Jesus and Yahweh: The Names Divine by Harold Bloom
My rating: 5 of 5 stars

Mixing Metaphors Is Dangerous Business

Theology, Harold Bloom recognises, is a style of poetry, mostly bad and often dangerous, especially when it starts up-ending established metaphors. Christian theology presents itself as commentary on foundational texts called the Bible. But these foundational texts are also poetic; they are theology not uninterpreted description. This is something which causes consternation to the theologians who wish to 'stabilise' sacred scriptures by fixing their meaning in order that theological thought can move on.

Literary criticism in the hands of a master like Harold Bloom breaks through the limits imposed by the discipline of theology. Specifically, literary criticism ignores theological intention. It doesn't care about faith or foundational texts. All texts are derivative. All texts are infinitely interpretable. The text, its characters, the coherence of its plot, its stylistic merits are the phenomena of interest, not its purported referent, God.

The question that Bloom poses is therefore literary: How does the mischievous, slightly insane character of Yahweh, one of the Hebrew divine names, become the sedate, unseen, somewhat redundant God the Father and his stand-in, Jesus the Christ, of the New Testament?

From a literary perspective, Yahweh is the supreme fiction created by any civilisation, anywhere, at any time. The only rival, according to Bloom, is Shakespeare's King Lear, who is clearly modelled on him. Yahweh is the protagonist of the Tanakh, the Hebrew Bible, but not of the Christian Old Testament, which has high-jacked Yahweh as a character and re-cast him entirely.

The co-optation of Yahweh was possible because of the poetic nature of scripture. The dominant trope in theology is metaphor. Metaphors are malleable. Twist one component and the relationship among terms shifts in myriad ways. Yahweh of the Tanakh is a warrior, a somewhat irascible, often needy entity, who comes and goes without explanation. During his period of guiding the Israelites through the desert to the promised land he appears to go a little mad. He stands, sword in hand with Joshua at Jericho and directs the destruction of thousands of innocents from time to time. This is the God, Yahweh, of irony and hyperbole.

Shift the emphasis from war and unpredictability to unlimited power, however, and there is a totally transcendent entity with only the most distant relationship with his creation. Re-interpret petulant jealousy as fatherly concern and frustration with his children, we then have an intense regal love which is constant. Understand that apparent mass murder is part of a grand master plan and the bloodshed is subsumed within an eternal mystery in which we must maintain faith. This is God the Father of the Christian Trinity, a God of omnipotence, omniscience, and of total impassivity. Not the character Yahweh. Different play. Different script.

This poetic process of metaphorical transformation applies equally to the person of Jesus. Bloom counts at least seven different Jesuses in the New or, as he prefers, Belated Covenant. Jesus is, among others, the pious Jewish man who continues the traditions of the Tanakh as suggested in the Epistle of James. He is visibly transformed through the mysterious and ambiguous metaphor Son of God in the gospel of Mark. And most dramatically he is cast as the overwhelmingly metaphoric Word, the eternally present companion of God in the gospel of John.

This last metaphor is sufficiently powerful to replace even the Tanakh itself as the focus of worship. Bloom is quite explicit in his appreciation of the intent: "The entire argument of the Belated Testament is that a man has replaced scripture." And not just scripture: Jesus’s remark “Before Abraham was I am” is a clear literary dig at Yahweh himself who self-identified in the Tanakh as ehyeh asher ehyer, “I am Who am.”

The literary process reaches another local high point in the gospel of John. As Bloom correctly notes, "There is very little basis in the Synoptics [the gospels of Mark, Matthew, and Luke] for the runaway Christianity [and anti-Semitism] of John....The central irony, for anyone who is not a Christian believer, is that the living Jesus of the Synoptics does NOT believe he is the Incarnation of Yahweh, and least of all at the moment of his death..." Thus there is a great deal of necessary back-filling theologically speaking, which will continue for several hundred years.

This process of literary transformation is triggered by Paul of Tarsus, a Jew who had never met Jesus but created a movement in his name. Jesus of Nazareth is entirely replaced by Paul with Jesus Christ, who is not to be known but simply 'believed on.' He has neither biography nor history that we can rely on.

As the protagonist of the New Testament Jesus Christ eclipses, or upstages, God the Father. The script laid out by Paul doesn't even have the Father in a walk-on part. Paul in fact conducts a very forceful aesthetic war, not against Yahweh whom he dares not attack, but against the vulnerable Moses, his go-to guy.

In Paul's hands Moses doesn't even rate second-billing. He's yesterday's news. Paul mis-quotes where he can and slanderously mis-interprets where he can't. Bloom can't resist Frederick Nietzsche's take on Paul:

"Paul is the incarnation of a type which is the reverse of that of the Saviour: he is the genius in hatred, in the standpoint of hatred, and in the relentless logic of hatred...What he wanted was power: with St. Paul the priest again aspired to power."

Bloom's own opinion of Paul is only slightly less heated: "Paul is an obsessed crank, who confuses anyone attempting a dispassionate stance toward him."

Bloom's objective in the book is to demonstrate that Jesus of Nazareth, Jesus Christ, and Yahweh are three totally incompatible literary personages. That he succeeds is without doubt. He leaves the theological implications of this incompatibility largely to the reader.

Addendum

The day after posting this review an interesting academic pre-quel showed up in my internet feed. Although written from a theological not a literary perspective, it confirms Bloom's hypothesis of the metaphorical development of the idea of Yahweh out of the previous names of God in the ancient Middle East:

http://journals.sagepub.com/doi/abs/1...

This is the abstract:

It is often taken for granted today that the differing terms for God in the Hebrew Bible function as synonyms, although, originally, not all terminology used for God referred to the same deity. This article provides an overview of the terms El, Yahweh, and Elohim, which are all equated today, and a hypothetical reconstruction of when these terms came to prominence in Ancient Israel. After plotting and considering the contribution of each term to the development of monotheism in Israel, which ultimately laid the foundation for Judaism, Christianity, and Islam, the following analysis considers some of the ensuing implications for communities of faith today when relating to their differing faith traditions.

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