War is Hell

For the first opening half hour or so of Steven Spielberg's 1998 film Saving Private Ryan, you, the viewer, are subjected to a horrifying scene of utter chaos and carnage as American soldiers attempt to storm the beaches at Normandy on the morning of June 6, 1944. This opening scene has been called one of the most realistic depictions of war in cinema.

That may be but the truth is, even that doesn't quite come close. Typically in Hollywood when a guy gets shot you see a firecracker-like pop-eruption on his chest, then a bloodstain. The actor twitches violently with each shot, falling dramatically. We have come to equate Hollywood 'realism' with blood; the more blood, the more realistic the depiction. The reality of the violence a gunshot visits upon a human body is far worse, however, and far more random. There are all sorts of variables involved -- the caliber, some technical aspects of the bullet and powder, the gun itself, the distance between the shooter and the victim, clothing, trajectory, etc. etc. etc. -- but in the end, a bullet is really just a merciless little axe hacking away at its victim, arriving by a fancy delivery mechanism.

All of this might just be interesting trivia except for the internet, which is very literally an information superhighway that allows communication in ways unheard before the late 20th century. With the recent events unfolding in the Middle East, the internet has allowed people on the streets to take pictures of state violence and transmit them around the globe, proving that the dictators in Syria, Iran and Libya are lying as they deny their forces have attacked unarmed crowds. In particular, I receive through a group in Syria daily pictures of the violence inflicted on protesters by their own government. These pictures often show horrific images of corpses, of human bodies mangled in ways that Hollywood will never show (and shouldn't). There is a political point behind showing these pictures, because these people are suffering under tyranny and these pictures make the naked evil of that tyranny apparent to all the world. Still, they are also a sober reminder that the violence shown in Hollywood films, even in their most sensational moments, falls far short of the reality and to some extent that de-sensitizes us to the depth of suffering experienced both in war -- be it World War II or the Civil War or the Punic Wars -- and in unstable countries ruled by tyrants. It is also a reminder of what we have asked many of our veterans to experience, so that we do not have to. War is a part of the human condition, and as long as there are tyrants there will be war, but we should be more circumspect about when and how we wage war for as General William Sheridan noted after the Civil War, war is indeed hell.

Even the Brooklyn Bridge has its History...

Try to imagine the most startling news story you could think of, say, something like "Elvis discovered alive, and in bed with Jackie O, also still alive, while clutching stunning evidence of Loch Ness Monster and the Kennedy Assassination!" That's pretty good, actually. I wonder if the National Enquirer is hiring? I can do better than "Bat Boy". Anyway, it seems I have some competition in this department as news services the world over hummed with this amazing story this week: "Filmmaker claims to have found nails that hung Jesus". Notice they didn't even have to supply the "!"; you did that all by yourself as you read that.

So the story goes that a very controversial film maker and amateur archaeologist, Simcha Jacobovici, claims he's found, well, the nails used to crucify Jesus. Now, there's an entire story behind this and I'm not going to get into it. If you're going to pursue it, I would strongly suggest reading the opinions of some real archaeologists such as Bibleplaces.blog or A Hot Cup of Joe to see what the real experts have to say. However, there is a secondary, underlying story about this, one that transcends shysters and snake oil salesmen trying to gain riches and fame from the gullible, and that is the world of relics in Christianity, particularly Catholicism. The first thing that usually comes to mind are the many infamous medieval forgeries that produced enough pieces of the original crucifixion cross to fill a forest, and enough thorns from the crown of thorns to fill many gardens' worth of rose bushes, but these are really just the outer peripheral edges of an entire world of physical relics which Christians once -- and some still today -- use as totem-like bridges to important people and events from the history of Christianity. In this sense, Jacobovici's claim is less important to a historian as far as whether he's right -- whether they really are the nails that tormented Jesus Christ -- than that someone would take notice of his claims and try to verify them. In other words, these nails, whether they are what Jacobovici claims or not, represent a much larger Christian history and that makes these nails interesting to historians, that some today -- whether they believe Jacobovici or not -- take the topic seriously.