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Fitzgerald-Mastersreport Copyright by Ryan Austin Fitzgerald 2016 The Report committee for Ryan Austin Fitzgerald Certifies that this is the approved version of the following report: Troubling Trypho: Associative-Group Language in Justin’s Dialogue with Trypho the Jew APPROVED BY SUPERVISING COMMITTEE: ______________________________________ Steve Friesen, Supervisor ______________________________________ L. Michael White Troubling Trypho: Associative-Group Language In Justin’s Dialogue with Trypho the Jew by Ryan Austin Fitzgerald, B.A.; M.A.; M.A.Religion Report Presented to the Faculty of the Graduate School of the University of Texas at Austin in Partial Fulfillment of the Requirements for the Degree of Master of Arts The University of Texas at Austin December 2016 Troubling Trypho: Associative-Group Language in Justin’s Dialogue with Trypho the Jew by Ryan Austin Fitzgerald, M.A. The University of Texas at Austin, 2016 SUPERVISOR: Steve Friesen Justin’s Dialogue with Trypho the Jew is a vital text in the study of early Jewish- Christian relations. This paper argues that Justin attempts to portray Christians as a legitimate and cohesive genos, ethnos, and laos, what I will call an “associative-group,” over and against his construction of Jews. Using Denise Kimber Buell’s argument that Justin defines Christianity in ethnoracial terms in contrast to Erich Gruen’s critique that ancient people did not think of self- identification in modern ethnoracial manners, I examine what I call Justin’s “associative-group” identity. Justin constructs Christianity as the “true” associative-group of God, connected through creative lineage from the patriarchs through Jesus. Justin uses the failure of the Jews in the Bar Kokhba revolt as proof that they are not the associative-group defined by their relationship to God or land, nor have they been since their rejection of Jesus as God’s Messiah. iv Chapter One: Introduction…………………………………………………………………..……1 Chapter Two: Justin and Identity in Scholarship…………………………………..……………..6 Chapter Three: Christianity as a Legitimate Associative-Group……..……...………………….29 Chapter Four: Proofs from Scripture and Bar Kokhba….………………..……………………..52 Chapter Five: Conclusion…………..……………………………...……………………………72 Works Cited.……………………………………………………………………………………..75 v Chapter One: Introduction The second century development of Christianity in relation to Judaism is crucial to understanding how Christians and Jews began to set boundaries that differentiated one from the other. Justin’s Dialogue with Trypho the Jew is an invaluable text of how one influential Christian attempted to do this. In Justin’s arguments about “fleshly” lineage (kata sarkon) of the Jews and Christians as the new Israel, he seeks to resolve a particular difficulty for which the early Christians had to account: their heritage was rooted in the writings and traditions of a people apart from whom they increasingly wished to define themselves. This paper examines Justin’s use of peoplehood language in the Dialogue, specifically genos, ethnos, and laos. I show that Justin uses this language to claim Christian superiority and uses the Bar Kokhba revolt as his contemporary proof. Not only does Justin claim Christianity as a distinct associative-group1 in its own right, but he argues that Christians have replaced Jews as God’s chosen associative-group because of the Jews’ ignorance of Christ from the Scriptures. In the wake of the Bar Kokhba revolt, Justin is motivated to distance his construction of Christianity from his construction of Judaism and he uses the revolt’s failure as evidence of his assertions about Christian identity. I argue that the fundamental question Justin is attempting to address is this: how are Christians a legitimate associative-group within the framework of Scripture? This paper will demonstrate that Justin’s Christians are the associative-group of God and that Jews, through their wickedness and ignorance, have been displaced as evinced most 1 More on this term below. 1 concretely in their defeat in the Bar Kokhba revolt. Regardless of Justin’s intent, his work influenced Christian discourse, such as that of Irenaeus and Eusebius, in such a manner that helped pave the way for anti-Jewish/Judaism for centuries to come. The structure of this paper will follow a series of questions Justin is attempting to answer. After a contextualization of my work and a note on Justin’s audience (chapter 2), I divide Justin’s strategy into three prongs. First, Christianity is a legitimate associative- group, not a mere superstition, philosophy or new creed, but an established and coherently defined associative-group (chapter 3). Second, Christians are the Scriptural people of God, as textually prophesied. This roots Christianity in history and makes a claim for continuity of divinely ordained descent. Third, those non-Christians who call themselves God’s people (Justin’s Hebrews to which group Trypho belongs) are not God’s people and have not been since their rejection of Christ (chapter 4). Justin’s proof beyond his interpretation of Scripture for the negation of God’s peoplehood is the failure of the Bar Kokhba Revolt and the expulsion of the Jews from their Promised Land, which Justin spiritualizes and claims for Christianity. This organization is not Justin’s structure, but my own that I have mapped onto the Dialogue for the sake of clarity. As such, my citations of the text will be arranged thematically. Justin is not a systematic author,2 so I do not to present his work as an air- tight argument; he is not without argumentative flaws (such as circular reasoning). Oskar 2 Harold Remus notes the Dialogue’s “seeming planlessness,” in “Justin Martyr’s Argument with Judaism,” in Anti-Judaism in Early Christianity, volume 2: Separation and Polemic, edited by Stephen G. Wilson (Waterloo, CA: Canadian Corporation for Studies in Religion, 1986), 71. 2 Skarsaune inverts the Shakespearian phrase for Justin: “Though Justin’s exegesis may be without method, it is not madness.”3 Justin is portraying himself as having the answer to the identity crisis in which many Christians must have found themselves during the second century. Justin’s answer is that Christians have a coherent identity and it is Jewish identity that is tenuous. My terminology of peoplehood is fundamentally about identity. Identity, while in vogue, is nebulously conceived due to its ambiguous nature.4 I will conceive of “identity” as Rogers Brubaker and Frederick Cooper have listed as their fifth “key use” of the term: Understood as the evanescent product of multiple and competing discourses, “identity” is invoked to highlight the unstable, multiple, fluctuating, and fragmented nature of the contemporary “self.”5 I take identity as this product of unstable and fluctuating discourses, but this does not mean that it lacks “real” or affective significance. Brubaker and Cooper rightly criticize how the openness of “identity” can too often lead to analytical quagmires that push the limits of practical use. I will not offer an end-all solution to this problem, I will only attempt to be as specific as I can when labeling groups of people. The unstable and fluctuating discourses in Justin’s Dialogue, and other Christians of his day, are those of social groups. The ways that people identified, and understood, themselves and others were through the discursive tools available, such as a people’s nation, geographical provenance, descent (whether mythical or historical), etc. Before the 3 Oskar Skarsaune, The Proof from Prophecy, (Leiden: E. J. Brill, 1987), 1. 4 Philip F. Esler calls identity “dangerously elastic.” Conflict and Identity in Romans: The Social Setting of Paul’s Letter (Minneapolis, MN: Augsberg Fortress, 2003), 19. 5 Rogers Brubaker and Frederick Cooper, “Beyond Identity,” Theory and Society, vol. 29, no. 1 (February, 2000), 8, italics original. 3 “disembedding” of what we call “religion” from established discourses, those such as Justin had to be creative and flexible in their efforts to label and justify their identity. Since the new movement of Christianity could not claim for itself the same kind of markers as others (such as the Ioudaioi), Justin attempted to forge a new kind of “peoplehood” discourse into which he could establish Christianity. This emerging status is what I will call Justin’s “associative-group.” I define “associative-group” as a group of people linked by constructions of historical lineage, descent, and/or land affiliations in distinction to other groups of people likewise conceived in terms of lineage and descent, practice, and/or land affiliations. Justin is not terminologically precise, so I use this term for clarity. “Associative-group” is a redescriptive category of my own that does not map onto any one aspect of ancient conceptions such as genos, ethnos, laos, or other factors such as fictive kinship or lineage, though it certainly includes conceptions which also fall into those categories. There are two crucial facets to this definition. First, this type of construction falls into the camp of “soft” identity outlined by Brubaker and Cooper.6 By doing this I resist stating what Christianity or Judaism “is” in any essentialist way but maintain Justin’s discursive production of, what is for him, firm identity markers. As is the case of mythic descent (such as the Romans from the Trojans), the historical reality matters less than the 6 Brubaker and Cooper, 10. “Soft” identity is the proposal that identity is fluid, fluctuating and, most importantly, essentially artificial. “Strong” identity assumes fundamental sameness and consistency within a people-group. Brubaker and Cooper question the usefulness of this “soft” conceptualizing by asking whether or not identity, when so nebulously constructed, is of any real use. I maintain that it is because Justin’s language is itself lose and variable, deconstructing the very boundaries he intends to establish. 4 discursive maneuvering of a particular reality. The second crucial facet of my definition is that this discursive production of identity functions comparatively and, in Justin’s case, competitively.
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