Sequel to 'God: A Biography'.
In the dramatic finale to the story that Jack Miles began in this Pulitzer Prize-winning 'God: A Biography', God is in crisis. When Babylon destroyed Jerusalem and carried the children of Israel into exile, God claimed that it was his doing. But his punishment, he promised, would not last forever. Soon he would restore Israel to its old greatness and more.
Yet as the story begins, five hundred years have passed, and God has not kept his promise. Worse, Caesar is poised to destroy the Temple and kill as many Jews, proportionately, as Hitler killed. God knows that he will not prevent this holocaust, but can he allow himself to do nothing at all? This is the supreme crisis of his life.
God's response to this crisis is utterly astonishing. He becomes a Jew himself and inflicts upon himself in advance the very agony that his people will suffer in a few decades. No less remarkable, he drastically revises the very meaning of victory and defeat.
When does victory over Caesar matter if in the end everyone dies anyway? Rather than defeat Caesar, God sets out to defeat Satan, the Prince of Darkness and the Lord of Death. He trumps his own failure to return as a mighty warrior by righting a wrong lodged even deeper in his conscience: the cruel curse that he spoke against humankind when he condemned Adam and Eve to death for yielding to Satan's temptation in the Garden of Eden. By dying and rising, God gives anew his original gift of immortality and swallows up his historical defeat in a cosmic victory that will "wipe away every tear".
God will not finally win this victory until the end of time. In the meantime, his military career is over. Having taught his followers to turn the other cheek, he pays the price of his own teaching. The Lion of Judah becomes, poignantly, the Lamb of God. But by assigning himself the role of Passover lamb, God expands his covenant with Israel - the covenant that began at the original Passover - to include all the children of Adam and Eve. In the final scene of the New Testament, this covenant becomes a joyous marriage.
Writing neither as a theologian nor as an historian but as a literary critic, Jack Miles has captured once again the lost, fierce, ecstatic power of the greatest classic of our literature.
