John Chrysostom and the Jews: Rhetoric and Reality in the Late 4th Century by Robert Louis Wilken.
As always, go please go here and give me a "helpful" vote.
The conventional wisdom is that St. John Chrysostom (aka the "Golden-mouthed") wrote Anti-Jewish polemics of surpassing ugliness, homilies that defined Christian anti-semitism, and poisoned subsequent Christian-Jewish relations. Robert Louis Wilken purpose is to place these diatribes into context, so that if Chrysostom's homilies aren't exactly redeemed, at least they can be defended from bearing the entire burden of the unfortunate relationship between Judaism and its daughter religion.
Wilken does this by edging up very slowly to the homilies themselves, taking the reader gradually into the world of Chrysostom so that the reader can find some empathy for the homilies by situating himself in Chrysostom's world.
Wilken initially introduces the reader to the city of Antioch, the city in which Chrysostom matured and delivered his homilies. Antioch was an old, thoroughly Hellenized city. The civic traditions and customs of Antioch were Hellenistic, which meant that they were thoroughly pagan. The culture to which the citizens aspired was a rhetorical culture, where much emphasis was given on learning the skills of rhetoric. Christians in Antioch were inculcated into this pagan culture, and themes and tropes of paganism were everywhere.
Wilken next describes the fractious and fractured Christian community of Antioch, which was divided between monks and city-folk, an Arian congregation led by an Arian bishop, and two orthodox communities. In this community, Chrysostom, who had been a monk, and then became a presbyter of one of the orthodox congregations, found that one of his main objectives was to defend the loyalty of his congregation from "poaching" by other Christians, pagans and Jews.
Wilken provides a fascinating discussion of the Jewish community in Antioch. At the time when Chrysostom lived the Jwish community had been in place for nearly a thousand years. The Jewish community was wealthy, powerful and well-established. Moreover, Judaism as a whole had been experiencing a revival for a couple of hundred years, recovering from the disaster of the Bar Kochba Revolt of 120 C.E. Judaism was a true rival to Christianity, even after Constantine. Judaism enjoyed the prestige of its antiquity, as well as the fact that it was the custodian of the very scriptures on which Christianity based its claims to authority. Moreover, Christians were attracted to Judaism because of their sense that Jewish rituals worked. the common Christian viewed oaths taken in the Synagogue as being more binding because of the awesomeness of Jewish rituals. Jewish magic, interestingly, was considered more puissant than ordinary magic. (The irony is that Jews had a converse attitude to the power of the name of Jesus, which was often invoked in their magic because of its perceived strength. See Peter Schafer, Jesus in the Talmud.)
So, Chrysostom perceived Judaism as a particular threat to his Christian flock, not the least because there were actual Christians who sufficiently attracted to Judaism to "judaize," i.e., to attend Jewish rituals, festivals and synagogue and to adopt Jewish practices. The dilemma that this presented to Chrysostom was that it seemed to argue very strongly to the rest of his flock that Judaism remained the true religion, since, after all, if Judaism was viable, how could Christianity be the true religion?
The strength of the Christian claim was historical. Christians could and did point to the fact that the Jewish Temple had been destroyed in 70 CE. The effect of this destruction was to powerfully vindicate Christ's prophecy about the destruction of the Temple as a foreshadowing of the eclipse of the old covenant in favor of the new covenant.
This historical argument was, however, contingent on history. The strength of the claim was that the Temple was destroyed and remained destroyed, but what if the Temple were to be restored? In approximately 360 CE this contingency appeared as if it were about to be actualized under the Emperor Julian the Apostate. Julian started to rebuild the Temple but his efforts were cut short by his death after reigning for 18 months. His aborted efforts were scarring the psyche of Christians in Antioch twenty years later when Chrysostom gave his sermon against the "Judaizing Christians."
A final key in understanding the homilies is the rhetorical culture of the Roman Empire in the "second great age of rhetoric." Sophists - not a term of derision at the time - and rhetoricians were the rock stars of the era. They were trained in the classic skills of public speaking. One of those skills involved giving a proper speech of derision and villification - the "psogos." The conventions of these speeches required over the top name-calling and extreme derision; there was no sense that "fairness" had any role in the "psogos."
Moreover, the audience knew and expected the rhetorician to live up to the conventions of the psogos. A good speech resulted in substantial audience interaction; a mediocre speech resulted in a cold audience.
According to Wilken, the focus of the time - on the part of both rhetorician and audience - was on style, not substance. Everyone knew that a game was being played with overstatements and conventions of villification which were stylistic rather than real. As Wilken points out, it is not the case that the over the top rhetoric unleashed over-excited mobs to destroy and wreck the villified; in fact, there seems to have been one such case, suggesting an exception and not the rule. (p. 123.)
Put this mix together and we have a better idea of what was going on in Chrysostom's polemics. Chrysostom was not an anti-semite as we understand the word. He was engaging in the conventional polemics of the time, and it would seem that everyone knew it and probably didn't take it seriously as a matter of substance. By the end of the book, we can achieve a certain measure of understanding because as Wilken observes, "Every act of historical understanding is an act of empathy." (p. 162.)
On the other hand, in cultural settings far removed from Antioch at the end of the Fourth Century, the conventions that informed Chrysostom's writings didn't apply, and in those circumstances, Chrysostom's polemics may have played a far more pernicious role. That history, however, is beyond the scope of Wilken's book.
On drawback I found in Wilken's book is that it didn't really deal with Chrysostom's homilies directly. By the final chapter we do get snippets of the homilies, but no extended quotations. This may be part of Wilken's strategy of building empathy toward historical understanding, premised on the notion that we moderns cannot read vast swathes of anti-semitic polemics without reacting to it in the way we have been culturally conditioned by our history to react viscerally against what we see as bigotry.
Wilken is a good writer. His story moves along at a good clip. I recommend this book along with other books on Jewish-Christian relationships of late antiquity, including Paula Fredriksen's Augustine and the Jews: A Christian Defense of Jews and Judaism. Another excellent source for deriving the historical understanding and empathy for Chrysostom's world is Peter Schafer's Jesus in the Talmud which demonstrates that "over the top" rhetorical tropes were not limited to Hellenistic culture, as shown by Talmudic - albeit Babylonian Talmud - references to the mother of Jesus being a prostitute and adulteress and Jesus being condemned to an afterlife of being boiled forever in human excrement.
Posts
