Thanks for bringing this to my attention. I've a few more things I'd like to add to this or the previous thread, but I'm quite pressed for time at the moment. My charity is also sorely strained, so I'd rather turn my attention to preparing the music for tomorrow's liturgy.
For now, though, I'd remark that James Carroll is equally a disgrace. His thesis in Constantine's Sword is that Christianity (I presume he cannot justly confine this criticism to Catholic Christianity) is inherently antiSemitic, since the Gospels clearly indicate that the Romans crucified Christ at the behest of the Sanhedrin. At the end of his execrable tome, he proposes the "solution" to this problem: that Christians abandon the notion that Christ's death was a redemptive sacrifice in expiation of our sins. Reducing Jesus to just another moderately-interesting "philosopher," in his thinking, automatically absolves the Jewish people of the charge of deicide.
The problem with this line of "thought", of course, is that if the Crucifixion was simply the unjust execution of a good man, then it was a crime attributable to the Sanhedrin. If, on the other hand, Christ's death was a redemptive sacrifice, and he really did rise from the dead, then the eternal benefit of that event to all mankind trumps any inherent injustice in the temporal means by which it occurred. The consistent teaching of Catholic Church, as well, is that guilt is not generational; that is, each individual is morally responsible only for his own acts. Any guilt for the injustice of the Crucifixion is at most attributable to Judas, Herod, and the Sanhedrin (if even to them in light of the transcendent nature of the event), and not to anyone else, most especially not to the Jews of our time. This is a necessary result of our theological understanding of the nature of free-will.
So, to put it bluntly, Carroll has it precisely ass-backwards. It is an embarassment that such an obviously illogical argument should have been given a moment's credence by anyone with pretentions to scholarship. Further reading in Constantine's Sword reveals that his prescription for an ideal Church is that it deny its own central tenets of belief. Carroll's solution to the supposed problems of Christianity is that it cease being recognizably Christian. (The Unitarians have already accomplished this feat, so he ought to simply satisfy himself with them.) Carroll also, perhaps unwittingly, reveals that his motivation for the destruction of the Church arises from his own psychic anxiety resulting from incidents in his upbringing.
In short, his book is an extended airing of personal dirty linen, but since its propaganda value is of immeasurable to the Left, he had no trouble finding a publisher for his tripe. Scholarship must always be motivated by a search for objective truth instead of a quest for the confirmation of one's personal prejudices. If anything, I'm more incensed by the assault on rationality Carroll's oeuvre represents than I am by its obvious antiCatholic bias.