The Anti-Jewish Strand in Melito

Abstract

The anti-Jewish texts of the second and third centuries did not appear on the scene “ex-nihilo.” These writers were the third and more virulent wave in the continuous confrontation between the Torah-observant followers of Jesus and the Gentile majority within the Jesus movement. The gradual anti-Jewish turn among some Gentile believers becomes unequivocal with the emergence of this new generation of authors. What is, more often than not, implied and obscured in the New Testament, is now explicit and blunt. The targets are no longer the Pharisees, the high priest, the authorities, the elders, or the scribes. Nor are the adversaries the enigmatic “Ioudaioi” of John or the “they/them” of Hebrews and Barnabas. Melito projects and externalizes the conflict onto all Jews. It seems that by the time of Melito’s writing, the externalized staging of the conflict that characterizes the second and third centuries had already taken hold of the minds and hearts of believers. In Melito we find no traces of an awareness of the internal origin of a now sacrosanct hatred. Wilson concludes that “no distinction is made between leaders and people, or between Palestinian and Diaspora Jews—as in some earlier writings, nor apparently between Jews of the past and the present. The crime is the crime of all Jews, past and present.” ¹ With Melito we are well into the third phase of the evolution of the anti-Jewish trajectory. Some scholars have pointed to the lack of evidence for a Jewish presence among Melito’s adversaries.² Others see evidence that the adversaries are Gentile sympathizers with Judaism. Regardless of who were the intended adversaries, the language deployed has all the characteristics of later anti-Semitic incitement.