Constantine's Sword: The Church and the Jews (26 page)

Paul knows from his own painful experience how most Jews have refused to accept Jesus as the Messiah. Yet here he does not make the meaning of that rejection absolute. "As regards the gospel," he goes on, and the clause is restrictive, "they are enemies of God, for your sake; but as regards election they are beloved for the sake of their forefathers. For the gifts and the call of God are irrevocable."
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If I may presume as a Christian to say so, this felt sense of the permanence of God's promise is the essence of Jewish faith. It is the meaning of the covenant, but it is also the meaning of the Resurrection. God's love conquers everything, including the inherent divisiveness of human beings, including the vicissitudes of time, including death. Paul put this perception into practice as he tried desperately to heal the breach that was opening between Christians who valued the Law and clung to the essential Jewishness of the kerygma, and those who wanted to define Jews as the enemy pure and simple.

"Paul tried to accomplish the impossible," Helmut Koester writes, "namely, to establish a new Israel on a foundation that could include both Jews and Gentiles."
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That foundation was the quick return of Christ, which was not to be. Paul's whole story, in effect, is a struggle to change the narrative's frame of reference from the conflict whose resolution is achieved by the victory of one side over the other—condemning the loser to historical irrelevance and expendability—to "shalom," which, as Stendahl says, "does not picture peace as a victory, but as a balance, a harmony,"
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where God's all-encompassing love, rather than excluding human power, is the source of resolution. It was a matter of living as if the End Time had already begun. Because this remained his frame of reference, Paul avoided the temptation to which other key followers of Jesus were then beginning to yield—to define "the Jews" as absolutely evil, especially by laying the full weight of the cross on them. "For all his fulminations against the observance of Jewish Law," Jon Levenson writes, "Paul never blames the Jews for the death of Jesus or ascribes the founding of the Church to God's wrath against the people of the old covenant. Indeed, he does not attribute Jesus' demise to the Jews at all—an extraordinary datum in light of the reports of the trial and execution of Jesus in the canonical Gospels."
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In his last years, wherever he went among Gentile churches, Paul took up a collection for the Jerusalem community, those fully Jewish Christians who were still observing the Law and worshiping in the Temple. Paul's great hymn to love, addressed to the Corinthians, was no sentimental abstraction, no mere wedding song, but a response to the worst crisis of his life, as he saw members of his new community define his old community as the enemy. Against that definition he staked his life—he had to. He was trying to live out the message of love he had learned from Jesus, and from the Jewish God.

Eventually Paul returned to Jerusalem, knowing he would be a controversial figure there among both the Jewish authorities and the Jewish Christians. He arrived with the collection, apparently a considerable sum of money, a symbol of "shalom." He made the gift of it to the Jewish Christians, and in deference to their express wish, he then went to the Temple to demonstrate his continuing devotion to the traditional cult of Israel. Paul knew nothing of supersessionism. He remained a Jew.
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Indeed, his faith in Jesus was, to him, a way of being more Jewish than ever. But something happened in the Temple. We don't know what. The similarity with the defining "crime" of Jesus is eerie. Here is Luke's account in Acts: "When the seven days were almost completed, the Jews from Asia, who had seen him in the temple, stirred up all the crowd, and laid hands on him, crying out, 'Men of Israel, help! This is the man who is teaching men everywhere against the people and the law and this place; moreover he has also brought Greeks into the temple, and he has defiled this holy place...'Then all the city was aroused, and the people ran together; they seized Paul and dragged him out of the temple, and at once the gates were shut. And as they were trying to kill him, word came to the tribune of the court that all Jerusalem was in confusion. He at once took soldiers and centurions, and ran down to them; and when they saw the tribune and the soldiers, they stopped beating Paul."
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Once again, Jewish villains and Roman rescuers. Once again, an undefined crime in the Temple. Once again, an account written years after the event as an anti-Jewish slander. Luke wants his readers to fault "the Jews," but the Jews who would have felt most passionately about Paul, the Jews most likely to have erupted at the sight of him, were in fact Jewish followers of Jesus—
Christians—
who disagreed with him about the observance of the Law.
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As John Gager and others point out, there is reason to believe that Paul's fulminations against "the Jews" were aimed at just such Christians.
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It was his purpose to heal the breach with this very group that got him arrested then. Since disturbances in the Temple could be defined by Rome as a capital crime, that purpose ultimately got him killed. As a Roman citizen, he could not be summarily executed, as Jesus was. Tradition holds that the prisoner Paul, having been brought to Rome, was executed there.

Saint Paul, so often identified as a culprit in the Jewish-Christian conflict, was in fact a victim of it. So many of the later phases of the Christian assault on Jews would be carried out in his name, yet in this first phase, he saw that dynamic taking shape and tried to stop it. Ironically, it is likely that he met a martyr's fate because of a Jewish-Christian conflict
within
the community of those who had accepted Jesus. The words "the Jews," convey none of these complexities. For Paul's insistence on such complexities—and for all of this—I love him still.

14. Parting of the Ways

T
HE SO-CALLED
"parting of the ways" between Christians and Jews would take place gradually over two or three centuries. All early conflict occurs within the multifaceted world of Judaism, not only in the sense that various sects and subgroups still identify themselves as "Israel," but also in the sense that the nature of the disputes reflects the long tradition of intra-Jewish tensions, especially between prophetic and priestly strains.
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The New Testament writings come late in reference to the lifetime of Jesus, but they come early in reference to the final split between entities called Christianity and Judaism.

In Judaism, differences between Galilee-based rabbinic modes and Hellenized Diaspora modes would be detected for centuries. To take one example, Greek-speaking Judaism, like that in the lively community of Alexandria—which in the first-century may have had as many Jews as Judea itself
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—would have developed quite apart from what the rabbis taught in Yavneh in Palestine. In basing itself on the Septuagint, the Greek translation of the Hebrew Bible that dated to the second or third century
B.C.E.,
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the Jewish community of Alexandria would have had much in common with Christianity, which did the same.

Archaeological surveys of gravesites in the ancient Mediterranean world show that it is often impossible, into the second and third centuries, to tell the difference between Jewish and Christian tombs.
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The remains of churches and synagogues dating even later show traces of mosaic decoration—a sacred vine motif, for example—that are similar.
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Christians have long been accustomed to thinking of representations of the fish, of bread, and of the cup as expressly Christian symbols, but in the age when such signs were being engraved on the walls of what we think of as Christian catacombs, non-Christian Jews were using the same symbols, so much so that one historian concludes that, while Christians were gathering at the Eucharist, some Jews also were using bread and wine "as vehicles of Jewish worship and hope."
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Among Jews today, Kiddush with challah and wine, like the Passover matzo, is a vestige of this usage. Bread and wine are central to the cult of Christians; that these elements are key to both Jewish and Christian ritual indicates the strength of common sources.

The fluidity of interaction between these groups is reflected in the ways that Church fathers, well into the fourth century, warn against Christian participation in Jewish observances. For centuries. Christians' celebration of Easter coincided exactly with Passover, and their observance of the Sabbath continued to take place on Saturday.
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It took the order of Constantine, referred to earlier, and decrees of the fourth-century Church councils to draw fast distinctions between Jewish and Christian observances, but the purpose of such decrees was to clarify the minds of Christians, who continued to think of themselves as Jewish. For example, some of the most apparently anti-Jewish sermons of Saint John Chrysostom, preaching in Antioch in the late fourth century, were aimed less at Jews than at Judaizers, those Christians who wanted to adopt or maintain Jewish practices.
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Ultimately, both Jews and Christians rejected the middle group of believers who sought to honor the organic link between the religion of Jesus and the religion of Jews—what Jesus, his mother, and his first followers, including Paul, all took for granted. Jewish Christians, like those who celebrated the Eucharist as a Passover meal, and Christian Jews, like those who'd continued worshiping in the Temple until its destruction or revering Jerusalem until its final obliteration, disappeared from this story and from history, if only over a very long time. Their fate is common in history for groups holding the middle ground once a dispute has been polarized. Thinking back to my great-uncle, the Irish Catholic who fought for the British in France in 1916, it is not only that the Irish who stood between London and the radical republican nationalists were lost to memory, but that they were often physically targeted by both sides. Thus the British high command ordered Irish regiments put into the front ranks at the trenches of the Western Front, guaranteeing their slaughter, while the Irish Republican Brotherhood took special aim at the Anglo-Irish gentry, torching their homes and driving many off. Once such a conflict is joined, those who refuse to identify with the polar extremes are in grave danger.

Despite the gradual character of the Jewish-Christian split, it is still possible to detect, early in the second century, a definitive event that in effect set the course. Within a few decades of the composition of John, the last canonical Gospel, and within a few years of the final Roman destruction of Jerusalem, in 135, a Christian preacher named Marcion (85–160) carried the idea of supersessionist "fulfillment" to its logical conclusion, arguing that the Jewish Scriptures no longer had validity as the revealed Word of God. As Jesus replaced the Temple, and as a God of love replaced a God of Law, the foundational writings of the kerygma—Marcion proposed the Gospel of Luke and a de-Judaized version of Paul's letters—replaced the Torah and other books of the Bible.
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This was a new Bible for a new Israel. A great debate ensued, and a crisis, too. What did Christians believe about Israel and its Scriptures? If the denigrations were true, why not abandon those texts, as God had abandoned those people?

Eventually Marcion's opponents—Clement of Rome, Justin Martyr, Irenaeus, and others—carried the day. The Jewish Scriptures, as the source of the prophecies that Jesus fulfilled, were necessary for Christian faith. The dynamic interaction of foretelling and fulfillment was essential to demonstrating the truth of claims about Jesus, especially in that period when the claim that he was the Messiah was evolving into the claim that he was divine. It was the foretelling-and-fulfillment mode that demonstrated the inadequacy of the Jewish moral code and the superiority of Jesus' morality of love. The Jewish Scriptures, which began as the source—Crossan's "prophecy historicized"—of the fully vivified Passion narrative, had now become the negative background against which Christian truth could shine. Oddly, this backhanded defense of Jewish texts would be replicated more than two centuries later, by Augustine, in defense of the Jewish people themselves. By then, the hysterics of the heresy-hunting fourth century were already slaughtering Arians and other Christian misfits, and they wanted to kill Jews as well. But Jews were the "witness people," whose continued existence as a negative proof was necessary. We shall see more of Augustine's fateful defense of the Jews in Part Three—a defense that was soon perverted, with terrible consequences, but a defense nonetheless that may well have spared the people.
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In the second century, Marcion won half the battle, for his idea of a canonical set of Christian Scriptures was accepted. The creation of a New Testament to stand permanently in tension with what now is designated as the Old Testament crystallized the foretell-fulfill structure. The tags "Old" and "New" institutionalized the Christian habit of Jewish denigration. More than that, the creation of a New Testament amounted, in Koester's words, to the creation of "an authoritative instrument... that would establish Christianity as a separate religion."
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Something similar was happening at the same time among the rabbis in Judea and Galilee, who, as Koester puts it, "codified the tradition that had empowered the reconstitution of Palestinian Judaism, the Mishnah."
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The Mishnah, as we saw, is a compilation of the oral traditions of the first years of rabbinic Judaism. It consists of civil and religious law, commentaries, and discussion. In contrast to the equivalent foundational texts of Christians, which included as canonical the anti-Jewish polemic, the Mishnah, in the words of the Christian scholar Clemens Thoma, "does not contain a single passage clearly denouncing Jesus or Christianity. At a time when the Church Fathers loudly and aggressively preached and wrote against the Jews, such refraining from polemics is proof of considerable inner strength."
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It is also an indication that rabbinic Judaism had no need to define itself against what could be dismissed as a minority breakaway sect. In this it was unlike nascent Christianity, which of necessity—here is the legacy of Marcion—defined itself against a Jewish negative. Nevertheless, the gulf between the sibling rivals grew, even if its insurmountability was more openly insisted upon by Christians than by Jews. The Mishnah became an emblem of a new rabbinic identity with which few Christians had any acquaintance. As such, it calcified the Jewish side of the growing break, while the newly canonical Christian writings did as much for those who followed Jesus. In other words, while Christians were devising structures that would separate them from the community once designated "Israel," rabbis were inventing forms of religion in which Christians could not participate, even if they wanted to. The books both symbolized the break and reified it.