Book contents
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- List of contributors
- List of abbreviations
- Introduction
- 1 Intolerance and martyrdom: from Socrates to Rabbi ‘Aqiva
- 2 The other in 1 and 2 Maccabees
- 3 The pursuit of the millennium in early Judaism
- 4 Conservative revolution? The intolerant innovations of Qumran
- 5 Who was considered an apostate in the Jewish Diaspora?
- 6 Why did Paul persecute the church?
- 7 Paul and the limits of tolerance
- 8 Philo's views on paganism
- 9 Coexisting with the enemy: Jews and pagans in the Mishnah
- 10 Tertullian on idolatry and the limits of tolerance
- 11 The threefold Christian anti-Judaism
- 12 The intertextual polemic of the Markan vineyard parable
- 13 Jews and Jewish Christians in the land of Israel at the time of the Bar Kochba war, with special reference to the Apocalypse of Peter
- 14 The Nazoreans: living at the boundary of Judaism and Christianity
- 15 Justin Martyr's Dialogue with Trypho: group boundaries, ‘proselytes’ and ‘God-fearers’
- 16 Accusations of Jewish persecution in early Christian sources, with particular reference to Justin Martyr and the Martyrdom of Polycarp
- 17 Early Christians on synagogue prayer and imprecation
- 18 Messianism, Torah and early Christian tradition
- 19 Jewish and Christian public ethics in the early Roman Empire
- Postscript: the future of intolerance
- General bibliography
- Index
16 - Accusations of Jewish persecution in early Christian sources, with particular reference to Justin Martyr and the Martyrdom of Polycarp
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 08 March 2010
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- List of contributors
- List of abbreviations
- Introduction
- 1 Intolerance and martyrdom: from Socrates to Rabbi ‘Aqiva
- 2 The other in 1 and 2 Maccabees
- 3 The pursuit of the millennium in early Judaism
- 4 Conservative revolution? The intolerant innovations of Qumran
- 5 Who was considered an apostate in the Jewish Diaspora?
- 6 Why did Paul persecute the church?
- 7 Paul and the limits of tolerance
- 8 Philo's views on paganism
- 9 Coexisting with the enemy: Jews and pagans in the Mishnah
- 10 Tertullian on idolatry and the limits of tolerance
- 11 The threefold Christian anti-Judaism
- 12 The intertextual polemic of the Markan vineyard parable
- 13 Jews and Jewish Christians in the land of Israel at the time of the Bar Kochba war, with special reference to the Apocalypse of Peter
- 14 The Nazoreans: living at the boundary of Judaism and Christianity
- 15 Justin Martyr's Dialogue with Trypho: group boundaries, ‘proselytes’ and ‘God-fearers’
- 16 Accusations of Jewish persecution in early Christian sources, with particular reference to Justin Martyr and the Martyrdom of Polycarp
- 17 Early Christians on synagogue prayer and imprecation
- 18 Messianism, Torah and early Christian tradition
- 19 Jewish and Christian public ethics in the early Roman Empire
- Postscript: the future of intolerance
- General bibliography
- Index
Summary
For in truth your hand was lifted high to do evil, for even when you had killed the Christ you did not repent, but you also hate and murder us…
(Justin Martyr, Dialogue 133.6)The charge that the Jews actively sought the death of Christians lies at the heart of the oft-rehearsed scholarly debate over Jewish involvement in the persecution of Christians, a debate which need only be cursorily signalled here. Harnack's vivid account, summarized in his words ‘as a rule [sic], whenever bloody persecutions are afoot in later days, the Jews are either in the background or in the foreground’, offers a useful starting-point. True, it is an account which easily can be shown to rely more on rhetoric than on wealth of evidence, which even when taken as historical record is remarkable for its paucity: in fact, it was not historical evidence so much as Harnack's own understanding of Christianity's discovery of its true identity which shaped his narrative. Yet it is an account which has left a long legacy. W. H. C. Frend's rhetoric is equally well known: ‘In the persecutions which were to wrack Asia in the reign of Marcus Aurelius the Jew was often in the background [note the echo of Harnack]. For nearly another century he [sic] continued to stir up trouble wherever he could.’ This is only a high point of a continuing theme in the early part of Frend's account, and has evoked an angry response from the critics, one which betrays that more than historical fidelity to the sources is at stake.
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- Tolerance and Intolerance in Early Judaism and Christianity , pp. 279 - 295Publisher: Cambridge University PressPrint publication year: 1998
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