morgannels blog

•

you're out of the woods, you're out of the dark, you're out of the night, step into the sun, step into the light

What Time Is It?

Harold Bloom has recently published Jesus and Yahweh: The Names Divine, which I’ve purchased, but haven’t read. Jonathan Rosen’s review in Sunday’s New York Times (forgive me, I’m still catching up from my week away) suggests that it’s as fascinating as I had hoped it would be when I got it. It focuses on the intersection of literary criticism and religious thought, an old theme of Bloom’s, one Rosen describes Bloom addressing in a class that Rosen took at Yale twenty years ago called “Counter-Normative Currents in Contemporary Jewish Literature”:

…which included moderns like Freud, Kafka and Babel but began with “the Yahwist,” author of the oldest strand of the Hebrew Bible. Suddenly, being a Jewish writer wasn’t just for post-Enlightenment Johnny-come-latelies, but an ancient birthright. This notion was given bolder expression in a lecture I heard Bloom deliver about how the New Testament was a “weak misreading” of the Hebrew Bible… Bloom punningly referred to the New Testament in Hebrew as “Brit haHalasha” (“weak covenant”), instead of “Brit haHadasha” (“new covenant”).

And then there’s this Jewish lament about Christianity, one my wife has been giggling about since she read the review on Sunday:

Christianity stole our watch and has spent 2,000 years telling us what time it is.

I have nothing to add to that. I’m looking forward to the book. I hope it’s as amusing and provocative as the review.

2 responses to “What Time Is It?”

  1. Anne Penkill Avatar
    Anne Penkill

    This is on my definite to-buy list. Bloom is a favorite of mine. Let us know your thoughts when you’ve read it. I also linked the NYT review and had a good chuckle over the watch joke.

    Like

    Reply
  2. morgannels » Blog Archive » It’s Not the End Time

    […] I’ve read the first half of Harold Bloom’s Jesus and Yahweh: The Names Divine, his meditation on the figure of Jesus, and found him at his incisive, dyspeptic best in his critique of what he finds in New Testament that’s not Jesus: For Paul, the Resurrection, or Christ event, proclaimed the death of Torah: since the end of all existence was very near, moral law became irrelevant. Two thousand years after Paul, it is a little bewildering to absorb what cannot be termed a mere delay in finalities. …I am not impressed when scholars argue that James and Paul subtly can be reconciled. Martin Luther’s anti-Semitic diatribe against James counts far more: he reacted with fury to the Epistle’s “a man is justified by works and not by faith alone” (2:24), a manifest repudiation of Paul’s “a man is justified by faith and not by works” (Romans 3:28). However one judges the New Testament, whether as literature or as spirituality, it is historically the most totally successful makeover ever accomplished. Since Christians worldwide now outnumber Jews by more than a thousand to one, you could assert (if you wished) that the New Testament rescued the Hebrew Bible, but you would be mistaken. Christians have saved their Old Testament… …about a third of the New Testament is Pauline. Between his priority, his centrality to the text, and his reinvention of much of Christianity, Paul is its crucial founder. Yeshua of Nazareth, who died still trusting in the Covenant with Yahweh, cannot be regarded as the inaugurator of a new faith. Can anyone like Paul? Only my dedicatee, Donald Akenson, shows a wry affection for the Apostle in Saint Saul (2000), pointing out accurately that Jesus Christ, in the Gospels, has become a divinity, while Paul “is a jagged, flawed, and therefore totally convincing human being.” …George Bernard Shaw compared Paul to Karl Marx, finding in each a fantastic builder of error that exiled all moral responsibility. That seems about right to me. Yahweh and Israel, Paul implies, will work out the Chosen People’s Redemption. Did Paul, who must have died still expecting Christ’s return, really believe that Israel would accept Christ at that moment? I have no answer, except that Paul’s Messiah certainly has little in common with what the Jews expected, since they awaited a victorious warrior. But then his Christ also has not much in common with Yeshua of Nazareth, in any of his Gospel versions, even in John. Paul’s delusion (what else could you call it?) is that he lives in the End Time. Yeshua of Nazareth, descendant of David, habitually addressed Yahweh as father (abba), but stopped short of reducing Yahweh to the single attribute of being “our father who art in heaven.” That reduction is Christian, and Yeshua, as we ought never to become weary of recognizing, was not a Christian, but a Second Temple Jew loyal to his own interpretation of the Law of Yahweh. Above all, Yeshua was not a Trinitarian, a statement at once obvious yet also shattering in its implications. […]

    Like

    Reply

Leave a reply to morgannels » Blog Archive » It’s Not the End Time Cancel reply