From Jesus to Christ

To the Christians, no one is more important than Jesus of Nazareth. Yet how many of them know how the historical Jesus was transformed from a flesh and blood human being into the Christ of faith? It is even possible that perhaps Jesus himself may not be a Christian! This is the shocking conclusion of Harold Bloom, a non-orthodox Jew and sterling professor of Humanities at Yale University and author of 27 books. The conclusion was contained in a book bearing a totally uncontroversial title called "Jesus and Yahweh: the Name Divine"(2005).(JY)

In the book, he examines the relationship between Yeshua (the Jewish name of Jesus) of Nazareth, "a more or less historical person", Jesus Christ, "a theological God" and Yahweh (the tetragrammaton YHWH), "a human, all-too-human God." To Bloom, "Jesus Christ, and his putative father, Yahweh, do not seem to be two persons of one substance, but of very different substances indeed." Yahweh, according to Bloom, "from Philo of Alexandria to the present, has been allegorized endlessly" but is "sublimely stubborn, and cannot be divested of his human, all to human traits of personality and of character." Perhaps because Yahweh "appears to have chosen exile or eclipse, here and now or perhaps is guilty of desertion", he has been "pragmatically" replaced by a theological Christ, the Holy Spirit and the Virgin Mother Mary and "Yahweh either dwindles into a remote God the Father or blends into the identity of Jesus Christ" (JY 2). To him, Yeshua had been transformed into a theological God first by the New Testament and then less tentatively by Greek philosophy but the Yahweh of the primary texts had been "transmogrified by the Redactor's frequent reliance upon the Priestly Author and the Deuteronomist," and had "all but vanishes among the great normative rabbis of the second century of the Common Era: Akiba, Ishmael, Tarphon and their followers.".

To Bloom, everything that can be known about Yeshua comes from the New Testament or the Gospels (which to Bloom are never intended as biography but only as "conversionary inspiration" nor "history in our sense" JY 12) and allied or heretical writings, all of which he considers to be "tendentious" because they reach us through texts that he cannot trust and those who look for the historical Yeshua, "find themselves, and not the elusive and evasive Yeshua, enigma-of-enigmas" because every Christian he knows has her or his own Jesus. As he says, "Like Hamlet, Jesus is a mirror in which we see ourselves" (JY 12). "Jesus is to the Greek New Testament what Yahweh is the Hebrew Bible..: the vital protagonist, the principle of apotheosis, the hope for transcendence." (JY 13)..The only affinity of Paul ,the greatest promoter of Jesus with his Lord, is that like his master, he has become all things to all men, as Paul himself admitted. Jesus as Christ, is different in Eastern Orthodoxy, Roman Catholicism, normative Protestantisms (Lutheranism, Calvinism etc.) and numerous other sects.

Freud, who thinks that religion is an illusion, (The Future of an Illusion 1921) nevertheless thinks that the warrior God Yahweh of the Old Testament has been "civilized by Jewish remorse for the Jews' slaying of Moses" something which Freud "imagines". (JY 2). To Freud, "that civilizing, with all its cultural discomforts", is what he means by "monotheism", something which is "a repression that establishes a benign civilization, whilst polytheism is seen as a return to a Hobbesian state of nature, rendering life into something nasty, brutish and short."  To Bloom's way of thinking, both Judaists and Muslims thought that Christianity, with its Trinity, is a return to polytheism. "Despite the brilliance of Christian theology, culminating in Thomas Aquinas, the Trinity is a sublimely problematic structure, not only in separating the concept of person from that of substance, but also in its positing the Holy Spirit as a crucial third with the Father and the Son, upon very little New Testament evidence." (JY 3). Even in the Gospel of John, "Yahweh and Jesus are linked...but not fused."

Bloom thinks that as most Christians everywhere are not theologians, they tend to "literalize" doctrinal metaphors. "What is increasingly clear to me is that the emergence of Jesus-as-God pragmatically created what was to develop into Christian theology..., Jesus Christ was not Yeshua but a theological rather than a human God. The mysteries of the Incarnation, and the Resurrection, have little to do with the man, Yeshua of Nazareth, and surprisingly little to do even with Paul and John, as compared with the theologians who voyaged in their wake." " (JY 3) Yahweh "was and is the uncanniest personification of God ever ventured by humankind" but "he began as the warrior monarch of the people we call Israel...an exuberant personality and character so complex that unraveling it is impossible." (JY 5). The Yahweh that Bloom was referring to was the "Yahweh of the Hebrew Bible and not of the God of that totally revised work, the Christian Bible, with its Old Testament and fulfilling New Testament. Historicism, be it older or newer, seems incapable of confronting the total incompatibility of Yahweh and Jesus Christ" (JY 5-6)

To Jack Miles (God, A Biography 1996), "Yahweh began life in a kind of self-ignorance fused with total power and a high degree of narcissism." Then after "various divine debacles...Yahweh loses interest, even in himself." (JY 6) but Jesus, insisted "both on his own authority to speak for Yahweh and upon his own intimate relationship with his abba (father)" just like the other charismatic prophets of the Old Testament. But Yahweh was different from all the other gods of Canaan "by transcending both sexuality and death." (JY 6). Therefore Bloom could not understand "the conception of Jesus Christ as a dying and reviving God..The Incarnation-Atonement-Resurrection complex shatters both the Tenakh (An acroymn for three parts which make up the Hebrew Bible: the Torah ( Five Books of Moses), Prophets and Writings---and the Jewish oral tradition" because whilst he could understand Yahweh being in eclipse, desertion and self-exile, "Yahweh's suicide is indeed beyond Hebraism" (JY 6-7").

Bloom finds that no representation of God that he has read "approaches the paradoxical Yahweh of the J Writer" because no character's personality is "so rich in contraries". To him, Mark's Jesus is comparable to Shakespeare's Hamlet, Cervantes' Don Quixote and Homer's Odysseus and Ulysses. He agrees with Dennis R MacDonald's The Homeric Epics and the Gospel of Mark (2000) that "Mark's literary culture was more Greek than Jewish" but still Mark's God remains Yahweh whilst Matthew's Jesus was rightly described as "the Jewish Gospel." In Mark's Gospel, which might have been composed just after the destruction of the Temple in the midst of the Roman slaughter of the Jews, Bloom finds , like Miles, "bewildering mood swings" of Jesus and of Yahweh, comparable to that of Hamlet. Bloom opines that "we cannot know how much of Yahweh's character and personality was invented by the J Writer, just as Mark's Jesus to some degree seems to be an original. though doubtless informed by the oral tradition just as Yahweh was" (JY 8-9). Mark's dark Jesus "asserts authority, which sometimes masks wistfulness in regard to the will of Yahweh, the loving but inscrutable abba." (JY 8). Only in Mark's Gospel do we find a Jesus going through an all night agony because his death is near and he dies after uttering an Aramaic paraphrase of Psalm 22, an outcry of his ancestor David. Bloom thinks that "Doubtless the real Jesus existed but he never will be found, nor need he be. Jesus and Yahweh: The Name Divine intends no quest." (JY 8). Bloom suggests in the book that "Jesus, Jesus Christ and Yahweh are three totally incompatible personages" and he explains how and why this is so. What troubles Bloom most is Yahweh. He says "His misrepresentations are endless, including by much of rabbinical tradition, and by suppressed scholarship--Christian, Judaic and secular." To him, Yahweh "remains the West's major literary, spiritual and ideological character, whether he is called by names as various as Kabbalah's Ein-Sof ('without end") or the Qu'ran's Allah. A capricious God, this stern imp, he reminds me of an aphorism of the dark Heraclitus "Time is a child playing draughts. The lordship is to the child."

Bloom asks rhetorically, where we can find the meaning of Yahweh or of Jesus Christ or of Yeshua of Nazareth and answers: "We cannot and will not find it, and "meaning" possibly is the wrong category to seek": "Yahweh declares his unknowability, Jesus Christ is totally smothered beneath the massive superstructure of historical theology and of Yeshua, all we rightly can say is that he is a concave mirror, where what we see are all the distortions each of us has become." He concludes: "The Hebrew God, like Plato's, is a mad moralist, while Jesus Christ is a theological labyrinth, and Yeshua seems as forlorn and solitary as anyone we may know. Like Walt Whitman at the close of Song of Myself, Yeshua stops somewhere waiting for us."

Despite the enigma of surrounding Yeshua of Nazareth, the theological Jesus Christ and the almost powerful yet Hamlet-like Yahweh, Bloom finds that we still cannot ignore "the permanent power of texts that cannot vanish: Tenakh, New Testament, Qu'ran." (JY 236). As he says, Yahweh "has an awesome capacity not to go away, though he deserves to be convicted for desertion, in regard not just to the Jews but to all suffering humankind. Bloom admires Sam Harris' ( a neuroscientist and secular humanist)The End of Faith: Religion, Terror and the Future of Reason (2004) but does not agree with him when the latter asks for evidence for "literal existence of Yahweh". To Bloom, "Creator and destroyer, Yahweh stands remote from the inner cosmos of neuroscience. He contains, and cannot be contained. Reason is not an instrument for dislodging him, however admirably that might extend democracy and limit Muslim terror and American and Israeli counterterror or what could yet be the horror of Hindu-Muslim nuclear exchanges or of Israeli preemptive obliteration in Tehran. ...Yahweh, though evident only as a literary character, reduced us to the status of minor literary characters, supporting casts for the protagonist-of-protagonists in a universe of death. He mocks our mortality in the Book of Job: we are dramatically unpersuasive when we mock him, and self-destructive when, like Ahab, we harpoon Leviathan, king over all the children of pride." (JY 237)

To Bloom, "Yahweh sanctifies the tyranny of nature over women and men: that is the harsh wisdom of Job's tale. St. Paul, a Hebrew of the Hebrews, tells us the last enemy to be overcome is death. He thinks that skeptics may agree with Sam Harris's conclusion in his book, that "Islam...has all the makings of a thorough going cult of death" (123), Bloom says, "If Yahweh is a man of war. Allah is a suicide bomber." (JY 237) . But Bloom disagrees with Sam Harris view that "Nothing is more sacred than facts.". He prefers William Blake's opinion: "For everything that lives is holy." to Deuteronomy's Yahweh, "obsessed with his own holiness.". (JY 237). He understands man's search and longings for transcendence but thinks like Shakespeare, that the holy should be evaded, because even Shakespeare, the supreme artist, is "wisely aware of even his own reinvention of the human.". (JY 237-238)

Whilst Bloom distrusts every account available to us of the historical Jesus, he is unable to find any great identity between Yeshua of Nazareth and the theological Jesus Christ. He says, "The human being Jesus and the all-too-human God Yahweh are more compatible (to me) than either is with Jesus the Christ and God the Father" (JY 238) Yet neither does he trust in the Covenant between Yahweh and the Jews nor in Freud's interpretation of religion as a longing for the father nor in Sam Harris's reductive opposition of "the future of reason" to religious terror. He thinks that whilst "the need (or craving) for transcendence may well be a great unwisdom," without it, "we tend to become mere engines of entropy"(JY 238). To him, "Yahweh, present and absent, has more to do with the end of trust than with the end of faith." But "the American Jesus has usurped Yahweh,
and may yet himself be usurped by the Holy Spirit, as we fuse into a
Pentecostal nation, merging Hispanics, Asians, Africans and Caucasian
Americans into a new People of God." (JY 13) He ends the book by asking, " Will he yet make a covenant with us that he both can and will keep?"(JY 238)

This is a very unusual book. It considers Jesus not from the traditional point of view of the Christian faith but as a Jew, which Jesus certainly was and in the context of the search of the Jewish people, a long suffering people seldom with a nation of its own, for earthly and spiritual salvation. Their original God, the Yahweh was a very militant tribal God, faithful, powerful, jealous, severe and loving by turn but arbitrary, unpredictable and inscrutable and may have little to do with the Christian God, adopted and usurped from the Jews and has only a tortuous and unreliable relationship with the historical Jesus, the real Jesus, who is said to have lived on earth and who claimed a special relationship with Yahweh! The Jesus of the Christians is a literary creation, a mythical character, an invented personality to fit in with the needs of whatever faith community who happen to have adopted him as their protagonist and hero! That's why Jesus has so many faces! In thus portraying the Christ of faith  as a literary invention, I think that Bloom may have been influenced by Jack Miles' (a Jesuit) two books, Christ, a Crisis in the life of God( 2001) and his later book God a Biography (2004).