God and Empire

"The second book takes the next step in the story, because it explains how, once Jesus comes into the story, the temptation to violence reasserts itself. Jesus comes to resist the violence of Rome. The one thing we know for sure about Jesus is that he was a person of non-violence. He issues a kind of prophetic call to his fellow Jews for non-violent resistance to Rome. The tragedy, and the manifestation that Jerusalem is always the place where violence comes back, is that the followers of Jesus embraced their own violence against the Jewish people. Coming out of the revelation of Christianity, we have a religion of peace that immediately begins to violently scapegoat the Jewish people. That is the original sin of Christianity. It plants the horrible seeds of anti-Semitism, which will ultimately, across the centuries, lead to savage violence against the Jewish people, often in the name of Jesus. Which is a profound betrayal of Jesus himself, who was, of course, always and only a Jew. So Crossan’s book gives us the Christian elaboration of the Jewish faith, but also shows how, especially once the Empire embraces Christianity, the Christian faith betrays itself. Christians embrace the Roman idea that Jews must be in exile from Jerusalem. We know that God has rejected Jews because the Temple has been destroyed, and they have been banished from Jerusalem. Christians begin to point to the Jewish banishment from Jerusalem as proof of Christian claims. Jerusalem remains central to the Christian vision – but now it’s Jerusalem without Jews. And Jews then are in exile from Jerusalem whenever the Christians are in control of it. That theological position is relevant to the ambivalence people have today about Jews at home in Israel. Then the story changes again when Islam arrives in Jerusalem, not long after Mohammad dies in the 7th century. The first thing the Islamic armies do is to move against Jerusalem, and they take it – non-violently, by the way. The Islamic claim to Jerusalem is almost as strong as the Islamic claim to Mecca. Muslims embrace the idea of Jerusalem, and one of the first things they do after taking over Jerusalem is to invite the Jews to come back into it. So that by the 7th century, you have all three religions rooting themselves in Jerusalem. “America is the new Jerusalem, and the most common place name of all the towns and cities in the United States of America to this day is Jerusalem.” So Islam takes control of Jerusalem, and, just as Jews were forced into exile after the Roman destruction of Jerusalem in the 1st century, now Christians are forced into exile from Jerusalem. Like Jews, they imagine a fantasy city which begins to define Christendom, European Christian civilisation. As soon as European Christian civilisation has the power to do so – in the 11th century – it assembles armies and moves against Jerusalem. Europe comes into itself during the three centuries of the Crusades; the Crusades represent an obsessive longing to take possession of Jerusalem, and one army after another goes to Jerusalem to take it back. They succeed in taking Jerusalem for a few decades. But then they lose it again. This is important because now Jerusalem is not just a city, but a fantasy. From then on, western Christianity and the civilisation it generates imagines Jerusalem as the solution to every problem. The fantasy of Jerusalem comes into tension with the reality of it. Muslims are in charge of Jerusalem, and they allow both Jews and Christians to be there in peace. But they become the fantasy enemy of western Christianity. Then there are the adventurers of colonialism. What was Christopher Columbus looking for when he sailed to the West in 1492? It’s quite explicit in his journals: he was looking for a new route to Jerusalem. The fantasy of Jerusalem defines what Christopher Columbus was doing, but also then defines the new world that follows from his discoveries. What were the British religious dissenters looking for when they went to the New World in the early 17th century? They were looking for the city on a hill, which is, of course, Jerusalem. That becomes a foundation of the American myth. America is the new Jerusalem, and the most common place name of all the towns and cities in the United States of America to this day is Jerusalem."