Parted Ways?

Christians often operate on the assumption that the New Testament marked the end of interaction between Christians and Jews.  Paul shakes the dust off his feet at Rome, quotes Isaiah 6, and that’s that.  The danger that Christians might deconvert to Judaism was over as soon as the New Testament was written.

The slightest reflection would show that this is myth not history.  If Judaism were no longer a rival to the church in the second, third, and fourth centuries, why were Christian writers so vigorous in their polemics?  Were they simply finding a convenient scapegoat, and using a rhetoric of differentiation to shore up loyalty to the nascent church?

Not likely.  Recent scholarship has been stressing the continuing relations between Jews and Christians, and has been showing that Christians responded with invective because of Judaism’s vitality not because they were beating a corpse.  It was Judaism’s stubborn refusal to dry up and blow away that roused Christian anxiety and assaults.  Lee Martin McDonald summarizes some of the evidence (in an essay in Anti-Semitism and Early Christianity: Issues of Polemic and Faith ): “Many Christians in the fourth and fifth centuries were anguished over the fact that gentile Christians and many pagan Gentiles were finding Judaism more attractive than Christianity . . . .

“Many were attending Jewish festivals regularly and even converting to Judaism.  Large numbers of them sought physical healing from the Jews through their prayers, incantations, and the wearing of Jewish amulets.  The success of the Jewish missionary efforts can be seen in the fact that Chrysostom felt obliged to warn Christians against converting to Judaism some twenty-three years after the death of Julian, near the end of the fourth century.  Consider also how the author of the Apostolic Constitutions , writing near the end of the fourth century and probably from the region of Syria, shows that not just the laity but also the church’s leaders were tempted toward Judaism.  He stipulates what treatment should come to those who follow Jewish practices and orders that ‘if any bishop, or any other of the clergy, fast with the Jews, or keeps the festivals with them, or accepts of the presences from their festivals, as unleavened bread or some such thing, let him be deprived; but if he be one of the laity, let him be suspended.’”

McDonald thinks it unlikely that Judaism could have had such success “without significant missionary activity.”  Melito of Sardis, like Chrysostom, was in a city with a large and thriving Jewish population, one that likely attracted some members of the church.