Harold, Jesus and Yahweh

Harold Bloom must be the most quotable literary critic on the Biblical block. In his recent Jesus and Yahweh : The Names Divine he pushes everyone's buttons. Mark Twain would be proud of him.

There are no verifiable facts about Jesus of Nazareth.

Josephus, a superb liar...

[T]he Gnostic sayings of Jesus in the Gospel of Thomas ring more authentically to me than the entire range of utterances attributed to him in the Synoptic Gospels and in the very late Gospel of John. There is not a sentence concerning Jesus in the entire New Testament composed by anyone who ever had met the unwilling King of the Jews...

And that's just from the three pages that constitute chapter 1!

Later Bloom describes the New Testament (which he also terms the "Belated Testament") as "the strongest and most successful creative misreading in all of textual history" and "historically the most totally successful makeover ever accomplished."

He doesn't mean that as a compliment!

On Paul: "he is an obsessed crank..."

On Christian theologians in general: "A literary critic must begin by observing that New Testament scholarship manifests a very impoverished notion as to just what literary allusion is or can be."

And: "I find it ironical, nearly two thousand years after St. Paul accused the Jews of being literalizers, that the leading scholars of Christianity are hopeless literalizers."

He also raises some fascinating questions. Why, for example, do the rabbis overlook the "I am who I am" (ehyeh asher ehyeh) text of Exodus 3? This is a hugely significant statement in Christian theology (especially thanks to Augustine), yet it barely raised a rabbinical eyebrow until Maimonides.

The first half of the book especially, on Jesus, is provocative, and perhaps one-eyed, but at the same time a delight, whether ultimately you agree or disagree. The second half is a little more dense, at least for those of us clueless about kabbalah. Not being a huge fan of Shakespeare I also found the references to Hamlet and his kin that occur throughout the book a little tiresome, but on balance this is a very readable book from a literary critic (not a group known for simple prose) and full of insight.