Anti-Judaism in Early Christianity: Volume 2: Separation and Polemic

6. Melito and Israel

76 Separation and Polemic Aquila, say that the devil enters into his dialogue partner and inspires his speech.67 If another element in the definition of anti­Jewishnessis the asser­ tion that the Jews are being punished for their crucifixion of Jesus, then Justin is guilty, but not to the degree that some other Christian writers are. In Dial. 16.3­4 Justin connects Jewish suffering with their crucifixion of Jesus, but other passages do not make that connection. Jesus was "crucified under Pontius Pilate by your people," saysJustin (Dial. 85.2), but he does not connect that to the destruction of Jerusalem. In sayingthat the destruction ofJerusalem should leadJews to repentance (108.2), he does not say that the destruction is the result of the crucifixion,for which he hasjust blamed theJews (108.2) and he goes on to say that, even though Jews travel around denouncing Jesus as the originator of a godless and lawless sect (hairesis. . . atheos kai anomos) and cursing Christians (108.2,3), yet Christiansdo not hate the Jews but, rather, pray for their repentance (108.3; cf. 133.6). In Dial. 110.6 Justin sees Jewish defeat in (the recent) war as attested in the scriptures, but, again, he does not connect that with the crucifixion (he cites Isaiah). Justin does say that those who persecuted Christ, and continue to persecute him (in his followers), shall,if they do not repent, have no inheritance in the holy mountain (26.1). In such a passage, Justin would seem to have preserved some of the "eschatological reser­ vation" that has been noted as characteristic of certain early Christian writings68 —salvation and its benefits are not merely now but also (and definitively) in the future. By way of contrast, one does not find in Justin, for example, the kind of harsh statements about the deserved punishment of the Jews that is set forth in the well­known passage in 1 Thess. 2.14­16or in Eusebius' account of the Christians' flight to Pella during the first Jewish revolt: Then "God's judgment at last overtook them [the Jews] because they had committed so many crimes against the Christ and his apostles, [thejudgment thus]obliterating utterlythat generation of the wicked from among humans" (H.E. 3.5.3). "It was necessary, then, that in the days in which they had disposed of the Saviour and benefactor of all, the Christ of God, they—shut up, as in a 67 Timothy and Aquila, fol. 75v­76r (Conybeare ed., 1898, p. 65): "The demon [daimon; diabolos appears in the line preceding], who hates good, seeing that God was being glorified and worshipped but that his own works were being undone and held in contempt, became extremely angry and entered into a certain Jew named Aquila. Just as, in paradise, he entered the weak vessel, the woman,through the snake, so he now entered into a Jew." In the AltercatioSimonis ludaei et Theophili the devil is also adduced as a cause of theJew's failure to see the Christian truth: 26 (p. 39, lines 3­6); 27 (p. 39, lines 20­22); 28 (p. 40, lines 19­20). 68 On the "eschatological reservation" seeJ.M. Robinson, in Robinson and H. Koester, Trajectories through Early Christianity (Philadelphia: Fortress Press, 1971), 31­35; E. Kasemann, An die Rdmer, Handbuch zum Neuen Testament, 8a (Tubingen: Mohr [Siebeck], 3d edition 1974), 158­59. Justin Martyr's Argument with Judaism 77 prison—should receive the destruction that dogged them from the divine judgment" (H.E. 3.5.6). As to Justin's "eschatological reserva­ tion," one may contrast with it the kind encountered in the Dialogue of PapiscusandPhilo, which focuses on punishment ofJews: from the time they crucified Christ the Jews have been dispersed and persecuted and separated from the temple and the observance of the law; they have been "cast out until the consummation of the age" (heds tes sunteleiastou aidnos).69 To the Gentiles, Papiscus and Philo goes on to say, belong the promises.70 So, too, Justin's Dialogue: along with much other early Christian literature it lays claim to "the promises in a book [the scrip­ tures] which was composed of promises and denunciations. The de­ nunciations, therefore, must belong to theJews."71 Christians, through their interpretations of the scriptures, "disinherited the Jew from his own sacred books at the very moment [following either of two disas­ trous Jewish revolts] when these provided his only [sic] comfort. All the law and the...