Monday, August 28, 2006
A little light reading?
I've been spending a lot of time with a fascinating book lately.
CONSTANTINE'S SWORD The Church and the Jews by James Carroll tells the story of the relationship between the Jews who remained faithful to the God of Israel and those who came to call themselves Christians. It is really nothing less than a history of anti-semitism: from simple polemics to empire-wide discriminatory laws, from the establishment of the first ghettoes to the introduction of genocidal pogroms.
The really scary part is the slow transformation of a small cult that worships the Jew Jesus to a culture that reviles and hates real Jews to the point of trying to wipe them out completely in the Holocaust. It is not merely incidental, this turning-against, not something that happened by accident. It was promoted by the most influential Christian leaders of their times.
Up until the time of Constantine, there was little difference between 'the Jews' and 'the Christians'. It is often impossible to to tell the difference between Jewish and Christian tombs in the second and third centuries. Churches and synogogues are decorated the same. While Christians celebrate the Eucharist with bread and wine, the Jews celebrate the Sabbath Kiddush likewise. The Church fathers had to continually warn against Christian participation in Jewish observances.
Struggling to create an identity for itself, Christianity begins to define itself by how it differs from the faith closest to itself: the faith of the Jews. The Sabbath is moved from Saturday to Sunday. The celebration of Easter is detatched from Passover. It is conveniently forgotten that Jesus and his disciples were all Jews. A new sermon genre is born: Adversus Judaeos - 'against the Jews.' But as a repressed minority, the animosity of the Christians toward their Jewish bretheren was impotent.
But with Christianity's adoption by Rome's ruler, things changed drastically. The cross was seized upon as a symbol of Roman and Christian unity. The Nicene Creed was amended to emphasize Christ's crucifixion (which was not even worthy of mention in the original Christian profession of faith.) Who gets the blame for it? The Romans who brought the cross to Palestine, sentenced Jesus to die upon one, and carried out the execution? How would that serve to unify the new Roman empire?
And thus begins a tragic history that culminates in the horrors of Hitler's Final Solution.
CONSTANTINE'S SWORD The Church and the Jews by James Carroll tells the story of the relationship between the Jews who remained faithful to the God of Israel and those who came to call themselves Christians. It is really nothing less than a history of anti-semitism: from simple polemics to empire-wide discriminatory laws, from the establishment of the first ghettoes to the introduction of genocidal pogroms.
The really scary part is the slow transformation of a small cult that worships the Jew Jesus to a culture that reviles and hates real Jews to the point of trying to wipe them out completely in the Holocaust. It is not merely incidental, this turning-against, not something that happened by accident. It was promoted by the most influential Christian leaders of their times.
Up until the time of Constantine, there was little difference between 'the Jews' and 'the Christians'. It is often impossible to to tell the difference between Jewish and Christian tombs in the second and third centuries. Churches and synogogues are decorated the same. While Christians celebrate the Eucharist with bread and wine, the Jews celebrate the Sabbath Kiddush likewise. The Church fathers had to continually warn against Christian participation in Jewish observances.
Struggling to create an identity for itself, Christianity begins to define itself by how it differs from the faith closest to itself: the faith of the Jews. The Sabbath is moved from Saturday to Sunday. The celebration of Easter is detatched from Passover. It is conveniently forgotten that Jesus and his disciples were all Jews. A new sermon genre is born: Adversus Judaeos - 'against the Jews.' But as a repressed minority, the animosity of the Christians toward their Jewish bretheren was impotent.
But with Christianity's adoption by Rome's ruler, things changed drastically. The cross was seized upon as a symbol of Roman and Christian unity. The Nicene Creed was amended to emphasize Christ's crucifixion (which was not even worthy of mention in the original Christian profession of faith.) Who gets the blame for it? The Romans who brought the cross to Palestine, sentenced Jesus to die upon one, and carried out the execution? How would that serve to unify the new Roman empire?
And thus begins a tragic history that culminates in the horrors of Hitler's Final Solution.
# posted by newbie @ 6:06 PM 
