What can we believe about--and how can we believe in--Jesus Christ in light of the atrocities of the twentieth century and the drift from religion that followed? Here, James Carroll traces centuries of religious history and theology to face this core challenge to modern faith. Carroll's search is a highly personal one, beginning with a crucial received memory of Jesus that separates him from his essential identity as a Jew, and therefore as a human. The divinity of Jesus trumped his humanity, including his Jewishness. Yet if Jesus was not taken as divine, he would be of no interest to believers. Thus Carroll takes the God-man question head-on, restoring its perennial answer, but in a new way. Drawing on a wide range of scholarship as well as his own acute searching, Carroll shows how faith in Jesus evolved in the first place. His fresh reading of the Gospels reinstates the context of the Romans' effectively genocidal war against the Jews, a first Holocaust that profoundly distorted the