.:: Book Review of CONSTANTINE'S SWORD
CONSTANTINE'S SWORD: THE CHURCH AND THE JEWS
Reviewed By Fr. Michael Hallford
James Carroll’s recently published book, "Constantine’s
Sword: the Church and the Jews" sets out as its central
argument the direct connection between the Jewish
genocide and Constantine. The book argues emphatically
that the Church’s foundational texts, the Gospels, the
writings of St. Paul and much of the early apologetics of
the Christian faith are inherently anti-Semitic and for the
Christian Church to do penance for its bitter history of
Jewish persecution, it must come to terms with the truth
of its past and must rediscover the real Jesus Christ amid the
lies of its apologists.
It would be easy as an Orthodox believer to simply
dismiss this work for its obvious intellectual dishonesty
and its blatant misrepresentations of history. But as a
winner of a national book award, it was well received
amongst those who pass for the intellectual and academic
elite, and it represents the current so-called modern
rethinking of Christ, a reinterpretation which has
found its fullest expression in the “Jesus Seminar”
whose founder John Dominick Croissan, James Carroll
freely quotes and glowingly praises throughout the
book. “We must separate the Christ of History from
the Christ of Faith,” James Carroll argues, and
through four hundred pages he argues who this really
was, and he bears no resemblance to the Christ of our
Church.
The book opens with a trip James Carroll made to
Auschwitz and the controversy surrounding a cross
placed there by Polish Catholics.He says that the Cross
itself is a symbol of anti-Semitism, and a tremendous
affront to the Jews who died there. He explains his
own childhood as an Irish Catholic, his eventual ordination
as a priest, and then his own falling away from
the Church, all laid out as a metaphor for his growing
awareness of what he believes the Church has done to
the Jews. He argues that his spiritual awakening
forced him to discard the traditional doctrines about
Christ in favor of a more enlightened and more historical
view of whom Christ really was, all of this of
course based on a selective reading of historical documents
and profound embracing of a Judeocentric view
of history.
Eusebius of Caesarea, in his History of the Church
outlines and confirms all the important historical details
about Christ, verifies the reliability of the Gospel
accounts and demonstrates the continuity through the
first three centuries of the central facts of the Gospel
accounts. Carroll blatantly denies all this. He challenges
the veracity of the Gospel accounts of the Crucifixion.
He denounces the accusation of Jewish complicity
in the death of Jesus Christ as anti-Semitic fabrications
and he sees the root problem of anti-Semitism
inherent within the words of the Bible itself.
The Jews had nothing to do with the death of
Christ, he repeatedly says throughout the book, and to
lay any blame beyond the Romans, who crucified
Christ because of his political crimes, is to become collaborators
with every killer of Jews throughout the
centuries. Nazism and the Jewish genocide were made
possible, he says, because the Church was already inherently
anti-Semitic, and he calls upon the Church to
abandon its terrible past and admit that everything the
Church has believed about Christ has been self-serving
lies. This is the message Carroll repeatedly strives to
emphasize and it is couched as a warning to those who
might think otherwise.
It is certainly beyond the scope of this review to
deal with a point- by -point refutation of every claim
made against the Church by Carroll in his book. One
could argue based on historical documents the veracity
of the Gospel accounts. Carroll argues that the
Gospels were written thirty to fifty years after the facts
and are therefore unreliable, but one cannot have it
both ways: Carroll’s book and the works of his co-conspirators
are written substantially later than the events
they describe - by his own logic they should be even
less reliable. He fails to take into consideration that
there could have been other factors beyond Christianity
that led to the Jewish genocide. Hitler and his inner
circle were avowed pagans. What role did these
beliefs play in the murder of Jews? Also, Carroll’s considering
the Latin Church as normative Christianity,
from an Orthodox perspective is even more problematic.
Yes, the Latin Church was anti-Semitic, but it was
also anti-Orthodox, anti-Protestant, anti-new world. It
has been a Church founded on a principle of conquest
and subjugation, and one can perfectly understand his
rejection of its ethos.
John Chrysostomos, Ambrosias of Milan, and other
Orthodox fathers wrote treatises against Judaism,
not because they had animosity towards the Jewish
race, but because they saw Judaism as a false religion.
They were men who believed vehemently in the veracity
of the Scriptures, and the truths codified in the decisions
of the Ecumenical Councils. Carroll readily
adopts a Judaic vision of history, which sees Christianity
as its chief enemy to overcome. One can easily see
Carroll’s own disappointment with the Latin Church
in the way he presents the history of the Church.
Judaism and Christianity both make claims
about absolute truth.
The Church believes the creator of the world became
a man, was crucified and rose from the
dead. The old covenant was replaced by the new.
The Messiah that Moses and the Prophets predicted
found its fulfillment in Christ;Carroll argues that the
rejection of these claims by Jesus Christ’s own people
invalidates them. Carroll argues this is the scandalous
truth that has been the cause of anti-Semitism: the
Church could never accept that the Jews had rejected
its claims about Christ and for this reason the Jews are
hated. This embrace of a Judeocentric vision of history
is the central thesis of his book. The central argument
of Carroll, which is the primary argument of all
the revisionist historians of Christianity, is that Christ,
the God/man is a creation of the Church, and more
importantly a creation of Constantine the Great
through the decisions of the First Ecumenical Council.
However, his thesis is flawed and untrue.
There is no scarcity of historical information about
the life of Jesus Christ. Numerous writings about
Christ outside of the New Testament are still extant,
including the writings of the Apostolic Fathers, from
Clement of Rome writing almost contemporaneously
with the Gospel of John, through the Apologists of the
mid second century. Critics such as Dominick Croissan
simply ignore these writings, and they ignore evidence
of the scriptures themselves that bear testimony to the
eyewitness accounts of our faith. St. Paul writing no
more than ten years after the events, comments extensively
about how the faith is built on eyewitness testimony,
there is such a huge crowd of witnesses, and he
comments that over five hundred individuals witnessed
Christ resurrected, and St. John begins his first
Epistle citing “what we have seen with our eyes and
heard with our ears and touched with our hands.” The
whole theory that Carroll espouses about how the
Gospels are “prophecies historicized” can only be sustained
in an absence of the testimony of so many witnesses.
The Gospels were written to bear testimony to
the truth that had been first told orally. Anyone who
reads St. Luke’s prologue to his Gospel will come away
with a clear understanding that the witnesses first testified
to what they saw and heard and only later did
they finally commit the oral message to a written form.
What Carroll and his cohort of revisionists propose is
a massive conspiracy, perpetrated as an intentional deceit,
to take events which never happened and pretend
as though they had, to take the Jewish scriptures and
create stories based on certain prophesies. And what
do they offer as evidence of this fraud: the fact that
rabbinical Judaism has rejected the Gospels. He presents
Talmudic Judaism as the final arbiter of history.
Thus, he says, if the remnant of one sect of Judaism,
the Pharisees, did not acknowledge these events as
true, then they obviously must be false. Christianity has a
problem, he proposes in several
places in the book: if “Jesus was in fact the Messiah,
why did his own people reject him” He ignores
the ample historical evidence of the Jewish expectation
of a different kind of messiah. Two unsuccessful
rebellions against Rome were predicated on
precisely such a messiah. Simon Bar Kochba the
leader of the second disastrous rebellion, was declared
by the leading rabbis of his time as the
promised messiah and he only led his people into ruin.
Carroll conveniently ignores this fact as well as other
historical references. It is not within the scope of this
review to critique rabbinical Judaism, or to argue the
striking dissimilarities between rabbinical Judaism and
the Judaism practiced before the destruction of the
Jewish temple. However, it is important to come to an
understanding of the underlying motive of Talmudic
Judaism in advocating against the historical veracity of
the Gospels.
With the acceptance of Christianity as the official
faith of the Greco-Roman world (Romiosini), Talmudic
Judaism was presented with an untenable situation.
The Messiah that the rabbis had rejected had
now become the God of the empire, and from a religious
and political standpoint, Judaism faced tremendous
social pressure to conform. In this aspect, one
can feel tremendous sympathy for the Jews, and denounce
any personal hatred for them as a people because
of their rejection of Christianity. The numerous
examples of anti-Semitic hatred cited in Carroll’s book
are indeed a blight against Christianity, but what Carroll
fails to understand is that the treatment of the
Jews under the Latin Church and then under the
Protestants is more of a reflection of the Western
Christian ethos and not indicative of the treatment of
the Jews under Eastern Orthodoxy. John Chrysostomos
wrote against the Judaizers, as he called them, because
he believed them to be practitioners of a false
religion, not out of any personal animosity to the Jewish
race. He wished to correct them in what he saw as
their false understanding of history. He would have
found the treatment of Jews under the medieval Papal
yoke unacceptable, and the Jewish genocide cannot be
seen as acceptable under any interpretation of Christian
Dogma. Christ called on his followers to love their
enemies and to pray for those who persecute them.
With understandable revulsion, Carroll catalogues
numerous examples of appellations of Jews as “Christ
killers.” He cites examples of such attributions in the
liturgical traditions of both the Orthodox East and the
Papal West, but he obviously does not understand the
context in which they were written. The Gospels clearly
implicate the Jewish temple leadership in the murder
of Christ, yet Carroll sees this as a later fabrication,
and as a massive fraud upon the Roman-Roman
people. Steven Bayme, the American Jewish Committee’s
national director of Contemporary Jewish Life
declares that “Jews must face up to the fact that the
Talmudic narrative clearly demonstrate fourth century
rabbinic willingness to take responsibility for the execution
of Jesus.” For Carroll, only the Jews, and to a
lesser degree the followers of Islam, have a clear picture
of who Christ really is. It is for this reason that a
film such as Mel Gibson’s “The Passion,” which seeks
to depict the events surrounding the Crucifixion, including
the trial before the Jewish Sanhedrin, has met
with such resistance from both Jewish and so-called
progressive circles. The critics see it as a further attempt
to deceive and defraud a modern audience. Carroll
repeatedly argues in his book that the Church in
order to make amends for its long history of anti-
Semitism must reconsider the foundational documents
of its faith. At the heart of Carroll’s renunciation of
the New Testament witness to the life of Christ is a
complete misunderstanding as to what role the New
Testament plays in the life of the Church. For the first
followers of Christ, the Old Testament was the only
scriptures they revered. They saw in the words of
Moses and in the words of the Prophets an image of
Christ, and they understood the Old Testament appearances
of God to the Hebrew peoples, as appearances
of the pre-incarnate word of God. St. Paul
specifically in his Epistle to the Hebrews, and elsewhere
scattered throughout many of his letters makes
numerous direct references and allusions to the Logos
or Word of God as revealed in the Old Testament
scriptures. Carroll, following Dominick Croissan, calls
this “prophesy historicized,” claiming the followers of
Jesus Christ borrowed from the Old Testament and
fabricated stories about Him to show how He fulfilled
the Scriptures. However, from the beginning there was
a principle of systematic interpretation at work, which
saw events witnessed by the Disciples having direct
reference to the Jewish scriptures. The Church only
reluctantly began to consider creating a Second
Testament to augment the Old, and they never saw
the New Testament as supplanting or replacing the
Old. If as Carroll claims the early Christians wanted
to separate themselves from Judaism, why did they
adopt both the Scriptures of the Jews and their worship
patterns? If they were so quick to supplant the
Old Testament with something entirely new, why was
the New Testament Canon not finalized until 394 AD
at the Council of Carthage? The Christian people always
saw themselves as heirs to the promises made to
Abraham and as the new Israel eagerly anticipated by
the Prophets.
