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Chapter  The Challenge of Unbelief: Knowing Christian Truth Through Jewish Scripture Aptly borrowing from Claude Lévi-Strauss’s structuralist theory of myth, Miri Rubin observed that medieval Christians found Jews to be ‘‘very good to think with.’’1 Jews served as an important symbolic construct for medieval Christian writers and so appeared in all sorts of contexts, some of which had little or nothing to do with concerns about real Jews. Jewish unbelief was a serious problem for Christians, not only in a real sense, but also in a theoretical one. While Dominican friars gave themselves over to an effort to conquer real Jewish unbelief and to bring contemporary Jews into the Christian fold, others found Jewish unbelief in itself to present a philosophical as well as a theological problem. Ongoing Jewish unbelief was a puzzle particularly for those exegetes who accepted that Hebrew Scripture was key to an understanding of God’s Word and that the Jews held critical insights into Scripture’s literal sense. It was difficult to reconcile persistent Jewish unbelief with the notion that Jewish Scripture, properly read, pointed the way to Christian truth. That Christian truth could be proved through Jewish Scripture was self-evident to most Christian theologians in the Middle Ages. Medieval Christian theology assumed an inherent, unbreakable connection between the Old and New Testaments, as everything promised in the Old Testament was held to have been fulfilled in the New. Christian Hebraism was predicated upon the notion that a better, fuller understanding of Old Testament Scripture would necessarily lead to a better, fuller understanding of the entire history of salvation. When the language of reason entered the schools in the twelfth and thirteenth centuries with its emphasis on rational foundations of belief, theologians embraced the language of philosophy and proclaimed the essential rationality of Christian faith.2 The Dominican mission to the Jews was built upon the assumption that the Hebrew Bible and  Chapter  even postbiblical rabbinic interpretations of the Bible could be used as proof to demonstrate rationally and conclusively the Christian faith. Persistent Jewish unbelief in the face of such compelling evidence was especially troubling, according to Jeremy Cohen, who has argued that the early medieval conception of the Jew as blinded from truth shifted over the course of the thirteenth century to a conception of the Jew as a deliberate disbeliever, rejecting clear evidence that should have led any rational mind to Christian truth.3 During the latter part of the thirteenth century, however, a philosophical challenge to such confidence arose in the schools, particularly in Franciscan circles, as new epistemological theories, launched in large part by Robert Grosseteste and Roger Bacon and then transformed by the secular theologian Henry of Ghent (d. ) and the Franciscans Peter Olivi (– ) and John Duns Scotus (–), led scholars to a vigorous debate over knowledge, cognition, and the attainment of certitude.4 Roger Bacon’s widely disseminated cognitive theory, influenced by Aristotle, Avicenna, Averroës, Alhazan, and Grosseteste and based upon the notion of multiplication of species, provided an alternative to Augustine’s emphasis on the role of divine light in the attainment of knowledge, an idea embraced and incorporated into a scholastic framework by Bonaventure and his followers John Pecham, Matthew of Aquasparta, and Roger Marston. Steven Marrone argues that the doctrine of divine illumination in the attainment of ordinary knowledge was already on the wane when Henry of Ghent developed its fullest expression in a series of writings between  and .5 In any case, Henry’s position sparked further debate by a number of Franciscan thinkers, most notably Olivi, Duns Scotus, and, eventually, William of Ockham. As Robert Pasnau explains, ‘‘Medieval theologians took particular interest in human cognition both as a way of establishing the epistemological foundations of theology and as a way of coming to know and to understand God.’’6 Cognition was the concern of the theology faculty because it dealt with the human ability to experience God in the natural world (God’s revelation in material creation) as well as in Scripture (God’s revelation in the Word). The intensity of interest in cognition theory among Franciscans is not surprising, given the order’s emphasis on knowing God through God’s footprint in the natural world. The Franciscan circles where the discussion was most lively included many of the same figures who were prominent in the Christian study of Hebrew and the use of Jewish exegesis outlined in Chapter . Nicholas of [18.188.40.207] Project MUSE...

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