"Ours is said to be a Godless age, yet billions remain faithful to religions thousands of years old." "In this series, eight well known commentators will go on personal journeys to explore the world's most powerful faith." "How it began in a remote part of the Middle East and spread to every corner of the planet." "From Africa to South America, from Syria to Britain, how it transformed the way we think - about God and about ourselves." "How it brought the promise of salvation to countless people, and death and destruction to countless more." "Whether we are believers or we are not, this global religion continues to exert the profoundest influence on the world in which we live." "CHANTING" "This film is the story of the origins and consequences of Christian belief." "The bare facts are that Christianity originated in devout Judaism and yet for Jews Christianity has, all things considered, been a calamity." "Here in this central square there was a big gallows to hang people." "It was terrorism." "To hang Jews?" "Yes, to hang Jews." "The Jews, very much for Christians, represent that element of original sin." "I still remember," "I was seven years old, they actually called me the Christ Killer." "To understand Christianity's Jewish origins we first need to understand the man whose life inspired it." "He was not a Christian " "Christianity could not grow out of Christianity." "Jesus was, and not incidentally, but through and through, a Jew." "I am a convinced Jew, but not a practicing one." "I'm a Jew of the head and of the heart." "The Judaism in which I grew up was not so much liberal or Orthadox as befuddled." "We were proud of being Jewish but we weren't always certain what being Jewish meant." "Thus, we would not dream of having bacon in the house, but my father was perfectly happy to dress up as Father Christmas every year and deliver us presents." "But we had no tree and we feared the cross as any vampire might." "The crucifix encapsulated all our troubles." "Because we Jews had killed Christ, as Christians believed, we were an outcast people." "And because we had been made outcasts in Christ's name, we were alarmed by every aspect of Christianity." "No matter that what the first Christians said, they said, "As Jews, to Jews"." "So, is Judaism Christianity's guilty secret?" "And does that guilt explain the abhorrence of Jews sewn into the garments of the Christian faith?" "This two thousand year history of Christianity begins with the idea of a Messiah." "The word Messiah does not mean God, or even Son of God." "A Messiah prepares the way for God." "In Jesus' day, the Jewish people lived under Roman occupation." "In a frenzy of expectation for a Messiah who would liberate their country and prepare them for the coming of the Lord." "It's always amazing to me how many Jews think" "Messiah's not a Jewish concept." "They think it's a purely Christian concept." "The reality is it began with the Jewish people, as we'll see." "Christianity took the concept and changed it dramatically." "The Old Testament makes frequent promise of a Messiah or redeemer of the Jewish nation." "Part prophet, part soldier, he would be of the royal line of David, whose birthplace was Bethlehem." "In order for Jesus to fulfil these Messianic prophecies, he too had to be born here." "For First Century Jews, Bethlehem would be considered a royal town." "This had been the birthplace of David and in the prophecy of Micah it was foretold that a successor to David, one of his descendants way down the line hundreds of years later, would be born there." "And so, according to many scholars, Christians simply invented Bethlehem because they thought of Jesus as the Messiah." "Now, I don't believe that." "The sequence of events, or at least one sequence of events, is familiar to everybody, Christian or not." "Mary and Joseph, travelling from Nazareth to pay their Roman taxes, no room at the inn, baby Jesus born in a manger, three wise men bearing gifts." "How much is history and how much is belief wanting to be history?" "Scholars and theologians cannot agree." "But even the two Gospel writers who agree that Jesus was born in Bethlehem disagree over the circumstances of the nativity." "Even those two that mention it, are at pains to get Jesus to Bethlehem somehow." "Not get him to Bethlehem because, for Matthew, Jesus is born in Bethlehem because that is the residence of his parents, they have a house according to the text." "They end up in Nazareth as refugees." "Luke made a mistake." "Jesus of Nazareth, ah, but then how come he was born in Bethlehem?" "So he has to invent the census to get him to Bethlehem." "But how can you know it was Luke that made the mistake and not Matthew that made the mistake?" "Because the census is nonsense." "The census, we're told, was for the Roman Empire." "This wasn't part of the Roman Empire." "This was an independent Jewish Kingdom." "It's a complete nonsense." "But Luke had to try and find a motive where a heavily pregnant woman would travel the length of the country." "He made a guess and he got it wrong." "# Silent night" "# Holy night...#" "And the guessing goes on." "Christians flock to the Church of the Nativity in Bethlehem, said to be built over the site of the manger in which Jesus was born." "I think Bethlehem was an embarrassment to the early Christians because there was a Messianic prophecy centred on Bethlehem, the prophecy of Micah, which promised a warrior king." "And Jesus was anything but." "He spent his time with tax collectors and sinners." "He didn't fulfil the Messianic prophecy of Bethlehem." "# Sleep in heavenly peace...#" "And there for Jews is the nub of it." "How could Jesus be the Messiah if he fulfilled none of the Old Testament prophecies?" "What's the point?" "This is a crucial point to understand - you don't get the title until..." "You finish the job." "OK?" "This by the way is the number one issue that Judaism would have with Jesus and Christianity." "What was the issue?" "Jesus didn't fulfil this description here." "Ah, and how does Christianity theologically sidestep the issue?" "Second Coming." "He'll come again in the future and then the job will be done." "Jesus did not bring about God's Kingdom here on earth." "Later Christians turned his material failure into spiritual success." "Salvation, they said, would happen in another world." "But for Jews, the Messiah they had long awaited was of this world - a real man, in the royal line of David, who would free them from Roman occupation or at least make them fit to be free from Roman occupation by bringing in an age" "of truth and justice and holiness." "Since none of this had happened," "Jesus could not have been the Messiah." "To Jews, for whom the world remains unredeemed, the true Messiah is still to come." "So if Jesus the Jew wasn't the Messiah, what was he?" "I think the most shocking thing I could say to you, is the apostles, all 12 apostles, Jesus himself, were not baptised as Christians." "HORN BLARES" "Bar Mitzvahs, Bar Mitzvahs, everywhere you look, Bar Mitzvahs." "Jewish boys becoming Jewish men and dancing wildly with the word of God." "Lovely that." "My own Bar Mitzvah was a much more sedate affair in Manchester, and all I remember about it was worrying about my suit and whether I could keep my Yarmulkah on." "But it's worth remembering that Jesus would have had a Bar Mitzvah, probably in Jerusalem, probably in the temple and probably in exactly this spirit." "In fact, Jesus's Bar Mitzvah is one of the few details the Bible hints at about his early life." "What Jesus did between his birth and his sudden appearance as a holy man aged 30, what his life was like as a Jew growing up in first century Israel, are questions that have baffled scholars for centuries." "The Gospels are more theological justification than history, written after Jesus's death, by Christians, for Christians." "The first major event in Jesus's life they do relate is his baptism." "according to her faith and because we love Jesus together, we baptise her in the waters of the Jordan in the name of the Father, Son and Holy Ghost." "Amen!" "Hallelujah!" "For Christians, baptism is the defining moment of their religious lives, the sacramental new beginning that symbolises admission to the Christian faith." "To Jews, the word Baptism has grown alien by association." "Throughout history, Christianity has sought to convert Jews out of their Jewishness by imposing baptism on them, though, ironically, baptism was ours, in the first place." "But to be baptised, you need a baptiser, even if you are Jesus." "of coming to the River Jordan." "How important to the Jesus story is John the Baptist?" "I think he is the key to the whole thing, because you open the Gospels," "Mark, the earliest Gospel, and who's there?" "It's John is on the scene." "He's thoroughly Jewish, and this is the sort of the catch, because he's baptising, and the word baptise immediately, as a Jew, you would think of something Christian, right?" "Yeah, John is baptising." "Yeah, don't do that to me." "So, here's this Jew baptising, and it's just a trick of the language." "Baptise means to immerse." "So, he's immersing people in water, but he's doing it as a thoroughly Jewish thing, an apocalyptic thing." "He says the time is near, repent of your sins, be baptised." "But the shocking thing for Christians, I think, is that Jesus as a Jew, we should say Jesus the Jew, comes down to the Jordan River and is baptised by John." "So, he is participating in this very Jewish rite of baptism." "So there's no question at all of his joining a new faith by going to John the Baptist to be baptised?" "No, not at all." "What John is telling the people, the crowds, is you're already Jews, but what you need to do is repent of your sins and turn to God." "So, be better Jews?" "Be better and be part of this revival, of a people prepared for God's Messiah." "You can see the difficulty for later Christians." "Once Jesus the Jewish teacher becomes Jesus the Christian God, his baptism, by a Jew, as a reaffirmation of his Jewishness, has to be explained away." "It's very interesting in the Gospels." "They have more of a problem with this as time goes on." "Mark doesn't really have a problem with it." "He said Jesus came and was baptised by John." "Then you get to Matthew, the next gospel, and Matthew's like, "OK, yes, he was,"" "but John objected." "He said, "You're too righteous."" "And it's starting to sound like the story's getting embellished." "And then you go to Luke, and he doesn't even say John baptised him." "And then you get to the Gospel of John, and the baptism isn't even mentioned." "So I think the most shocking thing I could say to you, on your quest as a Jew, is the apostles, all 12 apostles, Jesus himself, were not baptised as Christians." "Only after his baptism, the New Testament tells us, did Jesus take up his rabbinical vocation, urging all Jews to repent their sins and prepare for the Kingdom of God." "Here was where he preached that sometimes invigorating, sometimes divisive message, the Galilee." ""Think not that I am come to send peace on earth." ""I came not to send peace, but a sword." ""For I am come to set a man at variance against his father" ""and the daughter against her mother."" "Jesus based his new movement not in his home town, no man is a prophet in his home town, but in Capernaum." "Once a Jewish fishing village," "Capernaum is today a site for Christian pilgrims." "It was a place chosen by Jesus Christ." "He himself chose this town especially." "So what are we looking at here?" "What's, what's this?" "We are looking at the houses of the village." "They are common houses for common people, fishermen, farmers..." "And we think Jesus had a house here?" "He would have been a known figure here?" "Seen walking about?" "Oh, yes." "Teaching, healing?" "Yes, Jesus was living like a good Jew, going to the synagogue, praying and living according to the Law of Moses in his house." "You wonder how many of the pilgrims that come here know that what they're looking at is the town that in Jesus's time would have been devoted to Judaism." "Yes." "In synagogues similar to this, all across Galilee, Jesus and the 12 disciples preached his apocalyptic message, calling on people to change their lives before it was too late." "The Galilee in Jesus's time was a remote, rebellious place." "Religious, yes, but prickly, a thorn in the side of the Romans and the Jewish authorities in Jerusalem." "In this atmosphere, the character of Jesus was formed." "It was as a Galilean Jew that he befriended the poor and the despised." "It was as a Galilean Jew that he thundered against the powerful and the haughty." "But his genius transcended locality." "However inconsistent the apostles' accounts of Jesus, there emerges from them all a man extraordinary for the dark, riddling power of expression, for the magnificently scornful sweep of his mind, and for the example he evokes of a true communion of man and God," "not in Heaven, but here on Earth." "The Galilee used to be described as a spiritual crossroads, a melting pot of people and religions, in which it would be easy for a questioning Jew such as Jesus to realise the deficiencies of his obsolete ancestral faith." "This is the Jewish world." "This is their land." "This is their homeland." "There were according to... there were 204 Jewish towns and villages in the Galilee when he arrived at the Galilee 30 years after Jesus." "So, the Galilee was entirely Jewish." "In recent years, archaeologists have unearthed a wealth of new evidence to show that, far from being faint-hearted in its religion, Galilee was a thriving centre of Jewish practice." "You hear about the Galileans as, as rebellious men, hard men, rough speaking men, men whom Jews in Jerusalem were wary of." "These are hard life." "You have to wake up in the morning, you have to go to the field to work till sunset and then come home." "People were farmers, and that's mainly what they would do." "20 years ago people were asking who lived in Galilee and there was some discussions, how Jewish was Galilee, the Galileans, you know, were not really good Jews like those of Jerusalem, and this is why Jesus succeeded" "in building and creating here the new religion." "And now we all agree, all archaeologists and historians agree, that Galilee was Jewish, completely Jewish, and Judaism of Galilee was very similar to Judaism in Jerusalem." "This ruined village is also thought to be a likely site of the famous Wedding of Cana at which, according to the Gospel of John, Jesus turned water into wine." "Not being great drinkers," "Jews often joke that, had Jesus been an even better Jew, he'd have turned the wine into water." "In the fourth century," "Christian pilgrims carved a cave out of this hilltop, creating a shrine to commemorate the event." "For them, this miracle, performed at a Jewish wedding, had a subversive symbolic meaning " "Jesus transforming the old water of Judaism into the new wine of Christianity." "This despite Jesus's warning..." ""Think not that I am come to destroy the law, or the prophets." ""I am not come to destroy, but to fulfil."" "How does it harm a Christian's faith to restore Jesus to the real Jewish world in which he lived, to hear again in fear and trembling the words he spoke, freed from the distortions of a later, self-justifying and Jew-falsifying Christianity?" "Jesus never once expressed the intention of starting a new religion." "His ambition was to renew Judaism, to reawaken it to its own grandeur, not to abolish it." "His great sermons, delivered almost certainly in Aramaic and wrought from homilies and parables familiar to the Jews of Galilee, are masterpieces of Jewish thought." "That they derived from a highly refined Jewish ethic does not diminish their humanity or their truth." "Jesus is the more remarkable, to my mind, and the more inspiring, for being the Son of Man than the Son of God." "The event which once and for all severed Jesus from his actual Jewish past and propelled him into his supernatural Christian future, the final act, was his crucifixion." "I still remember, I was seven years old and they actually called me the Christ Killer." "Few modern Christians doubt that Jesus was a Jew." "But the idea that he improved on Judaism, founding a movement that spiritually superseded it, still lives at the heart of Christianity." "Every day Christian pilgrims come here to relive the Passion." "As the story has it, Jesus is betrayed by Judas, condemned by Jews to die and then paraded through the streets of Jerusalem bearing the cross on which he will be executed." "These final hours of Jesus's life ending in his agonising crucifixion have become the central symbol of Christianity." "The cross also symbolises Christianity's final bloody break with Jesus the Jew." "The story of Judas's betrayal, one of Jesus's closest disciples handing him over for 30 pieces of silver, has served a deadly purpose in the Christian demonisation of Jews." "Alone among the disciples, Judas has retained his Jewish identity," "Jewish features, and what it has suited some Christians to believe are Jewish characteristics." "But recent scholarship forces us to rethink the role of Judas in Jesus's death." "For where would Christianity have been without him?" "I feel very ambivalent about Judas." "And recently there has been, you know, a serious effort to get behind the stereotype" "and I think you can make a case that Judas was working for Jesus." "That Jesus, I am convinced, knew that his death would be the highlight of his mission." "But if you are right in this account that Judas is an agent of" "Jesus's will, it is lamentable, is it not, that Judas is then... then becomes the figure of derision -a by-word for treachery and evil and malice and greed." "And very unfairly." "I think it's in the Gospels where, you know, the suicide of Judas is interpreted as condign punishment for betrayal." "I think there's no question about that." "That they thought him at the beginning as a traitor." "The second leading actor in the Passion Play was the Roman Governor who ordered Jesus's execution, Pontius Pilate." "In the Christian story, Pilate reluctantly condemned Jesus only at the behest of the baying Jewish mob." "When he washes his hands of responsibility, he washes all Roman and all Gentile hands as well." "What goes on in the Gospel story is there's a shifting of emphasis from Roman responsibility over to the Jews, an attempt to make the Jews, both through their authorities and through the mob, which eventually when you get to John is screaming, "Crucify him!" "Crucify him!"" "and instead of Pilate you get to Judas, who has the misfortune of having a name which sounds like it means Jew in general." "As each new Gospel is written, so the contrast between" "Pontius Pilate and Judas Iscariot is made more stark." "See it as a moral whirligig - Pilate ascending into sainthood as Judas descends into hell." "For "Judas", read "the Jews"." "When I was growing up, we lived in a part of Brooklyn where everyone in the neighbourhood was Irish or Italian Catholic and I still remember," "I was seven years old, they actually called me the Christ killer." "OK, it was time for the Christ killer to go home for dinner." "Joseph Viglia didn't invite me to his first-grade birthday party because I killed his God." "Well, I had that too growing up - the Gentiles lived in the prefabs and we lived over the wall, they threw stones at us because we'd killed Christ." "But the implications of that are very, very serious." "The biggest sin that Jews did was to be involved in the death of Jesus and Jesus in Christianity is a part of God." "Who can fight with God?" "The Devil." "That created the association of the Jew and the Devil, and it also created the image of the Jew." "Just as the Jew was a physical threat to the personage of Jesus, he was a physical threat to Christians." "When Jesus died, any hope that he had been a Messiah in the Davidic sense, a liberator of the Jewish people, died with him." "So now what could his followers believe?" "That he had been a charismatic, holy man and healer whose example of devotion to God's Law remained undimmed by his death?" "Or that he had been a Messiah in another sense entirely - the Son of God himself, who had died for our sins and whose resurrection promiseda personal resurrection, through faith, for everybody." "The first position, wholly consistent with Judaism, was taken up by Jesus's family." "The second, in a violent break with Jewish theology, by the Apostle Paul." "Paul never met Jesus in the flesh." "Not one of the original 12 disciples, he joined the new movement only after Jesus's death." "In a vision on the road to Damascus, he claimed to have encountered the resurrected Jesus, from whom he was given the mission to proclaim his word among the Gentiles." "It was Paul who transformed Jesus the Jew into Jesus the Christ," ""not any human being," he said, "but the Son of God"." "Paul said that Jews who do not believe in Jesus are cut off from God." "He said they're beloved for their fathers' sake, meaning, you know, they had a good history, but if they don't accept this thing that I'm now teaching about Jesus you should consider them enemies." "Now this is, er, scary." "It's very divisive talk, isn't it?" "It's very divisive." "Always in Paul, there's "you're with us or you're against us" talk." "And he had Jewish enemies and I think as time went on he got more and more radical about this." "These differences came to a head about 20 years after Jesus's death, when his followers met to decide their future direction." "For Jesus's family, all strict Jews, the new movement remained within Judaism." "But Paul's eye was on the Gentile world." "Salvation, for him, came through faith, not deeds, belief in the crucifixion as an atoning sacrifice, not obedience to the Jewish Law, the Torah." "He said that...is obsolete." "He said that was from Moses to Christ and now that Christ is come we're not under the Torah." "So, if you think about it, you've got a sort of new view of God - not just the one God that a person can go to, you gotta go through Jesus." "A new view of the Jewish people - you're not the Jewish people any more, you gotta go to the Church." "And he says, "Whoever does not observe this" ""is not recognised by God."" "But it was war as much as doctrinal difference that caused Jesus's new movement to split finally from Judaism." "In AD70, after a violent rebellion, Roman legions stormed Jerusalem and destroyed the Temple, the centre of Jewish life." "65 years later, after another rebellion, the Romans finished the job, laying waste the entire city." "Anyone wanting to sell a Jewish-based religion to the Romans had now to ditch the Jewish part." "The focus of Jesus's new movement shifted from the ruined Jewish city of Jerusalem." "And for the first time his followers became known as Christians." "Paul's version of Christianity had won out." "Things that are done in the Church are Paul more than Jesus." "And I think the original Jewish teachings of Jesus have been largely muted." "But, when you're standing and doing the creeds or eating the bread and taking the wine or baptising, you're... and those are, you know, the quintessential Christian acts... that's only in Paul." "And so his triumph is..." "is almost complete." "In Rome, the might-proclaiming Church of St Paul's Outside the Walls proves the success of Paul's Christianity." "Above the altar, a rich mosaic depicts Paul at the right hand of Jesus and, next to Paul, Luke." "Between them, Luke and Paul were responsible for 15 of the New Testament's 27 books." "Thus, again, was history written by the victors." "The architect of Christianity's split with Judaism was the Apostle Paul - a man divided in his own Jewishness between a reverence for the old religion and an abomination of its laws and customs." "This ambivalence became the ambivalence of the Christian Church, a destructive doublethink in which the Jewish religion as practised by Jesus had of course to be embraced, while Jews themselves were vilified for their rejection of him." "And it is this doublethink that is the root of 2,000 years of Christian anti-Semitism." "Here in this central square there was a big gallows to hang people." "It was terrorism." "To hang Jews?" "Yeah, to hang Jews." "What do I call what I feel here?" "Sublimity, rhapsody, God?" "The idea of the soul longing to escape the flesh, of the spirit expressing its lightness in stone, is without doubt beautiful." "A melancholy intrinsic to Christianity, perhaps because it is rooted in fleshly failure" " Jesus having to die in order to live." "This beauty is not of a kind Jews associate with worship." "We keep a more austere church." "No graven images, no flights of ecstatic fancy." "No saviour dying in exquisite anguish just for me." "As a Jew who admires Jesus for his teaching, not his bodily escapism," "I cannot feel at home here." "But as a spiritual tourist, I do." "I can see why Christianity moved the world." "But lovely as these great centres of Christian praying are," "I cannot forget the contradiction at the heart of Christian prayer." "Beauty requires ugliness as its opposite and Christianity bestowed that ugliness upon the Jews." "How do you read that line from St Matthew, "his blood be upon us" ""and upon our children"?" "It's like a curse." "It is." "I read it with difficulty as one of the more problematic verses in the New Testament." "Curse on the Jewish people?" "Yes, definitely, yes, and as they say the curse is on us and on our children, that's in effect in perpetuity, not just for the ones who are speaking." "But that's by no means the, the worst that gets said?" "Not at all, no." "That particular verse in Matthew's Gospel has a counterpart in the Fourth Gospel, which claims that the Jews have as their father" "Satan, not God but Satan." "Jews arrived in Britain with William the Conqueror." "They were permitted to lend money and practise medicine, but were barred from other trades - from owning land, from employing Christians, or living in the same house as them." "Under Edward I, every Jew in Britain was made to wear a yellow badge." "Yellow, the colour of treachery, depravity and greed." "The colour, in Christian art, of Judas' robes." "And this in Britain, mark you, over 650 years before Nazi-Germany hit upon the same idea." "There's a lot of texts which were written by Christians, which aren't in the New Testament - a lot of these so-called apocryphal" "New Testament works, which develop and expand, distort, as it were, that whole picture of Jesus." "There's a Gospel of Peter, for example, which survives only as a passion gospel, but the anti-Jewish sentiment in that is more strongly expressed than it is in any of the four gospels of the New Testament." "But isn't all this building in to the early years of Christianity an implacable hatred for Jews?" "Definitely, yes, yes." "It's part of trying to explain how it is that this death of Jesus wasn't just an accident of history." "It was something that was pre-ordained and that there is almost a way of seeing the fate of the Jews as being there right from the beginning." "On the night of Friday 16th March 1190, the Sabbath," "York's Jewish community fled here to escape a rampaging Christian mob." "Rather than surrender, some committed suicide." "The rest were massacred - 150 men, women and children." "Today there is barely a handful of Jews living in York." "Lincoln Cathedral, 80 miles to the south, was witness to another and still more decisive event in the history of English anti-semitism." "This time, it revolved around that most abominable and bizarre of all" "Christian defamations of Jews - the blood libel." "Christians believed that Jews took the blood of Christian Children and mixed them with flour to make the Passover bread." "That was one belief." "The other belief was that Jews were not actually human." "Jews were depicted as having horns, or distorted faces, or humps on their backs, that kind of thing." "I think there was a sexual element to these, these kind of blood libels as well - that they were young boys, that they were very often accused of abusing them before they actually murdered them." "On 31 July 1255, an eight-year-old Christian boy, Hugh of Lincoln, disappeared." "His body was found a month later, in a pit belonging to a Jewish man named Koppin." "To this day, no one really knows what happened to him." "The Bishop of Lincoln decided that the child had been murdered by the Jews." "Koppin, terrified for his life, swore that he had murdered the little boy and that every Jew in England had agreed to this." "Koppin was executed, 91 Jews arrested, 18 of them hanged." "The charge - drinking Christian blood." "In its suggestions of cannibalism for religious purposes, the blood libel appears to parody the Eucharist." "As though, for Medieval Christians, Judaism stood for something barbaric at the heart of Christian worship itself." "The whole charge was ridiculous." "Eating blood is a total anathema to the Jews." "They would do anything to avoid blood." "Therefore, the very idea that they would use a blood in, in a ritual manner was abhorrent to them." "That's what so malevolent about that libel, isn't it?" "That of all people" " I've always assumed that's deliberate " "Of all the people to blame for that, the Jews, who you know, in who's law it is inscribed that you don't go near blood, that blood is a, blood is a, is a defiler." "And also a people who are so meticulous in their diet." "The last people on earth to have wanted to eat human blood." "Yes." "But presumably the idea of Jews killing young boys is just another way of telling the crucifixion story again." "Jews killed the young and innocent" "Christ, Jews go on killing the young and innocent Christian." "It is essentially oedipal." "It is the younger religion in terror of the older, cruel, parental religion." "Yes - a wonderful way of putting it." "I think that's exactly it, yes." "Little Saint Hugh became a Christian martyr - the object of a cult centred on his shrine in Lincoln Cathedral, which pilgrims were visiting as recently as the 20th century." "Only in 1955 did the Anglican Church think it was time to set the record straight." "There's a sort of certificate of acknowledgement or apology here." "And it tells of trumped up stories of ritual murders of Christian boys by Jewish communities being common throughout" "Europe in the Middle Ages." ""Such stories", it says," ""Do not redound to the credit of Christendom." ""And so we pray, Lord forgive what" ""we have been, amend what we are and direct what we shall be"." "Amen to that." "Every religion finds itself in condemnation of another." "The truth you see is the truth they won't." "The Christian church is founded on an assumption of Jewish blindness, perfidy and murder." "If the Jews rejected Jesus, one of their own sons, something was at fault with him or at fault with them." "It had to be with them." "Thereafter, the Jews become a pariah people, wished from the face of the earth, yet at the same time, a necessity." "The degraded, ever-present proof of what becomes of those who refuse the grace of God." "Here, in the very heart of Western Christendom, a mere breath from the" "Vatican itself, is a monument to Catholicism's aversion to the Jews - the Ghetto of Rome." "It was a Ghetto in 1555 and it lasted until 1870 and it was established for the only purpose, to save Jewish souls." "Who established it?" "The Pope Paul IV from the family of Caraffa." "He decided that it was absurd and inconvenient that Jews and Christians were still living together after what the Jews had done to Christ." "They killed Christ, so that for that they had to pay the price of not living with Christians?" "Yeah, because Christians could be contaminated by the Jews." "Did they say that?" "Did they use language like that?" "Yeah." "Contamination and so no inter-marriages was allowed, of course, and Jews could only get out from the ghetto at sunlight and come back at sunset." "Churches encircled the Ghetto, reminding the perfidious Jews that if Judaism was what got them in here, conversion to Christianity was their only way out." "And was the idea that we would just stay here forever, or what?" "The target, his target was converting Jews to save their souls, because a Jew is not baptised and no baptised souls go to hell." "And so let's say that it was a good intention." "And as a matter of fact, Jews were obliged to go every single Shabbat, which is a holiday for the Jews, to go inside churches to listen to the Holy Mass." "And how were they made to go in to a church?" "There would be Vatican Guards that would beat them and it was control." "Here in this central square there was a big gallows to hang people." "It was terrorism." "To hang Jews?" "Yeah, to hang Jews." "Now a pleasant place to eat kosher cheesecake, the Ghetto lasted until 1870, when Italy's Jews were given full citizenship." "But it was only in 1965 that the Catholic Church revised its official attitude." "The Jews, it finally conceded, were not after all responsible for the death of Christ." "TRANSLATOR:" "At an official level, the attitude has radically changed and in a positive way, positive." "Racism and these phenomena of the rejection of the other might still occur, so for that reason we must always be very vigilant, because the problem hasn't been solved for good." "I'm wondering how, for example, a Jew can ever read parts of the New Testament without feeling more than scandalised?" "I mean, when" "John talks about the Jews as devils, for example, the children of Satan." "TRANSLATOR:" "The Gospel of John isn't an anti-Jewish Gospel." "It is a Gospel that speaks about love." "And from this vision of love one can understand, relativise, the meaning of these texts, but we certainly cannot touch what is for us the word of God." "But God as interpreted by whom?" "In 2007, the new Pope, to a storm of Jewish protests around the world, revived an Ancient Latin prayer, calling for the conversion of the Jews." "Despite the thaw in relations between the two religions, unredeemed Jews still trouble Christianity." "The Holocaust cannot be called a Christian crime." "Christians connived in it, but Christians suffered in it, too." "The Holocaust was a crime against all humanity." "But centuries of Christian vilification of Jews enabled it, clearing a path for irrational loathing in the hearts of men, burdening Jews with a mythic guilt it was almost a Christian duty to avenge." "Make no mistake - for some Christians, the Holocaust was pay-back time." "If the great resounding words of Christian promise, sacrifice, atonement, redemption, love are to mean anything, the 2,000 year wrong that culminated in the Holocaust must be redressed." "Not in deed." "I cannot conceive the deed that would do it." "But as an act of the conscience and the mind." "Acknowledge it." "Acknowledge that this Jewish religion travestied for centuries is the foundation of all that you believe." "Acknowledge it is Jewishness you are honouring whenever you speak Jesus' words or invoke the majesty of a Messiah." "And then maybe Jews, for their part, can take back one of their own, and accept him as among the greatest of their teachers" " Jesus the Jew." "Subtitles by Red Bee Media Ltd"