Sins of the Fathers.

Constantine's Sword: The Church and the Jews: A History, by James Carroll (Houghton Mifflin, 756 pp., $28)

'If I were Pope . . ." Every Catholic at one time or another plays this game. Pro-lifers would excommunicate Senator So-and-So, traditionalists would return to Mass in Latin, theologians would silence each other, etc. In small measures, this can be a healthy exercise of one's imagination, envisioning a world in some way, small or great, better than the one we inhabit.

It takes a healthy ego to write a full-length book based solely on such woolgatherings, but even in its twilight, the Catholic Left has not lacked partisans with the necessary brio. Since 1999, we have seen John Cornwell's Hitler's Pope, Garry Wills's Papal Sin, and now James Carroll's Constantine's Sword, each laying out a vision of what God really intends the Catholic Church to be. Although each claims to be a work of history, each instead uses (and abuses) history to make a case for a Church without all the bad parts: priests, men, heterosexuals, absolute truth, confession, the papacy, Scripture, the Mass, the Resurrection, Rome.

On March 16, 1998, the Vatican issued its long-awaited statement on the Holocaust, "We Remember: A Reflection on the Shoah." The document acknowledged and condemned Christian discrimination against and persecution of Jews throughout its history, and repeated the teaching of the Second Vatican Council that "the Church . . . deplores the hatred, persecutions, and displays of anti-Semitism directed against the Jews at any time and from any source." Constantine's Sword is Carroll's attempt to rewrite this historic document as he thinks it should have been written.

A vocal segment of liberal opinion, including the editorial board of the New York Times, sniffed that the Vatican's statement was fine as far as it went-but it should also have condemned Pius XII for his alleged silence regarding the deportation of Jews, and should not have declared that anti-Semitism is external to the Church. The document quotes John Paul II saying, "In the Christian world-I do not say on the part of the Church as such-erroneous and unjust interpretations of the New Testament regarding the Jewish people and their alleged culpability have circulated for too long, engendering feelings of hostility toward this people." This distinction between "the Christian world" and "the Church as such" seemed to many observers-both Jewish and non-Jewish-a failure to admit just how pervasive Christian anti-Semitism has been in the Church itself.

The Catholic response to this was very theological: Yes, Christians at every level of the Church have treated the Jews unjustly. But when the Pope says "the Church as such," he is referring to Paul's doctrine of the Church as the "mystical body of Christ." The Church cannot sin, because Jesus was without sin, and the Church is nothing other than Jesus Christ dwelling among men in a mystical way. In this theological sense, and in this sense only, is the Church completely innocent of any injustices against the Jews.

Only from this theological viewpoint, it might be added, can the Church condemn the repeated actions of its members, even its leaders, without undermining her own institution. Because the Church is perfect and its members imperfect, the argument goes, it is possible to criticize Christians in the name of the Church, as being bad Christians when they are bad to Jews.

For most people, this solves the problem of dishonesty-the Pope is free to use theological terms in any way he sees fit. Yet Carroll rejects this distinction altogether. "Really to eliminate the contempt for Jews that lives not [just] in the hearts of prejudiced Christians but in the heart of 'the Church as such' requires fundamental changes in the way history has been written, theology has been taught, and Scripture has been interpreted. Indeed, in this context, the very character of Scripture as sacred text becomes an issue." So deep are the roots of anti-Semitism, Carroll insists, that to pull them up is to dislodge the central institutions and doctrines of Christianity. "We Remember," by trying to distance the Church from anti-Semitic Christians, did not go deep enough, so Carroll has set out to do it properly.

Carroll's story has three parts. Part One is an account of the early Church period in which Carroll denies the Resurrection of Christ and the divine inspiration of the Gospels. Part Two explains how the Gospel account of the Crucifixion led to the theology of the Cross as elaborated by the medieval bishop St. Anselm of Canterbury (1033-1109), which made the death of Christ at the hands of the Jews central to Christian spirituality. Part Three moves from the crusading impulse of Anselm's day to Auschwitz. All along, Carroll tries to connect anti- Judaism, the theological reasons for not being Jewish, with anti- Semitism, the prejudice against the Jewish people. In Carroll's revisionist story, all of the historic conflicts between Jews and Christians stem from the moment when (as the Christians tell it) every faction of the Jewish establishment-the Gospels mention the chief priests, the Pharisees, the officers of the temple police, the Jewish elders, the Sanhedrin, the scribes, the high priest, and the "Herodians" loyal to King Herod-demanded that the Roman praetor Pontius Pilate execute Jesus as a common criminal. Carroll draws a straight line between this Gospel account of the Crucifixion of Jesus and the horrors of Nazi ideology. No crucifix, no Auschwitz, he alleges. But because Carroll wants to remain a Christian, he seeks to preserve the authentic message of Jesus himself. Relying on the conclusions of the "Jesus Seminar," a well-publicized attempt to find the true historical Jesus behind the "propagandistic" New Testament accounts, Carroll discovers that the initial distinction between Judaism and Christianity itself is illegitimate: Jesus was himself a Jew who taught only love. His message was so revolutionary that it provoked the Romans (not the Jews) into killing him. The grieving disciples gathered in a "bereft circle" where they shared their memories of Jesus, sang songs, read poems, ate and drank to his memory-"the film The Big Chill captures this phenomenon," explains Carroll.

Strong emotions led the mourners to pretend that an imaginary Jesus was still with them-"it was as if there were one more member than could be counted . . . the followers once again felt the presence of Jesus, were certain of it, were healed by it." The apostles fell into the habit of talking about Jesus as though he were still alive and with them. When later converts heard the same words, continues Carroll, they took them literally and believed Jesus to have risen from the dead. These later generations were the ones to write down the Gospels, which pinned responsibility for the death of Jesus on the Jews in an attempt to curry favor with the Romans.

After the Romans burnt the Temple in a.d. 70, the Jesus followers and the Pharisees found themselves the dominant surviving factions of Judaism. Since it was no longer possible to offer sacrifices as Mosaic Law indicated, these groups represented the only plausible ways of reinterpreting God's covenant with Israel. Their leaders drew bright theological lines so that everyone could tell these versions of Judaism apart, using rhetorical arguments with which future generations would justify murders, calumnies, and genocide. Because Jesus' message was rejected by Pharisees and found greater acceptance among Gentiles, Carroll contends, the evangelists prettied up Roman involvement in the death of Jesus to exaggerate the role of the Jews.

For roughly two centuries after the completion of the New Testament, however, Judaism was officially recognized by the Roman emperor while Christianity was not, and indeed was, from time to time, forced underground by local persecutions. All this changed in the year 312 when a young claimant to the imperial throne named Constantine saw a cross in the sky above the words In Hoc Signo Vinces ("In This Sign, You Will Conquer").

Constantine's troops were just outside Rome, awaiting the next day's battle at the Milvian Bridge, and their general made a promise to God that if he won that battle he would convert to Christianity and tolerate the Christian religion throughout the empire. He quickly had a new standard made-"a long spear, overlaid with gold, formed the figure of the cross by means of a transverse bar laid over it"-behind which his troops won a complete victory.

Constantine not only tolerated Christianity but actively strengthened it, and his successors made it the official religion of the empire. Constantine made the cross so central to the Christian story that it "replaced the life of Jesus and the new life of Resurrection at the heart of the Christian imagination." At this, writes Carroll, "the balance shifted decisively against the Jews," because the polemical exaggerations of the Christian scriptures had already blamed the death of Christ on the Jews. In several chapters, Carroll describes how the confluence of imperial power, majority status, and devotion to the Cross gave Christians the ability and incentive to persecute Jews (on occasion) in ways ranging from the burning of synagogues to the denial of government jobs. Carroll's story then jumps to the end of the 11th century, when Pope Urban II launched a crusade to take back the Holy Land from Muslim control, and St. Anselm of Canterbury finished his dialogue Cur Deus Homo ("Why God Became Man"). The linking of theology and violence-"the cross was ubiquitous on the breasts of warriors"-encouraged some Crusaders to knock down a few German synagogues on their way to fight the Moors. But it is Anselm, by all accounts a relatively peaceful man (it is to him that we attribute the custom of beginning even letters to strangers with the intimate salutation "Dear"), to whom Carroll attributes the final theological pillar of Nazism. Anselm's powerful theological vision emphasized that Jesus' freely chosen death was the only way God could fulfill the requirements of justice, namely that man's sins be punished, without also condemning all men to hell. Anselm "succeeded in bringing the notion of Christ's death as atonement to its fullest expression," Carroll writes, because it "explained the dominant religious experience . . . an atoning cross lent meaning to what life required in a brutish time."

Anselm's reasoning is still very influential ("Redeemer" is one of the most commonly used titles for Jesus), and at the center of its logic is the death of Christ, i.e., the Cross. If we accept the first parts of Carroll's story, then we recognize that the Cross calls to mind the anti-Jewish propaganda of the early Church that the Jews were responsible for Jesus' execution, that anti-Judaism is the basis of anti-Semitism, and that anti-Semitism is the basis of all persecution of Jews from medieval pogroms to the death camps. Carroll's remaining chapters connect these dots in a rather familiar way, covering the Spanish Inquisition, the Roman ghettos, and the Dreyfus affair, before concluding with a multi-chapter summary of the story told in Hitler's Pope. (Carroll admits that Cornwell's bestseller has been ripped to shreds by many scholars, but uses it as a major source nonetheless.) Carroll's own contribution to this subject is his theological argument that anti-Semitism is essential to Christianity. It is hard to know where to begin dismantling this theory; the book has factual mistakes and errors in interpretation on almost every page. To begin with, Carroll is wrong to maintain that the cross became important only after Constantine's vision. That's why the death of Christ takes up so much of each Gospel, and why Paul's letters are packed with such lines as "we preach Christ crucified: a stumbling block to Jews and foolishness to Gentiles" (I Corinthians 1:23).

Carroll's claim that the early Church touched up the facts surrounding Jesus' death to appease the Romans and condemn the Jews is contradicted by the New Testament itself. Acts describes Peter in his first public appearance as leader of the Church addressing the Jews as "brothers," telling them flatly that they killed their Messiah, and yet offering them forgiveness because they did not know what they were doing. From the beginning, then, the Church saw the death of Jesus as an event in the history of Israel in which the Romans played an ancillary role; it was a great evil, but also an occasion for repentance and forgiveness.

Carroll's overarching mistake is philosophical, however. Jewish- Christian dialogue (as opposed to polemic) can only appeal to what the two religions have in common, namely, the Hebrew Bible and "Judeo- Christian" morality. This shared morality can help them agree on a just resolution of many conflicts, from property disputes to questions of religious freedom. But when it comes to what each thinks about the other's religious beliefs, each appeals to its particular tradition- Jews to the Talmud, for example, Christians to the New Testament-and they agree to disagree. Jews do not expect Christians to denounce Jesus as a blasphemer and Christians do not expect Jews to accept Jesus as Lord. Religious differences may be sad, but they are real; they may even result from the will of God.

Carroll, on the other hand, holds tolerance as his absolute good, and judges both religions by this standard. Rather than accept that God's will may exclude some people from salvation, Carroll insists that religion reshape itself to include everyone; his book ends with a call for a Third Vatican Council, to which not just Catholics would be invited but "Jews and Protestants, people of other faiths and no faith, clergy and laity, and, emphatically, women." If the Church doesn't do this, then the Church is evil; if Jesus didn't want this . . . but of course Jesus wanted this, and if Scripture and tradition say otherwise, then we need to change them too. To be good is to be tolerant; God is goodness itself, therefore God is tolerance-and tolerance is God.

Only the extraordinarily credulous will believe that better theology in the 11th century would have stopped Hitler's genocide. Like Cornwell and Wills, Carroll is trying to use the controversy over Pius XII to win a battle within the Catholic Church. All three books represent an attempt by a dying but still powerful movement to counteract the enormous prestige and popular respect given to Pope John Paul II. Fortunately, given the crowds who flock to see him, it doesn't seem to be working.