Jewish Romans, Christian Romans, and the Post-Roman West: The Social Correlates of the contra Iudaeos Tradition

Christianity was born in an argument over how to understand Jewish texts. While the biblical traditions referred to by Jesus of Nazareth would most likely have been in Hebrew or Aramaic, the texts and the arguments that shaped Christianity’s future were in Greek. Greek did more than make the new movement available to a wider world, both Jewish and pagan. It also made those Hellenistic Jewish texts that most mattered to the movement — the Septuagint (LXX), Paul’s letters, various early gospels — interpretively compatible with three important traditions from pagan high culture: ethnographical stereotyping, forensic rhetoric, and philosophical paideia. From these four elements, Christian traditions contra Iudaeos took shape. In the following essay, I propose to trace the growth and effects of Christian rhetoric contra Iudaeos in three related but distinct historical moments: in Roman imperial culture pre-Constantine; in Roman Christian culture postConstantine; and in the Christian culture of post-Roman, post-Arian Spain (589–711 ce). My goal is, first, to understand how this discourse functioned