Constantine's Sword: The Church and the Jews (16 page)

By the Irish analogy, think of the ultimate effect of British imperial power among the Irish themselves. The Irish war with England, begun in 1916, was extremely violent, including as it did the twentieth century's first indiscriminate shelling of an urban center, Dublin. Part of England's "draconian reaction"
⁶⁰
was the unleashing on an unarmed populace of the criminal-terrorist Black and Tans and the post-1918 deployment of trench-veteran tommies, who viewed the Irish war as an extension of the no-holds-barred war against the Hun and fought accordingly. And the first result of all this violence? The Irish population, which in 1916 had been overwhelmingly inclined to favor London—as my great-uncle probably would have—over the self-appointed, self-aggrandizing liberators of the Irish Republican Brotherhood,
⁶¹
by 1920 thought of London as the devil's own. The fierce, universal Irish hatred of England, a twentieth-century cliché, was in fact born in the twentieth century—just then. Thus even a diehard like Winston Churchill came to recognize that an English victory over this despicable people, short of the outright elimination of the native population, was impossible. Empowered to do so by Eamon de Valera, Michael Collins negotiated the Anglo-Irish Treaty of 1921. There would not be another until 1986.

There was a second result of the violence of that war. In addition to a unifying Irish hatred of the English, there would be a terribly disunifying Irish hatred of the self. "I tell you this—early this morning I signed my death warrant," Collins wrote to a friend after agreeing to the treaty, instinctively grasping what awaited him at home.
⁶²
No sooner had the Anglo-Irish war ended than the even more dispiriting Irish civil war began. Forces loyal to de Valera would eventually murder Collins, proving him a prophet. De Valera rejected the central terms of the treaty—an oath of allegiance to the Crown, British hegemony over the six counties in the north—but would later accept them once the paroxysm of Irish self-hatred had run its course. The Irish civil war—unlike, say, the American one—accomplished nothing, except to enable one Irish faction to vent its rage on another. Irish sectarian hatred served the overlord's purpose well, resulting in an Irish impotence the English could depend on for most of a century. Indeed, Irish sectarian violence was efficiently, if slyly, stoked by London all that time, from Lloyd George's government to Margaret Thatcher's.

Intra-Jewish conflict served Rome's purposes in just such a way. There is perhaps something craven in the Gospels' emphasis on "Jews" as a threat to order in the empire, as opposed to "Christians," and it does not mitigate the Gospel writers' responsibility for driving this wedge to note that they were responding to Roman oppression. But the more fundamental point is that in doing this, the followers of the murdered Jesus were only demonstrating how effective the imperial overlord had been in infecting the dominated population with its own cynicism and contempt. This dynamic becomes even clearer in the context that has provided us our starting point: One measure of the diabolical efficacy of Nazi torment in Auschwitz, besides the way Jews were victims of SS guards, was the way Jews were victims of fellow Jews, the capos who served as SS surrogates. The collapse of the moral universe that led Jews to participate in their own destruction in the death camps, or to take upon themselves a feeling of guilty responsibility for the evil around them, only emphasizes the abject evil of an absolutely oppressive system. That evil lies in the system's capacity to destroy the innocence of everyone it touches.
⁶³
When Jewish factions turned Rome's venom against each other, Rome won yet another victory. There is no question here of "Christian innocence," because among human beings there is no innocence when the question becomes survival. Extreme violence and extreme measures to survive it form the ground on which this entire story stands.

It is nevertheless important to emphasize that, well after the life of Jesus, those who remembered the conflicts surrounding both its beginning and its end mainly as conflicts among Jews—Herod's villainy, not Caesar's; the high priest's, not Pilate's—were being true to the ways these events had come to be understood in the period of heightened Jewish sectarianism that followed Jesus' death.
⁶⁴
Not "innocent," yet they were not liars either. The Gospel of Matthew was not composed by someone who had been there, not composed by someone who knew well that Pilate was a sadist who'd have thought nothing of dispatching an unknown Galilean troublemaker, and, knowing this, still consciously and falsely portrayed the Romans as innocent and "the Jews" as guilty. It would be a slander to say such a thing of Matthew (or the writers of that Gospel), just as it would slander my mother to say she lied to me when she led me to think her uncle was a hero of the Easter Rising.

Earlier, I cited John Dominic Crossan's 1995 characterization of the claim that the Jews murdered Jesus as "the longest lie," but in a subsequent work, in 1998, he amended that judgment. The authors of the foundational Christian documents, writing years after the event,
⁶⁵
"did not say this: I know that the Roman authorities crucified Jesus, but I will blame the Jewish authorities; I will play the Roman card; I will write propaganda that I know is inaccurate. If they
had
done that, the resulting text would have been a lie."
⁶⁶
Crossan does not attribute such venality to the Gospels, because to do so would impose a post-Enlightenment notion of history on a far more complex phenomenon. Rigid concern for "how it happened" is a contemporary preoccupation of ours, but no such emphasis informed the way the ancients wrote history. Reports of the words and deeds of the late Jesus evolved as his movement grew, and so did the understanding of who his friends and enemies were, depending on the experience through time of who the friends and enemies of the movement were. "As Christian Jewish communities are steadily more alienated from their fellow Jews, so the 'enemies' of Jesus expand to fit those new situations. By the time of 'John' in the 90s, those enemies are 'the Jews'—that is, all those other Jews except us few right ones. If we had understood (the literary genre) gospel, we would have understood that. If we had understood gospel, we would have expected that. It is, unfortunately, tragically late to be learning it."
⁶⁷

Just as the original fate of Jesus was shaped in part by intra-Jewish disputes, the communal memory of how that fate unfolded was itself shaped by those disputes, especially when Roman domination of Jews started to unravel. Writing fifty or seventy years after the death of Jesus, the Gospel authors continued to be influenced by the climate of crisis and dispute, Roman terror and Jewish polemic. But around the time of their writing, something new, and for this story something deadly, began to happen.

10. The Threshold Stone

A
NOTHER THING WRONG
with blaming the anti-Jewish texts of the New Testament on a primitive and essential "Christian" hatred of Jews is that doing so continues the victim's habit of exonerating the true villain in the story, which was and remains Rome. I acknowledge the apparent absurdity of this attempt, two thousand years after the event, to reconstruct its shape and meaning with more accuracy than the people who lived only a generation or two later. But in this one regard at least—the crucial influence of a dominant overlord—we have a distinct advantage over those first Christians and rabbinic Jews. For us, the grip of the overlord has long since been released, and the myth of hierarchy has been broken. The blanketing fog of an imperialist occupation blinded those who lived through it to the all-encompassing nature of Roman oppression. Similarly, the Romans, by controlling the future, controlled the way even their extreme savagery would be remembered by Jew and non-Jew alike. Yet neither of these facts excuses us from emphasizing that the story of Jesus, at a fundamental level, is one part of the story of Israel's refusal to yield to Rome. And this can be perceived more clearly now than it was then.

The empire's contest with Israel was one that, even if it took centuries, Rome was fated to lose. Worship a man in a toga because he wears a laurel wreath? Does not worship belong alone to the one God? Honor that man's face on coins or battle standards, much less on altars, when God has forbidden the honoring of images? Acknowledge the sovereignty of the invader over land that is itself the seal of God's covenant with God's people? Depend on Rome when God has long since proven to be absolutely dependable? Beginning with the violent arrival of Pompey's legions in 63
B.C.E.,
most Jews may have decided against open defiance of the occupiers, but there was never any question of the people's being folded into the empire with all the others. Even the Roman-friendly Josephus wrote proudly, as a Jew, "[We face] death on behalf of our laws with a courage which no other nation can equal."
¹
Nor should we fail to emphasize that Rome's brutal response to that refusal, especially in the climactic war of 66–73 C.E. when Jerusalem was laid waste and hundreds of thousands of Jews were killed (Josephus and Tacitus put the number of Jewish dead in this first war at around 600,000; in the second "Jewish War" sixty years later, the tally for Jewish victims is put at 850,000
²
), traumatized all Jews, including the followers of Jesus. Whatever the actual totals (and the size of these reported figures alone indicates the shock Jews must have felt), the vast number of victims were killed without the mechanized methods that make modern wars so lethal, which is why analogies between Rome and the worst of twentieth-century dictators may not be misplaced here. Rome had no apparent "racial motive" in its crackdown on provincial rebels,
³
but if the legions had had machine guns, bombs, railroads, and gas at their disposal, who is to say any Jew would have survived the second century?

So of course that war affected how the story of Jesus was remembered, and then how it was told, especially to the non-Jews of the Mediterranean world. In this era there were Jewish risings against Rome not just in Judea but in Mesopotamia, Egypt, Cyrenaica (near present-day Tunisia), and Cyprus.
⁴
The war had such significance to Rome that in 70
C.E.
Trajan built a triumphal arch at the Colosseum to honor the hard-won victory, and Roman coins were inscribed
Judea Capiata.
⁵
In the second war (132–135
C.E.
) Judea was stripped of its Jews and renamed Syria Palaestina.
⁶
It cannot be overemphasized that the texts of the New Testament were being written at one of the most violent epochs in history, with the twin assaults on Jerusalem, in 70 and 135, serving as rough brackets within which the composition occurred. The events of those years, and in particular the destruction of the Temple in 70, mark such a watershed that Paula Fredriksen can say that "the evangelists' position as regards the Temple ... is closer to ours, despite the nineteen centuries that intervene between us, than to that of those generations who immediately precede them."
⁷

To read the New Testament apart from the context of the Roman war against the Jews—as it almost always is—amounts to reading
The Diary of a Young Girl
without reference to the Holocaust. For one thing, the non-Jewish citizens of Galatia, Macedonia, Antioch, Armenia, and the slaves of Rome, would have been far readier to practice a religion—or better, adopt a way of life—that, while offering an implicit alternative to the degrading Roman worldview, explicitly defined its enemy as the Jews, who were such a flashpoint, than they would have been to practice one that explicitly defined the enemy as that same ruthless overlord whose foot was on their throats too. It was the
implicitness
of the challenge to Rome that would eventually lead to the Christian victory, and so in that way the explicit definition of Jews as the Christian enemy par excellence proved, as a kind of feint, to be quite useful. The difference from then on, in all those Gentile cities—and, with the one large Jewish city gone, the tragic difference that would set in motion the razor-edged arc of this narrative—was that they who now heard this story, and who now retold it, were not Jews. Therefore, they could only experience the disheartening, self-hating, imperium-inspired polemic of the Jesus movement from outside. And from outside there could be no loving assumption that the ultimate aim of this struggle, whatever else it accomplished, was a renewal of Israel. The hateful polemical language used by those outside the initiating, faction-torn community would begin to fall differently on the ear, the way it falls on modern ears.

When an ultra-Orthodox Jew of Mea Shearim in frock coat and leggings uses extreme language to vilify his opponent—say, the secular American Jews to whom he is only an oddity—almost no one hears that language, however contemptuous, as antisemitic. But the same language in the mouth of an Irish kid in Dorchester, Massachusetts, will reek of Jew hatred. Accusations heard in one context as vicious but simple polemic can in another take on the tone of racist slander. Once Christian became "Christian," once the embattled Jewish sect became the mostly Gentile "Church," the structure of the foundational story was set, the ground of Christian memory, the longest lie. "The Jews" would be the archenemy of Jesus, and of his people, from then on.

If I seem to be going to some length here to dilute, if not refute, the Jew hatred we so easily detect in the New Testament, and that would flower in anti-Jewish violence, it is to make the case that the Jew hatred that stamps the beginning of Christianity is not essential to this religion. If I believed it were, either to Christianity's origins or to its development, I could, I repeat, have nothing to do with this religion. That is the point of distinguishing between the impulses and beliefs of a faithfully Jewish Jesus and his faithfully Jewish first followers and those of their traumatized successors. Earlier in this book, when writing of the Vatican Council's denial of Jewish culpability for the death of Jesus, I derided efforts to place the blame at the feet of the Romans, in obvious contradiction to the record of the New Testament. I am attempting something different here. While certainly blaming the Romans, I am also trying to show that the New Testament impulse to blame Jews took root in soil that, yes, the Romans had contaminated—not Jesus. And if Christian Jew-hatred did not originate with the Jew Jesus, no matter how it developed, then it is not essential to Christian faith.