CONSTANTINE’S SWORD is a good but needlessly rambling and flawed book. One assumes that if the author (previously unknown to me) could have written a better book, he would have. Part spiritual autobiography (after the fashion of Augustine and Cardinal Newman), part romp through centuries of barely digested sources, the book tackles an important subject as well as the author apparently knows how. Why are Christians, especially Roman Catholics and Lutherans, Carroll asks, so strongly and almost eternally predisposed to hate Jews? Today's hatred is fueled by the very Christian Scriptures themselves. 

Carroll therefore invites today’s Catholics to call an unprecedentedly wide open Third Vatican Council, among other reasons, to admit that the Gospel of John got some things terribly wrong in exaggerating the importance of Jesus’s death on the cross of Golgotha and in making “the Jews” uniquely responsible for that death. The bibliography and the end notes are very good.

My advice to readers: wait for a second, revised edition, which will be improved if it is briefer by two-thirds.

for Barnes and Noble 7/8/2002

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CONSTANTINE’S SWORD:THE CHURCH AND THE JEWS is a hard book to do justice to. Author James Carroll was not previously known to me and that probably makes a difference. The dust jacket says that he has authored nine novels and a memoir, AN AMERICAN REQUIEM. The book has so much autobiographical detail in it that I wonder if Carroll, consciously or unconsciously, was writing for an established claque of devoted followers. As spiritual autobiography, CONSTANTINE’S SWORD is not in a class with Augustine’s CONFESSIONS or Newman’s APOLOGIA PRO VITA SUA.

As history, it is superficial, virtually romping through its largely secondary sources. In areas with which I am more familiar, it seemed reasonably accurate, with one of several howlers being that the city of Cologne was once called Colonus. It was not. Never.

Intended, I presume, as some sort of half-Socratic device, the book asks, literally, hundreds and hundreds and hundreds of questions: mostly unanswered. James Carroll's overriding question is, however, bang on:  why have so many Christians disliked or hated or even coerced or murdered so many Jews for so many centuries? One image of Carroll’s that stays in the imagination is that Christianity and post-Christian Judaism are products of one religious womb but are Siamese twins whose separation was much more traumatic than it need have been. Leading Christians (starting with the author of John’s Gospel) have over and over misconstrued Jews. They have defined Christianity against Jews whose very existence (on the dominant view they should have disappeared long since) threaten the younger religion. Other more constructive paths were briefly trod by some Christians, e.g., Abelard and Cusanus. And those paths are worth revisiting by today's Christians and even broadening them and trying them once again.

The book cries out for dialog, deeper probing and writing of better books on the subject of Christian wrongs to Jews. The subject is terribly important. The author's method, combining autobiography with history, group contrition and call for a new religious reformation and revival, is, alas, less than stellar.
 

review for amazon.com

July 8, 2002

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James Carroll. CONSTANTINE'S SWORD: THE CHURCH AND THE SWORD. Boston. Houghton Mifflin Company. 2001. xii. 756 pp.