James Carroll's article "Passover and the Passion" was brilliant and completely accurate. What most Christians do not realize when they are indoctrinated by their faith is that Christianity, indeed, had an early church history. Christians need to microscopically study it and understand most importantly the context of the tenets of their faith. There is a history behind the Christian story. Christianity was a competing faith among Jews. Never, I believe, in the wildest dreams of those who wrote the Gospels decades after Jesus' death, did they think that those passages would be used century after century by the Church and other Christians to exact their pound of flesh against the Jews for the death of Jesus.

Ultimately, the Holocaust and the killing of the six million had as its necessary historical precondition the proclamation of the perfidious Jew within the Gospel text itself. In my opinion, no matter how much the Church has tried to erase that stain and its villainous consequences for the Jewish people it cannot because it is there in black and white. What is not there in black and white is its historical underpinnings. People are often ignorant of the historical veracity of all Biblical text. Christians in particular often understand nothing of Christianity's roots first and foremost within Judaism. Many I suspect have feared that understanding the historical context of Christianity or any faith will undermine its credibility. Therefore, Christian authorities who have taught young children for millennia about that faith conveniently ignored and omitted the importance of its historical beginning. To say the least, the consequences of that omission have been profound.