Christ Read online

  Acclaim for Jack Miles’s

  CHRIST

  “[Jack Miles] is a daring critic.… Regardless of our agreement or disagreement with him, he prods us to read these familiar stories afresh, with all their original suspense and drama, his analysis serving as an invitation for our own.”

  —The Christian Science Monitor

  “As literary interpreters go, Miles does a lovely job.… Often thrilling.”

  —St. Louis Post-Dispatch

  “Brims with ideas, and Miles has a teacher’s urge to find a profusion of ways to explain those ideas.… Let all great religious texts have such enlightened readers.”

  —Daily Telegraph (London)

  “A literary vision of Christ with more insight, warmth, and verve (not to mention chutzpah), than have been seen … for many a year.”

  —America

  “Christ: A Crisis in the Life of God is, like Miles’s previous book, a stimulating, challenging work.”

  —San Jose Mercury News

  “Miles is a master, provocative and accessible, in presenting a God who is ambivalent, hesitant, moody, offhand, remote and opaque: a reluctant supernatural magician.… This is the most compelling page-turner of the year.”

  —New York Daily News

  Jack Miles

  CHRIST

  Jack Miles is a writer whose work has appeared in numerous national publications, including The Atlantic Monthly, The New York Times, The Boston Globe, The Washington Post, and The Los Angeles Times, where he served for ten years as literary editor and as a member of the newspaper’s editorial board. The recipient of a Ph.D. in Near Eastern languages from Harvard University and a former Jesuit, he has been a Regents Lecturer at the University of California, director of the Humanities Center at Claremont Graduate University, and visiting professor of humanities at the California Institute of Technology. His first book, God: A Biography, won a Pulitzer Prize and has been translated into fifteen languages. Currently senior advisor to the president of the J. Paul Getty Trust, a foundation supporting art and scholarship, Dr. Miles lives with his wife and daughter in Southern California.

  Also by Jack Miles

  GOD: A BIOGRAPHY

  FIRST VINTAGE BOOKS EDITION, NOVEMBER 2002

  Copyright © 2001 by Jack Miles

  All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. Published in the United States by Vintage Books, a division of Random House, Inc., New York, and simultaneously in Canada by Random House of Canada Limited, Toronto. Originally published in hardcover in the United States by Alfred A. Knopf, a division of Random House, Inc., New York, in 2001.

  Vintage and colophon are registered trademarks of Random House, Inc.

  The Library of Congress has cataloged the Knopf edition as follows:

  Miles, Jack.

  Christ: a crisis in the life of God / Jack Miles.—1st ed.

  p. cm

  eISBN: 978-0-307-78910-5

  1. Incarnation—Biblical teaching. 2. Jesus Christ—Person and offices—Biblical teaching. 3. Bible. N.T.—Criticism, interpretation, etc.

  4. Bible as literature. I. Title.

  BT220.M55 2001

  232—dc21 2001033808

  Author photograph © Marilyn Sanders

  www.vintagebooks.com

  v3.1

  For

  Mary Anne, Terrence,

  Catherine, Michael,

  and Mary

  Contents

  Cover

  About the Author

  Other Books by This Author

  Title Page

  Copyright

  Dedication

  Epigraph

  PROLOGUE: Crucifixion and the Conscience of the West

  A Note to the Reader

  PART ONE: THE MESSIAH, IRONICALLY

  His life before he was born

  “The winnowing-fork is in his hand”

  John hails him, strangely, as “the Lamb of God”

  The Devil tries to take his measure

  Disciples, unsought, follow after him

  He performs his first miracle, but reluctantly

  He stages an attack on the Temple, then retreats

  Interlude: the burden of his omniscience

  He speaks of a new creation, but privately

  He talks, but to himself, of God as illness and as remedy

  Interlude: the asexuality of the Father and the sexuality of the Son

  He admits, but to a heretic, that he is the Messiah

  Who do his disciples think he is?

  PART TWO: A PROPHET AGAINST THE PROMISE

  His inauspicious first cure: a Roman child

  A demon cries out, “I know who you are”

  The men of Nazareth, insulted, try to kill him

  Interlude: the story of his birth

  He repudiates his warrior past

  Interlude: the Roman shoah and the disarmament of God

  The price of his pacifism: John is murdered

  A whore demonstrates his strategy of shame

  He feeds a multitude

  He stills a storm

  He speaks of drinking blood, and many desert him

  He appears in sudden glory on a mountaintop

  PART THREE: THE LORD OF BLASPHEMY

  He flagrantly violates the law of Sabbath rest

  Scandal spreads, an arrest attempt fails

  He refuses to condemn an adulteress

  “Is he going to kill himself?”

  Interlude: the suicide of God Incarnate in Christian theology

  He resolves the great crisis in his life

  His new commandment: kindness to strangers

  His new promise: victory over death

  He raises a dead friend to life as a sign

  He is marked for death, then exalted as king

  PART FOUR: THE LAMB OF GOD

  The changing of the mind of God

  A second Passover

  The last testament of the Lord

  1. He washes his disciples’ feet

  2. He foresees betrayal but preaches love

  3. The supper of the Lamb

  4. “Take heart, I have conquered the world”

  He is arrested, tried, scourged, and sentenced

  He is crucified as King of the Jews

  He rises to life, incorporates, ascends to heaven, and marries

  EPILOGUE: On Writing the Lives of God

  Appendix I: One Bible from Many Scriptures

  (How It Happened and Why It Matters)

  Appendix II: The Bible as Rose Window

  (or, How Not to See Through the Bible)

  Acknowledgments

  Notes

  Permissions

  O the hope of Israel,

  the saviour thereof in time of trouble.…

  Why shouldest thou be as a man astonied,

  as a mighty man that cannot save?

  —Jeremiah 14:8–9

  Then said the Jews, Will he kill himself?

  because he saith, Whither I go, ye cannot come.

  —John 8:22

  And therefore as himselfe sayd No man can take away my soule And I haue power to lay it downe So without doubt, no man did, nor was there any other than his owne Will, the cause of his dying at that tyme.

  —John Donne, Biathanatos

  PROLOGUE

  Crucifixion and the Conscience of the West

  All mankind is forgiven, but the Lord must die. This is the revolutionary import of the epilogue that, two thousand years ago, a group of radical Jewish writers appended to the sacred scripture of their religion. Because they did so, millions in the West today worship before the image of a deity executed as a criminal, and—no less important—other millions who never worship at all carry within their cultural DNA a religiously derived s
uspicion that somehow, someday, “the last will be first, and the first last” (Matt. 20:16).

  The Crucifixion, the primal scene of Western religion and Western art, has lost much of its power to shock. At this late date, perhaps only a non-Western eye can truly see it. A Japanese artist now living in Los Angeles once recalled the horror most Japanese feel at seeing a corpse displayed as a religious icon, and of their further revulsion when the icon is explained to them. They ask, she said: “If he was so good, why did he die like that?” In Japanese culture, “good people end their lives with a good death, even a beautiful death, like the Buddha. Someone dying in such a hideous way—for us, he could only be a criminal.”

  Her perception is correct. The crucifix is a violently obscene icon. To recover its visceral power, children of the twenty-first century must imagine a lynching, the body of the victim swollen and distorted, his head hanging askew above a broken neck, while the bystanders smile their twisted smiles. Then they must imagine that grisly spectacle reproduced at the holiest spot in whatever edifice they call holy. And yet to go even this far is still to miss the meaning of the image, for this victim is not just innocent: He is God Incarnate, the Lord himself in human form.

  Winners usually look like winners, and losers like losers. But thanks to this paradoxical feature of the Christian myth, there remains lodged deep in the political consciousness of the West a readiness to believe that the apparent loser may be the real winner unrecognized. In Christianity’s epilogue to the God-story that it inherited from Judaism, the Lord God becomes human without ceasing to be the Lord and, unrecognized by all but a few, experiences the human condition at its worst before winning in the end a glorious victory. By losing to Caesar, he wins a duel with the Devil and defeats death itself. The Bible ends as the greatest comedies so often end: with a solemn and festive wedding. The creator of a new heaven and a new earth in which every tear is wiped away becomes the spouse of the entire human race. By losing everything, God wins everything, for everybody, and the last word he speaks, with his bride at his side, is “Come!”

  One of many implications of this epilogue to God’s life story has been that in the West no regime can declare itself above review. All power is conditional; and when the powerless rise, God may be with them. The motif of divinity in disguise is not unique to Christianity; but the Christian motif of unrecognized divinity judicially tried, officially condemned, tortured by his captors, executed in public, buried, and only then rising from the dead and ascending into heaven is, if not literally unique, then at least unique in the breadth of its political influence. Every verse in “Sweet Little Jesus Boy,” a black gospel tune sung at Christmas, ends with the wistful line “And they didn’t know who he was.” As his executioners nail him to the cross, Jesus prays: “Father, forgive them, for they know not what they do” (Luke 23:34). Wherever lines like these or the ideas behind them have spread, human authority has begun to lose its grip on unimpeachable legitimacy. In the West, any criminal may be Christ, and therefore any prosecutor Pilate. As the abolitionist poet James Russell Lowell put it:

  Truth forever on the scaffold, Wrong forever on the throne—

  Yet that scaffold sways the future, and, behind the dim unknown,

  Standeth God within the shadow, keeping watch above his own.

  The great Western myth is designed to raise a second, more profound and more disturbing question, however: If God had to suffer and die, then God had to inflict suffering and death upon himself. But why would God do this?

  Tout comprendre, c’est tout pardonner, the French say: To understand everything is to forgive everything. Every perpetrator was first a victim. Behind every crime stretches a millennial history of earlier crimes, each in its way an extenuating circumstance. But to whom does this infinite regression lead in the end if not to God? The guilt of God is certainly not a Christian dogma, and yet it is an emotionally inescapable implication of the Christian myth, visible and audible in countless works of Christian art. The pathos of those artistic enactments—those masses and oratorios, passion plays and memorial liturgies, and above all those paintings and sculptures in which the unspeakable is left unspoken—is inseparable from the premise that God is inflicting this pain upon himself for a reason. “The real reason,” as Albert Camus wrote in his haunting novel The Fall, “is that he himself knew he was not altogether innocent.”

  A rural American folk hymn from the early nineteenth century captures this pathos in words of striking simplicity:

  What wondrous love is this, O my soul, O my soul?

  What wondrous love is this, O my soul?

  What wondrous love is this that caused the Lord of Bliss

  To bear the awful curse for my soul, for my soul,

  To bear the awful curse for my soul?

  To God and to the Lamb I will sing, I will sing,

  To God and to the Lamb I will sing.

  To God and to the Lamb who is the great I AM,

  While millions join the theme, I will sing, I will sing,

  While millions join the theme, I will sing.

  “The great I AM” is, of course, God himself. The Lamb who is the great I AM is that same God turned into a sacrificial animal. The emotion the hymn is intended to evoke is rather like what many feel on visiting a battlefield where grave markers stretch to the far horizon. So many subjected to capital punishment, and so few, surely, guilty of anything approaching capital crime. Why had they to die? And did they die for me? What wondrous love was this?

  Yet what brings tears to the eyes of some brings vomit to the mouths of others. For some, a military cemetery is a monument only to vanity and hypocrisy. For some, the Crucifixion will ever be what it was for Friedrich Nietzsche in The Anti-Christ:

  God on the cross—are the horrible secret thoughts behind this symbol not understood yet? All that suffers, all that is nailed to the cross, is divine. All of us are nailed to the cross, consequently we are divine. We alone are divine. Christianity was a victory, a nobler outlook perished of it—Christianity has been the greatest misfortune of mankind so far.

  If Apollo and Dionysus are divine, then the brilliant and passionate are godlike. If the crucified Christ is divine, then the suffering are godlike. He is their ideal, and they pursue it through their own suffering. (“All of us are nailed to the cross, consequently we are divine.”) Nietzsche found this dignification of suffering perverse, a wanton inversion of the natural order. Spiritually speaking, he said, the early Christians stank in his nostrils like Polish Jews.

  Nietzsche’s visceral reaction, like his visceral anti-Semitism, commonly prompts a visceral counterreaction, but by this visceral intensity on both sides we may measure the power of what he was reacting against in the first place. His reaction was not gratuitous. He had seen, and seen correctly, something utterly shocking at the heart of the Christian myth, a “frightening hidden premise” to which the genteel Christianity of the late nineteenth century had grown numb. And he was prepared to offer a shocking anti-myth in order to make the original horror visible again. In The Anti-Christ, written in the last months before he lost his mind, Nietzsche asked:

  What is good? Everything that heightens the feeling of power in man, the will to power, power itself.

  What is bad? Everything that is born of weakness.

  What is happiness? The feeling that power is growing, that resistance is overcome.

  Not contentedness but more power; not peace but war; not virtue but fitness (Renaissance virtue, virtú, virtue unadulterated by morality).

  The weak and the failures shall perish: first principle of our love of man. And they shall even be given every possible assistance.

  What is more harmful than any vice? Active pity for all the failures and all the weak: Christianity.

  As we look back on a century of genocide, the sarcasm of “And they shall even be given every possible assistance” is ghastly, even as rhetoric. And yet the larger point is powerfully made. The divinization of the victim is the wellspri
ng of revolution, even as the demonization of the victim is the wellspring of repression.

  To Christianity’s “the last shall be first,” somnolently intoned from countless German pulpits, Nietzsche reacts—like a madman in the back pew—with outraged astonishment. The last first! Why should the first not be first? Do they not deserve it? What have the last done that they should displace the first? Leave the losers at the bottom where they belong! The madman’s outburst disrupts the church service, but the opening outrage, in truth, was that verse droned from the pulpit. The madman’s offense was to take it seriously, as a statement that, if it could not be accepted, would have to be forcefully rejected. And the ushers who struggle to subdue the madman must struggle as well, if they are sincere Christians, with their human, all too human, tendency to agree with him.

  Can there be such a thing as innocent, fully human suffering? Do not all adults have a little something on their consciences? Paradoxically, perhaps, humans believe more spontaneously in the innocence of animals than they do in their own. On a visit to Turin some months after writing The Anti-Christ, Nietzsche, long on the brink of insanity, was driven over the brink by the spectacle of a horse being flogged savagely by a coachman. The distraught philosopher flung himself on the fallen beast, wrapping his arms around its neck, seeking in vain to defend it. From the asylum where he was taken, he wrote his last semicoherent letter, signing it “The Crucified,” and then sank irretrievably into the madness that would last until his death a decade later.

  That helpless horse has everything to do with Nietzsche’s obsession with the Crucifixion and no little to do with the tenacity of the Christian myth in minds less susceptible to it than his. Ancient Israel felt toward the lamb the sensitivity that modern Europeans typically feel toward the horse. Hyperdomesticated, like the human animal itself, and therefore poignantly vulnerable to abuse, the lamb invited metaphorical use in myth and ritual. Thus, in the Book of Exodus, the blood of the Passover lamb saved the Israelites from the Angel of Death whom God had sent against Egypt. Smeared on the lintels of the Israelites, this blood warned the angel that these were the houses he must “pass over” on his awful errand. In the Book of Isaiah, several centuries later, reference was made to a mysterious servant who, like a lamb, suffered without protest. In the Acts of the Apostles, this lamb is identified as the divine Christ, who has shed (and shared) his blood to save all mankind not from any passing threat but from mortality itself: