Judaism, Orthodoxy and

EUGEN J. PENTIUC

EARLY JEWISH-CHRISTIAN INTERACTION WITH SCRIPTURE

In the last decades of the first century CE nascent Jewish Christianity was gradually outnumbered by the ever-growing Gentile element. From the outset, early Christianity and evolving Judaism experienced a long and intricate process of the “parting of the ways,” although there are an increasing number of scholars today who question this construct’s absolute nature, pointing to many continued interactions between the two communities of faith for many centuries.

Christians have always been aware of their links with the Jewish people and interacted with them, not least through the sharing of Scripture and moral and prophetic attitudes. The Old Testament, the first part of the Christian Bible, is essen­tially the Jewish Scripture. The very title “Old Testament” given by Christians to the Hebrew Scripture is a phrase coined by the Apostle Paul with regard to the writings attributed to Moses (2Cor. 3.14–15) and popularized by Origen of Alexandria

in the 3rd century. The title “New Testa­ment,” referring to the new collection put together by the early church, is taken from the Book of Jeremiah announcing that God will make a “new covenant” with Israel (Jer. 31.31).

What was the relationship between Jesus and Judaism and its Scripture? Any attempt to define this relationship should keep in mind two factors. On the one hand, Jesus places his sayings on the same level of authority as Moses’ teachings (Jn. 5.47), stating that he came to fulfill the whole entirety of the law (Mt. 5.17). On the other hand, Jesus relativizes several important Old Testament injunctions, among which were the Sabbath observance (Mt. 12.8, 12) and ritual purity laws (Mt. 15.11). This makes one think of the relation of the Old and New Testaments as being a relationship balanced between conformity and disrup­tion: a unity under tension. The Lord Jesus stands at one and the same moment within Judaism and beyond it. Although St. Paul never removed the Jews – the heirs of biblical Israel considered as the people of God – from the salvific framework of his theology of redemption (Rom. 9–11), he certainly moved them away from the center, at which axis point he located submission to Jesus, Lord of the New Covenant.

ANTI-JUDAIC SENTIMENTS AND ATTITUDES IN CHRISTIAN HISTORY

There are two foundational attitudes that have tended historically to fuel a certain level of anti-Jewish sentiment and negative attitude towards Judaism among the Christians from the 4th century onwards. The first of these was the position of theo­logical supersessionism attested in some of the New Testament and patristic writings, especially those using the typological imag­ery of the movement from Old to New as being the passage from shadow to reality. The second was the spreading out of an early Christian interpretation (based upon a certain exegesis of Mt. 27.25) that the entire nation of Israel was responsible for the death of Christ.

Anti-Judaism in Byzantium took both literary and popular forms. With some few exceptions, such as Clement of Alexandria (ca. 150-ca. 215), the major patristic writers evidence a considerable degree of anti­Jewish biases. Scholars have noted that the tension that existed between the communi­ties, as evidenced in the production of this type of literature, may also witness to the degree of “interrelation” that must have been happening – and which alarmed the clerical leaders and literary elite, eliciting their literary products of apologia. Many treatises Adversus Judaeos (Against the Jews) from the early church theologians continued this attitude and hardened it in later ages, especially when the familiarity between church and synagogue (that can be presumed as a feature of daily life in the cities of the Roman Empire in Late Antiq­uity) became more and more a thing of memory. Among the writers of this genre can be noted Melito of Sardis, who in Peri Pascha (mid-2nd century) suggests that because the Jews did not recognize God in the person of Jesus, then God “Unchose” them. Justin Martyr in his Dialogue with Trypho (second half of the 2nd century) also argued in turn that the common Jewish people were misled by their teachers who misinterpreted the prophetic texts of the Old Testament, and for this reason the Gentile Christians irreversibly “replaced” Israel. Origen in Against Celsus insisted on the fact that the Kingdom of God was given to Christians by virtue of being taken from the Jews, who nevertheless remained God’s chosen people until the time that they shall be returned to obedi­ence to Christ, an event which will occur at the final Apokatastasis, humanity’s eschato­logical return to God.

After 380, when Christianity became the official religion of the Byzantine Empire, the image of the Jews among the church gradually deteriorated, and their political position deteriorated as well. In his Eight Homilies Against the Jews (386–7), John Chrysostom with fiery rhetoric accused the Jews of the greatest crimes. Since they killed the Lord, Chrysostom argued, the demons dwell in them and in their syna­gogues. Since they are guilty of deicide, he said, then God hates them, and their syna­gogues are “assemblies of animals.” Such rhetoric has, sadly, often been used to inflame anti-Semitism in Christian history; the more eirenic and respectful view of the Apostle Paul and other fathers of the church being forgotten in favor of this alone. In this case, and perhaps other examples of violent anti-Jewish rhetoric (e.g., Ambrose of Milan, indignant in the case of the burn­ing of the synagogue of Callinicum, where the local bishop was commanded by the emperor to make restitution to the local Jewish community, and Ambrose rebuked him for supporting the “enemies of Christ”; or Cyril of Alexandria, who reacted to the burning of the Alexander church by rioting Jewish factions in his city), local political tensions between two lively communities can perhaps explain the abrasiveness of the language (Greco-Roman rhetoric always needing to be contextualized). But it left a record that tended to become absolutized. Byzantine state legislation, while offering limited protection to Jewish members of the empire, also put a heavy burden on them, so much so that many scholars left for the more welcoming environment of Babylon.

In 483 Theodosius II promulgated the revised code of laws that reflected many Jewish-orientated prescripts: Jews were for­bidden to retaliate against converts from their number to Christianity; Jews were no longer allowed to own Christian slaves; and they were not allowed to hold posts in the imperial administration. Justinian went further: in 553 Novella 146 banned the publication of rabbinic interpretations and demanded the use of languages other than Hebrew in the imperial synagogues; Jews were strongly “urged” to go beyond the historical (plain literal) meaning of the bib­lical text, and the Mishnah was prohibited from being read in the synagogues because it was not part of the sacred books.

NEW PERSPECTIVES AFTER THE 20TH-CENTURY SHOAH

The pattern of Jewish-Christian interactions thus goes back a long time, but it took the shock of the Nazi war crimes of the 1930s and 1940s and the traumatic event of the Shoah for a true and sustainable new consciousness of Jewish-Christian relations to arise. It grew up along with the sense that embittered relations of the past need not constitute an enduring pattern for the future. A first step towards reconciliation and dia­logue was made in 1947 when Christians and Jews met at Seelisberg (Switzerland), calling on Christian churches to revise their attitude and preaching about Judaism and its people. Yet another turning point occurred in 1965 when Pope John XXIII issued the encyclical Nostra Aetate, insisting that “Jews should not continue being presented as rejected by God.” In Orthodox Christianity the patriarchs of Constantinople and Moscow have both issued statements condemning anti-Semitism. Leaders of the Orthodox Churches today have often taken initiatives to foster respectful relations and respectful dialogue with Jewish leaders. However, within world Orthodoxy, there has as yet been no sustained effort to review com­monly available educational and theological materials which are so heavily indebted to patristic writings, or to explain them situationally, something that occurred as a necessary step to renewing relations in recent Roman Catholicism and Protestantism.

There are only a few direct contacts between Jews and Orthodox Christians outside the framework of the World Council of Churches. In March 1977 a dialogue between Jewish and Greek Ortho­dox leaders was held at Lucerne Univer­sity. In October 1979 another dialogue took place in Bucharest between Jewish leaders and Orthodox theologians from Romania, Bulgaria, Cyprus, Greece, France, Switzerland, and the United States. It is certainly a time for learning and reflecting. In the sentiment of Professor Rabbi Jacob Neusner, after both Golgotha and Shoah, Christians and Jews should return to Sinai, to Moses’ cleft in the rock, and there listen to God’s revelatory silence.

SEE ALSO: Bible; Christ; Church (Orthodox Ecclesiology); Old Testamen

REFERENCES AND SUGGESTED READINGS

Berdiaev, N. (1952) Christianity and Anti-Semitism, trans. A. Spears and V. Kanter. Aldington: Kent Publishing.

Cohen, J. (ed.) (1991) Essential Papers on Judaism and Christianity in Conflict: From Late Antiquity to the Reformation. New York: New York University Press.

Justin Martyr (1930) Dialogue with Trypho, trans. A. L. Williams. London: SPCK.

Melito of Sardis (2001) On Pascha: With the Fragments of Melito and Other Material Related to the Quartodecimans. Crestwood, NY: St. Vladimir’s Seminary Press.

Pentiuc, E. J. (2011) The Old Testament in Eastern Orthodox Tradition. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

Shepardson, C. (2008) Anti-Judaism and Christian Orthodoxy: Ephrem’s Hymns in Fourth-Century Syria. Washington, DC: Catholic University of America Press.

Siegel, S. (1976) “Judaism and Eastern Orthodoxy: Theological Reflections,” Journal of Ecumenical Studies 13: 579–85.