It may be difficult to reconcile the unrestrained bloodlust of these Medieval Christian soldiers with Jesus’s commandments to “love one’s enemies” and “turn the other cheek.” But that is because Christianity’s conception of cosmic war is derived not from the New Testament but from the Hebrew Bible (Old Testament). The knights who raped and pillaged their way to the Holy Land, who, in the words of the Christian chronicler Radulph of Caen, “boiled pagan adults whole in cooking pots, impaled children on spits and devoured them grilled,” were cosmic warriors walking in the path of the Lion of
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