A depiction of Jesus before Pilate. Photo credit: Flickr Creative Commons, Waiting for the Word
A former priest is troubled by the anti-Semitism that has been drawn from the story of the trial and crucifixion of Jesus of Nazareth.
Boston Globe columnist and author James Carroll argues that understanding the context of the Roman political war on Judaism in the first century is vital for both the Christian and secular world.
"When Europe turned against the Jews in the 1940s, either actively complicitous in the Holocaust or bystanders to it, the only way they could do that was by imagining that Jesus himself was not a Jew,” Carroll says. “The history of Christianity and Judaism would be very different if Christians had remained completely convinced throughout that Jesus himself was Jewish.”
In his book “Christ Actually,” Carroll writes that the historical accounts of Pontius Pilate don’t indicate that the Roman governor would have given Jesus much of a trial, much less put his fate in the hands of the Jews.
“By the time story is told, written down decades after the event, a mythical vision of Pontius Pilate has been created,” Carroll says. “The Pilate story is the literature of a civil war.”
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