Jack Miles’s brilliant God: A Biography put a whole new spin on Biblical studies. The former Jesuit scholar decided to treat the Old Testament as God’s autobiography: after all, it is going as God’s word, that is, written by him by proxy, and he is also the one character who appears in it from beginning to end (though he goes awol, temporarily, in the Book of Ruth).
Miles reads the Old Testament (or, more properly, the “Hebrew Bible” or Tanakh) as literature, not arguing about matters of literal truth or theological correctness, but asking instead what this document tells us about the mysterious and often contradictory figure at its centre. The story that emerges is one of a deity who made a deal with his chosen people and then, for various reasons, progressively withdrew from them, with the highly ambiguous and disturbing Book of Job as his final appearance.
In Christ, Miles takes the narrative further by delving into the New Testament. Here, he sees the story of a God whose former covenant with his people has in some way ceased to be viable, his promises to them left unfulfilled. If he is to continue in some form as a meaningful deity, Miles argues, so he has to reinvent himself and revise the nature of his covenant: it is no longer to be made with the Jews alone, but potentially with the whole human race, and his offer of salvation is no longer the earthly one of deliverance from oppression but rather the heavenly one of remission from sin and the promise of eternal life.
Miles’s readings of the gospels is exquisitely acute. He teases out every possible implication of Christ’s actions and utterances, and places them in their historical, textual and intellectual context. He is alive to every nuance, every cross-current. He shows us a god ironically become human, a god who had to die to live, simultanously fulfilling and repudiating the tradition that gave him birth. Christ is an extraordinary performance on Miles’s part, a masterpiece of interpretation, rivetingly readable and endlessly provocative.
It Ain’t Necessarily So, by contrast, takes an archaelogical look at what evidence there is on or under the ground for the familiar narratives of the Bible. Whereas archaeologists once took the Bible as their starting point and then managed to find all sorts of evidence to back up what they saw in the text, modern archaeology has tended to be more hard-headed, and while it is acknowledged that “absence of evidence is not evidence of absence” it is clear that not much credence can be given to the Bible as a factual historical record. Nonetheless, Sturgis’s investigations, tracing developments in Middle East archaeology while explaining how such findings may or may not interact with the dubious textual record of the Bible, make fascinating reading.
Richard Holloway, the former Bishop of Edinburgh, is not concerned with the literal truth of the Bible. “It is better,” he writes, “to see [the scriptures] as good poetry than bad science”. He wants to find out what possible significance and usefulness Christianity can have for people living in the 21st century, a world from which God appears to have progressively vanished like the Cheshire Cat in Alice in Wonderland. Can something be rescued from this tradition-encrusted body of doctrine and practice, one tainted by a bloody, oppressive history, one still used as an exclusionist weapon by bigots today?
Yes, says Holloway. A “radical rethinking” of Christianity, he argues, can provide us with “a usable ethic for our time”. And a convincing case he makes of it. You don’t have to believe in the virgin birth, but you do have to value compassion and tolerance — what he calls “dynamic pity”. That, for him, is the real challenge of Christianity. He is willing to historicise and to deconstruct, but in the end his reading of the core message of Christianity is profoundly generous and open-minded. He rediscovers a gospel of love beyond the calvaries of judgement; he is, in the end, the best kind of humanist, which is to say the best kind of Christian.
If only the majority of Christians were this engaged with the real world, as committed to practising what they claim to preach, there might indeed be something left of Christianity.