Bible Books

012

Mr. Big

God: A Biography

Jack Miles
(New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1995) 446 pp., $27.50

Imagine for a moment that the Hebrew Bible was written by Shakespeare, and that God was the supreme character of the play. What would be more natural than to ponder the complex psychology of the play’s protagonist? Recent scholarship on the nature of biblical narrative has made such a literary approach possible. In fact Harold Bloom attempted this in his brilliant and imaginative study, The Book of J (New York: Grove Weidenfeld, 1990). Bloom compared J’s Yahweh to Shakespeare’s King Lear, and even to Sigmund Freud’s portrait of the superego, in an attempt to represent the uncanny authority of this grand biblical character.

Jack Miles, an essayist and editor with a Ph.D. in Hebrew Bible from Harvard, is uniquely qualified to take Bloom’s attempt one step further. In this fascinating book, Miles writes a literary biography of God from the beginning of the Hebrew Bible to its end, from Genesis to Chronicles. He admits that it would also be possible to write a biography of God including the New Testament as its conclusion, and following the Christian rather than the Jewish order of the Old Testament books, but he uses the traditional Jewish order as his guide.

Miles is not immediately concerned with the disparate origins of the Hebrew Bible, since his task is to write a literary biography, not a literary history. But, to his credit, he acknowledges that the Hebrew Bible has a complex history, and he is sensitive to the different outlooks of different parts of the Bible in his character study of God. In a sense, he turns the traditional source-critical approach upside down in his study, accounting for differences in outlook from one text to another by ascribing psychological changes to God’s inner personality.

By making this literary move, shifting from the diversity of composition to the diversity of God’s inner character, Miles makes the drama of the Hebrew Bible come alive. As Miles continually illustrates, God’s character and motives change throughout the Hebrew Bible, from Creator to Destroyer to Friend to Judge to Father to Counselor and finally even to Absent One. To read the Bible with these character changes in mind is an exhilarating experience and for most readers will provide a thoroughly new view of the Bible.

Miles makes the most of his novel perspective. As an essayist he is adept at turning ideas around and examining them from all sides. To follow his imagination as he ponders God’s character and inner tensions through all the ups and downs of the Hebrew Bible is quite a ride—the author is witty, learned, opinionated and fearless. At times his discussions seem forced or don’t make much sense, but he usually settles down to some interesting or provocative points by the end of each aside.

One question that sometimes nags at the reader while reading the book is simply, does this work? Is it insightful to treat God in the Hebrew Bible as a literary character, and to see changes in God as a sign of psychological mutability or growth? Sometimes it works well—very well indeed—but sometimes it seems to lose touch with the biblical drama itself.

In the Pentateuch the changes in God’s nature seem very much a part of the narrative, as the complexity of God is gradually revealed through his deeds and relationships with humans. Yet by the time we get to the classical prophets, such as Second Isaiah (Isaiah 40–55), the dominant theme is not that God is changing in a psychological sense, as if he has learned something new about himself, but rather that God and his motives have been misunderstood all along, and that the prophet is announcing 014the news of God’s immutable nature.

To say of the prophetic God that he is anxious or that he improves his inner Self seems a bit like New Age psychobabble. For Miles to say that at this point “God is only imperfectly self-conscious and very slightly in control of the consequences of his words and actions” is to misrepresent the character of God in this part of the Hebrew Bible. We are in Miles’s debt for showing us the degree to which God changes in the Bible, but at this point the method obscures the prophets’ characterization of God. The prophets’ point is not that God has changed, but that the prophetic insight allows us to pierce the former obscurity of God’s grandeur and reality. According to the classical prophets, the change is not in God, but in the human perspective. In these parts of the Hebrew Bible, Miles’s method gets in the way of his biography of God.

In the final part of the book, Miles considers how God disappears in the Hebrew Bible, making no more personal appearances or speeches after his powerful, silencing response to Job. At the risk of seeming peevish, here I missed some acknowledgement to the work of Richard Friedman, who has developed the theme of the disappearance of God in the Hebrew Bible in several publications. Miles is clearly building on Friedman’s work, but fails to acknowledge it (though he did add a brief footnote in a later printing of the book). This breach of etiquette is inexplicable. Miles’s work stands out as a major contribution, written in a distinctive voice, and he need not be coy about his intellectual debts.

God: A Biography is a stunning work—illuminating, engaging and occasionally eccentric. It is not for the faint of heart, but for those with the appetite to see God as a complex character in a classic book, this will be a treat. It will stretch your sensibilities about God and the Bible.

Related Strangers: Jews and Christians 70–170 C.E.

Stephen G. Wilson
(Minneapolis: Fortress Press, 1995) xvi + 416 pp., $26.00 (paper).

During the first two centuries C.E., Jews and Christians lived in many communities around the Mediterranean and throughout the Near East. They encompassed a variety of outlooks, practices and social relationships in different historical and cultural contexts. In many cases, Jewish followers of Jesus were socially and spiritually Jews, rather than Christians in a distinct sense. Often leaders argued for boundaries and distinctions that their perplexed followers did not experience or observe. Christian writings, from the second-century Epistle of Barnabas to the fourth-century homilies of the preacher John Chrysostom, testify to the attraction of Jewish observances and worship for Christians. Only gradually, at different times and places, did the followers of Jesus separate from Jewish communities and become what we would call a new religion.

Wilson has written a clear, cogent and wise account of the relationships between Christians and Jews in the first two centuries C.E. His authoritative survey corrects many misperceptions and illuminates developments that have influenced interactions between Jews and Christians up to the present.

The complexities and silences of the ancient sources dictate the scope of Related Strangers. Most chapters concern Christian writings because Jewish sources largely ignored Christians or alluded to them very indirectly. The first chapter surveys the history of the first two centuries, including the Jewish wars with Rome and the places of Jews and emerging Christians in Roman social and political structures. The second chapter interprets the New Testament Gospels and Acts of the Apostles for their narrative treatment of Jews, their evaluations of Jesus in relation to the Jewish community and their anti-Jewish polemics. Subsequent chapters examine the portrayal of and attitudes toward Jews and Jewish traditions in the Christian apocrypha, some of which were adapted from Jewish writings; in Hebrews in the New Testament; in the amazingly anti-Jewish Epistle of Barnabas, which attributes the institution of Jewish law to Jewish sinfulness; and the Paschal Sermon of Bishop Melito of Sardis, which is the first Christian writing to accuse Jews of deicide; and in Justin Martyr’s Dialogue with Trypho (c. 160 C.E.), which takes Jewish views seriously even as it argues against them. Other chapters gather literary and historical fragments to reconstruct several kinds of Jewish Christians and similar patterns of worship. The book also treats Gentiles who observed Jewish law, Jewish responses to Christians in rabbinic literature and the impact of Gnostics and Marcionites on both communities.

A detailed account of Wilson’s views can only emerge from a thorough reading of his fascinating book. Here attention to a few problems will illuminate his 040interpretation and suggest some questions for further thought. Wilson acknowledges that his description of Jews and Christians as related strangers is complex. The incomplete and often difficult evidence will allow no simple scheme for understanding these two related traditions. Not surprisingly some of Wilson’s interpretations and positions are debatable. He sees the Bar Kosiba (Bar-Kokhba) Revolt against Rome in 132–135 C.E. as a key event that drove Gentile followers of Jesus from Jewish communities, weakened the influence of Jewish Christians on Christian communities and accelerated Jewish self-definition and practices against Christians. True, the Bar-Kokhba Revolt was more important than the previous war with Rome (66–70 C.E.) for Jewish-Christian relations. However, the separation of Jews and Christians should be associated with a variety of events over a long period rather than with any decisive moment, no matter how catastrophic.

Related to this, the years 70–170 C.E., the scope of the book, certainly include the most important period for the separation of Jews and Christians, but the fragmentary evidence we have continues in the third century with Origen, who was in contact with rabbinic scholars, and in the fourth with John Chrysostom, Jerome, the Talmudic authorities and imperial documents. Thus the period 70–170 C.E. is an appropriate range for this survey, but it is not the only one, and it is not as significant for historical interpretation as Wilson implies.

As a survey of the evidence, the book tends to connect things in an intelligible way, but sometimes the links are tenuous. The very important Epistle of Barnabas has no known author or date, and the arguments Wilson follows to place it in the late first century are less than convincing. He is admirably cautious in using rabbinic stories and sayings, all of which appear in later collections (third through sixth centuries for the most part) and most of which cannot be reliably placed in the first two centuries even if the rabbis to whom they are attributed lived then. However, in a desire to avoid extreme skepticism and take a middle way, he sometimes depends on extremely shaky evidence. For example, the Birkat Ha-Minim (a prayer cursing heretics that may have been directed at Christians) cannot be reliably dated to the late first or second centuries, nor shown to have been generally used in Jewish communities, nor proved to have been aimed at Christians. Thus it cannot be identified as a cause for the expulsion of followers of Jesus from the synagogue. Finally, information gained from recent archaeological finds and inscriptions and knowledge of Roman society and institutions play a larger role in early Jewish and Christian history than they do in Wilson’s account.

Wilson’s survey is exhaustive, readable, demanding and based on the best of recent scholarship. His judgment on a myriad of difficult texts, debatable interpretations and complex historical problems is unfailingly sensible and restrained, and he has avoided the pitfalls of previous treatments of this period. No longer are the orthodoxies and institutions of rabbinic Judaism and the “Great Church” tradition retrojected into the early period. This 300-page narrative, with 100 pages of notes, defines the current state of the question and will provide the starting point for discussion and research for some time to come.

The Invisible God: The Earliest Christians on Art

Paul Corby Finney
(Oxford Univ. Press, 1994) 319 pp., $45.00

No archaeological examples of distinctly Christian art can be dated earlier than the first decades of the third century. Does that mean that for the first two centuries Christians uniformly opposed visual images? And if they did oppose such images, was it because Christians consciously followed the prohibition, laid out in the Hebrew scriptures, against the making of graven images?

Paul Corby Finney revisits these questions in his lengthy and detailed examination of early Christian attitudes toward visual art. His conclusions challenge some long-held theories propounded by an earlier generation of scholars.

Many older theorists asserted that the earliest Christians were more anti-worldly and “spiritual” than succeeding generations, and as such would have forbidden the creation of any narrative or iconic art. Repudiating the surrounding pagan culture, the iconophobic Christians theoretically would have prohibited the veneration of divine images. Earlier theorists traced the emergence of Christian art works to the expansion of Christianity and concurrent loosening of standards caused by pressures from the uneducated and less rigorous members of the community (women, the laity and the lower social classes in particular).

Finney acknowledges that this view of early Christianity has textual support, specifically in the writings of Christian apologists who presented the new religion as a philosophical system that proclaimed a single, non-material and invisible deity. These texts suggest that early Christians worshiped a perfect, transcendent God—not lifeless statues. Finney concludes, however, that scholars have mistaken the apologetic literature, a polemical genre that discusses an idealized faith, for objective history that describes actual, practiced faith.

Finney then convincingly argues that a distinct Christian material culture only emerged in the late second to early third century because both time and financial resources were needed to create an entirely new collection of images that could be identified as specifically Christian. Before then, Christians simply adapted the types and styles of their polytheistic neighbors for their use. Certain well-known figures—the Good Shepherd, the praying figure (orants) and the seated philosopher—are classic examples of Christians borrowing from the existing catalogues of Greco-Roman art. Finney’s detailed study of late second-century lamps with depictions of shepherds (Good Shepherd/kriophoros) buttresses his argument by demonstrating that these lamps could have been purchased by Christians, if they were not specifically made for them.

Finney, having established an earlier,if not clearly distinct, program of Christian visual art, then turns to a long, similarly detailed study of the content and context of early Christian painting in the Roman catacombs. This second half of the book is nearly a separate monograph in which the author analyzes these early Christian frescoes apart from their significance as evidence that Christians finally developed an art of their own. This art, finally, needs to be seen both in continuity with its pagan roots, as it translates and adapts old forms, and as something new, with a new audience and a new message—synthetic, but not syncretistic. The Good Shepherd figure is an excellent example of a pagan prototype place in a Christian context and given a Christian significance.

Finally, Finney points out that early Christian art never represents God’s person or nature, but rather illustrates 041examples of God’s works (tekmeria theou). The images were not cultic or devotional objects, but reminders of past favors and messages regarding present hope and future expectations.

This book is both learned and ground-breaking. Casual readers will be daunted by the almost too-meticulous presentation of evidence and Finney’s scholarly digressions. This reviewer wishes Oxford University Press had included more photographs and tightened up the text. Despite these criticisms, the book provides a wealth of analysis, supported by good footnotes and bibliography. Finney’s work is an important contribution to the study of early Christian art history.

Mr. Big

God: A Biography