by Simon Schama
There was a Christian edge to the agitation. Antioch may have been notoriously pleasure-living and grandiose in its monuments, theatres, baths and villas, but it was at the same time home to fierce ascetics, many of whom lived as hermits and monks in the surrounding hills. The two aspects of the city – pious and profane – were a mutually nourishing cultural fit.26 The wicked hedonists of Antioch did what they liked and were then laid about by ferocious preachers like Chrysostom for being so heedless of the poor and the Saviour’s compassion for them. Of course the hedonists enjoyed that too; such dramatic performances. There were plenty of poor in the city and on the marshy plain where rice was grown – a back-breaking crop if ever there was one. Nowhere did saints and sinners live so closely together. Antiochenes took pride in their famous Christian history. It was in their city that according to Acts the word ‘Christians’ was first coined. It was in their city that Paul had dwelled for eight or nine years turning the direction of the evangel from ‘the circumcised’ to Gentiles. A whole congregation of already famous saints and martyrs rested there and were the object of popular affection: Pelagia the Penitent Harlot, once the fanciest courtesan in town, who after baptism freed her bejewelled slaves, gave all her riches to the poor and disappeared into a remote hermitage where she assumed the identity of a holy eunuch, her true sex discovered only on her death; Babylas, the defier of Roman persecution who asked to be burned in chains; Thecla the Equal-to-Apostles, follower of Paul, who dumped her betrothed, cut off her hair and became instead bride of Christ, surviving successive attempts to kill her off with lions, bulls and snakes.
Against such paragons, what was a mere emperor? The rioting crowds went round Antioch pulling down statues and busts of the imperial couple and dragging them through the streets like prisoners. This did not sit well at Constantinople, especially since Theodosius had only recently remarried after the death of his first wife. A price would be paid. And it was while the city waited like a captive with a rope around its neck, that a host of black-robed bearded monks and hermits, led by an ancient called Macedonius, descended on Antioch ‘like a troop of angels’, said Chrysostom, who deemed it a miracle. The monks and he pleaded for mercy and more or less got it with a mere eleven exemplary executions ordered by the emperor.
It was in this frantic atmosphere that Chrysostom launched his eight homilies Against the Jews: the rhetorical onslaught which, literally, demonised the Jews, made them all creatures of the Devil and their synagogues annexes of his lair. Its impact was immediate and long-lasting because Chrysostom was famous as a brilliant rhetorician (he had studied with the pagan teacher Liabanus). He was also deemed an irreproachable holy man who had returned to Antioch only when a life of self-mortification threatened to kill him should he persist with it. John had work to do: the most urgent task was to separate Christians from Jews, once and for all.
For they had long lived side by side in Antioch – if not always in harmony, then not always in antagonism. Jews had been in Antioch since its foundation in 300 BCE by Seleucus the Macedonian, most likely as mercenary soldiers (one of their favoured professions) who had been granted land for their service, as in Egypt. After the rebellion against Antiochus IV Epiphanes, the Hasmoneans had become involved in the civil wars of the Seleucids, at one point sending an army of thousands to fight for one of the contenders, Demetrius Nicator. Their reward was to have an established place in the city: a self-governing politeuma. The connection with Jerusalem and Judaea was close.
When the city fell into the orbit of Herod, it was added to his long list of building projects. A fine, colonnaded, covered stoa walkway along the major road running north to south was Herod’s doing. The city already had a wealth of pagan temples and an amphitheatre; the Romans added a great hippodrome for chariot races and gladiatorial contests, put a colonnaded stage up in the biggest theatre, and created the indispensable baths. Every indication is that the Jews enjoyed all of these urban pleasures as much as their Gentile neighbours. Their lifestyle was such that it could attract wealthy immigrants, even from Babylonia, like Zamaris, who rode into the city with a train of five hundred horsemen and a hundred relatives and family hangers-on, bought an estate outside town which farmed the local speciality of rice, and settled down to a Jewish-patrician Antiochene life.27 The opulent suburb of Daphne, where a temple of Apollo had been built by the Greeks, turned into a resort of spacious villas boasting the usual mosaics and fountains. The better-off Jews lived there and were the elite who congregated in the Matrona synagogue, evidently so handsome a building that to Chrysostom’s scandalised horror, Christian women would make excursions to hear the blasts of the shofar on the New Year and applaud with the Jews at the readings in Greek and at sermons delivered in the same language. Such shocking apostasy!
There were plenty of Jews who didn’t live the Daphne life, and their district was the Kerateion in the south-east of the city, where one of the newer amphitheatres was also located. Their synagogue (and in all likelihood there were many more around the city) was called Ashmunit, named surely for the Hasmonean connection. It too drew the Christian creed-tourists who provoked Chrysostom’s wrath, but also the more modestly provided Jews, artisans and vendors of the crafts and trades in which Jews even then specialised: silver and goldwork, fine leather goods, woven and embroidered textiles. A little way out in the country, Jewish landowners grew Syrian rice and some of those who rented from them and worked the crop were also Jews. A whole constellation of synagogues in the countryside bordering Mesopotamia – at Apamea and Misis (Mopsuestia) – with the usual mosaics and donor-inscriptions (including Noah’s Flood) testifies to the vitality and richness of this world, which was and wasn’t diaspora. From inscriptions at the Beit Shearim necropolis we know that many of the better off who died in or near Antioch, including one ‘Aedesios head of the council’, had their bones reinterred there, as close to Jerusalem as they could reasonably get, on the anniversary of their death.
The Jews of Antioch, then, even when they had to survive expulsion threats and periodic outbreaks of animosity, were deeply rooted in their home city, organically part of its society and history. But it was precisely the sense that cohabitation was impossible, between those who had accepted the Saviour and those who continued to deny him, that drove the vehemence of John Chrysostom. The blind and the saved needed sorting out from each other, a clean, clear difference marked – otherwise the corpus christianum, the body of Christians, which was, truly, the enduring body of Christ himself, would be home to that which would corrupt it.
The two monotheisms had not always been so starkly, mutually, exclusive. Since there was little or nothing in Jesus’ own reported teachings which required the repudiation of the Torah, it was possible to be a Jewish Christian, and considerable numbers in the first generations after his death were just that, both inside Palestine and beyond. Justin Martyr, in his combative dialogue at Corinth with the Jew ‘Trypho’, written in 140 ce, called these Jewish Christians ‘Ebionites’, from the Hebrew evyon for ‘poor’. (They were sometimes referred to by the rabbis as minim.) The name may have had less to do with their place in society as the poverty they embraced in the spirit of Jesus’ sermon on the Mount. In the spirit of the Matthew gospel (the only one they would read), the Ebionites accepted Jesus as the Messiah, but in the human guise in which the Hebrew Bible had prophesied he would appear. He was the ‘Son of Man’ coming with the clouds of heaven, to whom the ‘Ancient of Days’ in Daniel 7, ‘the hair of his head like wool’, had promised ‘dominion and glory . . . everlasting’. Which made the Ebionite Jesus human and corporeal, born of Joseph and Mary and very definitely not through virgin birth. They rejected all notion of his divinity, and what to any kind of Jew was the confrontationally blasphemous notion that Christ was coexistent with God (rather than created by Him), for that would violate the ultimate truth of One-Ness, affirmed daily in the shema. The resurrection of this man-messiah they could accept, however, for it was no more implausible than many of the miracle
s related in the Bible – although the notion that Jesus’ death wiped away the sins of mankind was beyond them.
There was much about the practices of the Ebionites related by Epiphanius of Salamis that echoes what we know of the community at Qumran. Both had an elaborate cult of angels; both set their face against the Temple establishment (for although the Pharisees are cast in the New Testament as the adversaries of Jesus, the target of so much of his preaching was rather the aristocracy of the Sadducees); both were compulsive bathers and purifiers. With one crucial exception – their opposition to the animal sacrifices demanded by the Torah (for the Ebionites were strict vegetarians) – they observed all the rest of the strictures of the Torah: fasts and festivals, the dietary laws and the Sabbath. James the Just – Jesus’ brother and the founding head of the ‘Church of Jerusalem’ (the first organised gathering of Jesusites after the resurrection and ascent) – is said to have been anxious to avoid hindering the recruitment of Ebionites by requiring the outright and complete repudiation of Torah law as a condition of joining the Christian community. Peter, whose first mission was primarily to the ‘circumcised’, had the same view as James. It was possible for neophytes who believed in Jesus as the Messiah to continue with Jewish ritual and still be received into the Church.
Not, however, for Paul, the true founder and maker of Christian theology, who took the drastically harder line which ultimately made it impossible to worship at both church and synagogue.28 The Jewishness of James and Peter inclined them to want to present Jesusism as a form of Judaism, steeped in and prophesied by the Hebrew scripture and reinforcing rather than abandoning the Torah. In some important respects Paul also thought of Christianity not as a repudiation of Judaism but as the ultimate fulfilment of its promise. But Paul read the Bible backwards for its messianic promises. Abraham’s covenant with God was ultimately for all mankind; the patriarch himself would be, as Genesis said, the father of many nations, his trust in God even as he was binding his son for sacrifice (another prefiguration) was above all an act of faith, and so on. Paul believed that the Bible had declared its own supercession, or rather the supercession of the law of Moses by the new covenant, the new faith. Paul compared that law to a ‘schoolmaster’, its instruction needed, but the kind of teaching that locked men away from the revelation of faith. It was now redundant.
Paul made much of his Jewish birth, but in the opposite sense from James and Peter. Who better than the officious persecutor of Christians to grasp the gulf separating the old version of Israel from the new? In Antioch, he and Peter played out their bitter argument over the residual claims of Torah observance. Paul took Peter’s refusal to eat with the uncircumcised as a kind of moral cowardice (akin perhaps to the three-times denial), flinching from the brave gospel truth that the new covenant of Christ’s blood had made the old mark on the flesh redundant. ‘In Christ Jesus neither circumcised availeth any thing nor uncircumcision, but a new creature.’29 To cling to the old way was to shrink from the salvation offered by the sacrifice. It was not just that the law of Moses was now redundant, it was that its obligations were actually a cloud shrouding the hard light of pure faith. ‘No man is justified by the law in the sight of God, for the just shall live by faith . . . for the law is no faith.’30
When Paul moved the heart of Christian theology from Christ’s life to his death, it made the implication of the Jews in his killing not just unavoidable but central to the new religion’s teaching. And since Christ was inseparably of the same substance as God the Father, that made their crime deicide. That in turn sharpened the difference between Jewish explanations for the destruction of the Temple. For the tannaim sages it was (as had been the case for the First Temple) punishment for not obeying the Torah; for Paul it had happened because they had not disobeyed enough or at least accepted its supercession. Having been the custodians of the old law and of its prophecies of the Messiah, it was all the more incomprehensible and unforgivable that they failed to acknowledge the meaning of (as he saw it) their own scriptures. Only a kind of devilish possession could account for such obtuse and wilful ‘hard-heartedness’ (a term that entered Christian descriptions of Jews almost from the beginning).
Despairing of his own people, the Jews, ever accepting the ultimate point of their own religion, Paul was grateful to be given the wide world’s mission to the Gentiles. For it stood to reason that while the Jews insisted that the Torah was for them alone, Christ’s sacrifice must necessarily have been to absolve the sins of all mankind; otherwise what was the point? So Paul brought all the universalising elements in the Bible – and there were plenty from Genesis on – to bear on the ecumenical character of the gospel. Gentiles were, in the lovely metaphor, the ‘wild olive’ that was grafted on to the old trees. And of course it was helpful that the more painful, not to say over-stringent, aspects of the Mosaic Law could now be cast aside for the broad church of pure faith.
How inexplicably vexing, then, for Paul and those who followed him to discover that not only Gentiles but even some among those who called themselves Christians were unaccountably drawn to the rites of the Jews, to the services of their synagogue, to their trumpets and readings, their fasts and feasts, the Passover meal rather than the Eucharist! For there is every sign not just before Constantine made Christianity the state religion of the Roman Empire, but afterwards too, that somehow the old covenant persisted alongside the new, and that Judaism had not simply been superseded in its entirety by the gospel. Some of this was of course the doing of the Church fathers themselves. The Jews had to be preserved as witness to Christ and as recruits to the conversion that would herald his return. But it must have been unsettling to discover that Christian ecumenism was actually matched by rabbinical dispensation for Gentiles who wished to observe the essence of the Torah. The six ‘Noahide laws’, which a tradition held had been already given to Adam in Eden, asked only that Gentiles refrain from idolatry, blasphemy, theft, murder, fornication and consuming the meat of animals that had been strangled and which therefore retained their life blood (it was assumed that blood-eating was abhorrent to all humans). Revealed again to Noah following the flood, a seventh had been added, namely the provision of courts of law. (How the Jews loved their law.) Those who abided by these core precepts, while not being admitted to the covenant of the Jews, would, as ‘righteous Gentiles’ or ‘God-Fearers’, be assured of redemption in the olam haba, the world to come. If the Ebionites were Jewish Christians, could there have been something approximating Christian quasi-Jews? Some tantalising evidence survives of at least one community, at Aphrodisias, in Caria (present south-west Anatolia), where Jews and God-Fearers nonetheless shared a synagogue, for a long list of donors is made up of sixty-eight Jews, fifty-four God-Fearers (or Ebionites) and three outright proselytes.31
The intensity with which Gnostic versions of the gospel insisted on the two natures of Christ – human and divine – only increased the possibility of some sort of synthesis, even if ultimately unacceptable to the strict guardians of both doctrines. There were, after all, still so many crossovers: the breaking of unleavened bread – matzo – and the drinking of wine at the Passover meal an obvious echo of the eucharistic consumption of bread and wine as the body and blood of the Saviour. The inclusion in the Seder meal of a shank bone of roasted lamb as a memory of the Temple ‘passover’ – the name for the sacrifice itself – is another echo of the lamb image of the Saviour. It was as if the two religions, both works in progress, were constantly looking over each other’s shoulder. And since the Torah had nothing to say about any kind of Passover meal (only the sacrifice and reading of the Exodus), it has even been daringly suggested that the rabbinical invention of the Seder might have been in response to the Easter rites rather than the other way round.32 That the two religions were engaged in a contested Passover–Easter dialogue at this formative moment is not in doubt. Even after the Council of Nicaea in 325, with Constantine himself present, separated out the two holidays and made sure that should they fall o
n the same day it would be the Jews who moved their Passover, that combative dialogue continued.
It was Constantine who gave Chrysostom his mission to disentangle the two religions once and for all. In his letter sent to bishops unable to attend the Council of Nicaea in person, Constantine made his own intensely Pauline position brutally clear:
It was improper to follow the custom of the Jews in celebration of their holy festival because, their hands having been stained with crime the minds of these wretched men are necessarily blinded . . . Let us therefore have nothing in common with the Jews who are our enemies, let us studiously avoid all contact with their evil way . . . for how can they entertain right views on any point having compassed the death of the Lord . . . [let not] your pure minds share the customs of a senseless people so utterly depraved.
Chrysostom might say that he was but following the spirit and the letter of the first Christian emperor’s instruction which somehow had not been executed. The beginning of a salutary alteration was the recognition that it was truly impossible to be Christian and Jewish at the same time. ‘The difference between the Jews and us is not a small one,’ Chrysostom said; ‘why are you mixing what cannot be mixed? They crucified the Christ whom you adore as God.’33 Such was the flirtation of his own flock with the Jews of Antioch that he would settle for nothing less than a physical separation. And to accomplish that, it was not enough that the Jews be characterised (as they had been by Justin Martyr in his dialogue with Trypho) as simply blind, obtuse and obstinate. They had to be turned into sinister subhumans.