Patrick Allitt reviews Laying Down the Sword: Why We Can’t Ignore the Bible’s Violent Verses by Philip Jenkins:
Early figures in Christian history approached the genocidal passages in different ways. Marcion, leader of a highly influential Christian movement of the second century AD, argued that the God of the Old Testament, capricious, brutal, and violent, was the antithesis of the God of Jesus in the New Testament. His own proposed version of the Bible omitted the Old Testament completely. So, a century later, did that of Mani, founder of the Manicheans, who thought of divine history as a great battle between light and darkness and denied that the New Testament fulfilled prophecies made in the Old.
Arguing against the Marcionites and the Manicheans, some of the Church Fathers, including Origen and Augustine, denied that the genocidal passages should be taken literally. In Origen’s view they should be read metaphorically or spiritually so that the Canaanites or Amalekites were not actual groups of people, deserving of death, but the tendency to sin in every human heart, against which we should make perpetual war.
Vorjack explores how violence in the bible has been used to justify racism. Qasim Rashid praises Jenkins' defense of Islam:
He argues that instead of focusing on Islam as a (the) problem, critics should recognize that the generalizations made about Islam as a violent faith apply equally to a reading of Christian or Jewish history. In short, religion does not justify terrorism — terrorists justify terrorism. In pointing to the diversity within Islamic thought and the ongoing efforts within the Muslim world to advance the cause of peace, Jenkins dismantles the false belief many propagandists push that terrorism in the name of Islam is the rule, not the exception.
The Dish 