From: HealantHenry-AT-aol.com
Date: Mon, 5 May 2003 05:52:01 EDT
Subject: read da fuckin' book


The indictment that anti-Semitism is essential to Roman Christianity is not, 
in my opinion, contingent on Carroll's relation to Crossan's thought, nor on 
an appropriate historical understanding of exactly how the little man on the 
crucifix took on a peculiar confessional significance.  These are side 
issues, very beside the point. Indeed they take up very little of the book's 
terrain in comparison to the vast history, over nearly twenty centuries, of 
church thought & action agst the Jews.  and most of the action is killing, 
torture, political oppression, and, finally, cobelligerence with the nazis 
... and treatises (or "infallible" dictations) to justify such horrors, 
persecutions and human pain.

Perhaps if Augustine's view of the Jew's symbology for the church were 
debatable; or the inquisitions; or the racial purity laws instigated after 
the Jews were forced to convert (the Other now on the inside; the Jesuits 
only reforming their racial purity rule in 1946); or the history of the 
ghetto in Rome; or the slaughter of European Jews in connection with the 
crusades; or the  reportage and societal influence of the Catholic journal, 
La Croix, vis a vis the Dreyfus affair and the repercussions on Jews in 
France and throughout Europe; or the implication that the evil of communism 
was an essentially Jewish plot; or the reichskonkordat of 1933; or the 
incredible irony and insensitivity of the 'sanctification' of Edith Stein; or 
many many other notable horrors perpetrated on the Jews for hundreds of 
years, molding and empowering this great crime, this great tragedy of the 
west, then the issue of Crossan's speculations would have some more than 
trivial weight.  

The history of Christendom, I will aver again, its face agst the Other, has 
been more hideous, criminal, genocidal and perverse than all the bloody 
missions of 'jihad' terror in all the history of Islam. It is in the book.

account closed,
hen


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