Of all the cultural legacies attached to Christian tradition, that of anti-Jewish thought, speech, and (sometimes) action is one of the most uncomfortable. It is also one of the most prominent. From early on, Christianity evinced discomfort with Jews, who did not accept Jesus as their messiah, and this perceived exigency often resulted in an aggressive posture toward a people whose legacy Christians came to arrogate to themselves. As scholars like Leonard Rutgers, Paula Fredriksen, and Oded Irshai have recognized, this Christian “problem” of continued Jewishness came to a head in the late fourth century,Footnote 1 when Christians were settling into their role as heirs of the Roman Empire, whose reins they had by that time held for around half a century. Late fourth-century Christians dealt in diverse ways with the fact that Jews not only still existed but were thriving throughout the later Roman world—a fact that itself has only recently been recognized by scholarshipFootnote 2—and the concomitant fact that Christians were often very attracted to Jewish practice, ritual, and community.Footnote 3 John Chrysostom wrote eight Discourses Against Judaizing Christians in 386–387 CE, so “manifestly attracted to the synagogue and Jewish festivals” were the Christians in Antioch at that time.Footnote 4 Chrysostom and other prominent Christian authors—especially Eusebius and Augustine,Footnote 5 but also Ephrem the Syrian,Footnote 6 Athanasius,Footnote 7 Ambrose of Milan,Footnote 8 and JeromeFootnote 9—have received concerted scholarly attention for their role in the Christian production of anti-Jewish/anti-Judaizing sentiment in the late fourth century.Footnote 10 On the other hand, recent scholarship has largely ignored a work that constitutes a significant permutation of this cultural trend in late antiquity.
Sometime around 370 CE, an anonymous author known as “Pseudo-Hegesippus” wrote a work called De Excidio Hierosolymitano (On the Destruction of Jerusalem).Footnote 11 This Latin work rewrote the Jewish War, which the Jewish author Flavius Josephus had written in Greek in the late first century CE. Josephus's War had described the destruction of Jerusalem in 70 CE by the Romans, an event which quickly became a watershed moment for Christians, who saw in it a moment of divine judgment marking a definitive break between God and his heretofore chosen people, the Jews. Cementing this understanding is the primary aim of De Excidio.
For various reasons, De Excidio has remained all but unknown to modern scholarship. It was well known in the Middle Ages and early modern period, and scholars of those periods are often familiar with the text. But it has played a negligible role in recent scholarly reconstructions of anti-Jewish rhetoric in late fourth-century Christianity.Footnote 12 Yet Ruth Nisse has recently stated that this text marked a seminal moment in the anti-Jewish strain of Christianity's collective intellectual development: “Pseudo-Hegesippus . . . initiates the Western Christian interpretation of the fall of Jerusalem in 70 CE that resounds throughout medieval theology and literature.” That is, De Excidio “explains how the political events described by Josephus reflect God's punishment of the Jews for the crucifixion of Jesus” in a way that sets the tone for the subsequent Latin Christian West.Footnote 13 In fact, it was probably the second-century Hegesippus, often confused with the fourth-century author called Pseudo-Hegesippus and who was a main source for Eusebius, that truly initiated this trend, as Marcel Simon points out in his classic study.Footnote 14 Still, what the author now called Pseudo-Hegesippus did do was codify that trend within the Christian historiographical imagination at a critical juncture in Christian history. If this is so, the fact that Ps-Hegesippus remains absent from almost all scholarship on the evolution of Christian anti-Judaism in late antiquity is a gap in the research and no less in our understanding. In order to appreciate the pivotal role that De Excidio played in the codification of anti-Judaism (and simultaneously of classicism) within Christian late antiquity, we must look not only to how Ps-Hegesippus presents his anti-Jewish historical vision but also to the generic boundaries and historical contexts within which Ps-Hegesippus wrote—and then not least to the later reception of De Excidio within anti-Jewish Christian literature.
I. Pseudo-Hegesippus and the Codification of Anti-Jewish Historiography
As early as the second century—and already anticipated in its earliest writings, the texts of the New TestamentFootnote 15—the internally diverse Jesus movement that came to be called “Christianity” often defined itself in contradistinction to, and in competition with, that which was Jewish, what Christian authors often construed as “Judaism.”Footnote 16 In retrospect, this development of an adversus Iudaeos tradition seems all but inevitable: the early Christians understood themselves to be a “race” or “nation,” one which could lay legitimate claim to the scriptural, cultural, and theological heritage of the Jews.Footnote 17 As the Jewish scriptures became the Christian Old Testament, the “new covenant” effectively reified a new people of God, birthing what is now called “supersessionism” or “replacement theology.”Footnote 18 This perspective created problems for early Christian thinkers who sought to explain history in theological terms; wherever one marked the “parting of the ways” between Christians and Jews (or Christianity and Judaism) in history, Jews did not cease to exist at the far end of that parting. Indeed, they have never ceased to exist.Footnote 19 If the church was Verus Israel, to use a term made famous by Marcel Simon more than seventy years ago, why did the Jews, the original Israel (vetustus Israel, as it were), still exist?Footnote 20 Already in the first centuries CE, therefore, Christians set to work explaining how it was that Jews, who were once God's people, still existed as Jews but no longer as God's people.
This focus on the logic of Heilsgeschichte is arguably the driving force behind all of the systems of counter- or anti-Jewish thought that Christians developed in the second and third centuries. The perpetuators of this line of thinking came to construct, as Paula Fredriksen has explained, a working theory of history wherein “the Jews’ trail of crimes stretched from their murder of the prophets to the murder of him who spoke through them, namely, Christ.” This resulted in “God definitively, publicly, and permanently rejecting” the Jews “by destroying their Temple.”Footnote 21 Within their first few centuries of existence, the early Christians had come to lay the death of Jesus at the feet of the Jews and to “read” the Jerusalem Temple's destruction in 70 CE as proof positive of divine condemnation and rejection of this murderous people.Footnote 22
Many ancient Christian writings claim that the Jews killed Jesus and that the destruction of Jerusalem and their Temple there was recompense for this collective action. But very few ancient Christian writings dedicate themselves wholly to the exposition of this historical perspective. In fact, De Excidio could fairly be considered the only text to do so. The prologue to De Excidio clarifies exactly what the text is about. To situate the larger body of work of which De Excidio constitutes a part, Ps-Hegesippus begins by claiming to have written “a historical version of the four Books of Kingdoms” (that is, 1–2 Samuel and 1–2 Kings; 1–4 Kingdoms in the Septuagint)Footnote 23 as well as a prophetic res gestae of the Maccabees, the Judean hero-kings of the last two centuries BCE. He then casts his work as dealing with “what remains, up to the burning of the Temple and the spoils of Titus Caesar” (that is, the despoliation of the Temple accoutrements by Titus and the Romans in 70 CE, still memorialized on the Arch of Titus, which today stands between the Forum and the Colosseum in Rome).Footnote 24 In casting De Excidio in these terms, Ps-Hegesippus situates it within a literary corpus of his own creation that may be read as representing all of Jewish political history beginning at its advent as a nation under its first king, Saul, moving through its resurrection as a nation under the Hasmonean Dynasty—following a period of deportation and exile when the Jews lived under Babylonian, (Medo-) Persian, Ptolemaic, and then Seleucid rule—and coming to a definitive end at the hands of the Romans in 70 CE. In this light, De Excidio appears as the third volume in a three-volume work surveying the totality of Jewish history. De Excidio self-presents as the tail end of a totalizing historical account of the Jews. In other words, De Excidio presumes to narrate the end of Jewish history.
Another way that Ps-Hegesippus presents his history is as a work that both continues and corrects the tradition to which it belongs. It does this with reference to its primary source, the Jewish War, written by the Jewish priest-turned-general Flavius Josephus in the first century after he had been captured by the Romans during the Roman-Jewish War (66–70), which resulted in Jerusalem's destruction. Josephus is the “famous author” (relator egregius) who wrote the history of the Roman Jewish War, Ps-Hegesippus claims, but though he wept for the Jews’ misfortune, which he narrated, “he did not understand its cause.” Inasmuch as Josephus, like the rest of the Jews, exhibited “faithlessness” (perfidia), he failed to comprehend the (Christian) truth that the destruction of Jerusalem, which he recorded, constituted the “punishment” (supplicium) of the Jews; this is ironic because Josephus himself “manifested” the “punishment” of the Jews (de eorum supplicio manifestauit), which he himself failed to understand (non intellexit). In framing his work this way, Ps-Hegesippus betrays an ancient authorial assumption, particularly characteristic of historiography, that the authority of a given writing came in part from its connection to earlier tradition.Footnote 25 While still writing firmly within the bounds of a tradition, the value of a given work would be assessed in terms of its ability to innovate, improve upon, and even correct its predecessors within that tradition. In this way, De Excidio presents itself as a Christian version of Josephus, already an extremely popular and important author for Christians (but not for Jews) in late antiquity.Footnote 26 In presenting De Excidio as both the last installment in a three-volume set and as an innovative “update” or “revision” of Josephus's Jewish War, Ps-Hegesippus propounds ab initio the subject matter of his work: as the last volume of Jewish history, the reader may reasonably expect De Excidio to explain why and how Jewish history came to an end; and as a Christian corrective to Josephus's Jewish version of events, De Excidio is explicitly interested in explicating Jerusalem's destruction as “punishment.”
That Ps-Hegesippus is concerned with “writing the Jews out of history” becomes clearer with a wider structural overview of the work: the work's latter bookend, its final chapter (chapter 53), ends abruptly with the infamous Jewish mass suicide instigated by the rebel leader Eleazar atop Masada.Footnote 27 Josephus had likewise described this horrible event, but his history had highlighted the Romans’ admiration for the Jews’ bravery in choosing death over capitulation and had then continued to narrate an ensuing series of engagements between Romans and Jewish rebel holdouts.Footnote 28 De Excidio, in contrast, ends directly after the mass suicide, with no mention of Roman awe; rather, it records only that “one lone woman survived.” She had hidden with five children during the mass suicide. When the Romans arrived, she heard them and came out of hiding to tell them what had happened. The work's final line then states that the Jews’ “supplies, which they had put aside from themselves, had already been consumed by fire” (De Excidio 5.53.2). The work ends with the fiery destruction of (the last of the) Jews and their property, leaving the reader with the distinct impression that the work is about endings and not beginnings—about the death of the Jews and the destruction of what was once theirs.
This concentration on the end of the Jews in history, presaged in De Excidio's prologue and inferable from its final lines, finds confirmation in the contents of the work that lie between those two poles. In several places one finds the indictment against the Jews as the party responsible for Jesus's death and the contiguous claim of Jerusalem's destruction being divinely wrought punishment. In places this is explicit, in others slightly less so. A more vague reference to this ideology comes in the speech of Agrippa at De Excidio 2.9, where Ps-Hegesippus puts into the mouth of the Jewish king a hypothetical question, asking how the Jews expected to receive God's help and blessing, given that the disciples of Jesus—that is, Christians—had spread throughout the Roman world (De Excidio 2.9.1). The implication is that the Christians have replaced the Jews, the latter having been abandoned by God. In explaining this, Agrippa rattles off examples of Jewish sacrilege and states that, indeed, scripture had predicted the profanation of the Jerusalem Temple: “Has not scripture said that these things were to happen? Has it not been written that all the sacraments of the Temple are to be profaned?” (De Excidio 2.9.1). Here Ps-Hegesippus aligns with the Christian move to see the demise of the Jews as something prophesied in the Hebrew Bible and recognized by Jews themselves. This is an oblique yet poignant example of this theme in De Excidio. More explicit is the discussion in De Excidio 2.12.1, which begins by stating that “they [the Jews] suffered the punishments [supplicia] for their crimes [scelerum] who, after they had crucified Jesus, the witness of divine things [diuinorum arbitrum], afterwards also persecuted his disciples.” What exactly that punishment consisted in is clarified by context: the preceding chapter is a discussion of how “all of Judea was on fire, and the entire province of Syria was enticed to war” (De Excidio 2.11.1). The ultimate form of that punishment is then presented as something that Jesus himself predicted during his life on earth; again, at De Excidio 2.12.1, Ps-Hegesippus states that Jesus Christ “predicted the impending destruction of the Temple” (excidium quoque templi futurum adnuntiauit). One should note that this chapter, De Excidio 2.12, revolves around Ps-Hegesippus's rendition of the (in)famous “Testimonium Flavianum,” the description and putative confession of Jesus made by Josephus in his Jewish Antiquities.Footnote 29 Ps-Hegesippus presents Josephus as having recorded that Jesus was an extraordinary man, a worker of miracles, who appeared to his followers after having been dead for three days; but he also presents Josephus as not having believed what he wrote about Jesus because Josephus, here a proxy for the Jews writ large, maintained his “hardness of heart” (duritia cordis) and “intentional faithlessness” (intentio perfidiae).Footnote 30
The apogee of Ps-Hegesippus's anti-Jewish historical perspective appears in book 5, the last and most important book of De Excidio. De Excidio 5.2 is a striking oration that the author himself “speaks” in the second person to Jerusalem and the Jews.Footnote 31 There one finds an explicit link between Jerusalem's divinely sanctioned destruction and the Jews’ killing of Jesus. Ps-Hegesippus charges that “with your own hands you crucified your own health [or ‘savior’: salutare], with your own hands you extinguished your life, with your own voices you banished your advocate, amid your domestic disturbances you killed your ally” (De Excidio 5.2.1). For this very reason, he continues, “your well-being [or ‘salvation’: salus] has abandoned you, peace has departed, serenity has ceased—rebellion has been given to you, destruction has been given.” Here, in a highly charged and, frankly, emotional authorial address, Ps-Hegesippus chastises the Jews of his fictive first-century narrative, placing upon them responsibility for Jesus's death and portraying the resultant destruction as wages paid/given (datum) in recompense. He actually depicts Jerusalem's downfall as a kind of mass Jewish suicide.Footnote 32 At the end of the speech, Ps-Hegesippus postulates that the Jews crucified the real Temple of God, the body of Jesus, and concludes by reiterating the finality of the Temple's destruction in 70 CE: “Now truly divine fire has consumed their sacred things [that is, the Temple's accoutrements]. For they were devastated by the Babylonians but were returned thereafter, destroyed by Pompey and remade again, but they have been thoroughly devastated since Jesus came, and they have vanished, melted by the heat of the divine spirit.”
This confirmation of Jerusalem's divinely ordained destruction carried heavy prophetic weight for Ps-Hegesippus, as it did for most Christian writers of late antiquity. At De Excidio 5.31.2, in a speech directed by the narrative actor Josephus to the Jewish rebel John of Gischala, Josephus cites prophetic books (prophetici libri), particularly Daniel, as having predicted Jerusalem's earlier destructions, reparations, and final destruction by the Romans. This latest development corresponds with “divine protections having already abandoned” the country. In this way Ps-Hegesippus presents the destruction of Jerusalem, its Temple, and the Jews as fated, divinely determined, and predicted in scripture and thus as something that the Jews themselves recognized (at least some of them, as witness Josephus). This corresponds not only to Jewish and Christian notions of predictive prophecy but also to the preoccupation held by historians of the Greco-Roman world over the machinations of fate, chance, or destiny.
The most blatant and most conceptually complete iteration of Ps-Hegesippus's anti-Jewish historical understanding comes in De Excidio 5.32.1, near the end of the work. There, Josephus has just finished one of several speeches to his Jewish countrymen attempting to dissuade them from continued resistance to Rome. The rebels are not moved. Tellingly, Ps-Hegesippus articulates their obstinance in theological terms: “For God had by this time long since been urging on their faithless minds [perfidas mentes], for which reason they polluted themselves with impious parricide by crucifying Jesus [se impio parricidio commacularunt Christum Iesum].” This is followed by the most overt statement of Ps-Hegesippus's philosophy of historical causality in all of De Excidio: “This is he whose death marks the destruction of the Jews [Hic est ille, cuius mors Iudaeorum excidium est], born of Mary, who came to his own and his own did not receive him.” Quoting the Gospel of John (1:11), Ps-Hegesippus makes a historical assertion: Jesus's death equals Jewish destruction. At the end of this short chapter, moreover, he marks the destruction of Jerusalem (that is, the Jewish ciuitas) as eternal, distinguished from the earlier destruction under Babylon by its finality: “This is the final destruction after which the Temple is irreparable, because they [the Jews] by their crimes turned away the leader of the Temple, the governor of restoration.” As forcefully as any author in Christian history, Ps-Hegesippus imputed Jesus's death to the Jews, equated this act with the guarantee of their divinely sanctioned demise as instantiated in Jerusalem's destruction, and presented both as historical facts. This emerges from De Excidio's prologue and ending, its structure, its language, and its rhetoric. The overall narrative effect of De Excidio is to present the Roman-Jewish War, which ended with Jerusalem's destruction in 70 CE and the short epilogue of the Masada saga in 73 CE, as marking the effective end of the Jews in history.
What I call Ps-Hegesippus's “writing the Jews out of history” is not a rhetorical feature of De Excidio that has gone unnoticed in scholarship. Albert Bell's 1977 dissertation, one of few book-length works to treat De Excidio to date, identifies the central theme of De Excidio as the “ultimate destruction” (supremum excidium) of Jerusalem (and the Jews).Footnote 33 For the few who have studied De Excidio, the anti-Judaism of the text has been obvious and has not escaped comment (though none of these treatments analyzes Ps-Hegesippus's anti-Judaism vis-à-vis genre as medium, context, and reception as the present article does).Footnote 34 Nor is Ps-Hegesippus particularly novel in this regard: his equation of Jewish guilt, Jesus's death, and Jerusalem's destruction was, as already noted, a virtually ubiquitous notion among Christians in antiquity. Thus, my argument is not that Ps-Hegesippus reinvents the wheel, as it were, but that he makes the wheel “stick.”Footnote 35 In other words, I am arguing not that De Excidio's historical conception of Jewish identity, guilt, and demise is thoroughly original but that its arrangement, presentation, and intensity are such that it constitutes an important articulation of this position. This moves our discussion forward from the content of De Excidio's formulation of anti-Jewish historiography to the form itself, the package in which that content appears, which in this case is the ancient literary genre of historiography.
II. Historiography: The Power of Genre
De Excidio properly belongs to the genre of ancient historiography,Footnote 36 a Greco-Roman literary tradition generally reckoned from Herodotus's Histories in the fifth century BCE to the Res Gestae of Ammianus Marcellinus in the late fourth century CE.Footnote 37 This is to be distinguished from the most commonly discussed forms of historiography in early Christianity—that is, church history and world chronicle, both (re)invented by Eusebius in the early fourth century—by its content, form, and readership. It deals with military, political, and national events, very often a particular war or series of battles, with a special interest in geography and description.Footnote 38
The significance and impact of De Excidio within the lineage of Christian anti-Jewish historiographical thinking follows (in part) directly from its belonging, uniquely among ancient Christian texts, to the broader Greco-Roman tradition of historiography and not the narrower Christian one. Though quite different than historiography as practiced today, history writing in the ancient world (that is, classical historiography) still tapped into an authority that presumed to dictate real, true, and therefore authoritative descriptions of past events.Footnote 39 To modern eyes, ancient historiography may appear tendentious; in the Roman world, history was a subspecies of rhetoric. More importantly, ancient historical literature drew not just upon historical veracity but also upon moral rightness and entertainment value to wield what M. J. Wheedon calls “the historiographical ‘truth-effect.’”Footnote 40 By these mechanisms, historiography provides a vehicle for making indicative statements with a high level of authority.Footnote 41 Averil Cameron points out an important feature of late antique Christianity when she mentions that Christians used “the deployment of narrative form to inculcate and confirm belief.”Footnote 42 Yet Cameron is talking about Christian stories about themselves, Christians writing about Christians (apocryphal acts, martyrdom stories, hagiographies); Ps-Hegesippus shows that Christians did the same thing by writing about their proximate others as well and in a classical mode. That De Excidio was written as Greco-Roman historiography will have lent it epistemological weight and cultural cachet.Footnote 43
I suggest that much of De Excidio's rhetorical power in locating an effective Jewish death in 70 CE has everything to do with Ps-Hegesippus's chosen genre of historiography. That genre was particularly suitable for making exactly that kind of claim. Here we may draw upon a helpful concept established by Marshall McLuhan in his essay entitled “The Medium is the Message.”Footnote 44 McLuhan, addressing the recent communicative technologies of radio and television,Footnote 45 argued that the medium of communication may be more important than content: “the medium is the message.” Neil Postman later applied this idea to rational argument, that is, popular (political) discourse.Footnote 46 He argued that certain forms exclude certain content and that modern media such as television are fundamentally incapable of supporting the serious, sustained engagement characteristic of traditional civic discourse. Rational argumentation was compatible with print typography; television was built for entertainment. In other words, particular media are more or less suited to certain kinds of content.
The principle McLuhan and Postman endorsed can be applied to ancient literary genres as well. In the ancient Mediterranean world, historiography was particularly well suited to communicating and authorizing the kind of historical claims that Ps-Hegesippus makes about Jewish collective identity. Unlike most other ancient literary genres, historiography was written in the seemingly dispassionate indicative mood. It conjured an air of unbiased objectivity by its use of the third-person voice and its arrangement of a chronologically sequential and causally correlated series of facts. One of the genre's innate claims to persuasive power is its implicit concealment of the fact that historical indicatives amount to arguments: if x happened, this means that not-x did not happen, a truth claim made available for acceptance, rejection, or qualification—except that a written history does not invite response but rather dictates the way things are (or were). Scholars have long since recognized the special relationship between historiography as genre and cultural claims to epistemological literary authority.Footnote 47 Andrew Laird, for one, has considered the way historical narratives “work on us, as they enforce upon us an imaginary conception of who we are, where we are, and how we got there.”Footnote 48 One way historiography did this in antiquity was by its grammatical and syntactical simplicity, which democratized the interpretation and comprehension of the ideas it contained in contrast to philosophical and poetic genres. The straightforwardness and power of tense, mood, and voice in historiography render the hermeneutical process, for which genre is by definition a guide,Footnote 49 more accessible and feasible. Moreover, the imagined lack of artifice that adorns simple prose supported historians’ portrayal of their work as unbiased, uncontrived, and thus trustworthy.
Historical narrative prose constructs de facto a cohesive veneer of realism over an unavoidable artificiality consisting of temporal categories (past, present, future),Footnote 50 spatial categories (this place, that space), and the ethnographic categories that reify collective groups (groupism) and negotiate relative identities.Footnote 51 In so doing, historiography garners rhetorical authority and persuasive power. In fact, there is good reason to believe that historiography, like any literary genre, has not only the capacity to organize thought but even to guide trajectories of imagination and prompt ways of thinking. Inasmuch as historiography creates or reinforces ideas of temporality, spatiality, and identity (see below), it taps into core mental processes whose physical effects are observable by neuroscience—that is, the cognitive formation, solidification, and recall of categories.Footnote 52 Given what we know of how the brain works, it seems safe to say that exposure, especially repeated exposure, to a literary form that creates and arranges knowledge the way that historiography does—that is, propositionally in terms of real individuals and collectives who have acted and been acted upon in real space and time—may well cement the mind's penchant for adopting particular narratives and taxonomies as true (biologically, this means establishing particular sequences of synapse firings) by articulating them in specific ways (which map onto human neural circuitry).Footnote 53 In other words, a text like De Excidio may have had the capacity to concretize a perspective on Jewish history and guilt within the very neural networks of its readers: Ps-Hegesippus may have codified his brand of anti-Jewish historiography not just upon minds but upon brains. This reconfigures the broader point that historiography affected (affects) the way that people thought and believed.
Ancient historiography appeared particularly well suited to saying things about specific collectives of the past. This statement finds support in the frequent collocation of the practice of ethnography and historiography in antiquity. The enduring racial stereotypes attached to the Carthaginians by Livy in his Ab Vrbe Condita,Footnote 54 the cultural Greek commonplace of Persian dissipation or ideas about the relative “hardness” and “softness” of peoples established by Herodotus in his Histories,Footnote 55 and the clichés of Jewish origins and customs collected and listed in Tacitus's Histories Footnote 56—all these ancient statements about particular peoples emerged within the generic confines of historiography. And late ancient Christians made various use of the cultural practice of ethnography.Footnote 57 But no ancient Christian author other than Ps-Hegesippus seems to have done so within the classical literary form of historiography.Footnote 58
If Ps-Hegesippus's genre of writing was as important and as idiosyncratic as I have suggested, an obvious question arises: why, and for whom, was Ps-Hegesippus so writing? As Terry Eagleton pointed out: “Readers do not . . . encounter texts in a void.”Footnote 59 Rather, the expectations of readers and the concomitant habits of authors are informed by various contextual factors, not least of which may be a culture's current political situation and resultant “mood.” Moving in this vein from an examination of the power of genre to what I will call the “power of context,” we shift our analysis away from the literary form and features that render De Excidio a persuasive text to the broader discursive habitat and cultural ecosystem that rendered it, in its own time as well as thereafter, a timely and therefore potent one.
III. The Emperor Julian, De Excidio, and the Power of Context
On June 17, 362 CE, the Emperor Julian, whom Christians would come to dub “the Apostate,” outlawed Christians from teaching secular literature within the empire. This resulted from Julian's identifying within Christianity—a system of thought that he knew, because he was raised in it—an “anti-culture” that “refused to believe the literature on which all education was based.”Footnote 60 Reaction to this legislation reverberated through subsequent Christian thought and literature,Footnote 61 especially since it was accompanied by a promise made by Julian to rebuild the Jerusalem Temple and restore Jewish rites there.Footnote 62 Julian threatened to separate the Christians from the intellectual and literary heritage of the classical world and at the same time to eclipse their religious and ethnic identity with a revivification of what Julian saw as a more legitimate one: that of the Jews. The Jews would be allowed to play in the religious game of Julian's Hellenistic world; the Christians would not. This twin threat held monumental importance for Christians of that age. Frances Young, in an essay dealing with Christian writings in the fourth and fifth centuries (the “Golden Age of Patristic Literature”), marked the aftermath of Julian's program as one of two “determinative moments for the character of Christian literature” in late antiquity.Footnote 63 (The first was Constantine's rise to power and patronage of the church following the empire's final attempt to eradicate Christianity.) As Albert Bell first suggested and as others have since endorsed, De Excidio seems to have been written at just this formative moment.Footnote 64 This immediate context of writing aids our understanding not only of De Excidio's anti-Judaism but also of its classical form and tenor.
The place of Judaism within Julian's culture program and attack on Christianity has recently received treatment in a monograph by Ari Finkelstein.Footnote 65 Finkelstein shows that the Jews are a multivalent resource for Julian, serving not just to undermine Christians, whom he calls “Galileans” (thus robbing them of any ethnic status), but also to reinforce the cultural koine of Hellenism. Notably, Finkelstein sees Julian's “Jewish gambit” as responding to Eusebius of Caesarea's “attempt . . . to ‘historicize’ the Jews as a defunct ethnos whose remains could be used to authenticate and define Christianity.” As we have seen above, Ps-Hegesippus undertakes the same tack to historicize a defunct Judaism, though without acknowledging any remains. This perspectival proclivity in De Excidio becomes more intelligible when viewed in the light of Julian's attempt to resurrect Judaism specifically as a means of delegitimating Christianity. Julian, “by raising the specter of the Jews . . . resurrects the power of a living, breathing, efficacious, and compelling Jewish people and their laws for Christians.”Footnote 66 Response to such shows of power can take different forms. Writing within a nascent Christian empire that understood (divine) power to be definitively on its side,Footnote 67 Ps-Hegesippus's response seems to have been one of outright contradiction: far from being a “living, breathing” entity, Ps-Hegesippus presents the Jews as obsolete and tacitly extinct.
Ps-Hegesippus's chosen genre of writing may well have been another means of responding to Julian's perceived reign of terror. De Excidio's generic identity, as mentioned above, was that of the Greco-Roman historiography of the classical world and not the Christian forms of historiography emergent in late antiquity. Frances Young, discussing the Christian literary aftermath of Julian's polemical splash, has pointed to a causal connection between Julian's attempt to cordon off Christians from the world of classical education and literature and the subsequent increase in Christian authors engaging in just that classical milieu in their writings. One method of doing this, which Ps-Hegesippus adopted, was one in which “Christian rhetoricians began to produce a new literature which had classical styles and genres but Christian content.”Footnote 68 De Excidio's unlikely genre identifies it as what Young calls a “reaction” to Julian's anti-Christian (and pro-Jewish) agenda.
If the post-Julianic age does (help) explain De Excidio's anti-Jewish content and classicizing format, a reasonable question could be: did De Excidio “work” in attempting to write the Jews out of history (while cementing the classical respectability of Christianity)? Commenting upon the fourth-century Christian tendency to respond to the threat of Jews and Judaism by recounting their divine damnation on account of the death of Christ, Andrew Jacobs avers that “this constant defeat of the Jews . . . only thinly covers over, and necessarily recalls and amplifies, Christian fears of the revival of their menacing otherness.”Footnote 69 Thus: “Every time the conquered Jew is conjured into the Christian imagination, so, too, is the menace that necessitated conquest. The interplay of conquest and resistance that emerges from this colonialist dialectic is likewise focused on the bare Temple mount, on the threat of Jewish resurgence.” Jacobs then marks the signal moment reinforcing Christian anti-Judaism in late antiquity: “This repetitive threat was made most palpable for Christians by the abortive attempt of the last pagan emperor, Julian, to permit the Jews to rebuild their Temple in Jerusalem.” He goes on to show that in the respective Church Histories of Rufinus, Socrates, Sozomen, and Theodoret, in addition to other literature (like the Letter on the Temple by Cyril of Alexandria), this moment became the primary fuel enlivening anti-Judaism within the Christian historiographical imagination: “The menace of the Jews and their Temple became another narrative of conquest and appropriation to be repeated by a triumphant Christian empire, one that brought the menace and fear of the colonized into sharper relief.”Footnote 70
Jacobs's point is that, in all these responses to Julian and/or the Jews, the Christian fixation upon and dismissal of Jewishness is always a simultaneous reminder of that same Jewishness and its “menace” (read: its power). Thus, read in the post-colonial light of nascent Christian empire, Ps-Hegesippus's insistence upon the extinction of Judaism was at the same time a testament to the Jews’ enduring significance. Ps-Hegesippus thus provides a new angle on the incoherence that Todd Berzon locates within the Christian anti-Jewish discourse of late antiquity (it is no accident that the fuel for Berzon's argument consists of authors roughly contemporary to Ps-Hegesippus: for example, Chrysostom, Jerome, Augustine, Rufinus, and the Theodosian Code).Footnote 71 Writing the Jews out of history was always a tenuous proposition.
If De Excidio was written contra Iulianum, as it were, then we may appreciate the text's anti-Jewish rhetoric and classical stylistic tendencies as a two-pronged response to Julian's doubly threatening polemic, in which Christians were cast not just as bad Jews but as bad Romans. In so doing, Ps-Hegesippus “out-Romaned a Roman Emperor” by producing a disputation on both fronts in one and the same piece of literature.Footnote 72 If so, were the Jews merely the necessary conceptual medium by which such an argument was to be made, or would De Excidio's anti-Jewish historiography have been seen as a necessary ad scribendum even if Julian had never risen to power? Other Christian authors were careful to make the same overall historical points as does Ps-Hegesippus (most prominently Eusebius), but none ever took time to clothe such an argument in classical historiographical garb. In any case, De Excidio does the work of combining these anti-Jewish, pro-classical tendencies of late antique Christianity, and the cultural context of the aftermath of Julian's anti-Christian invective may help explain both the impetus for and the success of Ps-Hegesippus's literary endeavor.
IV. The Legacy of Pseudo-Hegesippus
In his brilliant journalistic endeavor, Outliers: The Story of Success, Malcolm Gladwell articulates a cogent, multifaceted argument to the effect that unusual success—whether of individuals, groups, companies, etc. —is rarely, if ever, the sole result of “genius,” “brilliance,” or the special abilities or capacities we may impute to those who attain exceptional achievement.Footnote 73 Rather, success can almost always be explained, at least in part, by the times and environs in which individuals, groups, or companies are born, develop, and live. I suggest that the exact same principle may be applied to texts. One hardly need strain the imagination to see that by historical accident certain texts become world-famous and enormously influential while others are left by the wayside and forgotten (where now are the thousands of works imputed to Origen of Alexandria?). I submit that this always has to do with what we might be tempted to call “chance” but that is, in fact, a partially intelligible consequence of numerous contextual factors.
As we have shown above, De Excidio was written at a time when Christians felt an existential need to assert their ability to deal with the classical literary and cultural tradition and to delegitimize the Jews, whose very identity and history was seen as a clear and present danger to their own. It was written at a time when major advances in the infrastructure, resources, and administrative abilities of the church and of individual Christian elites had increased significantly.Footnote 74 Christians could thus more adequately reproduce and thus preserve texts.Footnote 75 De Excidio was written in Latin, the vernacular of the Roman imperial world,Footnote 76 though it may well have been penned in Antioch,Footnote 77 thus reaching beyond the (construct of a) “Western, Latin” sphere that scholars of late antiquity are wont to assume. It based itself on Flavius Josephus's Jewish War, a historically popular text among Christians, and produced a Christian version of this work, solidifying its importance for Christian readers. And De Excidio was written in a way that harnessed the rhetorical and cultural conventions of classical literature and genre to voice an anti-Jewish historical perspective in a medium more tailored to making such an argument than any other. Moreover, again, both the rationale behind the creation of such a narrative and the guarantor of its popularity may be found in the highly charged environment following Julian's reign in which Christians needed to conceptualize a historical Jewish identity that could be subordinated and made safe for Christian apprehension. Because of what it said, how it said it, and when it said it, De Excidio was destined to become a powerhouse of epistemology within ancient Christian anti-Jewish thought.
The two sections above provide reasons why Ps-Hegesippus constitutes a critical contribution to ancient anti-Jewish Christian thought: based on its form or genre and on the historical moment at which it emerged, De Excidio seems to have been uniquely poised to codify anti-Jewish ideas upon the Christian historiographical imagination. Before concluding, here I briefly show that we actually can trace Ps-Hegesippus's influence in this regard (drawing largely upon the work of Richard Matthew Pollard as well as several others).
A few centuries after De Excidio's appearance, Julian of Toledo (d. 690) cribs on Ps-Hegesippus's prologue in his anti-Jewish tract De comprobatione aetatis sextae (1.20).Footnote 78 This text plays upon the prophecy of Genesis 49:10—“The scepter shall not depart from Judah, nor the ruler's staff from between his feet, until tribute comes to him; and to him shall be the obedience of the peoples”—to argue that the Jews missed the obvious advent of their would-be messiah, Jesus, an idea implied in De Excidio's Prologue 3.Footnote 79 Probably not incidentally, this prophetic passage was also evidence that Emperor Julian, whose knowledge of Judaism was largely based in the biblical text,Footnote 80 marshalled in his Against the Galileans to refute the Christian claim to being the “true Israel.”Footnote 81 Thus, there is reason to believe that Ps-Hegesippus's historical-prophetic framing of his anti-Jewish narrative, presented in a way that reflects his situation in the immediately post-Julian era, had a direct influence on later iterations of Christian anti-Jewish writing. Ps-Hegesippus may have fueled an even more aggressive anti-Jewish agenda in the text known as the Vindicta Salvatoris (Vengeance of the Savior), probably written in Aquitaine around 700.Footnote 82 This text relates how the Roman emperor-to-be Titus is converted in Aquitaine upon hearing the story of Jesus. Joining with his father Vespasian, he then sails with any army to Jerusalem to wipe “the enemies of Jesus” off the face of the earth.Footnote 83 Ps-Hegesippus provided the impetus for the extrapolation of these same themes in other works: among these is the Carolingian poem Arve poli conditorem, an abecedarius that recounts Titus's and Vespasian's vengeance upon the Jews for their denial/murder of Christ where every stanza ends with the line: “the princes assembled to destroy that savage [Jewish] race.”Footnote 84 Pollard locates “the same sort of amplified interpretation of ‘divine vengeance’” in De Subversione Hierusalem, a work by Walafrid Strabo in 824 that was also influenced by De Excidio.Footnote 85 This text draws upon De Excidio to re-present the triumphant solution to the Jews’ killing of Jesus: the divinely ordained destruction of Jerusalem by the Romans.
Later, Paul Alvarus of Cordoba in 840 used De Excidio in his polemical Letters sent to a certain Eleazar, a convert to Judaism, to argue that not only was Jerusalem's destruction prophesied by Daniel but that even Jews had known this to be true (!).Footnote 86 The ninth-century work called the Anacephalaeosis can also be added to the list of trenchantly anti-Jewish works that relied upon Ps-Hegesippus: this text is based primarily upon De Excidio Footnote 87—it has sometimes been confused with itFootnote 88—and as such provides another example of the lasting, geographically dispersed, and rhetorically charged legacy of De Excidio's historicized anti-Judaism. A final example of Ps-Hegesippus's influence on later Christian anti-Jewish literature comes from the anonymous, mid-thirteenth-century De excidio urbis Ierosolimorum, a poem of 1,896 verses “on the destruction of the city of Jerusalem.”Footnote 89 This poem, which participates poetically in the medieval Christian enterprise of historical rumination over Jerusalem that bears the pockmarks of anti-Jewish perspective,Footnote 90 apparently drew on De Excidio.Footnote 91 In lines 1401–1402, it addresses “Judea” and asks the question: “What, Judea, did you think was going to happen to you, when you crucified him who had manifested himself as God?”Footnote 92 It is difficult to imagine that this line is not drawing upon a similar rhetorical question from De Excidio 5.2.1, where the author, addressing Jerusalem, asks: “What did you think was going to happen when you crucified your salvation [that is, Jesus] with your own hands?”Footnote 93 I suggest that, like so much earlier Christian literature, this poem draws upon one of the standard fonts of anti-Jewish material within ancient Christian literature: De Excidio.
More could be added to this short survey. For example, it may be no coincidence that an author like Isidore of Seville, who knew De Excidio well, was also an important figure in his time for perpetuating anti-Jewish ideas through literature,Footnote 94 or that Bede would use De Excidio as part of a discussion that amounts to a critique of Jewish unbelief.Footnote 95 The fact is that De Excidio, like the larger reception tradition of Flavius Josephus's works to which it is often taken to belong, was one of the most influential historiographical works of the Middle Ages, coming to hold an authority akin to that of the writings of the church fathers. Richard Pollard has shown this more thoroughly than anyone.Footnote 96 However, we should note that “it becomes very difficult to separate the De Excidio, Eusebius, and Eusebius-shaped readings of Josephus after the later fourth century. Both Eusebius and the De Excidio offer a moralizing, Christian interpretation of the destruction of Jerusalem: that it was divine vengeance for Jewish impiety and their hand in the death of Jesus.”Footnote 97 In other words, even though we can see that Ps-Hegesippus had an early, significant, and widely dispersed influence in terms of anti-Jewish ideology, we are incapable of fully appreciating the extent of that influence because the ideas which Ps-Hegesippus helped codify became (and to some extent had already been) part of the Christian vernacular. However, this does not hinder our argument; rather, it complements the conclusion that as both bastion of Christian anti-Judaism and repository of historiographical Latinity, De Excidio had an enormous influence on subsequent Christian tradition, and we do not even know the half of it.
V. Conclusion
The above survey is enough to show that De Excidio wielded a formidable influence upon subsequent Christian thought and literature, especially of the anti-Jewish variety and particularly as concerns the historiographical articulation of anti-Judaism (wherein Christ's killing and Jerusalem's destruction as divine punishment are linked). This undergirds the arguments made above: (1) that De Excidio communicates a forceful articulation of Christian anti-Jewish thought; (2) that some of that force came from De Excidio's genre of classicizing historiography; and (3) that Ps-Hegesippus's probable context of writing, the post-Julian era, made it a particularly timely iteration of its already axiomatic claims.
Quite frankly, what we know of De Excidio's ideological afterlife is probably only a drop in the bucket of the impact it actually had. In addition to being extremely anti-Jewish, the text was extremely popular and influential; it is an undeniably important point in the development of the anti-Jewish Christian historiographical imagination and its literary manifestations.Footnote 98 Therefore, in closing, I suggest that De Excidio's routine absence from scholarly accounts of developing Christian anti-Judaism in late antiquity is not a small lacuna but a glaring omission.
Ps-Hegesippus is almost never included in broader discussions of early Christian anti-Judaism today, and where he has been included in such studies in the past—for example, in Heinz Schreckenberg's massive project in the 1980s cataloguing “Die christlichen Adversus-Judaeos-Texte”—he becomes effectively lost in a vast sea of exemplars embodying the massive tradition of Christian anti-Jewish literature.Footnote 99 Scholars have thus either ignored or overwritten De Excidio's signal importance within the tradition of Christian anti-Judaism. Ps-Hegesippus's inclusion in such discussions is lacking because, in large part, scholars tracing the early iterations of Christian anti-Judaism cite the ancient Christian authors who are famous today and who thus exercise an outsized influence upon contemporary scholarly perspectives, as if the texts and authors familiar to contemporary scholars always reflect the popularity and influence of those texts and authors in (for example) the ancient and medieval worlds.
To mark out some prominent examples: David Nirenberg's Anti-Judaism: The Western Tradition is to my mind the best treatment in recent years of the development and significance of anti-Jewish thought. His chapter on “The Early Church” deals with the usual suspects: Irenaeus, Polycarp, Justin Martyr, Origen, Eusebius, John Chrysostom, Ambrose, Jerome, and Augustine.Footnote 100 Nirenberg's treatment of so many ancient authors is commendable, and my point here is not to criticize Nirenberg's work per se. But Nirenberg's choice of the last five of these authors mentioned, from Eusebius to Augustine, tacitly reinforces a scholarly assumption whereby the authors who constitute known entities to modern scholars become the authors who figure in (and are thus identified as being important for) scholarly discussions.Footnote 101 The familiar data, not necessarily the best data, drives the research. Another popular survey is James Carroll's Constantine's Sword: The Church and the Jews: A History, winner of the 2002 National Book Award in Jewish history.Footnote 102 The book has since been adapted to the big screen by Oren Jacoby as a full-length documentary film: Constantine's Sword (2008). A major portion of Carroll's history is expressly about the historicization of Jews as understood through a Christian prophetic lens as cursed and responsible for Jesus's death. Yet, while the historicizing anti-Jewish vision which Carroll isolates is precisely that which De Excidio casts in a unique way and at a critical juncture in history, predictably, Ps-Hegesippus makes no appearance in the book (but Eusebius and Augustine do). The simple reason for this is that ancient works and authors with which scholars are most familiar today end up ipso facto becoming the ad hoc sources cited when dealing with Christian antiquity (I say “today” because Ps-Hegesippus was quite well known throughout the pre-modern period, and then sometimes in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries). To Nirenberg and Carroll could be added innumerable other works, books like Robert Chazan's From Anti-Judaism to Anti-Semitism and Jeremy Cohen's Christ Killers.Footnote 103 At the very least, we may say that these (mostly excellent) surveys, which embody scholarly consensus, operate under an availability bias and account for only a part of the relevant data.Footnote 104 No one knows who “Pseudo-Hegesippus” is; everyone knows Eusebius and Augustine. Thus, the latter two appear in probably every modern survey of the tradition of Christian anti-Judaism; the former almost never does.
Ps-Hegesippus postulated powerfully and exhaustively the Jewish guilt for Jesus's death and Jerusalem's resultant God-sanctioned demise; he did so within the guise of ancient historiography; and he did so within a critical moment of Christian late antiquity—namely, the broad-spectrum response to Julian's anti-Christian cultural program. In and of itself, De Excidio's classicizing, anti-Jewish contribution to late antique Christian literature is substantial. Moreover, it is not difficult to trace Ps-Hegesippus's influence upon the Christian historiographical imagination—and in particular its anti-Jewish manifestations—across the centuries from late antiquity into the Middle Ages. For this reason, when we think about the tradition of Christian anti-Judaism, whether in late antiquity or over the longer dureé, De Excidio properly belongs to that complex of thought. Indeed, to omit it therefrom is to prefer the truisms of convention to the actual historical manifestations of literary reception and ideological development within the anti-Jewish pockets of the tradition of Christian discourse.
