Bloom (The Book of J) here tackles the characters of the Jewish and Christian gods: what god do we meet in Hebrew Scripture? Who is the Jesus of the New Testament, and does he bear any relation to the Jesus most Americans worship? Does, for that matter, the Hebrew Yahweh resemble the first person of contemporary Christians' Trinity? Bloom, as usual, skewers quite a few sacred cows: for example, he dismisses the quest for the historical Jesus as a waste of time, and says that Jewish-Christian dialogue is a "farce." Bloom's major points include his assertion that the Christian reading of Hebrew Scripture laid the groundwork for Christian anti-Semitism. and a nuanced discussion of the different ways Matthew, Mark and Luke present Jesus, his assertion that Bible translator William Tyndale anticipated Shakespeare, and his observation that, contra Marx, religion is not the opiate of the people but their "poetry, both bad and good."

Beautiful passages describing the god of the old testament, who is very human. Marred by Bloom's egotism and paranoid politics. ( )

Jonathan Rosen writes in his 11/27/05 NYTBR piece: "this is not a big book, but it is bursting with ideas and contradictions, discussions (and dismissals) of New Testament scholarship, accounts of Lurianic kabbalah, gnomic Nietzschean utterances and brilliant asides about the essence of American religion ... Bloom writes as if all Western literature were his private Talmud, turning and turning it to reveal hidden meaning, and taking the whole of it personally: the author of the gospel of John 'hates me and I respond in kind.'" ( )