Constantine's Sword: The Church and the Jews, by James Carroll

 

Constantine's Sword: The Church and the Jews
by 

James Carroll

Clif Hostetler's review

Aug 25, 2026  ·  edit

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bookshelves: religion, history, memoir

This book contains a deep dive into the history of Christian/Jewish relations, but it is also part personal memoir by the author sharing his spiritual journey striving to hold on to his Catholic faith that he perceives to be rooted in anti-jewish origins. Thus it is a scholarly written history amplified with a personal perspective that combines to create a compelling reading experience. 

The book’s narrative is framed around a beginning and ending which discusses the post-war controversy at Auschwitz where a Christian cross—and for awhile many crucifixes—were erected outside the perimeter of the former death camp. Some Jewish groups took offense at their presence. Near the end of this book the author returns to that controversy and shares his opinion of what should be done. 

The history covered by the book begins with the New Testament origins of Jew hatred, and finds it embedded in their Scriptures. Many of the early Christians forgot the Jewish origins of their religion and transformed their beliefs to be anti-Jewish. The following excerpt summarizes that history.

Catholic ambivalence toward Judaism dates, as we have seen, to the beginning. Jewish followers of Jesus found consolation in their Scriptures; but then, forgetting how the crucifixion narrative was constructed in the weeks, months, and years after his death, successors began to use those same Scriptures against Jews who failed to recognize the crucified Jesus as the longed-for Messiah, or who failed even to long for a Messiah. Ambivalence is implied in the very name that came to be applied to those Jewish Scriptures—the "Old Testament," which was valued for being ancient but was superseded for not being “New."

The pattern of ambivalence became set as one generation's mistake was compounded by the next, and made more dangerous. Jewish-Christian conflict in the first century took on ominous new meanings in the fourth, by which time Christians had all but forgotten that those early conflicts had been among people all of whom were Jews. Jewish rejection became a source not just of feelings of being threatened, but of feelings of hatred. Even as they evolved, such reactions remained ambivalent because the Jewish enemy was still the intimate enemy; the Jew as other was still the brother, the sibling rival. Christians hardly noticed when, as the "parting of the ways" became dramatic and the centers of Jewish life shifted away from the centers of Roman and Christian life, Jews stopped thinking of the Church as competition. If one sibling opts out of the rivalry, the one remaining can feel it more intensely than ever. That, in effect, is what began to happen when Christianity tied permission for Jewish survival to the formal theological role of Jews as the permanent negative other. 

This anti-Jewish tilt became even more threatening to Jews when Constantine gave Christianity its preferred status. Under the influence of Constantine the cross was elevated as the symbol of the Christian religion, an association not previously widely used. This symbolism firmly implanted the memory of Christ’s death as front and center in Christian belief, and Jews had been—and were—responsible.

Under Jerome (circa 347–420) it appeared that Jews would be doomed, but thankfully Augustine of Hippo (354—430) called for sparing the Jews. Augustine said they should remain as reminders of their history, but they should not be allowed to thrive. Thus through much of medieval history the Popes and Church officials tried to protect Jews from violence, but popular sentiments were not able to comprehend the ambiguity between survival and not thriving. 

The book describes the small Jewish population in the Rhineland prior to the First Crusade (1096–1099) as relatively literate and played a role in translation work and introduction of Aristotle’s writings to northern Europe. But when the Crusaders arrived they imagined them to be the infidels at hand and massacre resulted. 

So the hated Jew of the crusader's imagination was unrelated to the actual Jews he came upon, which only emphasizes the fact that something besides the normal sway of social upheaval explains what began to happen. The source of Jewish-Christian violent conflict lay entirely on the Christian side of the hyphen—an obvious statement, but not one that can go without saying. The crusaders, suddenly obsessed with the "infidel," projected onto Jews a fantasy tied to an ancient memory that had little enough to do with the Jews of that bygone era, and nothing whatever to do with Jews as they existed in the crusaders' time. The age-old "Jewish problem," that is, was and remains a Christian problem, spawned by an ignorant Christian imagination. Its cause? The answer is so plain we can hardly see it as such, and it has been there all along. A miscarried cult of the cross is ubiquitous in this story, from Milvian Bridge to Auschwitz. The "war of the cross," which is another way of saying "crusade," is the definitive epiphany, laying bare the meaning of what went before and what came after, even to our own time. 

Thankfully, intervention by Bernard of Clairvaux (1090–1153) was able to prevent a repeat of this tragedy with the Second Crusade (1147–1149). 

Anselm of Canterbury (1033–1109) is famous for finally—after a thousand years—explaining the cosmic need for Christ's Crucifixion in his satisfaction theory of atonement. This elevation of the dogma of Crucifiction once again emphasized the role of Jews as Christ killers. But this book’s author, James Carroll, points out that Christianity could have gone in a more peaceful direction by accepting the explanation of Jesus’ life and death offered by Peter Abelard (1079 –1142). 

Why did God become a man? In Romans, Paul says that “both Jews and Greeks" are justified "through the redemption which is in Christ Jesus, whom God put forward as an expiation by his blood.” But how? Abelard's answer, given in one of the ”quaestiones” of his Exposition, is that Christ came to show us how to live, not to die in submission to the brutal power of the Father. "We are made more righteous by Christ's death than we were before, because of the example Christ set us, kindling in us by his grace and generosity a zeal to imitate him." The death is exemplary, Abelard insists, and not expiatory. This is not exactly a new idea, but it strikes a note rarely sounded before.

Abelard's writing described above is one of several times in history where the author points out times when Christian theology could have gone in a more peaceful and nonviolent direction. 

The author uses the term "prophecy historicized" to describe the origin of many of the stories in the Gospels about Jesus. He spends considerable attention on the subject of the seamless robe which he believes is based on Exodus 28:31-32. The author as a young person in 1959 got to see the "seamless robe" (i.e. relic) on display in city of Trier which happens rarely—many decades between displays. He learned later as an adult that the last time it had been previously displayed was in 1933 to celebrate the Reichskonkordat, an agreement between the Catholic Church and the Nazi government of Germany. Hitler had been invited to the 1933 event. (Thankfully. he saved the church historical embarrassment by not attending.)

Near the end of the book the author calls for a Vatican III to make needed corrections to the Roman Catholic Church. The following are his proposed agenda items. The quotations that I've excerpted provide only the briefest of descriptions and don’t do justice for the case that the author makes for them. 

Agenda Item 1: Anti-Judaism in the New Testament ...
When the anti-Jewish polemic of John, and the entire New Testament, is read outside the context and in ignorance of the Jewish community that produced it, the words become truly lethal.

Agenda Item 2: The Church and Power ...
THERE ARE FEW things we can say with more certainty about Jesus than that he defined his mission in opposition not to Judaism but to the imperium of Rome. …
"Christian biblical theology must recognize," the Catholic feminist theologian Elisabeth Schüssler Fiorenza has written, "that its articulation of anti-Judaism in the New Testament goes hand in hand with its gradual adaptation to Greco-Roman patriarchal society. … 
The mentality of power is the issue, and as the Gospels display a treasonous anti-Judaism, they also reveal, in the anonymity of these very women, assumptions of male dominance that must equally be rejected.

Agenda Item 3: A New Christology ...
The Church's fixation on the death of Jesus as the universal salvific act must end, and the place of the cross must be reimagined in Christian faith. …
If the death of Jesus is no longer seen as the trigger of a transformation of a wrathful God, then the false idea of "the Jews" as perpetrators of that death will cease to have weight— then and only then. That is why the cross must be reimagined, and deemphasized, as a Christian symbol.
A new Christology, faithfully based in the Scriptures and available from a tradition that includes an Abelard, will in no way support supersessionism. A new Christology will banish from Christian faith the blasphemy that God wills the suffering of God's beloved ones, and the inhuman idea that anyone's death can be the fulfillment of a plan of God’s.

Agenda Item 4: The Holiness of Democracy ...
Vatican III must therefore turn the Church away from monarchy and toward democracy, as the Catholic people have in fact already done. Vatican III must restore the broken authority of the Church by locating authority in the place where it belongs, which is with the people through whom the Spirit breathes. Vatican III must affirm that democracy itself is the latest gift from a God who operates in history, and the only way for the Church to affirm democracy is by embracing it.

Agenda Item 5: Repentance ...
The cross at Auschwitz, transcending whatever benign intention attaches to it, embodies supersessionism, medieval absolutism, the cult of martyrdom, the violence of God, the ancient hatred of Jews, and the Christian betrayal of Jesus Christ. 
…
Therefore the Christian Church should come here and perform a simple penitential rite. This rite must be conducted in silence, to compensate for the sinful silence of the Church, but more, to push beyond all the words that have come too easily. The most precious Christian words—Golgotha, redemption, sacrifice—have no place here.
____________

I offer the following excerpt from near the end of the book as the author’s closing sentiment. The following statement follows his acknowledgment that all humans are creatures of their time and place in history and had he been somewhere else in history perhaps he would have participated in actions and beliefs that he now rejects. 

The shame I feel as a Catholic Christian, aware in detail of the ways that the Church sanctified the hatred of Jews, not only betraying Jesus but tilling the soil out of which would come the worst crime in history, is shame not only at what my people did, but at what I can now admit I might well have done myself.

The following excerpt from the book was interesting: 

All of the accusations against Pius XII, — from his overreadiness in 1933 to negotiate the Nazi-legitimizing Reichskonkordat; to his indifference to the fate of unbaptized Jews, as reflected in the "secret annex" and the record of other Vatican initiatives limited to converted Jews; to his 1939 cancellation of his predecessor's encyclical condemning Nazi antisemitism; to his refusal to condemn the brutal German invasion of Catholic Poland; to his tacit acceptance of Nazi and fascist anti-Jewish legislation; to his failure to mention the Jews, or even the Nazis, by name in his Christmas message of 1942 to his meeting repeatedly with Croatian Ustashi leaders, including Ante Pavelič, a mini-Hitler who found refuge in the Vatican after the war; to his declining ever to excommunicate Hitler, Himmler, Bormann, Goebbels, or other Catholic Nazis — all these accusations pale beside this one, dating to events in October 1943.

The 1943 event being referenced at the end is the rounding up of Jews in Rome by the Nazis, literally just outside the Pope’s window.