SUNDAY, DEC 21, 2014 04:00 AM +0900
James Carroll on disarming the memory of Jesus: “America threatens the world with violence in ways that no other country does”
The brilliant scholar James Carroll on anti-Semitism, Pope Francis and how liberals can be honest believers
MICHAEL SCHULSON
キリスト教というのはユダヤ教の一派だったのであって、それが、ユダヤ人と敵対するようになったのは、ローマがユダヤ人を弾圧し、それで生き延びたのは、ローマに抵抗しなかいでエルサレムを去ったラビたちのグループとやはりエルサレムからガリラヤに移ったイエスのグループだったが、それ以降、”ユダヤ人”とキリスト信者の間で、真のイスラエルをめぐる抗争があり、そうした文脈のなかで、ユダヤ人が悪者になっていったのだ、と。聖書のなかでも”ユダヤ人””ユダヤ人”とたくさんでてくるが、人助けもしない、欲深い、偽善者のように悪者として登場している、と。 南米では、いまだに、ユダヤ人であることを明かすと、イエスキリストを殺したな、といわれる、と。
こうした、２項対立的発想、他者を否定的に評価することで、あるいは、他者を排斥することで、、自己を正反対の肯定として含意・定義していく発想は、反ユダヤ主義、反イスラム主義、人種差別主義、植民地主義の発想の根幹にあり、克服していくべきである、と。
イエスの教えの根幹は、むしろ、非暴力であって、現代のアメリカにおいてはとりわけ重要なものだ、と。
https://www.google.co.jp/search?q=obscurantism&rlz=1C1LEND_enJP463JP463&oq=obscurantism&aqs=chrome..69i57&sourceid=chrome&es_sm=93&ie=UTF-8
フランスが誇り、また、フランスの本質のようになっている世俗主義というのは、そもそもカソリック弾圧から始まり、宗教を弾圧することで、自己規定たる世俗主義が成立していたが、カソリックがおとなしくなって国家に刃向かわなくなってしまったので、いまや、イスラム教が宗教的脅威として必要であり、イスラム教を弾圧することで、フランスはフランスであり続けようとしているのである、みたいな感じか。
ここでも、２項対立的発想、他者を否定的に評価し、自己を正反対の肯定として含意・定義していく機構が作動しているところにも注目。
15 January 2015, 10.02pm AEDT
The French myth of secularism
フランスは宗教に中立な世俗主義のようなことを言っているが、実はキリスト教、ユダヤ教には甘く、イスラム教にはつらい法システムになっている、と。
----以上、記事３篇 おわり
James Carroll on disarming the memory of Jesus: “America threatens the world with violence in ways that no other country does”
The brilliant scholar James Carroll on anti-Semitism, Pope Francis and how liberals can be honest believers
MICHAEL SCHULSON
Carroll is a journalist, columnist, novelist and scholar. A devout Catholic, he used to be a priest. In his new book, “Christ Actually,” Carroll chronicles how the Roman war pushed early Christians to define themselves in opposition to Judaism, and to divorce Jesus from his Jewish roots.
That’s part two of the break. Part one of the break, I’m arguing, is the Roman war against the Jews. Let’s say there were five separate parties of Judaism in the 60s of the first century. Sadducees, Pharisees, the priesthood, the Essenes, the Jordan Valley—multiple ways of being Jewish. All of them were destroyed in the Roman war except two: the party associated with the rabbis, who left Jerusalem and refused to be part of the war against Rome. And the other party, the Jesus people, who also split from Jerusalem and set up in Galilee. It’s because they refused to be part of the violent resistance against Rome that they survived at all. Two new religions come out of the destruction of the Temple [during the Roman war].
And begin to diverge.
And then they begin to argue with each other over who can claim the legacy of Israel. Who is the true Israel? And the argument, as you know, becomes ferocious, which is what informs the conflict in the Gospel between Jesus and the, quote, Jews, unquote. The Gospels are written over three decades.
You write in the book that you hear sermons every week in church that promote this kind of polarized thinking.
I heard one last week. The scripture put before Christians and Catholics was about Jesus’ attack on the Temple. That’s a classic case of this problem. Jesus is understood as going into the Temple and defending what he calls “my father’s house” against the avaricious Jews. He upends the tables of the money-changers as if the money-changers are medieval Jewish lenders. That’s the way the story is heard.
It’s an outrage to imagine that Jesus was in any way opposed to the normal business of the temple. If there was money-changing going on at the Temple, it was because people, Jews from all over the Mediterranean world, were showing up there regularly, and they all had different currencies.
Here’s what I recommend for every Christian: bring your Jewish friend to church with you, and let your Jewish friend listen to the text, and then ask your Jewish friend how they felt. Jewish folks listening to these very common texts—the Good Samaritan parable, the attack on the Temple, any number of them—or the way that polemical phrase, “the Jews, the Jews, the Jews” keeps showing up …
Think of all of this as a bug in the software of Christianity; how do we de-bug it? Number one, we have to understand how the texts came to be written this way. Number two, we have to hear the anti-Jewish texts as if we’re Jews; we have to learn how to do that. Number three, we have to measure everything we say and believe about Jesus against the fact that he was authentically, fully an Orthodox Jew until the day he died.
That seems like a daunting task. Just the other day, a Catholic in a large Mexican city shied away from me and said, “Oh, you killed Jesus!” when he learned that I was Jewish. That experience is not unusual. Where will this kind of education have to come from?
In Latin America, that myth still holds to a larger extent than in English-speaking countries.
The way the English language uses the word “pharisee” as a synonym for “hypocrite”—that’s a slander. The Pharisees were not hypocrites. They’re put in the role of villainous hypocrites in the conflict with Jesus in the Gospels, but that’s fiction. Christians should stop using the word “pharisee” as a synonym for “hypocrite.”
This is your second book that involves anti-Semitism and the Church. There are many atrocities of which the Church has been guilty over the years. What makes anti-Semitism seem especially toxic?
Anti-Semitism is the godfather of this entire problem. That bipolar structure of mind I was defining a few minutes ago, positive vs. negative, that informs the imagination of Christianity in the Constantinian period, is then the grounds on which the culture of Christendom is constructed. The bipolar positive/negative, Jewish vs. Christian structure of imagination defines the European mind, and in the era of the Crusades, that positive/negative structure is expanded to include Islam, so that Europe can define itself positively against Islam.
What I’m suggesting is that this bipolar structure of mind begins in anti-Jewishness, expands to Islamophobia, and then, in subsequent centuries after the crusades, continues in the adventuring, colonizing period, when Europeans set out to establish plantations in the far reaches of the rest of the planet. What you get in the colonizing period is a new version of the positive/negative bipolarity. Only now it’s white Europe over people of colors everywhere. That bipolarity is the invention of racism. Edward Said argues that Orientalism, which is his word for this phenomenon, begins in anti-Semitism.
What would it mean to act like Jesus in today’s world, or to be a modern imitation of Christ?
The biggest single thing I can think of is nonviolence. The thing that I most value about Jesus was his clear commitment to nonviolence in a very violent world. That message has never had more importance, especially for me as an American. The United States of America threatens the world with violence in ways that no other country does, and that boils down to our refusal to disarm after the end of the Cold War. This unchecked, monumental national security establishment that is defining our nation in terrible ways—the nonviolence of Jesus speaks directly to the American condition.
キリスト教というのはユダヤ教の一派だったのであって、それが、ユダヤ人と敵対するようになったのは、ローマがユダヤ人を弾圧し、それで生き延びたのは、ローマに抵抗しなかいでエルサレムを去ったラビたちのグループとやはりエルサレムからガリラヤに移ったイエスのグループだったが、それ以降、”ユダヤ人”とキリスト信者の間で、真のイスラエルをめぐる抗争があり、そうした文脈のなかで、ユダヤ人が悪者になっていったのだ、と。聖書のなかでも”ユダヤ人””ユダヤ人”とたくさんでてくるが、人助けもしない、欲深い、偽善者のように悪者として登場している、と。 南米では、いまだに、ユダヤ人であることを明かすと、イエスキリストを殺したな、といわれる、と。
こうした、２項対立的発想、他者を否定的に評価することで、あるいは、他者を排斥することで、、自己を正反対の肯定として含意・定義していく発想は、反ユダヤ主義、反イスラム主義、人種差別主義、植民地主義の発想の根幹にあり、克服していくべきである、と。
イエスの教えの根幹は、むしろ、非暴力であって、現代のアメリカにおいてはとりわけ重要なものだ、と。
https://www.google.co.jp/search?q=obscurantism&rlz=1C1LEND_enJP463JP463&oq=obscurantism&aqs=chrome..69i57&sourceid=chrome&es_sm=93&ie=UTF-8
The glorious triumph of atheistic rationality over the dangerous totalitarian obscurantism of the Catholic church is one of the great foundation myths of republican France. And coded within this mythology is the message that liberty, equality, fraternity can flourish only when religion is suppressed from the public sphere.
And the reason publications such as Charlie Hebdo persist with their crass anti-clerical cliches (where the joke is usually a variation on bishops buggering each other) is that a powerful strain of French self-understanding actually requires a sense of external religious threat against which to frame itself. But as the Catholic church is no longer planning to sponsor a coup against the state, Republican identity requires something new to define itself against – something just like radical Islam. As Voltaire put it: “If God did not exist it would be necessary to invent him.” Thus France picked a fight with Islam by banning the headscarf from schools in 2004 and the niqab from all public life back in 2010 – bans which closely echo the hostility of earlier generations to the veiling of nuns.
フランスが誇り、また、フランスの本質のようになっている世俗主義というのは、そもそもカソリック弾圧から始まり、宗教を弾圧することで、自己規定たる世俗主義が成立していたが、カソリックがおとなしくなって国家に刃向かわなくなってしまったので、いまや、イスラム教が宗教的脅威として必要であり、イスラム教を弾圧することで、フランスはフランスであり続けようとしているのである、みたいな感じか。
ここでも、２項対立的発想、他者を否定的に評価し、自己を正反対の肯定として含意・定義していく機構が作動しているところにも注目。
15 January 2015, 10.02pm AEDT
The French myth of secularism
フランスは宗教に中立な世俗主義のようなことを言っているが、実はキリスト教、ユダヤ教には甘く、イスラム教にはつらい法システムになっている、と。
----以上、記事３篇 おわり
