Bearing False Witness

Debunking Centuries Of Anti-Catholic History

Rodney Stark

• Publisher: SPCK Publishing
• Year: 2017
• Print ISBN: 9780281077748
• eBook ISBN: 9780281077755
• Topic: Theology & Religion
• Subtopic: Christian Denominations

The following historical statements all appear in well-established textbooks, and have become part of our common culture. Which of them would you say are true?* The Catholic Church incited and actively colluded in nearly two millennia of anti-Semitic violence, and Pope Pius XII is still rightfully known as 'Hitler's Pope'.
* Only recently have we become aware of ancient and remarkably enlightened Christian gospels, which narrow-minded Catholic authorities tried to suppress.
* Once in power as the official Church of Rome, Christians quickly and brutally persecuted paganism out of existence.
* The fall of Rome and the ascendancy of the Church precipitated Europe's decline into a millennium of ignorance and backwardness, which lasted until the Renaissance.
* Initiated by the pope, the Crusades were but the first bloody chapter in the history of unprovoked and brutal Christian colonialism.
* The Spanish Inquisition tortured and murdered huge numbers of innocent people for 'imaginary' crimes, such as witchcraft and blasphemy.
* The Catholic Church persecuted and tried to suppress scientists such as Galileo, and the Scientific 'Revolution' therefore occurred mainly in more tolerant Protestant societies.
* Being entirely comfortable with slavery, the Catholic Church did nothing to oppose its introduction in the New World, or to make it more humane.
* Until very recently, Catholicism's hierarchical view of the ideal state has resulted in its bitter resistance to all efforts to establish more liberal governments and its eager support for right-wing dictators.
* It was the Protestant Reformation that broke the repressive Catholic grip on progress and ushered in capitalism, religious freedom and the modern world. In this powerful and persuasive book Rodney Stark subjects these and other widely-held beliefs to a rigorous historical assessment. He gives a compelling account of how each of them became accepted as the conventional wisdom, how egotism and ideology often worked together to create false or highly distorted pictures of people and events, and how we need to work hard to recover the truth if we're to undo the cultural damage that centuries of anti-Catholic history has done.

Sins of Anti-Semitism

1

“For centuries, persecution of the Jews was justified in the name of God. The inspiration for the medieval ghettos and for the bloody pogroms of history was provided by the doctrine that the Jews had murdered Christ and thereby provoked God’s eternal wrath and punishment.”1

That is the first paragraph of a book I published many years ago. It seems appropriate to begin this chapter by explaining how I came to write it.

During my first year of graduate school at Berkeley, I was recruited by the director of the Survey Research Center to work on a major research project devoted to studying anti-Semitism, funded by the Anti-Defamation League of B’nai B’rith. I was soon assigned to that portion of the research devoted to the effects of Christian teachings on negative beliefs and feelings about Jews. Although I had not yet even earned my master’s degree, I soon took primary responsibility for designing and executing major public opinion surveys devoted to this topic, analyzing the results, and writing the book Christian Beliefs and Anti-Semitism.

Not surprisingly, the data showed that there was a significant link between belief and prejudice—those American Christians who blamed “the Jews” for the Crucifixion were also more likely to accept standard anti-Semitic stereotypes of the Jews as avaricious, cheap, clannish, unethical, and unpatriotic. Consequently, before I had completed a draft of the book, I was asked to prepare a brief summary of the findings to be distributed to the bishops attending Vatican II—the remarkable Ecumenical Council convened by Pope John XXIII in 1962. According to Cardinal Augustin Bea, as quoted in the New York Times,2 that summary of mine played a significant role in producing the council’s statement on the Jews (Nostra Aetate), which read:

True, the Jewish authorities and those who followed their lead pressed for the death of Christ; still, what happened in His passion cannot be charged against all the Jews, without distinction, then alive, nor against the Jews of today. Although the Church is the new people of God, the Jews should not be presented as rejected or accursed by God, as if this followed from the Holy Scriptures. All should see to it, then, that in catechetical work or in the preaching of the word of God they do not teach anything that does not conform to the truth of the Gospel and the spirit of Christ. Furthermore, in her rejection of every persecution against any man, the Church, mindful of the patrimony she shares with the Jews and moved not by political reasons but by the Gospel’s spiritual love, decries hatred, persecutions, displays of anti-Semitism, directed against Jews at any time and by anyone.

I was very pleased that the council had acted, and was proud to have played any part in bringing it about. However, at that time I was far too unsophisticated to appreciate the many subtleties in the council’s text, and I lacked sufficient historical background to realize that there really wasn’t anything new here—that the Church never had taught that the Jews were outside God’s love. And it was many years before I became aware of the extent to which the Catholic Church has stood as a consistent barrier against anti-Semitic violence, albeit Christians who attacked the Jews often justified their actions on religious grounds. My awareness of these matters grew as I worked on different aspects of ancient and medieval history—in one instance writing a long analysis of all known outbursts of anti-Semitic violence in both Europe and Islam, spanning the period 500 through 1600.3 Eventually, this work forced me to reconsider the entire link between Christianity and anti-Semitism.

Keep in mind that through the many centuries there have been a huge number of Roman Catholic clergy—some of them saints, some of them opportunists, some of them devout, some of them corrupt, many of them ignorant, a few of them atheists, and even an occasional howling lunatic. Not surprisingly, some of these clergy did believe that God hated all the Jews, and even a few may have gotten involved in outbursts of anti-Semitic violence. But, as will be seen, such views and actions did not have official standing and did not reflect the normal behavior of Catholic clergy toward Jews. To the contrary, the clergy often defended local Jews from attacks, sometimes risking their own lives by doing so.

Inventing Anti-Semitism

Let’s begin at the start: many contemporary scholars charge that the Church originated anti-Semitism.4 The celebrated feminist theologian Rosemary Ruether has even claimed that “the church must bear a substantial responsibility for a tragic history of the Jew in Christendom which was the foundation upon which political anti-Semitism and the Nazi use of it was erected.”5 Jules Isaac struck the same chord: “without centuries of Christian catechism, propaganda, and vituperation, the Hilterian teachings, propaganda, and vituperation would not have been possible.”6 And, according to Robert T. Osborn, “Christians have been anti-Jewish and anti-Semitic, apparently from the beginning.”7

These charges are based on passages in the New Testament that attack the Jews for rejecting Christ and for persecuting Christians, although all of the scholars who believe that the Christians invented anti-Semitism know that deep hostility toward Jews existed long before the birth of Jesus. Perhaps because of their antagonism toward the early Church, scholars dismissed what the ancients sometimes felt toward the Jews as merely “antipathy.”8 It did not amount to anything lasting and basic, such as what might be called anti-Semitism, but was momentary, arising entirely from political conflicts such as the Maccabean Revolt. In fact, these negative feelings toward Jews were only “sporadic,” mere “isolated pockets of distemper.”9 In contrast, they claimed real anti-Semitism was deep and abiding, something entirely new introduced by Christianity and born of Christian arrogance and ambition. If this were so, then many leading Roman intellectuals must have been secret Christians!

It was the great Roman philosopher and statesman Lucius Annaeus Seneca (4 BCE–65 CE) who denounced Jews as an “accursed race”10 and condemned their influence. It was Marcus Tullius Cicero (106–43 BCE), regarded as the greatest Roman orator, who complained that Jewish rites and observances were “at variance with the glory of our empire, [and] the dignity of our name.”11 It was the esteemed Roman historian Cornelius Tacitus (56–117 CE) who railed against the Jews because they “despise the gods” and called their religious practices “sinister and revolting.” Not only that, according to Tacitus, the Jews had “entrenched themselves by their very wickedness” and they sought “increasing wealth” through “their stubborn loyalty” to one another. He remarked: “But the rest of the world they confront with hatred reserved for enemies.”12 I am unable to detect how Tacitus’s complaints differ from standard modern anti-Semitism as it usually is defined and measured.

Nor was it only a matter of words. The Jews were expelled from Rome in 139 BCE by an edict that charged them with attempting “to introduce their own rites” to the Romans and thereby “to infect Roman morals.”13 Then, in 19 CE, Emperor Tiberius ordered the Jews in Rome to burn all their religious vestments and assigned all Jewish males of military age to serve in Sardinia to suppress brigandage, where, according to Tacitus, “if they succumbed to the pestilential climate, it was a cheap loss.”14 In addition, all other Jews were banished not only from the city, but from Italy “on pain of slavery for life if they did not obey,” as told by Paulinus Suetonius (c. 71–135 CE).15 In 70 CE, Emperor Vespasian imposed a special tax on all Jews in the empire, thereby impounding their contributions that had been made annually to the temple in Jerusalem. And in 95 CE, Emperor Domitian executed his cousin Flavius Clemens and “many others” for having “drifted into Jewish ways,” as Cassius Dio (163–229 CE) put it.16

Even so, the Romans did not invent anti-Semitism. There are several surviving versions of an account of an expulsion of lepers and undesirable foreigners from Egypt that parallel the Exodus. These accounts have been interpreted by some scholars as the first appearance of anti-Semitism. There also are quite hostile treatments of the Jews as godless misanthropes, written in the first century BCE by Greeks, including Didorus Siculus (c. 90 BCE–30 BCE), Strabo (c. 63 BCE–24 CE), and Apion (20 BCE–45 CE), who even accused the Jews of ritual cannibalism.17

Clearly, then, anti-Semitism did not arise from the conflict between Christians and Jews as to the divinity of Jesus. Rather, it stemmed from the intense commitment that exclusive religions invariably generate among their adherents and the hostile responses this commitment provokes among outsiders. As the distinguished E. Mary Smallwood put it, Jewish “[e]xclusiveness bred unpopularity, which in turn bred anti-Semitism,”18 just as Christian exclusiveness subsequently bred Roman antagonism toward them too. In fact, not only were Jews and Christians persecuted by Rome, but so were some exclusive pagan faiths, including congregations devoted to Isis and to Cybele (Magna Mater).19

With the demise of these pagan faiths and the rise of Christianity, anti-Semitism was the only one of these ancient prejudices to survive. But unless one believes that the Church was the only channel of cultural transmission, there is no reason to suppose this legacy of pre-Christian anti-Semitism did not live on in Western Civilization—probably often linked to definitions of Jews as religious outsiders, but not dependent on that linkage. That is, antagonism toward Jews probably had a life of its own, rooted in classical times and sensitive to continuing Jewish exclusiveness. For example, the New Testament does not portray Jews as wealthy misers, but this image was as central to the medieval hatred of Jews as it was to Tacitus and his fellow Romans. In addition, of course, is the anti-Semitism inherent in the theological conflict between the two faiths.

Early Religious Conflict

There are a number of harsh, fearful, and hostile references to Jews scattered throughout the New Testament. One of the most incendiary and most frequently cited of these is the passage in Matthew 27:24–26: “So when Pilate saw that he could do nothing, but rather that a riot was beginning, he took water and washed his hands before the crowd, saying, ‘I am innocent of this man’s blood; see to it yourselves.’ Then the people as a whole answered, ‘His blood be on us and on our children.’ So he released Barabbas for them; and after flogging Jesus, he handed him over to be crucified.”20

Other examples include:

‣Matthew 23:37: “Jerusalem, Jerusalem, the city that kills the prophets and stones those who are sent to it.”

‣John 5:16–18: “Therefore the Jews started persecuting Jesus, because he was doing such things [curing a sick man] on the sabbath. But Jesus answered them, ‘My father is stil...

Table of contents

• Introduction: Confronting Spurious History
• 1. Sins of Anti-Semitism
• 2. The Suppressed Gospels
• 3. Persecuting the Tolerant Pagans
• 4. Imposing the Dark Ages
• 5. Crusading for Land, Loot, and Converts
• 6. Monsters of the Inquisition
• 7. Scientific Heresies
• 8. Blessed Be Slavery
• 9. Holy Authoritarianism
• 10. Protestant Modernity
• Postscript
• Notes
• Bibliography and Recommended Reading
• Illustration Credits
• Search terms