EASTER QUINTET ON THE CHURCH’S DAWN// Part II// From ‘Judaism for Gentiles’ to the ‘Judaism of Gentiles’

By the early second century AD gentile forms of Christianity began to dominate sources. Exactly how this transition occurred is mysterious as Christ’s original Jewish followers in Jerusalem were eliminated in the Roman destruction of the city in AD 70––though Eusebius claimed remnants fled to Pella in north-west Jordan––non-Christian literary sources in Hebrew are late (the earliest, the Mishnah, was not edited until c.200), and Christian Jews did not leave much of an archaeological record.[1]  A generation after Paul, the Gospels presented Jesus as arguing with all types of Jew, from scribes and Pharisees to Sadducees and priests. Moreover, Christ in John’s gospel reviled the Jews claiming that ‘if God were your Father you would love me… But you belong to your father the devil, and follow his desires’ (Jn. 8:42). Subsequently, John of Patmos attacked Jews that failed to embrace Christ as those who ‘belong to the synagogue of Satan’ (Rev. 2:9). Notable, however, is that while invective regularly pocked intra-Jewish disputes, the failure to embrace Christ––as Jews appear to have Christ en bloc by the second century––transmuted from an in-group transgression to a slur against all Jews who became innately obdurate, mendacious and miserly.

The tension over whether Jews were God’s first born, Christ’s brothers (his disciples were Jews), or among the deicidal damned runs through the synoptic gospels. Most accounts are clear, however, that Jesus was popular among Jews: his triumphal entry into Jerusalem drew huge crowds, for example, not least to see the man who had raised Lazarus (Jn 12:9). Moreover, the Pharisees looked to avoid killing Jesus in certain times and places to avoid popular riots (Mk. 14:1) and Pilate’s prosecution would have been pointless if Jesus had drawn few followers. The synoptics, however, ultimately push Pilate’s legal responsibility for Jesus’ death into the background in order to foreground the guilt of Caiaphas and the population of Jerusalem. This sentiment crescendos with Matthew’s Jesus accusing the Jews of murdering the prophets (Matt. 22:30) and the Jewish crowds admitting guilt in a corporate manner (Matt. 27:25). The book of Acts then reinforced the same message by recording Peter’s accusation that the Jews had crucified Christ (2:22) and shared a responsibility for the act, a position not reversed until Paul VI’s Nostra Aetate (1965).[2] Christian gentiles portrayed the catastrophic results of revolts against Rome (AD 66-73) including Bar Kokhba (AD 132-35) as the result of God’s desertion. Exiled without a temple, Justin explained that such catastrophes ‘have happened to [Jews] in justice for slaying the Just One.’[3] Rome would ‘never have dominated Judea,’ added Tertullian, if she had not ‘transgressed to the utmost against Christ.’[4] The Jews committed the greatest sin of all time, concurred Origen, a crime that resulted in their abandonment by God.[5]

The flipside of the Jewish fall was Pilate's rise. In John’s gospel, Pilate proclaimed Jesus innocent and presented him to the crowd with the famous words ‘Ecce Homo’ (Jn. 19:5). Pilate himself carved the plaque for the cross reading ‘Jesus of Nazareth, King of the Jews’ (Jn. 19:19), and when a bystander suggested it be amended to read ‘This man said “I am King of the Jews,”’ Pilate refused. Finally, it was the fifth magistrate of Judea who turned Jesus’ body over to Joseph of Arimathea for burial before sunset (Jn. 19:38).

Such details informed the extra-biblical legends about Pilate that circulated from the second century onwards. Apocryphal tales framed him as an early gentile convert and Tertullian wrote that Pilate became a ‘Christian in his own convictions’ and had sent word of Jesus to emperor Tiberius, who also would have converted if imperial ideology had permitted.[6] Moreover, Irenaeus reported that the Carpocratians (Gnostics from Alexandria) claimed to possess a portrait of Jesus painted by Pilate.[7] 

Augustine suggested that Pilate not only recognised Jesus’ innocence but also his divinity, and that he had consequently converted to Christianity. Pilate was further compared with the magi, claiming that while the latter were the first to perceive Jesus’ divinity at his ‘rising,’ or birth, Pilate was the first to note it at his ‘setting,’ or death.[8] In this vein, the Ethiopic church still venerates Pilate as a saint and a martyr, celebrated on June 25, almost certainly off the strength of Eusebius’ claim that while Pilate had convinced the emperor Tiberius to add Christ to the Roman pantheon, Caligula forced him to commit suicide.[9]

Under the Church Fathers the intra-Jewish conflict swelled into a corpus that repudiated not just a single Jewish decision––already stretched to account for the entire gens––but the Jewish tradition, which became retrospectively destined to scorn the God that had chosen them. Thinkers such as Justin argued that the Jewish tradition amounted to little more than a tedious thread of misunderstandings in which the Lord resorted to stop-gap measures in order to prevent further moral deterioration, only for such initiatives to be mistaken as ideals. God, for example, had never desired blood sacrifice but allowed it to distract from temptation of idolatry.[10] Ancestral bumf, however, had no place in a world in which Christ had minted both a new covenant and a new (universal) humanity (Eph. 2:4).

In brief, Jews were persistently bewildered by God’s intentions and had proven unworthy of their own history. This meant their moral force was spent and that authority over their literary traditions was best transferred to those who had recognized God acting in history. The Christian ability to discern Christ, as well as signposts to him in scripture, threw shade on those who had dropped the baton and––Caliban-like––fumbled the divine script in a tragicomedy of errors.

The literary authority of Christians snowballed as they highlighted countless allegorical nuances and coded references to Christ throughout the Old Testament. This allowed scriptures to be disconnected from Jewish communities, providing a space in which Christ and Paul could be made to seem anti-Jewish rather than pursuing the fulfilment/fruition of Judaism (as Christ noted in Matt. 5:17 and Paul in Rom. 11:15), and the Church could claim to be the New Israel––with its origins in the dozen disciples rather than the dozen tribes of Israel––hence Paul’s analogy of the olive tree with the trunk never technically being replaced but in which the living parts are gentile grafts (Rom. 11).

The idea that Christians had discerned a higher calling in the Old Testament was indebted to the neoplatonic theory that the highest god could only be approached through the mind via correct thought, a view Christians adopted to show correct opinion (orthodoxia) ran through holy literature and provided access to the one true God. Only lower gods, daimones, were attracted to blood sacrifices of Jewish ritual. Despite such rituals being defunct since AD 70, it amounted to a devastating argument due to its meme-worthiness. Soon the idea that Jews were obsessed with blood sacrifices or infested with demons contaminated almost every story, supercharging events with unshakeable tropes.

This led to confusion. Paulinus, bishop of Nola (d.431), for example asked how Paul could state that Jews were ‘beloved of God because of their forefathers’ (Rom. 11:28) if they were also damned for being enemies of Christ? Put simply, ‘If the Jews were beloved of God, how will they perish? And if they do not believe in Christ, how will they not perish?’[11] Augustine advocated sticking to supersessionist theories, explaining that Israel’s redemption did not refer to the Israel of the flesh but the spiritual Israel, the Church.[12]

Orthodoxy’s developing views on Jews did not lack competition. Two extreme positions were particularly popular: Valentinus’ notion that Jewish scriptures contained highly complex codes for unlocking a mystical cosmogony that promised redemption––a claim made credible by the fact it was passed down to Valentinus via another Gnostic thinker, Theudas, who was supposedly one of Paul’s followers––gained traction for example.[13] As did Marcion’s claim that Jewish scriptures formed a dark, erroneous realm led by a lower god, a demiurge, whose risible will was best interpreted by Jews, while any salvation was to be scraped from Paul’s letters and a version of Luke’s gospel.

Moreover, though some countered heretics by comparing them to Jews––who provided a useful example of the negative consequences that followed falling away from the Christian side of history––others deployed Jews as examples of a people more touched by the divine than any other. Jews were therefore celebrated as authorities on authenticating relics or martyrdom accounts in the Holy Land; Jerome translated parts of the Old Testament from Hebrew––which he learned from a Jewish convert––rather than traditional Greek texts; and most importantly, Augustine distinguished Jewish law from gentile alternatives as sourced from God rather than demons, meaning the Jewish culture of Jewish Christians could not become obsolete like gentile equivalents.

Roman culture inherited this ambivalence. According to Roman law, Judaism was ‘prohibited by no law,’ protected religious assembly, and forbade the destruction of synagogues.[14] Yet the law also characterized the faith as a ‘feral,’ ‘nefarious sect’ which ‘polluted.’ Furthermore, Jews were barred from positions in the military, law and imperial service––manifestations of a deeper cultural turn which demoted Jewish culture to a ‘perversity… alien to the Roman empire.’ [15] In brief, Jewishness was not just an abortive form of Christianity but an abhorrent way of being Roman.

NOTES [1] Eusebius, H.E., 3,5,3. [2] ‘Nostra Aetate,’ Vatican Archive, October 28, 1965. https://www.vatican.va/archive/hist_councils/ii_vatican_council/documents/vat-ii_decl_19651028_nostra-aetate_en.html 

[3] Justin, Trypho, 16.

[4] Tertullian, Apology, 26.3.

[5] Origen, Against Celsus, 4.32.

[6] Tertullian, Apologetics, 21 [7] Irenaeus, Adversus Haereses, 1.25.6. Although Irenaeus condemned this kind of image worship, he did not dispute the sect’s claim to own an ‘authentic’ life portrait of Jesus, or that Pilate might really have painted such a picture.  [8] Augustine, Sermons, 201. 

[9] Eusebius, H.E., 2.2.7.

[10] Justin, Trypho, 32.

[11] Letter, 121.2,11.

[12] Letter,149.2,19.

[13] Clement of Alexandria, Stromateis 7.17

[14] Theodosian Code, 16.8.9

[15] Theodosian Code, 16.9.19