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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

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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.

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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.

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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.

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“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.

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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. As I will discuss in greater detail below, Christianity was not easily defined as an associative-group through traditional means of descent or longstanding provenance in the second century, and Jews represented an associative-group against which some Christians struggled to define themselves. By uniting Christians under this rubric, Justin is using a category with practical cultural capital. The consequences of

Justin’s construction is that this point in history reveals a crucial shift in the ways that people began understanding their social identity apart from traditional roots in cultural history.

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Chapter Two: Justin and Identity in Scholarship

It is difficult to discuss early Christianity without taking note of the debates on terminology and methodology. In this chapter I will explain the trajectory out of which I approach the Dialogue and how that relates to the wider conversation about early

Christian and Jewish identities. My argument is that Justin’s Dialogue is a construct of

Christian identity as a historical and Scriptural associative-group in the context of

Christian doubt.

Scholarship on Justin’s works had for some time focused mainly on his Apologies and their relationship to the wider Greco-Roman world. Michael Slusser posited that when Oskar Skarsaune published The Proof from Prophecy in 1987, a new trend which viewed Justin in relation to Judaism began to gain traction.7 Scholars have only in the past few decades turned to Justin for questions of Jewish-Christian relations and the

“parting of the ways.” Scholars such as Denise Kimber Buell, Daniel Boyarin, and Erich

Gruen have made important contributions to the study of Justin and early Christianity and community self-identity. By working through some of this material I will stake out a position that shares Buell’s concern with “ethnoracial reasoning,” Boyarin’s argument that the “parting of the ways” was not definitive by Justin’s time, and Gruen’s concern

7 Michael Slusser, “Justin Scholarship: Trends and Tradition,” in Justin Martyr and His World (Minneapolis, MN: Fortress Press, 2007), 16. Skarsaune suggested that the Dialogue had been relatively neglected because it is so long and, “as a whole is so astonishingly dull,” 1, citing Erwin R. Goodenough, The Theology of Justin Martyr (Jena: Frommannche Buchhandlung, 1923), 87. Even Goodenough is gentler than psychologist William F. Day, who called the Dialogue a work of “pompous petulance,” in “A Behaviorist Looks at the Surviving Work of Justin Martyr,” Behaviorism, vol. 12, no. 2 (Cambridge Center for Behavioral Studies, Fall, 1984), 114

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that “ethnicity” is anachronistic for antiquity. What binds them together in this paper is attempt to formulate properly the conditions on which Justin set the boundaries of his associative-group.

Jewish-Christianity and the Parting of the Ways

Examining Christian and Jewish identity in the second century necessitates a look at the term “Jewish-Christian” in relation to the “parting of the ways.” The basis of my examination is the degree to which Judaism and Christianity can be differentiated and when this can be done. Bernard Green writes,

[The “parting of the ways”] has raised questions about Jewish and Christian self- definition; about the best terminology to use to describe Jews and Christians and, above all Jewish Christians or Christian Jews; about whether the split should be seen as competition or complex interaction; about whether Judaism and Christianity should be considered in a parent-child relationship or rather should be seen as siblings emerging from the aftermath of the destruction of the Temple and the political aspirations of Judaism in the great wars of 66-73 and 132-5. The debate continues and no consensus had yet emerged.8

While Green suggests that the parting of the ways was perhaps mostly complete around the time of Nero’s persecution,9 James D. G. Dunn, on the other hand, locates the divide in the decades between the two major Jewish revolts of 70 and 132-5, calling the split

“clear-cut” after 135.10

The location of the split inherently relates to how one defines “Christianity” and

“Judaism.” These terms denote people bound together by commonalities and

8 Bernard Green, Christianity in Ancient Rome: The First Three Centuries (London: T&T Clark International, 2010), 57. 9 Ibid., 58-9. 10 James D. G. Dunn, The Parting of the Ways, 2nd edition (London: SCM Press, 2006), 312.

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distinguished by differences, but these groups share critical identifications such as reverence for the same deity and the same “Scripture.” Scholars have become increasingly aware that attribution of modern qualities of “Jewishness” or “Christianness” are anachronistic and imperialist, particularly the attributions of individualistic “belief systems” which only in modern times have been characteristic of religious affiliation. 11

For example, Paul the apostle was clearly considered a “Christian” by many in antiquity,12 though he himself never uses the word, instead describing himself as “from the genos of Israel, the tribe of Benjamin, a Hebrew from Hebrews, a Pharisee according to the law” (Philippians 3.5).13 Trypho, according to Justin, also claims to be a Hebrew, but Justin clearly would not put Trypho in the same theological camp as Paul.14 If

11 See David Chidester, Savage Systems (Charlottesville, VA: The University of Virginia Press, 1996); Brent Nongbri, Before Religion (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press); Tomoko Masuzawa, The Invention of World Religions: Or, How European Universalism Was Preserved in the Language of Pluralism (Chicago, IL: The University of Chicago Press, 2005). 12 See Clement of Rome, To the Corinthians; Ignatius of Antioch, To the Romans; Ignatius of Antioch, To the Ephesians; Acts 11. While Paul is not unequivocally called a “Christian” in these texts, it is clear from the context that 1) they consider themselves “Christians” by use of the term explicitly, and 2) they consider Paul an insider of their own group. It may have been as superfluous to call Paul explicitly a Christian as it would to call him a man. 13 John Elliott even rightly denies the historical validity of calling Jesus a Jew, in “Jesus the Israelite was neither a ‘Jew’ nor a ‘Christian’: On Correcting Misleading Nomenclature,” Journal for the Study of the Historical Jesus, vol. 5, issue 2 (Los Angeles: Sage Publications, June 2007), 119-54. Steve Mason also notes our inability to identify “Judaism” confidently before the third century, see “Jews, Judaeans, Judaizing, Judaism: Problems of Categorization in Ancient History,” Journal for the Study of

Judaism, 38 (2007), 471. 14 Justin, Dialogue, 1: “Hebrew of the circumcision.” Paul also boasts in the same passage cited to be circumcised on the eight day, as is proper Hebrew custom.

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labeling “Jews” and “Christians” cannot be done in a theologically modern manner, how can we categorize these diverging peoples?

Shaye Cohen begins categorizing “Jews” as such in the first century BCE. To

Cohen, the Hasmoneans allowed non-Jews to convert and as such it became a “religious” affiliation.15 Cohen makes distinctions between “political” Judaism and “religious”

Judaism to discuss implications towards allegiances with other nations and the allowances of conversion, respectively. Due to the interactions between Jews and non-

Jews in the Hellenistic Mediterranean, particularly during the Hasmonean period, Cohen argues that gentiles could be included by mimicking the Greek politeia, separating

“Jewishness” from ethnicity.16 As Cohen states,

The idea that the Idumaeans and Ituraeans could somehow adopt membership in the Judaean state, and somehow become Judaean themselves through the observance of the Judaean way of life, presumes the definition of Judaeanness as a way of life and as a citizenship (italics added).17

I would push Cohen on this point in that he is assuming that ethnicity is a fixed identity that cannot be changed.18 This assumption underlies most of Cohen’s work. For example,

15 Shaye Cohen, The Beginnings of Jewishness (Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1999), 105. 16 Cohen also connects the development of this version of Jewishness to the development of “Hellenization” generally, ibid., 132. 17 Ibid., 127. 18 Cohen assumes an equivalence of “ethnos” to “ethnicity” (ibid., 7), though also treats his primary word of study, Ioudaios, as one which evolves to denote political (127) and religious (137) attributions . Cf. David M. Miller, “Ethnicity Comes of Age: An Overview of Twentieth-Century Terms for Ioudaios,” Currents in Biblical Research, 10(2) (2012), 304; Miller, “Ethnicity, Religion and the Meaning of Ioudaios in Ancient ‘Judaism,’” Currents in Biblical Research, 12(2) (2014), 221-2.

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Cohen mentions Dio, who notes that non-Jews sometimes practice Jewish traditions and are thus Jewish.19 Cohen says Dio distinguishes between “ethnic” Judeans and non-ethnic

“Jews,” even though Cohen shows that the word for “Judean” and “Jew” is the same

Greek word “Ioudaioi.” Dio says that even though only some are called Ioudaioi, really everyone who practices their customs are Ioudaioi.20 This does not appear to mean that

Dio is distinguishing an ethnic and non-ethnic issue, but that what defines Ioudaioi is actually what is practiced. This allows a more fluid understanding of ethnicity that Cohen does not recognize. Cohen concedes that ethnicity conceived of as practice allows boundary crossing but draws too distinct a division between “ethnicity” and “religion.”

As Seth Schwartz puts it,

Cohen…oversimplified what was in actuality probably evidence for a slight and gradual shift as part of a trajectory that was not necessarily unidirectional, and certainly did not entail all the Jews in the world suddenly leaping simultaneously across the abyss separating the poles of a binary system [of ethnicity and religion].21

In contrast to Cohen, Daniel Boyarin has published extensively on the problems of understanding the categorization of Jews in relation to Christians in antiquity. In his article “Justin Martyr Invents Judaism,” Boyarin argues that it was heresiological discourse that fostered the construction of self-identity of Jews and Christians as differentiated both from each other and from improper forms of themselves (false Jews or

19 Ibid., 150. 20 Cassius Dio, Roman History, 37.17.1. 21 Seth Schwartz, “How Many Judaisms Were There?: A Critique of Neusner and Smith on Definition and Mason and Boyarin on Categorization,” Journal of Ancient Judaism, 2:2 (2011), 232.

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false Christians).22 With second century Jews needing to categorize the Christians as

“other” (eventually “minim”), they also affirmed boundaries of “orthodox” vs. “heresy.”

Boyarin widens his scope on this question.

Boyarin argues that while the second century rabbis may have attempted to define

Judaism as a “religion” disembedded from land, ethnicity, etc., they ultimately (by the time of the Babylonian Talmud) rejected such a theologically driven identity in favor of ethnic priority (“An Israelite, even if he sins, remains an Israelite,” Sanhedrin 44a).23 One of Boyarin’s goals in both articles is to show that the very fact that Jews and Christians were attempting to differentiate themselves from each other (and also enact discursive fields of power/knowledge such as “religion”) is strong evidence that there was contention regarding how these boundaries could be set.24

The problem of defining Jews and Christians is crucial in the study of so-called

“Jewish Christians.” Skarsaune has argued against this term in favor of “Jewish believers in Jesus.” This is defined as “Jews by birth or conversion who in one way or another believed Jesus was their savior.” The basis is therefore “ethnicity rather than the criterion

22 Daniel Boyarin, “Justin Martyr Invents Judaism,” Church History, vol. 70, no. 3 (September 2001), 427-61. 23 Boyarin, “The Christian Invention of Judaism: The Theodosian Empire and the Rabbinic Refusal of Religion,” Representations, vol. 85, no. 1 (Winter 2004), 21-57. 24 Paula Fredriksen even challenges the larger question of the “parting of the ways,” given the revisionist history of Christianity from the 4th century through the Middle Ages that crafted the Christian narrative to imply a greater and earlier distinction from Judaism, “What ‘Parting of the Ways’?” in The Ways That Never Parted: Jews and Christians in Late Antiquity and the Early Middle Ages, edited by Adam H. Becker and Annette Yoshiko Reed (Tübingen: Mohr Siebeck, 2003), 35-63. Cf. Schwartz, 236-7; Esler, Conflict and Identity, 73, who, in agreement with a late “religious” differentiation, recalls Cohen’s religious “Judaism” as an “anachronistic illusion.”

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of ideology.”25 Skarsaune finds precedence for this view in ancient sources,26 arguing that

“in the ancient sources, ethnicity is the sole criterion for the adjective ‘Jewish’ as it is used in the combined terms ‘Jewish believer’ and ‘Jewish Christian.’”27 Skarsaune further clarifies that a Jewish believer in Jesus does not continue to practice the law, whereas a Jewish Christian does.28 Furthermore, “a Believer in Jesus” is defined “on the level of doctrine” (Christology) and as one who converts (no one is born a Christian).29 I commend Skarsaune’s methodological clarity, but his definitions explicitly take

“Judaism” as an ethnic category and “Christianity” as a cognitive category. As I will discuss below, Jews as ethnic and Christians as cognitive (i.e. theological) is a problematic assumption.

Boyarin has also challenged the concept of the “Jewish-Christian” as a useful or even legitimate term.30 To Boyarin, Jewish-Christian assumes that there was in fact something we could definitively call “Judaism” before the third century, which he

25 Oskar Skarsaune, “Jewish Believers in Jesus in Antiquity – Problems of Definition, Method, and Sources,” in Jewish Believers in Jesus, edited by Oskar Skarsaune and Reidar Hvalvik (Peabody, MA: Hendrickson Publishers, Inc., 2007), 3-4. 26 John 8.31, “Jesus said to those Ioudaioi who believed in him”; Origen, Celsus 2.1, “those of the Jewish people who have believed in Jesus [oi apo tou laou tōn Ioudaiōn eis ton Iēsoun pisteusantes]”; Eusebius, Church History 4.5.2, “believing Jews [ex Ebraiōn pistōn],” among some others. 27 Skarsaune, 7. 28 Ibid., 9. 29 Ibid., 13-4. 30 Boyarin, “Rethinking Jewish Christianity: An Argument for Dismantling a Dubious Category,” in The Jewish Quarterly Review, vol. 99, no. 1 (Winter 2009), 7-36. Boyarin acknowledges the similarities of his project with that of Michael Allen Williams in Rethinking “Gnosticism”: An Argument for Dismantling a Dubious Category (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1999); c.f. James Carleton Paget, “The Definition of the Terms Jewish Christian and Jewish Christianity in the History of Research,” in Jewish Believers in Jesus, 51.

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disputes. Secondly, this term assumes a relatively fixed idea of “religion,” which he does not believe appropriate before the fourth century. This leads Boyarin to the conclusion that “there is no nontheological or nonanachronistic way at all to distinguish Christianity from Judaism until institutions are in place that make and enforce this distinction.”31

Finally, Boyarin takes the use of “Jewish-Christian” as a heresiological term developed by Christians in the second to fourth centuries to describe a false (per)version of

Christianity.

One obvious problem of “Jewish-Christian” (that may have been too self-evident for Boyarin to assess) is that it grammatically prioritizes the noun “Christian” (why not

“Christian-Jew”?). “Jewish-Christian” inherently implies that there is a clear idea of what constitutes a “Christian” (the noun), but less so the adjective (“Jew-ish”). Even under an anachronistic application of modern sentiments of “religion” it would be difficult to deem someone both “Jewish” and “Christian” without subordinating one to the other (“they’re actually Christian”). One way that this has been done is to associate theological belief with the Christian aspect, namely a belief in Jesus as God’s risen Messiah, while associating the Jewish aspect with law observances. This has roots in biblical narratives such as Matthew (“I have not come to abolish the law”) or even Paul (allowing some to keep Jewish food prescriptions, 1 Corinthians 10). What is underneath this assumption, however, is that what “really” counts is the theological aspect; they are actually

Christians, they just also happen to practice some Jewish rituals. This, of course, fails to delineate exactly how “Jewish” they can be before they are more Jewish than Christian.

31 Boyarin, “Rethinking Jewish Christianity,” 28.

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The assumption is again that they can be as Jewish as they want so long as they maintain a particular theological belief concerning Jesus.32

Regarding Jewish and, in particular, Christian ethnicity, Denise Kimber Buell argues that early Christians used the tools available to them at the time to demarcate their own identities (from Jews and others), those tools being what Buell calls “ethnic reasoning.” 33 Buell defines this as a way that “Christians defined themselves in terms of larger corporate collectives, which have variously been called ‘ethnic groups,’ ‘races,’ or

‘nations.’”34 Against later conceptions of Christianity and Judaism that claim Christianity as “universal” and Judaism as “ethnic,” Buell argues that early Christians did not understand themselves as lacking in racial or ethnic identities, but understood themselves as a race bound by particular parameters (such as “faith”). For Buell, to deny that “faith” can be ethnoracial is to impose modern conceptions of both “faith” and “race” anachronistically.35 She argues that Christian literature, such as Justin’s Dialogue, attempted to establish Christianity as a race alongside (though better than) others such as

32 This theological belief tends to be a replication of that of the scholars’ own environment as well. 33 Denise Kimber Buell, Why This New Race? (New York, NY: Columbia University Press). 34 Ibid., ix. 35 Esler also chooses not to translate genos as “race” because of the “nineteenth century pseudo-science” which gave rise to modern assumptions about race which are, again, anachronistic. Esler marks genos as a word Josephus uses to mark lineage or “desent- group.” More on this below. “Judean Ethnic Identity in Josephus’ Against Apion,” in A Wandering Galilean: Essays in Honour of Seán Freyne, edited by Zuleika Rodgers with Margaret Daly-Denton and Anne Fitzpatrick McKinley (Boston: Brill, 2009), 78-9.

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Judaism, though acknowledges these boundaries as both “fixed” (such as in modern conceptions of race or ethnicity) and “fluid” (permeable and inclusive to others).36

Adolf von Harnack’s work on the “third race” set the tone for examining

Christianity in racial terms in modernity. Harnack showed that second and third century

Christians were responsive to racial identification.37 Like Buell a century later, Harnack argued that Christians were working out their identities in racial terms. Tertullian, in apparent response to the label “third race,” wrote,

We are indeed called the third race [genus] of men! Are we monsters, Cyropennae, or Sciopades, or some Antipodeans from the underworld? If these have any meaning for you, pray explain the first and second of the races, that we may thus learn the ‘third...’ The Phrygians, then, are held to be the first race…If, then, the Phrygians are the first race, still it does not follow that the Christians are the third.38

Tertullian does not reject being a genus, but he takes exception to the designation of being “third.” If, as Tertullian continues, Christians are third after Romans and Jews, what of the Greeks? What of the Egyptians? Harnack’s point was that by the time of

Tertullian there was an understanding (among some) that all people who were not

Christians or Jews were one race and Christians and Jews were the other two. This may have been one understanding, but even in Tertullian the lines are only very tenuously drawn, as Tertullian claims his pagan opponents also have three races: male, female, and

36 Buell, 95-6. 37 Adolf von Harnack, Mission and Expansion of Christianity in the First Three Centuries, translated by James Moffatt, second edition (New York, NY: P. G. Putnam’s Sons, 1908). 38 Tertullian, To the Nations, 1.8.

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eunuch. Tertullian’s point is that the division of people in this way is absurd, since

“There is indeed no race now that is not Christian.”39

Both Harnack and Buell have correctly shown that Christianity was not understood in antiquity as free of race while Jews were dependent on it, but stating that

Christianity was racial is different from stating how it was racial. Buell’s goals are not focused exclusively on Justin, and do not attempt a systematic examination of Justin’s ethnoracial language. Buell uses Justin to counter claims that Christianity was considered ethnically fluid (not depending on race or genealogy) while Judaism was ethnically fixed.

While Justin does use these semantics at times, Buell points out that Justin also resists making Judaism completely fixed as, after all, Trypho continues to emphasize the actions which make one Jewish, not their heritage or lineage. Justin also fixes Christianity by genealogically rooting Christians to Noah and Abraham and mandating knowledge of

Christ and baptism. Buell stops short of examining how Justin uses his terminology, but she provides a first step: acknowledging Justin’s use of associative-group language to counter modern assumptions about a strictly theological version of Christianity.

Erich Gruen recently put the study of ancient ethnicity in his crosshairs, noting,

“The ancients did not have a word for ethnicity. That, of course, has proved to be no deterrent whatever for modern scholars.”40 Gruen concludes that the ancients “did not agonize much about ethnicity,” and thus scholars should not anachronize such terminology to the extent that they do. By assessing the most relevant highlights of

39 Ibid., 1.8, “siquidem non ulla gens non Christiana.” 40 Erich Gruen, “Did Ancient Identity Depend on Ethnicity?: A Preliminary Probe,” Phoenix: The Journal of the Classics Association of Canada, 67:1/2 (Spring, 2013), 1.

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Gruen’s article, I will situate my own position on the matter for this study. I agree with some of Gruen’s points and not with others. Here he serves as a useful foil to those more comfortable with ethnic terminology.

Three groups of people stand out in Gruen’s analysis: Gauls, Jews, and

Christians. It is notable that his treatment of Gauls (and Phoenicians for that matter) is from a qualitatively different angle than that of the latter two. For Jews and Christians,

Gruen treats ethnicity as having “shared lineage” and “shared genealogy.”41 Regarding

Gauls, Gruen probes whether non-Gallic authors attribute “innate qualities” of the Gauls to their ethnicity.42 He correctly surmises from his evidence that authors such as

Polybius, Diodorus, Strabo, and Caesar regarded the qualities of the Gauls as happenstance: due to their harsh living conditions, access to luxury items, etc.43 His point is that their behavior, as understood by the ancients (not the Gauls themselves), was not a result of their “fixed ethnic identity.”

When Gruen shifts to ancient Jewish literature, he examines the literature of the

Jews’ conceptions of themselves.44 As noted, he examines the Jews under the rubric of intermarriage and genealogical descent (real or fictive). From the biblical evidence (pre-

Maccabean), Gruen points out that, despite the strong claims of descent from Abraham and Jacob, the Hebrew Bible does not prohibit exogamy.45 Even the strong messages of

41 Ibid., 3. Gruen also examines Roman self-perception under this rubric. 42 Ibid., 10-2. 43 Gruen demonstrates that Cicero had the same justification for the behavior of Phoenicians, 12. 44 I do not criticize Gruen’s shift from outsider to insider examination in itself because the availability of our evidence necessitates such maneuvering. 45 Gruen, 5-9.

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Ezra and Nehemiah against the marriages to foreign women are more about the practices

(idolatry) that they bring to the community than of purity of bloodline. The a priori assumption Gruen makes is that, in order to fit his model of ethnicity, the Hebrews must descend from only Hebrews. The problematic nature of exogamy disappears if Gruen allows lineage to count through one parent, which qualifies even in genetic descent.

Gruen correctly notes a shift in self-conceptualization from the Hellenic period on.46 Gruen finds that the Maccabean literature, Philo, Josephus and the Jewish Sibylline oracles discuss the Jews in terms of piety (belief) and practice. Gruen assumes that this precludes a genealogical concern for ethnicity. For this reason, Gruen calls the Jews of this period a “political entity” and a “religious entity,” as opposed to an ethnic entity.47 It is also completely possible, however, to associate one’s community of common descent with positive attributes without undermining a genealogical identity.

Finally, Gruen approaches early Christianity to claim it makes lineage metaphorical and “religious” (i.e., not ethnic).48 Maintaining his definition of ethnicity in genealogical terms, Gruen argues that early Christian literature from Paul through

Tertullian uses lineage in figurative ways to communicate what it means to be God’s

46 Ibid., 13-7. 47 Ibid., 16. Gruen comments on a passage in Josephus of a man who was a “‘Jew by genos,’ but the ancestors of his people were Indian philosophers! [sic]” This sentence could prove useful to Gruen’s argument, but the passage is Josephus’s account of Clearchus’s account of Aristotle’s account of this Jew (Against Apion, 1.179). Aside from the problems of that line of communication, Josephus’s point in bringing up the story is to demonstrate Aristotle’s admiration of the character of the Jew. Josephus makes no comment about the assertion of Indian ancestry, so Gruen’s argument is from silence. 48 Gruen, 17-20.

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people. If ethnicity is to be limited genealogically, Gruen is correct.49 This narrow view of “ethnicity,” however, is exactly the point those such as Buell are attempting to address: a priori assumptions of ethnicity by genealogical standards are as anachronistic as Gruen claims ethnic self-perception is. Gruen’s insistence on ethnicity as defined by genealogical lineage precludes the possibility that early Christians self-identified ethnically.

Gruen has, in fact, hit the nail on the head (even if some in Buell’s camp might think that nail is in his own foot). Ethnicity did not exist in antiquity in the same way that ethnicity functions today. Collective identities were messy. In his conclusion, Gruen writes,

[This brief essay] has attempted to call into question a widespread and common assumption: that the construct of ethnicity is consistently tied to the framing of collective identity. Descent and genealogy held high importance for antiquity. It does not follow, however, that they formed the basis for a singular group self- consciousness.50

Gruen clearly equates “ethnicity” with “descent and lineage” and “collective identity” with “group self-consciousness.”

This paper is situated between Gruen’s equations. My goal is to examine the

“collective identity/group self-consciousness” that Justin constructs in his Dialogue in order to advance the conversation about the relevance of Buell’s concern for ancient

“ethnicity/descent and lineage.” Boyarin and Cohen have both advanced the conversation

49 Paul, however, only uses the word genos in two ways: as an explicit reference to his own people of Israel (2 Cor 11:26; Gal 1:14; Phil 3:5) and an expression to globally spoken languages (1 Cor 12:10, 28; 14:10). 50 Gruen, 20.

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of Jewish identity, the latter in particular relation to early Christians such as Justin. As

Cohen examined the semantic field of Ioudaios in antiquity, I will examine Justin’s use of genos, ethnos and laos to determine his construct of Christianity’s status as an

“associative-group” over and against the Jews. I owe much to Boyarin’s argument that

Justin and his ilk inspired Jews and Christians alike to define themselves in one way or another, whether ethnic or not. My argument is that Justin justifies Christian identity as

God’s associative-group through their “true” status as Israel since the time of Jesus’s death. Justin uses genos, ethnos, and laos in particular ways to do this. For Justin,

Christianity as Israel is both proven by “proper” understandings of Scripture and demonstrated by the catastrophic failure of the Bar Kokhba revolt and subsequent exile.

By speaking in terms of Justin’s “associative-group,” I make no claim regarding the degree of ethnoracial language he employs, but encourage readers to consider how parallel ancient self-understandings are to modern conceptions of ethnicity and race.

Justin’s Audience

Justin’s (the implied author’s) goals in the Dialogue cannot be elucidated without considering to whom he is writing. There is not currently a consensus on who the target audience would have been, whether Jew, Jewish-Christian, Gentile-Christian, converts,

“God-fearers,” etc. After reviewing various conclusions on this issue, I will argue that the

Dialogue makes the most sense if we imagine his audience to be those whom Justin would have called Christians (those within his constructed associative-group). Specifying whether these Christians were Jewish or Gentile or converts (or born and raised

Christian) is beyond our ability to determine from the available evidence.

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Jon Nilson argued for a “non-Christian Gentile audience at Rome which is very favorably disposed towards Judaism and Christianity, yet is unable to adequately distinguish the one from the other.”51 Nilson assumes that the addressee, Marcus

Pompeius (141), is 1) a real person, 2) a Roman, and 3) “as such, a Gentile.”52 Regardless of whether this person was a real historical figure to whom Justin addressed the

Dialogue, this conclusion from the name is not convincing. Certainly there were Roman

Christians in Justin’s day.53 Nothing more is given about the identity of this character.54

The Dialogue does not contain an original epistolary introduction, nor does it contain any form of conventional farewell. The name itself is rather generic and corresponds to no identifiable person of Justin’s time. There is little reason to assume that this Marcus

Pompeius is a non-Christian, if he even existed at all.55

Nilson then argued that the first nine chapters, which sketch Justin’s arrival at

Christianity through philosophical investigation, would have been more appreciated by a

Gentile. This assumes that a Christian would be less likely to know or be interested in

51 Jon Nilson, “To Whom is Justin’s Dialogue with Trypho Address?” in Theological Studies, (September, 1977), 539. 52 Ibid., 540. 53 See Romans 16 for several Jesus-followers (later called Christians) in Rome even in Paul’s day; cf. Craig D. Allert, Revelation, Truth, Canon and Interpretation (Boston, MA: Brill, 2002), 39; cf. Charles H. Cosgrove, “Justin Martyr and the Emerging Christian Canon,” in Virgiliae Christianae, vol. 36 (Leiden: E. J. Brill, 1982), 212. 54 Nilson, 540, notes the reference to the reader in chapter 8, where Justin refers to the reader as “beloved” (philtate), but this is as easily applicable (if not more so) to a Christian. 55 Bucur, 37. It is interesting that the name, if fictional, would likely have evoked the most famous Pompeius, Pompey the Great. It was he who ended Judean independence by conquering Jerusalem, incorporating it into the Roman Republic. Given Justin’s investment in shaming the Jews by their failures against Rome, it is conspicuous that the supposed recipient of this text shares the nomen of the first Roman to conquer Jerusalem.

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philosophy, which is undermined by Trypho’s approach to Justin on account of his philosophical garb (1). Presenting Christianity as acceptable to Greek philosophy (as is

Justin’s goal in his Apologies) does not make the audience Gentile any more than the fact that it is written in Greek. The Dialogue’s introduction could just as easily demonstrate to a Christian audience that the Christian “philosophy” is justifiable even to elitist Greeks.56

Nilson states that Justin’s choice of such a weak proponent of Judaism as Trypho and the ineffectiveness of quoting from the Septuagint to a Jew likely precludes a Jewish audience.57 The effectiveness of Trypho as a debater is difficult to ascertain given his limited role as a speaker, and it is subjective in any case.58 Nilson further claims a Gentile convert to Judaism would be the same kind of Jew that Trypho is, which is speculative.59

Nilson’s emphasis on Justin’s concern regarding converts60 is misplaced. Nilson points to Justin’s claim that Jews had spread false rumors about Christians to assert that

Justin is trying to correct Gentile misunderstandings of Christianity.61 Justin could, just as easily, want a Christian audience to know how to combat these claims made by Jews. I

56 See Allert, 41-2. 57 Allert argues that the extensive use of Scripture is not an indication that the audience is unfamiliar with it, but that the greater context necessitates a mutual respect for Scripture (43-4). I agree that the Dialogue relies on the readers’ familiarity and appreciation of Scripture, but Allert downplays the debate about Hebrew/Greek Scriptures because Justin claims to only use texts on which Trypho will agree (Dialogue, 71). A strict conclusion on this matter is irrelevant to my purposes, as the important issue is that Nilson’s argument for a non-Christian Gentile reader based on Septuagint usage is overstated. 58 Phillip Sigal notes the accuracy of Trypho’s critiques to what Jews would have argued, suggesting Trypho is not so weak after all, "An Inquiry into Aspects of Judaism in Justin's Dialogue with Trypho," Abr-Nahrain 18 (1978-79), 74-100. Cf. Remus, 74-5. 59 Nilson, 541. 60 Ibid., 542. 61 Ibid., 542; Dialogue, 17, 32, 93, 108, 117.

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would grant Nilson that this could represent the existence of Jewish evangelism, but this does not mean the reader has to be a non-Christian.62 In any case, there does not appear to be good evidence for such evangelism.63

Craig D. Allert lays out the case in significant detail for the range of possibilities for Justin’s audience, ultimately concluding that the audience would have been “a Jewish audience in the context of missionary activity between Jews and Christians,”64 but concedes that the Dialogue “would naturally commend itself to a Christian audience” and that Justin “may have had Jewish Christians as well as Gentile Christians in mind.”65

Surely Justin may have been well pleased if Jews, Gentiles and Christians alike found value in his work, but the wide variety of possibilities Allert concedes weakens the strength of his conclusion.

Allert claims that the surface reading of the text lends itself to a Jewish audience because the purpose (of Justin the character) is, to convince Trypho, a Jew, to become a

Christian.66 Allert outlines the arguments against a Jewish audience, demonstrating strengths and weaknesses before making his conclusion. I agree with much of his work,

62 Allert also notes that merely pointing out that Jews have slandered Christians does not indicate a non-Christian Gentile audience, but actually functions better if the audience is Jewish (51). I consider it equally as likely that any “point of order” Justin makes against the Jews would be received well by a Christian reader. 63 Nina E. Lively, ““Theological Identity Making: Justin’s Use of Circumcision to Create Jews and Christians,” Journal of Early Christian Studies, vol. 18, no. 1 (Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2010), 53; Paula Fredriksen, “Judaism, the Circumcision of Gentiles, and Apocalyptic Hope: Another Look at Galatians 1 and 2,” in The Galatians Debate, ed. Mark Nanos (Peabody, MA: Hendrickson Publishing, 2002), 241; Fredriksen, “What ‘Parting of the Ways’?” 43, 49-56. 64 Cf. fn. 62. 65 Allert, 61. 66 Ibid., 37-8.

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but I find the basic assumption that the audience is Jewish until proven otherwise problematic; apologetic literature lends itself primarily to those within the group.67

Allert’s conclusion about the argument for a Christian audience (mainly taken from

Cosgrove’s argument) is that Christianity does not offer the “least problematic” of the possibilities, particularly because of Justin’s “non-polemic tone.”68 I agree with Tessa

Rajak that, “For all [the Dialogue’s] charming introduction, to ascribe good humour, friendliness, even kindness, to the dialogue as a whole is to read highly selectively.”69

The Christian audience is most clearly demonstrated by the internal evidence of the text’s purpose.70

67 Tessa Rajak assumes that it is in fact a Christian audience that is the most obvious surface-level understanding, in large part to the harshness of Justin’s language towards Jews, “Talking at Trypho: Christian Apologetic as Anti-Judaism in Justin’s Dialogue with Trypho the Jew,” in Apologetics in the Roman Empire, edited by Mark Edwards, Martin Goodman and Simon Price (New York, NY: Oxford University Press, 1999), 79; cf. Frances Young, in the same volume, who writes, “[Justin] may have intended that outsiders should find his explanations convincing…but in this he was probably self- deceived…It was the Christian community which welcomed the reasoned justification of its socially awkward position, “Greek Apologists in the Second Century,” 84-5. Victor Tcherikover, “Jewish Apocalyptic Literature Reconsidered,” suggested that most Christian literature of this sort was intended for internal use, Eos 48 (1956); Nina E. Livesey, “Theological Identity Making: Justin’s Use of Circumcision to Create Jews and Christians,” Journal of Early Christian Studies, vol. 18, no. 1 (Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2010), 21-2; Judith M. Lieu, Image and Reality: The Jews in the World of the Christians in the Second Century (Edinburgh: T&T Clark, 1996), 105; Stephen G. Wilson, Related Strangers: Jews and Christians 70–170 c.e. (Minneapolis, MN: Fortress Press, 1995), 264. 68 Allert, 61. 69 Rajak, 68. 70 Herbert W. Basser sees more sympathy towards the Jews in Justin than in other Christian literature against Jews, but generally assumes they are all written with a Christian audience in mind; see Studies in Exegesis: Christian Critiques of Jewish Law and Rabbinic Responses 70-300 C.E. (Boston: Brill, 2000), 52.

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I argue that Justin’s purpose would be most effective to those who were of like mind,71 though the text does not state its purpose explicitly. A complication in establishing the text’s purpose is the complex layers of authorship. There are three levels of “authorship” to notice. First, the implied author is the reconstructed historical Justin based on the text.72 Second, we have Justin the narrator, who is located in the first person

“I” who describes the conversation to the recipient of the letter (Marcus Pompeius in this case). 73 Thirdly, there is Justin the character, who is the version of Justin who is narrated as speaking to Trypho in the text.

These three “Justins” have different goals, whether explicit or not. The goal of

Justin the character is to convince Trypho to “be of the same opinion as ourselves, and believe that Jesus is the Christ of God;” a goal which the speaker ultimately fails to accomplish (142). The goal of Justin the narrator is, ostensibly, to inform the reader of a conversation he had had with a man named Trypho. The goal of the implied author is in large part what this paper hopes to elucidate; it is not expressed.

It is unlikely that the implied author’s goal is to convince a Jewish audience that

“Jesus is the Christ of God.” First, it seems ineffective to use a dialogue with a Jew in

71 Frances M. Young, Biblical Exegesis and the Formation of Christian Culture, (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997), 126-7. 72 H. Porter Abbott, The Cambridge Introduction to Narrative (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002), 77-9. 73 Abbott, 63, 66-7; Roland Barthes, “An Introduction to the Structural Analysis of Narrative,” in New Literary History, vol. 6, no. 2, On Narratives and Narrative (Baltimore, MD: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 1975), 244. Abbott points the relative unanimity among literary critics that the narrator (an instrument, a construction, a device wielded by the author) is not to be confused with the author who actually wrote the words down (even if written in the first person).

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order to convince a Jewish reader of that which the narrator failed to convince the Jew in the text.74 Second, the text is very harsh towards the Hebrew people in many places, which would likely alienate a Jewish reader;75 the tone of Justin the speaker seems particularly negative given the façade of politeness with which Justin the narrator tries to maintain. Thirdly, Justin the character is much more preoccupied in purposes other than directly addressing the objections of Trypho, indicating that Justin the character is either a poor listener or (my contention) that Justin the implied author has little care of reaching a Jewish readership.76

Justin gives so little information about Trypho that we are left to speculate about

Trypho’s historical existence. It is possible that Justin did have an encounter with a Jew, maybe even named Trypho, and that their conversation was either more or less similar to what Justin recorded,77 but it is in any case speculative and analytically unhelpful. I take the position that Trypho, whether a real historical figure or not, functions in the Dialogue

74 Remus notes how it is typical in Adversus Iudaeos literature for the debating Jew to be won over by the end of the dialogue, 74. Cf. Fred C. Conybeare, The Dialogues of Athanasius and Zacchaeus and of Timothy and Aquila (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1898). 75 Rajak, 79. P. Lorraine Buck makes the same argument regarding Justin’s Apologies, that it is highly unlikely that Justin addressed the Roman officials with such an abusive tone. “Justin Martyr’s Apologies: Their Number, Destination, and Form,” The Journal of Theological Studies, ns 54, no. 1 (April, 2003), 53-4. 76 Take, for example, the times Trypho asks Justin to justify his reading of “young woman” as “virgin” in Isaiah 7.14 (43 and 67) without ever getting an answer. While Justin addresses Trypho’s concern in 76, he claims he will not address passages with which Trypho disagrees regarding translation, yet continues to rely on this verse. 77 Demetrios Trakatellis calls Trypho’s character “a mixture of both” history and fiction, though claims an entirely fictional character would have made readers “[discard] the document out of hand as unacceptable fiction,” which I find a bit strong; “Justin Martyr’s Trypho,” The Harvard Theological Review, vol. 79, no. 1/3, Christians among Jews and Gentiles: Essays in Honor of Krister Stendahl on his Sixty-Fifth Birthday (Cambridge University Press on behalf of the Harvard Divinity School, January - July, 1986), 296-7.

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for Justin’s own literary ends, so he must be treated as a fictional character, Justin’s straw man. If Justin did create Trypho ex nihilo, it would not necessarily imply that a Jewish audience was not intended, but it would signify that Justin was very confident in his knowledge of what a Jew would say; it would be much easier for actual Jews to figure out that Trypho was not representative of them.

While Justin’s Apologies do have their critiques of Jews, the majority of Justin’s arguments in that text are to be used against non-Christian Gentile opponents.78 The

Dialogue shifts from the Apologies by relying on Scripture, which Justin shares with his opponent Trypho. While the non-Christian Gentile opponent would need to be convinced philosophically, a Jewish opponent (by Justin’s logic) would need to be convinced biblically. Justin’s three texts, then, equip Christian readers with the argumentative tools and proofs to win over, or at least defend adequately against, Jews and Gentiles alike who might challenge them.79

I will be moving forward in this project with the assumptions outlined above.

First, the Dialogue argues for a particular view of Christianity that confirms their status as God’s true chosen associative-group. Second, Justin is writing during a time when a

78 Runar M. Thorsteinsson, “The Literary Genre and Purpose of Justin’s Second Apology: A Critical Review with Insights from Ancient Epistolography,” Harvard Theological Review, 105(1) (January 2012), 91-114; Troxel, A. Craig, “‘All Things to All People’: Justin Martyr’s Apologetical Method,” Fides et Historia: Official Publication of the Conference on Faith and History, 27 (1995), 27. 79 Sara Denning-Bolle notes that such extensive citations from Scripture would not likely be necessary for a learned Jew, but more so for “less educated Christians.” “Christian Dialogue as Apologetic: The Case of Justin Martyr Seen in Historical Context,” Bulletin of the John Rylands University Library of Manchester, 69 (1987), 503, fn. 28. Cf. Henry Chadwick, "Justin Martyr’s Defence of Christianity," Bulletin of the John Rylands Library. 47 (1964-65), 275.

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strict separation between Jews and Christians as two well differentiated associative- groups is neither universally acknowledged nor systematically delineated. Third, the implied author considers himself a Christian and he is writing to others he would also deem Christian in order to affirm their status as God’s associative-group over and against

Jews. I will show that noting the specific ways that Justin uses associative-group language increases our ability to track the trajectory of Christianity as a distinct identity by better appreciating the nuances of Justin’s boundary-making.

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Chapter Three: Christianity as a Legitimate Associative-Group “It is an obligation incumbent on all men to live according to their country's customs, in which case they will escape censure; whereas the Christians, who have abandoned their native usages, and who are not one nation like the Jews, are to be blamed for giving their adherence to the teaching of Jesus.”81

The quote above is one of Celsus’s many attacks on Christianity. Celsus’s activity seems to have been in the 160s and 170s C.E., making him a contemporary of Justin.82 I draw attention to this quote in order to demonstrate a contested issue of Justin’s time: the group identity of Christianity.83 This accusation that Christians are “not one ethnos”84 is a claim that Celsus’s contemporary Justin goes to great lengths to counter.85 By examining the vocabulary available to Justin that denoted cohesive populations, I will show that

Justin attempted to justify Christianity as a legitimate associative-group, specifically over and against his construction of Jews.

81 “τὸ δεῖν πάντας ἀνθρώπους κατὰ τὰ πάτρια ζῆν, οὐκ ἂν μεμφθέντας ἐπὶ τούτῳ· Χριστιανοὺς δὲ τὰ πάτρια καταλιπόντας καὶ οὐχ ἕν τι τυγχάνοντας ἔθνος ὡς Ἰουδαῖοι ἐγκλήτως προστίθεσθαι τῇ τοῦ Ἰησοῦ διδασκαλίᾳ.” Celsus, as quoted by Origen, Against Celsus, 5.35, emphasis mine. 82 R. Joseph Hoffman, Celsus: On the True Doctrine (New York, NY: Oxford University Press, 1987), 30. 83 It is worth observing that, in citing this quote in his refutation, Origen does not defend the accusation that Christians are not an ethnos, but instead attacks the assumption that everyone should only practice the traditions of their ancestors and that this is inherently a good thing, 5.35-7. 84 Or, an “anomalous group,” as noted by Mason, 497. 85 It is not my contention that Justin is responding to Celsus directly, but that Justin was familiar with the accusation at least indirectly. Carl Andresen, Logos und Nomas: Die Polemik des Kelsos wider das Christentum, argues that Celsus had read at least some of Justin and was partially responding to him (Berlin: de Gruyter, 1955); cf. Chadwick, 283- 4.

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Justin86 uses the terms genos, ethnos and laos to describe his version of

Christianity as a legitimate associative-group that has replaced the Jews in the eyes of

God. As Buell noted, “the persuasiveness of these constructions [of Christianity] depends on their ability to convince readers that they speak of real groups.”87 Justin the implied author employed the above terms to justify his own “real group.” I will examine how these terms are functioning in the context of the Dialogue. Each word has its own semantic realm in which Justin uses them, though with substantive overlap. Examining how Justin uses these terms will demonstrate how the implied author affirms Christianity not only as a legitimate associative-group, but as God’s associative-group. This will set the foundation for my argument that Justin uses the status of Christians as a cohesive associative-group both to legitimate his reading of Scripture and to show how the implied author uses this interpretation in order to confirm that the Bar Kokhba revolt’s failure is proof of God’s rejection of the Jews in favor of the Christians.

Perhaps the most important word to examine is genos.88 It means most generally

“race,” “kin,” “descendant,” or “generation,” but it appears in connection with circumcision and lineage kata sarkon to the patriarchs. The semantic range of genos suggests that Justin uses it to compete against Jewish claims of identity regarding practice and descent. For Justin, it is God who determines lineage and collective identity, not a particular practice or genealogy.

86 Because this chapter focuses on the immediate context of Justin’s associative-group language, unless otherwise noted I will use “Justin” to mean “Justin the character.” 87 Buell, 64. 88 Justin also uses “genea” occasionally, but the meaning is virtually indistinguishable so I have combined them into one category.

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Justin uses genos in about 50 different places.89 The first use of the term is in the first chapter, in order to label Trypho: “Then he told me frankly both his name and his family [genos]. ‘Trypho,’ says he…‘I am a Hebrew of the circumcision.’” These are two of the only pieces of information given about Trypho. Once Justin has labeled Trypho as such, for the rest of the text any reference to “your genos” could reasonably mean

“Hebrew.” About half the time Justin does indeed use it to describe Jews, as in “your genos” (as opposed to “mine”).90 At the very least, in these cases Justin uses it in this way to describe the Jews as a self-contained people, different from himself and different from

Christians or polytheists.91

What is more interesting about genos for Trypho is its connection with the practice of circumcision. Justin breaks the association of a genos with circumcision in order to justify his point that circumcision is irrelevant to one’s belonging to an associative-group. Trypho is not just in the “Hebrew” genos, he is “of the circumcision”

(ek peritomēs). Justin notes later in the Dialogue that the uncircumcised person will be cut off (pun likely intended) from his genos (23; c.f. Genesis 17.14), implying the strong connection between genos and the Jewish necessity of circumcision. What is even more important for Justin to prove, however, is that the “true genos of God” (to alēthinon

89 For simplicity’s sake I round down to acknowledge when he uses the term multiple times even in the same sentence. 90 Chapters 47, 48, 49, 51, 52, 55, 64, 66, 67, 69, 78, 82, 87, 89, 97, (102?), 107, 108, 115, 117, 119, 120, 122, 123, 130, 141. 91 Mason notes the continual recognition of Jews as a distinctive group (ethnos) by Greek dissenters to Christianity such as Celsus, Porphyry, and Julian. Mason’s general point is about the ethnic status of Ioudaioi, but my point is that Justin makes no great shift here in acknowledging Jews as a cohesive group. See Mason, 497-8.

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genos tou theou, 116) does not need circumcision. For example, “Noah was the beginning of our genos: yet uncircumcised, along with his children he went into the ark” (19).

Abraham too is an example of God’s genos apart from circumcision. Justin finds it

“ridiculous and absurd” that God would desire each genos to have independent standards of practice and goes on to claim in Pauline style that surely Abraham, when uncircumcised, was deemed righteous by God, therefore the genos of God cannot rely on circumcision (11, 23).92 Justin even claims that since women, the “female genos” (33), cannot be circumcised God cannot require it of God’s genos as a whole. Justin argues that

Jesus was sent out of the genos of Abraham to put an end to the practices (circumcision, among others) that were only instilled due to the hardness of their hearts (43, cf. 106).93

Christianity is, therefore, God’s genos regardless of any need for circumcision.94

Apart from circumcision, the figures of famous patriarchs are significant in

Justin’s use of genos. When Noah prophesied about his sons, Justin understands their fates as predicting the current situation:

92 Cf. Rodney Werline, “The Transformation of Pauline Arguments in Justin Martyr’s ‘Dialogue with Trypho,” The Harvard Theological Review, vol. 92, 1 (Cambridge University Press on behalf of the Harvard Divinity School, January, 1999), 84-5. 93 Justin is not consistent in his explanations for God’s command to circumcise, as discussed below. 94 Sidney B. Hoenig demonstrated the development of circumcision as a divine covenant in and of itself in the Tannaitic and rabbinic periods. Hoenig shows that, in response to Christian antinomism as early as Paul, the rabbis doubled-down on circumcision as a necessary qualification of inclusion, arguing that Abraham was only “perfected” after he was circumcised. After the destruction of the Jerusalem Temple, the rabbis needed to bolster the importance of circumcision (and other laws) as requisites for those in the Hebrew genos. “Circumcision: The Abrahamic Covenant,” The Jewish Quarterly Review, vol. 53, no. 4 (Philadelphia, PA: University of Pennsylvania Press, April 1963), 322-34.

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The descendants of Japheth would take possession of the property of which Shem's descendants had dispossessed Canaan's descendants; and spoil the descendants of Shem, even as they plundered the sons of Canaan. And listen to the way in which it has so come to pass. For you, who have derived your lineage from Shem (oi apo tou Sēm katagontes to genos), invaded the territory of the sons of Canaan by the will of God; and you possessed it. And it is manifest that the sons of Japheth, having invaded you in turn by the judgment of God, have taken your land from you, and have possessed it (139).

Justin’s analogy here is that Christians, in the same way that the genos of Shem (Jews) invaded and usurped the genos of Canaan, Christians have usurped the genos of the Jews and their inheritance. Genos is also linked to the “house of Jacob,” both as in the same genos as Judah, Isaac and Abraham (11, where he points out Abraham’s uncircumcision95 and 43 twice) and independently as a marker for what Justin likely understands as merely

“Jews” (15, 36). David is also of the genos out of which Christ came (45), which includes the genos of Jacob, Isaac and Abraham (100). Here again we see the Christian genos through Justin’s interpretation of patriarchal history that relates to Christian identity.96

There are a few important instances where Justin clearly categorizes Christians as a genos themselves. In chapter 48 Justin acknowledges for the first time that his own associative-group is a genos: “For there are…of our genos who admit that [Jesus] is

Christ, while holding Him to be man of men.” While in the context of pointing out that

95 “Ἰσραηλιτικὸν γὰρ τὸ ἀληθινόν, πνευματικόν, καὶ Ἰούδα γένος καὶ Ἰακὼβ καὶ Ἰσαὰκ καὶ Ἀβραάμ, τοῦ ἐν ἀκροβυστίᾳ ἐπὶ τῇ πίστει μαρτυρηθέντος ὑπὸ τοῦ θεοῦ καὶ εὐλογηθέντος καὶ πατρὸς πολλῶν ἐθνῶν κληθέντος.” Cf. Werline, 83. 96 This relates to the idea that one’s temporal heritage is important to present social identity. As Buell notes Justin’s claim, “We were before the foundation of the world,” that bolstered Christianity’s ancient pedigree, 63-84. See also Esler, Conflict and Identity, 22-4; Susan Condor, “Social Identity and Time,” in Social Groups and Identities: Developing the Legacy of Henri Tajfel, edited by Peter Robinson (Oxford: Butterworth Heinemann, 1996), 285-315.

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Justin does not agree with the people about which he speaks, he admits that they are a genos qualified by the admission that Jesus is Christ. It is only after more than 100 chapters that Justin comes out with strong statements about the Christian genos. In 116, while somewhat obliquely, Justin states,

For just as that Jesus, called by the prophet a priest…even so we, who through the name of Jesus have believed as one man in God the Maker of all…we are the true high priestly genos of God…Now God receives sacrifices from no one, except through His priests.

It is not until chapter 135 that Justin boldly declares, “As, therefore, Christ is the Israel and the Jacob, even so we, who have been quarried out from the bowels of Christ, are the true Israelitic genos.” Later, Justin states that Christ “became again the chief of another genos regenerated by Himself” (138). The genos of Christianity is, for Justin, clearly defined within Scriptural tradition to refer to those of his genos, not Trypho’s.

Many instances of genos are rather generic and lack significant analytical usefulness. In the plural, genē can mean simply “everyone” or “all nations/tribes/families/etc. everywhere.”97 It can also have a temporal sense, such as all people or generations hence (likely in 34, 38, 64 and 92). Genos can even be either synonymous to ethnos or act as a subcategory of ethnos such as in 31: “And there were given Him power and kingly honour, and all ethnē of the earth by their genos, and all glory, serve Him.” Justin at times uses genos to distinguish different kinds of people such as his own Samaritans (120), or Greeks and barbarians (121). In the latter instance he continues to list kinds of people as “nomads,” “vagrants,” “herdsmen,” etc., so these too

97 Chapters 64, 67, probably 73, 74, 84, 88, 93, 95, 102, 106, 108, 111, 119, 124, 130, 131, 138.

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might for Justin equate to his immediate use of genos, though it is also quite possible that he is listing other kinds of people without necessarily equating them as individual genē.

This seems more likely, and thus genos here is simply “Greek” and “barbarian.” This generic use does not negate the value of a Christian genos, it merely demonstrates the versatility of the term.

One of the most important uses of genos for Justin is the establishment of

Christianity as a genos by the power of God. This argument weaves through the Dialogue at various points, and it is crucial that the reader follows Justin’s logic (as it is) on this point, both for Justin’s purposes and my own. Justin builds on Genesis 49:8-12 and Isaiah

53:8 to posit Jesus as the head of the Christian associative-group,98 declared so not by descent, law or circumcision, but by the power of God. This is not merely an effort to allegorize Scripture to determine a deeper meaning99 (though Justin is indeed doing that).

Justin reads the text this way to link the assumptions of genealogical descent and genos in order to subvert these (kata sarkon) assumptions for Christians.

First, Justin uses Genesis 49 and the gospel tradition to link Jesus (the one from whom Christians descend) to Judah (the one from whom Jews descend). This allows a

98 It could be objected that I cannot adequately propose a context for Justin’s own definition of a term when used as a citation because it ceases to become Justin’s use and becomes that of the author cited (usually Isaiah). This is fair, but I have to assume that there was a reason Justin used one text over another. The fact that Justin chose one passage to cite and not another is evidence that, regardless of the “original” meaning in the context of the Hebrew Scriptures, Justin used these passages for his own purpose, and the words take on new meaning in Justin’s context. One cannot presuppose that anyone quoting Shakespeare truly understands the linguistic innovation (or even the immediate context!) in the citation. 99 Frances M. Young, Biblical Exegesis, 124-5.

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continuity of Scripture that Justin can use to usurp the Jewish associative-group. He says that Moses, the presumed author of the text, spoke in a parable which Justin will explain to Trypho (52). In its biblical context, Jacob is dying and speaks last words to each of his sons. The relevant passage reads,

Judah, your brothers shall praise you; your hand shall be on the neck of your enemies; your father’s sons shall bow down before you. Judah is a lion’s whelp; from the prey, my son, you have gone up. He crouches down, he stretches out like a lion, like a lioness—who dares rouse him up? The scepter shall not depart from Judah, nor the ruler’s staff from between his feet, until tribute comes to him; and the obedience of the peoples is his. Binding his foal to the vine and his donkey’s colt to the choice vine, he washes his garments in wine and his robe in the blood of grapes; his eyes are darker than wine, and his teeth whiter than milk.

Justin uses Zechariah 9:9100 and his knowledge of Christian tradition to show that it was

Jesus who rode the donkey (53; cf. Mark 11:1-11 [without Zechariah citation]; Luke

19:28-39 [without citation]; Matthew 21:1-5 [with citation]; John 12:12-5 [with citation]). Justin has here linked Jesus to Judah through the donkey imagery, but his next goal is to connect these to God’s genea through the garments washed in the “blood of grapes.”

100 “Lo, your king comes to you; / triumphant and victorious is he, / humble and riding on a donkey, / on a colt, the foal of a donkey.”

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Isaiah 53:8 reads, “His judgment is for him to be taken away in humiliation; who will describe (“declare”) his genea?” (LXX, translation mine).101 The passage comes from a chapter in Isaiah that had already been used in the Acts of the Apostles in reference to Jesus, though in quite a different way. The Isaiah passage expanded reads,

He was oppressed, and he was afflicted, yet he did not open his mouth; like a lamb that is led to the slaughter, and like a sheep that before its shearers is silent, so he did not open his mouth. By a perversion of justice he was taken away. Who could have imagined his future (Who will declare his genea)? For he was cut off from the land of the living, stricken for the transgression of my people (Isaiah 53:7-8, NRSV).

This is the fourth of the so-called “Suffering Servant Songs,” which is cited in Acts 8:32-

3. In Acts, only a portion is included (“Like a sheep…land of the living”) and it is not given an exegesis; when asked about the passage’s meaning, Philip told the Ethiopian eunuch the gospel of Jesus. The crux of the passage for Justin is the phrase, “Who shall declare [the suffering servant’s] genea?” While Justin is aware of the relation of the

“lamb led to the slaughter” to Jesus, that only functions to connect Jesus to Isaiah in a superficial manner. The real interpretation is that God alone has the power to declare the suffering servant’s (Jesus’s) genea. This genea, the Christians, is demonstrated by the blood of the grape from Genesis.

Justin claims that Christ’s blood is that blood of the grape, not made by man, but cultivated by God. Christ would not be, therefore, “of the genos of man, but of the power of God…[This] proves that Christ is not man of men, begotten in the ordinary course of

101 Cited in 13, 43, 53, 68, 76; referenced without citation in 32 and 89.

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humanity” (54). Justin admits that this is an “obscure prediction,” but that it means that, unlike humans who can trace their lineage through their parents (or “declare their genea”), Christ, as one born from God, cannot have his lineage (genos/genea) “declared” but by the power of God (76, cf. 63). Justin therefore claims the status of a genos without having to be able to trace a familial lineage. 102

An example of standard approaches to Justin’s alteration of familial lineage is expressed by Susan Wendel. Wendel compares the “descent of the spirit” in Justin and

Luke-Acts, emphasizing a spiritual inheritance (Christian) over an ethnic one (Jewish).103

She states correctly,

Justin attempts to claim Israel’s identity and inheritance…According to Justin, ethnic Israel rightly incurred punishment in the destruction of the temple in 70 CE and after the Bar Kokhba revolt; their culpability, especially in killing Christ, led to their ultimate disinheritance.104

However, her study consistently emphasizes the transfer of God’s spirit to a different people who do not share an ethnic identity. She uses “ethnic Israel” to demarcate particular Jews (“kata sarkon”) whom Justin presumably is targeting. Unlike Luke, who maintains (Jewish) Israel as an important group in God’s plan, Justin negates their importance by substituting Christians as the recipients of the spirit. Wendel writes,

“Justin sees Jesus…as taking the Spirit away from the Jewish people and giving it to

Christ-believers instead.”105 Bruce Chilton, in the same volume, writes, “This eternal

102 Justin also explains this in his First Apology, 32. 103 Susan Wendel, “Interpreting the Descent of the Spirit: A Comparison of Justin’s Dialogue with Trypho and Luke-Acts,” in Justin Martyr and His World (Minneapolis, MN: Fortress Press, 2007), 95-103. 104 Ibid., 95, emphasis mine. 105 Ibid., 100-1.

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covenant [which now must be kept by all people who claim God’s inheritance] establishes who is a true, spiritual Israelite and Judaite.”106

Chilton is correct, but Justin does not only maneuver God’s spiritual inheritance to Christians (though he does), he establishes Christianity as Israel tout court. The nuance is not merely a benign subtlety. If we assume that the shift Justin demonstrates from Jew to Christian was only the transference of a spiritual preference, we sustain the discredited view that Judaism was a strictly ethnic category and Christianity was a spiritual category. To fully appreciate Justin’s arguments we must examine this “spiritual inheritance” in a less Cartesian way. We must see Justin’s claim in light of the developing boundaries Jews and Christians both attempted to establish in associative- group terms first. The claims to ethnicity are secondary terms that modern scholars may or may not feel are appropriate.

The term ethnos shows a much more stable meaning than that of genos, as it often means either “everybody” generally107 or follows the typical translation of “Gentile” 108

(non-Jew). While it appears more frequently than genos, its limited range of meaning shows how differently Justin intended it and how different its associative-group connotations are. There are a few places where the context suggests a more particular intent, and these are more useful towards engaging how the implied author thought about these terms in conjunction with each other. For Justin, the new associative-group of God

106 Bruce Chilton, “Justin and Israelite Prophecy,” in Justin Martyr and His World, 83. 107 Chapters 11, 13, 16, 22, 24, 26, 29, 31, 32, 34, 37, 39, 50, 52, 64, 91, 109, 111, 115, 116, 120, 121, 123, 124, 130, 131, 135. 108 Chapters 10, 11, 12, 13, 14, 17, 21, 25, 26, 28, 29, 35, 53, 55, 64, 65, 69, 72, 73, 79, 83, 85, 95, 96, 109, 117, 121, 122, specifically uncircumcised in 123.

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is increasingly those among the Gentiles (ethnē). Justin uses Scripture to manipulate the term to his purposes, valorizing the Christian ethnos and casting the Jews out of God’s associative-group as the ethnē were before thought to be.

In chapter 108, Justin describes the Jews as an ethnos in order to undermine their distinction from the Gentiles (ethnē) in regards to God’s preference. Justin explains, using Jonah as the sign Christ put forward (cf. Mt 12:38-41),109 that as God required the

Ninevites to repent, so God sent Jesus to die and rise from the dead “in order that your ethnos and city might not be taken and destroyed, as they have been.” Jesus, spending three days in the earth as Jonah spent three days in the belly of a fish, proclaimed repentance. Justin turns this story around to position the Jews as the Ninevites, but even worse; at least the Ninevites repented. Justin uses ethnos in this context to needle Trypho about the fact that their city was in fact destroyed and heavily put down more recently during the Bar Kokhba revolt. By calling the Jews an ethnos in this context, Justin makes them equivalent to the (gentile) Ninevites but, unlike the Ninevites who repented, as failures, proved by their multiple and recent defeats.110 In only one other case does Justin use ethnos to describe Jews specifically (56).111

109 In Matthew Jesus calls them a “wicked genea,” not ethnos in this context. 110 Matthew Bates comes to similar conclusions through a different method, claiming that Justin elides “ethnic Jews” with the gentiles of Isaiah 42:1-4 (cited in Dialogue 123). Bates assumes that Justin has a (relatively) decided definition for what makes a Jew an “ethnic one” (presumably what I have called kata sarkon), though as Buell has demonstrated, Justin allows fluidity in Jewish boundaries that complicates Bates’s execution. Bates, “Justin Martyr’s Logocentric Hermeneutical Transformation of Isaiah’s Vision of the Nations,” Journal of Theological Studies, vol. 60, pt 2 (2009), 552-4. 111 This other time is rather innocuous, only referring to “the whole of your nation” who understand a portion of Scripture.

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Elsewhere it is Justin’s own people, the Christians, who are an ethnos.112 In these cases, however, Justin intentionally uses this term to exclude the Jews from God’s people, using the common “gentile” denotation to drive home the extent to which Jews are mistaken and replaced. Justin quotes Malachi in chapter 41, “My name has been glorified among the ethnē, and in every place incense is offered to my name, and a pure offering: for my name is great among the ethnē” (Mal 1:11) and explains it, “He then speaks of those ethnē, namely us, who in every place offer sacrifices to him, i.e., the bread of the Eucharist.” The strategy is clear: Justin cites a text that valorizes the ethnē, then he stakes his claim as one of gentiles to whom Scripture refers.113 Justin does this again in 52, citing, “And he shall be the desire of ethnē” (Gen 49:10), claiming that it is those “out of all the ethnē who are pious and righteous through the faith of Christ” to whom this passage refers, likewise with Micah 4:1-7 in chapter 109, and Isaiah 42:6 in chapter 122.

In sum, Justin uses ethnē as a generic term to denote either “everybody everywhere” or to lump non-Jews together as “gentiles,” but in the few places his usage departs from this, particular strategies emerge. Justin’s interpretation of certain passages from the Hebrew Bible allows him to reposition both Jews and Christians in prophetic accounts, which allows him to set the Jews in the context of “gentile” villains and set

Christians within the valorized ethnē as God’s proper people.

112 Chapters 24, 34, 41, 47, 52, 109, 119, 122, 130, 135. 113 Young calls this general strategy a “salvation-historical perspective which unhistorically consigned the Jew to a negated past which was in practice still present, and so making this text confirm the Christian reading of Torah rather than the supposed Jewish reading,” Biblical Exegesis, 128.

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Justin’s use of laos is probably least consistent, as it is a much more general term that comes closer to the contemporary English “people.” In several cases this is most clearly just what Justin means.114 While “laos” may be unburdened with theological weight in many cases, it is also frequently tied to the same discursive realm as genos and ethnos above, particularly regarding discussion of the Hebrew people, God’s people, and

Christian people. Justin uses it to designate the Jews in relation to their sins and hardness of heart. God’s former laos is thus represented as that associative-group who is no longer righteous to God, and Justin therefore pushes the Jews out of it.

Many of the examples in the text border between a general use for laos as

“people” and a particular denotation for Jews. As such I have divided these instances to analyze Justin’s use most specifically. Part of the issue is that many occurrences are either quotes from the Hebrew Bible or the interpretation of the Hebrew Bible, so the use of laos is a general “people” but the clear and practical signified are Jews. In a case such as Justin’s citation of Psalm 47115 in chapter 37, “The Lord has reigned, let the laoi be angry…He is high above all the laoi,” it clearly means “people” in the most mundane sense: everybody in the world. However, in a case such as chapter 49, it clearly means

“people” on the surface, but in context it really means the Hebrew people: “Do you not think that the same thing happened in the case of Joshua the son of Nun, who succeeded to the command of the people (laoēgēsian)116 after Moses…” There are even more

114 Chapters 20, 34, 37, 38, 58, 63, 70, 73, 74, 109, 135. 115 Justin calls it Psalm 46, following the LXX. 116 laoēgēsian derives from Linear B word lawagetas, combining “people” and “leader”; Thomas G. Palaima, “The Nature of the Mycenaean Wanax: Non-Indo-European Origins

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specific moments when Justin explicitly differentiates the Hebrew people, such as in chapter 82, “No more do we wish to live like the rulers of your laos,” or chapter 85,

“[Jesus], who suffered, and was crucified under Pontius Pilate by your laos…” It is therefore not insignificant to distinguish when Justin means Jews incidentally or Jews specifically.

While Justin’s generic ethnos is the most frequent use, my division between general, incidentally Hebrew and specifically Hebrew shows that Justin most commonly uses the word laos to denote the Hebrew people in some sense. Many cases, like those cited above, are likely supposed to mean “people” generally but in Justin’s context, often biblical, they refer to the Hebrews.117 By contrast, there are only about a dozen places I put in the category of non-Hebrew specific uses (cf. fn. 20).

The places in which Justin refers specifically to Hebrews are also numerous.118

Some of these instances take on a decidedly pejorative or even derogative tone, such as the following accusation:

For God, knowing before that you would do such things, pronounced this curse upon you by the prophet Isaiah: “Woe unto their soul! They have devised evil counsel against themselves…Therefore they shall eat the fruit of their own doings. Woe to the wicked! Evil, according to the works of his hands, shall befall him. O my laos…those who extort from you shall rule over you. O my laos, they who call you blessed cause you to err” (133).

and Priestly Functions,” in The Role of the Ruler in the Prehistoric Aegean (BE: Université de Liège, 1995), 129. 117 Chapters 22, 28, 30, 49, 50, 52, 53, 64, 65, 66, 72, 75, 77, 78, 80, 86, 97, 98, 101, 106, 136. 118 Chapters 82, 85, 90, 91, 92, 103, 110, 112, 113, 115, 117, 123, 126, 127, 132, 133, 134, 135, 138.

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The Hebrew people, to Justin, are cursed by God, essentially for remaining Jewish (not heeding Christ). They “err” by continuing in their ways and not acknowledging Jesus as

Christ: “they would not have the law of the Lord of Sabaoth, but despised the word of the

Lord, the Holy One of Israel (Jesus)” (133). This leads the Hebrews to all kinds of sins against God. Furthermore, Justin again takes the opportunity to jab Trypho about military defeat:

For the expression, ‘He that is afflicted [and driven out],’ i.e., from the world, [implies] that, so far as you and all other men have it in your power, each Christian has been driven out not only from his own property, but even from the whole world; for you permit no Christian to live. But you say that the same fate has befallen your own laos. Now, if you have been cast out after defeat in battle, you have suffered such treatment justly indeed, as all the Scriptures bear witness (110).

Justin proposes that Jews would desire Christians to be exiled (or killed!). Then Justin mocks the Jewish diaspora by claiming they have justly deserved their exile and whatever they have suffered. Immediately afterwards he claims that Christians, unlike Jews, have done no evil and are therefore undeserving of the same fate. In fact, Justin transfers the grace of God from the Jews to Justin himself:

This grace has been transferred to [us Christians], as Isaiah says…‘This laos draws near to me…but their heart is far from me; but in vain they worship me…Therefore, behold, I will proceed to remove this laos, and I shall remove them’ (78).

In much the same spirit, Justin uses laos to denote Jews in a decidedly negative way. A common theme for Justin is the Hebrews’ “hardness of heart,” perhaps taken from Jesus’s claim in Mt 19:8 that Moses’s law permitting divorce was due to the people’s hardness of heart, but that husband and wife should never part. Ten times does

Justin use laos in terms of the hard-heartedness of the Jews as the reason for Moses

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giving them the law.119 Justin does not merely describe them as stubborn, but adds to his criticism that the Jews are “without understanding, both blind and lame” (27), idolatrous, child-sacrificers (46), and foolish (123). Compared to the unharnessed colts which are the ethnē, the Jewish laos is saddled with the law like an ass (53).

Justin also favors laos as a term for those whose transgressions necessitated

Jesus’s sacrifice. In this context, laos does not specifically target Jews, nor is it intended to be specifically polemic, but it is matter-of-factly stated, cited from Isaiah 53:8: “And who shall declare his genea? For his life is taken from the earth. Because of the transgressions of my laos he came unto death” (13).120 While Justin is not targeting the

Jews explicitly from this passage (it is in fact the sins of the Gentiles as well for which

Jesus died), he makes sure Trypho knows that the Jews are also to blame by reminding him, “[Jesus] shall appear in glory and above the clouds; and your laos shall see and know him whom they have pierced” (14).

A more positive way that Justin uses laos is in reference to God’s laos. In this way Justin maneuvers the Christian people into place. In parallel with genos, God’s laos

“did righteousness, and forsook not the judgment of God. They ask of [God] now righteous judgment, and desire to draw near to God” (15). As opposed to the wicked, God will deliver his laos and they will glorify him (22). In Justin’s millennial kingdom, God’s

119 Chapters 27, 43, 44, 45, 46 (twice), 47, 67 (twice), 123. Note these are not the only times Justin calls the Hebrew people hard of heart, but the times laos is used in that context. 120 Justin also uses this theme in chapters 14, 43, 63, 89 and 101. While the parallelism of genea and laos is typical of Hebrew poetry and implies synonymity, Justin generally prooftexts; the fact that these words are in poetic parallel is beside Justin’s point.

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laos will rejoice and their work will be fruitful (81). God will come to his laos and stand in their midst (110). Those who are uncircumcised God will call to become his worthy laos (123), and gentiles (ethnē) will become God’s laos despite the Jewish genos (130), even to the point of being an even more faithful laos (131).

Justin uses laos in an interesting way to connect its definition to that of ethnos.

The Roberts-Donaldson translation reads,

the proselyte, who is circumcised that he may have access to the people, becomes like one of themselves, while we who have been deemed worthy to be called a people are yet Gentiles, because we have not been circumcised.121

The Greek of the emphasized portion, however, is, “ἡμεῖς δὲ λαὸς κεκλῆσθαι ἠξιωμένοι

ὁμοίως ἔθνος ἐσμὲν,” which I would translate as, “But we, being worthy to be called a people, as we are an ethnos.” The difference is that Justin is not merely claiming to be a laos among the Gentiles, but a laos in its own right as an ethnos.122 Justin then links laos to Israel:

Since then God blesses this laos, and calls them Israel…how is it that you repent not of the deception you practice on yourselves, as if you alone were the Israel, and of execrating the laos whom God has blessed?”

Justin calls this laos the “true sons of God” who “keep the commandments of Christ”

(123-4). Furthermore, the signs of Noah were addressed to the laos “faithful to God” and to the laos “who obeyed [God],” as opposed to the Jewish genos (138).

Taking a step back, the immediate context of Justin’s most common uses of genos, ethnos, and laos demonstrates ranges of meanings as shown in the chart below.

121 Dialogue, 123, emphasis mine. 122 Justin further negates claims such as Celsus’s above.

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Genos Ethnos Laos

Jews/Hebrews Non-Hebrew people Jews (often negatively) Everybody everywhere Everybody everywhere Generic “people” Kinship Christians God’s people Circumcision/practice Transgressors needing Jesus

Table 1

Justin puts both Jews and Christians in all of these categories at some point, but I have included above only his most common denotations. Some of this is predictable enough, such as the use of ethnē as non-Hebrews or genos as Hebrews and/or kinship.

Justin is not merely arguing that Christianity is a new and better associative-group, but that Christianity is a genos and an ethnos and a laos, while functionally these remain different kinds of markers. In the same way that Justin acknowledges that Hebrew is a genos in a certain way, an ethnos in a certain way and a laos in a certain way, Christian people are likewise each of these, not merely all of them combined.

As a genos, Christians are the proper high priestly genos of God, whose sacrifices alone does God accept (116). As the Hebrew genos was known for their offerings and practices such as circumcision, the Christians are also a genos for their offerings, though their offerings be prayer and thanksgiving instead of circumcision (117). While the

Hebrews are a genos by descent from Judah, Christians are also a genos from Judah, though by “faith and spirit” through Christ (135). As water and wood saved the genos of

Noah by whom the Hebrews descended, so too has Christ, as the “chief of another genos” through water (baptism) and wood (the cross) saved the Christian genos. Christian people are also as the ethnē as they are comprised of many kinds of people from all over the world. They are not geographically isolated but are numerous and global, as God

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promised to Abraham (120); they are, in a sense, all ethnē, declared so for the same reason as Abraham: righteousness and faith (119). The Jews thought of themselves as a light to the ethnē, and for Christians it is Jesus who is the light that enlightens the ethnē, the Christian ethnē (122). Finally the Christians are also a laos as they are particular to

God but not hard-hearted like the Hebrew people. The Hebrew laos is burdened by the law (53), the Christian laos is redeemed from their transgressions by Jesus (119, cf. 13,

14, 43, 63, 89, 101). Many cases are not clear, and Justin does fluctuate in his usage, but as he has different conceptions of these ideas of peoplehood as I have shown, likewise does he have different representations of what kind of people Christians are. Even if

Justin cannot describe exactly what kind of people, he has the strong assertion that

Christians are a legitimate associative-group.

In chapter 130, Justin employs all three of these associative-group terms to demonstrate to Trypho that the Scriptures predicted the conversion of gentiles (ethnē) to the people of God. Justin first cites Deuteronomy 32:43: “Rejoice, ethnē, with his laos...”

Here Justin associates Christians with God’s laos, and Gentiles as ethnē, since it is the laos who are “well-pleasing to God.” He then describes the Jews as a genos, saying,

“God has from of old dispersed all men according to their genē…and out of all genē has taken to Himself your genos, a useless, disobedient and faithless genos.” The Jews here are a genos, but this marker is negative, while the ethnē are God’s true chosen laos. He drives the point home by stating:

For when He says, “Rejoice, ethnē, with his laos,” He allots the same inheritance to them, and does not call them by the same name; but when He says that they as ethnē rejoice with his laos, He calls them ethnē to reproach you. For even as you provoked Him to anger by your idolatry, so also He has deemed those who were

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idolaters worthy of knowing His will, and of inheriting His inheritance (emphasis mine).

The so-called Gentiles have now become the true people of God, almost out of spite to the Jews who reviled them as idolaters. The only uses of genos in this passage refer to

Trypho’s people (Jews), while Justin is among the ethnē and God’s laos.

Justin uses all three terms in a similar way in chapter 119. The Jews are a genos from whom God turns away his face because they have no faith (citing from

Deuteronomy 32). God will “provoke them [the genos] with a foolish ethnos.”

Afterwards, a new laos will prosper as corn springing from the ground (just as God’s

“declared” genos is divinely established as the blood of a grape). Justin shifts this laos to the ethnos of Deuteronomy 32 and the promise God made to Abraham that he would be the father of many ethnē. These ethnē are not for Justin the “Arabians, or Egyptians, or

Idumaeans,” etc., but are the ethnē of faith, God’s people who are “an ethnos of similar faith (homoiopiston to ethnos), God-fearing, righteous, and delighting the Father, but it is not you, ‘in whom is no faith’” (119).

Scholarship has widely (and correctly) acknowledged that Justin seeks to supplant

Jews, but most have done this through the lens of theology. Boyarin writes,

The Dialogue, by establishing a binary opposition between the Christian and the Jew over the question of the Logos, accomplishes two purposes at once. First, it articulates Christian identity as theological. Christians are those people who believe in the Logos; Jews cannot, then, believe in the Logos. Second, Christians are those people who believe in the Logos; those who do not are not Christians but heretics. The double construction of Jews and heretics—or rather, of Judaism and heresy—effected through Justin's Dialogue thus serves to produce a secure religious identity, a self-definition for Christians.123

123 Daniel Boyarin, Border Lines: The Partition of Judaeo-Christianity (Philadelphia, PA: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2004), 39. See also R. M. Price on Justin’s Logos

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Justin the implied author surely does have a theology that makes Christianity a replacement of Judaism, but looking at his use of language demonstrates that he does not do this merely in the theological or intellectual realm (creedal). Justin maneuvers

Christianity into the position of an associative-group by using culturally recognized divisions. Boyarin’s point about the relationship between the Logos and Justin the implied author’s heresiological agenda notwithstanding, the implied author does not seek merely to replace Jewish theology as such, but to replace the Jewish people as the associative-group of God in a more concrete sense.

What does all this do for us? While it corroborates Buell’s argument that Justin the implied author does not view either Christianity or Judaism as monolithically “fixed” or “fluid,” the terms defining an associative-group are not completely interchangeable.

The differing contexts and shades of meaning he gives these terms and their place within the structure of the text reveal a rhetorical strategy. Justin the implied author uses his terminology to position Christians, instead of Jews, as the proper people of God as prophesied in the Scriptures. Christians are in the genos of the faithful patriarchs, regardless of lineage kata sarkon or circumcision. They are an ethnos of the Gentiles

theology and “Platonic theology,” “‘Hellenization’ and Logos Doctrin in Justin Martyr,” Vigiliae Christianae, vol. 42, no. 1 (Boston, MA: Brill, 1988), 18-23; Carl Francis Baechle, “A Reappraisal of the Christology of St. Justin Martyr,” PhD dissertation (Fordham University, 2009); Bates, 545-9; Christians and Jews as “theological beings in distinction of social ones,” Livesey, 51-79; Justin as philosopher, Arthur J. Droge, “Justin Martyr and the Restoration of Philosophy,” Church History, vol. 56, no. 3 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1987), 303-19;

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(ethnē), unified as a laos under God’s favor. Christians are not, to Justin, nebulously defined; they are demonstrably solidified.

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Chapter Four: Proofs from Scripture and Bar Kokhba Justin argues that God transferred the quality of being the people of God from the

Jews to Christians as both cause and consequence of misunderstanding Scripture.

Christians, by his logic, are superior in their understanding of Scriptures, which is intimately linked to their status as an associative-group. To Justin, Scripture foretold the coming of Christ in the person of Jesus, and it is the Jews’ ignorance and wickedness that caused them to kill God’s messiah. In a circular manner, they are wicked because they are ignorant, but they are ignorant because they are sinful. Either by being taught by ignorant teachers, by being inherently or willfully foolish, or by active deceit and hard- heartedness, Justin claims the Jews lost their privilege of being God’s people and they have suffered the consequences through their defeat in the Bar Kokhba revolt.

Proof from Scripture

There are some distinct ways that Justin constructs Jews in relation to their scriptural interpretation. While Justin has many approaches throughout the text in no particular order, I will proceed thematically. I will begin with Justin’s criticisms of the

Jews’ teachers, then the Jews themselves. Then I will examine the Jews’ motives and consequences (to Justin). Finally, I will show how Justin argues that all of these ignorant and malicious hermeneutics led to the Jews’ situation as the displaced ex-people of God.

Justin the character accuses the teachers of his immediate audience (Trypho and friends) of being ignorant to the true meaning of Scripture. In response to the accusation that Christians have been duped into believing a “groundless report” and have invented a

Christ where there was not one, Justin replies, “You know not what you say, but have

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been persuaded by teachers who do not understand the Scriptures” (9). Here it is the teachers who have misled Trypho. Trypho is not necessarily to blame, other than being gullible or easily manipulated. Marc Hirshman writes,

One of [Justin’s] main goals in this treatise is to prove to the Jews, represented by Trypho and his companions, that the rabbis had failed at the task of biblical exegesis and persuade them that the Christian interpretation, received through the grace of Christ and his apostles, is the true one.124

Justin asserts that the Jews have mishandled their Scriptures by not understanding their true meaning (willfully or ignorantly). Elsewhere it is clearer that the teachers are ignorant. Justin asks how Moses, while commanded not to make images, was allowed to fashion a serpent on a staff for his people to be healed (Numbers 21:1-9). Trypho’s friend confesses that he has asked the teachers and received no reply (94). This demonstrates the inability of the teachers to discern that this story foreshadows Jesus dying on the cross to heal his people. In a more malicious manner, Justin later tells Trypho, “Obey not the

Pharisaic teachers, and scoff not at the King of Israel, as the rulers of your synagogues teach you to do after your prayers” (137). Here the Jewish teachers are not only ignorant of Jesus’s identity but actively teach mockery of him. We begin to see here how Justin links improper scriptural teachings with disdain for Christians.

For the most part, however, it is not a vague category of “teachers” that receive

Justin’s criticisms. Justin typically accuses Trypho more directly of being ignorant of the

Scripture’s true meaning. Regarding biblically ordained Jewish practice such as circumcision or sacrifice, Justin claims that the Jews have read their Scriptures but not

124 Hirshman, 32.

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understood them nor caught the text’s true spirit. In this instance Justin also takes a position of ownership, claiming the Scriptures are not actually “yours” (the Jews’), but

“ours” (the Christians’): “They are contained in your Scriptures, or rather not yours, but ours. For we believe them; but you, though you read them, do not catch the spirit that is in them” (29). Possession is therefore linked to proper understanding; Scripture belongs to Christians because they understand it.

The Scriptures’ “true spirit” for Justin is the foretelling of Jesus as God’s Christ.

The Jews’ problem is either being too incompetent in scriptural interpretation or willfully denying (Justin’s) reality. Justin says that the Jews “have not understood anything of the

Scriptures” regarding predictions of Jesus (34). The Jews are too “hard-hearted” to understand that Zechariah 9:9 refers to Jesus (53). The Jews “foolishly” think Psalm 99 refers to Solomon instead of Jesus (64). The Jews misunderstand Psalm 110 as referring to Hezekiah, but Justin again claims it refers to Jesus (83). It is the Jews’ “irrationality” that prevents them from seeing Jesus’s crucifixion as a divine act (93). Justin repeatedly reads Scripture in ways that he can demonstrate the Jews’ ignorance of prefigurations of

Jesus as God’s Christ.

Justin’s explanations for Jewish ignorance of Scripture is bolstered by his appeal to fulfilled prophecy. Skarsaune demonstrates that Justin relies on Scriptural support for the prophecies Justin claims were fulfilled through Jesus. Scripture’s true meaning can only be obtained by understanding this fulfillment; denying the prophetic nature of the text has malicious intent.

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Once the hidden meaning of the Scriptures has been brought to light by Christ and the apostles, it shows itself to be rational and convincing, and every denial of its validity and cogency is due either to hatred of the truth or cowardice.126

I agree with Skarsaune that Justin needs to portray himself as a torch-bearer of apostolic and prophetic tradition to make his point, but Justin’s goal is not only to establish a correct Christian hermeneutic. Justin uses Scripture to prove Christian priority over

Jewish interpretation, positing his contemporary Jews as schismatics because they ignore

Scripture.

Not only are Justin’s accusations intended to insult Jewish hermeneutics, but he also uses their ignorance to reclaim the Scriptures for Christians, who are given the wisdom to understand. Regarding the well-known passage in Isaiah 42 that the Jews would be a “light to the Gentiles,” Justin claims that Jews are “children of hell” because they do not realize that it is the Christians, “illuminated by Jesus,” who are the light:

“You think that these words refer to the stranger and the proselytes, but in fact they refer to us who have been illumined by Jesus. For Christ would have borne witness even to them; but now you are become twofold more the children of hell” (122). Justin here turns a biblical passage which prioritizes the ethnic identity of the Jews into a prophecy prioritizing Christian status. The Jews misunderstand the Scripture and think that because they are “the children of Jacob after the fleshly seed” they will be saved. To Justin, they deceive themselves, since it is in fact the Christians who are the “blessed Israel” (125).

In other cases Justin accuses the Jews of actively misrepresenting or distorting

Scripture for their own justifications. Regarding Isaiah 7:14 (“Behold, a young

126 Skarsaune, 12.

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woman/virgin will conceive”), Justin accuses Jewish teachers of “distorting and harmonizing” Scripture to refer to “whom they are pleased to explain them” (68).

Furthermore, according to Justin, the Jews have even blasphemously taken passages out of the Scriptures that foretell Jesus in order to avoid Justin’s conclusion (72). From

Jeremiah, the Jews supposedly took out 11:19, which Justin cites: “'I [was] like a lamb that is brought to the slaughter: they devised a device against me, saying, Come, let us lay on wood on His bread, and let us blot Him out from the land of the living; and His name shall no more be remembered” (72). Interestingly enough, Justin admits that because this deletion was only recently done, it still remains in some copies of Scripture.127 Justin turns mere misunderstanding into malicious intent. He even states that if the Jews had correctly understood more passages than they did, “be well assured they would have deleted them, as they did those about the death of Isaiah, whom you sawed asunder with a wooden saw” (120). It is to the Jews’ own peril that they do this, as Justin warns them,

“do not venture to pervert or misinterpret the prophecies, since you will injure yourselves alone, and will not harm God” (84).

Justin the character also tells Trypho how Trypho (as a stand-in for all Jews) has suffered because of his erring use of Scripture. After demonstrating the scriptural proofs for Christ’s two advents (birth and Parousia), Justin states,

127 Justin claims that the Jews took out a passage in Ezra that read: “Esdras said to the people, ‘This passover is our Saviour and our refuge. And if you have understood, and your heart has taken it in, that we shall humble Him on a standard, and thereafter hope in Him, then this place shall not be forsaken for ever, says the God of hosts. But if you will not believe Him, and will not listen to His declaration, you shall be a laughing-stock to the nations” (72). This passage, however, is not in Ezra.

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After the manifestation and death of our Jesus Christ in your nation [genos], there was and is nowhere any prophet: nay, further, you ceased to exist under your own king, your land was laid waste, and forsaken like a lodge in a vineyard (52).

The implication here is that there is a causal link between the death of Jesus and the destruction of Jerusalem. Later Justin links their misunderstanding of the necessity of circumcision to their deserving of expulsion from their land:

Unless, therefore, a man by God's great grace receives the power to understand what has been said and done by the prophets, the appearance of being able to repeat the words or the deeds will not profit him, if he cannot explain the argument of them. And will they not assuredly appear contemptible to many, since they are related by those who understood them not? For if one should wish to ask you why, since Enoch, Noah with his sons, and all others in similar circumstances, who neither were circumcised nor kept the Sabbath, pleased God, God demanded by other leaders, and by the giving of the law after the lapse of so many generations, that those who lived between the times of Abraham and of Moses be justified by circumcision, and that those who lived after Moses be justified by circumcision and the other ordinances…[God will be slandered] unless you show…that God who foreknew was aware that your nation would deserve expulsion from Jerusalem, and that none would be permitted to enter into it (92).

Beyond merely killing God’s Christ, Justin expands Jewish antipathy onto all

Christians. The pride in Jewish ethnic heritage makes them think that, because of their misinterpretation of Scripture, they have security of salvation and have thus become

“murderers of the righteous,” namely, Jesus and other Christians (102). Justin elsewhere states,

But you hesitate to confess that He is Christ, as the Scriptures and the events witnessed and done in His name prove, perhaps for this reason, lest you be persecuted by the rulers, who, under the influence of the wicked and deceitful spirit, the serpent, will not cease putting to death and persecuting those who confess the name of Christ until He come again, and destroy them all, and render to each his deserts (39).

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Here Justin suggests that the Jews deny Christ because they are afraid of being persecuted by the rulers (Romans), rather than because they legitimately deny Jesus’s status. Later

Justin makes a blanket statement that Jews and Gentiles alike want death for Christians:

You curse in your synagogues all those who are called from Him Christians; and other nations [ethnē] effectively carry out the curse, putting to death those who simply confess themselves to be Christians; to all of whom we say, “You are our brethren [adelphōn],” rather [than] recognize the truth of God (96).

Justin does not quite seem to associate a strict causality between Jewish curses and

Christian persecution, but he puts the Jews on the side of the oppressors.

Justin offers an explanation for this consistent Jewish misreading of Scripture, namely, God took away their ability to understand because of their wickedness. Justin tells Trypho,

[These scriptural proofs] will appear strange to you, although you read them every day; so that even from this fact we understand that, because of your wickedness, God has withheld from you the ability to discern the wisdom of His Scriptures (55).

Despite Scripture’s many prophecies about God’s Christ, the Jews did not recognize

Jesus and killed him. The mantle of God’s associative-group was therefore transferred to those who did recognize Christ: Justin’s Christian associative-group. Justin later expands on this more explicitly:

You do not tremble at God's threats, for you are a people [laos] foolish and hard- hearted. “Therefore, behold, I will proceed to remove this people [laos],” says the Lord; “and I will remove them, and destroy the wisdom of the wise, and hide the understanding of the prudent.” Deservedly too: for you are neither wise nor prudent…but utterly incompetent to know the hidden counsel of God…“Therefore,” says the Lord, “I will raise up to Israel and to Judah the seed of men and the seed of beasts.” And by Isaiah He speaks thus concerning another Israel: “In that day shall there be a third Israel among the Assyrians and the Egyptians, blessed in the land which the Lord of Sabbath has blessed, saying, blessed shall my people [laos] in Egypt and in Assyria be, and Israel mine

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inheritance.” Since then God blesses this people [laos], and calls them Israel, and declares them to be His inheritance, how is it that you repent not of the deception you practice on yourselves, as if you alone were the Israel, and of execrating the people [laos] whom God has blessed? For when He speaks to Jerusalem and its environs, He thus added: “And I will beget men upon you, my people [laos] Israel; and they shall inherit you, and you shall be a possession for them; and you shall be no longer bereaved of them” (123, emphasis mine).

This new Israel is Justin’s self-claimed identity, Christianity. The Jews were hard-hearted and ignorant, so God removed wisdom from them and gave their inheritance to another associative-group. The ultimate cause for the Jews’ failure to understand is paradoxical.

They are too wicked to understand, so God removed the ability for them to comprehend.

The fact that they do not understand is proof of their ignorance.128 The inheritance lost from this scriptural mishandling is a transferral of the status of the “people of God” (laos theou) from Jews to those (Christians) who understand Scripture, even if they only understand it because they have been given the grace to understand by God.129

Justin’s accusations of Jewish impropriety with God’s Scripture are not merely insults to Jewish intellect or reading habits, but part of his strategy to claim Christianity as the true people of God. By demonstrating the inability of Jews properly to interpret

Scripture, Justin seeks to prove the impossibility of them being God’s people. There is again a certain circularity to Justin’s argument: Christians are God’s people because they

128 It is similar in logic to the Egyptian Pharaoh whom God punished for the hard- heartedness that God caused in the first place. So Justin is, perhaps, at least as consistent as the God of Exodus. 129 Dialogue, 100, “He revealed to us all that we have perceived by His grace out of the Scriptures”; 119, “Would you suppose, sirs, that we could ever have understood these matters in the Scriptures, if we had not received grace to discern by the will of Him whose pleasure it was?”; 58, “I purpose to quote to you Scriptures, not that I am anxious to make merely an artful display of words; for I possess no such faculty, but God's grace alone has been granted to me to the understanding of His Scriptures,” etc.

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are the only ones who can correctly interpret God’s Scriptures as proof that Jesus is the

Christ. Further circularity is that Jews have lost God’s inheritance due to their ignorance, so God took away their ability to interpret Scripture in a way that would allow them to understand the truth.. For Justin, this functions as mutually supporting evidence.

Regardless of the logic of the matter, the result is that Christians are God’s new people because they have correctly recognized Jesus as the scripturally foretold Christ. This allows Justin to claim both God’s inheritance and authority over Scripture for Christians.

The need for Scriptural hegemony also bolsters Justin’s case for priority of his associative-group. The respect gained for an old tradition is well known in antiquity.

Justin expresses this attitude when he writes of the Hebrew prophets:

There existed, long before this time, certain men more ancient than all those who are esteemed philosophers, both righteous and beloved by God, who spoke by the Divine Spirit, and foretold events which would take place, and which are now taking place. They are called prophets (7).

Justin seeks to root Christianity historically so as not to appear as a follower of some new

(and thereby suspect) movement. Establishing Christianity as a continuation of God’s associative-group is necessary for Justin to prove his legitimacy.

The purpose of Justin’s scriptural polemics is to demonstrate that Christians are

God’s prophesied associative-group. The struggle for identity must, for Justin, have a scriptural basis. By concluding that the Jews have not understood their Scriptures, Justin is able to claim Scripture for himself. Not only is Christianity a legitimate associative group, they are also an old and established lineage as proven through Scripture. The

Jews, since the time of Christ, have been usurped by those who continue to understand

Scripture. For Justin, it is not Christians who branched out, it is that God’s associative-

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group has progressed and evolved after Christ; those who maintain Jewish ideology are deluded and are actually the defectors.

Proof from Bar Kokhba

Justin’s disparaging language towards Trypho and Jews extends beyond degrading Jewish hermeneutics or understanding. Justin uses the failure of the Bar

Kokhba Revolt to drive home the failure of the Jews as God’s people and to distance

Christianity from what Justin interprets as God’s punishment on those who lost God’s covenant. This distance is most effective to the extent that Justin can differentiate

Christians from Jews. The revolt functions as evidence for the rowdiness of Jews and offers Justin an opportunity to map Jewish displacement in both geographical and genealogical terms. The Jews as an associative-group attached to a particular land have lost both their peoplehood from above (God) and from below (land). I will thus argue that

Trypho’s status as a refugee from the war is an important step for Justin’s literary construction establishing Christianity as the new associative-group of God.

The evidence we have for the expulsion of the Jews from Judea is secondary.

Eusebius records Aristo of Pella in which Hadrian expelled the Jews at the time he renamed the region Syria-Palestine.130 According to this, Jews were not even allowed to view the land from a distance. Tertullian confirms this in Against the Jews:

But we perceive that now none of the race of Israel has remained in Bethlehem; and (so it has been) ever since the interdict was issued forbidding any one of the Jews to linger in the confines of the very district.131

130 Eusebius, Church History, 4.6.3. 131 Tertullian, Against the Jews, 13.

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Justin himself wrote of the edict in his first Apology:

That the land of the Jews, then, was to be laid waste…And you are convinced that Jerusalem has been laid waste, as was predicted. And concerning its desolation, and that no one should be permitted to inhabit it, there was the following by Isaiah: Their land is desolate, their enemies consume it before them, and none of them shall dwell therein. And that it is guarded by you lest any one dwell in it, and that death is decreed against a Jew apprehended entering it, you know very well.132

The extent to which the edict was followed or for how long it was upheld is debatable, but it was certainly well known enough for Justin to use as a point of attack.

Trypho’s status as a refugee from the revolt has received little attention in many analyses of this text. Justin’s agenda to position Christians as God’s new and preferential people generally takes precedence. One of the difficulties is that Justin does not give

Trypho much of a voice, making this text less of a proper dialogue and more like a treatise. That Trypho’s character has few lines does not make his role insignificant. His role is to be the listener of Justin the character’s speech. Justin the narrator is not speaking to the reader. He is letting the audience (and Marcus Pompeius) watch as he speaks to Trypho, a stand-in for any and every Jew. That Trypho is supposed to represent all Jews makes him much more important than he appears to be. For this reason every bit of information given about him carries significant narrative weight.

We know two things: Trypho is a Jew and he has fled from the Bar Kokhba revolt:

Then he told me frankly both his name and his family [genos]. "Trypho," says he, "I am called; and I am a Hebrew of the circumcision, and having escaped from the war lately carried on there, I am spending my days in Greece, and chiefly at Corinth" (1).

132 Justin, Apology, 47.

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While it has been acknowledged that it is important for the Dialogue that Trypho is

Jewish, it is also significant that he has escaped the war.

Despite the pretense of a friendly dialogue, Justin frequently insults Trypho from several angles and the physical displacement of the Jews adds insult to injury. Justin sets the initial scene with a cordial meeting between himself and Trypho and scholars have been all too willing to go along with Justin’s supposed amicability of the discussion.

Skarsaune wrote,

Justin wanted indirectly to characterize his Jewish interlocutor as “fond of strife and superficial”...The reader’s eventual irritation at the many digressions is to be blamed on Trypho. Justin, on the other hand, answers all questions with angelic patience: “Even though you act maliciously I will continue answering whatever argument you put forward and use in objection.” The reader may also feel the many repetitious tedious. But again – blame Trypho or his companions.133

While Skarsaune is indeed correct that this is what Justin attempted, the dialogue itself shows Justin as far more contentious than Trypho. Robert Grant called the dialogue

“a fairly amicable agreement to disagree,”134 and Trakatellis claims the tone to be “in a spirit of honesty and sincerity combined with courtesy,”135 but that is too polite. Trypho, noting Justin’s clothing as that of a philosopher, seeks to dialogue about God and philosophy for mutual benefit. While Justin feigns pleasantness, he speaks quite harshly to Trypho’s at times.136 He accuses Trypho of speaking “like a diviner whatever comes

133 Skarsaune, 165. 134 Robert Grant, A Short History of the Interpretation of the Bible, 2nd edition (Minneapolis, MN: Fortress Press, 1984), 44. 135 Trakatellis, 297. 136 It is perhaps not surprising that one of the few to notice this unfriendliness is the Jewish scholar Marc Hirshan, noting, “As for Justin's method in his exegetic contest with the Jews, it should be noted that the Dialogue is so confrontational that a true exchange is

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into your mind” (9), tells him “you have understood all things in a carnal sense, and you suppose it to be piety if you do such things, while your souls are filled with deceit, and, in short, with every wickedness” (14). Justin says that Trypho will never understand God’s wisdom in scripture because of his wickedness (50). Justin even calls Trypho, along with other Jews, “twofold more the children of hell” (122). These are not statements one would expect in a friendly dialogue between peers.137

Justin the implied author frames Trypho’s character with references to the Bar

Kokhba revolt. That Trypho has himself fled from the revolt lends makes Justin the character’s comments more personal to Trypho. Almost as if to remind the reader of this fact, when Justin and Trypho find an appropriate place to have their dialogue, they

“having seated themselves on the one side [of the gymnasium], conversed with each other, some one of [Trypho’s Jewish comrades] having thrown in a remark about the war waged in Judaea” (9). Here there are two explicit references to the Bar Kokhba revolt, bookending the introduction of the dialogue. In the first chapter Trypho identifies himself as having fled the revolt and, after introductory material in which Justin explains certain broad philosophical concepts and his own conversion, the ninth chapter concludes with the reminder that these Jews had the revolt on their mind. Immediately following this remark chapter ten begins with specific concerns about why Christians do not follow the

all but impossible,” in A Rivalry of Genius (Albany, NY: State University of New York, 1996), 34. 137 The harsh quality of these statements strengthen my view that this dialogue is both fictitious and created for a Christian audience. Justin also accuses Trypho of being misled by uninformed teachers (9), of despising God’s law due to evil deeds (12), of being quarrelsome and captious (64), and his people of being “ungrateful, murderers of the righteous, and proud of [their] descent” (102).

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Jewish law. Justin is not merely historicizing Trypho, as he could have done this anywhere in the text. That the only two explicit references to the revolt were at precisely the introduction of Trypho and the end of the introduction, spoken by the Jews themselves, indicates a more relevant status to the rest of the text.

Skarsaune approaches the text from the perspective that Justin had compiled several sources in the work. He indicates that Justin blames the Jews for their predicament in an attempt to call Jews to repentance.138 If the audience is mainly

Christian, as I have argued, repentance is only Justin the character’s goal, not that of the implied author; it is a rhetorical play within the text. The implied author uses the revolt as a further way to set Jews apart from Christians. I quote at some length the following passage for its importance both to Justin’s whole project and to this paper:

"And God himself proclaimed by Moses, speaking thus: 'And circumcise the hardness of your hearts, and no longer stiffen the neck…' And in Leviticus: 'Because they have transgressed against Me, and despised Me, and because they have walked contrary to Me, I also walked contrary to them, and I shall cut them off in the land of their enemies. Then shall their uncircumcised heart be turned.' For the circumcision according to the flesh, which is from Abraham, was given for a sign; that you may be separated from other nations, and from us; and that you alone may suffer that which you now justly suffer; and that your land may be desolate, and your cities burned with fire; and that strangers may eat your fruit in your presence, and not one of you may go up to Jerusalem. For you are not recognized among the rest of men by any other mark than your fleshly circumcision. For none of you, I suppose, will venture to say that God neither did nor does foresee the events, which are future, nor fore-ordained his deserts for each one. Accordingly, these things have happened to you in fairness and justice, for you have slain the Just One,139 and [God’s] prophets before [Jesus]; and now you reject those who hope in [Jesus], and in [God] who sent [Jesus]…cursing in your synagogues those that believe on Christ. For you have not the power to lay hands upon us, on account of those who now have the mastery. But as often as you could, you did so. Wherefore God, by Isaiah, calls to you, saying, 'Behold

138 Skarsaune, Proof, 291-2. 139 “καὶ ὑμῖν οὖν ταῦτα καλῶς καὶ δικαίως γέγονεν. ἀπεκτείνατε γὰρ τὸν δίκαιον…”

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how the righteous man perished, and no one regards it. For the righteous man is taken away from before iniquity. His grave shall be in peace, he is taken away from the midst. Draw near hither, ye lawless children, seed of the adulterers, and children of the whore. Against whom have you sported yourselves, and against whom have you opened the mouth, and against whom have you loosened the tongue?'” [16, emphasis mine]

This passage clearly refers to the plight of Trypho and his fellow Jews after the

Bar Kokhba revolt was put down. To Justin, the cause of the Jews’ defeat was that the

Jews killed God’s Christ, Jesus. The language of “you vs. us” strengthens the divide

Justin seeks to create. Skarsaune correctly notes the scandal of God’s own people killing the messiah,140 and Justin disparages Trypho for it.

Justin goes out of his way to show Trypho back-handed compassion by comparing them to the Ninevites:

And though all the men of your nation [genos] knew the incidents in the life of Jonah, and though Christ said amongst you that He would give the sign of Jonah, exhorting you to repent of your wicked deeds at least after He rose again from the dead, and to mourn before God as did the Ninevites, in order that your nation [ethnos] and city might not be taken and destroyed, as they have been destroyed; yet you not only have not repented, after you learned that He rose from the dead…You accuse [Jesus] of having taught those godless, lawless, and unholy doctrines which you mention to the condemnation of those who confess him to be Christ…Besides this, even when your city is captured, and your land ravaged, you do no repent, but dare to utter imprecations on him and all who believe in him. Yet we do not hate you or those who, by your means, have conceived such prejudices against us; but we pray that even now all of you may repent and obtain mercy from God, the compassionate and long-suffering father of all (108).

Justin, knowing full well that Trypho experienced a war personally and that Trypho was a refugee, blames the Jews for their own destruction by associating them with the

Ninevites.

140 Skarsaune, Proof, 289.

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Justin, quoting Isaiah 3, again blames Jewish failures on their killing of Jesus, saying that they have eaten the fruit of their deeds:

For other nations [ethnē] have not inflicted on us and on Christ this wrong to such an extent as you have, who in very deed are the authors of the wicked prejudice against the Just One, and us who hold by Him…So that you are the cause not only of your own unrighteousness, but in fact of that of all other men. And Isaiah cries justly: 'By reason of you, My name is blasphemed among the Gentiles.' And: 'Woe unto their soul! because they have devised an evil device against themselves, saying, Let us bind the righteous, for he is distasteful to us. Therefore they shall eat the fruit of their doings (17).

It is worth knowing that the direct context of the Isaiah passage is the destruction of

Judah and Jerusalem. Justin’s dialogue cites Isaiah so often with a specific purpose: just as Trypho has experienced a crushing defeat, so did Israel in Isaiah’s time. Isaiah’s warnings and laments are thus even more apropos because of Trypho’s background.

Instead of merely being impious, Justin’s Jews killed Christ and thus lose their privileged status. For this they “suffer these things which [they] now justly suffer” (19).

Justin later states that “those who have persecuted and do persecute Christ [i.e.

Christians], if they do not repent, shall not inherit anything on the holy mountain” (26).

While this holy mountain is, for Justin, an eschatological image, the very real situation of the Jews in the second century looms large in the concrete reality of the statement.

Justin’s Jews are unrepentant, however, as he tells Trypho “even when your city is captured, and your land ravaged, you do not repent, but dare to utter imprecations on Him and all who believe in Him” (108). Justin claims that it is in fact the Christians, not the

Jews, who have been driven out of their homeland:

“For the expression, 'He that is afflicted [and driven out],' i.e., from the world, [implies] that, so far as you and all other men have it in your power, each

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Christian has been driven out not only from his own property, but even from the whole world; for you permit no Christian to live. But you say that the same fate has befallen your own nation [laos]. Now, if you have been cast out after defeat in battle, you have suffered such treatment justly indeed, as all the Scriptures bear witness; but we, though we have done no such [evil acts] after we knew the truth of God, are testified to by God, that, together with the most righteous, and only spotless and sinless Christ, we are taken away out of the earth. For Isaiah cries, 'Behold how the righteous perishes, and no man lays it to heart; and righteous men are taken away, and no man considers it’” (110).

The Jews here have no right to complain that they lost the revolt, because Justin believes that they deserved it, unlike his “righteous” Christians. Justin again justifies Jewish defeat later in chapter 133, citing Isaiah 5.

Beyond the aspect of a military defeat, Justin plays on the attachment of Jewish identity to the land itself to distinguish the Christian associative-group. One of the most foundational stories of Judaism is the Exodus from Egypt. It would not be exaggerating to say that Jewish/Hebrew identity was intrinsically tied to the Exodus story and the habitation of the promised land (Judea). Justin puts Joshua’s conquest of Canaan in parallel with Jesus’s new covenant to create a new paradigm of identity that privileges the new Christian associative-group over the Jews.

Justin first claims that Jesus was the one who spoke to Moses concerning the entrance to the promised land:

Behold, I send My angel before thy face, to keep thee in the way, to bring thee into the land which I have prepared for thee. Give heed to Him, and obey Him; do not disobey Him. For He will not draw back from you; for My name is in Him (75; cf. 132).

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For Justin, God’s angel is Jesus, the original messenger who led the Hebrew people in their land of milk and honey.141 Justin returns to this connection in chapter 113:

[Joshua] led the people [laos] into the Holy Land, and as he distributed it by lot to those who entered along with him, so also Jesus the Christ will turn again the dispersion of the people, and will distribute the good land to each one, though not in the same manner. For the former gave them a temporary inheritance, seeing he was neither Christ who is God, nor the Son of God; but the latter, after the holy resurrection, shall give us the eternal possession.

Jesus is here the new Joshua, but better. Joshua’s territory was temporary, Jesus’s is eternal. This is not merely a mundane analogy or a pun on a name; this is a targeted interpretation of the reality of Jewish expulsion from Judea. Whereas the Jews lost their inheritance of the promised land, Justin claims that Christians have a better, eternal, inheritance of salvation.142

Justin does this in a similar way with Abraham (119). God told Abraham to depart from his home and occupy a new land. Just so, Justin says,

We shall inherit the holy land, when we shall receive the inheritance for an endless eternity, being children of Abraham through the like faith. For as he believed the voice of God, and it was imputed to him for righteousness, in like manner we having believed God's voice spoken by the apostles of Christ…Accordingly, He promises to him an ethnos of similar faith, God-fearing, righteous, and delighting the Father.

141 Justin can get away with this due to his reliance on the LXX and the name Iēsou. 142 Cf. Timothy G. Crawford, “Taking the Promised Land, Leaving the Promised Land: Luke’s Use of Joshua for a Christian Foundation Story,” Review and Expositor, 95(2) (1998), 251-61. Luke may have used the Joshua story as a basis for the Acts of the Apostles precisely to make the point of Christian salvation as parallel to the Jews entering the promised land. See Wendel, Scriptural Interpretation, for parallels of Luke to Justin.

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In a move similar to Paul (Galatians 3:6-9), Justin establishes a lineage to Abraham based on righteous faith.143 Justin, however, is not only claiming that Jews have no faith, but by claiming an eternal inheritance of a “holy land” Justin is degrading the relationship that

Jews had to their own “holy land.” Christians will have what the Jews have forever lost, which is not just geographical space, but their identity.

Justin ties the loss of Jewish identity to their killing of Jesus and the loss of the promised land.

After the manifestation and death of our Jesus Christ in your genos, there was and is nowhere any prophet: nay, further, you ceased to exist under your own king, your land was laid waste, and forsaken like a lodge in a vineyard (52).144

The genos of the Jews, who perpetrated the murder, is left desolate, ceasing to exist under its own government. Even after the destruction of the temple in Jerusalem, client kings of the Herodian line continued rule until 93 or 96 C.E. It is only after the Bar Kokhba revolt that the Romans intervened in Judean governance more directly.145 Justin’s association of

143 Justin may even be paraphrasing Galatians here, adding that God’s children are those “of like faith” [omoian pistin]. See Martinus C. de Boer, Galatians (Louisville, KY: Westminster John Knox Press, 2011), 184-252; Moisés Silva, “Abraham, Faith, and Works: Paul’s Use of Scripture in Galatians 3:6-14,” Westminster Theological Journal, 63 (2001), 251-67; Philip F. Esler, Galatians (London: Routledge, 1998), 29-57; N. T. Wright, “Paul and the Patriarch: The Role of Abraham in Romans 4,” Journal for the Study of the New Testament, 35(3) (March, 2003), 207-41. 144 “μετὰ δὲ τὴν Ἰησοῦ τοῦ ἡμετέρου Χριστοῦ ἐν τῷ γένει ὑμῶν φανέρωσιν καὶ θάνατον οὐδαμοῦ προφήτης γέγονεν οὐδέ ἐστιν, ἀλλὰ καὶ τὸ εἶναι ὑμᾶς ὑπὸ ἴδιον βασιλέα ἐπαύσατο, καὶ προσέτι ἡ γῆ ὑμῶν ἠρημώθη καὶ ὡς ὀπωροφυλάκιον καταλέλειπται.” 145 See Hanan Eshel, “The Bar Kochba Revolt, 132-135,” in The Cambridge History of Judaism, vol. 4, edited by Steven T. Katz (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2006), 105-127 for a good overview of current constructions of the revolt’s history; cf. Werner Eck, “The bar Kokhba Revolt: The Roman Point of View,” The Journal of Roman Studies, Vol. 89 (1999), 76-89; Menahem Mor, “The Geographical Scope of the Bar-Kokhba Revolt,” in The Bar Kokhba War Reconsidered: New Perspectives on the

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political disenfranchisement and the death of Jesus links the loss of land and identity as a consequence of Jesus’s death as well.146

Finally, Justin negates the Jewish promised land by appealing to Noah. Just as

Jesus saved by wood (the cross), Noah saved humanity by wood (the ark) (138). Justin dismisses the promise of God to Noah as being particular to any land because no land was safe from the deluge. Instead, despite Jerusalem having been set aside for a time, the promise was for “the laos who obeyed him.” Furthermore, Justin traces the Jews to the lineage of Noah’s son Shem, whose descendants “would keep in retention the property and dwellings of Canaan” (139). The descendants of Shem, however, would be despoiled by the descendants of Japheth. Christians, however, “shall be with [Christ] in that land

[of the saints], and inherit everlasting and incorruptible good.”

In sum, Justin uses the Bar Kokhba Revolt’s failure as a link which ties the destruction of Jerusalem to the death of Jesus at the hands of the Jews. The subsequent expulsion of the Jews from the promised land indicates the removal of them as God’s people, a reverse Exodus. By linking Jesus to Joshua, Justin constructs a new associative- group which replaces the Jews in a new “promised land.”

Second Jewish Revolt against Rome, ed. Peter Schäfer (Tübingen: J. C. B. Mohr, 2003), 107-31. On the severity of the Roman reaction from the rabbinic perspective, see Yigael Yadin, Bar-Kokhba: The Rediscovery of the Legendary Hero of the Second Jewish Revolt against Rome (Israel: Japhet Press, 1971), 256. 146 The scriptural connection of the Hebrews to the land should not be underestimated, even in the diaspora. Cf. Walter C. Kaiser, Jr., “The Promised Land: A Biblical- Historical View,” Bibliotheca Sacra, 138 (October-December, 1981), 302-12.

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Chapter Five: Conclusion

In his Dialogue, Justin establishes Christianity as a legitimate associative-group and retrojects this delineation back to the advent of Christ. For Justin, the “parting of the ways” was finalized when the Jews killed Jesus. According to Justin, the wickedness of

Jews and their misreading of Scripture prevented the Jews from recognizing Jesus as

God’s Christ. When the Jews killed him, God removed their status as God’s people and bestowed it upon those who properly understood the prophecies of Scripture. In this way, there has only ever been one associative-group which God favors at one time, and the

Jews lost that status at the crucifixion. The consequence of the Jews’ actions led to their eventual destruction and banishment from the land which was intimately tied to their historical tradition and collective identity. The Jews’ status as an associative-group favored by God was removed entirely and they, ironically, became a people “that is no people.” It is therefore not, to Justin, a question of when the ways parted. For Justin, the

Jews ceased being an associative-group bound by God’s preference.

Justin used the terms genos, ethnos, and laos throughout the Dialogue to frame the identity of Christians around scriptural descriptions of God’s associative-group. Justin targeted the relationship of Christians to famous patriarchs to bolster his claim of continuity and supplant those same claims made by the Jews (kata sarkon). Neither genealogical descent nor the practice of circumcision hold the Jews together as God’s genos/ethnos/laos, but the submission to the proper understanding of Scripture does.

Justin upholds the status of the Jews before Jesus as God’s associative-group, but Justin cuts God’s ties to the Jews after they killed his Christ.

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Justin’s Jews lost their status as God’s associative-group because they did not understand Scripture and they were wicked. In circular fashion, Justin claims that the

Jews killed Jesus because they were too ignorant to realize his foretelling in Scripture, but that their ignorance was actually a result of their wickedness. If they had been good, they would have understood Scripture; if they had understood Scripture they would have been good. The associative-group that did understand Scripture were those whom Justin calls Christian.

For proof of Justin’s claims, the Dialogue invites the reader to remember the terrible defeat of the Bar Kokhba revolt. Framing Trypho’s character as a refugee from the fallout is more important than most scholars have noted. By interpreting the revolt’s failure as God’s judgment on the Jews, Justin cuts to the heart of the Jews’ relationship with God: the covenant of God’s associative-group and the promised land. For Justin,

God’s associative-group is so clearly not the Jews of Justin’s time that God destroyed their holy city and banished them from entering, effectively nullifying the connection the

Jews thought they still had with God. Justin’s “promised land” is the promise of salvation and it is that promise which holds Christians together as God’s associative-group.

Referring back to “Gruen’s equations,” I explained how this paper would function as a tool for scholars’ correlations between ancient self-perception and modern explanations. That Judaism was a “religion” as well as an ethnic group (à la Cohen) is not so clearly demonstrated in Justin’s text, as I agree with Boyarin’s assessment of the gradual development of Judaism as ethnic only towards the third and fourth centuries.

That being said, formulations of Christianity and Judaism did indeed revolve around

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similar rhetoric, which Justin uses to establish his points. I have shown that Justin constructed Christianity as a legitimate, coherent associative-group connected to a set of literature believed to be inspired by a God who shows favor towards the group that understands it. This literature (Scripture) links Justin’s associative-group through lineage, even if that lineage takes a creative turn at Jesus’s advent. Justin shaped lineage to work within parameters of a genos as he understood it. Justin’s associative-group therefore is static in the sense that there had only ever been one to qualify as “God’s people,” even if the specific qualifications of that status vary; the genos of God remains the same (under

Justin’s rubric) as world events change around God’s plan. Regardless of the language scholars choose to describe Justin’s Christians (associative-group, race/ethnicity, community self-identity, etc.), I have demonstrated that Justin persistently defines

Christianity as the associative-group to which God grants salvation by its understanding of themselves as the scripturally favored. Justin defines Christians against the Jews who have lost their status as God’s associative-group through their ignorant wickedness, proven through their defeat in the revolt. It is not Justin’s point to demonstrate when Jews and Christians became different associative-groups, nor am I making a historical point about when ways parted. It is Justin’s rhetoric that we must not will into reality just because he says so. Justin’s parting of ways is not between Jews and Christians, but between Jews and God.

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