Jewish persecution

From Acts on through the church fathers, it was a commonplace among writers that the Jews were involved – sometimes leading, sometimes following – in persecuting the church.   Judith Lieu ( Neither Jew Nor Greek?: Constructing Early Christianity (Academic Paperback) ) doubts the evidence.  The charges are embedded within rhetorical flourishes that apparently robs them of probative value.

Irenaeus, for instance, sees Jewish/Christian conflict as a fulfillment of a type: “Jacob took the blessings of Esau as the latter people has snatched the blessings of the former.  For which cause his brother suffered the plots and persecutions of a brother, just as the church suffers this self-same thing from the Jews.”  Lieu thinks we need to “ask whether the exegeted text has been more creative than historical experience.”

Other writers use the Jews as part of a rhetoric of differentiation and self-identity.

Jews and Gentiles are in the crowd that witnesses Polycarp confess to being a Christian, and Lieu comments, “From the point of view of the narrative, Polycarp’s clear testimony must have a universal audience and he himself must stand alone against the gathered forces of the opposition.”  Martyr accounts frequently include this kind of universalization, which not only gives the Christians a global audience but also reinforces their self-image as the third race.  Jews and Gentiles cry out, “How long the third race? ( usquequo genus tertium ).”  The presence of Jews thus “is deeply implicated in Christian apologetics of self-identity; considering the dialectical relationship with Judaism within those apologetics, claiming their antiquity and heritage while denying their legitimacy, we may be surprised that it is not found more frequently.”

Two things.  First: Either Jews were present at Polycarp’s trial, or they were not.  Pointing out that a writer exploits their (claimed) presence to reinforce a Christian trope doesn’t decide the question of whether they were actually present one way or the other.  Lieu has no evidence that Jews were not present.  Her questioning of the account is curious, given her interest in the rhetoric of early Christianity; for all her attention to rhetoric, she remains a skeptic of rhetoric, with an instinct to reduce early Christian rhetoric to “mere rhetoric” even when she knows that rhetoric is never “mere.”

Second: Her final comment betrays her.  If in fact the Jews are stuck where they weren’t in reality as a rhetorical ploy, it is indeed surprising that they are not found there more frequently.  So surprising, in fact, as to undermine Lieu’s entire argument.  For if a Christian writer needed no evidence of Jewish persecution to claim that Jews persecuted – no evidence beyond their imaginations fueled by biblical types – then why not include them everywhere and always?  That they didn’t serves as evidence that the Christian writers were interested not only in the rhetoric of self-identification (which is certainly true) but also in writing accurate accounts of martyrdoms.