Loss acquires meaning and generates recovery.1

I have done much rebuilding. To reconstruct is to collaborate with time gone by, penetrating or modifying its spirit, and carrying it toward a longer future.2

When Oliver Cromwell died on 3 September 1658, addresses of sympathy poured in from across the country. Formal ceremonies channeled sincere anxiety about what would happen to England now that the binding force of the Lord Protector was absent. Yet Gilbert Burnet tells us, in a piece of clerical gossip, that the scene taking place inside Whitehall Palace was, at times, comical.

In the place where penitents stand even the wholly righteous cannot stand.(R. Abahu)1

I prefer a man who hath sinned and done wickedly and repented to the man who hath not sinned and hath not manifested repentance; for the former possesseth a humble mind and the latter esteemeth himself in his thoughts a just man. (Abba Poemen)2

The surprise find of a portion of the lost Dialogue of Jason and Papiscus, to be presented below, was made inside another text discovery. In the course of searching for manuscripts containing works by Sophronius, the seventh-century patriarch of Jerusalem, one of the authors (JD) came across, in the collection of St. Catherine's monastery at Mt. Sinai, a book that consists exclusively of extracts from a variety of patristic, chronographic, and heresiological sources. The original purpose of this codex was, among other things, to gather evidence for the time and dating of important Christian events.1 For example, the first extract discusses a method for calculating the date of Easter, and the second is concerned with identifying the years and days of the week on which Christ's birth, baptism, and passion occurred. Other extracts are focused on an assortment of different topics ranging from the nature of God to the origin and meaning of certain philosophical or theological concepts, such as “beginning” (ajrchv) and “eternity” (aijwvn).

The Popes against the Jews. This declarative statement certainly makes for a scintillating title, as David Kertzer no doubt appreciated when he chose it for his book on the papacy's role in the emergence of modern anti-Semitism. Published in 2001, Kertzer's The Popes against the Jews: The Vatican's Role in the Rise of Modern Anti-Semitism quickly emerged as one of the most critically acclaimed and contentious books of its genre and generation. It took direct aim at a thesis being proffered at the time by the Vatican positing a fundamental distinction between the traditional “religious” anti-Judaism of Christian provenance, and the modern, politicized racial anti-Semitism of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, which constituted the catalytic element of a noxious brew of ideas and resentments that led to the Final Solution. The anti-Judaism / anti-Semitism distinction, Kertzer argues, “will simply not survive historical scrutiny.”1 While acknowledging that the Catholic church could not be held responsible per se for the Holocaust, even less for having approved the exterminatory policies of the Hitler regime and its collaborators, Kertzer imputes to the modern popes—especially those of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries—a significant degree of responsibility for having contributed to the social and cultural milieu in which the Final Solution was conceived and attempted. Although the Vatican never sanctioned the campaign to eliminate European Jews, Kertzer writes, “the teachings and actions of the Church, including those of the popes themselves, helped make it possible.” In fact, Kertzer maintains that the Vatican was one of the major “architects” of a new and distinctly modern form of anti-Semitism that drew inspiration and moral authority from traditional religious apologetics to buttress a radical secular politics of anti-Jewish repression and exclusion. The Holocaust, he concludes, “came at the end of a long road…. [I]t was a road that the Catholic Church did a great deal to help build.”2

This dissertation tracks Jesuit discourse about suffering in the missions of Northern New Spain from the arrival of the first missionaries in the sixteeenth century until their expulsion in the eighteenth. This research project asked why tales of persecution became so prevalent in these borderland contexts and describes how missionaries sanctified their own sacrifices as well as native suffering through martyrological idioms. It argues that in both corporeal and textual forms missionaries were passionate in their efforts to pacify the northern frontier of Mexico. It also correlates colonial martyrologies to longer traditions of redemptive death in the history of Christianity. The belief that sacrifice begets growth reaches back to the biblical writers and church fathers like Jerome and Tertullian. More recently, Talal Asad has argued that “dying to give life” lies at the foundation of western civilization and its capacity for war. This dissertation charts a transitional moment in the longer geneaology of matyrological discourse that extends early Christian tales of persecution to the modern logic of redemptive sacrifice. It argues that Christian martyrdom traditions helped early modern Jesuits rationalize their participation in the Spanish colonization of the Americas and explain rebellion, disease, and death as providential.