The Symbol of the Cross
His use of biblical scholarship is spotty and selective. Offered a choice between the careful work of Raymond Brown and the carelessness (both substantive and rhetorical) of John Dominic Crossan on the New Testament accounts of Jesus' passion, Carroll picks Crossan, repeating time after time throughout his book Crossan's theory that the gospels got Jesus wrong because they were little more than polemic efforts to prove that He was the Messiah and to demonize the Jews who rejected Him as such.
This allows Carroll to eliminate the gospel accounts as reliable witnesses concerning Jesus in His historical setting. After that, it is short work to find the Jesus that suits one's taste. In Carroll's case, Jesus is all about love. And as someone all for love, He was a good Jew. And therefore He opposed, not anything about Judaism — what was there to oppose? — but Rome. And He was not opposed by any Jews — how could they object to love? — but by the empire. What is historically unclear, given a complete lack of evidence in its support, is why Jesus' statements about love would have been interpreted as “anti-Roman,” or why Rome executed Him as a would-be king, given that His gospel was merely, “All you need is love.”
Such a stripped-down Jesus also poses a question about the form of the Christology that Carroll's imagined Vatican III might come up with. Presumably, as devoted followers of the democratic method, its attendees would vote for a Jesus that exemplified their lowest common denominator, which would mean that the new and improved Jesus would be the perfect reflection of the contemporary ethos. “All you need is love” seems about right. But speaking of Carroll's regard for democracy as “holy”: Why should a Church that ran on democratic process be expected to improve on the record of anti-Semitism compiled by authoritarian leaders? Wasn't Hitler elected by the German people?
Reading Carroll's book, one increasingly wonders why anyone should bother trying to reform Christianity. If the resurrection of Jesus is only, as he claims, a vague sense of communal warmth derived from remembering Him, if the human Jesus is only a purveyor of cliches about love, then why be a Christian?
Carroll does not seem to grasp that because of the resurrection, the cross of Jesus has meant for believers from the beginning to today a radically new identity, a challenge to the systems of the world, a transformed mind, and a renewed heart. He does not show any sense that, from the start, the Christian experience of Jesus as Lord has meant that “Christology” cannot be defined in strictly Jewish but in cosmic terms. Because Carroll shows no appreciation of the symbol of the cross in positive terms, he ends up distorting Christianity in the same way that anti-Semitic Christians distort Judaism.
(This article courtesy of of CRISIS, America's fastest growing Catholic magazine.)
Ridding the Church of its Anti-Judaism
Perhaps it was to provide a generic scholarly cover for a work that is partly an account of the sad and sinful story of Christian hostile speech and murderous actions against Jews (although delivered with a journalist's superficial reliance on secondary sources rather than a historian's critical sifting of primary sources) and partly an embarrassing and never necessary autobiography-cum-travelogue, along with an idiosyncratic vision of how the Church can reform itself.
The book has eight parts. Parts 1 and 2 reveal Carroll's habit of merging the historical with the personal. He begins with his own visit to a site of Nazi atrocities (“The Cross at Auschwitz”) and then skips back 2,000 years (“New Testament Origins of Jew Hatred”). The leap is deliberate. The problem with Christianity, Carroll argues, is the cross of Christ. The way we can rid the Church of its historic anti-Judaism is to change the story from the beginning, eliminating the cross from Christian theology.
Parts 3 through 5 of the book walk the reader through the familiar tale of Christian oppression and violence against Jews, starting with the emperor Constantine in the fourth century and finding perfect expression in the Inquisition. Parts 6 and 7 sketch the persistence of anti-Semitism through modernity and the response to Hitler of the Church in Germany (especially the future Pope Pius XII, nuncio to Germany during Hitler's rise). Part 8 is titled “A Call for Vatican III,” a hypothetical future Church council that Carroll thinks should be attended by people of all faiths (and no faith!) and consist of a conversation that would lead, he is confident, to the rejection of anti-Judaism in the New Testament, the restructuring of power in the Church, a new Christology, and a declaration of the sanctity of democracy.
Hardly Another Confessions
Carroll's penchant for autobiography is irrelevant and distracting and at times downright icky. One jacket blurb calls the book “Augustinian.” But St. Augustine's Confessions served to indict himself and praise God, whereas Carroll's “confession” lacks both remorse and genuine substance. Indeed, Carroll casts himself as a lad perpetually awakening to new insight despite the efforts of family, society, and above all, the Church, to keep him from seeing the truth. He can confess no sin of anti-Semitism himself, except that of failing early enough to castigate the religion in which he was reared and which he once served as a priest, for its anti-Semitism. He is guilty, in a word, of being Catholic.
As a historical account, Carroll's narrative is most effective when he deals with sympathetic characters — his reading of Abelard and Heloise is moving, and his account of the last days of Dreyfuss's family during World War II is powerful — or when he brings to light material that has not already been thoroughly masticated in such books as Garry Wills's Papal Sin (2000). Carroll's chapter titled “Setting a Standard: The Church Against Bismarck” is argumentatively the best in the book, for it shows what the Church was capable of by way of resistance to an authoritarian German government, a level it failed dismally to reach in the case of Hitler.
The real deficiency in Carroll's historical analysis is his reliance on a single explanatory key for everything. Imagining the cross of Jesus as Constantine's sword may sell books, but it does not adequately interpret this dark history. Yes, he can make it work for Constantine and for the Crusades. But what about the 600 years between those outbreaks? Certainly the cross was a central part of Christian preaching and piety, yet Christians and Jews lived during those years in relative amity and cooperation.
