Jerusalem, Jerusalem: How the Ancient City Ignited Our Modern World by Mel Foster,James Carroll

Carroll agonizes over violence committed by the dastardly religious. Alas, the cruel reality of facts: Philip and Axelrod’s 'Encyclopedia of Wars' tied religion to 6.98% of all wars, a minuscule amount, and removing those connected to Islam cut the number to 3.23%. Let me repeat that: 3.23%.

But Carroll cares nothing for mere facts: "The connection between religion and violence has been powerfully laid bare in the twenty-first century" (p 310) he mysteriously insists. Atheists made the twentieth century the greatest abattoir in history, with one hundred million people murdered (see the book "The Black Book of Communism") and let us not forget the fifty million murdered by atheist communists in China (see the book "Mao's Great Famine: The History of China's Most Devastating Catastrophe, 1958-1962".

They targeted the religious. Nor were the killings in Russia of unarmed, frequently elderly, nuns and priests simple gun shots to the head. Archbishop Andronnik of Perm was buried alive. Archbishop Vasily was crucified and burned. Father Johannes was dismembered. (p 123, The Forgotten: Catholics of the Soviet Empire from Lenin through Stalin.)

An official Russian government report published in 1995, estimated that "200,000 Russian Orthodox priests, monks, and nuns had been slain and another 500,000 imprisoned " (p 277) and "Of those priests arrested and interred a grand total of twelve would survive the Gulag (p 277).

Other good books on the subject: Red Famine: Stalin's War on Ukraine", "And God Created Lenin: Marxism vs Religion In Russia, 1917-1929" and "The Plot to Kill God".

You would think that after slaughtering 150 million human beings atheists would be hiding in the shadows, trying not to draw attention to themselves.

Not Carroll, who unbelievably contends that "Jerusalem is the cockpit of violence,... for three thousand years." History books tell a different story. They paint Jerusalem as a scruffy little city, essentially a village for a millennia, and it was either ignored or taken over quickly by pretty much any army that passed by. The armies of the Mongols, the Hans, the Aztecs, and the other well armed men tramping across the globe in hopes of a little fun, scarcely deemed to notice Jerusalem. And the facts suggest only about 3% of them were galvanized by its scriptures.

Jerusalem barely qualifies as a spitball, let alone as the "cockpit of violence". Carroll is simply wrong, flat out wrong, because religious wars, excepting Islam, add up to a measly 3.23% of wars. And that even includes the Buddhist wars, yet it still totals a piffling amount. What I want to know is this: how does Carroll explain the rest?

Carroll carps that the "Old Testament contains six hundred passages that speak of bloody killing'... War...is at the center of biblical life... because Israel’s God is a warrior God. ” (p 45).

Utterly wrong again. Carroll, who once attended a seminary, knows perfectly well that the early Christians had to contend with heretics who fell away from the church on this very point, so he must have heard the answer. The Old Testament was written during a primitive era by a people relating their history as they understood it. They said God was wrathful, or that he changed his mind.

Christian theologians dismissed the idea that God could be angry. Or even stub his toe and have a bad day. Christians said entire of the Old Testament had to be viewed through the new revelations of Jesus Christ, and these were revelations of love, from a God who was love itself, and joy, since Christ conquered death.

St Augustine explained that the New Testament lies hidden in the Old and the Old Testament is revealed in the New, a phrase I'll bet Carroll heard at least fifty times in seminary, yet curiously cannot recall today.

Carroll is consumed by a shivering, ugly hatred of Christianity, yet smiles fondly at "the benign tolerance of paganism." (p 61).

Tolerant Romans butchered every single Druid they could lay their hands on and every Carthaginian. The tolerant Carthaginians slaughtered their own children in industrial quantities, as a bribe so they could prevail against the Romans. The tolerant Aztecs and Mayans yanked the still beating hearts from thousands of unfortunates every single year, including children, before settling down to their jolly feasts featuring body parts of the people they had just murdered.

The tolerant pagan gods cared not a whit about pedophilia, also practiced on an industrial scale by both ancient Greeks and Romans. Nor did the Stoics. Only the Christians cared enough about it to end it.

And I doubt Ignatius of Antioch, as he was being fed to the lions, was thinking, "Golly, what luck I was born into the tolerant Roman empire."

Those who wrote the gospels, or, as Carroll nastily states, the "interpreters...spin doctors" (p 56) left the Christian scriptures "drenched in blood...(since) God was "violent enough to require the death on a cross of God's only begotten son" (p 46).

What a hurtful lie. The crucifixion was an act of breathtaking sacrificial love for humanity. And it was a donation, not a requirement by the Father.

The consequences Carroll refuses to examine: if there is no God then might makes right, violence is as much a nothing as kindness, morality doesn't exist except as a personal or cultural preference, so why, why is Carroll raging on against Christianity?

The complete failure of his thesis is revealed when he can only find the Crusades to put forward as proof of Christianity's "violence...brought to the altar...a martial ethic". Yes, in two thousand years. Sounding pathetic and desperate, he later grouses over the war to free the slaves.

And as for the Crusades and their "perversions" he fails to mention a few salient points. Before the Islamic armies came, the vast arc of territory which was originally under the Roman empire, had been Christian. Four popes came from North Africa, and there were some 700 bishoprics across Africa, Egypt, and the Middle East, the population totaling about fifty percent of the Christian world. Which all fell to the Muslims. The first Crusade was called when the pope had received a letter pleading for help, as an enormous Islamic army was close to Constantinople. A good book on the subject: "God's Battalions".

Wrong: Carroll claims Crusaders traveled home laden with "plunder". At least half of those who went on a Crusade died, a fact well known at the time, which is why going on a Crusade was seen as a penitential act, and as for "plunder", it is remarkably hard to get plunder when all you do is lose.

More errors: early Christianity was "dominated by Gentiles and Hellenized Jewish Christians who had little feeling for the Judean Jewishness of Jesus" (p 84), he insists, not explaining then why the gospels refer to the Old Testament pretty much every other line.

Utter dribble: "The Gospels were composed as a literature of violence, as wartime literature...they were composed ... to serve as a hospitable niche for the self-nurturing virus of war" (p 86).

How odd, then, that they resulted in two thousand years of hospitals that tended to the deaf, the sick, and the blind, and those stricken with leprosy. Even today, with all the government aid available, Catholic nuns and priests tend to the majority of lepers in the world and one third of AIDS patients. Even while they were being persecuted by the tolerant Romans, Christians were raising money to help the poor or as aid in times of famine.

A belief that God was truth itself, the Logos, and that, because we are born rational creatures, we should seek to understand God and the world by use of logic, began in the west as a result of belief in a rational God. Technology is a fruit of this belief. So were international human rights, proposed by fourteenth century nominalism. Christian theology argued against slavery, so slavery was ended across all but the fringes of Europe. Much later, in 1435, the papal bull Sicut Dudum the pope declared that anyone who bought, sold, or kept a slave was excommunicated. This was followed by half a dozen other papal bulls saying the same thing.

Such books as "Handbook of Religion and Health" or "Who Really Cares", exhaustively went over the research on religious people compared to those who were non religious. The religious were much less likely to steal, cheat, lie, commit a crime, commit adultery, they had children who achieved higher outcomes, and gave to charity in far higher amounts than the non religious.

Good books on the subject of how Christianity changed the world for the better: "The God that Did Not Fail", "The Charity of the Church", "The Popes and Slavery" and "The Book That Made Your World". "When Children Became People" discusses the manifold benefits of Christianity for children and why women converted in droves to the early church.

More error: "The historical Jesus was more likely to have been a defender of the Temple and its cult than a critic of it (p 93). Then perhaps Carroll could explain why the Sadducees wanted him dead.

Unhinged: "Temporal dualism and spatial dualism combine to denigrate the here and now, a denigration that has proven to be history’s most potent source of violence against the earth and its inhabitants—violence carried out in this world in the name of another world; life assaulted for the sake of afterlife. Only in the hereafter does God’s reign of justice, mercy, and peace apply. In the by-and-by, therefore, anything goes" (p 112).

The only Christians consumed with the other world were saints such as Father Maximilian Kolbe, who gave up his life for that of a married Jew in the Nazi death camps. Violence tends to be what happened to the saints, not what they practiced. And calling Christianity "history's most potent source of violence" is hyperbolic.... even deranged. And 'anything goes"? He's never heard a whisper of the ten commandments?

The errors stagger on: "Revelation makes explicit the perversion that implicitly infects the other foundational texts of Christian faith,...Revelation’s inclusion in the New Testament gives the lie to Christian claims to be only a religion of love, and forecasts the bloody mayhem that will be the mark of Christian sway almost everywhere it holds".

This is humiliatingly silly overreach, but he's desperate because the New Testament calls for forgiving your enemy seven times seventy a day, not exactly a cry for "bloody mayhem". The only people in the history of Christianity actually influenced by Revelation were a few village schizophrenics and the occasional small nest of hysterics. And "the bloody mayhem that will be the mark of" Christianity? Didn't he have an editor? Or a history book?

"The material and the spiritual Jerusalem became confusingly intermingled...in the crudely superstitious minds of northern Europeans" (p 137). Oh, those crudely superstitious Christians, so unlike the glittering genius that is Carroll.

He gives the game away: "the Dominican and I shared a kind of elitist condescension toward the ordinary faith of the vast majority of believers " (p 45). Believers, poor dullard clods. So unlike Carroll.

At the end of the book, he introduces his preference to Judaism or Christianity. "Good religion may... have a secular character (p 314) he craftily states, then slips in, "Good religion may indeed presuppose a religion of no religion" (p 315). Ah, a glimmer of truth in his mountain of fabrications. Carroll's good religion is the absence of religion! Why, we are all shocked, shocked! Who could have seen this coming?

The only thing Carroll claims is holy is "the therapist" (p 315). I am not making this up. The holy therapist is where you go to worship self.

Please, pray for him.

James Carroll goes back to prehistoric times as he relates the story of monotheism. He explores the actual and metaphorical history of Jerusalem; follows the intertwined threads of Judaism, Islam, and Christianity; and carries us up to the present day problems in the Middle East. He matches his scholarship with emotional engagement. I loved the book.

James Carroll at his best!

fascinating work on this most famous city; the author knows his material and shows it from the city's early emergence to its present
status. Regardless of one's faith or lack of it, the book is worth reading to better understand its prominence today.

Wonderful and enlightening book. Gives great insight about the history.

THIS BOOK IS A MUST READ.See my review on the book (AN AMERICAN REQUIEM) BY James Carroll if you want to be educated on how Jerusalem has effected history and the church.

Packed with amazing information, which is to say: DENSE. A highly recommended study. I'm amazed page after page with new sight lines on Judaism and Christianity. The book is a huge intellectual adventure, and a very rewarding read provided you give it the time.

Carroll raises and answer questions not only about Jerusalem, past, present, earthly and heavenly, but also
grounds religion and its role in the human violent response to life. Another outstanding book from the mind of a
scholar and gifted writer.