![]() ![]() Such a formulation freely sounds unfair and overstated. In essence, for Fredriksen, Jesus was a doubly duped victim, bilked by the failure of history to end and swindled by a mismanaged political game, a religious enthusiast who, by a bungled act of Roman plotting, unwittingly founded a new Jewish lunatic fringe: a crowd of mentally "marginal Jews" made in his image, a first-century sect of blundering and impervious prophetic dullness. A few select issues will be evoked below. Such a project is obviously unobjectionable as far as it goes, though it takes many turns and pronounces many judgments that can and really should be disputed and resisted. From here, with characteristic verve, the book-which is a kind of smashed-together summary of positions developed in her previous works (e.g., Jesus of Nazareth, King of Jews and Paul, the Pagan's Apostle )-launches out upon Fredriksen's long-standing enterprise of rethinking and rewriting the entirety of Christian origins as a fully Jewish story. Lamentable as Christian anti-Judaism surely is, one wonders if a moralizing font of vulgarized ex-Christian "Jewish" anti-Christianism, dispensing seductively packaged speculative historical reconstructions, is what better Christian–Jewish relations really needed.Īt the base of the study stands a sharp variant on a perfectly benign first principle of historical reason: Jesus was a Jew. In the meantime, of course, when the world did not end, these misguided Jews somehow turned into misguided Christians, and the book ends as an ethical thrust aimed at "one of the West's most sustained fonts of anti-Judaism" (183), namely Christianity, a faith built on layer upon layer of illusion. "Christians" did not yet exist in that far-away first generation, she confesses, only misguided Jews who thought that they would be history's last. Still more: she is a former-Catholic Jewish historian of early Jewish Christians, who on her last page rejects her own catchy title as a distorting anachronism. The title hides an autobiographical interest, for Fredriksen is herself a Jew who was a Christian. And so, with provocative and original analysis, Bauman questions whether anti-Christian violence in contemporary India is really about religion, in the narrowest sense, or rather a manifestation of broader concerns among some Hindus about the Western sociopolitical order with which they associate global Christianity.B y natural disposition, I am inclined to follow the (now not so) New Criticism, but Paula Fredriksen has written a book that begs for a good old-fashioned Freudian reading: When Christians Were Jews: The First Generation. ![]() Intensifying the widespread Hindu tendency to think of religion in ethnic rather than universal terms, the ideology of Hindutva, or "Hinduness," explicitly rejects both the secular privatization of religion and the separability of religions from the communities that incubate them. With such theories in mind, Bauman explores the nature of anti-Christian violence in India, contending that resistance to secular modernities is, in fact, an important but often overlooked reason behind Hindu attacks on Christians. Integrating theories of anti-Christian violence focused on politics, economics, and proselytization, Anti-Christian Violence in India additionally weaves in recent theory about globalization and, in particular, the forms of resistance against Western secular modernity that globalization periodically helps to provoke. Is "religious" conflict sui generis, or is it merely one species of intergroup conflict? Why and how might violence become an attractive option for religious actors? What explains the increase in religious violence over the last twenty to thirty years? Bauman, and if so, does it cause conflict more than other social identities? Through an extended history of Christian-Hindu relations, with particular attention to the 2007–2008 riots in Kandhamal, Odisha, Anti-Christian Violence in India examines religious violence and how it pertains to broader aspects of humanity. ![]() Does religion cause violent conflict, asks Chad M. ![]()
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