harold bloom on jesus and yahweh

nov 29th

bloom clearly does not believe in the mythology of jesus christ. i like the way he dismisses josephus flavius, as i have mentioned before the *only contemporary historian* who even mentions jesus christ in passing, as a 'non-stop liar'. the dead sea scrolls recovered at kirbat qumran generally show that most of what is attributed to jesus christ was already well-known to the essenes a couple of centuries before the alleged birth of jesus christ.

For Bloom, Jesus and Jesus Christ are two entirely unrelated figures, and Bloom spends the first half of the book exploring their incompatibility. Jesus is the Jew Yeshua about whom no verifiable facts are knowable. What we do know, aside from a few scraps from Josephus ("wonderful writer and non-stop liar"), is contained in unreliable works written "almost entirely by Jews in flight from themselves, and desperate to ingratiate themselves with their Roman overlords and exploiters." By this Bloom means the New Testament, which he also refers to as "the Belated Testament."

bloom claims that there was a jew named jesus. maybe, but he claims (and i would tend to agree) that person has nothing whatsoever to do with the jesus christ of the paulist bible.

http://www.nytimes.com/2005/11/27/books/review/27rosen.html

also, interesting comments bloom makes about good old yahweh, the jealous demiurge whom his mother was scolding all the time:

He is the "man-God" who appears to Joshua with a drawn sword, the jealous, zealous, hungry, hands-on deity who makes Adam out of a mud pie, picnics with the elders on Mount Sinai, chooses Moses and then, with irrational outrage, tries to kill him as he travels back to Egypt. This God made the redactors of the Hebrew Bible so uncomfortable that he was gradually papered over, displaced by priestly sources and the Deuteronomist, and then finally done in by the rabbis of the Talmud, whom Bloom clearly admires, and in some ways even resembles, though he finds their recasting of God as the merciful, covenant-keeping Lord of monotheism a betrayal of the rough, irrefutable reality that Yahweh represents.