James Carroll goes to painstaking lengths in his new book, “Christ Actually,” to confront millennia of undisguised anti-Semitism, scriptural fabrications and tactical misreadings of history, all of which have prevented an informed understanding of Jesus of Nazareth. Using historical and scriptural analysis, Carroll urges the Christian faithful to reexamine their theologies through a lens that begins with Jesus’s identity as a Jew among Jews, whose collective survival was repeatedly and brutally threatened by the Roman Empire during and immediately after Jesus’s lifetime.Read full article >>