The
mythologisation of the Jewish People within Christendom
1. Synopsis
The paper examines the way in which the Jewish people
became mythologised within Christian thought, and how the Christian church then
acted on the basis of its own constructs. The way in which Christianity
differentiated itself from Judaism and the Jewish people is found to be crucial
to this process. The paper finds that the first major push for differentiation
occurred in the first half of the first century CE. The Trajan war and the Bar
Kochbar revolt are thereby found to be significant to the process, as they
meant that, both internally and within the wider Roman world, to be associated
with the Jews, by being identified as a sect of Judaism, became increasingly
onerous. The success of Marcionism and Christian Gnosticism at this time attest
to the desire for a Christianity with no ties to Judaism. These sentiments are
found to have impacted upon the way in which the emerging orthodoxy
differentiated from the Jewish people and religion. The question became not how
much to retain, but how little, and what was retained was taken as an exclusive
possession, not shared. Within this process, the Jewish people and religion
became a doctrinal construct within Christianity. The process of
mythologisation began. As the Church gained temporal power in the fourth
century and beyond, this mythologising ceased to be mere theorizing, but became
the basis on which the Church treated the Jewish people. By taking the Jewish
scriptures, the Jewish religion was declared defunct. By taking the scriptures
on the basis of hermeneutics, the Jewish people were determined to be carnal.
By confiscating the Jewish God, the Jewish people were found to be heretics,
and by rejecting Jewish customs the Jewish people were seen to be aliens. The
paper looks at how in each of these cases, the Church later acted towards the
Jewish people on the basis of its own mythology, and how, by so doing, pressured
them to conform to the Christian myth of what they should be. The paper also
briefly looks at how the acceptance of this mythology by the Christian masses
of Europe created the essential preconditions
for their acceptance of the Nazi mythology of the Jewish people.
Contents
1. Synopsis
2. Contents
3. Introduction
4. The Creation of
the Myth
4.1
Christianity as a late sect within Second Temple Judaism
4.2 The
move away from Judaism/ the need to differentiate
4.3
Exclusive legitimacies
5. The Contents
and Construction of the Myth
5.1
Introduction
5.2 The
Jewish Bible
5.2.1. Marcionism: the rejection
5.2.2. Gnosticism: the redefinition
5.2.3 Later
historical occurrences/developments
5.2.4
Orthodoxy: the confiscation
5.2.5 Implications of the hermeneutic: The Jews as
defunct
5.2.6
Implications of the hermeneutic: The Jews as carnal
5.3 The
Jewish God
5.3.1
Implications: The Jews as heretic
5.3.1.1 Jewish
involvement in Christian heresies
5.3.1.2
Christian conversions to Judaism
5.3.1.3 The Jew
as deliberate heretic
5.3.1.4 Social
engineering
5.3.2 Continuance of the myth
5.4 The
Jewish customs
5.4.1
Implications: The Jews as aliens
6. Conclusion
6.1 The
Importance of beginnings
6.2 Other
voices
6.3 Mythic
construction
6.4 The
Myth accepted
6.5 The
Myth enacted
7. Bibliography
7.1 Primary
Literature
7.2 Secondary
Literature
3. Introduction
This paper seeks to examine the origins, content and
development of the Church’s mythologisation of the Jewish people. As such, its
focus is on the continuous dialogue between history and theology.
The consequences of the relationship between Christianity
and Judaism have been profound and lasting for both. This paper will seek to
examine the course and nature of the differentiation which occurred as orthodox
Christianity moved outside the Jewish orbit and the extent to which these
solutions became an ongoing characteristic of Christianity. The origins of this
process are critical. In formulating their own identity vis-Ã -vis Judaism, the
Christian self-identity contained within it a certain Jewish identity. The
Jewish people became a theological construction within much Christian thought
and deed. The process of mythologisation was started. Decisions that were taken
early in a specific set of historical circumstances, then entered into the
dogma of the Church. This in turn affected how the Church interacted with these
issues at a later date. This does not assume any grand plan or conspiracy. The
demonisation of the Jewish people by the Church was a very uneven process, but
certain continuities and developments can be seen over time. The paper will seek
to show how Jewish identity became a theological issue for the Church,
and that the Church tended to view and treat the Jewish people in light of
this. The importance of this cannot be overestimated. Just as the early Church
worked out its beliefs concerning the Trinity, the means of salvation and so
on, so it worked out its doctrine of the Jews. And just as those doctrines were
defined, defended and propagated, so too this one.
Rosemary Ruether,
for example, has shown that while the tone may vary from writer to writer, the
themes of its Adversus Judaeos
literature remained essentially the same over centuries (as, for example, did
its teachings on the Trinity).
In examining the origins of various aspects of this
mythology, the approach of the paper will be to place these origins within the
broader anti-Semitism
of the time, and especially, to focus on the debate within early Christianity,
between Marcionism, Gnosticism and the emerging Orthodoxy. This approach is
suggested by Stephen Wilson, Judith Lieu and John Gager.
The contents of the myth will be viewed as part of the
Church’s struggle to define itself, and within this process, to determine which
elements of its Jewish heritage needed to be retained, and which could be
jettisoned.
Within the development and construction of the myths,
the paper moves from the doctrinal debate to its historic consequences.
These sections will examine the ways in which the Church sought to propagate
this mythology as part of its doctrine and self-understanding. Given the
disparity in power that came to exist between the two groups, attention will
also be paid to the ways in which the Christian church has acted to try and
force the Jews to conform to that mythology, through attempts at social
engineering. In these sections, the works of Malcom Hay,
Friedrich Heer,
Edward Flannery and William Nicholls
will form the major references.
While the paper seeks to trace the development of
ideas across history, it should be remembered that these are complementary and mutually
reinforcing ideas. The myth of the Jew as carnal, as Christ killer, as heretic
and as rejected are clearly not isolated from each other. Often, the
information given in one section is also relevant to another.
It should not be assumed that the Jewish people were
the passive victims of church policies, but their many and varied responses to
these processes lie outside this paper’s scope.
Clearly, other aspects of the mythology could have been examined. Those that
were included were chosen because of their centrality both to the Jewish myth
and the Christian identity. Likewise, the paper does not attempt to present a
comprehensive study of the Jewish/Christian relationship, but limits itself to
tracing the development of specific strands of that relationship over time.
Other options for dealing with that relationship did exist, and are briefly
referred to in passing within the body of the paper, and in the conclusion. The
paper as such however deals mainly with those options which were eventually incorporated
into orthodoxy, and with Marcionism and Christian gnosticism as they affected
that process.
This paper rarely deals with Jewish people as such,
but deals rather with the mythic construct of “the Jew” within Christianity.
This construct is plainly anti-Semitic. It is understood as such throughout the
paper.
4. The Creation of
the Myth
4.1 Christianity as a late sect within Second Temple Judaism
Christianity began as a messianic sect within Judaism.
It needs to be remembered that the Jewish community in the land of Israel
at this time was itself already highly sectarian
and divided.
The ground rules for sectarian infighting and competition were already well
understood by the time the Jewish followers of Jesus of Nazareth came on the
scene. This was due to the historic and religious experience of the community
up to this point. If the Babylonian exile had brought the concept of the godly
remnant to the fore, the impoverished reality of post-exilic life turned it
divisive. If the godly individual could survive the destruction of the sinful
nation, the remnant was supposed to function as a conduit to the restored,
post-exilic community, where godliness would again be a community attribute.
The less-than-ideal nature of the post-exilic community fundamentally
challenged this worldview. This discontinuity between the historic remnant and
the godly remnant created a crisis of identity, between the individual’s
loyalty to and identification with the community
the “all Israel”
which was so fundamental to the doctrine, and the individuality/sectarian
identity required by Isaiah and the godly remnant motif. Individuals had to
pursue godliness, and yet be loyal to a community that did not live up to its
eschatological promise. The powerful and contradictory impulses this unleashed
were not resolved until 90 CE, with the triumph of Rabbinic Judaism.
This tension is evidenced in the increasingly sectarian writings of the
intertestamental period, as different Jewish movements try to claim for
themselves the identity both of the “true” remnant, and “all Israel”. This is true of the
Essenes,
the communities of 1 Enoch, Psalms of Solomon, 4 Ezra, 2 Baruch, the Pharisees,
and followers of “the Way”.
It is this tension that creates the society of the New Testament.
Note also that these different groups relied on their interpretation of the Law
to justify their claims. That Christianity laid claim both to the
title “Israel”
and to the Jewish scriptures (by dint of their “correct” hermeneutic), is thus
unremarkable. It is another, and this time unique, characteristic of the new
sect that gives these patterns wider historic significance.
4.2 The move away from Judaism/ the need to
differentiate
From the time of the Council in Jerusalem,
and the acceptance/inclusion by this sect of gentiles as gentiles, existential
problems of identity emerged.
These occurred on two fronts. Firstly, the inclusion of uncircumcised gentiles
as full members inevitably strained the relationship of the new sect with the
wider Jewish community.
Likewise, the relationship of converted gentiles to
the Jewish roots of their faith also became problematic. They were involved in
the argument without the softening ties of kin and culture.
They had a personal faith in the Jew Jesus, believed the Jewish Scriptures
(using the Greek translation) to be the word of God, and yet were
uncircumcised. Even their style of worship remained patterned on the Diaspora
Synagogue. As Frend put it, “Outside Israel,
Christianity developed within the framework of Hellenistic Judaism”.
They were comprised of both Jews and non-Jews, and defined themselves as Israel.
What then was their relationship to the rest of the Jewish people?
The period from the 60s through to the 200s saw the
first convulsive wrestlings of the now increasingly gentile church
with these issues. This occurred during a difficult time. From the mid 60s (for
example, in the writings of Persius
and Seneca the Younger)
through to the aftermath of the Bar Kochbar revolt, pagan Rome was in conflict with Jews and Judaism.
The wave of anti-Jewish writers
included Quintilian,
Martial,
Plutarch,
Tacitus
and Juvenal.
Vespasian placed a special tax on all Jews,
while popular feeling towards the Jews was so strong after the Jewish war (66-74
CE) that Titus was forced to cancel his marriage to Bernice.
The Jewish Diaspora uprisings of 115-117 CE (the “Trajan war”)
greatly increased the popular resentment of Jews generally.
Hadrian also came to be anti-Jewish,
re-imposing the Jewish tax, and outlawing the Jewish feasts, Sabbaths, and
Torah study.
During this time also, there were largely
uncoordinated attempts by various Jewish communities to distance/distinguish
themselves from the increasingly non-Jewish
church. Community specific acts of violence (Stephen, Polycarp etc.), the
introduction of the 19th Benediction,
and the persecution of Jewish Christians by Bar Kochbar,
further served to weaken the perceived debt/allegiance that the emerging
gentile church might have otherwise felt towards the Jewish people.
The relationship of the incipient gentile church to
the Jewish community was thus a difficult one socially (at a time when Jewish
customs were not liked), nationally (during a time of three major Jewish wars -
the Diaspora one was highly significant), religiously (both groups claiming the
same Scriptures) and economically (the imposition of the Jewish tax for those
perceived as “proselytes to the Jewish faith”
and on those who “without publicly acknowledging it yet lived as Jews”).
For a gentile convert to Christianity, to identify
with the Jews was to grasp an unwelcoming lightning rod. The impetus within the
gentile church for a differentiation from the Jewish community was thus an
early and major issue for it. Indeed, one of the striking facts about the early
Christian church was its ability to distinguish itself from Judaism so quickly
in the official mind. In Acts 18:15, and possibly at Rome in 49 CE, Christianity is seen by Roman authorities as
a Jewish sect having problems within its mother community. By 64 CE, however,
Nero clearly distinguishes between the Jewish and Christian communities of Rome.
How lasting this differentiation in the official minds lasted is difficult to
tell. Suetonius’s comment about Hadrian persecuting those who “without publicly
acknowledging it yet lived as Jews” may well refer to Christians, and this may
have been the impetus for further acts of differentiation by the Roman church.
What is remarkable is that by 112, Pliny is able to report the self-description
of Christians in Bithynia,
who identify themselves without any reference to Judaism. In other words, for
the Christians in Bithynia,
Christianity is no longer a Jewish sect, but has become a distinct
religion.
The differentiation was however, neither quick nor
easy. They had too much in common. Likewise, there was genuine bewilderment
(turning to frustration)
that while gentiles had acknowledged Jesus as the Jewish Messiah,
the Jewish people as such had not.
Their faith both affirmed the Jewish scriptures, and was rejected by the Jewish
people. No wonder that Paul referred to this as a mystery.
This tension can be seen in the attitudes of early
Christian leaders. It is seen both in their attitudes to the Judaism of their
own day, and, increasingly, in their attitude to the non-Christian Jewish
people of their day. Ignatius “rejected any identification between the Church
and Judaism”.,
and said it was “outrageous to utter the name of Christ and live in Judaism”.
Judaism was cast off as “tombstones and sepulchers of the dead”. The Lord's day was to be lived for, not the
Sabbath. Yet he finds his inspiration “in the Hebrew Prophets”. Turning to the
Jewish people, Barnabas finds the (non-Christian) Jews to be “wretched”,
yet then describes himself as “as being one of you, and loving you both
individually and collectively more than my own soul”. Eusebius later tried to solve the problem by
making a sharp distinction between Hebrews who were good men in the Old
Testament, and Jews who were evil.
For Eusebius, the link with the Jewish past was to be maintained by severing
the present day Jewish people from their own heritage. In a situation then of
general gentile anti-Judaic sentiment, combined with the rejection by the
Jewish community as such of the messianic claims of Jesus of Nazareth, the
process of genuine differentiation between Judaism and Christianity began.
4.3 Exclusive legitimacies
To an extent sometimes not recognized, the continued
existence of an unconverted Jewish people in itself presented an existential
challenge/threat to the new faith. As Chrysostom put it:
If Jewish rites
are holy and venerable, our way of life must be false. But if our way is true,
as indeed it is, theirs is fraudulent. I am not speaking of the Scriptures. Far
from it! For they lead one to Christ. I am speaking of their present impiety
and madness.
As the early church leadership moved to define its
position concerning its Jewish heritage and the Jewish people, it did so under
the conviction that there could be no common ground. As will be seen, this
conviction would have profound consequences for both Christianity and for the
Jewish people.
5. The Contents
and Construction of the Myth
5.1 Introduction
With the rejection of Christianity by the Jewish
people, the rise within the Diaspora church of a more gentile leadership (who
felt less loyalty to the Jewish nation), the Church moved into a crisis of
identity. Frend
places this crisis in the years 100-135 CE, that is, it was in the sub-Apostolic
generation that genuine differentiation occurred.
Having failed to convert the majority of the Jewish people, they had now to
determine to what extent their identities still remained linked, and to what
extent a new, gentile/universal identity was possible.
As seen, the need to differentiate Christians from Jews and Christianity from
Judaism was a fundamental church priority/group dynamic at this stage of its
development.
All aspects of its Jewish heritage (Jewish Festivals, Scriptures and God, the
Sabbath etc.) were thus thrown into a process of internal negotiation to
determine what was expendable and what must be retained. In a related
development, it had also to formulate its relationship with the existent Jewish
community. At a time when its own situation was frequently under threat, and
when its attachment to Judaism was resented by much of its gentile membership,
and often detrimental to its acceptance within the wider gentile community, the
early church began the process of mythologisation.
While pagan anti-Semitism would wax and wane, for the Church, because this wave
of anti-Jewish sentiment occurred during its own period of self-definition, the
anti-Semitism of the time affected the way it differentiated itself from
Judaism and the Jewish people. This influenced and became incorporated in its’
own self understanding. As such, it became permanent and institutionalized.
This internal Church process had important
ramifications for the Jewish people. The Jewish heritage was assessed, the
Church deciding what could be abandoned, and what must be kept. What was
abandoned was ridiculed,
what was kept was laid claim to as an exclusive possession. Within this, the
Church laid the groundwork for its own definition of the Jews. They were those who had
what it did not value, and who did not have what it required. These judgments
and dispositions were made on an entity which the Jewish people believed was
theirs in its entirety.
In examining this history, use will be made of the two
major Christian heresies of the age, Marcionism and Gnosticism, as these throw
into sharp relief the importance of the issues, the options available and the
choices made.
5.2 The Jewish
Bible
During this time of differentiation, the single most
important issue came to centre on the place within Christianity of the Jewish
scriptures.
The main options were to abandon it, to change it, and/or to claim it. The
incipient Christian communities experimented with all of these. Marcionism
chose the first, Gnosticism the second, and Orthodoxy finally settled largely
upon the third.
5.2.1. Marcionism: The Rejection
The first systematic attempt of sub-apostolic
Christianity to define the relationship between itself and the Jewish people
and scripture was made by Marcion.
The son of a Christian bishop, Marcion (born about 90 CE),
had his formative years during the Trajan war. In this time of general
anti-Jewish sentiment, Marcion rejected the idea that to be a Christian forced
him in some way to identify with Israel. While Ignatius might love
the Jewish prophets yet hate Judaism, Marcion moved more logically to a total
rejection of the Jewish prophets, people, God and scripture. As well as
rejecting the Jewish scriptures, Marcion culled the nascent New Testament
scriptures of all reference to the Jewish scriptures and “declared everything
that contradicted his own teaching to be a forgery by Jewish apostles and their
followers. Basing himself mainly on
Luke’s words and Paul’s epistles, Marcion produced a ‘pure’ gospel of his own”.
His hermeneutic was literal, and a major emphasis was the rejection of the idea
of Old Testament prophecy being fulfilled in the New.
This was a logical, but extreme extension of views
already in the Christian community, and it found varying degrees of sympathy
not only with those who were prepared to publicly identify with it, but also
with those who remained within the Orthodox Church.
While it is difficult to know what, if any, effect Hadrian's law prohibiting
study of the Jewish scriptures had on Christian study, it is important to note
that, for Polycarp the Old Testament was
“practically unknown”,
and that his knowledge of it was “slight”.
He also venerated the writings of Paul above all other scripture.
It is also interesting that Tertullian charges Marcion with having “gnawed away
the Gospels”
(as opposed to “gnawing away the Old Testament”). In general, the inspiration
for the Patristics at this time were mainly the Gospels and Epistles.
In other words, Marcionism was a Christian movement
that, by stretching trends current within the Church, discovered the line
beyond which Christian anti-Judaism could not go. By crossing the line, they
forced others to determine where it lay. It was up to Justin Martyr to prove to
the orthodox
the necessity of the Old Testament. Indeed, he uses it not only in his Dialogue
with Trypho,
but, more interestingly, more than one third of his First Apology (to Marcus
Aurelius) is devoted to the “proof from prophecy”.
The effect of this clash on the emergent Orthodoxy
will be discussed within that section. The continuance or re-emergence of
Marcionite thought within Christianity will be discussed at the end of the
section on Gnosticism, due to the shared antipathy both had for the Jewish
scriptures.
5.2.2. Gnosticism: the redefinition
As with Marcionism, Christian Gnosticism can also be
seen as an early Christian attempt to distance itself from Judaism, and to
redefine its relationship to the Old Testament.
Concerning Gnosticism, Jonas has written; “the nature of the relation of
Gnosticism to Judaism in itself an undeniable fact is defined by the
anti-Jewish animus with which it is saturated”.
The relationship between Judaism and Gnosticism is
complicated, but is perhaps usefully generalized by hypothesizing a general
Gnostic sub-culture
with which some Jews attempted a syncretism, resulting in a Jewish Gnosticism,
which would develop into the Kabalistic strain of Judaism,
but which even at this stage, is disapproved of by the Rabbis,
and viewed as heretical,
and a largely separate movement of gentile Christians,
motivated by a desire to jettison the Jewish roots of their faith,
and replace them with a popularist gentile world view of the time. It is this
Christian movement to which that term will henceforth refer.
The use of the Old Testament within Gnostic literature
supports this view. The Gnostic knowledge of the Old Testament has not only
been described as “meager and truncated”,
but we also find reference to “the massive evidence of anti-Jewish use of
Jewish material”.
Both of these witness to an aggressively anti orthodox-Jewish Gnosticism,
either already Christianised, or available to those who wished to take that
path (as a means of distancing Christianity from Judaism).
It should again be stressed that members of the Church
experimented with Gnosticism at a time when to be associated with Judaism was
politically, legally and socially damaging, and that the general anti-Jewish
sentiment was shared by those in the Church. It is this desire to distance
themselves from Judaism that gives us the motive underlying the movements. It
was Christians wishing to escape the reproach of being labeled with Jews
that formed the adherents of Marcionism and Gnosticism.
The force of such sentiment can be seen from the
success of the Marcionite church, which in the 3rd century, was larger in the
eastern empire than the orthodox church.
It is also found in the polemics and propaganda of the time. Marcionites,
Gnostics
and pagans
all reproached the orthodox as “Jews”, stressing their continued use of the
Jewish scriptures etc. While sharing with Marcionites the negative view and use
of the Old Testament, Gnostics moved beyond Marcion when they tried to find a
substitute body of scripture. This comprised both Christianized earlier Gnostic
works,
and their own writings. As seen, even the LXX was totally disdained by the
Gnostics. Given its usage by the early church (especially in Alexandria), this can only be explained by
the pervasive anti-Jewish sentiment of the Gnostics, and their disdain for
“psychic” Christians as “Jews”.
Regarding hermeneutics, the phenomenon of Gnosticism
highlights another means by which the early church was grappling with how to
come to terms with the Jewish scriptures, while distancing themselves from the
Jewish people. Allegory was the means by which the Gnostics tried to combine
two fundamentally different quantities. In this mix, Christianity was
interpreted according to Gnostic understanding, that is, Christianity became a
mere example of Gnostic truth. This was a fundamental weakness of the system.
Irenaeus emphasized this in his Against
the Heresies, where “the chief Gnostic error is seen to be its exegesis,
which involves the imposition of an alien pattern upon Scripture”.
Similarly, Origen charged that Basilides “related the Apostolic word to
preposterous and impious fables”
As with Marcionism, Gnosticism both affirmed trends already present within
Christianity, and exaggerated them to the point of heresy. Within orthodoxy,
Justin Martyr had written that “Jews read their Scripture at a literal level,
and so fail to comprehend its true meaning”.
The Gnostic reproach of orthodoxy as being “still Jewish”, and the success of
this strategy again reinforces the depth of popular anti-Jewish sentiment at
the time, and the difficulty Orthodoxy had in formulating and selling its own
views on Scripture. Note here both the similarities and the differences between
the Gnostic and Orthodox approaches; Gnosticism used allegory to define itself
as the antithesis of the Jewish scriptures, Orthodoxy used similar means to
define themselves as the rightful heirs of the Jewish scripture.
As with Marcionism, Gnosticism represents a movement
from within the Church, in its case, not only cutting off, but also attempting
a syncretism with the popular currents of the day. As a movement within
Christianity, it was not always distinguishable from Christianity,
much of it remained within the Church, and many individuals created their own
meeting place between the two.
The Nag Hammadi
Codices give us Gnostic views of their own position. As the epistle of Peter to
Philip demonstrates, Gnostics began by affirming orthodox belief and formulae.
These were then reinterpreted on a higher level. This fact explains why
Gnostics could hold responsible positions in the church and were in the
forefront of the church in making commentaries and even in evangelizing pagans
to orthodox belief, which was a necessary first step to Gnostic teaching.
As a Christian movement concurrent with Marcionism,
and trying to deal with the same problem as Marcionism (although exploring
different solutions), Gnosticism also shared some of the weaknesses of
Marcionism; “Gnostic Christianity resulted in the loss of historical perspective”.
This was due not only to their rejection of the Old Testament as scripture (it
was reacted to in an antagonistic sense), but also to their essential view of
history as the absence of the true God, the realm of the Demiurge, the present
as meaningless except as the elect are delivered from it, and their future
eschatology as precluding material aspects and consisting only of a restoration
to the Pleroma. Likewise, the Resurrection was described as “a state of being
rather than an historical event”.
As seen, this was a difficult position to defend, and “many of the church
fathers emphasized the importance of history for the Christian revelation”
to attack this weakness.
In any event, Marcionism and Gnosticism form the first
example of what A. Davies calls “the perpetual dilemma posed by Christianity to
the anti-Semitic mind: whether to reconstruct or to reject it. To be acceptable
the Christian faith must indubitably be purged of its Jewish elements”.
While ultimately rejected by orthodoxy, the legacy of both movements would
provide fertile ground for later generations of Christians who pursued the same
goals.
5.2.3 Later historical occurrences/developments
While always marginal, the attempt to totally separate
the Christian faith from the Jewish scriptures did not entirely disappear, but
reoccurred in various heretical or marginal groups across history.
Within the Reformation, such ideas also occurred within certain strands of the
Anabaptist movement. “For my own part”, wrote Erasmus,
“provided the New Testament remain intact, I had rather that the Old should be
altogether abolished, than that the peace of Christendom should be broken for
the sake of the books of the Jews”.
In another echo of Marcionism, Menno Simons also “wrote extensively of the
‘bad’ God of the Old Testament”.
It was however in the early decades of the twentieth
century, and at a time when the European churches were again finding any link
with the Jewish people onerous,
that Marcionism had its greatest revival.
The question again came to focus on the nature of the relationship between
Christianity and the Jewish scriptures and Judaism. While F.C. Baur had viewed
Jewish Christianity as original, and Pauline as secondary
(thus retaining a Jesus who was essentially Jewish), Albrecht Ritschl argued
that the decisive break was original, that is, that Jesus also was
anti-Judaistic.
“Ritschl created a picture of an early Jesus movement united in a goal of
eliminating Jewish elements”.
Adolph von Harnack continued this approach. He argued for the total “newness”
of Christianity, and found the completion of these ideas, and a kindred spirit,
in Marcion. He stated, for example, that Marcion’s point of departure was
“‘provided in the Pauline contrast of law and gospel, on one side malicious.
petty and punitive correctness, and on the other side merciful love.’”
This clearly was Harnack’s own view. It was this affinity with Marcionism that
led him to state:
If one carefully
thinks through with Paul and Marcion the contrast between “the righteousness
that is by faith” and “the righteousness that is by works” and is persuaded
also of the inadequacy of the means by which Paul thought he could maintain the
canonical recognition of the Old Testament, consistent thinking will not be able
to tolerate the validity of the Old Testament as canonical documents within the
Christian church.
Both Marcionism and Gnosticism can be viewed as
attempts within the early Christian community to formulate an identity not
independent of the Jewish scriptures, but in opposition to them. Jews and
Judaism were not ignored, they provided the antithesis of their faith. “Paul”,
Harnack wrote, “held fast to an indefinite compromise with Jewish convictions;
and that, instead of carrying the fight along the whole line, he on important
points yielded to the Jew in the Jewish Christian-not from cowardice or
insincerity, but because the Jew in himself was still too strong”.
These ideas were further expounded upon by Emanuel
Hirsch, who taught church history, New Testament and systematic theology at Guttingen University in the 1930s and 40s. In Das alte Testament und die Predigt des
Evangeliums he wrote that even before he went to
university, he had already recognized the Old Testament as “no Christian book”,
and was therefore unsurprised when his professors expressed the same point of
view. His motivation here was religious.
In a further embrace of Marcionism, Hirsch stated that “honesty required a
giving up of the New Testament use of prophecy as proof”.
This Hegelian view of thesis/antithesis was also
applied to this area by Kierkegaard, whose own work was then quoted by Emanuel
Hirsch, “Christianity could have had no other religion as precursor, for no
other but Judaism could establish, by means of negation, so definitely, so
decisively what Christianity is”.
While used in a different context, the words of Adolf Hitler also reflect this
mythological antithesis: “The Jew offers the most striking contrast to the
Aryan”.
It was within this climate that the “German
Christians” occurred. The first organisational structure of the movement, the
League for a German
Church (Bund for deutsche Kirche) was formed in
1921. Its purpose was to work for the reformation of the Church along
nationalistic lines, and to free it from its “‘Judaistic’ characteristics”.
One of its most prominent members, Friedrich Anderson, was an “avowed critic of
the Old Testament”, and of “all Jewish blurring of the pure teaching of Jesus”.
He often appealed to Harnack’s book Marcion
to defend these views. During the Nazi era itself, the “German Christians” also
appealed to this work when they banned the Old Testament and published a
special edition of the Gospels “free of Jewish influence” (because “Zionism has
to disappear from the liturgy and song-material”.).
In general, however, the Christian need of the Old
Testament had been demonstrated. When,
in his famous Advent sermon of 1933, Cardinal Fulhaber defended the Old
Testament, (and explicitly not the Jews of his day)
he was remaining true to that orthodoxy, and was the legitimate heir of Justin
Martyr. And so, by rejecting the total separation of religions as proposed by
Marcion and Christian gnosticism, Christianity (as will be seen) retained the
Jewish scriptures, and remained in conflict with Judaism over their ownership.
5.2.4 Orthodoxy: the confiscation
Formulated during this early, difficult time,
Orthodoxy finally opted for an exclusive
retention of the Jewish scriptures.
The reclamation of
Christ’s humanity could only be accomplished by reclaiming the Creator, the
same God to whom the Jewish scriptures bore witness.
The challenge of Marcionism and the Gnostics had to be met by an assertion of
the unity of God ... Only the retention of the Jewish Bible as Scripture for the
Church could make this stand possible. But this carried with it the necessity
of denying the Bible to the Jews.
The conflict this position caused with the existent
Jewish community was waged by the Church both in the area of hermeneutics,
(“The scriptures are rightly ours because we are the ones who rightly
understand them”)
and, increasingly as the balance of power swamped all else, by force. One
suspects that this conflict was not entirely unwelcome, given the Gnostic and
Marcionite reproaches that orthodoxy remained too Jewish.
This exclusive claim was made explicitly by Tertullian
in The Prescription Against Heretics,
which stated that it was senseless and
unprofitable to argue with heretics (including Jews) over the interpretation of
the Holy Bible. The right procedure was to deny them, a priori, the right to
invoke the Scriptures. In other words according to Tertullian, only Orthodox
Christianity had a right to the Bible. This teaching was to become standard
Christian doctrine. Augustine put it this way; “And so - scattered across the
globe - they have become as it were the custodians of our books, like the
slaves who carry their masters' law books to court - and then wait outside”.
In his Dialogue
with Trypho, A Jew Justin Martyr states, “But you, expounding these things
in a low [and earthly] manner, impute much weakness to God, if you thus listen
to them merely, and do not investigate the force of the words spoken”.
This charge, that the Jews did not understand the Scriptures because they read
them in a carnal way, provided the justification for the claim that only the
Church now possessed (by reason of their hermeneutic) the Scriptures. “The
sacred texts of Israel belonged to the Church, and all the promises in them
applied to the gentile Church ... the Church was the Bible’s true subject and
theme, and in the Church alone it would find its proper place as the Old
Testament along side the New ... What for Jews is the constitution of a
commonwealth now becomes for Christians a cryptogram for Christ”. The Old Testament was now (since the Old
Covenant was no longer binding), either typological or prophetic. By affecting
the confiscation in the way they did, Christianity changed the very nature of
what they had taken.
This change is seen most clearly when one looks at the prophetic dialectic of judgment
and promise. Rather than applying to the one people, they are now seen as
applying to two. Statements of condemnation apply literally, to “the Jews”,
while statements of promise apply figuratively, to “the Church”. “This turns
the Jewish Scriptures, which actually contain the record of Jewish
self-criticism, into a remorseless denunciation of the Jews, while the Church
in turn is presented as totally perfect, and loses the prophetic tradition of
self-criticism!”
These struggles, regarding hermeneutics and ownership,
continued into Protestantism. Mark Edwards notes,
Significantly,
Luther also viewed the Jews, or rather Jewish exegesis, as a more internal than
an external threat. It was, after all, to counter Jewish efforts to proselytize
Christians that Luther wrote his ‘Against the Sabbatarians’. Of greater threat
however, was the challenge posed by Jewish exegesis of the Old Testament.
Luther believed his Christological interpretation of the Old Testament and his
Christian interpretation of various messianic Old Testament passages to be of
vital importance to his theology. Jewish exegetes challenged both”.
For Luther, stressing the historicity of his faith
and the proof from prophecy, his earlier view
(made when he was seeking to convert Jews), that they were entrusted with what
he now needed, became anathema. After he had translated the Bible into German,
with the help of Jewish rabbis,
he claimed that it was henceforth a German book. The only Bible you have any
right to, he told the Jews, “is that concealed beneath the sow’s tail; the
letters that drop from it are free to eat and drink”.
Luther also stated that, as well as burning their
synagogues, Jews should have their religious writings (including the Bible)
taken from them, and that their Rabbis must no longer teach the law.
Clearly the later Luther regarded the Old Testament as an exclusive Christian
possession. The Jewish people had no right to it physically, and had no right
to their own interpretations of it. While not indicative of all Protestant
views,
Luther’s later pamphlets were never repudiated by the Lutheran church (until
after the Holocaust).
Orthodoxy, both Catholic and significant portions of
Protestant, has thus been able to both retain the Jewish scriptures, and at the
same time, deny the rights of the Jewish people to them. Their sentiment
towards the Jewish people has not been one of gratitude, but, by adopting an
exclusivist position, their act has been one of theft. This need not have been
the case, but the consequences of its own struggle with the even more
anti-Judaic sections of its membership, the Marcionites and Christian Gnostics,
clearly influenced its approach.
5.2.5 Implications
of the Hermeneutic: 1. The Jews as Defunct.
As just seen, Christian doctrine came to state that
the Old Testament applied only to Christ, and to his body, the Church. Rather
than a ‘both and’ approach, this exclusive claim meant that Jewish restoration
was debarred from being a legitimate theme of Jewish prophecy. The Jews were
allowed a past, but no present and no future. Here again, the way in which the
Church appropriated the Jewish scriptures for itself has had direct
consequences for the way in which it viewed (and treated) the Jews of its own
time. They were theologically constructed as a people who had, and who were
allowed, no future. This had practical consequences both within the Diaspora,
and as it concerned the Churches attitude to the restoration of a Jewish homeland.
Within the Diaspora, the Theodosian Code (CE 438) ruled that new synagogues were to be handed over to
the Catholic Church, while older synagogues were not to be beautified or
repaired. The synagogue must be seen to be outdated and falling apart. This is
but one example of Christian law being used to try and force the Jewish people
and religion to conform to the Church’s doctrinal understanding of what they
should be. In this case, Jewish prosperity was theologically anathema. That is,
the Church believed that it had a vested interest in preventing the Jews from
prospering. As Pascal phrased it,
The condition in
which one sees the Jews is moreover, a great proof of the Religion. For it is an astonishing
thing to see that people subsisting for so many years, and to see them always
in a state of misery; it being necessary for the proof of Jesus Christ, both
that they subsist as a proof, and that they be wretched, because they crucified
him.
Examples of the Church intervening with the secular
authorities to pursue this policy are numerous. In 1081 Pope Gregory VII wrote
as to Alphonso VI of Castille: “We admonish your Highness that you must cease
to suffer the Jews to rule over Christians and exercise authority over them. For to allow Christians to be subordinate to
Jews, and to be subject to their judgment, is the same as to oppress God’s
Church and to exalt the synagogue of Satan. To wish to please the enemies of
Christ means to treat Christ himself with contumely”.
Thomas Aquinas agreed with this and preached the idea that Jews must be
compelled to live in perpetual slavery.
On March
5, 1233, Pope Gregory XI wrote to the archbishops and bishops of Germany.
He wrote that German Jews were not living in “the state of complete misery to
which they had been condemned by God”. Jews were not living in “the yoke of
perpetual enslavement because of their guilt”.
Pope Innocent III re- stated this in a letter to the
Archbishop of Seus and the Bishop of Paris (15 July 1205): “The Jews are condemned to eternal
slavery”.
Pope Paul IV in 1555 published a Bull (Cum nimis absurdum) again declaring that
Jews were condemned by God to eternal slavery.
This attitude was carried over to a certain extent into European
Protestantism. In 1538, Landgrave Philip of Hesse wished to give the Jews in Hesse a definitive status. Martin Bucer, who exercised a
deep and permanent influence on Calvin, (who was in exile in Strasbourg, in
Bucer’s close proximity, at this very time) joined with six Hesse clergy to
write that Jews should not be allowed to raise themselves above Christians, but
should be confined to the lowest estate (that is, slave labor).
While the Church saw itself as the benefactor of
humanity, its own beliefs led it to oppose Jewish freedoms and success. While
the Church may have apologised for such actions, the theological basis for them
has not been eliminated. Jewish success, especially nationally, is still a
theological problem for much of Christianity.
The idea remained within much Christian thought that the promises of God apply
only to the Church, and not to Israel.
The well loved Bible Commentaries of Matthew Henry
(ca. 1600) contain this doctrine. His
commentary on Jeremiah 33. 25 and 26 reads in part:
See how firm the
covenant stands notwithstanding, as firm as that with day and night: sooner
will God suffer day and night to cease than he will cast away the seed of
Jacob. This cannot refer to the seed of Jacob according to the flesh, for they
are cast away, but to the Christian church, in which all these promises were to
be lodged.
The Christian denial of the rights of the Jewish
people to their own interpretations of their Scriptures has been seen in much
Christian reaction to the reestablishment of the Jewish homeland. If the Jews
were not to prosper in the Diaspora, because they had no future and were under
God’s curse, then clearly, the idea of a Jewish restoration was also
impossible.
M. Shukster and P. Richardson
argue that the Letter of Barnabas was written during the reign of Emperor Nerva,
when it seemed that the Jewish Temple might be rebuilt. This was viewed by
Barnabas as a threat to Christian belief.
This view is even more pronounced in Chrysostom, for example,
We have said
enough to prove that the temple will never be rebuilt. But since the abundance
of proofs which support this truth is so great, I shall turn from the gospels
to the prophets, because the Jews put their belief in them before all others.
And from the words of the prophets I shall make it clear that the Jews will recover
neither their city nor their temple in days to come.
In other words, part of Chrysostom’s belief, based on
his exclusive claims to the scriptures, (“from the words of the prophets”) is
that a Jewish homeland will not be re-established. That is, a rebirth of the
Jewish state would have been theologically threatening to his faith. This view
did not disappear. During the height of the Holocaust, Pius XII wrote, on the 22nd of June 1943, to
the American ambassador to express his opposition to the recreation of a Jewish
state in Palestine.
William E. Cox, writing twenty five years after the Holocaust, stated that “All
earthly promises to Israel
have been either fulfilled or invalidated because of disobedience. All
spiritual promises are being fulfilled through the church”. He also stated that
“God withdrew his presence from Israel
as a nation. The Jewish state came to a bitter end in AD 70. Nor will national Israel
ever again be a fruitful nation”.
Reformed theologian, Loraine Boettner, also writing after
the Holocaust, and after the re-establishment of the State of Israel, stated
that the Jewish people should have assimilated, and that their continuation
since the time of Jesus was “sinful”. He went on to write that “the continuance
of this bitterly anti-Christian racial group (this theologian’s description of
the Jewish people!) has brought no good to themselves and their has been strife
and antagonism in practically every nation where they have gone. They have not
been a happy people ... the recently established nation of Israel has ruthlessly displaced an
Arab population and seeks to expand further into the surrounding regions”.
This denunciation of the Jewish people and attack on the re-established nation
of Israel
occurs in his theology text because his theology requires it. As he states
later in the same work, a Jewish Kingdom re-established in Palestine “is based on a ‘false principle’,
that God still has a special purpose to be served by the Jewish people as a
nation”. As far as Boettner is concerned, all the
promises given by God to Israel
are fulfilled in the Church.
Turning to the physical epicenter of this debate,
Canon of St Georges Anglican Cathedral in Jerusalem,
Dr Nain Stifan Ateek, has stated “how can the Old Testament be the Word of God
in the light of Palestinian Christians’ experience with its use to support
Zionism?” His solution is a “Palestinian” way of reading the Bible whereby “the
Word of God incarnate in Jesus the Christ interprets for us the Word of God in
the Bible”. Ateek seems even to veer towards Marcionism
when he writes, “there are certain passages in the Old Testament whose
theological presuppositions and even assertions need not be affirmed by the
Christian today, because they reflect an early stage of human understanding of
God's revelation that conflicts with the Christian's understanding of God as
revealed in Jesus Christ”..
Again, for these church leaders, the Jewish Scriptures apply only to Christ.
The Jewish Scriptures do not contain a Jewish future.
The theological construct that was used to assume
exclusive ownership of the Old Testament thus carried with it the idea that
both Judaism and the Jewish people were now defunct. This in turn has led the
Church across the centuries to try and portray the synagogue and the people in
this light. It is offended by Jewish contentment, and has fought for Jewish
oppression.
5.2.6 Implications
of the Hermeneutic: 2. The Jews as Carnal
If hermeneutics was the means by which the Church
claimed to be the true (and only) custodians of the scriptures, the
justification for this claim lay in the idea that, as carnal beings, the Jews
could have no understanding of the scriptures, which (like the Church) were
spiritual.
As already noted, Justin Martyr stated that the “Jews read their Scripture at a
literal level, and so fail to comprehend its true meaning”.
The Encyclopedia Britannica, in its section on anti-Semitism, lists as one of
its causes “the assertion that Jews misinterpreted ‘materialistically’ (that is
literally) the Old Testament passages foretelling the coming of the Messiah”.
This idea both tapped into and powerfully reinforced one of the central
Christian myths about the Jewish people.
The Jews were “carnal”. They had wanted an earthly
deliverer,
had a physical circumcision, and were thereby disqualified from the promises
and word of God. Jerome, for instance, writing in his Homily on Psalm 108, “the
Jews take their name, not from Judah who was a holy man, but from the betrayer.
From the former we (Christians) are spiritual Jews, from the traitor come the
carnal Jews”.
The process of mythologisation took over powerfully at this point. When Ephrem
says that the synagogue is cast off because “she is wanton between the legs”,
it is not the actions of real individuals that are being condemned, rather, he
is trying to express the fundamental character of an entire people. The Jews were animals, they were in essence
bestial.
John the Damascene (ca. 675 -749 CE) wrote that God gave the Jews the Sabbath
because of “grossness and sensuality” and an “absolute propensity for material
things”.
Chrysostom preached against Jews, describing them as “living for their belly,
mouth forever gaping, the Jews behave no better than hogs and goats in their
lewd grossness and the excesses of their gluttony. They can do one thing only:
gorge themselves with food and drink”.
Flannery comments on this and other denunciations by Chrysostom that “behind
the invective lies a very clear theology of Judaism. It is this theology,
moreover, rather than the vituperation that inflicted the greatest injury on
the image of the Jew”.
What was happening here was the creation of a myth, not the description of a
real people. The Church leaders got carried away with their own “eloquence” and
their own theological constructs. In the Middle Ages, Bernard of Clairvaux (ca.
1090 -1153 CE) preached against “bestial”
Jews, declaring them lower than animals. His contemporary, Peter the Venerable
(abbot of Cluny)
told the faithful that it was their duty to hate Jews, and declared:
Truly I doubt
whether a Jew can be really human ... I lead out from its den a monstrous
animal, and show it as a laughing stock in the amphitheatre of the world, in
the sight of all the people. I bring thee forward, thou Jew, thou brute beast,
in the sight of all men.
In the fifteenth century, German religious art
depicted Jews as pigs, Italian as scorpions.
Among other things, Luther called them “bitter worms” and “disgusting vermin”.
The Jew as carnal connected to a whole complex of
Christian thought: the idea of the flesh as evil, the promotion of celibacy,
and the general disdain for the physical world.
These concepts became incarnated in the Jew.
He had betrayed his high calling, surrendered to the temptations of the flesh,
and now lived only to indulge in earthly pleasure. In his discussion of Romans
11 Matthew Henry states:
Or, it may be
understood spiritually; their backs are bowed down in carnality and worldly
mindedness. Curvae in terris animae -
They mind earthly things. This is an
exact description of the state and temper of the present remainder of that
people, of whom, if the accounts we have of them be true, there is not a more
worldly, wilful, blind, selfish, ill-natured, people in the world. They are
manifestly to this day under the power of this curse. Divine curses will work
long. It is a sign we have our eyes darkened if we are bowed down in
worldly-mindedness.
To a church trying to instruct its flock in the
virtues of asceticism, the Jews were both a threat and an object lesson.
Note that Judaism in general saw the created world as good, and its pleasures
to be properly enjoyed,
while much Christianity saw the world as evil, and all of its pleasures to be
renounced. Within this genuine clash of world views, the more moderate Jewish
position, that one could be both spiritual and enjoy the God given pleasures of
this world, was anathema to the Church. As it claimed for itself pure
spirituality, so it assigned to the Jews utter carnality.
This mythic conception was one which the Church went
to lengths to propagate. Jews in the middle ages, for example, were often drawn
with oversized genitals. More pervasively, the Church also forced Jews
into money lending. Peter Abelard, in his A Dialogue of a Philosopher with a
Jew and a Christian has his Jewish character say;
Confined and
constricted in this way as if the whole world had conspired against us alone,
it is a wonder that we are allowed to live. We are allowed to possess neither
lands nor vineyards nor any landed estates ... Consequently, the principal gain
that is left us is that we sustain our lives
here by lending money to strangers; but just this makes us most hateful to them
who think they are being oppressed by it.
And so the “carnal Jew” became “the greedy Jew”. This was not only their nature, it was their
very spirit, they incarnated the very idea. It was not only that they were
different and damned, they were also a dire source of temptation. If a
Christian desired money, or any material pleasure, then he was infected with
the Jewish spirit.
This view continued into the twentieth century. In 1936 Cardinal August Hlond,
the new primate of Poland,
wrote in an official pastoral letter;
It is an actual
fact that the Jews fight against the Catholic Church, they are free thinkers,
and constitute the vanguard of atheism, bolshevism and revolution ... It is also true that the Jews are committing
frauds, practicing usury and dealing in white slavery. It is true that in the
schools the Jewish youth is having an evil influence, from an ethical and
religious point of view, on Catholic youth...
This charge was made by a free Catholic Church
primate, in a country that had already witnessed three years of Nazi
anti-Semitism. Note that “Bolshevism”, as an ideology concerned with economic
structures, concerned with the human condition in physical terms, fitted
perfectly into the Christian myths of Jew as materialist and Jew as heretic
(see the next section). That Russian Jews, who had been on the receiving end of
the Tsar’s pogroms, embraced it in significant numbers as a means of liberating
society from oppression,
served only to confirm the Church’s beliefs. The Polish Bishops issued its
first collective statement in 1920. It included the following,
The real object of
Bolshevism is world conquest. The race which has the leadership of Bolshevism
in its hands, has already in the past subjugated the whole world by means of gold and the banks ... The hatred of
Bolshevism is directed against Christ and his Church, especially because those
who are the leaders of Bolshevism bear in their blood the traditional hatred
for Christianity.
This mythology was adopted by Nazism. In 1920, for
example, the Nazi Party program (paragraph two) acknowledged the value of
“positive Christianity” in the fight against “the Jewish-materialistic spirit”.
The Jew as carnal has proved to be a persistent myth.
Originally formulated as providing the hermeneutical key to Christian claims
for the exclusive possession of the Old Testament, it expanded into an
essentially Gnostic worldview, where creation itself was evil, and the Jew was
its personification. It is within this mythical counter incarnation
that the Jews became scapegoats for Christian desires, and that the old Russian
saying, “kill a Jew and save your soul” becomes understandable. It was the same
mythology that enabled the Christian professor to say that to be a Christian,
one must kill the Jew inside of himself.
The weapons fashioned in the early fight to claim the
Jewish Scriptures have kept their cutting edge for over fifteen hundred years.
They have helped to create a mythology that has proved to be even more
persistent that Christianity itself, gentiles who left the Church retaining
this belief. The Christian struggle for self-definition
was not limited to the struggle over the books of the Jews alone, however.
5.3 The Jewish God
Both Marcionism
and Gnosticism
drew an absolute distinction between the Jewish God of the Old Testament
and the Christian God of the New. By their view that both the creator god and
matter were intrinsically evil, they also locked themselves into a docetic view
of Christ, for otherwise they would have been obliged to link Jesus with the
Old Testament and with the Creator. It was on this level that Orthodoxy
disputed with them. If one assumes, with Nielsen, Harrison, Hoffman and Knox,
that Polycarp's Letter to the Philippians attacks Marcion as the “false
teacher”, then what we find is that for Polycarp, it is Marcion’s docetism that
is the main cause of offence. Jesus’ humanity required that the god of creation
be the Christian God. The arguments of Marcion were countered with the teaching
that it was not the God of the Old Testament who was evil, but the people of
the Old Testament who were. The Jewish God was to be retained, but not shared.
As David Efroymsen noted, “The God of the Hebrew Bible was ‘salvaged’ for
Christians precisely by means of the anti-Judaic myth”.
Strengthening this view, the identification of Jesus
as God meant that the Jews had rejected and killed their own God. Melito of
Sardis put it this way;
He
who hung the earth is hanging;
he
who fixed the heavens has been fixed;
he
who fastened the universe has been fastened to a tree;
the
Sovereign has been insulted;
the
God has been murdered;
the
king of Israel
has been put to death by an Israelite right hand.
Once again, the way in which the Church formulated its
own teaching in conflict with other groups served to highlight its own
anti-Semitism, and to incorporate it into its doctrines.
5.3.1 Implications:
The Jews as Heretic
In the eyes of the Church, the Jewish people had
deliberately murdered their own God. What had once been theirs was theirs no
longer. This had a number of ramifications: firstly, God had left the Jewish
people. Their Synagogues were brothels,
their prayers the braying of animals.
God was exclusively the God of the Christians. Secondly, within the myth, the
Jew also became the archetypal heretic. He was not a pagan, he had been in the
truth, knew the truth, yet deliberately chose to spurn it.
The words of Acts 3:17-20 were ignored. Jews were “natural”
heretics, and their influence could be looked for where ever heresy arose.
The two ways this would manifest itself were in Jewish involvement in Christian
heresies, and in Christian conversions to Judaism.
5.3.1.1 Jewish involvement in Christian heresies
Jews were accused of involvement in most Christian
heresies. Tertullian accused them of aiding the Marcionites.
Jews were also described as allies of the Arians.
Augustine stated that one of the real errors of Pelagianism was its
“Jewishness”.
Likewise, in 399 CE, Augustine, preaching before a Catholic Council at Carthage, drew the
attention of his hearers to the “incongruous alliance” of Donatists, Jews and
pagans.
The extent of any “alliance” between Donatists and Jews in the face of common
Catholic persecutions is unknown (a footnote in E. Flannery's book states
simply, “Jews were suspected of involvement in the Donatist heresy”.).
Note however, that Julian the Apostate was said to be pro-Jewish
(even to the extent of possibly approving the rebuilding of their Temple), and Optatus
accuses the Donatists of sharing in “the common joy”
over Julian’s restoration of religious liberty.
Turning to a later (twelfth to thirteenth century)
heresy, a number of writers
note that large numbers of Jews settled in areas where Albigensians were
numerous. This may indicate a tolerant
attitude towards Jews. The Counts of Toulouse, who defended the Albigenses, are
also described as being “pro-Jewish”
The Popes’ crusade against the Albigenses of 1227 CE was specifically worded as
being against “Jews and heretics”. It is certainly quite likely that some Jews
and some Albigenses did collaborate, their being several schools of Kabbala in
southern France
at this time. It also seems possible that less extreme groups of both
communities (the more orthodox Jews and the Waldenses) would have had many
opportunities for contact. Waldo himself, one of the Waldenses founders, lived
first in Lyons, a town on the Rhadanite (Jewish) trade route, which had a large
Jewish population. It had also been the home of Rashi.
As with Raymond, Count of Toulouse, the Duke of Savoy,
in 1572, (who was at this time also a protector of the Waldenses, against the
orders of the Catholic Church) was also apparently sympathetic to the Jewish
people, desiring to give the Jews the right to settle in Nice, but was forced
by the Pope to renounce the plan.
That the Waldensians also wished to live under religious freedom did not
automatically make them friends or allies of others who wished the same. This
can be seen in their “petition to the Duke of Savoy” in 1597, where they remind
the duke of the religious freedom granted (in Savoy) to “Jews and other enemies of
Christ”.
This difficulty in trying to establish what degree if
any of either friendship or collaboration existed between different sects over
the centuries and the Jewish people is again seen in the case of the Hussites.
The mythological element was present from the first. At the condemnation of
Huss, the verdict handed down by the prelates read in part; “Accursed Judas,
who, having forsaken the council of peace, art entered into that of the Jews,
we take this holy cup from thee”.
While some Hussites attacked Jews as usurers,
in general, the Jewish people were widely connected with the Hussite cause. The
Dominican friars who were sent to preach against the Hussites, also instigated
savage persecutions of Jews for that very reason.
Two possible reasons for Jewish support of the Hussites have been suggested.
The first was the desire of the Jewish people for religious tolerance.
The stated aims of Ziska’s rebellion were “Freedom from the Austrian yoke,
deliverance from the tyranny of Rome,
and the full enjoyment of civil and religious liberty”.
It is easy to imagine why some Jewish people would aid those who fought for
religious liberty,
and indeed the Jews in Bohemia
held a day of fasting and supplication for the success of the Hussites. The other reason was theological (although it
clearly also had political implications). John of Capistrano, the Franciscan
monk sent to deal with the Hussites, claimed that the Jews were responsible for
the ideas behind Hussitism.
They were not mere allies, they were the root instigators. In sermons across Germany
he stated that “The Jews declare that every man can be saved by his own faith,
which is impossible”.
One can also see how this thinking would lead the Catholic Church to
consistently portray the coming Protestant reformation as a Jewish heresy,
while for Luther, the essence of Catholicism was its “Jewish” legalisms. That
both sides could find reasons for calling the other side Jewish is important.
It was in the Church’s own interest to link any deviation with “the Jews”. This
was (within their world view) understandable, as Jews were natural heretics,
and it was useful because it showed that their opponents had been seduced by
the tools of Satan. Likewise, any beliefs which moderated the strict dualism of
orthodoxy could be seen as a move towards “Jewish” theology.
There was also an element of self-fulfilling stereotypes; the Jewish
predicament under Catholicism giving them an interest in any group which
espoused religious toleration. All of this makes the actual extent of any
Jewish involvement in any of the above “heresies” is virtually impossible to
determine, but suggests that in large measure, the charges were an expression
of the Church’s own mythology.
5.3.1.2 Christian conversions to Judaism
As well as involvement in Christian heresies, the
Church also worried about Christian conversions to Judaism. Chrysostom, for
example, preached against Christians who admired Judaism:
Among the
miserable and wretched Jews a number of Holy Days are presently being
celebrated. There is the sound of the
ram horns, there are the leafy tabernacles and days of fasting. Many of our people go there to gape at the
ceremonies and some do not scruple to take part in the festivities and the
fasting! ... I know only too well that many feel respect toward the Jews and
consider their ceremonies to be holy. I am, therefore, determined to tear out
this pernicious attitude by the roots.
In the early centuries especially, Judaism, or the desire
to have positive relations with Jews, does seem to have had a significant
presence within some Christian communities. As Orthodoxy came to believe in the
books of the Jews and the God of the Jews, so some Christians respected the
Jewish people and desired good relations with them. Orthodoxy saw this as a
threat. Marcel Simon comments on this;
it is the
existence of pro-Jewish sentiments among the laity that is the real explanation
for Christian anti-Semitism. Anti-Semitism was the defense reflex of the
orthodox hierarchy to the Jewish danger ... if the Jews are painted so black,
it is because to too many of the faithful, they appeared at first sight not
sufficiently unattractive. The most compelling reason for anti-Semitism was the
religious vitality of Judaism.
This statement does seem overly simplistic, and to
ignore the whole raft of reasons, social and theological, for Christian
anti-Semitism. Nevertheless, it does highlight another plank in that raft: the
danger of the Jew as heretic. While it waned, this danger did not disappear. As
he spread Catholicism into Germany,
St Agobard complained that the peasants were forsaking the Church to listen to
Jewish rabbis:
Several among us
willingly sharing with them the food of the body, have also allowed themselves
to be seduced by their spiritual nourishment ... Laborers and peasants are
inveigled into such a sea of errors that they regard the Jews as the only
people of God, so that only among them is to be found the observance of a pure
religion and of a faith far more certain than our own.
While heretics as such had to be eliminated from the
community, so the Church, especially as it gained political power, sought to
isolate Jews from society. They were viewed as a constant source of spiritual
danger to it.
In reality, the “danger” was minimal (the medieval church was under no serious
threat from the Jewish people), but according to its own mythology, the Jews
were by nature seducers and heretics. It acted according to its mythology. Jews
and Judaism were constantly portrayed as a danger.
On March
5, 1233, Pope Gregory XI wrote to the archbishops and bishops of Germany
that some Christians “had of their own free will, turned Jew”.
He then forbids the holding of disputes with Jews, “lest the simple minded
slide into the snare of error”. As Hay comments,
To isolate the
Jews, to keep them away as much as possible from all social contact with the
Christian world, was supposed to be a measure necessary for the safety of
Christian souls. This was why the Council of Paris, in 1223, forbade Christians
to serve in Jewish households; “lest through the superficial plausibility of
their law, which they wickedly pretend to explain, they may lead into the pit
of disbelief the Christian servants who dwell with them”.
It was this perceived need to isolate Jews that gave
rise to the ghetto. The Synod of Breslau (1267 CE) stated this when it created
the forced segregation of Jews there: “Since the Poles represent a new
plantation on the soil of Christendom, it is to be feared that the Christian
population among whom the Christian religion has not yet taken deep root, may
succumb to the influence of the counterfeit faith and evil habits of the Jews
living in their midst”.
This mythology was strongly affirmed within
Lutheranism. Like the Catholics, Luther also feared Christians converting to
Judaism. As early as 1537, he refused to see Josel von Rosheim, who, as the
emperor's appointed spokesman for the Jews, had hoped to enlist Luther's help
for the Jews the elector of Saxony had
expelled from his lands. To his table companions he exclaimed, “Why should
these rascals, who injure people in goods and body and who estrange many
Christians [from Christianity] with their superstitions, be given permission?
For in Moravia
they have circumcised many Christians and called them by the new name of
Sabbatarians ... I'll write this Jew not to return”.
His article, Against Sabbatarians was
published the following year (March, 1538).While being a general attack on all
Jews, it was specifically addressed to Christians in Bohemia and Moravia who were accused of converting to
Judaism.
In 1543, Luther published three treatises against the
Jews. He introduced the first of these, On
the Jews and Their Lies by stating that while he had intended to write
nothing more about the Jews, he had since learned that Jews were still enticing
Christians to become Jews, and he had issued this book so that he might be
numbered among those who had resisted the Jews and warned the Christians.
His second anti Jewish treatise of that year, On the Ineffable Name and on Christ’s Lineage, (or, Shem Hamphoras) was again written, Luther said, to expose to
German Christians the “devilish lies of the Jews”. While no Protestant ruler
put all of Luther's recommendations into effect, nevertheless, as a result of
the pamphlets, in May 1543, elector Johann Friedrich legislated against Jews,
stating as his reason Luther's treatise which had opened his eyes to Jewish proselytizing
and to their attacks on Christianity. Johann of Kustrin, Margrave of Neumark,
also revoked the safe-conduct of Jews under his jurisdiction, and Landgrave Philip
added yet more restrictions to his 1539 order.
That Luther himself had sought out a Rabbi to help him in his
translation of the Bible shows how easily charges of “Judaising” could be made.
Fears of wide scale conversions to Judaism were the
product of mythologisation, not of reality. As with the previous section, the
Jews were seen not only as a problem to themselves, but as a threat to the
Church, especially one that seemed to be constantly fighting heresies.
5.3.1.3 The
Jew as deliberate heretic
The Church tended to think and also to act according
to its own mythology. As seen, this mythology viewed the Jewish people not as
mere unbelievers, but as deliberate unbelievers. They knew the truth (as the
Church saw it) and deliberately chose to oppose it. Perhaps the best example of
the Church acting out this mythology is the entire history of ‘Host
Desecrations’. From the thirteenth to the eighteenth centuries, claims were
made across Europe that Jews had broken into
churches in order to once more abuse the body of Christ. In claiming that the Jews did such things,
the claimants were attributing to the Jewish people Catholic beliefs.
For example, in 1555 Bishop Lippomano (whom the pope
sent as papal Inquisitor to Poland)
brought charges of host desecration against a Jewish girl and three Jewish men.
These were then executed “on charges of having maltreated a stolen wafer until
it had begun to bleed”. Before their
deaths, these Jewish people declared; “It never occurred to us to pierce the
host, for we could never believe that it was the body of God. God is incorporeal, just as a wafer is
bloodless”. Acting from their own mythology, the Christian judges did not
believe this claim, and ordered the executioner to “ram burning torches into
the victims’ mouths”.
Thousands of Jews died across Europe in
similar circumstances.
Clearly, at such times, the churches were utterly
delusional (bread does not grow wings). Their own mythology overwhelmed
reality, and became a warrant to murder. If, in these instances, there was no
evidence of any link between their mythology and reality (except for the sworn
testimony of priests in open court), in other areas, the Church’s actions did
indeed attempt (with varying success) to conform reality to their mythology.
5.3.1.4 Social engineering
Church actions have often worked to create their own
mythology. Any intent would seem at best to be subconscious, and it is indeed
to the very exclusivism of the Church, (which was the source of much of its
anti-Jewish mythology in the first place) that the origins of this largely
unintentional, but not wholly unwelcome social engineering can be found. It was
the exclusivism of the Church (which did not allow Jews to farm or belong to
trade guilds etc.) that forced the Jewish people into money lending. This in
turn powerfully confirmed in the popular mind the Church’s mythology of the Jew
as carnal. Likewise, it was another expression of this exclusivity, the
expulsions of Jews from Christian lands, which combined with the total
rejection/exclusion of Jewish customs and worship to create genuine Jewish
heretics.
Faced not only with persecution
and expulsion, but also with the confiscation of their children who were then
to be raised as Catholics by monks and nuns, in the fourteenth and fifteenth
centuries, large portions of the Jewish populations of Spain and Portugal converted to Christianity.
These people were then known as Marranos, or as New Christians. Rather than
solving the problem however, this internalized it, for the Church doubted the
sincerity of these conversions, yet now struggled to find a way to isolate
those it still mistrusted from the rest of the Church. Many of the Marranos
tried to keep their customs and faith, yet at the same time, many also came to
appreciate elements of Christianity.
In their search for integrity, parts of this community welcomed the young
Luther’s positive attitude towards the Jewish people, identified with the
apostasy of the false Jewish messiah Sabbati Zvi,
and helped to birth the Enlightenment.
For the Catholic Church, all this confirmed its view of Jews as eternal
heretics, and the Church in Spain
began to define Jews by race
as the only means of protecting its flock from “the Jewish menace”.
By the incarnation of its exclusivist claims in civil
legislation, the Church finally managed to create an element in its own
mythology, a body of genuine Jewish heretics.
5.3.2 Continuance of the myth
This mythology did not go away.
The 1936 pastoral letter of Cardinal August Hlond has already been quoted, and
also fits well into this context. For an example on the Protestant side, in
1937, Martin Niemoller (the leader of the Pastors’
Emergency League) preached; “We speak of the ‘eternal Jew’ and conjure
up the picture of a restless wanderer who has no home and cannot find peace..
whatever it takes up becomes poisoned, and all that it ever reaps is contempt
and hatred because ever and anon the world notices the deception and avenges
itself in its own way”.
Speaking four years into the Nazi era, this leading German pastor sees and
propagates the idea of the Jews as natural corrupters, who deserve their
punishment.
For both the Nazi Party and the European churches at
this time, the greatest perceived threat was what their own mythologies led
them to define as the “Jewish heresy” of Communism. This myth also played a
central role in the Nazi view of the Jews as, by nature, corrupters. In Mein Kampf, Hitler wrote;
Nothing gave me
more cause for reflection than the gradually increased insight into the
activities of Jews in certain fields. Was there any form of filth or
profligacy, above all in cultural life, in which at least one Jew did not
participate? When carefully cutting open such a growth, one could find a little
Jew, blinded by the sudden light, like a maggot in a rotting corpse.
The Nazis also redefined the issues in terms of race.
The myth easily adapted to this, and the Jews became corrupters of Aryan blood.
The exclusive claims of the Church to the god of the
Old Testament were responsible for the enduring myth of the Jew as heretic.
This myth portrayed the Jewish people as a source of danger to the Christian
peoples among whom they were dispersed. Christian churches continued to teach
their adherents that Jews were corrupters, even as the Nazis concurred with
this belief, and adapted it to their racial ideology.
5.4 The Jewish customs
Jewish customs play a central role in the Jewish
identity and in Jewish worship. As such, they formed both an integral part of
Jewish religion, and provided the most obvious differences between Jews and
gentiles. A gentile might not be aware of the doctrinal tenets of Judaism, but
he knew that Jews did not work on the Sabbath, or eat pork. The question for
the early church was ‘does becoming a believer in the Jewish messiah require
you to become Jewish?’(see Acts 15:1) In
other words, Jewish customs formed the cutting edge of the whole question of
the place of the Jewish Law for gentile believers.
From Apostolic times, the Jewish customs of
circumcision and dietary laws had been held not to apply to gentile converts.
In sub-Apostolic times, the place of Jewish feasts and Sabbaths were also
considered. Once again, this did not occur in an ideal environment. Jewish
Sabbaths and festivals were their most public expression of faith, and had long
been ridiculed by pagan authors. Both were banned by Hadrian. As the centre of
Imperial will, these laws may well have been vigorously enforced in Rome.
Concerning the Sabbath, the role of the Marcionites in
the argument was significant. It is known that before Marcion parted company
with the Church in Rome,
that church introduced a Sabbath fast. Marcion and his followers retained this
fast, specifically to show their contempt for the God of the Old Testament.
This was a point of continuity between Marcionism and Orthodoxy. Justin Martyr
also opposed keeping the Sabbath,
as did Tertullian
(until his Montanist leanings). That this practice was anti-Jewish in nature,
and part of the hatred of differentiation, is shown by Pope Sylvester
(314-335), who declared the Sabbath fast to be “in execration of the Jews”.
The Gnostics also denigrated the Sabbath.
Turning to the Feasts,
the only one generally maintained by the Church, Passover, had both its name
and its date changed. Concerning the date change, while the Quartodeciman
controversy pitted the Johannine churches of Asia
against the western churches, the dispute had its flashpoint in Jerusalem. Here, the need
to clearly differentiate from Jerusalem
was extreme. After the defeat of Bar-Kochbar, Hadrian (who was more tolerant of
Christianity than of Judaism)
expelled the entire Jewish population from Jerusalem (including the Jewish Christians
who lived there). The gentiles who replaced them included some Christians,
and it was their decision (taken at a time when they would not have wished to
be associated with the displaced Jews, remembering also that Hadrian had
outlawed the Jewish festivals) to opt for the western practice which ignited
the controversy.
In general, the struggle seems to have represented a
significant stage in the Churches differentiation from Judaism. Its final resolution at the Council of Nicea,
clearly reflects an aggressively anti-Jewish outcome.
And first of all,
it appeared an unworthy thing in the celebration of this most holy feast we
should follow the practice of the Jews, who have impiously defiled their hands
with enormous sin, and are, therefore, deservedly afflicted with blindness of
soul. For we have it in our power, if we abandon their custom, to prolong the
due observance of this ordinance to future ages, by a truer order, which we
have preserved from the very day of passion until the present time. Let us then
have nothing more to do with this detestable Jewish crowd ... and withdraw
ourselves from all participation in their baseness.
That only one of the Jewish festivals was retained by
the Church, and that even this one had both its name and date changed to
distance it from its Jewish roots, gives a good indication of the attitude that
the early church adopted towards Jewish religious observance. Efroymson, for
example, summarized Tertullian’s attitude in this way, “The one constant factor
is that nothing Jewish can ever be Christian”.
Once again, this exclusivity became a lasting feature of Christian dogma. If
the Jewish scriptures and God were retained exclusively, Jewish customs were utterly
rejected. To celebrate a Jewish feast,
or practice a Jewish custom was to be suspect in the eyes of the Church
authorities. Likewise, for a Jew to convert to Christianity was not simply to
accept Jesus as messiah, it was to renounce every aspect of Judaism. A Jewish
baptismal candidate in the Catholic Church, for example, was required by church
law to state not only his faith in Jesus, but also their rejection of Jewish
customs. Without that, they could not become a “Christian”. The following are typical
of such standard professions of faith;
I do here and now
renounce every rite and observance of the Jewish religion, detesting all its
most solemn ceremonies and tenets that in former days I kept and held. In the
future I will practice no rite or celebration connected with it, nor any custom
of my past error, promising neither to seek it out or perform it ... I promise
that I will never return to the vomit of Jewish superstition ... [I will] shun
all intercourse with other Jews and have the circle of my friends only among
other Christians.
And,
I renounce the
whole worship of the Hebrews, circumcision, all its legalisms, unleavened
bread, Passover, the sacrificing of lambs, the Feast of Weeks, Jubilees,
Trumpets, Atonement, Tabernacles, and all other Hebrew feasts, their
sacrifices, prayers, aspersions, purifications, expiations, fasts, Sabbaths,
new moons, foods and drinks. I absolutely renounce every custom and institution
of the Jewish laws ... in one word, I renounce absolutely everything Jewish.
For the gentile Church clearly, the customs of the
Jews were expendable.
5.4.1 Implications:
The Jews as Aliens
The cumulative effect of such teaching (for it did not
happen rapidly) was the increasing perception of the Jew as fundamentally
other. Their festivals, their food and their customs were all different, and to
be avoided as somehow corrupting.
Once more, the Church legislated to reinforce this
belief. At the Fourth Lateran Council, (CE 1215) it was decreed that Jews must
wear a distinctive badge on their clothing, (similar rules would later apply to
lepers and prostitutes). Flannery cites “numerous reiterations of the
prescription by councils, popes and civil rulers”.
In France,
Jews had to wear a yellow badge, in Germany, a “Judenhut”,
in Poland,
a pointed hat, in Sicily,
Jewish shops were marked with a circle. “By these measures the Church impressed
on the population the conviction that the Jews were a race of outcasts, branded
with the mark of Cain ... treated at all times as if they were beings of an
inferior species”.
It the distinctive clothing isolated them within their
social environment, even greater isolation and separation from the rest of
humanity occurred from the sixteenth century on, as church councils and Popes
argued and legislated for the creation of ghettos. The ghetto represented the
natural conclusion of the Christian mythologisation of the Jew as alien. They
were now, in both Catholic and Protestant lands, forbidden to dwell among
normal society. The ghettos were locked at night, Jews being allowed out to
work during the day. Across Europe, Jewish
communities were in effect placed in prison for around three centuries (varying
from country to country) as the Church treated the Jews on the basis of its own
mythology. Commenting on this, Fisher wrote;
For many
centuries, the gates of mercy were closed upon them. They were regarded as
outcasts, debarred from the most honorable callings and responsibilities, and
constrained to the pestilential squalor of the ghetto. Always despised,
periodically plundered and in times of public calamity or fear, exposed to the
blood lust of murderous and ignorant mobs, the Jews of Europe ... endured
unspeakable miseries.
The Jewish author, Joseph Ibn Verga, in the middle of
the 16th century, wrote, “All people of the earth are as one in their hatred
against the Jews; all creatures in heaven and on the earth are united in sworn
hostility to them. Before the Jewish child can lisp, it is already followed or
surrounded by hatred and scorn. We are despised as the lowest worms”.
In 1765, Bishop Newton wrote that “All over the world the Jews are in all
respects treated as if they were a different species”.
While the Church taught that you should love your neighbor, it made sure that
the neighbor was not Jewish.
The ghetto walls were not broken down by a change of
heart within Christianity, but rather by the spread of the Enlightenment
(a phenomenon about which the Churches were still very wary, and which many
blamed on the Jews). The Churches never agreed with this policy. In 1810, for
example, Napoleon broke down the walls of the ghetto in Rome. In 1815, with the return of the Pope to
power, the ghetto was re established. Full emancipation arrived in Germany
in 1871
(in Italy,
1870,
Austro Hungary
1867, Great Britain,
1890).
As late as 1937 the Jesuit periodical La Civilta Cattolica
recommended the re-imposition of ghettos as their preferred solution to the
Jewish problem. Bishop Prohaszka of Hungary, in a much distributed statement,
said in 1936, “we ... must put a curb on Jews ... It is not liberalism, but an
enslaving stupidity to empty of the ghettos of Galacia and Poland into Hungary
and let the Jews attack innocent people”.
From its early history, the Church came to utterly
reject Jewish customs as un-Christian. They separated themselves from Judaism
and the Jewish people, and, over a thousand years of Christendom, used their
power to legislate to confirm in the popular mind the image of the Jew as
other. Their clothes, their customs, their very residences were forced to be
different. They were excluded from humanity. This myth of the Jew as alien did
take root, and within sixty eight years
(that is, within living memory), the ghetto walls that the Enlightenment had
knocked down were being rebuild by the Nazis.
“For nearly two thousand years ... the Christian world
relentlessly dehumanized the Jew, enabling the Holocaust, the ultimate
consequence of this dehumanization, to take place. While it is true that many
Nazis were anti-Christian (and that Nazism itself was anti-Christian), they
were all, as the Jewish Philosopher Eliezer Berkovitz has pointed out, the
children of Christians”.
6. Conclusion
6.1 The Importance of beginnings
As the early Christians grappled to define themselves
and their beliefs, the anti-Jewish climate of the second century, and battles
with its extreme internal manifestations, Christian Gnosticism and Marcionism,
forced the Church to make decisions in an early and rushed way which would
nevertheless have a lasting impact on the character of the Church. By adopting
extreme positions, Marcionism and Gnosticism forced the early church to work
through and define its own stand.
They forced orthodoxy to articulate their own views on a number of issues
earlier and in a more acrimonious atmosphere than might otherwise have been the
case.
Within this environment, the Church chose to frame and to defend its doctrines
in anti-Semitic ways. Anti-Semitism was thereby incorporated into the Church’s
theology. The Jewish God and Jewish Scriptures were retained by means of
damning the Jewish people. They and their customs came to be wholly rejected.
Rachel was leaving, but she was taking the household gods with her.
In every faith, tradition generates its own inertia,
and in this case, these decisions carried in them the prestige and authority of
the earliest Church Fathers. To disagree with anti-Semitism was to disagree
with the most revered voices in the Church. Anti-Semitic mythology has an
impeccable church pedigree. The continuing impact of this, especially in the
Catholic Church, where tradition is seen as a genuine source of authority,
cannot be overestimated.
In 1926, a Catholic organization, Amici Israel (Friends of Israel) was founded by a Dutch convert
from Judaism. While praying for Jewish conversions, it also stressed God’s love
for the Jewish people. Its members soon included 19 cardinals, 278 bishops and
3,000 priests world wide. In 1928, it was condemned by Pope Pius XI and by the
Holy Office, the Vatican’s
bureau for orthodoxy. The stated reason was that Amici Israel was acting contrary “to the thinking of the Church
Fathers”.
In 1942, the satellite state of Croatia, whose president was also a
parish priest, enacted anti-Jewish laws. That these were based in race and not
religion caused some concern, although not one priest in the deputies voted
against them. When the Vatican
questioned the government, the Foreign Minister replied by citing manuals of
Canon Law that directly agreed with the present legislation.
No further correspondence on the subject occurred. Unless the Pope was prepared
to disagree with Canon Law, there was nothing more to say. Over 58,000
Jews were subsequently deported, mostly to Auschwitz.
The case was presented more argumentatively by the
French anti-Semite, Edouard Drumont, who in 1891 wrote that “to ask a Catholic
priest to deny the fact of ritual murder is simply to ask him to admit that the
Church, by beatifying poor little children whose throats were cut by Jews, has
been guilty of the most hateful imposture and made cynical sport of the
credulity of nations”.
A church that was unable to criticize the Church Fathers and Canon Law was
unable to combat an anti-Semitism which appealed to these for support. As seen,
the very strategy which was adopted to retain the Bible robbed the Church of
self criticism, and rendered the Church unable to contemplate the need for
forgiveness.
The Pope may wish to be friendly with Jewish leaders,
and his personal record during the Holocaust is excellent, but he cannot purge
anti-Semitism without attacking its mythical and doctrinal roots. There is no
sign that he has personally glimpsed the necessity of doing so or even that he
could do so if he did. The infallible church has no mechanism for repenting of
its own theological sins.
6.2 Other voices
While this paper has traced the development of
Christian exclusivity and mythologisation, there were other options, and other
voices. Barnabas bears witness to some who speak of a covenant that is “both
theirs and ours”, Chrysostom attacks Christians who enjoy worshipping with
Jewish people. The whole Quartodeciman controversy bears witness that there
were Christians who desired to maintain links with the Jewish community. Historically, these voices were suppressed,
and served only to increase the perceived need of the leadership to promote
anti-Semitic mythologies. Nevertheless, they remain testimony to the
possibility of another path.
6.3 Mythic Construction
As with all of their doctrines, the churches worked
hard to make their theological conception of the Jews understandable and
accepted by its people. Charges of ritual murder, host desecration, plague
carriers and so on, all had their place, as did anti-Semitic hymns, sermons,
plays and sculpture. Social engineering was also carried out on a grand scale,
although to what extent this was understood or planned, and to what extent it
was a more elemental working out of their original choice of exclusivism
remains unclear. In any event, the “outdated Synagogue” was seen to be falling
down, the “carnal Jew” was forced into money lending, the “heretical Jew” was
forced to convert, the “alien Jew” was forced to be different. Through the
actions of the Church, the ideas of the Church Fathers were incarnated.
6.4 The Myth Accepted
The effort was effective, and within society at large,
part of what it was to be a Christian was to be anti-Semitic. For example,
turning to the twentieth century, the Christian Social parties that sprang up
between the wars in Europe were anti-Semitic
“on traditional religious grounds”.
Anecdotal testimony supports this. Ruth Rouse was a representative for the
World’s Student Christian Organization from before World War One till the
outbreak of World War Two. Traveling through Europe,
she found that not only was anti-Semitism endemic, but that it was totally
identified with Christianity. She gives a typical experience;
When I first addressed women students in Vienna, the lecture room
was filled with curious girls: half those present were Jewesses. No one had the
faintest doubt that the Federation, as a Christian society like all other
“Christian” organizations with which they were aquatinted would be anti-Semitic
and Roman Catholic. The first question asked me at this meeting was “what do
you think of the pogroms in Russia?”
and both gentiles and Jews expected me as a “Christian” to express approval.
Likewise, when Robert Wilder was introduced to the
head of a European government, the man took him by the hand and exclaimed, “I
am delighted to meet a member of the Christian Student Movement, for I too hate
the Jews”.
6.5 The Myth Enacted
Within the Christian myth, there was always a certain
tension, a virtual contradiction. To the myth itself, that the Jew was evil,
corrupting and a danger to society, Augustine had added the restraint that, as
a “witness people”, they should not be killed off entirely. You were to hate
and fear them, but you could not protect yourself by eliminating them. There is an inconsistency here. As Bertrand
Russell put it, “If it were certain that without Jews the world would be a
virtual paradise, there could be no valid objection to Auschwitz”.
Nietzsche indeed found that those who remained within the Christian tradition
“could not turn against Judaism with sufficient force”.
For him, the Germanic spirit had been corrupted by Jewish ideas of mercy. In
The Antichrist he stated that “The Jews have made mankind so thoroughly false
that even today the Christian can feel anti-Jewish without realizing that he
himself is the ultimate Jewish consequence”.
Once Christian values had been abandoned, precisely because they were Jewish,
“there was no further moral barrier to genocide”.
It was children of Christians, who retained the myth but not the faith, that
brought the myth to its logical conclusion.
7.
Bibliography
7.1 Primary Literature
Augustine, Contra
Fastum
http://www.ccel.org/fathers2/NPNF1-04/npnf1-04-13.htm#P1134_596001 ).
Augustine,
On the Gospel of Saint John, in “A
select Library of the Nicene and Post Nicene Fathers of the Christian Church” Editor P. Schaff
(trans. P. Holmes; Grand Rapids:
Eerdmans, 1971) Augustine, VII.
Augustine,
On the Psalms, in “A select Library
of the Nicene and Post Nicene Fathers of the Christian Church” Editor P. Schaff
(trans. P. Holmes; Grand Rapids: Eerdmans,
1971) Augustine, VIII.
Augustine,
In Answer to the Jews, in “The
Fathers of the Church: A new translation” Editor R. Deferrari (trans. C.
Wilcox; 100 vols; New York:
Fathers of the Church Inc., 1955).
Babylonian
Talmud, Avodah Zarah (trans. Rabbi
Dr. H. Freedman; Judaic Classics Library CD ROM; Davka: Chicago, 1995).
Babylonian
Talmud Berakhot (trans. Rabbi Dr. H.
Freedman; Judaic Classics Library CD ROM; Davka: Chicago, 1995).
Babylonian
Talmud, Gittin (trans. Rabbi Dr. H.
Freedman; Judaic Classics Library CD ROM; Davka: Chicago, 1995).
Babylonian
Talmud, Niddah (trans. Rabbi Dr. H.
Freedman; Judaic Classics Library CD ROM; Davka: Chicago, 1995).
Babylonian
Talmud, Rosh Ha Shana (trans. Rabbi
Dr. H. Freedman; Judaic Classics Library CD ROM; Davka: Chicago, 1995).
Babylonian
Talmud, Sanhedrin (trans. Rabbi Dr.
H. Freedman; Judaic Classics Library CD ROM; Davka: Chicago, 1995).
Babylonian
Talmud, Shabbat (trans. Rabbi Dr. H.
Freedman; Judaic Classics Library CD ROM; Davka: Chicago, 1995).
Babylonian
Talmud, Yoma (trans. Rabbi Dr. H.
Freedman; Judaic Classics Library CD ROM; Davka: Chicago, 1995).
Chrysostom, Homily
1
(http://www.fordham.edu/halsall/source/chrysostom-jews6.html#HOMILY_I
).
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This
theme will be returned to later, but note here the comment from J. Carmichael,
“It was not the social reality in the era of the Church Fathers that kindled
hatred of the Jews ... but the obsession of the elite with a metaphysical
theory”. J. Carmichael, The Satanizing of
the Jews (New York: Fromm, 1992) 45.
R.
Ruether, Faith and Fratricide (New
York: Seabury, 1974)183-204.
J.
Gager, The Origins of Anti-Semitism
(UK: Oxford University Press, 1985). Note that chapter ten is titled,
“Anti-Judaism in the Theological Response to Marcion and the Christian
Gnostics”.
M.
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Hart, 1975).
F.
Heer, God’s First Love (London:
Weidenfeld and Nicolson, 1967).
“The
Jews themselves naturally played no role in the formation of the theology that
cast them in such a sinister role”. J. Carmichael, 1992: 37.
The
significance of this sect within Judaism is not always appreciated. Josephus
gives the number of Pharisees a generation earlier (based on the number fined by
Hyrcanus) at 6,000 (Antiquities of the
Jews 17.41). He also estimates that there were about 4,000 Essenes (Antiquities of the Jews 18.20). In Acts 2:41 Luke estimates the initial
number of Jewish Christians at “about three thousand”. While clearly, many of
these converts were only visiting Jerusalem,
and would have later returned to their homes, in Acts 21:20 James, the leader
of the community in Jerusalem,
puts the number of members of Jewish Christians within Jerusalem in the thousands. Given the difficulty
in assessing the accuracy of all of the above numbers, the record of Acts
suggests that the “followers of the Way” were a significant sect within Judaism
from the first.
As S.
Sandmel has noted, there were “Judaisms” in the first century, but no one
“Judaism,” and early Christianity was “a Judaism”. S. Sandmel, Judaism and Christian Beginnings (New
York: Oxford University Press, 1978) 4. Note that this approach can run the
risk of becoming overly atomizing. J. Dunn speaks of “a common and unifying core
for second Temple
Judaism” J. Dunn, The Parting of the Ways
(London: SCM Press, 1991) 18.
The
extent to which one can refer to a “Jewish community” at this time is
debatable. As with the question of Judaisms, the danger is of concentrating
only on those factors which divided the community, to the point where the
community as such essentially disappears. While acknowledging their divisions,
(indeed, he attributes the fall of Jerusalem
to them, as does the Babylonian Talmud, Yoma 9b) Josephus is also clear as to
who is a Jew and who is not. The Jewish populations of various towns are given
(for example, The Jewish War II,
XVIII, 1), Jews are distinguished from gentile Judaisers (The Jewish War II, XVIII, 2), and Jews are said to be bound
together by “ties of blood” as “countrymen” (The Jewish War II, XVIII, 3. See also Romans 11:1). It would seem
that in Josephus’ day, the Jewish community was neither monolithic, nor
non-existent. See also S. Cohen’s point that “most Jews were not members of any
sect. They observed the Sabbath and the holidays, heard the scriptural lessons
in Synagogue on Sabbath ... and adhered to the ‘ethical norms’ of folk piety”.
S. Cohen, From the Maccabees to the
Mishnah (Philadelphia: The Westminster Press, 1987) 172. A clear sense of
community if reflected in such a comment. Note also that while not all ethnic Israel
was included in any one Judaism’s “true Israel” (Romans 9: 6, Sanhedrin 10:1), they were still
generally acknowledged to be ‘ethnic’ Israel (Acts 18:6, Rosh Ha Shana 17a, Gittin 57a). A. Saldarini, while acknowledging its division into
sub-communities, is still able to write of the larger Jewish community” A.
Saldarini, Matthew’s Christian-Jewish
Community (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 1994) 5., and this approach
will also be taken within this paper.
Note
that the sharpest charge leveled against the Pharisees was that in their
striving for personal godliness, they separated themselves from “am Yisrael”.
This charge is encapsulated in their title, a sectarian label used only by
their opponents (they referred to themselves as “the sages”). For example,
within the Babylonian Talmud, in both Yoma
19b and Niddah 33b, Sadducees are
recorded as referring to the Sages as Pharisees. See Flusser, D., Jewish Sources in Early Christianity (Tel
Aviv: MOD, 1989) 27. Note also that the negative connotations did not carry
over into translation, both Josephus (The
Life of Flavius Josephus 10-12) and Paul (Acts 23:6) using the word in
non-derogatory ways in Greek.
“The
Essene Judaism’s ‘Israel’ proves so exclusive that most of the Jews of their
day must be classified as mere gentiles” B. Chilton and J. Neusner, Judaism in the New Testament (New York:
Routledge, 1995) 86. Note, however, that there is clear polemic behind this
view. The Essenes drew their members from the wider Jewish community, and John
the Essene was a commander of Jewish forces in the Jewish war. See M. Stern,
“The Period of the Second
Temple” in A History of the Jewish People Editor H.
Ben-Sasson (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1969) 273.
Even
the hypocrisy of some Pharisees is thus understood - in a divided society, where a few are
recognized as being more religious than the rest, and are honored for it, it is
not surprising that hypocrites will be attracted to such status and join such
groups. It is of interest that the Pharisees themselves recognized such
problems, four of the “woes of the Pharisees” in the Talmud (Jerusalem Talmud, Berakhot 9, 14b, as quoted by D.
Flusser) deal with hypocrisy, and that with the triumph of Rabbinic Judaism,
the standards became normative, and the problem died down. Even anti-Jewish
polemics of the second century did not accuse the Jews then living of the
charge. See D. Flusser, 1989: 27-30. See also M. Weinfeld, “The Jewish Roots of
Matthew’s Vitriol”, Bible Review 13-5
(1997) 31.
“The
community must also legitimate its claim to be the true people of God in the
face of its competition, who would obviously dispute this. The claims and
disputes of these communities usually centered on the law and the proper
understanding and interpretation of it. The law emerged as both the common
ground and the battle ground”, J. Overman, 1990: 24.
As
recorded in Acts 15, ca. 44 CE.
See
the parable of the new wine and old wineskins (Matthew 9:16-17). Concerning the historicity of the
acceptance by the Jewish Christians of gentiles, see the Nazarene commentary on
Isaiah, as quoted by Jerome. Here, in the commentary on one of the fulfillment
quotations of Matthew, Isaiah 9:1-4, both the gentile mission and the
apostleship of Paul are affirmed. R. Pritz, Nazarene
Jewish Christianity (Jerusalem: Hebrew University Press, 1992) 64.
Even
with these ties, violent confrontation was not unknown. The promulgation of the
“Decree of Eighteen Things” lead to a clash between the disciples of Hillel and
Shammai where a number were killed. See P. Tomson, Paul and the Jewish Law (Minneapolis: Fortress Press, 1990) 173-5.
Up to
100 CE, Christians still saw themselves as “true Israelites” (as in I Clement).
The Church was still competing for the title of “true Israel”, and saw itself in terms of
a fulfillment of Judaism. W. H. C. Frend, The
Rise of Christianity (London: Darton, Longman and Todd, 1984) 124.
Galatians 2:11-14 records an early example of this problem.
On the
broad scale, while the first followers of Jesus were all Jewish, four hundred
years later, Augustine knows of no existent body of Jewish Christians, (Contra Fastum XIX 17) and speculates
that they may have died out within recent memory. On a more limited scale, Acts
starts in Jerusalem and ends in Rome, and passages such as 13: 46-47 and 28:
26-28 suggest that from very early on, Christianity outside the land of Israel
had more success attracting gentiles than Jews (see also Romans 16: 4). This is
also the clear inference from Cyprian (CE 200-258). Book One of his Treatise XII: Three Books of Testimonies
Against the Jews includes the following statements;
“19. That two peoples were foretold, the elder and the
younger; that is, the ancient people of the Jews, and the new one which should
be of us.
20. That the Church, which had previously been barren,
should have more sons from among the Gentiles than the synagogue had had
before.
21. That the Gentiles should rather believe in Christ.
22. That the Jews should lose the bread and the cup of
Christ, and all His grace; while we should receive them, and that the new name
of Christians should be blessed in the earth.
L.
Feldman, Jew and Gentile in the Ancient
world (New Jersey: Princeton University Press, 1993) 156, 164. L. Feldman, Jewish Life and Thought among Greeks and
Romans, (Edinburgh: T&T Clark, 1996) 370. For example, in Satires 5.179-184, the Jewish Sabbath is
his first proof that superstition enslaves man. S. Bacchiocchi, From Sabbath to Sunday (Rome: P.G.U.R.,
1977) 174.
L.
Feldman, 1996: 131, 369. See also E. Flannery, 1985: 23.
S.
Bacchiocchi, 1975: 175.
L.
Feldman, 1996: 379-80, 387.
“The
apogee of pagan antisemitism was reached in Tacitus”. E. Flannery, 1985: 23.
L.
Feldman, 1996: 182. Note that this tax, the fiscus
judaicus, was later intensified under Domitian, S.
Bacchiocchi, (1975) 172.
F.F.
Bruce, The Spreading Flame: The Rise and
Progress of Christianity from its first beginnings to the Conversion of the
English (London: Paternoster Press, 1958) 267.
Geographically, the revolt occurred throughout the eastern Diaspora
communities, and was especially severe in Cyrenica,
Egypt, Libya
and Cyprus.
See S. Safrai, 1976: 370.
L.
Feldman, (1996) 191-5. See also L. Grabbe, Judaism
from Cyrus to Hadrian (London: SCM, 1992) 568-9, 596-599.
Having
started his reign with a respect for the national needs of the provinces, and
even a promise to rebuild Jerusalem,
it seems that his pan-Hellenic tendencies meant that while prospering the
provinces, he also came increasingly to oppose what he saw as foreign. This led
him to outlaw circumcision (a measure not aimed specifically against the Jews),
and to plan for a Hellenistic city to replace Jerusalem. In the aftermath of the failed Bar
Kochbar revolt, this attitude hardened to the point where it became
anti-Jewish. See S. Safrai, 1976: 330-335.
Babylonian Talmud, Sanhedrin 12a,
32b., and Avodah Zarah 17b.
That
is, neither Jews nor Christians saw themselves as the same. For example, “One
thing that is clear, however, is that by 155-60, at least in Smyrna, Jews saw Christians as distinct from
their own community”. C. Setzer, Jewish
Responses to Early Christians (Minneapolis: Fortress Press, 1994) 115.
Given
this name as it was the last of the Benedictions formulated (Babylonian Talmud,
Berakhot 28b), it actually is listed
as number twelve in both the Babylonian and Palestinian recensions. E. Schurer,
The History of the Jewish People in the
Age of Jesus Christ (Editor G. Vermes; 3 vols; Edinburgh: T&T Clark,
1979) 2: 456-63. One of its purpose clearly was to exclude followers of Jesus
from the Synagogue. Note that the earliest recension of the Palestinian version
(from the Cairo Geniza) includes the phrase “and may the Nazarenes and the
heretics perish quickly”. E. Schurer, 1979: 461. Within the land of Israel,
this would have functioned largely against Jewish Christians; outside Israel,
it functioned to exclude both Jewish and gentile Christians. Note that
Patristic sources also attest to the attraction of the Diaspora Synagogue for
gentile Christians, and so it appears that the leaderships of both communities
worked to polarize and separate their congregations.
Suetonius, (ca.69-ca.150 CE) Life of
Domitian 12.2, 365., as quoted by Bacchiocchi, 1975: 172. Note that
Domitian ruled before Hadrian, that is, before the Bar Kochbar revolt. For his
persecution of those who converted to Judaism, see Dio Cassius, Roman History 67.14, 1-2., as quoted in
L. Feldman, 1996: 346.
In 49
CE Claudius expelled the Jewish population from Rome (Suetonius, Claudius 25, as quoted in Feldman, 1993: 47., and Acts 18:2) for
arguments concerning one “Chrestus”.
Note that Tacitus in his report of the persecution of Nero (The Annals 15, 44) spells the word
“Christ” in the same way, and that Tertullian, in his The Apology chapter three, corrects the pagans, saying, “But
Christian, so far as the meaning of the word is concerned, is derived from
anointing. Yes, and even when it is wrongly pronounced by you ‘Chrestianus’ (for you do not even know
accurately the name you hate)”. If then this argument was between believers in
Jesus and Jews who did not believe in Jesus, (see L. Feldman, 1993: 47, P.
Tomson, 1990, 61) then by expelling all the Jews from Rome, the same attitude
as evidenced in Acts 18:15 is being shown. Tomson further argues that while
Jewish Christians were expelled, gentile Christians were not. This would
further argue that for the Roman authorities at that time, arguments about
Christ were an internal Jewish matter. Christianity was simply a Jewish sect.
And
not only Nero. Tacitus (The Annals
15, 44) writes that Nero “inflicted the most exquisite tortures on a class hated
for their abomination, called Christians by the populous”. The Church Fathers later blamed Nero’s wife
Poppea (who was either a Jewish proselyte or a “God fearer” - see Josephus, Jewish Antiquities 20.195) for setting
him against the Christians. A. Harnack, The
Expansion of Christianity in the First Three Centuries (trans. J. Moffatt; London: Williams and
Norgate, 1905) II: 116., states that, “without this hypothesis [concerning
Jewish instigation] it is scarcely possible, in my opinion, to understand the
persecution”. See also his remarks in 1:
66. All of this suggests that the Jewish community in Rome at this time did not consider the
Christians to be a part of their community, and further, that the Roman
authorities, possibly because of clarification from Poppea, were now also able
to make this distinction.
For
example, Acts 17: 2-3. Note also the frequent use of the “proof from prophecy”
argument of the Church Fathers requires that Jesus be the Messiah of Jewish
promise.
Romans
11:25. See also Luke’s usage of Jewish symbols in Luke 1, where Judaism both
legitimizes the message (Gabriel coming first to a righteous priest in the Holy
Place chosen by lot, surrounded by the prayers of all Israel), and at the same
time, to reveal its inadequacy. Zechariah responds with lack of faith, and is
unable to bless the people, or to proclaim the message.
Chrysostom, Homily 1, Against the Jews.
See also the comment on this by J. Cohen, “Robert Chazan’s ‘Medieval
Anti-Semitism’: A note on the Impact of Theology” in History and Hate Editor D. Berger (New York: Jewish Publication
Society, 1986) 69., “the logic of early Christian history dictated the
affirmation of Christianity in terms of the negation of Judaism”. Note also the
beginning of chapter thirteen of the Epistle of Barnabas, “But let us see if
this people [the Christians] is the heir, or the former [the Jews], and if the
covenant belongs to us or to them”.
W. H.
C. Frend, 1984: 124.
The
following quote highlights the ongoing significance of this debate. In 1933,
Hans Ehrenberg, a Jewish Christian pastor who was deported to Buchenwald
in 1938, wrote, “The Church of Christ in Germany stands or falls in 1933 on
the temptation to eradicate Judaism from itself”. Quoted in V. Barnett, For the Soul of the People (New York:
Oxford University Press, 1992) 35.
R.
Longenecker makes a highly pertinent point of distinction here, that in the New
Testament, the Adversus Judaeos
polemic was “an intra-family device used to win Jews to the Christian faith, in
the second century it became anti-Semitic and was used to win Gentiles”. R.
Longenecker, New Testament Social Ethics
for Today (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1984) 40.
For
example, in The Epistle of Mathetes to
Diognetus, Jewish worship is attacked as foolish because it offers
sacrifices to a God who does not need them, and as impious because it
discriminates in matters of food and days when God made all things equal.
Christians, it argues, abstain from “the busy-body spirit and vain boasting of
the Jews”. The Epistle of Mathetes to
Diognetus 4. S.
Wilson comments on this that, in Diognetus, “The promotion of
Christianity is thus bolstered by the denigration of Judaism”. S. Wilson, 1995: 31. Likewise Jerome states that their
prayers and psalms were like the grunting of animals, and an offence to God. M.
Simon, “Christian Antisemitism”, in Essential
Papers in Judaism and Christianity in Conflict Editor J. Cohen (New York: New York
University Press, 1991) 146. Or as Chrysostom put it, “everything the Jews now
do is a grotesque joke, at once laughable and disgusting”. Homily 6: 5.
Speaking of these movements, S. Wilson
observes, “the way in which they were resisted made a significant contribution
to the ingraining of negative attitudes toward Judaism in later Christian
theology”. (1995: 195). Speaking about Marcion, J. Lieu writes, “unquestionably
he molded the church’s attitude to the Jews in a way which was to be lasting;
with Marcion the question of the Jews became an integral part of the question
of God and of the question of Christ”. J. Lieu, Image and Reality: The Jews in the world of the Christians in the
Second Century (Edinburgh: T&T Clark, 1996) 262.
“The
struggle of the Church with Judaism inevitably centered on a struggle for
possession of the Jewish Bible” W. Nicholls, 1995: 175.
“The
sub-apostolic age is dominated by the love-hate relationship between the two ‘Israels’.
It was left to Marcion in the 140s to cut the Gordian knot”. W. H. C. Frend,
1965: 125. “Marcion cannot be understood outside the controversy between church
and synagogue” W. H. C. Frend, 1984: 125.
W. H.
C. Frend, 1969: 329.
Justin
Martyr, First Apology 58. Note that
Hermeneutics, as an expression of philosophy, are able to both transcend and
outlast specific religions. In Alexandria
(which was more Greek than Egyptian - or than Greece), Platonic ways of
interpretation progressed through Philo to Clement of Alexandria, and into
Sufiism. More remarkably, Aquila, the Jewish
proselyte, and disciple of Rabbi Akiva adopted his hyper literalist approach to
the scriptures (even to translating the definite object marker), taught that
the Bible was literal and that its prophecy was not fulfilled in Jesus. Aquila lived in Synope, and less than a generation
earlier than Marcion, who taught precisely the same hermeneutic, but this time
from an anti-Jewish perspective.
W. H.
C. Frend, 1984: 216. “For some Christians, however, Marcion's rejection of the
Law and all it stood for was attractive”.
The
extent to which one can speak of an orthodoxy at this time is debatable. R.
Wilken states that Justin Martyr belonged to “an identifiable group with
distinct bounds”. R. Wilken, “Diversity
and Unity within the Early Church” The
Second Century 1-2 (1981) 109. He also comments regarding Celsus that,
“when he wishes to offer substantive criticism of Christianity, he does not
discuss the Gnostics or the Marcionites; Celsus assumes he knows what
Christianity is ... he aims his attack at the ‘great church’, the centrist
party if you will ... Significantly, seventy or eighty years later, when Origen
wrote his Contra Celsum, he freely
identified himself with the Christianity that Celsus observed and had
criticized”. R. Wilken, 1981: 107. The Gnostic Gospel of Philip likewise refers to their non Gnostic Christian
opponents as “apostles and apostolic men”, apparently conceding their claim to
apostolic tradition. S. Wilson, 1995: 200. It
is to this group that the term orthodox at this time refers.
“If we
assume that Justin, in the Dialogue with
Trypho, uses the Old Testament material of his lost writing ‘Against Marcion’, then we can get an
idea how he defended the Old Testament as a book on Christ ... it is mainly
with the doctrine of the two Gods and the rejection of the Old Testament that
Marcion for Justin called Christian truth into question.. In Justin's anti-
Marcionite polemics, it is ultimately a matter of defending the Old Testament
and its Christian use”. G. May, “Marcion in contemporary Views: Results and
Open Questions” The Second Century
6-3 (1978) 138.
A.
Guerra, “The Conversion of Marcus Aurelius and Justin Martyr: The Purpose,
Genre, and Content of the First Apology” The
Second Century 9-3 (1992)182. See also, R.J. Hoffman, “How then know this
troublous Teacher? Further Reflections on Marcion and his Church” The Second Century 6-3 (1997-8) 189.,
“the church's apologetic interest in documenting its antiquity - a needed
riposte to pagan attacks on the church as ‘nova,
prava et immodica superstitio’, the Old Testament was strategically more
useful than it was theologically inconvenient. Further, the decision as to how
the Old Testament was to serve the church or whether it was to serve it at all
was made precisely at a time when the church could not afford to be ‘new.’”
“Gnostics, too, viewed the whole of creation, including the Jewish scriptures,
to be the work of the (sometimes evil) Demiurge”. S.
Wilson, 1995: 130. Valentinus has been described as a Christian
who sought “to set forth the living essence of their Religion in a form
uncontaminated by the Jewish envelope in which they had received it”. F.
Burkitt, quoted in “Anti-Semitism in Gnostic Writings”, R. Wilson, in Anti-Semitism and Early Christianity
(Editors C. Evans, D. Hagner; Minneapolis: Fortress Press, 1993) 277. Note also
that in the Testimony of Truth, the
view that “the orthodox, by still retaining the Old Testament ... were not
truly living in ‘the freedom with which Christ has set us free’”. R. Wilson,
1993: 287. See also the quote, cited in S. Wilson,
1995: 201, “No Jew [was ever born] to Greek parents [as long as the world] has
existed. And [as a] Christian [people] we [ourselves do not descend] from the
Jews”. Here the Gnostic writer both affirms his view of himself as a Christian,
and denies “any prior connection with Judaism” (to quote Wilson).
“This
movement now appears as an immense stream, having its source in popular
eclectic religious philosophy” J. Menard, “The Coptic Gnostic Literature of
Chenoboskion” Studia Montis Regii 1
(1958) 31. “Gnosticism is an extremely widespread phenomenon in late Hellenism,
occurring in many different communities-Jewish, Christian and pagan” A. Segal,
“Judaism, Christianity, and Gnosticism” in Anti-Judaism
in Early Christianity Separation and Polemic, Editor G. Wilson, (Ontario:
Wilfrid Laurier University Press, 1986) 146.
For
example, the Nag Hammadi manuscripts refer to the mystic significance of the
number 72. There are no parallels in Patristic, Hermetic or Rabbinic works, but
the concept reappeared in a 12th century Kabbalistic work, , indicating “the
presence of a Jewish Gnostic tradition one thousand years earlier” N. Sed, “The
Twelve Hebdomades, The Throne Chariot of Sabaoth and the Seventy Two Languages”
Novum Testamentum 21-2 (1979) 156.
“Rabbis employed etymologies ingeniously to polemize against ... Gnostic views”
H. Basser, “Allusions to Christian and Gnostic Practices in Talmudic Tradition”
Journal for the Study of Judaism 12-1 (1981) 87.
Jewish
theology within the inter-testamental period in general evidenced an increasing
distancing of God; a lessening of direct references to God, the bat kol and so on. A. Segal, 1986: 156-157, posits the development
of this trend within the Jewish community to the point of its becoming the “two
powers” heresy, a form of Gnosticism.
“The
specifically Jewish elements in Gnosticism are negligible”, J. Menard, 1958:
31. Note however that Menard is looking at a highly specific collection of
Gnostic writings. For a further discussion on this, see S.
Wilson, 1995: 204-205.
“[Basilides] castigated Yahweh as an aggressive deity and the Jews as a people
who took after him, aspiring to subjugate other nations, an interesting comment
perhaps on the feeling in Alexandria
in the years between the Jewish rebellion of 115 and the rising of Bar Kochbar
in 132 ... Basilides hated Judaism”. W. H. C. Frend, 1984: 205.
R.
Wilson, 1974: 272. This quote referred only to the Gnostic writings found
within the writings of their Christian opponents. Concerning the Nag Hammadi
writings, the following points are significant;
a. in their
most recent translation, (B. Layton, The
Gnostic Scriptures [London: SCM Press, 1987]), Layton has one and a half columns of Old
Testament references for the entire collection, as opposed to eight columns of
New Testament references.
b. “there are
no Old Testament references in the Nag Hammadi library which do not also occur
in the New Testament. Jewish origin of Gnosticism seems less probable than the
view that Gnosticism is the product of the hellenisation of Christianity” W.
Beltz, “Gnosis und Altes Testament”, Zeitschrift
fpr Religions und Geistgeschichte 28-4 (1976) 353.
R.
Wilson (quoting H. Jonas), 1993: 273.
Indeed, S. Wilson refers to it as “a form of
metaphysical anti-Judaism”. S. Wilson, 199S. Wilson, 1995: 199.
See S. Wilson, 1995: 200.
“the
reproach of Judaism plays a fundamental role ... in the debates between Gnosis
and the church” K. Koschorke, quoted in R. Wilson, 1993: 277. “in the days that
we were Hebrews, we were orphans”, “he who has not received the Lord is still a
Hebrew” W. H. C. Frend, 1984: 210.
“Christians themselves gave the outside world the impression of being baptised
Jews (see Origen, Contra Celsum
4.23)” W. H. C. Frend, 1984: 332.
“Gnostic teaching is nothing beyond a mere technique of approach to the
divinity ... the use of certain Biblical expressions in these writings lack
their true sense and meaning”. J. LaFrance, “The meaning of gnosis the Gospel
of Truth”, Studia Montis Regii 5
(1962) 57.
“One
must be careful of clear-cut distinctions between orthodox and Gnostic
speculations”. A. Van Eijk, “The Gospel of Philip and Clement of Alexandria”, Vigilae Christianae 25-2 (1971) 94.
“Christian Gnostics influenced the development of theology, and were only
gradually differentiated from the church” R. van der Broek, “The Present State
of Gnostic Studies”, Vigilae Christianae 37-1 (1983) 41. C. Hendrick, “Gnostic
Proclivities in the Greek life of Pachomius and the Sitz im Leben of the Nag
Hammadi Library” Novum Testamentum 22-1 (1980) 78., also finds a Gnostic
tradition in the Pachomian monasteries, while the author of “Epistle To
Rheginos” is described as “a Valentinian deeply attached to Christianity”. W.
Van Unnik, “The Newly discovered ‘Epistle To Rheginos’ on the Resurrection,” Journal of Ecclesiastical History 15
(1964) 141.
K.
Koschorke, “A Gnostic Pentecost Sermon”, Zeitschrift
fpr Theologie and Kirche 74-3 (1977) 323.
E.
Yamauchi, “The Gnostics and History” Journal
of the Evangelical Theological Society 14-1 (1971) 29.
L.
Martin, “Note on the ‘Treatise of the Resurrection’”, Vigilae Christianae 27-4
(1973) 281.
For
example, the Paulicians (ca. eighth century CE) and the Albigenses (ca.
thirteenth century CE). See L. Clover, The
Church (Florida: Blessed Hope Foundation, 1960) 201-2, 283.
Note
that Maurras, a Jesuit rehabilitated by the Pope on the eve of World War II,
stated; “I should not wish to sacrifice the learned procession of church
councils, popes and the modern elite of great men with their anti-Semitic
proclamations, in order to place my trust in the gospels of four obscure Jews”.
F. Heer, 1967: 150.
It
should be noted that this movement openly acknowledged its link to Marcion.
Concerning this, any attempt to divide Acts portrayal of the early church as
split into hostile Hebrew and Hellenistic camps is to be rejected. See H.
Marshall, “Palestinian and Hellenistic Christianity: Some Critical Comments”. New Testament Studies 19, 271-287. C.
Halliday “New Testament Christology, Some Considerations of Method” Novum Testamentum 25-3 (1983) 257-278.,
comments critically on the underlying tendency to compartmentalize as “Jewish”
or “Hellenistic”. The presuppositions brought into play here can be revealing;
everything that is defined as legalistic is now attributed to the “Jewish”
church, everything that is defined as free, liberating etc., is attributed to
the gentile Hellenistic church.
“For
Ritschl, Jesus presented not an extension but a renunciation of Judaism and its
law that became a sharp dividing line between his teachings and those of the
Jews”. S. Heschel, Abraham Geiger and the
Jewish Jesus (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1998) 123.
Note
that in his reconstruction of Marcion, A. Harnack attributed to him an
anti-Semitism that went beyond that found in the (admittedly meager) sources.
“This culpability [Marcion’s attribution of guilt to the Jews, as recorded by
Tertullian] does not seem to amount to much, certainly not to A. Harnack’s
judgment that according to Marcion the Jewish people were particularly evil,
unfaithful and hard-hearted against their God”. J. Lieu, 1996: 263. W. Nicholls
indeed views Marcion as less anti the Jewish people of his day than orthodoxy
was. W. Nicholls, 1995: 179. Clearly, our view of history is not untouched by
our own view of the present, just as Tertullian’s own anti-Semitism may have
influenced how he recorded his areas of disagreement with Marcion.
A.
Harnack, Marcion, 21. Quoted by J.
Tyson, Luke, Judaism, and the Scholars (South
Carolina: University of South Carolina Press, 1999) 35.
A. Harnack,
Marcion, 133. Quoted by J. Tyson,
1999: 35.
A.
Harnack, The Date of Acts, 60-61. Quoted
by J. Tyson, 1999: 38-39. This attitude was also present when “a world-renowned
New Testament scholar remarked to his students, ‘The first thing you must do to
be a good Christian is to kill the Jew inside of you.’” Quoted and denounced in
B. Young, Jesus the Jewish Theologian
(Massachusetts: Hendrickson, 1995) xxi.
First
published in 1936, a fiftieth anniversary edition appeared in 1986, under the
enthusiastic editorship of Hans Muller, professor at Tubingen. R. Ericksen, “Assessing the
Heritage: German Protestant Theologians, Nazis, and the ‘Jewish Question’”, in Betrayal; German Churches
and the Holocaust Editors R. Ericksen and S. Heschel
(Minneapolis: Fortress Press, 1999) 29.
R.
Ericksen, 1999: 33. This antithetical view is also present in much of
Orthodoxy. Nicholls states that “Tertullian was able to save the unity of God
and the antiquity of Christianity against Marcion only by adopting Marcion’s
own principal of antithesis ... The opposition between the old Israel
and the new provided the very structure on which theological thought was now
based”. W. Nicholls, 1995: 182. Note also S. Sandmel’s
comment concerning Bultmann, whom he accuses of describing “a Judaism that
never existed so that he can set a special view of Jesus over and against it”.
S. Sandmel, “Bultmann on Judaism” in The
Theology of Rudolf Bultmann Editor C. Kegley (New York: Harper and Row,
1966) 218. This has been the more normative Jewish experience of that faith. As
Abraham Joshua Herschel wrote, “The Christian message, which in its origins
intended to be an affirmation and culmination of Judaism, became very early
diverted into a repudiation and negation of Judaism; obsolescence and
abrogation of Jewish faith became convictions and doctrine; the new covenant
was conceived not as a new phase or disclosure but as abolition and replacement
of the ancient one; theological thinking fashioned its terms in a spirit of
antithesis to Judaism”. Young, 1995: xxxiii. This antithesis is clearly far
removed from the opinion of W. Davies, who stated that Paul “came to understand
the Christian life as patterned after that of Judaism: it was for him not the
antithesis, but the full flowering of that Faith”. W. Davies, Paul and Rabbinic Judaism (Philadelphia: Fortress Press, 1980) xxx.
A.
Cochrane, The Church’s confession under
Hitler (Philadelphia: Westminster Press, 1962) 75.
Note
the opposition in the Letter of Barnabas to some in his community who were
arguing that “the covenant is both theirs and ours” Letter of Barnabas, 4.6.
“these
words ... Are you aquatinted with them, Trypho? They are contained within your
scriptures, or rather, not yours but ours. For we believe them”. Justin Martyr,
Dialogue with Trypho, A Jew 29.
Later, Justin also remarks, “For the prophetic gifts remain with us, even to
the present time. And hence you ought to understand that [the gifts] formerly
among your nation have been transferred to us”. Justin Martyr Dialogue with Trypho, A Jew 82.
Justin
Martyr, Dialogue with Trypho, A Jew
29.
W. Nicholls,
1995: 153, 174.
Even
the pagan critic Celsus noticed the discrepancy, “How can Christians allege
that the Jewish Bible is authoritative for them, if on principle they do not do
what it explicitly says?” W. Nicholls, 1995: 185. See also Augustine, “First of
all, however, this error of theirs [the Jews] must be refuted, that the Books
of the Old Testament do not concern us at all, because we observe the new
sacraments and no longer preserve the old. For they say to us: ‘what is the
reading of the Law and the Prophets doing among you who do not want to follow
the precepts contained in them?’” In
Answer to the Jews II: 3. in The
Fathers of the Church: A new translation Editor R. Deferrari (trans. C.
Wilcox; 100 vols; New York:
Fathers of the Church Inc., 1955) vol 27: 393.
M.U. Edwards, “Against the Jews”,
Republished in Essential Papers on
Judaism and Christianity in Conflict, (New York: New York University Press,
1991) 371.
Just
as the early church could not afford to be viewed as novel, so Luther, in
conflict with the Catholic Church, with its long history and claims to be the
mother church, needed an historic legitimacy of his own.
In his
younger days, Luther admitted the Jewish claim on Scripture; “And yet they are
friends, cousins and brothers of our Savior; no other people has been treated
with such distinction by God; it was to them that he entrusted the Holy
Scriptures” F. Heer, 1967: 132. Luther’s views concerning the Jewish people
changed over time. His earlier, more positive view came to be replaced by an
extreme anti-Semitic one. For a discussion of this, see the article by M.
Edwards, 1991.
Note
that Jerome likewise sought out the help of a Rabbi for his translation, and
likewise abused him once the task was completed. M Simon, 1991: 144.
M.
Hay, 1975: 167. It is in such statements that Luther moves from anti-Judaism to
anti-Semitism.
M.
Luther, Against The Jews and Their Lies,
CE 1542, quoted in Cohn-Sherbok, The
Crucified Jew (London: HarperCollins, 1992) 73.
For
example, see the statement by The World Lutheran Federation, 1984, in Brown,
1992: 181. See also C. Williamson, 1993: 34., and the statement of the Council
of Presidents of the Lutheran
Church of Australia,
1996, as referenced in the Australian Jewish News, December 13, 1996, 5.
E.
Flannery, The Anguish of the Jews
(New York: Paulist Press, 1985). 96. Note that Aquinas also spoke of the need
for a certain moderation, so that the Jews could stay alive.
The
Jewish philosopher Michael Wyschogrod has noted that “the State of Israel is a
theological problem for Christians”. He continues that unless Christianity is
to repudiate the ancient decision to “make the Hebrew Bible its own”, it must
realize that these promises are part of the Scriptural tradition, and hence of
concern not only to Jews, but “something the Church must struggle with”. M.
Wyschogrod, “The Bishops and the Middle East” First Things (April, 1990) 16., as
quoted in R. Wilken, “In novissimis diebus: Biblical Promises, Jewish Hopes and
Early Christian Exegesis”, Journal of
Early Christian Studies 1 (1993) 1.
Note
that this is not a question of the right of Christians to also have
interpretations of the Scriptures, but rather of their denial of that right to
the Jewish people.
M.
Shukster and P. Richardson, “Temple
and Beit Ha-midrash in the Epistle of Barnabas” in Anti-Judaism in Early Christianity; Volume 2, Separation and Polemic,
Editor G. Wilson, (Ontario: Wilfrid Laurier University Press, 1986) 17-31.
Chrysostom, Homily 4: IV. See also Homily 5:6 “Come now, and let me give
you abundant proof that the temple will not be rebuilt and that the Jews will
not return to their former way of life”. Likewise, all of Homily 5 argues that if Christ be true, then the Jewish people can
have no national future. Augustine likewise wrote of Jerusalem, “no one of the Jews is permitted
to come hither now: where they were able to cry against the Lord, there by the
Lord they are not permitted to dwell”. On
the Psalms, in Works, volume
VIII, 308.
As
reported in the National Catholic
Reporter, Kansas City;
July 30, 1999;
Matt Kantz.
N.S.
Ateek, 1989., as quoted in Faith and
Freedom, vol. 1, number 3, Sept. 1992. Likewise, the Greek Catholic
director of Al-Liqa in Jerusalem has stated that one of the important tasks of
the intifada was “to write a Palestinian theology [that is] also an uprising
[intifada] against the exploitation of the Holy Bible to justify the [Jewish]
settlement policy ... Any believer who tries to justify through his theology
the religious rights of Israel in Palestine is an infidel who denies God and
Christ”. Intifada of Heaven and Earth.
Christian Aid writer, Janet Morley would seem to agree, stating “There has been
much abuse of the Bible to legitimate modern policies. Palestinian Christians
have found the issue so sensitive that many have ceased to use in their
liturgies those parts of the Old Testament that speak of ‘Israel’” J. Morley, Companions of God, (London: Christian
Aid, 1994).
The
question of whether modern Zionism is a valid expression of the Jewish
prophetic hope is debated within Judaism. Christians and Palestinians may well
have valid grounds for questioning aspects of modern Israel. These questions are outside
of this paper’s scope. The point being made here concerns Palestinians and
others speaking in their capacity as church leaders to state that the very idea
of a Jewish homeland is theologically ruled out as a misuse of Scripture. This
is Christian supersessionism, and takes from the Jews the rights to debate the
meaning of their own Scriptures. Jewish success still offends much Christian
doctrine.
See
also Justin Martyr, “For the true spiritual Israel, and descendants of Judah,
Jacob, Isaac, and Abraham (who in uncircumcision was approved of and blessed by
God on account of his faith, and called the father of many nations), are we who
have been led to God through this crucified Christ”. Dialogue with Trypho, A Jew XI.
P.
Koppel, “Anti-Semitism”, The Encyclopedia
Britannica, (24 vols; London:
William Benton, 1966) II:81.
“The
Jews had failed to recognize their Messiah because they were carnal, sensual,
instead of spiritual like the Church”.
W. Nicholls, 1995: 208.
Medieval Christian law came to outlaw marriage between Jews and Christians on
the grounds that it was a form of bestiality. See J. Carmichael, 1992: 73.
M.
Luther, On The Jews and their Lies,
in Luther’s Works Editor F. Sherman
(55 vols; Philadelphia:
Fortress Press, 1971) 47: 272. Luther’s words clearly reflect the concept of
Jews as carnal. He twice speaks of their desiring a “worldly king” (Works,
47:292, 302), and refers to them as a “base, whoring people ... full of malice,
greed, envy ... pride, usury, conceit” and so on (Works, 47: 167). He also refers to them with other animal
analogies, such as “venomous serpents” (Works,
47: 277) and as a “venomous basilisk” (Works,
47: 172). The extent to which this was a conscious application of the myth (as
it was in Chrysostom’s case) is unclear. What can be said is, that whether
intentional or not, such words served to affirm and make available this aspect
of the anti-Judaic myth for at least one strand of Protestantism.
Aphraates, for example, in a homily devoted entirely to virginity, states,
“because of their sensual nature and carnal desire”, the Jews rebel against
this virtue. “They laugh at those who practice it, and say to them, ‘You are
unclean because you do not take a wife. We are holy because we have assured our
posterity.’” Quoted in M. Simon, 1991: 143. Simon also quotes Lucas, Geschichte, 38., as seeing in asceticism
“one of the central points of conflict between Jews and Christians”. Simon,
1991: 168. See also F. Heer, 1967: 37-41, for a discussion on the links between
celibacy, monks and anti-Semitism.
Concerning the pervasive abandonment of the church of its Jewish heritage, and
its replacement by pagan Greek philosophy, Marvin Wilson writes, “Yet, by the
middle of the second century, Christianity ultimately accepted and used Greek
philosophy. As the ‘new’ Israel
sought to gain a hearing for the gospel among gentiles, the Church moved, as it
were, further from Mount Sinai and closer to
Mars Hill. Justin Martyr had been influenced by Platonic thought before his
conversion. After he became a Christian, Justin brought many of Plato's ideas
into his teaching. As the Hebrew Scriptures were used to bring Jews to Christ,
Justin used Platonic thought to reach Greeks. In the following century, Clement
and others from Alexandria
would place even greater emphasis upon reading the Bible through Platonic eyes.
One of the results was that third century Christians began to view the physical
world of flesh and matter as evil. The perpetuation of this view throughout the
centuries would have dire consequences for the Church, especially in the
understanding of such areas as salvation, spirituality, marriage, and the
family”. Wilson,
M., Our Father Abraham (Grand Rapids:
Eerdmans, 1989) 90.
“Antisemitism thus was not rooted only in theology but also in a pastoral zeal”
W. Nicholls, 1995: 65.
Peter
Abelard, A Dialogue of a Philosopher with
a Jew and a Christian quoted in W. Nicholls, 1995: 228.
“Such
was their preponderance-Trotsky, Zinoviev, Kamenev, Sverdlov, Sokolnikov-that
both before 1917 and after, the revolution was widely considered as part of a
world-wide Jewish conspiracy. It was not, of course; and yet one is almost tempted
to say that, to a very considerable degree, it was the Russian Jews fighting
back”. A. Elon The Israelis: Founders and
Sons (London: Sphere, 1972) 64-65.
R.
Modras, The Catholic Church and
Antisemitism, Poland
1933-1939 (Jerusalem: Harwood Academic Publishers, 1994)118.
“Jews
do not have to define themselves in relation to Christianity, whereas
Christianity cannot escape defining itself by reference to Judaism” W. Nicholls, 1995: 174.
“The idea
of foreignness between the good God on one hand, and the Demiurge with his
creation on the other hand, appears as a peculiarly Marcionite thought”. G.
May, 1978: 145.
For
example, Saturninus taught that Christ had been sent “to destroy the God of the
Jews”. W.H.C. Frend, 1984: 196.
Quoted
in J. Gager, 1985: 161. “Efroymsen’s analysis of Tertullian’s anti-Judaism
begins with a seeming paradox. Why is it, he asks, that ‘the largest block of
anti-Jewish material ... is to be found not in his early treatise, Against the Jews, but in the later Against Marcion?’ His answer is that
Tertullian has taken traditional anti-Jewish motifs and used them to create an
anti-Judaic myth whose function is to recover the God, the Scriptures and the
ancient pedigree of Israel from Marcion’s damaging attack ... The
‘”inferiority” of God’s “old” law and/or cult cannot be due to any
“inferiority” on God’s part, but must be accounted for by the inferiority of
the people with whom God was working at the time.’” J. Gager, 1985: 163.
W.
Nicholls, 1995: 182. It is difficult to imagine any collaboration going beyond
a defense of their shared hermeneutic. As seen, Marcionites were not
pro-Jewish.
L.
Lucas, The Conflict between Christianity
and Judaism: A Contribution to the History of the Jews in the Fourth Century (Warminster:
Aris & Phillips, 1993) 21. Note that Lucas attributes this to the
similarities between Jews and Arians on the subject of Christ’s divinity. See
also E. Flannery, 1985: 59.
E.
Flannery, 1985: 305. L. Lucas also cites a number of Imperial decrees aimed
against “Donatists and their Jewish allies”. Lucas, 1993: 22. See also Lucas,
66-67. Note, however, that in the sixteen decrees against the Donatists in the
Theodosian Code, the Donatists are often grouped with other non-Catholics in
quite a general way, 16.5.46 listing “Donatists, heretics and Jews”, 16.5.54,
“Donatists and heretics”, sirm.12, “Donatists and pagans”, sirm .14, “the
Donatists and the rest of the vain heretics who cannot be converted to the
worship of the Catholic communion, that is, the Jews and the gentiles who are
commonly called pagans”. The Theodosian
Code and Novels and the Sirmondian Constitutions (trans. C. Pharr; Princeton: University Press, 1952). The existence of any
alliance, except in the minds of their Catholic opponents, must remain
unproved.
M.
Simon, 1991: 161. W. Jones, A History of
the Christian Church (2 vol; Galattin: CHRAA, 1983) I: 322. For a fuller
treatment, see L. Lucas, 1993: 57-61.
Quoted
in D. Benedict, History of the Donatists
(Galattin: CHRAA, 1985) 42.
For
example, F. Heer, 1967: 66-68.
G.
Orchard, History of Baptists (Texas:
Bogard Press, 1987) 221.
E.
Barnavi, A Historical Atlas of The Jewish
People, (New York: Schocken Books, 1995) 138.
A. Miller,
Miller’s Church History (Addison:
Bible Truth Publishers, 1980) 670.
“In Austria,
under Archduke Albert, things went especially badly as an accusation of Jewish
collaboration with Hussites was rumored; all in all, many Jews were punished by
imprisonment, impoverishment, killings and banishments”. E. Flannery, 1985:
321.
“A
common charge directed against any heresy was that of ‘Judaising’: it was
considered a quality inherent in any form of belief or organization that rejected
the dominion of the Church”. J. Carmichael, 1992: 64.
Note
G. Wigoder’s comment concerning the Jews in the time of Luther, “many of them
hoped that these changes would restore to Christianity its roots in Judaism,
and in this respect, they had already found the Hussites a change in the right
direction”. G. Wigoder, “The Reaction of the Jews to Luther” Immanuel 20 (Spring 1986).
H.
Ben-Sasson, 1969: 580.
Chrysostom, Homily I:5. Talking of
the third century, H. Vogt writes: “One must not, however, imagine that this
superstitious fear of the Jews existed from the beginning. Actually, it was to a large extent the result
of the measures which the victorious church employed against the
synagogue. These measures were often
adopted because Christians by no means kept themselves as isolated from the
Jews as their bishops would have wished; in fact, the synagogue, and
particularly the Jewish holidays, exerted a certain attraction for Christians”.
H. Vogt, The Jews, A Chronicle for
Christian Conscience (New York: Associated Press, 1967) 47.
Cohn-Sherbok, 1992: 39. Heer takes up the issue: “The peasants and country
people of the Carolingian period were as susceptible to Jewish preaching as
they were to be later in Poland, and as they were in the ninth-century empire
of the Khazars, when the whole nation followed the example of the royal family
and adopted the Jewish faith, remaining true to it until they were conquered by
the Greeks and Russians in 1016”. F. Heer, 1967: 59.
“Heretics had to be exterminated, for their disease was contagious. And the
Jews, no less deadly, had to be separated from the Christians. The edicts
against heretics and Jews passed by the Fourth Lateran Council in 1215, when
the reputation of the papacy was at its height under Innocent III, are
manifestations of the same feeling”. F. Heer, 1967: 72.
The
introduction reads as follows, “I had made up my mind to write no more either
about the Jews or against them. But since I learned that these miserable and
accursed people do not cease to lure to themselves even us, that is, the
Christians, I have published this little book, so that I might be found among
those who opposed such poisonous activities of the Jews who warned the
Christians to be on their guard against them. I would not have believed that a
Christian could be duped by the Jews into taking their exile and wretchedness
upon himself. However, the devil is the god of the world, and wherever God's
word is absent he has an easy task, not only with the weak but also with the
strong. May God help us. Amen”. Martin Luther, On the Jews and Their Lies.
The
following comments from On the Jews and
Their Lies are of interest. “Three learned Jews came to me in the hope that
in me they would find a new Jew because we here in Wittenburg have begun to
read Hebrew. They even imagined that because we Christians have begun to read
their books, this would swiftly change us”.
During
these occasions, the wafer was said to variously shed tears, grow wings and try
to escape by flying around the room, beg for mercy, and bleed human blood. M.
Hay. 1975: 148, H. Lindsey, The Road to
Holocaust, (Bantam Books, 1990) 20.
For
example, in 1391, a crowd led by Ferrand Martinez, an arch-deacon in Servile,
is estimated to have killed approximately 50,000 Jews in a three month period.
E. Flannery, 132.
Had
the church allowed the retention of Jewish customs and observances, that is,
had it allowed for the possibility of Jewish Christians, much trauma would have
been avoided.
D.
Cohn-Sherbok, 1992: 96. For a fascinating counter-history, see R. Ben-Shalom,
“The Converso as Subversive: Jewish Traditions or Christian Libel?” Journal of Jewish Studies 1-2 (1999)
259-283., “In other words, the image of the converso as subversive, devised and
encouraged among Christians, was inverted into a converso justification for
living a Christian life”. R. Ben-Shalom, 1999: 264. The question must be asked,
to what extent this was indeed a survival mechanism, and to what extent it was
an internalizing of the Christian stereotype.
D.
Cohn-Sherbok, 1992: 98., Spinoza coming from a Marrano background.
E.
Flannery, 1985: 136. “Antisemitism and anti-Marranism fed upon one another and
the notion grew that the evil in Judaism and Marranism had a common
source-hereditary Jewishness, mala sangre
(bad blood): Jews, baptized or not, were perverse and defiled”.
Note
that it was the “problem” of the Marranos which led to the establishment of the
Inquisition in Spain.
Flannery, 137. To quote from A.
Griffiths, “The fires of the modern Inquisition, it was said, had been lighted
exclusively for the Jews”. A. Griffiths, The
Inquisition at Home and Abroad (New York: Dorset Press, 1991) 32.
Note
the “almost fanatical” French Catholic support for the anti-Dreyfus campaign, a
support described by E. Flannery as “entirely spontaneous and explicable on
historic grounds”. E. Flannery, 1985: 188. For the church, that Dreyfus was
Jewish made him a natural traitor, and, within France, belief in his guilt quickly
became a point of honor, and indeed, a justification for an entire world view.
Note that one of the handwriting experts at the first trial stated that Dreyfus
was guilty “because all Jews are traitors”. W. Nicholls, 1995: 334.
D.
Goldhagen, Hitler's Willing Executioners
(London: Little Brown and Co., 1996)112, 506. At the same time, Niemoller also
spoke of the “dark and sinister history of this people”.
“Bear
in mind the devastation which Jewish bastardisation visits on our nation each
day ... This contamination of our blood ... is carried on systematically by the
Jew today ... The Jew uses every possible means to undermine the racial
foundations of a subjugated people”. A. Hitler, Mein Kampf vol 1 chapter 11.
Hadrian's laws made it “vitally important to those who were not Jews to avoid
exposing themselves to suspicion; and the observance of the Sabbath was one of
the most notable indications of Judaism”. B. M. Metzger, Studies in the Lectionary Text of the Greek New Testament 12.,
quoted in S. Bacchiocchi, 1975: 212.
S.
Bacchiocchi, 1975: 187. “According to Epiphanius,
Adversus haereses 42, 3, 4, Marcion ordered his followers ‘to fast on
Saturday, justifying it in this way: because it is the rest of the God of the
Jews ... we fast in that day in order not to accomplish on that day what was
ordained by the God of the Jews.’”
“Outside Jewish Christianity, all second century references to the Sabbath
commandment either endorse the metaphysical interpretation, or reject the
literal interpretation as Judaistic, or do both”. R. Bauckham, “Sabbath and
Sunday in the Post
Apostolic Church”
in From Sabbath to the Lord’s Day Editor D. Carson (Grand Rapids: Zondervan,
1982) 269.
S.
Bacchiocchi, 1975: 194. Note that Oscar Cullmann also states that the choice of
Sunday to be their day of worship was made “in deliberate distinction from
Judaism”. O. Cullmann, Early Christian
Worship (London: SCM Press, 1953) 9.
While
not a major specific issue, (due to their overall spiritualizing hermeneutic),
the Sabbath is given “a clearly negative aspect in the ‘Exposition of
knowledge’ and the ‘Apocryphon of John’ ... and the ‘Gospel of Truth’” T.
Baarda, “The Sabbath in the Parable of the Shepherd”, Nederlands Theologisch Tijdschrift 41-1 (1987) 17.
It
should be noted that the Gnostics also denigrated the Jewish feasts. “The
Valentians considered the psychics’ Eucharist merely celebrated the Jewish
Passover” E. Pagels, “A Valentarian Interpretation of Baptism and Eucharist -
And its Critique of ‘Orthodox' Sacramental Theology and Practice”’, Harvard Theological Review 65-2 (1972) 153. The bite of such an
observation is seen the Gnostic teaching of the “opposition between the God of
the Jews, whom the Catholics serve [and note, “no one who is under the Law will
be able to look upon the truth” Testimony
of Truth] and Christ, whom the Gnostics follow” R. Wilson, 1993: 287.
S.
Bacchiocchi, 1975: 178.
“And
thus, when the city had been emptied of the Jewish nation and had suffered the
total destruction of its ancient inhabitants, it was colonized by a different
race, and the Roman city which subsequently arose changed its name and was
called Aelia, in honor of the emperor Aelius Adrian. And as the church there
was now composed of gentiles, the first one to assume the government of it
after the bishops of the circumcision was Marcus”. The Church History Of Eusebius, 4, 6, 4.
Epiphanius stating that the controversy “arose after the time of the exodus of
the bishops of the circumcision”. S. Bacchiocchi, 1975: 162. Note also that it
was with the return of the Jewish Christians sixty years later that the then
bishop of Jerusalem,
Narcissus, appealed to Clement of Alexandria for help against “opposition from
the Quartodecimans”. S. Bacchiocchi, 1975: 162. Note also the statement by J.B.
Lightfoot, “In the Paschal controversy of the second century the bishops of Jerusalem, Caesarea, Tyre
and Ptolemais ranged themselves not with Asia Minor,
which regulated the Easter festival by the Jewish Passover, but with Rome and Alexandria, thus avoiding even the semblance
of Judaism”. J.B. Lightfoot, The
Apostolic Fathers, 1885, II part I, 88., as quoted in S.
Bacchiocchi, 1995: 103.
D.
Efroymson, quoted in W. Nicholls, 1995: 185.
J.
Parkes, The Conflict of the Church and
the Synagogue (New York: Hermon Press, 1974) 395-7. Part of a collection of
such professions, the first is from 655
CE, from Visigoth Spain, the second is taken by Parkes from the Liber Sacramentorum Romanae Ecclesiae,
Assemani, Cod. Lt. I: 105. Note also the comment by Brown, written in 1992,
that “many Jewish believers have been served ham sandwiches at church
luncheons, to make sure they are ‘free’”. M. Brown, 1992: 84.
“Jew-hat”, E. Flannery, 1985: 103.
M.
Hay, 1975: 164-166. In 1555, for example, Pope Paul IV decreed the
establishment of “ghettos” throughout Europe.
D.
Baron, The Shepherd of Israel and His Scattered Flock
(London: Morgan and Scott, 1910) 24.
German
Catholic reaction to this is seen as early as 1873, when the Historisch-politisch Blatter, a leading
Catholic paper, stated that, as summarized by D. Dietrich, “the emancipation of
the Jews would lead to the ultimate subjugation of Christians” D. Dietrich, Catholic Citizens in the Third Reich (New
Jersey: Transaction Books, 1988).13.
Within
two years of the Roman ghetto being opened, Pope Pius IX was attacking the
influence of Jews in public life. No apologies or changes in policy here. D.
Dietrich, 1988: 14.
The
“Semi-official organ of the Holy See”, the paper had formal approval from Popes
Pius IX and Leo XIII. Their editorial policy was “always and in all matters to
reflect the thinking of the Holy See” R. Modras, 1994: 334.
D.
Prager, and J. Telushkin, 104.
“It
was through Marcion that the latent crisis of Christian foundations and norms
became manifest. His straightforward assault however also aroused the forces of
defense”. G. May, 1978: 149.
“The
Christian response to Marcion’s disparagement of the God of the Old Testament
as put forward by Tertullian and others
was to lay far heavier blame on the Jews” J. Lieu, 1996: 262.
P.
Blet, Pius XII and the Second World War
(New Jersey: Paulist Press, 1999) 172.
L.
Dawidowicz, The War Against the Jews 1933-45
(London: Penguin Books, 1975) 452.
M.
Hay, 1975: 185. Note that the semi official Vatican Jesuit paper, La Civilta Cattolica, ran a series of
articles on ritual murder from 1881-1882. In these it stated that “It remains
therefore generally proved that the sanguinary Paschal rite ... is a general
law binding on the consciences of all Hebrews to make use of the blood of a
Christian child, primarily for the sanctification of their souls, and also,
though secondary, to bring shame and disgrace upon Christ and to Christianity”.
[Dec. 3, 1881,
606]., and “Every year, the Hebrews crucify a child ... in order to be
effective, the child must die in torments”. [Jan. 21, 1882, 214.].
