On Holy Saturday, The Washington Post took an old Sally Quinn interview (posted 36 days earlier, on February 27) so they could rip Christians on Easter weekend for their allegedly persistent anti-Semitism. Not the Muslims – no, the Christians. The original headline was “Jesus Was a Jew — Get Over It: A Q&A with award-winning writer James Carroll on how Christians misunderstand Jesus.”
Carroll's book is titled Christ Actually: The Son of God for the Secular Age. In the Saturday paper, they presented it as a standard Jesus article with the headline: “Something astonishing about Jesus.” Yes, everyone who worships him is nearly a Nazi.
I thought of a better title for your book: Jesus Is a Jew, Get Over It.
That is it in a nutshell. That is, of course, what Christians really have not reckoned with.
Why is anti-Semitism so persistent?There is a bug in the software of western civilization. The Christian church, for accidental reasons of history, defined itself positively over the negative of the synagogue. We are good; they are bad. We are the New Testament; they are the Old Testament. We are grace; they are law. We are generosity; they are greed.
Why do think that Christians don’t want Jesus to be Jewish? How did Jesus end up being blond and blue-eyed?
The Jesus movement, which began as a Jewish movement, took place during what I call in Christ Actually the “first holocaust.” And just as the “second holocaust” of [World War II] traumatized not only the Jewish people but also the conscience of the west, so the first holocaust did something similar.
The first holocaust was the Roman war against the Jewish people, which unfolded in three phases between 69 and 135, and, in which, according to ancient historians, perhaps as many as two million Jews were killed by the Romans — a percentage of the population that is analogous to what the Nazis did.
Quinn chose Carroll because like her, he is a secular leftist that poses as a religious thinker, but can only create a God that matches the liberal program to a T. As a Boston Globe columnist, Carroll was so leftist that he proclaimed his hope for God and Obama in 2009: “By the grace of God, it is not too late to match the greatness with which [Soviet leader Mikhail] Gorbachev acted 20 years ago.”
Back in 2005, he loathed America and George W. Bush: “What kind of nation does our flag fly over now? Not a less innocent one, because American innocence was never the truth....As our President demonstrated last week, we have become a people who wage unending war -- killing and maiming our young ones and theirs -- without being remotely able to say why.”
In his book The New Anti-Catholicism: The Last Acceptable Prejudice, Philip Jenkins argued that Carroll’s longtime agenda in attacking Christians as anti-Semites is creating a wave for “reform” of the Catholic Church, reinventing it to match modern liberalism:
Carroll is simply wrong about anti-Semitism being integral to Catholic Christianity: no direct historical highway leads from the evangelists to Auschwitz. Just as suspect, therefore is Carroll's attempt to discredit traditional Christianity by contextualizing it together with the dreadful crimes of anti-Semitism. He is overpresenting his case in order to justify a "reform agenda" that amounts to a blueprint for the annihilation of the Catholic Church. Much of Carroll's book is devoted to his agenda for a proposed Third Vatican Council, which would cure the Catholic Church of the dreadful faults that have made it a "failed and sinful Church." For all its excellent intentions, its moral fervor, Carroll's book is a frontal attack on Catholic Christianity, and this agenda shapes its interpretations on every page. (p. 190)
Back in December, the Post book review by Kate Moos praised Carroll’s book as exploring Jesus not so much as creed (who needs crusty theology?), but just as a role model of “unwavering acceptance” for the brokenness of humanity:
Carroll, a former priest, has written at length about his spiritual formation in a deeply Catholic 20th-century milieu. That milieu included religious practices now held up as quaint or ridiculous under secular scrutiny - such as blessing oneself with holy water or earning time off from purgatory - but it also included a flowering of liberal Catholic intellectualism and social thought, which are equally the legacy (though often overlooked) of mid-century Catholic religiosity.
Jesus attracted not the exemplars of public virtue and moral strength but strugglers and drifters. Carroll reminds us that Jesus chose his disciple Peter not on the basis of the strength of Peter's character (when threatened, he turned weasel, as Jesus had warned), but on the basis of his fallibility and the degree to which he required forgiveness.
The divinity and greatness of Jesus for a secular age, Carroll asserts, are not to be found in the miracles ascribed to Him, nor in the grandeur of his elevation by millennia of Christian theology. Carroll argues, finally, that the appeal of Christ to the contemporary faithful has much less to do with creed, and more to do with our ability to imitate Him in his unwavering acceptance of and love for the brokenness of human beings.
Or as Booklist summarized, “Carroll…strives to reconceive Christ for a secular, post-Holocaust, post-Hiroshima era….readers seeking a faith responsive to the zeitgeist will find it here.”
