About the Judeo-Christian "tradition":
It is absurd to talk about a Judeo-Christian tradition. I say this in spite of the political good that this does for the State of Israel or the remnant of Jewry. Nevertheless, it is an absurd fiction. There is no Judeo-Christian tradition. There cannot be. What is at the heart of the book is a very grim fact: As you and I talk to each other at the moment, we are in a cosmos in which there are one-and-a-half-billion people who call themselves Christians. One-and-a-half-billion people who call themselves Muslims. There are 14 million self-identified Jews. That takes care of Yahweh on the one hand, and that takes care of—since we're outnumbered a thousand to one by each—that takes care of.... ah, never mind. I don't want to say the obvious. That's part of the problem with this book. To say the transparently clear and plain gives offense.
About the Old Testament Jehovah:
There's a kind of scamp in there. But he also goes violently crazy as he leads the Israelite host in that ridiculous, mad 40 years [of] wandering through the wilderness, trekking back and forth. He gets crazier and crazier and the poor things get crazier and crazier. One of my favorite passages in the book is what I am talking about—the ridiculous attempt on the part, first, of the neo-Platonizing Jews like Philo of Alexandria, and then later the high rabbinical sages, to get rid of what they might call the anthropomorphic element and say he isn't a man, he isn't a human, he doesn't do certain things, since it's made very clear that he's walking down the road frequently, that he's picnicking, that he's doing this, that, and the other thing, that he's burying Moses with his own hands, he is closing the door of the Ark with his own hands, and so on.
Concerning "who" Jesus is:
As for Jesus, there isn't any single Jesus. There are Jesuses and Jesuses and Jesuses and Jesuses. Indeed, here in the United States, it seems to me that every professed Christian has her or his own Jesus, just as every supposed scholar in that mad, quixotic quest (rather pathetic) for the historical Jesus, they always come up with a reflection of themselves in a concave mirror, a kind of distorted image of themselves.