By Jack Miles. Just as good as God: A biography. Even the epilogue and the appendices, on his process and the field of literary criticism of the Christian Bible itself, are good reading.
Repentance in the Greek of the Gospels is metanoia, a changing of the mind. The changing of the mind of God is the great subject, the epic argument, of the Christian Bible. Having blighted his own work and cursed his own image with misery and mortality, God faced an immense challenge. He had to restore his masterpiece. He had to redeem those whom he himself had exiled from paradise. For his own sake and not just for theirs, he had to recover the lost crown of his creation.