Carroll’s Sword

Revisiting the former priest’s controversial thesis that Christian scripture is shot through with anti-Semitism.

Bob Richman, left, director of photography, and director Oren Jacoby confer on the set of “Constantine’s Sword,” which opens Friday, April 11.

by Eric Herschthal
Staff Writer

When “Constantine’s Sword” opens in theaters this Friday — the day Pope Benedict XVI is scheduled to appear at Park East Synagogue — fans of the best-selling James Carroll book from which it is based may notice a few changes. Several controversies since the book was published in 2001 have been added: Evangelical proselytizing at the U.S. Air Force Academy, President George W. Bush’s invocation of a “crusade” in the current wars abroad and Pope Benedict XVI’s revival of a Latin prayer deemed offensive to many Jews.
“It had to be a fresh take,” the film’s director, Oren Jacoby, said in an interview at his home. “We felt we couldn’t ignore” the developments since the book was published.
The inclusion of current events, however, is

not simply the director pulling out his trump card, his artistic license. It is meant to highlight the continuing relevance of Carroll’s main point: that religious intolerance runs through the core of Christianity’s history. And as both the film and book make clear, this begins with an intrinsic anti-Semitism built into Christian scripture. As the Christian scholar and priest, John Pawlikowski, who reviewed Carroll’s book and is featured in the film, put it in an interview: “Hatred of the Jew expanded to embrace the hatred of other groups as well. The Jew was the first group it was OK to hate.”
But then as now, Carroll’s thesis remains highly contentious. One reviewer called the book a “masterpiece,” another “flawed.” There were no neat divisions among religious, professional or political stripes, either. It made some Jews anxious — shhh, James, we got our Nostra Aetate. Catholics, pointing to the same Vatican reform denying the Jews’ responsibility for Jesus’ death, said the problem had been fixed; still others said, bravo!
Given the film’s debut this week, intentionally timed to coincide with the pope’s New York visit (and to a shul no less), it seems a good time to assess Carroll’s argument. The stakes, though, have always been high: if the reading of Christian scripture has been wrong for millennia, could a reinterpretation set the course right? “It’s not a matter of apology,” Carroll said in an interview, “It’s about changing the attitudes that made this” — Christian history, implicitly negative he argues — “possible.”
Carroll pivots it all on a re-reading of the life and times of Jesus, relying heavily on recent scholarship. Only in the last few decades have new texts been discovered that were written from around the time of Jesus’ death. The so-called Gnostic Gospels — the accounts of Jesus’ life that the early church founders threw out because they were demeaned heretical — have been a particular boon. Scholarly groups like the Jesus Seminar, which Carroll favors most, focus on the battles between Jewish sects at the time of Jesus’ life (often put at 5 B.C.E. to 30 C.E.).
Jesus was a member of one of the main Jewish sects, the Pharisees, which sought greater control over the Second Temple, in Jerusalem. But Jesus was a carpenter, not a member of the priestly class, and had nothing to gain from these political fights. He wanted to return Judaism to its core values — namely, in Carroll’s telling, love and spiritual renewal. Jesus had followers, but never did they consider themselves separate from the larger Jewish community.
But the letters of Paul have often suggested a different story. They are the only surviving documents from Jesus’ lifetime and they are an essential part of Christian scripture. Paul lived in present-day Turkey and was probably born five years after Jesus, around 1 C.E., scholars say. He became enthralled with the word being spread about Jesus’ teaching and became a fiery proselytizer, crisscrossing the Mediterranean spreading the Word — the Gospel. It is Paul’s surviving letters that contain some of the first evidence of anti-Semitism; “a hardening has come upon the heart of Israel,” Paul writes to a group of Jesus’ followers. “They are the enemies of God.”
Problem is, Carroll writes, Paul was himself a Pharisee who used his Hebraic name, Saul, with no compunction. He may have been occasionally given to “rage, prejudice and self-obsession,” as Carroll writes in “Constantine’s Sword,” but Paul’s entire dossier suggests a man much more taken with Jesus’ message of love and compassion. Plus, “Paul never knew Jesus,” Carroll writes. His word must be read with this in mind; he had no idea about what Jesus actually said, and to put Paul’s word’s in Jesus’ mouth is a “profound betrayal” of Jesus’ word.
If we don’t know what Jesus really said, the implication is that scholarly research can fill the void. For Carroll, this is paramount, especially since the question of who killed Jesus — Nostra Aetate or not — remains the central stumbling block. The main account we have is from the Five Gospels, the core texts of the New Testament, which unquestionably depict the Jews as rallying the Romans to kill Christ.
But Carroll’s reading, relying on the most recent scholarship, casts serious doubt on this. The Five Gospels were most likely written 40 years after Jesus’ death, around 70 C.E. At that time, the Roman army entered Jerusalem to quash a Jewish uprising, destroying the Second Temple along the way. To curry favor with the new Roman authorities, and avoid being attacked, Jesus’ followers played up their differences with the Pharisees. This only deepened the animosity between the Pharisee leaders and Jesus’ followers, setting the two in even greater opposition. So the often-crude depictions of Jews in the Five Gospels may exist only because the writers “were trying to save themselves,” said Elaine Pagels, a leading scholar of early Christianity at Princeton. “This is wartime literature.”
The inclusion of Pagels, who briefly appears in the film, is significant here: her scholarship focuses on the books not included in the New Testament, the so-called Gnostic Gospels. These were the books that were discarded over the second and third centuries as the followers of Jesus grew in number and a centralized church began to develop. It was Marion, for instance, a Christian preacher living in the mid-second century, who tried to “de-Judaize” the literature of Jesus’ followers and form a new Christian Bible. He took some of the Gospels — written by Matthew, Mark, Luke, John and Thomas — and discarded most of the rest.
But it is these discarded texts, like the newly discovered Gospel of Judas, that offer a different view of the earliest Christians. Pagels’ latest book for instance, titled “Reading Judas” and co-authored with Karen L. King, suggests that Judas may have actually helped Jesus by turning him into the Roman authorities. According to the Judas account, Jesus encouraged him — hastening, as it were, Jesus’ ascent to his Father in heaven.
The early development of Christianity is, of course, just a part of the long history Carroll tracks. But its re-interpretation remains central to the rest of the history. If, for instance, Constantine, the fourth-century Roman general, had inherited a less manipulated Bible, would he have needed to convert the entire Roman empire to his faith? In any event, he did. And as Carroll tells it, the infusion of state power with misunderstood Christian literature set the history on a devastating course. There were the Crusades, the Inquisition, and the Holocaust to follow. While Carroll makes sure to highlight the other variables shaping history well beyond theology, Christian anti-Semitic scripture remains his dominant thread.
Not surprisingly, criticism remains. Pagels, who nonetheless lauded the book and film, said that Carroll’s emphasis on the centrality of anti-Semitism to Christian theology “is overstated,” noting “Jim is not a biblical scholar.” Beyond the scholarship, many simply deny flat out that one idea can ever be traced through 2,000 years of history. And when it comes to this idea somehow preconditioning Europe for the Holocaust, an event focused on in both the book and film, critics descend from many angles: an affront to the uniqueness of Nazi evil, an abuse of the Church, an injustice to six million and more.
That shouldn’t overshadow the praise, though — a National Jewish Book Award for history, a New York Times Notable Book of the Year, many strong reviews, panel invitations and subsequent book contracts. And while Carroll says that the Catholic Church has made considerable headway since the 1960s, Vatican II and Nostra Aetate, he remains skeptical of some of the latest trends in Christianity today. “Evangelicals read the Bible literally,” he said, noting that the historical context is essential.
But maybe Carroll’s concern can be assuaged, at least a bit. People alarmed about the Evangelical rise in America often quote a poll that suggests 83 percent of Americans believe the Bible to be the Word of God. But, another poll finds that less than half of American Christians can name the author of more than one of the Five Gospels.
In other words, people think they believe what is in the Bible even though they may not actually know its contents. If Carroll is right and the Christian Bible is inherently anti-Semitic, that ignorance may turn out to be a blessing.

Westchester Jewish Conference

Westchester’s Jewish Community Relations Organization