Christ Actually: The Son of God for the Secular Age. James Carroll
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William Collins
An imprint of HarperCollinsPublishers 1 London Bridge Street London SE1 9FG
This eBook edition first published in Great Britain by William Collins in 2014
Copyright © 2014 by James Carroll
James Carroll asserts the moral right to be identified as the author of this work
Grateful acknowledgement is made for permission to reprint extracts from the following copyrighted works:
“Christmas Trees” from New and Collected Poems 1952-1992 by Geoffrey Hill. Copyright © 1994 by Geoffrey Hill. Reprinted by permission of Houghton Mifflin Harcourt Publishing Company and the author. All rights reserved.
The Jewish Gospels: The Story of the Jewish Christ by Daniel Boyarin. Copyright © 2012 by Daniel Boyarin. Reprinted by permission of The New Press.
“Triduum” from A Little Book of Hours by John F. Deane (Manchester, England: Carcanet, 2008.) By permission of the author.
The Scripture citations in this book are from the Revised Standard Version, unless otherwise noted.
A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library
All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. By payment of the required fees, you have been granted the non-exclusive, non-transferable right to access and read the text of this e-book on-screen. No part of this text may be reproduced, transmitted, down-loaded, decompiled, reverse engineered, or stored in or introduced into any information storage and retrieval system, in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereinafter invented, without the express written permission of HarperCollins
Source ISBN: 9780008103484
eBook Edition © November 2014 ISBN: 9780008103491 Version: 2014-10-24
For Annie
The present life of man, O King, seems to me like to the swift flight of a sparrow through the great mead-hall wherein you sit at supper in winter, with the warm fire ablaze, whilst the storms of rain and snow prevail abroad; the sparrow, I say, flying in at one door, and immediately out at another, once more into the dark winter.
So this life of man appears for a little while, but of what went before, or what is to follow, we are utterly ignorant. If, therefore, this new teaching contains something more certain, it seems justly deserving to be followed.
—A chief counselor to Anglo-Saxon king Edwin in 6271
Contents
Copyright
INTRODUCTION: Christ Actually
CHAPTER TWO: The First Holocaust
THE TEMPLE AS THE CAUSE OF THE GOSPEL
CHAPTER THREE: The Jewish Christ