Jesus and Yahweh: The Names Divine

IN THE book Jesus and Yahweh:  The Names Divine, Sterling Professor Harold Bloom (Yale), a Gnostic Jew, offers an arduous attempt in deciphering how the Church’s Jesus displaced, not only the authentic Jesus of Nazareth, but also Yahweh [the God of the Moses] who “retreated to the remnants of Jewry, until he returned as the Allah of Islam.”

 Book Excerpt

Jesus and Yahweh:  The Names Divine

Written by James Bloom

Published by Riverhead Books, NY, 2005

 Selected by Linda “iLham” Barto

 Sterling Professor Harold Bloom (Yale), a Gnostic Jew, offers an arduous attempt in deciphering how the Church’s Jesus displaced, not only the authentic Jesus of Nazareth, but also Yahweh [the God of Moses] who “retreated to the remnants of Jewry, until he returned as the Allah of Islam.”  Bloom expounds on the mystery of the Trinity while, he explains, “making clear my admiration for its imaginative and cognitive splendor, even as I wonder at its audacity and outrageousness.” 

The agony of Bloom’s own soul lies exposed on every page as he tries to understand a God who, according to Bloom, “suffers fiercely from any ingratitude, and is desperately jealous, crosses over to insanity during the forty years of leading the Israelites through the Wilderness, in the crazy trek from Egypt into Canaan.”  Floundering in his spiritual confusion and dismay, Bloom states that God “has been a personal disaster for Moses from the start,” and, with regret, Bloom suggests that God is “a disaster for his champions more often than not.”  Bloom describes Yahweh as “mischievous, inquisitive, jealous, and turbulent,” but recognizes that “Allah’s dignity does not permit such descents into human vagaries.”

Bloom’s main purpose for writing the book, however, is to show the outrageous although remarkably efficient rewrite that the Church has made of the Tanakh (the Jewish Bible).  Bloom writes with literary genius and powerful dignity.  (The following excerpts are not necessarily in order as they appeared in the book.)

“The New Covenant necessarily founds itself upon a misreading of the Hebrew Bible.  Yet the power of Christian translators, particularly Jerome and Tyndale, has obscured the relative weakness –aesthetic and cognitive— of the Greek New Testament in its agon with Tanakh.  Even if Mark were as powerful a writer as the Yahwist, there could be no contest, since Torah (like the Qur’an) is God, whereas the entire argument of the Belated Testament is that a man has replaced Scripture.  ….

 “…all of the New Testament is obsessed with its anxious relationship to the Law and the Prophets, and seeks to resolve a complex anguish resulting from that overwhelming influence, by the strongest and most successful creative misreading [of the Bible] in all of textual history.  The Qur’an is the nearest rival I know.  ….

“Historically, both the New Testament and the Qur’an have pragmatically eclipsed the Hebrew Bible, but these successes are neither aesthetic nor necessarily spiritual, and Yahweh may not yet have spoken his final word upon this matter.  We all know that history rides with the big battalions and, for a time, favors those who win the big wars, but history is an ironist almost of Jesus’ genius, and the signs of an apocalyptic war between Christendom (to call it that) and Islam are now omnipresent.  ….

“A pragmatic separation between Yahweh and Jesus widens, and Yahweh has not survived in Christianity, but only in the Allah of Islam.  The dying God has also turned out to be Yahweh, not Jesus.

“All gods age, Yahweh included, though his dying may not prove to be final, since Islam could yet prevail.”