Harold Bloom's new book, Jesus and Yahweh: The Names Divine, is reviewed by Jonathan Rosen in tomorrow's New York Times.
It was interesting to read about what Rosen describes as "the radical difference between the Hebrew Bible and the Old Testament":
A key difference, Bloom notes, is that the Hebrew Bible ends with II Chronicles and the "heartening exhortation to 'go up' to Jerusalem to rebuild Yahweh's Temple."
The reconfigured "Old Testament" ends with the minor prophet Malachi prophesying the return of Elijah, a lead-in to the Gospel of Matthew.
Other excerpts:
I never thought I would hear a professor publicly proclaim - at Yale, no less - the great, private Jewish gripe that in layman's terms might be expressed: Christianity stole our watch and has spent 2,000 years telling us what time it is. * * *
Jesus Christ, as opposed to Jesus, is a later theological construct that owes a great deal to Hellenic thought.
Christ, for Bloom, is a betrayal of Jesus the man, Yeshua, who clearly[:]
- lived inside a Jewish world,
- trusted in the covenant with Yahweh,
- did not think the Law was death,
- and would be appalled at, or at least entirely baffled by, the religion created in his name.
Jesus belongs on one side of the Judeo-Christian divide, Christ on the other.
(Emphasis, bullets, and extra paragraphing added.)
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