscovenant by destrojdng Jerusalem andexiling Israel, works through his dread-ful ambivalence in stages, whether manic(Isaiah), depressive (Jeremiah), or psy-chotic (Ezekiel). But it is only whenGod on a whim, making a wager withSataninfficts unbearable sorrows onhis servant Job that he finally sees, andunderstands that he sees, the fiend thatdwells vvdthinhim.

This m ome nt of hideous self-knowledgeshocks God. From this point onward inthe Bible, Miles observes, God is silent,ashe has no m ore direct speech. The clos-ing vmtings of the Tanakh serve as hisfade-out. In the books of Ruth an d Esther,Daniel and Chronicles, human moralautonomycomesto com pensate for divinesilence and occultation, when actionsthat once God would havetaken on behalfof theJews,statements that heoncewouldhave made to them, they now take andmake for themselves. God, tra ppe d andperhaps paralyzed by the confiicting ele-ments of his own character, recedes. Manaloneisleft.

HERE, AT THE close of his book.Miles endsvntha haun ting reflec-tion on the problem of evil. Allcultures deal with the questions arisingfromwar,dea th, disease, meaning (and itsdark twin, meaninglessness), the un bear-able suffering of the innocen t. In W estemmonotheistic systems, however, the prob-lem is particularly acute, because it endsas an indictment of God. ( How can agood God allow this to happen? ) Readingthe B ible as a record of God 's moraldevelopment. Miles construed evil as asymptom of a divine identity conflict, cre-ated when the various ancient Semiticdeities with their particular functions(creator, destroyer, warrior, guardian,lover, mother) all fused, in Israelitemonotheism, into an impossibly over-charged single personality. Thus th e tro u-bled character of the biblical God is asmuch (or even mo re) a part of the problemof evil tha n a p art of its solution. Contem-porary Western culture. Miles concluded,remains even now haunted by this Godwho,though absent, has neverfinallyde -

parted . This God is the divided originalwhose divided image we remain. His isthe restless breathing we still hear in oursleep.What made Miles's book enjoyable,even exhilarating,wasno titschief charac-terhis Grod gave me, and evenhimself,the creepsbut the breadth of educationand culture thathisdevelopment ofitstor-tured chief character put on display. Milesdrew widely and deeply on great s tores ofknowledgeof literature and music; ofSemitic philology and ancient Near East-em history; of poetry ancient and mod-em, in myriad languages. His writingmade the reader think; his ideas aboutvarious aspects of biblical literature mad eone stop and refiect on familiar texts innew ways. Despite his creation of one ofthe most repellent characters in recent fic-tion, then. Miles communicated an imageof himselfasa w riter that was appealing,erudite, ethical, and deeply humane. Thepleasure of reading odwas, in no smallway, th e pleasure of getting to know Miles. odA Biography based as it was onthe Jewish canon, inevitably suggested itsown sequel. Could Miles produce a char-acterological study of Christ, the chiefdramatispersonaof the New Testament,by similarly following the sequence ofbooks in the Ch ristian canon?A sAN EPILOGUE to theTanakh,theNew Testamentisboth similar anddissimilar to the foundational col-lection.Much newer and m uch shorter (itstwenty-seven texts all seem to have beenwritten sometime roughly in the closinghalf of the first century), it is much morefocused on a single and singular theme:the redemptive consequences of the lifeand the death of Jesus ofNazareth, a his-torical personage in a waythat Godisnot.Like the Tanakh, this shorter collectioncan itself be seen as a twice-told tale ofsuffering and salvation. The first andtighter cycle follows the narrative of thelife, death, and resurrection of Jesus asconveyed (variously) in the first four writ-ings that open the Christian canon, theGospels of Matthew, Mark, Luke, andJohn. The second and longer cycle thatinvolves Jesus's generation (he died circa30 C.E.) and the generations thereafterunrolls in the rest of the New Testament'swritings (some of which, such as Paul slet-ters, were written some twenty yearsbefore the Gospel of Mark, the earliestGospel). These describe and prom ise a re-capitulation of Jesus's experience of dea thand resurrection for the believer, to beaccomplished definitely when Jesus him-self repeats the divine drama by comingagain, defeating evil, and retu rning to Godthe F ather together with those who havenow been raised,likehim, from th e dead.


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But the New Testament's first fourbooksare notliketheTanakh's first five.Rather than developinga master narra-tive that moves across all four writingsfrom a start to aclose,the Gospels tellJesus's story four times, aroun d the core ofhis public mission, from bap tism to cruci-fixion. The efFectislikeRashomon andthe personality of Jesus, the characteriza-tionsofhis friends, followers,andoppo-nents, the sequence and thesignificanceofspeechesandevents,allshift a nd changein each re-telling. Their central message,like their central character, changestoo.Th efirsthree Gospels, of Matthew, Mark,and Lukethe synoptic or seen-togethergospelsall proclaim, with differentaccents, Jesus of Nazareth's teachingsaboutthecoming KingdomofGod.Thefourth Gospel, John, is strikingly difier-ent, and focuses instead onthe theologicalsignificance of Jesu s asthe divine Son.Historians goingatthis diverse m ate-rial must endlessly sort through and dis-

criminate among traditionsearlierandlater; plausible, implausible,andimpos-siblein quest of the Jesus ofhistory.Theologians too,like historians, thoughaccordingtodifierent criteria, must alsomake choices, deciding what to emphasizeand whatto playdown when constructingor interpreting church doctrine aboutJesus within the traditions of their partic-ular communities offaith. HowmightMiles,as a'literary vwiter tellingauni-fied story while drawingon theGospels'many difierent ones, approach thesesourcesand negotiate their difierences?Miles cameupwitha simple, audaciousinterpretive stratagem.Hisnew bookisno ta story about Jesus.It is,instead,acontinuationofhiseariier fictional biog-raphy based on theTanakh.Themaincharacterin hristisno tJesus:itis God.

THINGS HAVENO Tgonewell,eitherfor God or for Israel, since lastwe saw thematth eend ofMiles'searlier book. The prophets had spokeninluminous termsofthe gloriesof Israel'sreturnfi-omexile: th e crookedwayswouldbe made straight; David's line wouldbeestablished forever;theTemple, restoredand beautiful, would drawallnationstoitself.Evidently,saysMiles, the prophetsand thus God, whose messagethey medi-atedwere viTong. The victorious paradehome wascanceled. Fewresponded toCyrus's invitationto return.TheSecondTemplewas apaltry, inglorious afiair. Andin thehalf-millennium betweenC)TUSandJesus,thepeopleand thelandofIsraelsimply passed from one foreign suzeraintyto another, from Persia totheH ellenistickingships that followed Alexander theGreat tofinally and most disastrouslyRome.

In sum, God has discovered thathe could not or would not keep hispromise. Ow ing to his failure, n ot theirs,his covenant with Israel has lapsed.Worse, God foreseesin thecomingofRome a more devastating destructionthan even Babylonhadwrought.In theyear 70 C.E., Rome would demolishJerusalem, crucifying so many thousa ndsof Jews in th e course ofalong and vicioussiege tha tthe land surroundingthecitywould be stripped, denuded of trees.After 135 C.E., defeating the Bar Kochbarevolt that in many ways wasthe last gaspof the war in 70, Rome erased Jerusalemaltogether, plantingin itssteadapagancity called Aelia C apitolina. Israel againwas savaged and scattered in an exilemore enduring than that under Babylon. God cannot or will not do anythingabout any ofthis;but stillhe mustdosomething.But what? Relying primarilyonJohn'sGospel, Miles presentstheanswerto the

conundrum thathe hasconstructed.Histormented chief character determinestoresolve the ongoing crisis of his confiictedpersonality. G od unde rstand s tha the isth e one fiindamentally responsible forhaving humanity in general, and Israelinparticular, in their dreadful situationofsufiering and dea th. He understands th athe , not Israel,hasfailed to keep theircovenant. Finally, and most fundamen-tally,heunderstands that he,notthey,isth e one who sinned in the GardenofEden. Theyatethe forbidden fruit; bu the ,inhis intemperate fury, cursedhis owncreation w ith sufieringanddeath.In thepast, from timetotime, God hasbeenmercifiil;butnow,on thecuspof anewdevastation, he has become p enitent. Andso he resolvestochangeto change him-self,to change thecovenant, to changethe world. God decides to become GodIncarnate.Entering human historyas anembod-ied male Jew, Miles writes, God atonesfor his abandoning Jerusalem to Romeby arranging for Jerusalem to abandonhim to Rome first. Hence, for purposes of

emplotment,theprominenceofPassoverin this story about the death of God andthe redemption of his character. Thelamb whose blood saved the Israelitesfrom God's Angel of Deathat thefirstPassover becomes the divine lamb orLamb ofGodwhose blood saves all man-kind from God's own curseatthe secondPassover. By becoming hum an,bydyingas he knows so many Jews will die, Godreconstituteshis ownidentity.Byrisingfrom the dead an d thus promising eternallife to all human ity, God renews his owncreation. Through his ownincarnation,death, and resurrection, Grod starts overagain.

R E-READING THESE familiar texfrom a novel perspective. Mileonce moreproduces startling, evdaring results. God as God Incarnatcan fiirt with women, duel w ith Satan, towithhisfollowers, andbafile his intelocutorsinways that speak immediatelindeed shockingly, to modern sensibities. Released from any obligationtohitoryor to theology, tellinghis tale vvdanachronistic abandon. Miles uses theculturally powerful scenes fromtheGopels in imaginative waysto createneinsightsinto these textsan dintoourselvtheir cu ltural progeny.Still,asread ers of his storywemust ashow does God scrucifixion resolve anthing, really? What difierence doesmake wh ether God himself diesif hdeath failstoavert the deaths ofsomaothers? Howdoes an indefinitely poponed celestial wedding of God anhumanitythe happy ending for whiMiles strainsbyconcluding w ith themculled from the Book of Revelationheanythingat all? If God s character,Miles's fic tion,is thequestion, then hodo any of these other elementssufferindeath, resurrectionprovideanaesthecally pleasinganddramatically satisfyianswer?Theydo not, and they cannot. Fluwith mythological potency in antiquittheir power has diminished withagwhat workedas aresolutionto theprolem ofevilas itwas imaginedinthe fircentury doesnotworkin thesamewnow. Miles uses these elements of thGospel stories because he has to usethemif they are unsuccessful, they are alobligatory. Why? Because Miles, despihis authorial freedom to cast his chicharacter as an intemperate, conflictsadist and then to change him into a prscient, penitent masochist, is himself costrainedbyhis texts. Asthepostmodeauthor of a postmodern fiction. Milcould eschew a resolution to his stoentirely, rather than re-use an ancient onthat doesnotithe tale that h e tells;bhe seemstowanthisbookto bebothfictional story about God Incarnate aa literary readingofthe N ew TestamenHe thus cannot bypass or ignore thcanon's emphasis on crucifixion and resurection, though aesthetically theseelments compromisehis storybymoviit,atthe end, from fictiontofantasy.Fthis reason, what defineshisproject allimitsit.But whatisMiles's project?In aforwordto thereader ofhis book,at seeral points along the way,andagaininconcluding appendix ( The Bible as RoWindow, or. How Not to See Through thBible ), Miles offers his textas aformliterary appreciation of the NewTest


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ment. His essay, he says, is meant to helpthe reader to regard and tosavortheNew Testament's religiously motivatedartistry, jus t as the visitor toacathedralmight enjoy the play of lightinstainedglass.And again at several points in thisbook,as in his earlier one,heremarksupon the parsimony of biblical proseinorder to state one of his chief principlesof interpretation.It is this: since every-thing insignificant hasbeen lefrout,assume that everything kept in issig-nificant. By so committing his attention.Miles can conjure observationsofgen-uine subtlety from seemingly incidentalnarrative details.The problemisthat Miles the authorof this theo-biographical fiction mustabandon, overlook, or ignore the greaterpart ofthose New T estament textstowhich Miles the literary critic is commit-ted to interpreting. He does soin order touse them to tell the story of Jesusas acontinuation of the story of his previousfictive character, God. Thu s the Gospelsof Matthew , Mark, an d Luke scarcelyfig-ure in h is account at all, because the lit-erary conceit tha t Jesus is actually Godis best accommodated by the GospelofJohn. W here scenes or sayings that Milesdoes want to use occur in the S)Tioptics,he will splice lines into block paragraphstaken from John, and then comment onthe text that he has thereby created. Theintellectual end pointwhat Miles has tosayis often pleasing. But towriteanew biblical textbyclever editing in orde rto make the point seems, well, unortho-dox, or at least n ot quite ko sher, asatech-niqueofbiblical interp retatio n, literaryor otherwise.

M ILES'S SEVERAL FEINTS in thedirection of history also confusehis enterprise. Invoking Joseph-us, he suggests that the number of Jewsslaughtered by Romefollovving thesiege ofJerusalem was comparable to the portionthat perished in the Nazi shoah But wedo not know ho w many Jewsor, for thatmatter, how many peoplelivedin theRoman Empirein the first century, norhowmany resided farthereast,outside theempire. Nor do we know how many diedin the siege: Josephus's figures are notori-ously unreliable. Hence wedo not andcannot knowifthe one slaughter corre-latesinany respectimpact, numberswith the other. Why does Miles speak as ifhe does know, or can know? He seems tobereaching foranaesthe tic effect, whereinRomans correlate v^ith Nazis, first-century debacle with twentieth-centurygenocide. Histrue subject is theodicy,God's (and, for hisstory, God s)inactioninthefaceofevil. The poor historicalanalogies jus t get in th e way.

But Miles makes such analogiesbe-cause he attempts to situate his modemliterary understandingofC hristianityinreal time, in the ancient past. Despite hisexplicit disavowalof a historical stand-point, his project veers into an attempt athistorical explanation. Thushe writesthatthe horror ofthe war with Rome canscarcely failtohave raised m any of theradical or desperate questions about Grodthat, to some, seem to have arisen for thefirst time in the twentieth century. As forradical or desperate answers to thosequestions, one seemsto have beentheChristian vision of the divine warriorself-disarmed. The pacifism tha t God Incar-nate preacheslove your enemy, turn theother cheek, andsoonis the radicalreversalinthe divine identity required,indeed created,bythe ancient evange-lists contemplating God's failuretopro-tecthispeople. An ancient religious imag-ination, writes Miles, transformedtheJews' slaughter into Grod's crisis of con-science, resolvedinand through the C hris-tian revision of the Tanakh. God, newlypacifist, put himself on the cross; God,newlyinternational, made anewcovenantwith all mankind.B UT MILES IS wrong. The ancientslaughter i fail to raisethesame sorts of radical or desp eratequestions aboutGod that the twentieth-century slaughter raised, because ancientpeople are not modern people, and theythought about things differently.TheNew Testament texts, unedited, advancedifferent claims about Jesus, about God,and about the resolution of the problemof evil from the ones that Miles createsand then, confusingly, attributes to them.First and most obviously, the Gospels donot identify Jesus with God: they are twodifferent persons. Even in those passagesthat present Jesusasdivine,he issub-ordinate, and this subordination ofdivine entities under one supreme deityis consistent with the tenetsofancientmonotheism. Moreover, the doctrineofChrist as fully God and fully man wasafourth-century teaching, one that couldbe defendedby anappealto the first-centurytexts,but not one native to them.And eventhefully divine/fiilly hu manChrist was imagined as another persondistinct from God.Christian pacifist traditions predate thewar with Romebytwenty years (theyappear also in Paul's letters), so they areno taresponse toit.And th e pacifists wereJesus's followers, not Jesus himself Dur-ing his mission, Jesus threatened unsym-pathetic villages with total annihilation.In post-resurrection traditions about him,he returns as a warrior, descending fromheaven withacryofcommand, leading

angelic legions, defeating powersandprincipalities: no divine disarmamenthere. And the canonical vision of th eChristian end-time is not at all inclusive.From among all the nations, onlythe saints that is, those Christians whosereligious vision coincides with th at of theparticular authorw illbesaved. PlentyofothersJews, pagans, other Christians-are excluded from salvation.As for Rome's defeat of Jerusalem,asfar as the historical evangelists are con-cerned, God did act, just as he hadacted through Assyria and Babyloninthe more distan t past. The old paradigm,renoun ced by Miles's God, w orked finefor them . The evangelists' God sent Rom eagainst Jerusalem topunish Jerusalemfor killing Christ. No mystery there; andlittle visible trauma; and, for that mat-ter, no turningofthe messianic cheek.Imperial slaughter did notimperiltheworld's meaning, or the Bible's meaning,for these ancient authors. They were

innocent of Spinoza and Nietzsche.Atrocity, for them , did not entail the perilof atheism.

THE FORCE AND the originality ofMiles's reading of ancient Christiantextsliepreciselyinhis freedomfrom responsibility either to history (whatmay or may nothaveactually happene d inthe past)or totheology (the systematicreligious sense that Christian communi-ties have made of their books and theirviewofthat past).It is Miles's modemsecular imagination, notsome ancientJevvdsh religiousone,th at conceived of theGospels asa tale of divine disarmament.And itisourworld,not the world of antiq-uity, that provides the generative elementsofMiles sstory,and th e moral and culturalcontext that givesitpower. Miles knowsthis,though w hen he reaches for historicalexplanation he seems to forget it.The biblical rose window ofMiles'sliterary appreciation has been shatteredby modernity's experience of the problemof evil. And it is to this problemthedeathofGod as imagined not by John ,but by Nietzsche; the deathofmanasaccomplished n ot by Nebuchadnezzar orVespasian, butbyHitler and somanyothersthat Miles has directedhisimagination. Whateverhisintentions, hisbook conducts us to an appreciation notof the Bible, but of our own nihilism. Bydravvdng selectively on the richest libraryto have survived from antiquity, the mostgeneratively important collection ofbooks in our culture. Miles has narra-tively re-imagined theproblem ofeviland provideda resolution. But alas: thehappy ending, even in awork offiction,sa victimofour times, and cannot con-vincingly conclude this story.


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2002 - miles - like father, like son

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