ISRAEL IN THE AGE OF THE CHURCH

Early Jewish-Christianity

The first Christians were all Jews who initially still frequented the Synagogue and who would have considered it unthinkable that their new faith was a break with their Israelite heritage. There was no reason why Jewish-Christians should not have had their sons circumcised or have continued celebrating the Jewish festivals commemorating God's great works of salvation of the Old Testament.

This self-evident view began to be challenged after the apostles decided that Gentiles could be admitted into the Church without first having to convert to Judaism and be subjected to the Law (Acts 15). Suddenly, the Judeo-Christians were faced with the difficult task of having to welcome a sudden influx of believers from pagan backgrounds as equals in Christ while not wanting to scandalize the unbelieving Jews whom they still wished to win for the Messiah. How were they now to relate to Judaism and to the Torah? Even Peter was not exempt from the difficult situations this problem raised (Gal. 2:11-14).

Paul's position regarding this issue is often misunderstood. He is, of course, emphatic in his rejection of all Judaizing tendencies that sought to impose the Law on Gentiles, and he also makes it clear that Jewish believers are justified by faith in Christ apart from their observance of the Law (Rom. 3:28, Gal. 2:16). But other passages, often overlooked, bear testimony to the fact that Paul did not simply do away with the Torah for Jewish-Christians. After all, he called the law and commandments "holy, righteous, and good" (Rom. 7:12) and had Timothy - whose mother was Jewish - circumcised (Acts 16:3). Also overlooked is the passage where the brothers in Jerusalem rejoice that thousands of Jews have believed and are zealous for the Torah (Acts 21:20) and where Paul agrees to make a vow to quell the false rumors claiming that he had allegedly taught "all the Jews who are among the Gentiles to forsake Moses, telling them not to circumcise their children or observe the customs." He should take this vow, they tell him, so that "all will know that there is nothing in what they have been told about you but that you yourself live in observance of the law" (Acts 21:24). While under arrest in Rome, Paul told the local leaders of the Jews that he had "done nothing against our people or the customs of our ancestors" (Acts 28:17). Long after he wrote his epistles to the Galatians and to the Romans on justification by faith apart from the works of the law, Paul was still a Torah-abiding Judeo-Christian who apparently never discouraged Jewish-Christians from keeping the law (as long as they did not see in it the means for salvation). He was apparently just as misunderstood then as now.

The Parting of Ways

Meanwhile, the conflict between Church and Synagogue began in earnest with the first Jewish persecutions of Christians, quickly escalating after the death of Stephen and the scattering of the Church throughout Judea and Samaria. Paul in his missionary travels always brought the gospel "to the Jew first" in the Synagogues, but this earned him stonings, flagellations, imprisonments and threats of death at Jewish hands. The split between Church and Synagogue was exacerbated after the Great Jewish War and the destruction of the Temple in 70 A.D. Remembering Jesus' prophecies about Jerusalem being surrounded by foreign armies, the Judeo-Christians fled the city before the final catastrophe, thereby reinforcing their image as traitors in the eyes of the Jews who did not believe in Jesus. At the same time, the Christians saw in the destruction of the Temple the confirmation of their belief that the scepter had passed from the Jewish religious leadership to the Church. It was the end of Old Testament Judaism.

Deprived of Temple and priesthood, Judaism was forced to redefine itself in the years following the fall of Jerusalem, with its worship now revolving around Synagogue and Torah rather than Temple and sacrifices. In order to exclude the Judeo-Christians from the Synagogues, which they still attended, the rabbis inserted in the daily prayers a malediction of "heretics" (aimed towards Christians), which the Judeo-Christians could not in good conscience recite. The final break between Church and Synagogue occurred during the next Jewish-Roman war in 132 A.D., when the Jews hailed their leader Bar Kokhba as the Messiah, thereby dashing the final hopes of the Christians that the Jews would recognize the messiahship of Jesus. The Romans crushed the Jewish rebellion and razed Jerusalem, renaming it "Aelia Capitolina" and forbidding Jews to even approach the city. Though Jews had already been living across the Mediterranean world for a long time, this new disaster marked the beginning of the post-Christic Diaspora, during which the Jews would wander through history deprived of their Holy City and of the land that God had promised to their ancestors.

At the same time, the increasingly Gentile Church was becoming less and less tolerant of the Judeo-Christians' identification with their natural roots. Both the Synagogue and the Church displayed animosity toward Jewish Christians who tried to maintain any semblance of the Jewish heritage. "Buffeted and excluded by the policy of the Jewish community for holding on to his belief in Jesus, the Jewish Christian was in turn castigated by the Christian Church for holding on to any semblance of Judaism. Jewish Christians were indeed men and women caught in the middle."[2] With the legalization of Christianity in the fourth century, massive conversions from the Roman world and increased persecution for Jews (including Jewish Christians) resulted in the Church becoming increasingly "gentilized" until the Judeo-Christian presence virtually disappeared from its ranks. A few centuries after the Jewish Messiah had come to his people Israel, the Church had become a completely Gentile entity and would continue her pilgrimage through history largely divorced from her Jewish roots and heritage.

Israel in the Patristic Writings

Edward Flannery, in his classic book The Anguish of the Jews writes: "Jews generally are acutely aware of the history of anti-Semitism, simply because it comprises so large a portion of Jewish history. Christians, on the contrary, are all but totally ignorant of it, for the simple reason that anti-Semitism does not appear in their history books... The pages Jews have memorized have been torn from our histories of the Christian era."[3] It is an imperative if unlikable task to sketch out the history of the Church's relationship to the Jews if we are to accurately grasp Israel's intimate connection with the life of Christ up to our present day.

The uneasy co-existence of the Jewish people who had rejected their own Messiah and of the Church fighting for her survival in the Roman Empire became the occasion for a profusion of apologetical writings from the Church Fathers concerning Israel and Judaism. This theological offensive against Judaism would shape the Christian's view of the Jews up to our own day. Flannery writes: "The refutation and debasement of Judaism progressively became integral elements of [the Church's] apologetics; among its apologists, there were signs of a rising irritation, the beginnings of a certain Judaeophobia."[4]

It is in the patristic period that what is known today as "replacement theology," "theology of substitution," or "revocationism" emerged and gained popular acceptance. This idea proposed that the election of Israel had been revoked, and that the Church was now the "New" and "True Israel." Nicholls points out how two major themes run through this controversial literature: "The first is the rejection of the Jew by God and the election of the Gentiles as the true Israel in their place. The second is the inferiority of Jewish law, worship and scriptural interpretation and their spiritual fulfillment in Christianity... Central to both themes is the idea that the Jews rejected and killed Jesus, the Messiah sent to them by God. This is why they have lost their status as the chosen people."[5] He continues:

The rejection of the Jews has its counterpart in the choice of the Gentile church to succeed them as God's chosen people...The contrast between the Jews and the nations, a basic theme of the Bible itself, is turned backward and given the opposite of its original meaning: now the Gentiles instead of the Jews are the people of God. After the end of the first century, few writers attempt to maintain the Pauline idea that Israel is the stock on to which the Gentile church is grafted. The election of the Gentiles and the rejection of the Jews have to go inextricably together...Since the Jews never accepted God, the covenant with them was abortive, and it was replaced by one with a people who did accept God, the prophet and the Messiah. In short, the Church is, and always has been, the true Israel.[6]

Therefore, "the claim of Jesus and his disciples that the kingdom of God was in the midst of their contemporaries has been transformed into the claim of the Catholic Church to supersede the Jewish people as the elect people of God."[7] But this is not all: Even the Hebrew Scriptures are interpreted as "a remorseless denunciation of the Jews, while the Church, in turn, is presented as totally perfect."[8] All criticisms and curses of the Old Testament are directed towards the Jews while all promises of blessings are now seized by the Church as her own.

The Fathers we will now quote show how easily this anti-Judaic replacement theology turned into fiery anti-Semitic rhetoric. Though the Church condemned the champion of early Christian anti-Judaism, Marcion, who rejected the Old Testament entirely, the writings of many other Fathers show a hostility to Judaism at least equal in virulence.

The whole of the epistle of Barnabas, for example, is an exposition of the Church as the true Israel. It attempts to demonstrate how Jews misunderstood the Old Testament, "which, the writer asserts, was never intended to be observed literally, since all therein is but a prefiguring of Christ and the Church."[9] Not only is the Church the true Israel, it has always been so, even in Old Testament times. The Christians claim the whole of the Scriptures for themselves and antedate the rejection of the Jews and the emergence of the Church to the beginning of revealed history. Thus Ignatius of Antioch writes: "Christianity did not believe in Judaism, but Judaism in Christianity."[10] Justin Martyr in his Dialogue with Trypho[11] St. Hippolytus in his Demonstratio Adversus Judaeos reminds the Jews that their misfortunes are the result of them having killed Christ. He warns of the ills "that will befall them in the future age on account of the contumacy and audacity which they exhibited toward the Prince of Peace."[12] Origen, in his work Against Celsus Moreover, he states, "we say with confidence that they will never be restored to their former condition. For they committed a crime of the most unhallowed kind, in conspiring against the Savior of the human race."[13] says of the Bible to Trypho the Jew: "your scriptures, or rather not yours but ours, for you, though you read them, do not catch the spirit that is in them." writes that the Jews' rejection of Jesus "has resulted in their present calamity and exile."

With the conversion of the Roman Empire to Christianity in the fourth century came a sharp increase in the intensity of the Christian diatribe against the Jews. Park notes that Eusebius of Cesarea and Hilary of Poitiers present to the pagan world "a complete caricature of the history of the Jews."[14] Eusebius founds it on a distinction between "Hebrews" and "Jews": The ancient Hebrews and patriarchs were, in fact, Christians whereas the Jews, in contrast, are a less worthy people for whom the law was a necessity. Similarly, Hilary reinterprets Jewish history for the purpose of proving Jews a perpetually perverse people, despised by God. St. Gregory of Nyssa describes the Jews as "slayers of the Lord, murderers of the prophets, enemies of God, haters of God, adversaries of grace, enemies of their fathers' faith, advocates of the devil, brood of vipers, slanderers, scoffers, men of darkened minds, leaven of the Pharisees, congregation of demons, sinners, wicked men, stoners, and haters of goodness."[15] St. Jerome calls them "serpents," and "haters of all men." Their image is Judas, and their psalms and prayers are the "braying of donkeys."[16]

St. John Chrysostom's name, the "golden-mouthed," seems ironical in light of his writings concerning the Jews. He calls them "most miserable of all men...lustful, rapacious, greedy, perfidious bandits, inveterate murderers, destroyers, men possessed by the devil who debauchery and drunkenness have given them the manners of the pig and the lusty goat...they are impure and impious, and murder their offspring and immolate them to the devil." Their Synagogue is "an assembly of criminals...a den of thieves...a cavern of devils, an abyss of perdition, the domicile of the devil, as is also the souls of the Jews." Their rites are "criminal and impure;" their religion is "a disease." Why these denunciations? Because of the Jews' "odious assassination of Christ" which lies at the roots of their degradation and woes." For this deicide, there is "no expiation possible, no indulgence, no pardon." Vengeance is without end; Jews, moreover, will always remain without temple or nation. Their rejection and dispersion was "done by the wrath of God and his absolute abandon of you." Thus the Jews live "under the yoke of servitude without end." God hates the Jews and always hated the Jews, and therefore so should Christians: "He who can never love Christ enough will never have done fighting against those [Jews] who hate him." "Flee, then, their assemblies, flee their houses, and far from venerating the synagogue because of the books it contains hold it in hatred and aversion for the same reason." Chrysostom himself gives the example: "I hate the synagogue precisely because it has the law and prophets...I hate the Jews also because they outrage the law."[17]

What is particularly troubling about Chrysostom's language is the context. Christianity in Chrysostom's time was no longer threatened by Judaism, and he never experienced persecution from the Jews. Park explains: "The only explanation of his bitterness contained in the sermons themselves is the too close fellowship between Jews and Christians in Antioch. There is no single suggestion that the Jews were immoral or vicious; no suggestion that Christians were actually corrupted by the contact, either in their morals or their orthodoxy."[18] Jean Daniélou continues: "If the imprecations of a Chrysostom against the Jews are so violent, it is because in the fourth century Judaism had not ceased to be highly attractive to Christians."[19]

In the midst of this ever-increasing Christian anti-Semitism, efforts to convert the Jews to Christ did not cease. The Church's evangelistic approach, however, was a far cry from Paul's attitude of becoming as a Jew to win the Jews and becoming as one under the law to win those under the law. Jews who converted to Christianity were now violently forced to completely renounce their Jewish heritage. This is illustrated by the following professions of faith that were extracted from them on Baptism:

I do here and now renounce every rite and observance of the Jewish religion, detesting all its most solemn ceremonies and tenets that in former days I kept and held. In future I will practice no rite or celebration connected with it, nor any custom of my past error...I promise that I will never return to the vomit of Jewish superstition. Never again will I fulfill any of the offices of Jewish ceremonies to which I was addicted, nor ever more hold them dear.[20]

I renounce the whole worship of the Hebrews, circumcision, all its legalisms, unleavened bread, Passover, the sacrificing of lambs, the feasts of Weeks, Jubilees, Trumpets, Atonement, Tabernacles, and all the other Hebrew feasts...and I absolutely renounce every custom and institution of the Jewish laws.[21]

If I wander from the straight path in any way and defile the holy Faith, and try to observe any rites of the Jewish sect...then may all the curses of the law fall upon me...may there fall upon me and upon my house and all my children all the plagues which smote Egypt, and to the horror of others may I suffer in addition the fate of Dathan and Abiram, so that the earth shall swallow me alive, and after I am deprived of this life I shall be handed over to the eternal fire, in the company of the devil and his angels, sharing with the dwellers in Sodom and with Judas the punishment of burning.[22]

Thus we see how the Church spared no efforts to separate herself from her spiritual parent and sever all ties with Jews and Judaism.

St. Augustine, milder than Chrysostom, is known for his theory of the Jews as a "witness-people" whose role is still providential. They give witness to the truth of the Christian faith by their dispersion and their woes, serving as "slave-librarian" of the Church. Because they rejected Christ, they are condemned to perpetually wander across the world as a sign of their unbelief. At the beginning of the Middle Ages, this was the commonly accepted notion in Christendom that the "wandering Jew" is destined to move about the world until the end of time, never finding rest.

Christian Anti-Semitism in the Middle Ages

The next logical steps after anti-Jewish theology and anti-Semitic rhetoric were discriminatory anti-Jewish legislation and persecution that peaked in the high Middle Ages. Flannery writes, "While the Church and the Christian state were at the zenith of their power and influence, the sons of Israel reached the nadir of their unending oppression. This was the age of Innocent III and Henry II, Gregory VII and Henry IV, of the Crusades, of Aquinas and Dante, of St. Francis, of Notre Dame and Rheims Cathedrals; but it was no less the age of anti-Jewish hecatombs, expulsions, calumnious myths, autos-da-fé, of the badge, the ghetto, and many other hardships visited upon the Jews."[23]

It is outside the scope of this paper to go into the details of the discriminations, humiliations, expulsions, exiles, pogroms, massacres and other horrors that were inflicted on Jews by Christians throughout the history of the Church. These are all too well documented in numerous works, such as Messianic Jewish scholar Michael L. Brown's Our Hands Are Stained With Blood - The Tragic Story of the "Church" and the Jewish People.[24] Yet this tormented history remains so vivid in the memory of the Jewish people that we cannot afford to ignore it, especially because of its culmination in the Holocaust.

The 1998 Vatican document We Remember: A Reflection on the Shoah asks the poignant question: "It may be asked whether the Nazi persecution of the Jews was not made easier by the anti-Jewish prejudices imbedded in some Christian minds and hearts. Did anti-Jewish sentiment among Christians make them less sensitive, or even indifferent, to the persecutions launched against the Jews by National Socialism when it reached power?"[25] Though a group of Jewish scholars conceded in a recent statement that Nazism was not a Christian phenomenon, it is difficult to disagree with them that "without the long history of Christian anti-Judaism and Christian violence against Jews, Nazi ideology could not have taken hold nor could it have been carried out."[26] Nicholls proves this point by reproducing from Raul Hilberg's book The Destruction of the European Jews a table of comparisons between the canonical laws of the Church in the medieval period and the later measures of the Nazis, showing how the latter were not original but followed a known precedent.[27]

[1] Ratzinger, The Spirit of the Liturgy, p. 19.

[2] Rausch, Messianic Judaism, p. 12.

[3] Flannery, p. xi.

[4] Flannery, The Anguish of the Jews, p. 35.

[5] Nicholls, Christian Antisemitism, p. 208.

[6] Nicholls, op. cit., p. 213.

[7] Nicholls, op. cit., p. 220.

[8] Nicholls, op. cit., p. 209.

[9] Flannery, p. 31.

[10] Ignatius of Antioch, Epistle to the Magnesians 10, as quoted in Flannery, p. 31.

[11] Justin Martyr, Dialogue with Trypho, xxix, as quoted in Park, p. 97.

[12] Flannery, p. 39.

[13] Flannery, op. cit., p. 38.

[14] Park, p. 162.

[15] Gregory of Nyssa, Homilies on the Resurrection, as quoted in Flannery, p. 47.

[16] Flannery, p. 47.

[17] John Chrysostom, Homilies Against the Jews, as quoted in Flannery, pp. 48-49.

[18] Park, p. 163.

[19] Daniélou, Dialogue with Israel, p. 39.

[20] Visigothic Profession of Recceswinth, as quoted in Park, p. 395.

[21] Profession of Faith of uncertain eastern origin, attached to the Clementine recognitions, as quoted in Park, p. 398.

[22] Visigothic Profession of Erwig, as quoted in Park, p. 395.

[23] Flannery, p. 89.

[24] Brown, Michael L., Our Hands Are Stained With Blood. ICN Ministries, Pensacola, 1999.

[25] Commission for Religious Relations with the Jews, We Remember: A Reflection on the Shoah, IV

[26] Dabru Emet - A Jewish Statement on Christians And Christianity, 2002.

[27] Nicholls, op. cit., p. 204.