I just finished reading Christ: A Crisis in the Life of God, by Jack Miles. I highly recommend it to anyone interested in putting the New Testament into its Jewish context, which should be any Christian or anyone interested in the meaning of the life of Jesus of Nazareth.

Christ is the follow up to Miles’ book, God: A Biography, his Pulitzer Prize winning 1995 book that took the character of God in the Old Testament and did what Miles called a literary criticism, but which you might simply call reading for the meaning of the text in context.

He does the same for God Incarnate, the figure of Jesus, in the New Testament.

The crisis in the title refers to the growing feeling among First Century Jews that the promise of a military-national divine response to Roman occupation is due, but perhaps not forthcoming. God in the person of Jesus is doing something new.

Miles makes the fascinating point in passing that the question is not whether and to what extent the New Testament is “compatible” (208), with the Old Testament. That question is ill conceived. “One might as well ask, for the question would be exactly parallel: Is the Talmud compatible with the Tanakh? …Each is a revision of the older Hebrew scriptures. …[T]wo parallel responses to a single religious, political and intellectual crisis.” The crisis: what is God going to do about the Romans?

What we now call Rabbinic or Normative Judaism moves away from a military-national understanding of God, as does early Christianity.

I would add, both return to it in different ways later.