Church history

A couple of useless comments today:

I've just gotten finished reading through Colossians, reading along through IVP's "Ancient Christian Commentary," gleanings from the writings of the church fathers. This is a great series of books, but here's the problem I ran into: The comments are little paragraphs of sometimes only one sentence, taken out of long treatises or sermons. So as they appear in the books they are completely without the context of the original writings. I found that I had to be careful to be really immersed in the point of the scripture passage or of where the various church fathers were coming from, or the commentaries could easily be misconstrued.

Second thing, the History Channel is showing a four-hour program about the first three crusades. What I'm writing about here is the third crusade, in which Richard the Lion Heart and Muslim leader Saladin basically fought to a draw. First, there's no arguing that the crusades are a blot on the church's history, and there were atrocities on both sides (although saying war crimes existed in the 12 century is probably a foolish argument.) But here's an interesting thing that came out of the program. Both Western and Muslim historians were used as sources, one Muslim historian in particular, who had written a biography on Saladin. When Saladin recaptured Jerusalem, he summarily executed the Knights Templar there, considered the greatest of the crusader soldiers. The historian rationalized this, saying Saladin was a vicious man in a vicious time, and he was just trying to survive. Later Richard conquered the city of Acre and took some 250 Muslims prisoner, whom he eventually summarily executed as well. The same historian expressed outrage at the brutality of the act, and not just that the people of the time were shocked at the brutality but shocked that it was perpetrated in the name of Christianity. So he unwittingly witnessed that Islam was a religion of violence, but Christianity was not supposed to be.