Christ: A Crisis in the Life of God

Five years after his brilliantly successful, Pulitzer Prize-winning book about God as portrayed in the Old Testament, 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 500 year 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.

A writer of exceptional eloquence and imagination, and profound literary sensibility, Jack Miles has captured once again the lost, fierce, ecstatic power of the greatest work in our literature.