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195 of 209 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
A challenging but worthwhile read, October 21, 2005
This review is from: Jesus and Yahweh: The Names Divine (Hardcover)
Harold Bloom is almost overly frank about his personal predispositions throughout this book. He lets us know--repeatedly--that his religious leanings are toward a sort of gnostic, non-Covenental Judaism. And he admits that his ambition--through most of his 70-odd years--has been to read both the Jewish Bible (Tanakh) and the Christian Bible not only well, but also for himself. This book is the product of what can only ever be an unfinished project, since the greatness of the Jewish and Christian scriptures keep them always before us.
Bloom's favorite characters in all of literature, in descending order, are Yahweh (of the Tanakh/Old Testament), Jesus (of the New/Belated Testament), and Hamlet. There is no shortage of reverence and amazement for Jesus and Yahweh in this book.
The subject matter of this book necessarily precludes any attempt to artificially break it down into neat categories and packages. In other words, attempting to formally outline this book would be a harrowing experience. Bloom's writing wanders and trips and backtracks. But Bloom never lets key themes slip through the cracks: it's the first book I've ever read where I genuinely appreciate how repetitive it sometimes becomes. By returning to an underdeveloped theme several times in various contexts, we come to understand the rather nuanced and complex conclusions Bloom is trying to explain.
Some critics have labeled this book self-defeating, but only because they misread it. These critics claim that Bloom asserts that everyone winds up seeing only themselves when they look at the person of Jesus Christ. That's not at all what Bloom says. The book's approach is as a character study of 3 fascinating characters: the historical Yeshua (Jesus, in Greek) of Nazareth; the divinity his followers either realized him to be or made him into, Jesus the Christ; and the God of the Hebrew scriptures, Yahweh. Bloom points out what should be painfully obvious to anyone who has read much in the subject: the so-called Quest for the Historic Jesus is a doomed enterprise. All extant texts about Yeshua of Nazareth are heavily proselytizing documents, intended to win people over to their set of beliefs rather than to create an accurate historical record. Because there is so little to work with in trying to uncover the "historical Jesus," most of the work consists of deciding which words, sentences, or authors to trust. It's a highly subjective process, and one in which the searcher is bound to reveal more to us about himself than about Yeshua of Nazareth. Because the enterprise is so flawed and suspect, Bloom hardly spends any time at all on the historical Yeshua; instead, he moves quickly on to the characters we find in the literary bodies of the Jewish and Christian Bibles.
Bloom has not set out to write a polemic, and I don't think he has written one. He longs to discover what has happened to the ancient Yahweh of the Tanakh he reveres so deeply (and whom Jesus--for Bloom the greatest of Jewish geniuses--also deeply revered). Compared to this longing, he doesn't really seem to care much at all about getting us to agree with his conclusions.
That said, the core conclusion of Bloom's book is that the Christian New Testament constitutes the greatest misreading in the history of literature. "Greatest" because its various authors are genuinely brilliant in how they bend the Hebrew scriptures to align with their new Christ the Messiah, and a "misreading" in that it considers itself to be the fulfillment of the "Old Testament" even though it frequently gets the Tanakh just plain wrong. Bloom is inclined to refer to it as the "Belated Testament" when he points out how the New Testament's turning of Yahweh into the tame, vague God the Father is a disappointing neutering of the most complex and enigmatic character in all of Western (indeed world) literature.
Because this is not a direct attack on Christianity and because of its high degree of complexity, Christian readers will not be able to quickly duck and run into the shelter of the typical gang of apologists--Josh McDowell, Ravi Zaccharias, etc. Instead--and here is the true value and genius of this book--"Jesus and Yahweh" will send you diving for your Bible--perhaps in different translations than you're accustomed to--to read it anew, in a deeper, broader, and more astute way.
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29 of 31 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
Chatting with a Scholar, February 12, 2006
This review is from: Jesus and Yahweh: The Names Divine (Hardcover)
Bloom's latest book (he's written more than 20 over a period of 40+ years) is a casual discussion of Jesus, Christ, and Yahweh. When I say "casual", don't get me wrong. This is not a coffee table book or a book for beginners. It is an incredible discussion by a top scholar of the interrelationships between 3 critical figures, but as a discussion it is more casual than it is scholarly (e.g., there are no footnotes, no index, no bibliography, etc). I would recommend this book to people with some background information about (at least 2 of) the 3 principles, yet a beginner also will find it enlightening.
I am especially drawn to this book because Bloom agrees with me on some unpopular ideas about Jesus (e.g., he was in his 40s when he died, the Gospel of John reflects anxiety about the failure of the 2nd coming to come, the synoptic gospels are "conversionary inspiration", Josephus had his own agenda and isn't the neutral historian many people consider him to be, etc.). Of course, many of Bloom's ideas are not so non-traditional (e.g., Mark's gospel is the closest to the "real Jesus", biographers of Jesus read themselves into his life, etc).
The book has no real organization, and he drifts back and forth between various themes. In most books this would be a negative, but in Bloom's hands the transitions are seamless and beneficial. Another positive aspect of this book is Bloom's breadth of scholarship. He is at home discussing Freud, Shakespeare, Whitman, Plato, Spinoza, Goethe, etc. He wanders from gnosticism to judaism to christianity to marxism.
Here are some quotes...
"I distrusted throughout this book every account available to us of the historical Jesus, and I have been unable to locate much of an identity between the Jew from Nazareth and the theological God Jesus Christ." (p. 238)
"Freud's identification with Moses helps make Moses and Monotheism into one of the strongest of his more fantastic writings..." (p. 4)
"He came not to abolish but to fulfill the Law, however fiercely St. Paul, Martin Luther, and many since have labored to misapprehend the subtlest of all teachers, whose ironies transcend even those of Plato's Socrates." (p. 130)
Enough said. This book belongs in any serious scholar's library.
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105 of 131 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
Bloom lets us overhear him talking to himself....., October 22, 2005
This review is from: Jesus and Yahweh: The Names Divine (Hardcover)
The fundimental challenge to reading this book is that in order to get it, you first have to read a lot of other books. Really, it is probably only barely humanly possible to read as many books as it would take.
I'm sure that many Bloom fans will pick up this book and wonder where he's gone! I can sympathize--Confessions of a reviewer; I've only read enough other books to catch glimpses, as it were out of the corner of my eye, of what Bloom is talking about here.
OK, lets get out of the way the inevitable comparison of this book to Bloom's earlier "Book of J". One of the things which makes "Book of J" so much more accessible is that in includes not just Bloom's commentary, but also a new translation of J itself, in one handy package This makes it easy to bounce back and forth between Bloom and J, and so its much easier to understand and absorb Bloom's abrupt insights. But a similar didacticism would be impossible for this book--the only way to do it would be to just put it on a shelf in the Library of Congress.
But this book really shouldn't be compared to "Book of J". A much better comparison would be to the Gospel of Mark, which it bears resemblance in its literary technique and its "insider" outlook.
First literary technique: Other reviewers have commented that Bloom seems to be randomly bouncing around among topics. But recall, the Gospel of Mark is famous for just the same thing! In the course of a few sentences, Jesus is baptised by John, driven into the wilderness, comes back, and starts proclaiming the Kingdom of God. Why this rapid cutting between scenes? Why these big gaps between sentences? Is Mark out of his mind? No--Mark realized that the best way come to grips with Jesus is to -leave- the gaps--because the reader will be forced to bridge those gaps to make any sense of the story. Its the _active_ mental act of bridging the gaps which Mark knows is necessary to really "get" who Jesus is. These gaps create such an imperative to be filled that both the authors of Luke and Mathew wrote books to fill them! And the fact that they both filled the gaps differently from each other creates another gap for us to bridge.
Bloom is doing similar things in this book. Many times, he'll string two sentences together, and to my unread mind, they have no connection with each other. Sometimes I can bridge the gap, sometimes I can't. But when I can--wow. I wonder what it would be like to be able to bridge all the gaps in this book.
This book also resembles Mark by its "insider" outlook. Recall how the Gospel of Mark begins--it doesn't start out by saying "Jesus was a guy who lived in palestine.." or by any description of who Jesus was--Mark's audience already knew who Jesus was, and apparently knew many other mysteries which Mark doesn't tell us about. We're supposed to be insiders by the time we read Mark. Similarly for Bloom's book--he just baldly assumes many things which we're already supposed to know. Bloom creates gaps which only the congnoscendi can bridge. If I live long enough, I'll review this book again--perhaps by the time I'm 74 I have read enough....
This is a book which Bloom didn't write for us--its a book he wrote for himself. We can only be grateful that he's letting us overhear him talking to himself.
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