Jews, Christians, and the Roman Empire: The Poetics of Power in Late Antiquity

13. Roman Christianity and the Post-Roman West: The Social Correlates of the Contra Iudaeos Tradition

c h A p t e r 1 3 Roman Christianity and the PostRoman West: The Social Correlates of the Contra Iudaeos Tradition pAulA FredrIksen This is for Ora. Christianity was born in an argument over how to understand Jewish texts. While the biblical traditions referred to by Jesus of Nazareth would most likely have been in Hebrew or Aramaic, the texts and the arguments that shaped Christianity’s future were in Greek. Greek did more than make the new movement available to a wider world, both Jewish and pagan. It also made those Hellenistic Jewish texts that most mattered to the movement—the Septuagint (LXX), Paul’s letters, various early gospels—interpretively compatible with three important traditions from pagan high culture: ethnographical stereotyping , forensic rhetoric, and philosophical paideia. From these elements, Christian traditions contra Iudaeos took shape. In this essay, I propose to trace the growth and effects of Christian rhetoric contra Iudaeos in three related but distinct historical moments: in Roman imperial culture pre-Constantine; in Roman Christian culture post-Constantine; and in the Christian culture of post-Roman, post-Arian Spain (589–711 ce). My goal is, first, to understand how this discourse functioned in its communities of origin and, second, to see whether and how the church’s “hermeneutical Jew” (the “Jew” as a figure for wrongly reading the Bible) and the church’s and the government’s “rhetorical Jew” (the “Jew” as a polemical anti-Self) related to the social experience of real Jews—and of real Christians. To what degree, if any, did Christian rhetoric contra Iudaeos shape Roman and post-Roman social reality? 250 Chapter 13 When late first- and early second-century Christians began to dispute with one another over the right way to be Christian, they could turn to two layers of paleo-Christian tradition for their models: the ancient biblical stories in the Septuagint; and the first-century writings of Paul, of the later evangelists , and of other early authors. In the Septuagint, from Exodus to Deuteronomy , God and Moses complained to each other about Israel’s behavior, while prophets thundered against other Jews’ practices and the psalmist lamented their sins. In first-century writings, Paul bitterly criticized his apostolic competitors (“Are they Hebrews? So am I! Are they Israelites? So am I! Are they descendants of Abraham? So am I! Are they ministers of Christ? . . . I am a better one!”; 2 Cor 11.22–23), while the evangelists’ Jesus took on scribes, Pharisees, Sadducees, and priests. In brief, these Hellenistic Jewish texts, with all their intra-Jewish arguments, were a gold mine for later Christian rhetoric contra Iudaeos. These criticisms of Jews and of Judaism native to Jewish texts were enhanced by the “rhetorical Jews” of learned pagan ethnography. Empire had provided ample opportunity for Graeco-Roman literate elites to comment on barbarian “others.” These others served as an occasion to articulate the inverse of the ideal Self.1 Thus, Greeks were virile, while Persians were effeminate; Greeks were rational, while Egyptians were irrational; Romans were pious, while Jews were impious; Romans were civilized, while Germans were savage; and so on.2 Graeco-Roman ethnographers did attribute terrible behaviors to Jews: Jews, they said, were antisocial, secretive, clannish, and sexually profligate ; they sacrificed humans and occasionally ate them.3 But these ethnographers also put Egyptians, Persians, Scythians, Gauls, Britons, and Germans to such use. The fact that we know so much more about pagan anti-Jewish stereotypes than we do about the stereotyping of these others is directly attributable to the activity of later Christians, who preserved the hostile pagan remarks against Jews while augmenting them with genres all their own.4 The adversarial conventions of Graeco-Roman rhetorical culture also enhanced Christian discourse contra Iudaeos. These modes of argumentation had deep roots, which went back to the days of the classical polis. Two later social settings had radically stabilized and perpetuated the polis curriculum: institutions of secondary education (Hellenistic gymnasia earlier; Roman-era schools later) and the chambers of municipal governments (whether city councils or courts of law). From one generation to the next, the learned and literate— for the most part sons of urban elites—were taught how to present a persuasive case for and against some proposition by orally rehearsing traditional Post-Roman West 251 arguments and their traditional, coordinating counterarguments. This mode of education, propelled by and propelling public disputation, instructed the student...