Living Letters of the Law. Jeremy Cohen
a curse” (3:10), and Paul seemed to suggest that the Jews' appreciation of Scripture had resulted in their rejection by God:
For it is written that Abraham had two sons, one by a slave and one by a free woman. But the son of the slave was born according to the flesh, the son of the free woman through promise. Now this is an allegory: These two women are two covenants* One is from Mount Sinai, bearing children for slavery; she is Hagar…. She corresponds to the present Jerusalem, for she is in slavery with her children. But the Jerusalem above is free, and she is our mother…. Now we, brethren, like Isaac, are children of promise. But as at that time he who was born according to the flesh persecuted him who was born according to the spirit, so it is now. But what does Scripture say? “Cast out the slave and her son; for the son of the slave shall not inherit with the son of the free woman.” So, brethren, we are not children of the slave but of the free woman. (4:22.-31)
Galatians reaches the conclusion (5:6) that “in Christ Jesus neither circumcision nor uncircumcision is of any avail,” for which Paul soon provided a more elaborate theological argument in his Epistle to the Romans. Romans echoes and develops some of Galatians' central themes: the futility of the law in the achievement of salvation, the sinfulness of the Jews, and God's covenant of grace with those who descended spiritually from Abraham by emulating his faith. Romans (9: 25) refers to the Gentiles who embrace Jesus with God's words to Hosea, “Those who were not my people I will call my people,” while invoking the prophecy of Isaiah to proclaim the repudiation of the Jews: “Though the number of the sons of Israel be as the sand of the sea, only a remnant of them will be saved.”
Nevertheless, in an apparent about-face that has long perplexed New Testament scholars,5 Paul proceeded immediately to endow his Jewish coreligionists with a critical role in the divine economy of salvation. For having deduced that a Gentile fares no worse than a Jew in the eyes of God, and having castigated the Jews for their rejection of Jesus, the Christological portion of Paul's epistle to the Gentile Christians of Rome concludes on a note of qualification regarding the nation of Israel:
I ask, then, has God rejected his people? By no means!…So I ask, have they stumbled so as to fall? By no means! But through their trespass salvation has come to the Gentiles, so as to make Israel jealous…. For if their rejection means the reconciliation of the world, what will their acceptance mean but life from the dead? If the dough offered as first fruits is holy, so is the whole lump; and if the root is holy, so are the branches. But if some of the branches were broken off, and you, a wild olive shoot, were grafted in their place to share the richness of the olive tree, do not boast over the branches….
For if you have been cut from what is by nature a wild olive tree and grafted, contrary to nature, into a cultivated olive tree, how much more will these natural branches be grafted back into their own olive tree. Lest you be wise in your own conceits, I want you to understand this mystery, brethren: A hardening has come upon part of Israel, until the full number of Gentiles come in, and so all Israel will be saved…. As regards the gospel they are enemies of God, for your sake; but as regards election they are beloved for the sake of their forefathers. (11:1–28)
No matter how one might ultimately choose to define Paul's intentions, our present interests would underscore several key aspects of this message. Presenting the Jews so as to facilitate his doctrinal instruction of Gentile Christians, Paul attributed momentous importance to the people of Israel. This importance bespoke a divinely ordained mission that found expression over the course of human history: before Jesus, during his lifetime, and subsequent to his death. Precisely in their identification with the sacred text of Scripture—“the Jews are entrusted with the oracles of God” (Romans 3:2); they are “the adherents of the law” (Romans 4:14)—the Jews had contributed to the salvation of the world and would continue to do so. God gave them the law “to increase the trespass,” with the result that “where sin increased, grace abounded all the more” (Romans 5:20). The Jews' rejection of Jesus constituted the ultimate trespass and allowed the Gentiles to enter into God's covenant. Upon the completion of this process, the Jews will regain God's favor, and their conversion will signal the final redemption, “life from the dead” and all. The Jews have not entirely forfeited their election. They still serve a vital purpose, pedagogic and eschatological, which demands their survival until the end, when “all Israel [pâs Israél] will be saved.”
Struggling to find consistency in Paul's attitudes regarding the Jews, modern Christian writers continue to debate the ramifications of these texts. Some have discerned a Pauline stratum at the base of Christian antisemitism; others have found his ideas virtually free of hostility toward Judaism, which they instead attribute to Paul's later interpreters.6 For our purposes, Paul's undeniable ambivalence retains a primary importance, as does his retention of Israel and Israel's relationship with Scripture within the divine economy of salvation. During the decades after Paul, these issues continued to exercise key voices in the formulation of primitive Christianity, including those of the evangelists, the author of Hebrews, and the apostolic fathers. Over the course of the centuries that followed, their ideas underwent further development and received more systematic expression in the Adversus ludaeos polemic (arguments “against the Jews”) of many church fathers—Justin Martyr, Melito of Sardis, Tertullian, Origen, Eusebius of Caesarea, Ephrem the Syrian, Aphrahat, John Chrysostom, Ambrose of Milan, and others—which gave rise to a genre of Christian literary expression unto itself. Patristic concern with the Jew and his Judaism constitutes the second contextual sphere within which our story took shape.7
Paul's view of the error of the Jews as the obverse of the truth of Christianity lived on, encasing all subsequent reflection on Judaism in Christian theology. Yet as the Gentile constituencies of Christian churches increased and the intensity of direct interaction between Jews and Christians subsided, the teachings of Adversus ludaeos shifted their emphasis. They now served chiefly to fuel attacks by Gentile Christians, who had never converted to Judaism, against Christians who still observed Jewish law. Seeking to justify the departure of the church from the synagogue, Christian preachers tried to demonstrate not only that observance of the old law without belief in Jesus was insufficient but that it was inherently wrong. The New Testament had replaced the Old; and just as the Gentile church had replaced the Jewish people as the community of God's elect, so too had the inauguration of a new gospel rendered the old law at least counterproductive if not thoroughly sinful.
Beyond Jews and Jewish Christians, Christian Adversus ludaeos polemic soon found additional targets. Clamoring for acceptance in a hostile Roman world, early Christian teachers proclaimed both to their pagan detractors and to prospective pagan converts that Christianity was not a recently contrived distortion of biblical Judaism but the genuine continuation and fulfillment thereof. Ancients placed the highest value on antiquity, and Greco-Roman civilization typically respected the Jews as one of the oldest peoples of all. From an ancient Mediterranean perspective, why convert to Christianity if its novelty, perhaps the very source of its attraction, constituted prima facie evidence of its invalidity? The discourse of Adversus ludaeos supplied the answer: Despite their literal observance of biblical law, the Jews had forsaken God's covenant of old, whereas the Christians, interpreting that law figuratively, had maintained it. Inverting the biblical typology of Israel's redemption from Egyptian bondage, commemorated in the very season of Passover during which Jesus was crucified, the second-century bishop Melito of Sardis reassigned the roles of oppressor and oppressed, damned and saved, in his Peri Pascha (On the Paschal Sacrifice),8 presumably a liturgical poem for the celebration of Easter:
You killed your Lord at the great feast.
And you were making merry,
while he was starving;
you had wine to drink and bread to eat,
he had vinegar and gall;
your face was bright,
his was downcast;
you were triumphant,
he was afflicted;
you were making music,
he was being judged;
you were giving the beat,
he