St. Augustine and the Jews

The earliest portrait of Saint Augustine (6th century). Image credit*

Boston University historian Paula Fredriksen, a specialist in the history of early Christianity, is a longtime fan of the fourth century theologian Augustine of Hippo, a.k.a. St. Augustine. Her new book, Augustine and the Jews , is the fruit of almost 15 years of thinking about Augustine and his world.

In ‘All Israel will be Saved’: Paul and Augustine on the Redemption of the Jews (website ), a recent talk at University of California Santa Barbara, Fredriksen, talks about her fascination with Augustine. She sets up the discussion by quickly summarizing the state of Christianity in the year 399. Christianity was now the official state religion of the Roman Empire, and the leaders of the official church were busy persecuting heretics, that is other Christians who disagreed with them. Fredrickson makes the interesting observation that more Christians were killed by the state after Constantine’s conversion than in the years when Christianity was an illegal religion.

The Roman state was also closing pagan temples, a measure that Augustine approved. However one non-Christian group was immune from persecution: the Jews. Although Jews were often villains in the New Testament, and despite the negative opinion of Jews held by many of the church fathers, the Jewish religion had been “grandfathered in” as part of the status quo.

In this environment, Augustine argued with other Church fathers about the role Jews were to play in the divine drama of the redemption of the world. In the generally anti-Jewish climate of early Christianity, Augustine made three assertions which were very radical for the time.

1) Other contemporary theologians believed that the Jews willfully misunderstood the will of God, that commandments such as avoiding pork and shellfish were meant to be understood metaphorically and not literally. Augustine disagreed, arguing that the Jews understood God’s commandments correctly, considering that they had received the commandments before the advent of Jesus.

2) Also going against the popular scholarly consensus, Augustine argued that Jesus and the early disciples had all been observant Jews. Jerome, another early church father, believed that this assertion was “an insult to Christianity.”

3) Finally, Augustine said that Jews were correct to continue to practice their religion in the ancient way because God himself was the author of their religious law.

Still, don’t get the idea that Augustine was seeking diversity and interfaith dialogue. He believed that Jews would not achieve eternal life in heaven, but then he also thought that only a minority of Christians would be worthy of eternal life.   Fredriksen believes that Augustine’s views were an important strain of thought in the early medieval period, and a force for religious toleration.

For more from Paula Fredriksen, check out her 2006 lecture series Sin: The Early History of an Idea available on this feed (you have to scroll down a ways).

*Image credit: Wikipedia. Public domain.

Related posts:

• Web resources on early Christianity