Living Letters of the Law. Jeremy Cohen
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were dancing,
he was being buried;
you were reclining on a soft couch,
he in grave and coffin.
O lawless Israel, what is this unprecedented crime you committed,
thrusting your Lord among unprecedented sufferings,
your sovereign
who formed you,
who made you,
who honored you,
who called you ‘Israel’;
But you did not turn out to be ‘Israel’;
you did not ‘see God,’
you did not recognize the Lord.9
God had therefore disowned the Jews, annulled their ritual law, and transferred their inheritance to the church, which now constituted the only true Israel, not a recently arrived impostor.
Even after pagans had undergone Christian baptism, an incentive to preach to them against the Jews remained. Especially in the large metropolitan centers of the Eastern empire, where sizable Jewish and Christian communities intermingled freely, Christians frequently emulated Paul's Galatian correspondents and looked upon Judaism and its biblical rituals as the “real thing.” Christianity might be a watered-down “Gentile's Judaism” in their eyes, whereas the truly authentic biblical religion belonged to the Jews; for rituals that surely mattered— a holy day like Passover or the New Year, a familial rite of passage, an oath to cement a major business transaction—a visit to a Jewish home or synagogue could make perfect sense. Alarmed by such Judaizing tendencies, churchmen disparaged the Jews in order to bolster Christian self-confidence: Christianity and Judaism did not lie on the same continuum, such that the former naturally directed its adherents toward the latter. On the contrary, as Melito explained to his parishioners, “in the same way as the model is made void, conceding the image to the truly real…, the [Jewish] people was made void when the church arose.”10 The rites of the Jews, once precious, have been rendered worthless, and the hermeneutical downfall of Israel has caused its disinheritance.
Casting old and new covenants as contradictory, however, may smack of dualism. The “heretic” Marcion and others like him argued that the savior-God of the New Testament could not possibly have created—or entered—the material world of the Old Testament or authored its inferior law. There were actually two cosmic powers, one supremely good and the other inferior if not utterly evil, who ruled over two worlds, one spiritual and the other material; the struggle between these powers and their respective realms determined the fate of the cosmos at large and that of every individual. In defense of their monotheism and in opposition to the dualists, orthodox fathers of the church sought to establish the divine authorship of the Old Testament on one hand and the incontrovertible superiority of Christianity over Judaism on the other. And once again, polemic against the Jews nourished the patristic argument. The deficiencies of the old law reflected not upon its divine legislator but upon its Jewish practitioners, and the guilt of the latter should not devolve onto the former. Jew and dualist heretic, ran the argument, thereby had much in common. Each understood—in fact, misunderstood—the old law entirely in its literal sense: One accepted it wholeheartedly on that basis; the other rejected it outright. Of the heretic who denied the incarnation of God in the body of Jesus, the North African Tertullian pleaded that he “now give up borrowing poison from the Jew—the asp, as they say, from the viper.”11 As for the Jews, Justin Martyr declared to his Jewish interlocutor Trypho in his famous Dialogos (Dialogue) of the second century, “you are a people hard of heart, and without understanding, and blind, and lame, and sons in whom there is no faith.”12 The precepts of the old law had no salvific value, but they constituted God's resulting punishment for Jewish sin, which ranged from their idolatry to their crucifixion of Jesus and to their persistent hatred of Christians. Circumcision, argued Justin, “was given for a sign, that you should be separated from the other nations and us, and that you alone should suffer the things that you are rightly suffering now, and that your lands should be desolate and your cities burned with fire, and that foreigners should eat up the fruits before your face, and none of you go up to Jerusalem.”13 So, too, the Sabbath, the sacrifices in the temple, and other cultic rites of ancient Israel condemn the Jews for their misdeeds. And, now that Jesus had proffered an entirely different sort of legislation, “the law given at Horeb is already antiquated…. A law set over against a law has made the one before it to cease, and a testament [diathk] coming into existence later has limited any previous one.”14 Only a genuinely Christian hermeneutic allowed for enjoying the true value of the law without suffering from its drawbacks. Interpreted properly in its Christological sense, the law was intrinsically good; those who misunderstood it were sinful.
When churchmen addressed their anti-Jewish polemic to non-Jewish audiences—to undercut the credibility of Jewish Christians, to legitimate Christianity in the eyes of pagans (whether hostile or sympathetic), to combat reverence for Jews and Judaism among Christians, and to counter the dualist biblical exegesis of heretics—they naturally depicted Jews in a fashion that would advance their own theological agenda. As one historian of this early period has written, “at the root of the matter lies, then, not the actual condition or behavior of the Jews, but rather the image of the Jews required for the purposes of Christian theology.”15 But note well: Throughout this process of self-definition and propagation, Christianity never dispensed with this hermeneutically crafted Jew. From the first stages in its development, the Jew served a purpose—or a mélange of purposes—in the new religion, purposes that rendered Adversus ludaeos a basic medium for Christian self-expression, whose applications far exceeded direct confrontations between Christian and Jews. Simply put, the Jew had a particular role to play in a divinely ordained historical drama. His role stemmed from his failure to embrace Christianity when Jesus, his own kinsman, came to redeem him and his people before all others. This failure, in turn, had a chiefly hermeneutical basis; it derived from a deficient reading of the biblical covenant that God had revealed to him, an inability to discern the fulfillment of the Old Testament in the New.
As the church fathers of the second, third, and fourth centuries formulated some of the vital presuppositions for medieval Christian constructions of Jews and Judaism, their work revealed a developmental trend that also set a precedent for things to come. Guy Stroumsa has recently highlighted the process whereby Christian anti-Judaism intensified, growing increasingly harsh and more intolerant, between the second and fourth centuries. In the wake of Constantine's conversion, churchmen envisioned a new Christian identity that would integrate the Roman polity and society, an identity the Jews did not share; it followed that “the Jews, together with the pagans and heretics, had to be publicly vanquished and humiliated.”16 Adversus ludaeos polemic grew more ad hominem, casting slurs on contemporary Jews, depicting them in demonic terms, and displaying less concern for the nexus between the Jew, his Scripture, and his literalist interpretation of it. Bewailing the attraction that contemporary Judaism still exerted upon Christians in Antioch, for example, John Chrysostom focused his Adversus ludaeos sermons much less on the didactic and eschatological role of the Jew than his predecessors had, and he emphasized the radical disjunction of Judaism and Christianity much more:
Where Christ-killers gather, the cross is ridiculed, God blasphemed, the father unacknowledged, the son insulted, the grace of the Spirit rejected. Indeed, is not the harm even greater than where demons are present? In a pagan temple the impiety is open and obvious and can hardly seduce or deceive one who has wits about him and is soberminded. But in the synagogue they say that they worship God and abhor idols. They read and admire the prophets and use their words as bait, tricking the simple and foolish to fall into their snares. The result is that their impiety is equal to that of the Greeks, but their deception is much worse. They have an altar of deception in their midst which is invisible and on which they sacrifice not sheep and calves but the souls of men. In a word, if you admire the Jewish way of life, what do you have in common with us? If the 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