Sins of the Fathers. - Review - book review

National Review, March 5, 2001 by Daniel P. Moloney

Strong emotions led the mourners to pretend that an imaginary Jesus was still with them-"it was as if there were one more member than could be counted . . . the followers once again felt the presence of Jesus, were certain of it, were healed by it." The apostles fell into the habit of talking about Jesus as though he were still alive and with them. When later converts heard the same words, continues Carroll, they took them literally and believed Jesus to have risen from the dead. These later generations were the ones to write down the Gospels, which pinned responsibility for the death of Jesus on the Jews in an attempt to curry favor with the Romans.

After the Romans burnt the Temple in a.d. 70, the Jesus followers and the Pharisees found themselves the dominant surviving factions of Judaism. Since it was no longer possible to offer sacrifices as Mosaic Law indicated, these groups represented the only plausible ways of reinterpreting God's covenant with Israel. Their leaders drew bright theological lines so that everyone could tell these versions of Judaism apart, using rhetorical arguments with which future generations would justify murders, calumnies, and genocide. Because Jesus' message was rejected by Pharisees and found greater acceptance among Gentiles, Carroll contends, the evangelists prettied up Roman involvement in the death of Jesus to exaggerate the role of the Jews.

For roughly two centuries after the completion of the New Testament, however, Judaism was officially recognized by the Roman emperor while Christianity was not, and indeed was, from time to time, forced underground by local persecutions. All this changed in the year 312 when a young claimant to the imperial throne named Constantine saw a cross in the sky above the words In Hoc Signo Vinces ("In This Sign, You Will Conquer").

Constantine's troops were just outside Rome, awaiting the next day's battle at the Milvian Bridge, and their general made a promise to God that if he won that battle he would convert to Christianity and tolerate the Christian religion throughout the empire. He quickly had a new standard made-"a long spear, overlaid with gold, formed the figure of the cross by means of a transverse bar laid over it"-behind which his troops won a complete victory.

Constantine not only tolerated Christianity but actively strengthened it, and his successors made it the official religion of the empire. Constantine made the cross so central to the Christian story that it "replaced the life of Jesus and the new life of Resurrection at the heart of the Christian imagination." At this, writes Carroll, "the balance shifted decisively against the Jews," because the polemical exaggerations of the Christian scriptures had already blamed the death of Christ on the Jews. In several chapters, Carroll describes how the confluence of imperial power, majority status, and devotion to the Cross gave Christians the ability and incentive to persecute Jews (on occasion) in ways ranging from the burning of synagogues to the denial of government jobs. Carroll's story then jumps to the end of the 11th century, when Pope Urban II launched a crusade to take back the Holy Land from Muslim control, and St. Anselm of Canterbury finished his dialogue Cur Deus Homo ("Why God Became Man"). The linking of theology and violence-"the cross was ubiquitous on the breasts of warriors"-encouraged some Crusaders to knock down a few German synagogues on their way to fight the Moors. But it is Anselm, by all accounts a relatively peaceful man (it is to him that we attribute the custom of beginning even letters to strangers with the intimate salutation "Dear"), to whom Carroll attributes the final theological pillar of Nazism. Anselm's powerful theological vision emphasized that Jesus' freely chosen death was the only way God could fulfill the requirements of justice, namely that man's sins be punished, without also condemning all men to hell. Anselm "succeeded in bringing the notion of Christ's death as atonement to its fullest expression," Carroll writes, because it "explained the dominant religious experience . . . an atoning cross lent meaning to what life required in a brutish time."