Constantine's Sword

The Church and the Jews, A History

James Carroll

• Publisher: Mariner Books
• Year: 2002
• ISBN:
  9780547348889
• Topic: Theology & Religion
• Subtopic: History of Christianity

The "monumental" New York Times bestseller in which a Catholic explores the problem of anti-Semitism through Church history ( The Washington Post ).

A Los Angeles Times Best Book of the Year and a New York Times Notable Book

In this "masterly history" ( Time ), National Book Award-winning author James Carroll maps the profoundly troubling two-thousand-year course of the Church's battle against Judaism and faces the crisis of faith it has provoked in his own life as a Catholic.

More than a chronicle of religion, this dark history is the central tragedy of Western civilization, its fault lines reaching deep into our culture. The Church's failure to protest the Holocaust — the infamous "silence" of Pius XII — is only part of the story: the death camps, Carroll shows, are the culmination of a long, entrenched tradition of anti-Judaism. From Gospel accounts of the death of Jesus on the cross, to Constantine's transformation of the cross into a sword, to the rise of blood libels, scapegoating, and modern anti-Semitism, Carroll reconstructs the dramatic story of the Church's conflict not only with Jews but with itself. Yet in tracing the arc of this narrative, he implicitly affirms that it did not necessarily have to be so. There were roads not taken, heroes forgotten; new roads can be taken yet. Demanding that the Church finally face this past in full, Carroll calls for a fundamental rethinking of the deepest questions of Christian faith. Only then can Christians, Jews, and all who carry the burden of this history begin to forge a new future.

"Carroll discusses the history of Christian-Jewish relations honestly, touchingly, and personally…Carroll investigates his own prejudices as a believing Christian, a former Catholic priest, and a long-time civil rights activist. As he unearths history (using all the best sources), he also encounters emotions he didn't realize he had and shows how his historical journey was also a personal pilgrimage of faith."— Booklist

"A triumph."— Atlantic Monthly

56

Agenda Item 1: Anti-Judaism in the New Testament

“HOMO SAPIENS is the species that invents symbols in which to invest passion and authority,” the novelist Joyce Carol Oates once commented, “then forgets that symbols are inventions.”¹ The first followers of Jesus were no less human than the rest of us, and we saw that this is more or less what they did. Recall that after Jesus died, his friends quickly came to understand him in Jewish apocalyptic terms, expecting him to return soon, ushering in the End Time. This is why, for example, Paul counseled his readers to forgo marriage, not because he was antisex but because so little time remained that procreation, an ultimate investment in the open future, had ceased to have meaning. The assumed imminence of Christ’s return informed the first Christians’ readiness, even eagerness, to offer their lives as martyrs. The cult of martyrdom and apocalyptic longing go hand in hand.

It may help to review here what we saw before. The first true crisis facing the Jesus movement was that its first generation began to die off without seeing the return of the Lord. The Second Coming had proved to be not nearly so imminent as expected. What did it mean, in light of this new experience, to say that Christ’s Kingdom had already been established? All at once, this became a pointed question, since whatever else that Kingdom was, the Jews who identified with Jesus assumed it involved a liberation of Israel from the oppression of Rome. Around 70 C.E., of course, Rome’s oppression intensified, with the destruction of the Temple, which compounded the Jewish-Christian crisis of faith. Throughout these years, his followers were telling each other the story of Jesus, in terms taken in part from his biography as they knew it and in part from the Scripture. We saw that the seed of Christian Jew-hatred was planted here, with the old set against the new, with Jews defined as the enemy not only of Jesus but of God, and with Judaism defined as the religion that had outlived God’s covenant. Thus the story, especially the core of it known to us as the Passion narrative, was, in Oates’s term, “invented.” We saw how the Seamless Robe of Jesus featured in this sacred exercise of imagination.

But after the crisis of the Temple’s destruction, after the followers of Jesus had begun to adjust to the obvious fact that the Lord’s return was not imminent, and after the expressly “Jewish” character of the movement was changed by the loss of the cult center of the Temple and by the influx of Gentile converts, the followers “forgot” that the Passion narrative was invented. Since Jesus had not returned, they had to do something the first generation had never expected or sought to do, which was to create an apologetic kerygma, or Jesus story, designed to bolster the faith they had in Jesus, both as a way of reassuring each other through the period of crises and as a way of explaining what they believed of Jesus to others, whom they now had to recruit to the movement.

It was at this point that the details of the narrative that had their origins not in the historical life of Jesus but in the Jewish Scriptures were reimagined as “facts.” Now the Seamless Robe of Jesus, say, was understood as having actually existed, and the “facts” of its seamlessness and of the centurions’ having rolled dice for it were understood as “fulfillments” of the Jewish Scriptures in which those details had first appeared. This perception was pressed into service of the apologetic impulse, and all at once the details of the Passion narrative and the pattern of Jewish “foreshadowing” and Christian “fulfillment” became understood as proving the claims that followers of Jesus were making for him. Such proof would have been unthinkable in the first years after the death of Jesus, not only because the invented character of the story was so well known, but because proof was unnecessary in any case, since Jesus was coming back so soon.

Once the story of Jesus took this shape, its rejection by other Jews—who themselves were responding to the trauma of the destruction of the Temple—had unprecedented bite. Recall that, in this post-Temple period, only the synagogue-based movement generally associated with the Pharisees had survived to compete with the Jesus movement for the legacy of Israel. When these rabbinic Jews, who were building their identity around the Scriptures, rejected the claims being made by the Christian Jews, the Christians felt threatened because those same Scriptures functioned as their proof. This conflict found its way into the second, third, and fourth iterations of the story Christians were telling each other and newcomers, which is how the Pharisees came to be pressed into service as the main antagonists of Jesus, even though they had been no such thing.

As Christians died, the excruciating death of Jesus took on a meaning, in isolation from his message and life, that it had not had at first. In Luke, Jesus says to the men on the road to Emmaus, “O foolish men . . . Was it not necessary that the Christ should suffer?”² Of course, this is not the voice of Jesus but that of his followers, confronted years later with the problem of how to make sense of the suffering they themselves were undergoing. Surely it was suffering at the hands of Rome, as ever. But even more, at the level of meaning they were so desperately clinging to in that traumatic time, it was suffering at the hands of their fellow Jews who alone could call that meaning into question. So as Christians felt themselves and their movement to be mortally challenged by the refusal of their fellow Jews to affirm their messianic understanding of Jesus, it was a small step to lay the actual death of Jesus at the feet not so much of Rome as of these rejecting Jews. Christians accounted for the rejection they were experiencing by making a version of that rejection—“his own people received him not”³—central to the experience of Jesus, not just in his Passion but throughout his life.

In this way, by the time the text of the last Gospel is written, “the Jews” are defined as the ontological enemy of Christ. In a contest with antagonists at first identified in John as “Pharisees,” but then as “the Jews,” Jesus is remembered as saying to them, “You are from below, I am from above . . . but now you seek to kill me, a man who has told you the truth which I heard from God . . . If God were your Father, you would love me . . . Why do you not understand what I say? It is because you cannot bear to hear my word. You are of your father the devil, and your will is to do your father’s desires. He was a murderer from the beginning, and has nothing to do with the truth, because there is no truth in him. When he lies, he speaks according to his own nature, for he is a liar and the father of lies.”⁴ Jews are cast as the devil. But still—and this remains crucial—it is mainly Jews who are saying so.

If the first followers of Jesus, whom we called the healing circle, had in their grief invented the first draft of the story in part out of the Jewish Scriptures, subsequent generations invented third and fourth drafts out of what they had already heard, but also out of their own experience. The literary genre that came out of this complicated, profoundly human process of invention is not history, nor is it fiction precisely. It is, rather, gospel, and in addition to its being profoundly human, it is profoundly Jewish, for the creative interaction between inherited sacred texts and mundane experience is at the heart of what might be called the Midrashic imagination. The violence of human experience has often been reflected in the works created by such imagination, and the anti-Jewish polemic of, say, John, because of its character as a Jewish invention, stands comparison with the “troubling texts” that imbue the Jewish Scriptures with blood, from those slaughtered firstborn male children in Egypt to the Canaanites driven from Palestine.⁵ When the anti-Jewish polemic of John, and the entire New Testament, is read outside the context and in ignorance of the Jewish community that produced it, the words become truly lethal.

The tragedy built into this process is the one Oates identified, namely, that people—especially those Gentiles who had no knowledge either of Jewish Scriptures or of the ways Jews used them—forgot that the Gospel was invented. They forgot not only that it was invented in its details, but that it was invented in its structure. Here we begin to see why Nostra Aetate did not go nearly far enough, and what a Third Vatican Council must begin to take up. Yes, the damage done to Jews by the slanderous assertion that they, more than the Romans, put Jesus to death has been incalculable, and as a first order of business that slander has to be repudiated. But the role of “the Jews” as villains in the climactic act of the Passion narrative comes right out of the dramatic structure of the kerygma itself, which puts Jesus in ontological conflict with his own people—a conflict, as I argued throughout Part Two of this book, of which he would have known nothing. The primal Christian slander against Judaism, rooted in the foundational Christian text, is that Judaism is Christianity’s negative other. It is not enough to absolve Jews of the deicide. Is it possible to ask if the entire structure of the Gospel narrative can be criticized as being unworthy of the story it wants to tell?

Similarly with the basic framework of New Testament–Old Testament, which gives form to the Christian construct of salvation history. According to that scheme, Israel’s prophetic “foreshadowing,” which is by definition insubstantial and inferior, is contrasted with the Church’s “fulfillment” as the new Israel, or, more polemically, the “true Israel.” Although we cannot assume that Jews and Christians will ever approach the Scriptures in the same way, surely Jews have a right to ask: Must the Christian understanding of the very structure of God’s Word include the derogatory “replacement theology”⁶ that is so often found in the New Testament? When the wrath of an Old Testament God is “replaced” with the love of a New Testament God—and this formulation remains basic to Christian preaching—how can Jews not take umbrage at the insult to the Jewish heart such a contrast implies and at the distortion of the fundamental proclamation of Torah, which is God’s love?

Throughout the book we have referred to this habit of mind by its technical term, supersessionism, and a number of Christians, aware of what it can lead to in the post-Holocaust era, have sought to repudiate it. Nostra Aetate’s attempt amounted to a first, tentative expression that cried out for elaboration, which, in subsequent commentaries, various officials have tried to supply.⁷ Such scholars as the Lutheran Krister Stendahl insist, with similar sensitivity to consequence, that it is wrong to read Saint Paul, as Christians often have, as defining the Church, either in his own life or in history, as a replacement for Israel.⁸ “I ask, then, has God rejected his people?” Paul wrote toward the end of his life. “By no means!”⁹

Thus the Church seeks increasingly to affirm, against a dominant Christian tradition, that God’s covenant with Israel has never been repudiated. If that is the case, what is the relationship of the “new covenant” of which Jesus speaks at the Last Supper¹⁰ to the preexisting covenant God had made at Sinai? Are there two covenants? Separate but equal? Or, if there is one covenant, how do these two divergent experiences of it mesh? As we saw, some scholars insist that what Jesus, if he used such language, would actually have been talking about was the “renewed covenant” referred to in Jeremiah,¹¹ but Jews can still detect in that formulation, offered from outside Judaism, an assumption of replacement. The German Jesuit biblical scholar Norbert Lohfink proposes a single covenant but “a twofold way to salvation,”¹² but the very idea of salvation introduces the question of whether Jews are subsumed in a Christian covenant in the afterlife, which amounts to a postponed religious imperialism. In other words, after nearly two thousand years of reading such texts in one way, we have barely begun to imagine how to read them in another.

It is impossible to imagine that the members of a new Vatican Council could return to the early second century and undo what was done after Marcion—the “tragic mistake,” as some scholars call it, of the formalizing of the New Testament canon, which institutionalized, from the Christian side, the split between Judaism and Christianity. The road not taken then might have led to a religious collaboration between evolving rabbinic Judaism and nascent Christianity, with some kind of mutual notion of the one covenant, binding both currents to the broader stream of the one Israel. But only in science fiction do people get to relive such choices and follow such roads to other, wished-for outcomes. There is no changing the fact, in other words, that Christianity and Judaism are separate religions, each with distinct integrity that the other must respect. But by recalling that this real outcome, which after all was imagined neither by Jesus nor by Paul, was the result of contingent human choices made in response to accidents of history, the members of Vatican III could understand that no purpose of God’s was served by the “parting of the ways,” and that no conclusions about the superiority of one religion or the other should be drawn from it. Furthermore, Vatican III must affirm in the clearest terms what has so far been indicated only obliquely, at the level of theology, not official Church teaching—namely, that while Judaism exists without essential reference to Christianity, the reverse is not the case. The God of Jesus Christ, and therefore of the Church, is the God of Israel. The Jews remain the chosen people of God. The Jewish rejection of Jesus as the Son of God is an affirmation of faith that Christians must respect.

The task of Vatican III will be to reorder the Church’s relationship to the “troubling texts” that deny all of this. There is no question of simply eliminating them, nor of rewriting them to purge the Epistles and Gospels of what the contemporary ear finds offensive. To some extent, translations can properly soften the edges of the anti-Jewish polemic, substituting, for example, “the leaders” for “the Jews” as the protagonists at the crucifixion, but it would be a mistake to do more to let the Gospels off the hook. Indeed, their offensive character is part of what the Church must learn not only to admit but to claim. The anti-Jewish texts of the New Testament show that the Church, even in its first generation, was capable of betraying the message of Jesus, establishing once and for all that “the Church as such” can sin. The Church as such stands in need of forgiveness. The Church must therefore preach the anti-Jewish texts of the Gospels—not against the Jews, but against itself.

In doing such a thing, the Church would be true to its oldest tradition. Christianity has inherited its theological method from Judaism, and that method, perhaps despite itself, is self-critical because biblical faith is self-critical. The prophetic tradition—the prophet Nathan, say, criticizing King David himself—is only the most obvious manifestation of this method, but it is constant. Biblical faith, that is, contains within itself the norms in terms of which biblical faith confesses to having continually fallen short. The Christian problem here, in other words, is a Jewish problem. And the solution is Jewish too. That the first followers of Jesus violated his message by slandering their rivals, even demonizing them, establishes better than anything else that the Church, at its core, is as sinful as any other institution.

Therefore, we must have a structure of understanding that enables Christians to read the foundational texts not as divine, as if partaking in the perfection of God, but as invented, to use Oates’s word again. That God’s Word is “inspired” does not mean it is free of self-contradiction or of tragic consequences. Surely the wonder of inspiration lies in God’s use of the inherently flawed medium of the word in the first place. The sin to be repented of, and resisted, is the sin of forgetting that God’s Word is human. Much contemporary biblical scholarship assumes this. Vatican III must make the work of such scholarship more widely available in the Church, which means that Christians must be called to a more sophisticated relationship to God’s Word. So when they hear the Passion narrative read during Holy Week, they must be helped to hear it not as history but as gospel. To the extent that the texts involve more hate than love, they must be proclaimed as a revelation also of the flawed nature of those who created them. That proclamation of a flawed Gospel, created by flawed believers, leads to what is, after all, good news—that the one whom the Gospel proclaims is the one who will return again to bring this flawed beginning to its completion.

Vatican III, against the long Church tradition of claiming already to be in possession of the fullness of truth, must renew the Christian expectation that there is more to come, exactly because the Kingdom of God is unfinished. Among Jews such an expectation informs messianic hope, but among Christians it takes the form of faith in the Second Coming of the Lord. The measure of this desire is our own present need for it, and the effect of it is self-transcendence. The need for this perspective becomes clear in a study of history such as we have undertaken here. The obvious flaws of a Church that has so readily given itself over to hatred reveal the ways in which the “already” is simply not enough. Any Christian proclamation that says that salvation, redemption, grace, perfection, whatever you call it, has already come is unbelievable on its face. It is also unchristian, because it denies, in the Catholic theologian David Tracy’s phrase, “the overwhelmingly ‘not-yet’ actuality of history itself.”¹³ A Church that believes it is “as such” incapable of sin—exempt...