Christ: a crisis in the life of God Jack Miles William Heinemann, 383pp, £18.99 ISBN 0434007374

Religious belief is less vulnerable to persecution than to ennui. No torture is more destructive of faith than the bland tolerance extended to it by contemporary liberalism. Every Easter, the Christian preachers try to arouse our grief at the spectacle of God crucified, but their efforts meet with scant success. The scene is simply too familiar to evoke a passionate response; any tale repeated endlessly finally engenders boredom.

The brilliance of Jack Miles's new book on Christ is that it manages to "make strange" the best-known story in history. Miles cites a Japanese artist referring to "the horror most Japanese feel at seeing a corpse displayed as a religious icon". This horror was shared by Nietzsche and would have been shared by contemporaries of Jesus. Miles makes no attempt to mitigate it. From the standpoint of Old Testament expectation, he insists, horror is a natural reaction to the ministry of Jesus. Christ is a grotesque parody of the Messiah. Unless he is seen as such, we lose the meaning of his life and death.

But if Miles's approach to the Bible is in one respect startlingly original, in another it is very traditional. This is a theological, not a historical reading. Miles has returned biblical interpretation, in an ironic, sidelong manner, to its point of origin. The fathers of the Church viewed the Bible as a work without history. Given that all the books of Scripture shared a common origin in the eternal mind of God, any one could be used to shed light on any other. The whole was seen as an intricate system of allegory. Medieval Christians felt free, in Miles's words, "to explore the Bible . . . as if it were a wondrous garden, whose paths and glades and ponds and grottos all intersected in endlessly surprising and delightful ways".

The growth of historical scholarship in the 19th and 20th centuries shattered this innocence. The Bible was now seen as the purely human record of a superhuman history. Its authority, in other words, lay not in itself, but in its relation to an external reality. If that relation should prove fictitious, it was nothing more than an ancient manuscript. The onus was thus on believers to prove the historical veracity of the Bible, or at the very least to isolate a "kernel" of historically sound material from the surrounding husk of mythology. But the further that historical research progressed, the more difficult it became to make any such separation. No single verse of the Bible could with certainty be declared free of mythological taint. Historical criticism ended up in an "unedifying and rather dreary" morass of early church polemics. And it seemed unable to explain, given its own avowedly secular premises, why this particular ancient text was worth expending so much labour on.

Miles describes his own approach to the Bible as "literary". He is not concerned, in other words, with the historical personage who may or may not lie behind the gospel narrative; all that interests him is the character of Christ as he appears in the narrative itself. Miles compares the historical critic to a man peering through a stained-glass window. Reading the Bible for clues as to what "really happened", he has, in some pretty fundamental sense, missed the point.

But although Miles calls his approach "literary", he might as well have called it "theological". His deliberate bracketing of the historical question allows him to return, with a clean scholarly conscience, to the purely internal play of meaning that fascinated the early Church fathers. The literary stance recaptures, albeit from a knowing distance, the historical innocence of the first readers of the Scriptures. The Bible has once again become a "wondrous garden". Miles's own attitude to the Bible hovers ambiguously between aesthetic detachment and religious commitment, yet this ambiguity is felt not as an evasion, but as an honest acknowledgement of conflicting demands. He describes his approach, in a marvellous phrase, as one of "serious play". Perhaps all modern theology, if it is to be intellectually honest, must be conducted in such a mood of serious play.

Miles does not ignore history altogether. While leaving to one side the question of the historical truth of the New Testament, he happily applies his erudition to the task of working out what it means. A trained philologist, he demonstrates how exciting that apparently dry discipline can be. Simply by attending closely to the words on the page, he extracts new and unexpected meaning from the most cliched of texts. Take his reading of what is perhaps the most frequently quoted verse in the Bible: "Resist not evil: but whosoever shall smite thee on thy right cheek, turn to him the other also." This is usually interpreted, often with some embarrassment, as enjoining capitulation to evil. But, as Miles points out, it is the right cheek that is being slapped. That implies, assuming a right-handed attacker, a backhanded slap of the sort that a master might administer to a slave. For the slave to then turn his other cheek would be, far from passive submission, a bold gesture of defiance. This reading seems textually unimpeachable; it also accords more closely with the spirit of Gandhi and Martin Luther King.

To think theologically is to think in symbols. The biblical Christ lives and moves in the symbolic world of Jewish Scripture, a world in which Miles is also perfectly at home. Much of his book is taken up with explicating the symbolic dimension of passages that might, to an unsuspecting reader, seem purely historical. Christ's constant consorting with whores and adulteresses, for example, should not be read as evidence of a Victorian predilection for rescuing fallen women. The whore, in Old Testament prophecy, is a symbol of Israel's religious promiscuity. Yahweh is a jealous god, and will not permit his bride to consort with other deities. In forgiving whores and adulteresses, Jesus is symbolically foreshadowing the forgiveness that will later be extended to Israel as a whole.

But if Christ: a crisis in the life of God is an unabashedly theological reading of the New Testament, it is far from orthodox. Orthodox theology has always been somewhat embarrassed that God issued two testaments, the second in direct contradiction to the first. For if God is, as scholastic theology insists, timeless and omniscient, he cannot, as a matter of logical form, be permitted to change his mind. Theologians usually paper over the problem with vague references to the "unfolding" of truth. The New Testament is presented, in good Hegelian fashion, as the consummation of the Old.

Miles refuses to resort to any such conciliatory device. He insists, with childlike simplicity, that God has done precisely what he appears to have done: changed his mind. He has broken his promise to the Jews; though they have faithfully kept the law, he will not - indeed, he cannot - prevent the forthcoming destruction of their nation by the Romans. So he saves his face in the only way he can. He redefines the covenant in such a way that his refusal to save the Jews from military disaster will no longer appear a breach, and (to defuse accusations of double-dealing) takes upon himself the same suffering that will later be inflicted upon them. God had to die upon the cross because, as Camus suggests in The Fall, "he himself knew he was not altogether innocent".

Such a god, it is true, is no longer the God of orthodox Christian theology. He is not omniscient and omnipotent; he is not even free of sin. Miles has, as he admits in a note, revived the ancient Gnostic heresy according to which divinity and humanity save each other reciprocally. But his interpretation accords better with our spontaneous understanding of the biblical narrative than do the chilly formulations of the medieval church. It also expresses a certain moral logic. Breaking promises is not always a bad thing to do, especially in politics. No one now reproaches General Charles de Gaulle for breaking his promise to the pieds-noirs. Undying fidelity is the basic formula underpinning all fanaticism. Promises must sometimes be broken, Miles seems to be saying, if there is to be the possibility of new life.

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