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98 Separation and Polemic peals are apparently made to contemporary as well as past generations ofJews, the politicaland socialrealitiesof life in Sardis suggest quite the opposite. Only when the text is read in isolation from itscontext can an argument like Rengstorf's appear plausible. We have no explicit evidence to show howJews and Christians in Sardis viewed each other. That Melito had to travel toJudea to clarify the content of the Hebrew Bible maysuggest that there waslittle formal contact between them, and perhaps a degree of animosity. It is not improbable that some of the Christianswere convertsfrom Judaism or descendants of such. There may also have been traffic in the other direction. In a number of earlier documents there are suggestions that Gentile Christians in Asia Minor were fascinated by and attracted to Judaism (Ign. Phld. 6:1; Rev.2).Justin is aware of thisdanger (Dial. 47), though he blames it on undue pressure from legalistic Jews. A similar phenomenon apparently provoked John Chrysostom, at a later date, into some of the most deplorable anti­Jewishstatements in early Chris­ tian literature. Here wehave moved into the realm of speculation, but a situation in which church and synagogue were separate entities but where occasional traffic flowed in one or both directions, and where there was a need to defend Quartodeciman practice but refute the charge of judaizing, would go a long way towards explainingMelito's hostility towards the Jews. Quite apart from this, however, it is clear that the very existence of a large, visible, and influential Jewish com­ munity in Sardis would implicitly challenge any Christian claims to the traditions of Israel, encourage a strident tone, and make it most unlikelythat Melito's communities, unless specifically instructed (which they are not), would exclude from the term "Israel" all Jews except those responsible for Jesus' death in the first century. (5) There are a number of hints that Melito,like many of his contem­ poraries, tried to counter the increasingly popular teachings of Mar­ cion. Blanknotes that the titles of many of the sixteen worksattributed to Melito have an anti­Marcionite ring to them22 and, though cautionis required because wecan only guess at their contents and even the titles can be differently construed, it seems probable that Melito was con­ scious of the Marcionitethreat.23 The conscious attempt to clarify the relationship between the two covenants, which shows some points of contact with the gnostic Ptolemaeus,24 the insistence that the one is fulfilled in the other, and the modalist christology which identifies Christ with God and sees him as an active participant not only in Israel's 22 Blank, Meliton, 15­17. 23 Werner, "Melito," 206­207; Hall, On fascha, xli. 24 B. Lohse, "Meliton von Sardes und die Brief des Ptolemaus an Flora," in E. Lohse (ed.), Der Ruf Jesu und Die Antwort der Gemeinde (Gottingen: Vandenhoeck und Ruprecht, 1970), J. Jeremias Festschrift, 179­88. Melito and Israel 99 history (lines 398f., 451f., 582f.) but also in the creation of the Universe (lines 398f., 590f., 710f.) could all have been developed without refer­ ence to the Marcionites, but in the context in which Melito worked it seems unlikely that they were. It has been argued that Tertullian is more anti­Jewishwhen writ­ ing against Marcion than when writing specifically against the Jews,25 and there isno doubt that Marcion posed some awkwardproblems, not the least of which was how to preserve the Old Testament scriptures while resisting Marcion's charge of judaizing—to which, of course, a Quartodeciman would be peculiarly susceptible. Dispute with the Mar­ cionites could have influenced Melito's view of Judaism in twoways: first, by encouraging the preservation of the old covenant by means of its subordination to and fulfilment in the new, with its inevitable deni­ gration of the old and those who continued to live by it; and secondly, in reaction to Marcion's separation ofJesus from the Old Testament God, by encouraging a virtual identification of them which, in turn, trans­ forms the murderers of Jesus into the murderers of God. (6) Melito's christology, in fact, deserves separate consideration. Whether reacting to Marcion or not, the fluid and not entirely consistent christological statements contribute significantly to his views ofJudaism. The identification ofJesuswith the character and attributes of God (lines 41­64), the understanding of the incarnation as the enfleshment of the Creator (lines 451­504), and the assertion that "God is murdered" (line 715) fully justify Hall's succinct summary: "Melito...

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