Giles Fraser, Crucified by Empire

Thanks to Helenann Hartley for sending over this link from Saturday's Guardian which I'd missed (no doubt because it is still lying folded up and unread):

Crucified by empire
The blood libel that 'the Jews' killed Jesus sent millions to their deaths
Giles Fraser (Vicar of Putney and lecturer in philosophy at Wadham College, Oxford)

It's a well-written, informed piece that helps put the debate over The Passion of the Christ in context; an excerpt:

What is going on here is intra-Jewish sectarian polemic. Note: intra-Jewish not anti-Jewish. The attack on "the Jews" in the Gospels is a family argument, and is conducted with the ferocity typical of a family argument. The prophets of the Hebrew Scriptures frequently denounced Israel for failing to live up to God's expectations. "These people draw near with their mouths and honour me with their lips, but their hearts are far from me," insists Isaiah. Attacks upon "the Jews" in the Gospels are of a piece with this intra-Jewish prophetic invective. But once Christianity morphed from a small Jewish sect, wrestling to establish its identity against the prevailing religious establishment, to the official religion of the Roman empire, these denunciations became deadly. Torn from the context of an intra-Jewish row for the soul of Judaism, "the Jews" starts to be heard as "them" as opposed to "us". From this moment on, the Gospels are used as justification for the greatest crime in European history - the death of one Jew becoming the pretext for the murder of millions more. Christians have too often preferred an anti-semitic lie to a disturbingly relevant truth: Jesus was destroyed by the logic of empire.