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God: A Biography, by Jack Miles

- Abstract

No summary of mine can do justice to the richness of this book. Jack Miles, a journalist and former Jesuit who holds a doctorate in Near Eastern languages from Harvard, has conceived the idea, which may not be entirely new but has never before been pursued with such thoroughness, of treating the God of the Bible as a literary character. In his pages, God emerges as a complex and ever-changing personality, the hero of the greatest work of literature in mankind’s history, created over hundreds of years by different artists of varying skills.

It is Miles’s argument that God changes profoundly in the course of the Bible. The interest of his work—rather, one of its many interests—lies in his exploration of how and why. In a sense, he writes, God ages, like the earth He creates and the human race He designs to possess it.



About the Author

Paul Johnson is the author of Modern Times, A History of Christianity, and A History of the Jews, among many other books.