Helen Fry
Christian Views of Jews, Part 2: The Church Fathers

Dr Helen Fry - Christian Views of Jews, Part 2: The Church Fathers

- So in this lecture we’re going to look at the end of the first century CE of the common Era into the Church fathers and look at the views of Jews as portrayed in the New Testament, towards the end of the New Testament and also into the first century, second century and beyond. And I want to start with a quote as I did yesterday from the late professor Robert Wistrich whose book was titled “The Longest Hatred”. Brilliant, brilliant work and I do recommend, it’s still so relevant to read today. “No other prejudice has displayed such intensity and historic continuity nor resulted in such devastating consequences as antisemitism.” And of course there is many. Next slide please. Many scholars would argue a link between the topics we’re discussing yesterday and today and the emergence of antisemitism of 2000 years of Christian antisemitism. And yesterday this slide was missing and I want to explain the sources behind the gospels of Mark, Matthew and Luke, we’re keeping John to one side ‘cause he’s slightly different and drawing on slightly different sources. And he’s also the oldest of the gospels to have been written. So Mark written before the destruction of the temple. Just to recap, Matthew, around 75, 80, scholars put him more 80. The latest predictions are that he wrote it as late as 110 CE. That’s not the majority of scholars. Most believe it’s around 80 or 90. Luke again in the middle there around 80, but certainly Matthew and Luke writing after the destruction of the temple in Jerusalem in 70 CE. And you can see that Mark sort of stands there alone. And we discussed yesterday how Mark is drawing the gospel of Mark is drawing on his own early oral traditions, some of which he has added his own interpretation. Some scholars believe he also has drawn a bit on Q, and that’s ambiguous.

But what about Q, Q, that source that’s been named for the underlying oral tradition that appears in Matthew and Luke but doesn’t actually appear in Mark. And we compared some passages yesterday and you can see the differences. We marked up the differences between the passages and quite clearly we can’t take each of the narratives as necessarily totally historically accurate, but we began to see whereas the later gospels emerge, particularly Matthew and Luke and then later John, how there is development in the faith and thinking of the early communities. Next slide please. So that’s just to give you a sort of foundation and grounding, but it’s believed that the gospel of John, the latest to be written, which draws on Greek Hellenistic language to explain to the Roman world is very, very different. Now I just want to deal with one other difficult text. Oh I don’t know why that one’s in here actually. But let’s recap. Yesterday we looked at this one, “His blood be upon us and our children”, and we looked at how that passage is only in the gospel of Matthew and it begins to reflect his community that is trying to keep in with the Rome Romans, the occupying Romans. The Romans are persecuting some Christians. The apostle Paul originally was involved in the persecution of not all Christians, not all Jewish Christians but some until his conversion.

And so we can readily see that we concluded yesterday that Pilate washing his hands of any involvement in the sentencing, crucifixion of Jesus is clearly historically not accurate. It does still leave us with this one problematic sentence, two sentences in the New Testament, which we need to deal with and particularly in the Christian world, we need to deal with head on some of these most difficult texts when we’re trying to deal with anti Judaism and lingering anti Judaism in liturgy and preaching and of course in antisemitism. Next slide please. So what we can conclude, you take away Matthew’s statement which he’s clearly added because it’s not in the other gospels and it certainly is not in any form in the gospel of John, although John has his own issues as we’ll see shortly. Jesus died, we can affirm, on a cross as a common rebel at the hands of the Romans, crucifixion, as we said, a Roman execution. There is no way that Pontius Pilate would have revealed any weakness in quelling and what he could see as a potential insurrection at a time of great instability. And after Jesus’ death, what we do know is that his disciples and the women in particular who aren’t amongst his closest 12 disciples, but the women who were clearly followers and supported his mission financially, interesting. And in the early church as well, they claimed resurrection. However we want to interpret that, they had some of religious experience in which they believed that Jesus had been raised from the dead, resurrection being an idea within the Paraseic tradition, emerging tradition.

But they believed that it happened, the end is nigh. And gradually there is this, I put as I put here, this chasm, this divide between the School of Hillel and many New Testament scholars and Jewish scholars studying this period believe that Jesus is closest to the Pharisees. He’s closest in particular to the school of Hillel, although there are some differences between them. But they believe, and I believe that to be true, that he’s closest to the school of Hillel. But after his death, loosely we put the School of Hillel, School of Jesus, they are beginning to have their differences over identity and particularly what is claimed for Jesus. And we’re not saying anything about divinity, anything that he’s in any way got some kind of divineness in him. I know the Trinity and that’s very, very hard to explain even to Christians who’ve grown up in it. Very, very difficult philosophical concept. The church fathers had difficulty explaining themselves, but at this point there is no sense. And Jesus certainly himself wouldn’t have believed in a trinity and a Godhead. That’s three, Father, son, holy Spirit, none of that, solely and simply what’s claimed for Jesus is that he’s resurrected from the dead. Now the majority of the school of Hillel just didn’t believe that, they hadn’t had that experience. They didn’t believe it, but Jesus followers do. And that doesn’t take them outside Judaism. It’s an inter-pharisaic debate and some of the polemic against the Pharisees that we begin to see, particularly in the gospel of Matthew is reflecting that after the death of Jesus is not historical, that vitriolic debate is not historical to the time of Jesus himself. And what you get are different Jewish Christian communities, some of them around Jerusalem, some of them around Jesus’ brother James, some of them following his mother, Jesus’ mother Mary, others following some of the apostles.

And they are going out and they’re preaching and they are teaching and they’re keeping the message of Jesus alive in the sense of his kingdom of God is imminent, the end is near, we’re going to be freed from Roman oppression. This is what they’re preaching, they’re not preaching the later stuff that’s been overlaid and is often interpreted into the New Testament today. And which does affect Christian views of Jews, the way that this is interpreted. So there are these different communities who have what are quite minor differences really, but they can still stay within Judaism, temple worship, keeping Passover, keeping all the Jewish festivals. And eventually what we see is a difference over identity. Not at this point beliefs about Jesus beyond resurrection. But the real fractious issues start to emerge on identity. What I mean is, do Gentiles and there are a number of Gentiles beginning to be attracted to Jewish Christianity, which is still within Judaism, there’s a problem. Do Gentiles have to convert to Judaism to become Jewish Christians? That I covered in my series, The Partings of the Ways, which should be on the lockdown university website. So do go and look at that because there’s some fascinating material there that explains also a lot of the backdrop we don’t have time to discuss today. But really the most intense debates begin in the early church after Jesus’ death. They gradually are morphed into with the Gentiles. Now if the Gentiles hadn’t been attracted to Jewish Christianity, I suggest that none of this would’ve arisen because the debates would’ve been completely different. They would’ve been totally centred on Jesus’ resurrection, the delay in his second coming or his coming, the delay in the end of times.

But the Gentiles causes a confusion. We’ve now got gentiles who want to be part of this church but still within Judaism and there are different bits take on different bits of meaning and they have an identity crisis. Do Gentiles have to become full Jews And some of the communities say no, they just keep the food laws, they don’t have to be circumcised. So you’ve got all that debate going on. But gradually, after the destruction of the temple, we’ve got a completely reimagination if you like, a reinterpretation of prophets, of scripture in both Judaisms of the day and Christianity. And by the time we get to John’s gospel, the split between church and synagogue is irrevocable. John’s community is primarily appealing to Gentile converts. He has a problem with that because he and his community do believe that Jesus is the Messiah, not in any divine sense but as the instrument if you like, God’s instrument by which the end of times will be inaugurated. Of course that doesn’t happen and that does cause as I said, its own problems. So what we have to understand, which is absolutely fascinating, is the diversity in of course in Judaisms of the day, but also in the Jewish Christian communities. John’s community had major differences with the thinking of the Jerusalem church. So they sort of parted also the Jewish Christians linked to the Jerusalem church. So we’ve got a lot of diversity, no one view of Christianity. And those communities, Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John start to write down their oral traditions before they’re lost. They’re almost into the second generation and they’re writing down their oral traditions which later become part of canonised scripture.

And that’s not decided until another nearly 500 years. Next slide please. But we need to bear in mind that what they’re doing now is placing on record their oral traditions so they can be passed on and they’re not the only ones. There are a whole raft of text, as I said before, gospel of Judas even, Gospel of Mary, gospel of Thomas, gospel of Thomas is very close to Q. I find that fascinating, gospel of Thomas is one of the earliest that didn’t make it into the New Testament. And it’s very clear that he draws on some of the same stories and very close to Matthew and Luke. So we understand that diversity and after that cataclysmic event, the destruction of the temple, there’s no more sacrificial worship for the different Jewish groups, for the different Jewish Christian groups. And now there has to be this major redefinition and it’s a huge identity crisis for both of the traditions. And I don’t think we should underestimate that. And quite often it is actually, the impact that that has. Pharisaic Judaism becomes rabbinic Judaism, Jewish Christianity starts to become a more distinct group because they start to use temporal language and impose that on the person of Jesus. So it starts to change their view of Jesus. And a belief in Jesus still in this time did not supersede any Jewish teaching or tradition. Those early Jewish Christians did not, but we gradually find, certainly after the destruction of the temple that in Matthew’s community and Luke’s community, by the time that’s written down, we are finding that they are beginning to reassess their relationship to the Hebrew Bible, to the historic Jewish communities and to begin to bring in views of supersessionism, IE that the church has replaced Judaism, but it’s not there in the time of Jesus himself.

And it’s certainly not there in the very earliest of the Jewish Christian communities. The earliest conflict, as I explained, was centred on identity. Fascinating, the disagreement is over whether Jesus was resurrected or not. And that’s just a matter of a belief or of an experience. But it doesn’t change the essence of their belief or put them outside the boundaries of Judaism at this time. But what happens after the destruction of the temple does most definitely, it’s the partings, several partings of the ways it’s slow, it’s gradual, but it causes a really fractious relationship between the different Jewish communities and Jewish Christian communities and those Christian communities which have a majority of a gentile audience. So all this is going on and to assert, next slide please, to assert the fact that they believed they were the true inheritors of that, they start to voice their own oral traditions written down in their gospels as being their version. I’m reluctant to say the truth, but by the time you get to the church fathers, they get completely hung up on orthodoxy and what is the correct interpretation of scriptures? What’s the correct part of Christianity? And there are a number of heresies, we won’t go into those today, but there were a number of heresies, Christian heresies. But the church fathers decided no, this has gone too far. And so this is a period where all the communities are working out their identity, they’re in competition. And we start to get this reflected particularly in the later gospels. And this is one example of one of the difficult texts that people would say as part of the anti-Jewish tradition, John eight. And in it it says, “Jesus then said to the Jews who had believed in him”, and don’t anymore, “You are of your father, the devil and your will is to do your father’s desires”, IE to do the the desires of the devil. He was a murderer from the beginning and has nothing to do with the truth. Really difficult, you’re going to start equating Jews as doing the work of the devil and you don’t get that in the earlier traditions.

So there are differences. Interestingly if we’re going to compare John’s gospel generally across John’s gospel with a synoptic gospels and the synoptics of the earlier ones, Matthew, Mark, Luke, those three, Matthew, Mark and Luke, the Synoptics identify a number of different groups. So throughout the parables and stories of Jesus’ life that are contained in those three gospels, there are disagreements between Jesus and different groups. Now some of those disagreements may not be absolutely historical to Jesus himself. We’re not going to discuss that in detail today. We can do that perhaps in another course ‘cause I think it is interesting and it is important. But in those gospels there are a number of disagreements. Pharisees being an obvious one. Jesus does clash with the Sadducees, particularly in the temple and the overturning of the tables. Very interesting, perhaps we’ll study that one day. Sometimes the enemies if you like of Jesus are the scribes, Herodians or just the crowd. But in the gospel of John, all the disagreements that are reflected in the gospel of John are the Jews. So there’s no distinction between the different groups. And John is reflecting his community where their primary competition, their primary enemy if you like to their success as a community remains the ongoing vibrant survival of the Jewish community. Now synoptic gospels use the term the Jews only 15 times. In Greek. Scholars have also said can be interpreted as Judeans. So not necessarily Jews per se, but it puts a whole new complex on interpretation on some of those passages. But even if we take the interpretation of. To be the Jews, that term is only used across the Synoptics gospels.

There’s three gospels 15 times, but it’s over 70 times, at least 70 times in the gospel of John. And it’s always hostile, always. And it’s reflecting this hostility that John’s community is fighting for its own survival, it believes it is the true inheritors of the scriptures. It believes its community is holding the truth. Next slide please for want of a better word. And that hostility is reflecting in the gospels. The gospels are not to be taken as literal truth, as literal history. They do have layers of interpretation on them depending on when they were written and the communities themselves. So that’s just one example that I gave one of the difficult texts in the gospel of John. But how can we deal with it? That’s the thing. And I’m not sure that whether we’re Jewish or Christian or no faith at all, we have no tools really, do we? We’re given no training if you like to deal with those. How do you deal with those difficult texts? And I reiterate what I said yesterday, it is really important for us to understand the historical context. It doesn’t take away from Christian faith at all. And I think that’s a lot about what Christians can be worried about. If you start dismantling or deconstructing certain passages in New Testament, what are you left with? But in fact it is a very rich process. I did it through university for a secular degree and it’s fascinating, really fascinating. So what we do have to do is encourage a grownup adult understanding, a historical context, understand each of those gospels, their traditions, why they’ve developed in the way they have. And to understand that the Jewish community which is thriving, it hasn’t died. It is just the Pharisees have survived. Sadducees haven’t, obviously the zealots largely. Community and the Dead Sea scrolls largely don’t survive. So the Jewish community, what’s left the Pharisaic tradition is also trying to preserve its identity in the face of Christian missionary activity.

And there is no overt mission to the Gentile world at all in Jesus’s historical ministry. That mission to the Gentile world comes later when Gentiles start becoming attracted to Jewish Christianity. And it starts to change the identity of those communities after Paul finally decides to take a mission to the Gentile world, still preaching to the Jewish world and also the later community like the gospel of John, they are fighting against if they think they’re the true inheritors, they’ve got an attractive Judaism that they are competing with. And this is something which the church fathers face as well. So the Jewish community are facing now an overt and sometimes aggressive missionary activity which they are obviously standing up against and John’s community is much more diverse as well. So he still got within his community those who believed that Jesus in some sense was the Jewish Messiah, but not in any divine sense. And those who thought that they could stay within Judaism. So he’s having to deal with that. It’s a crisis, all the Jewish or what about anymore. So all this is going on in the community that’s trying to define itself internally. Jewish Christians fighting if you like, with gentile Christians trying to carve out the identity and linking their interpretation back to the historic Jesus, even if it isn’t historical to Jesus, against an emerging Judaism which is emerging strongly after the destruction of the temple.

So you’ve got this parallel development and alongside that, there are those within John’s community who are starting to take in Hellenistic views for the Greek Roman world views of possibly even sort some kind of pagan language or in terms of divinity. And they’re starting to begin to bring in and it causes a lot of debate within that community, belief in the divinity of Jesus. So this is all still partially an intra Jewish debate and this is not therefore what is said in John’s gospel. Matthew’s, is not based all Jews of every generation. So to summarise, we may not agree with John’s views but can we understand those sayings in context? And they can’t be used to endorse any kind of antisemitism historically going forwards. But I do see the difficulty 2000 years later where we are now, that vehement, apologies for the typo, the vehement hatred in John’s gospel for the Jews is still problematic and it’s something we do have to address head on. And even with standing in the background to these sayings, I believe the monumental reeducation ahead is almost impossible task. Next slide please. We did a lot of it in Christian Jewish dialogue in the 1990s and I was involved in that and we thought there was real progress. But look where we are today and maybe it is that in every generation we have to put a real push at this education to understand that the images of Jews in the New Testament, number one are different depending on the community. They are different views depending on the community. They are not necessarily historic words views of Jesus himself. And the problem of course is later, Christians have actually taken this literally and believe that Jesus literally said some of these things and that the image of the Jews in the New Testament, the various images reflect that increasingly difficult fractious relationship with the diverse Judaisms of the first century. So it’s the political concerns under Roman occupation of 2000 years ago.

So for me, understanding the historic background to these texts is absolutely crucial. I would say the same for any of the religious text, to try and understand the imagery and what’s being said. Can we then go forward and make progress. But the difficult task I think still facing Jewish Christian relations today, interfaith relations and in the fight against antisemitism where these images often have tipped into a secular antisemitism and we think of the rise of Nazi Germany but also other ways that antisemitism is sort of morphed still today. How do we deal with image of Jews in the New Testament today? We do need this reeducation programme that the New Testament to understand it does not reflect absolute exact history. And I think that we need to do more work well especially in the Christian communities and you know the Catholic progress of Notitarde in the 1960s, the World Council of Churches, all those amazing statements which root Jesus in his Jewishness was groundbreaking in its time. The World Council of Churches did a statement in the 1990s, what’s happened today with the rise of antisemitism? And I will ask before I get too political, where are the voices of the churches today in what has happened to Israel after October the seventh? So I think it is relevant. Next slide please, because I think so much hatred has become so ingrained in our culture in the western world. The question is how now can we deal with it? Because we thought with all the progress up to the 1990s in Christian Jewish relations, in church statements, in that between the Catholic church and synagogue in Rome, where is it all gone?

And I think we now really do need to confront head on some of those difficult texts in the New Testament. And really it’s going to be slow and it’s going to be a hard climb but that’s no reason not not to do it. So those difficult texts in the New Testament, some of which of course find their way into Christian hymns and liturgy, that’s a whole nother subject. But it is an ongoing problem. It’s too easy to interpret those New Testament texts literally and not to understand what the term the Jews, the Judeans may be, which Jews, which group, it needs to be scrutinised and understand that background and the claims made by those New Testament writers shouldn’t be taken, they’re taken as fact because they’re in the Bible. But another typo, my apologies, but in fact, it is healthy to question this and I think we have to, so is a Jewish style. Needed in the way Christians study their biblical text. And they must study I believe, must, probably a bit strong, but may I suggest it might be helpful to also study the original language, which is what we did at university, to know that even the Greek translation, which is based on some of the Hebrew, learn the original Hebrew to understand or at least for a scholar or a priest to teach the congregation, to understand that certain words like. Don’t just necessarily mean the Jews, can actually be interpreted as the Judeans. And that makes a whole new context on the text. So maybe we do need to start to do that. And that’s not done in the Christian world. It’s mainly done from a faith experiential view and interpretation rather than looking at the history. I think history is so important when we look at or trying to tackle the image of the Jews in the New Testament, which clearly have had an impact going forward historically and an impact on what the church fathers then do with that imagery. Next slide please. And before I go onto the church fathers, I just want to throw this in. I have done a couple of sessions before on Mary Magdalene. She’s fascinating because there is a gospel that’s allegedly attributed to her. It didn’t make it into the New Testament, but what about the oral traditions even before they’re written down into the gospel of Thomas, gospel of Mary, et cetera.

What about the oral traditions of the women? The women were so central to Jesus’s ministry but their traditions were suppressed and they weren’t totally written out because they were so important that those early Christian gospels could not totally write out those women from the narratives. It’s a woman, Mary who is the first and in one gospel only witness to the resurrection before the disciples turn up and see it for themselves. Now I believe that to be historically accurate. I think if the gospel writers could have written it out, they would’ve done. But the tradition is so strong that they absolutely could not write it out. How different might our history, the history of Christian treatment of Jews been, had those traditions of the women survived, it would be wonderful for scholars to start to uncover the earliest traditions similar to the Q sources. Can we recover the oral traditions that the women, like Mary, the mother of Jesus were circulating, like Mary Magdalene. How different were they? To what extent is there anti-Jewish polemic in them? And from a basic study so far, it looks like it doesn’t have that same polemic. Absolutely fascinating, next slide please. So now we come to what rapidly becomes a really difficult period and where everything sort of takes off with the church fathers. And we’re going to look today and next week a little bit more on the church fathers into the mediaeval period. How rapidly those images of Jews, Judaism, those arguments, those intra Jewish debates, how they are taking beyond any interpretation that’s in the original text, particularly in the New Testament. Next slide please.

So from around 100, what I’ve put there, this new Christian orthodoxy starts to emerge and eventually you get various councils like the Council of in 325. That’s going to define what is Christian belief because by the end of the first century, by 100 CE, it’s those that are in power actually winning. And they are trying to define and particularly the bishops are trying to define an orthodoxy. You can’t have the chaos of some communities believing this and others that. And so there’s this real push to actually create what is Christian Orthodox teaching? And I mean orthodox, not as in Greek Orthodox or Russian, but orthodox as in not heretical if you like, but the Christian community is still in a minority. And this I found fascinating 'cause historically at the end of around 100 CE and going forwards, the Jewish community is thriving in the diaspora. We need to understand that because that is what the church fathers, I’m not saying it’s right that they did this, but if we understand why they developed some of the most horrific anti-Semitic teaching that becomes part of Christian orthodoxy. They’re not against a Judaism that’s dying, small Jewish communities. There’s an a power struggle and they see these Jewish communities in the diaspora as a direct threat to their own communities. And the more the threat is felt, the more intense the theology against Jews develops. We can’t change that but hopefully we can understand how it’s happened. I just wonder if we can cut out the whole of 2000 years and just go back to some historic teachings in the first century to Jesus, I don’t think that’s going to happen but we’ve got to deal with what’s happened in between. So the church fathers begin to believe because they think they are the orthodoxy. They are not only the Christian orthodoxy but they are the true inheritors of the scriptures. There is a disagreement, not even with yes, within the churches, but there’s a disagreement between the church if you like, or the churches and Judaism that’s developed, Pharisaic Judaism over interpretation of scripture of Hebrew Bible. And the church starts to say, well, we’ve got the correct interpretation.

And they then start to weave in that Judaism, Jewish faith has been totally superseded by the one true church. The true inheritors of God’s promises are the church, this is what they are fighting, they are preaching and fighting politically and sometimes the churches in certain communities are in a minority to the thriving Jewish communities. And that’s some kind of understanding we’re not taught in the Christian world. We tend to think, it’s a kind of assumption in the Christian world that sort of Judaism sort of rolls over a bit and it goes into its own way and does its own thing. But no, the church is really struggling against a strong, vibrant Judaism and the church and the church fathers now start to say, look the promises have been taken away from the Jewish community. It’s now transferred to the church. The church, and this awful phrase, it does make it into parts of the New Testament, new Israel. Start to talk about in some of the letters of Paul, old covenant, new covenant, old Israel is now seen as unfaithful. Unfaithful because they hadn’t accepted the message of Jesus. They’ve rejected Jesus and that whole very damaging polemic that voices this rejection, we can totally understand if we look at the historical context, why Judaisms of the day did not necessarily accept Jesus’ messages. Jesus was a group amongst many of the prophetic tradition. But the difficulty comes with the church fathers starting to say that God has rejected the unfaithful Israel, Israel’s rejected Jesus. And it’s that rejection of Jesus that fiercely underpins what becomes some of the worst anti-Semitic teaching in the church.

And now the church is saying, you can only, this dreadful word salvation, which comes in from the Greco Roman world, that the Jews can only receive salvation if they believe in Jesus, whatever belief means. And depending on the community at the time, which Christian community depends on which beliefs you have to believe. And that’s not formulated until at least the Council of Nicaea 300 years later. Well 325, next slide please. So you can see, I’m trying to show you a sort of progression that the anti-Jewish tradition. That morphs into antisemitism is a gradual thing to try and understand how it happens. And it doesn’t take long for someone like Justin Martyr, and I’ve given you his dates there. Born in Samaria what was then Palestine, he was actually pagan originally, he describes himself as pagan, to Greek parents. He’d studied philosophy as so many of them did at that time. He converts to Christianity and moves to Rome interestingly. So he is called Martyr because he was martyred alongside his students in around 160 CE. Now just before he dies he’s written this very importantly, it’s called “Dialogue with Trypho the Jew”. And it’s not a real dialogue as some of the dialogues are later, but it’s this imaginary dialogue in which he’s having this discussion if you like, this dialogue. And they’re talking of course about religious views and differences. He’s trying to explain through the mouthpiece of Trypho these differences. And although it’s written in Rome, he actually sets it in Ephesus, which is of course modern day Turkey. And he starts to bring in these views in this dialogue they’re having, it’s argued that the law is given to Christians because of quote, awful phrase again, Jewish hardness of heart.

So you start to this idea that Jews have not converted to Christianity ‘cause their hardness of heart, they’ve rejected Jesus. And then you very quickly get the whole concept of stubbornness and blindness. I mean really, really damaging and become part of Christian teaching. But what Justin Martyr next slide is doing in his day is also addressing the fact that Jews haven’t on mass converted to Christianity. Next slide please, if they believe that Christianity is now the truth. If you like, the true interpretation of scripture, well why aren’t Jews converting? And that for me is at the root of Christian antisemitism. It’s the Christian community reacting against the fact that Jews did not convert, totally secure in their own faith. They’re thriving and the more intense the struggle between ideologies, the more persecution and the more vitriolic, the more hatred gets built into Christian thinking. But you have a rare situation actually in Ephesus, we were doing some more research on this, between the Jewish and Christian communities were quite cordial and Justin’s dialogue in a way, his dialogue with Trypho for the Jew. He does accept the differences between those religions and both of those communities in his dialogue. A drawing on the Greek version of the Bible makes it a bit easier I guess for his writings it’s generally cordial. There’s a bit of antisemitism, anti Judaism, not quite antisemitism yet. And at this point there are still Jewish Christians in Justin Martyr’s community who are remaining within Judaism. So there are parts still of the church, say broadly, some communities that still where the Jewish Christians within it are still seeing themselves as part of Judaism, keeping everything that’s Jewish and going to synagogue.

And there are still also Gentiles being attracted to Judaism as Judaism, which of course Judaism at this time is not a missionary religion and potentially a very small window pre-Jesus they had a little sort of, I mean it was academic papers being written on that. But by and large of course there is no missionary, no missionary activity at all by the Jewish communities. But gentiles want to convert to Judaism. So you’ve got that mix in and you’ve got Gentiles who want to convert to Christianity, okay, simple on one level but some of them want to become Jewish Christians first. So you’ve still got this complete mess if you like. This muddle of identity of communities where there are no clear boundaries because the congregations are if you like doing their own thing. And of course that’s no good from the point of view of the priests and the leaders of the church who are trying to impose an orthodoxy on these communities, on these congregations. Next slide please. It’s far more complex than we imagined. So we’ve got this imaginary dialogue between Justin Martyr himself, as a Christian philosopher and Trypho. And so as I’ve concluded there, it reflects theological disagreements amongst both of them and it’s an imaginary dialogue as I said, it didn’t really happen as far as we can tell, but it’s not yet virulent antisemitism. Next slide please. So couple of quotes from Trypho the Jew, Justin Martyr says, “Especially excluded from eternal salvation, are they who in their synagogues have cursed and still do curse those who believe in that very Christ.

There is no other way than this. You’ve come to know our Christ, be baptised with a baptism that cleanses your sin and thus live a life free of sin.” We are not quite as original sin, that view comes with Augustine of Hippo. But you can see it’s not exactly pro the Jewish community. You can see the tensions there, but it’s not yet antisemitism. Next slide please. But Justin Martyr does go on to develop a sort of theology of replacement. He endorses that replacement that the Jews have been replaced, that faith has been replaced by the church. The most problematic I think of those early church fathers comes from Melito of Sardis. So he’s around in the second century. He actually dies around again, we don’t know exactly, 180 CE. He’s bishop of Sardis, he has power and he’s compiled, as I’ve said, the the earliest known Christian Cannon of the Old Testament. So he’s coined the term Old Testament as far as we can tell, he’s the first church father to actually refer to the Hebrew scriptures as the Old Testament. He is also the first to make the charge of deicide and that would stick in the church for 2000 years. Next slide please. And if we look at the background to Melito of Sardis, it’s absolutely fascinating. There are archaeological remains in Sardis. I don’t know if any of you who have been to look at these, these are remains of the church, one of the churches in Sardis, quite extensive, wouldn’t you say? Next slide please. But even more fascinating, these are the ruins of the synagogue, a massive synagogue and Sardis had one of the largest, I think at that time, synagogue, well outside of what was then Palestine in the diaspora. I mean look at how humongous synagogue. And you can imagine, you can just see now that the power struggle between those communities. Judaism was very much thriving and bishop of Sardis, you know this is what he’s dealing with.

He believes that his community is the orthodox community. It’s true inheritors of the scriptures. And just down the road they’ve got this massive synagogue with massive community that’s totally not interested in the church itself and completely thriving doing its own thing. And I think that puts a whole new perspective on things and it might help to understand why we get so early this development of anti Judaism, which to our shame, the church keeps going for 2000 years with this antisemitism. Next slide please. Next slide please, yeah, so the debate between those two communities is over the interpretation of scripture, who has the correct interpretation of scripture and that’s how the anti-Jewish traditions begin to emerge. Because if you issue polemic, it’s much, much easier to destroy your competition if you over-exaggerate, if you are polemical in what you write about them. And that’s what’s beginning to happen. The continuing, as I’ve written there, existence of Judaism not only in what was then Palestine, but also in the diaspora. It’s a threat to Christians because Gentiles who are converting to Christianity, some are also still interested in going to synagogue and being partly Jewish Christians first, it’s all kind of mixed up with this physical threat, it’s competition. That’s how it’s perceived by the church fathers. And so Melito of Sardis, his writings on Pascha, which is one of the Easter homilies that he writes, is one of the earliest traditionally called in the. In the anti-Jewish tradition. So now formally we can see the beginnings of anti Judaism soon tips into antisemitism proper. Next slide please. I mentioned just now on Pascha.

This is his Easter homily and going forwards pretty much without exception, the church fathers for centuries hereafter would write homilies at key times, particularly at Easter. Sometimes they would write them to coincide with the Jewish festivals. They were always a polemic against the Jewish community, certain images of Jews being propagated in them and actually being preached in the churches. This one in particular written by Melito of Sardis, you can see a sort of fragment of it, is a commentary on Exodus 12. And in it he very clearly, it’s his interpretation is exegesis if you like. On Exodus 12, he’s contrasting very clearly now the old and new covenants Christianity, he’s bringing in views that it’s superior, it’s new covenant. And again, reiterating and reinforcing the fact that it is a superseded Judaism, even though the Jewish community down the road is thriving, he is staking his claim that this is the true community and he’s now starting to bring in Passover language to describe the person of Christ, Jesus Christ being sort of post historical Jesus. And that all scriptures, all of them, Hebrew Bible, even those that didn’t make it into the Hebrew Bible, they’re pointing, the prophets also. All of those, Isaiah, they’re all pointing to Christ, to none other than Jesus himself. Next slide please. So Melito, as I said just now, is the first Christian to accuse the Jews of deicide. we have some pretty near the mark in the New Testament, but they don’t go as far as accusing Jews of deicide, killing Jesus. His blood be upon us, upon our children. Matthew, we discussed, but that’s not deicide, Melito is the first to say that in killing Jesus, the Jews have killed God. Now Melito has crossed a line. And this became official church teaching for 2000 years. And I’m pretty sure all of the churches have now actually renounced the charge of deicide, the Roman Catholic Church did it of course in Nostra Atar in 1965. And in it he says, “Oh Lawless Israel, what is this unprecedented crime you committed? You lie dead but he has risen from the dead.”

So you’ve got this whole horrific imagery that Israel, the Jewish religion is dead, whereas the Christianity is vibrant. That clearly isn’t the case on a physical level in Sardis, but a dangerous line has now been crossed and one that subsequent church fathers would in re-introduce into their own teachings and would endorse. Next slide please. So I’m just going to make a couple more before we finish for today and take up next week. And so this struggle with the church fathers in their communities, they’re trying to bring this orthodoxy, they’re trying to impose this, they’re fighting heresies within the Christian heresies. They’re fighting a vibrant Jewish community. And that goes on for another 200 years until another key pivotal moment. I think as cataclysmic you one could argue for the history of Christian, Jewish relations as a destruction of the temple, in 325, the conversion of emperor constant Constantine, the Roman emperor, head of the Holy Roman empire, he converts to Christianity and his way of unifying the Roman empire is to impose Christianity as the official religion of the empire. And now you have church and state so entwined that political power becomes religious power and now the church can move forward knowing that it’s got the backing of the Roman emperor himself, hugely damaging for Christian, Jewish relations and that ongoing power struggle. Next slide please. So it has huge implications as I just said. Number one for the Christian persecution of Jews because although it looks like there’s no evidence that we can find that Constantine ever persecuted Jews himself, subsequently, now it becomes a symbol of power. Actually, subsequent Christian communities begin, as do some of the emperors, begin to persecute the Jewish communities. And going into the mediaeval period, of course, the kings taking away Jewish wealth, restricting the church, restricting Jewish occupations.

He’s very much influenced by his own mother Helena, who I believe was one of the founding figures in the Holy in Jerusalem. Perhaps correct me if I’ve got that wrong, but of course he becomes quite revered in many ways in all of the Orthodox churches, not just in the Roman Catholic world, but in the Eastern Orthodox churches. Those church fathers have a power now, they are linked very closely church and state. And that becomes so in the Russian Orthodox later and in the other countries. But certainly now we have a very, very different scenario and the tip of the balance of what’s happening to the Jewish communities where the church has been given the greatest power it could possibly have to take its message forward to entwine the church and state so closely to have them so intertwined means that it become and does become an instrument of physical persecution based on Christian teaching that develops even further is antisemitism going forwards.

So that’s what we’re going to look at next time. We’re going to look at John Chrysostom, We’re going to look at Cyril of Alexandria and Augustine of Hippo and we’re going to go into see how they’ve influenced and their anti Judaism and antisemitism, their views of Jews get taken up in the mediaeval period with horrifying consequences. So I hope you found that helpful as a backdrop to the historical situation to understand the history today between the development of those ideas and to understand the history, I think today is so, so important and I think we will need to still work on what to do with this very difficult history. 'Cause clearly antisemitism has not gone away. It’s found itself in new guises as well. How do we deal with that today? I think by understanding the history and working through together how to progress and to deal with that. So I look forward to seeing you next time, next week.