8. Tertullian And Jews
8
TERTULLIAN AND JEWS
We know there was a Jewish community in Carthage from the funerary inscriptions at Gamart, a cemetery a few miles north of Carthage, close to the coast, which had been excavated in the 1880s by Fr Delattre. About one-half of all Jewish inscriptions found in Africa by the early twentieth century came from this cemetery, with its two hundred or so hypogea carved into the rock. Depictions of menorah and the Hebrew word shalom on inscriptions, most of which were written in Latin, would confirm the Jewish nature of these burials (Caplan 1921:4–5, 12–14). Caplan’s idea that Christians were also buried in this cemetery, based on non-Jewish imagery on the wall decorations and lamps, although dismissed by scholars (e.g. Le Bohec 1981:168–9; Barnes 1985:274), is supported by others such as MacLennan (1990:122–5).
If there is disagreement about what we can tell about the relationship between Christians and Jews in Carthage based on the archaeological evidence, the same is true with regard to the literary evidence. Barnes’ 1970 statement that ‘Judaism and Christianity had diverged and gone their separate and hostile ways…’ (Barnes 1985:273) may be an accurate response to the notion that Christianity in Carthage derived from Judaism, but it is modified somewhat in his postscript of fifteen years later: ‘…we should think of Jews and Christians in the western provinces during the second century as rivals and competitors rather than as parent and daughter communities’ (Barnes 1985:330). Even though he admits that he had earlier underestimated Tertullian’s knowledge of Jews in Carthage, his concession that we should think of Tertullian ‘…fixing the Jews whom he saw on the streets of Carthage with a gloomy and baleful gaze, but not as engaging them in conversation, still less as seeking their company in social or intellectual gatherings’ (Barnes 1985:330) does not sit well with his comment that they were rivals and competitors. Why describe them as rivals and competitors unless there was some point of contact?
As I argue in the introduction to my translation of Against the Jews, the evidence of this text has not been taken seriously enough by scholarship because of the debate surrounding its authenticity. If a structural rhetorical analysis of the text puts it beyond any doubt that Tertullian was indeed the author of the whole treatise, then this piece of anti-Judaic
Here I wish to consider some of Tertullian’s references to Jews in his other treatises. Tertullian tells us that the Jews were ‘the seed-plot of all the calumny against us’ (To the Heathens 1.14.2) and the Jewish synagogues were the ‘fountains of persecution’ (Antidote for the Scorpion’s Sting 10.10). Are Tertullian’s statements historically accurate or merely part of his inflammatory rhetoric? William Frend has argued that Tertullian’s charges against the Jews were in reference to recent events (Frend 1958:157; 1965:334; 1970a:294–6). Scholer (1982:821–8), however, examines all the texts that possibly refer to Jewish persecution of Christians in Tertullian and concludes that they all refer to events in apostolic times.
David Efroymson has pointed out that the vast bulk of Tertullian’s anti-Judaic references are to be found in Against Marcion (Efroymson 1979:100). Marcion, who was originally from the Black Sea area but spent his latter years in the middle of the second century establishing a rival church in Rome, put forward a hierarchy of gods: a lesser one revealed through the Old Testament who was responsible for creation, who operated according to justice and who was responsible for evil entering the world, and a greater one who was revealed through the New Testament, who operated according to compassion and who was Father of Jesus. This Jesus was not the messiah of the Old Testament, who was to be a Jewish political figure, but a universal messiah who had come unexpectedly to rescue humankind from what the creator god had established. Furthermore, this Jesus was not human because all matter was corrupt. In the five books of Against Marcion, which appeared in at least three ever-expanding editions over the course of a number of years and which incorporated material from the earlier Against the Jews, Tertullian argued for the unity of God (book one), defended the Old Testament god as God (book two), identified Jesus as the messiah promised in the Old Testament (book three), even on the basis of Luke’s Gospel, the only gospel Marcion accepted as canonical (book four), and Paul’s letters (book five).
Tertullian insisted that the one God acted more harshly in the Old Testament than in the New because God had been dealing with a more difficult people, the Jews. As Efroymson puts it: ‘…the (admitted) “inferiority” of God’s “old” law and/or cult cannot be due to any inferiority on God’s part, but must be accounted for by the “inferiority” of the people with whom God was working at that time. Thus the God of the Hebrew Bible was “salvaged” for Christians precisely by means of the anti-Judaic myth’ (Efroymson 1979:101). The fact that the Jews (like Marcion) did not recognize Jesus as the promised messiah was no reason to doubt the veracity of promise or the God who made the promise (Against Marcion 3.7.1; 3.8.1). Efroymson’s point is that the Jews were not the primary targets or partners in dialogue with Christians. They had been transformed into something symbolic that helped mainstream Christians sharpen their self-identity (Efroymson 1976:62–3). He would consider that, as so much of Against the Jews appears in Against Marcion, the former treatise was really only a draft for the latter and that the Jews were mentioned only in so far as that through them Marcion might be attacked, not because there was real contact between them.
Tertullian was a supersessionist—the Christians had replaced the Jews because of the latter’s infidelity, which would mean that the Christians had inherited their claim to being an ancient religion (and therefore worthy of greater pagan tolerance) (Apology 21). This is why Tertullian could not accept Marcion’s rejection of Christianity’s Judaic origins; to do so would be to eliminate one of the features that gave Christianity any respectability in the eyes of the Romans. Elsewhere, Efroymson has pointed out that in his other writings Tertullian turned Jews into a symbol of all that was wrong: ‘Most of his writing is an exercise in rhetoric, in argument, in polemic, and a good deal of the polemic finds at least some room for an anti-Jewish reference. Briefly, it usually involves the argument or the suggestion that the adversary or the opposing position is in some way “Jewish”, and therefore wrong’ (Efroymson 1980:25). To take but one example, in On the Apparel of Women 2.13.5–6, Tertullian stated that love of gold was something the Jews did because they abandoned God and that Christians were not to imitate that. I would suggest, in addition, that the symbol worked because the referent still had the potency to challenge and shock.
Given that the Jews had a negative symbolic value for Tertullian, are we able to conclude anything about his contact with Jews in early third-century Carthage? Tertullian’s references to Jewish customs and social practices like daily ritual bathing (On Baptism 15.3), fast days celebrated outdoors (On Fasting 16.6), observance of circumcision and the sabbath (Against the Jews 2.10; Apology 21.1; On Idolatry 14.6) and the veiling of women (On the Military Crown 4.2; On Prayer 22.8) have usually been taken as derived from a reading of the Scriptures rather than from contemporary familiarity (Barnes 1985:92; cf. Frend 1968:192–3). It is precisely this opinion that Barnes was later prepared to modify. As Horbury (1972:457–8) points out, in On the Shows 30.5–6 Tertullian displays knowledge of some contemporary criticisms of Christianity offered by Jews: that Jesus was the son of a minor official or that his body was stolen by a gardener. Against the Jews 3.4; 13.4 shows knowledge of the ban on Jews entering Jerusalem after the Bar Kokhba revolt of 132–5 (and possibly of the granting of an exemption by Antoninus Pius to Hadrian’s total ban on circumcision). Claudia Setzer (1997:190) argues that not all of Tertullian’s comments (such as those concerning ritual bathing and veiling women) are biblically based.
If there was a debate about the interpretation of Scripture, who was Tertullian’s audience? Whom was he trying to persuade with his arguments? Was he trying to convince Jews that they were wrong? Was he trying to reassure Christians that they were right? Did he want to steer monotheistically minded pagans in the ‘right’ direction? Scholarship has tended to divide into one of two exclusive alternatives. The first, which we may call social or historical, was championed by Simon in 1948 (Simon 1996) and believes that there was a competition between the two religions, particularly for converts, which meant that anti-Judaic literature was directed against the Jews. The second, originally put forward by von Harnack in the 1880s but defended in more recent years by scholars like Tränkle (1964), Barnes (1985), Ruether (1974), Rokéah (1982), Gaston (1986) and Taylor (1995), which we may call theological, believes that the Jews in the Christian literature were symbolic constructs designed to help Christian self-definition. Such exclusive alternatives are rejected by several scholars (Lieu 1996; Stroumsa 1996), who are more inclined to find a’both-and’ solution. As Judith Lieu argues, there is both an image (the theological construct) and the reality (the historical and social rivalry): ‘Recognition both of the stereotyping and of evidence of real contact, even in the same author, means we must speak about “image and reality” in some form of interaction.’ (Lieu 1996:12). Although Taylor has explicitly rejected such a possibility,