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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.
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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.
"...an erudite and provocative literary tour de force that would make a perfect Christmas or Hanukkah present for believers and nonbelievers alike . . . No one who reads Miles' book will be able to think about even the most familiar Biblical scenes--Jesus' response to the woman taken in adultery, the Last Supper, the Crucifixion itself--in quite the same way." --Newsday
"A book of great power and depth." --The New Yorker
"The brilliance of Jack Miles's new book on Christ is that it manages to 'make strange' the best-known story in history . . . startlingly original." --The New Statesman
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