Constantine's Sword Page #3

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That is the journey I have to take.

Why is it a Jewish cadet

who is singled out?

I understood somehow...

that I had to take on this question

of Jewish Christian history,

which is so complicated

and so dark.

Somebody said you live your life forward

but you understand it backward.

My first memory

of hearing the word Jew...

had to be at church

when I was 7 years old.

I knew who the Jews were,

they had killed our lord.

Then they had refuse

to believe in him.

When I was a kid,

the death of Jesus was what...

first grabbed me.

It was a figure like this that I would

kneel before next to my mother.

The power of the passion story

even for someone like myself...

who cannot accept the

divinity of Jesus...

the story of his mortality

is supremely moving.

- But this is a man I loved.

- Yeah.

Also a man to whom I pray.

My problem has been that,

when I stand before a figure like this,

I can appreciate them and be moved

by them only on condition...

that I shut down a piece of my heart...

that I obliterate something

of what I know about...

the actual consequences

in the real world...

of these images

and of these figures.

- For you?

- Well, not for me.

I am an American Jew

born in the 1950's...

that makes me one of the spoiled

brats of Jewish history.

I am one of the luckiest Jews

who had ever lived.

But certainly for my parents and

the people who preceded them, yeah.

The supremacy of the cross

in European culture...

was responsible for the death...

of many of my people...

for centuries before I was born...

and eventually for the death

of my own family...

in south-eastern Poland.

I am the descendant of the victims.

So, you have a much more difficult

problem than I do.

In other words if you want

to understand Anti-Semitism...

don't study Jews, study non-Jews.

Why do we blame the Jews?

Generation after generation,

where do this contempt come from?

I'm trying to figure out where it all

went wrong between Christians and Jews.

And we go back to Jesus,

we have to go back to Jesus.

Before there were Christians...

when there were only Jews...

because Jesus certainly

saw himself as a devout Jew,

a prophet...

and was called Rabbi.

How did the story then get told...

with the Jews being cast

as the villains here?

Well, it's an extraordinary twist.

The way the stories are told

in the New Testament Gospels.

It says basically that it was the

Jewish leaders who arrested Jesus...

who tried him, who

sentenced him to death...

and who basically duped the Romans

into crucifying him.

Is that true to history?

It looks completely at odds

with what we know about history.

We know that this was a Roman charge, a

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