Douban: Jesus and Yahweh

Harold Bloom has written about religion and the Bible throughout his career, but now, with Jesus and Yahweh, he has written what may well be his most explosive, and important, book yet.

There is very little evidence of the historical Jesus-who he was, what he said. As Bloom writes, "There is not a sentence concerning Jesus in the entire New Testament composed by anyone who ever had met the unwilling King of the Jews." And so Bloom has used his unsurpassed skills as a literary critic to examine the character of Jesus, noting the inconsistencies, contradictions, and logical flaws throughout the Gospels. He also examines the character of Yahweh, who he finds has more in common with Mark's Jesus than he does with God the Father of the Christian and later rabbinic Jewish traditions. Bloom further argues that the Hebrew Bible of the Jews and the Christian Old Testament are very different books with very different purposes, political as well as religious.

Jesus and Yahweh is a thrilling and mind-opening read. It is paradigm-changing literary criticism that will challenge and illuminate Jews and Christians alike, and is sure to be one of the most discussed, debated, and celebrated books of the year. At a time when religion has come to take center stage in our political arena, Bloom's shocking conclusion, that there is no Judeo-Christian tradition-that the two histories, Gods, and even Bibles, are not compatible-may make readers rethink everything we take for granted about what we believed was a shared heritage.

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