The Old Testament is filled with genocides commanded by God, the lives of the saints with gory torture, and medieval knights were bloodthirsty warlords.

This claim has three parts: (a) the Old Testament contains many episodes in which God commands the extermination of whole peoples (for example the Canaanites, Amalekites and Midianites in Deuteronomy, Joshua, Numbers and 1 Samuel); (b) traditional lives of the saints (hagiographies and martyrologies such as the Golden Legend) are full of graphic torture scenes; (c) medieval knights were in large part violent warlords given to bloodshed, as described in mainstream medieval historiography. 'Filled with' is a matter of degree: a part holds if the text or scholarship shows repeated, prominent instances, not just one. True: all three parts are supported by the primary texts and mainstream scholarship. Mostly true: all three are broadly supported, but one is somewhat overstated (for example scholars describe knightly violence as common but disputed in extent). Mixed: one of the three parts is clearly unsupported or substantially overstated while the others hold. Mostly false: two or more parts are substantially overstated, with only isolated instances behind them. False: the texts and scholarship show the described content is essentially absent.

Set before the research began.

1. E1 Barbara Newman · My Feet Are Cut Off: Lives of the Saints London Review of Books · 3 December 2009

   “The Legend shows remarkable ingenuity in the deaths of its martyrs, featuring 81 types of torture in all, from the barbecued St Lawrence to the skinned St Bartholomew, who is said in different versions to have been crucified upside down, flayed alive and beheaded.”

2. E2 Barbara Newman · My Feet Are Cut Off: Lives of the Saints London Review of Books · 3 December 2009

   “But the authentic Acts of the Martyrs are sober documents, and do not linger over accounts of torture any more than the Gospels revel in the gory details of crucifixion.”

3. E3 Chivalric Violence (Chapter 6) - A Companion to Chivalry Cambridge University Press · 4 July 2019

   “Medieval knights and men–at–arms were first and foremost practitioners of violence, whose mentality and worldview were underpinned by chivalric ideals, especially the primacy of honor.”

4. E4 Making Sense of Old Testament Genocide: Christian Interpretations of Herem Passages Oxford University Press (OUP Academic) · 1 March 2018

   “Making Sense of Old Testament Genocide: Christian Interpretations of Herem Passages”

I rate this mostly true. Part (b) holds well: a scholarly review says the Golden Legend has 81 types of torture (E1). The same review notes that the authentic Acts of the Martyrs are sober documents that do not linger over torture (E2), which qualifies the point. Part (c) is supported by a Cambridge companion chapter that calls knights "first and foremost practitioners of violence" (E3). Part (a) has the thinnest support: only the title of an OUP book that treats the Old Testament herem passages (plural) as genocide (E4), with no detail on how many there are or how prominent.