Constantine's Sword

In Constantine’s Sword: The Church and the Jews, James Carroll, a former Catholic priest turned journalist and novelist, delivers a powerful indictment of the politicized religion that from the time of Constantine the Great persecuted heretics, non-Romans, and, most of all, Jews. Carroll’s historical account is colorful and accurate, but what this book mostly does is exorcise a demon that plagued the author personally for years: his shared responsibility as a Catholic believer and official for an anti-Semitic tradition that helped generate the Holocaust. This is a stirring job of writing that looks forward to Carroll’s later work as… show more.

Judaism and Christianity have been intertwined for centuries, right from the start as the Jewish Jesus was crucified by Roman authorities. The late 1st century CE Gospel of Matthew developed anti-Jewish sentiments. Some 50 years after the death of Jesus, this writing portrays a Jewish mob saying that Jesus’ death should be upon them and their children, a charge that has reverberated through the centuries and is responsible for the death of hundreds of thousands. This book examines the interplay between Christianity and Judaism throughout the centuries into modern times.