Jack Miles

Miles shows us God in the guise of a great literary character, the hero of the Old Testament. In a close, careful, and inspired reading of that testament - book by book, verse by verse - God is seen from his first appearance as Creator to his last as Ancient of Days. The God whom Miles reveals to us is a warrior whose greatest battle is with himself. We see God torn by conflicting urges. To his own sorrow, he is by turns destructive and creative, vain and modest, subtle and naive, ruthless show more and tender, lawful and lawless, powerful yet powerless, omniscient and blind. As we watch him change amazingly, we are drawn into the epic drama of his search for self-knowledge, the search that prompted him to create mankind as his mirror. In that mirror he seeks to examine his own reflection, but he also finds there a rival. We then witness God's own perilous passage from power to wisdom. For generations our culture's approach to the Bible has been more a reverential act than a pursuit of knowledge about the Bible's protagonist; and so, through the centuries the complexity of God's being and "life" has been diluted in our consciousness. In this book we find - in precisely chiseled relief - the infinitely complex God who made infinitely complex man in his image. Here, we come closer to the essence of that literary masterpiece that has shaped our culture no less than our religious life. In God: A Biography, Jack Miles addresses his great subject with imagination, insight, learning, daring, and dazzling originality, giving us at the same time an illumination of the Old Testament as a work of consummate art and a journey to the secret heart of God. show less

Jack Miles packs more insights into 100 pages than most anyone else I can think of. I think what I so appreciate is that I feel he is actually exploring and clarifying (and describing the impossibility of ultimate clarification) rather than marshalling arguments, evidence, and historical support for a particular viewpoint. I was busy highlighting fascinating tidbits that I had somehow missed or forgotten in my reading on religion (e.g. the roots of the words paganism and heathenism), as well show more as the profound and poetic quotations that Miles includes (from Bertrand Russell to Marcel Proust) without ever being pretentious, and his own beautiful prose (the last paragraph is among the best I have read). The last essay has the same title as a recent Elaine Pagels book (which I also gave five stars). Guess I appreciate those writers who can incorporate the scholarly and the personal into a profoundly meaningful experience. show less

One of those empty religion apologists. I got far enough into the book to notice that he makes the point that even the notion of comparative religions is a western idea. He argues that it arose from the extension of Christianity, which was a kind of modification of Judaism, to non-Jews, thus forcing a separation of the religious and the cultural elements of Jewish practice which hadn't been necessary before.

Jack Miles says he wrote this book--following the example of C.S. Lewis--because it was a book that he would want to read that no one had written yet. He (along with John Shelby Spong and Bart Ehrman) definitely writes books I would like to have written in another life where I was a writer of books about religion and scriptures. I found it engrossing, engaging, and the most informative book I have yet read about the character of Allah and the message(s) of the Qur'an. I love the whole show more premise of this "trilogy," approaching the scriptures of the Abrahamic traditions as a literary critic and examining God as the central character. Don't know where you go from here, Mr. Miles, but I'm anxious to find out. show less