Born in Chicago, Jack Miles was a Jesuit seminarian from 1960 to 1970, studying at Xavier University in Cincinnati, the Pontifical Gregorian University in Rome and the Hebrew University in Jerusalem before completing a doctorate in the department of Near Eastern Languages at Harvard.[1] He is fluent in several languages.

Over a period of nearly twenty years (1975–95), Jack Miles was an editor at Doubleday, the executive editor at the University of California Press, the literary editor at The Los Angeles Times, and a member of the Times editorial board, writing on politics and culture.

Jack Miles has been a Mellon visiting professor of humanities at Caltech, the director of the Humanities Center at the Claremont Graduate University, a Regents' Lecturer at the University of California, Irvine, a visiting fellow with the Committee on the Conceptual Foundations of Science at the University of Chicago, and scholar in residence at the Getty Research Institute.

Currently senior fellow for religious affairs with the Pacific Council on International Policy and general editor of the forthcoming Norton Anthology of World Religions, Jack Miles became, in 2008, Distinguished Professor of English and Religious Studies at the University of California, Irvine. He lives in Southern California with his wife, Jacqueline, a psychologist. Their daughter, Kathleen, graduated from Berkeley. He is a practicing Episcopalian.