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1 The Mosaic law in early Christianity
Whether and how the Mosaic law continued to have enduring significance after the coming of Jesus was a question that was debated among the members of the early Jesus movement and continued to preoccupy Christians in the second and third centuries. In many of their writings devoted to considering the status of the law, we often find a comparatively more anti-Judaic tone than that employed by Clement. Polemical rhetoric, however, often occurred with a simultaneous appropriation of Jewish thought and practice. These discussions continued to play a central role in early Christian explorations of self-definition, as much of the debate among Christians about “orthodoxy” and “heresy” invoked, and sometimes revolved around, questions of how various elements of Jewishness should be differentiated and incorporated into Christian thought and practice.
Acknowledging the competing strategies of appropriation and exclusion that early Christian authors employed in establishing these unstable boundaries raises some challenges for certain contemporary ways of modeling the landscape of late antiquity. In arguing that the borders between Jewishness and Christianity remained fluid throughout the second and third centuries, Daniel Boyarin has proposed what he has described as a “wave theory” model.1 He contrasts this to an older, kinship model of the relationship between Judaism and Christianity which analyzes the similarities between the two as a consequence of their common origins, after which they diverged. In contrast to this older approach, he suggests one in which the two might both be thought of as continually in contact with one another, in such a way that a change in one might affect the other.2 On Boyarin’s account, “social contact and the gradations of religious life were such that, barring the official pronouncements of the leaders of what were to become the ‘orthodox’ versions of both religions, one could travel, metaphorically, from rabbinic Jew to Christian along a continuum where one hardly would know where one stopped and the other began.”3
In describing the “wave theory” model, however, Boyarin occasionally uses the language, not of a three-dimensional wave pattern, but of a one-dimensional “spectrum.” On this spectrum, Boyarin places the followers of Marcion, who rejected the idea that the Jewish scriptures had any significance for Christianity, on one end, and those Jews who had no knowledge of or interest in Jesus of Nazareth on the other; “In the middle, however, there were many gradations that provided social and cultural mobility from one end of this spectrum to the other.”4 Considering how these different ways of modeling the fluidity between ancient religious boundaries—the linear spectrum and the three-dimensional wave—might compete with one another may reveal how certain discussions of this fluidity may depend, if implicitly, upon an understanding of the degrees of any particular Christian’s relationship to “Jewishness” as in some sense quantifiable. Such a conception appears to be implicit in the characterization of the second-century Christian Marcion as on the far-end of ancient Christian rejection of Jewishness. Yet the fact that early Christians employed a variety of ways of confiscating elements of Jewish cultural productions that were themselves similarly diverse, at times for the very purpose of differentiating themselves from contemporary Jews as they imagined them, suggests that there may be problems with modeling Jewish and Christian difference in terms of a linear progression.
The present chapter will offer a survey of some of the major discussions of the status for the law among devotees of Jesus in the second and third centuries. Looking at the different ways in which early Christians represented the law will, I hope, illustrate the difficulty of quantifying the “Jewish” or “anti-Jewish” elements of a particular author’s thought, and therefore indicate some of the limitations of the “spectrum” model. Locating Clement in this larger backdrop will help us bring into relief the peculiarity of his Christianity and the way it informs, and is informed by, his interpretation of the status of Moses and the Mosaic law.
The status of Moses in early Christianity
Not every effort made by the followers of Jesus to delineate themselves from Jews and Jewishness revolved around a preoccupation with the figure of Moses. Take, for example, the martyr Ignatius of Antioch, whose death at Rome has traditionally been placed around 110 on the basis of Eusebius’ claim that he lived during the time of Trajan (Eusebius, HE 3.36; cf. Martyrdom of Ignatius 2).5 While in captivity, Ignatius wrote seven letters to various communities in Asia Minor. In these letters, he both rejected a docetic Christology and defended the authority of the bishops; in addition, however, he was also concerned to establish clear lines between “Judaism” or ἰουδαισμος (a term which first appears in the Maccabean literature; 2 Macc. 2.21; 8.1; 14.38; 4 Macc. 4.26) and “Christianity” or χριστιανισμός (a term which appears first in Ignatius), and argued against those Christians he claimed to be guilty of Judaizing (ἰουδαΐζειν).6
As Judith Lieu observes, the status of the Mosaic law itself does not appear to be a question that especially preoccupies Ignatius.7 In his diatribes against the Judaizers, found in Epistle to the Philadelphians and Epistle to the Magnesians, he argues that followers of Jesus should not observe the sabbath (σαββατίζω) (Magn. 9) or practice of circumcision (Philad. 6); yet these themes may here reflect common designators for Jewish practice, and not that Ignatius’ opponents were in fact engaging in these practices.8 Shaye J.D. Cohen, in exploring Ignatius’ rhetorical constructions of ἰουδαισμος and χριστιανισμός, likewise argues that Ignatius’ discussions of circumcision reveal a preoccupation not with the performance of the practice as such, but with the delineation of his own views from his intra-Christian competitors, whose credibility he sought to tarnish by identifying them as “Judaizers.”9 Ignatius here employs certain tropes that served as markers for “Judaism” in the context of this polemic in a way that may not tell us much about the practices of his opponents. His rhetorical use of these markers, however, takes place concomitantly with an appropriation of the mantle of the prophets (Smyrn. 5.1; Philad. 5.2; Magn. 9.2).10
Other texts from the second and third centuries more explicitly deal with the status of Moses and the Mosaic law. In Epistle to Diognetus, a text of uncertain provenance,11 elements of the law such as the dietary laws, the sabbath, feasts and fasting are described as errors on the part of the Jews (Ep. Diog. 3–4). Alternatively, in the Epistle to the Hebrews, the Mosaic law, while of divine origin, is described as of temporary significance and only held normative force before the coming of Jesus (Heb. 3:1–6; 8:1–12; 9:1–27). In the Epistle of Barnabas, we find yet another construction of the status of Moses and his law, in which the author argues for the law’s ongoing relevance for the followers of Jesus; he does so, however, by rejecting the conventional practices of “the people” or ὁ λαός, employing an allegorical interpretation of scripture that has led a number of scholars to suggest that it was written in Alexandria, sometime after the fall of the temple in 70 CE and before the Bar Kokhba revolt in 132.12
The historical circumstances in which Barnabas was written have been a matter of scholarly debate, which has often focused on the reference to the destruction and reconstruction of a temple in Barn. 16:2–5. This mention of the temple is generally taken to refer to the destruction of the Jerusalem temple in 70, but arguments concerning what reconstructed temple—real or hypothetical—is referred to are inconclusive. This passage has alternatively been taken to refer to Hadrian’s construction of the temple to Jupiter or to an expectation of a Herodian temple, either under Nerva or Hadrian.13 The possibility of a reconstructed Herodian temple may make sense of Barnabas’ rejection of the temple cult in his interpretation of the Mosaic law, as well as other elements of traditional Jewish practice. On Barnabas’ reading, the practices followed by “the people” were misunderstandings of Moses’ true teachings; as the letter says concerning the dietary laws, for instance, the people failed to understand the true sense of the commands;
Thus when Moses said, “Do not eat the swine or eagle or hawk or raven or any of the fish which do not have scales on them,” he understood three teachings. Indeed, later he says in Deuteronomy, “I will establish my ordinances upon this people as a covenant.” But the commandment of the Lord was not to not eat, for Moses had spoken spiritually (ἐν πνεύματι). Thus he mentioned the “swine” for this purpose, saying, “Do not consort with those men who are like swine. For whenever they live indulgently, they forget the Lord, and whenever they are in need, they remember the Lord.” And so the swine, whenever it nibbles away, does not know its master, and whenever it is hungry, it cries out, and receiving food, is again silent. “Do not eat,” he says, “the eagle or the hawk or the kite or the raven.” So he means, “Do not consort with or become similar to those who do not know how to feed themselves through labor and sweat, but carry off what is another’s in their lawlessness and go about, as though innocent, while making watch and seeking to take another’s through their greediness.” For so these birds alone do not feed themselves, but sit idly and seek how they might eat the flesh of others, being a pestilence in their wickedness. “And do not eat,” he says, “the sea-eel or the polypus or the cuttlefish.” Thus he means, “And do not consort with and become like those men, who are impious to the end and are condemned already to death.” For so those fish swim accursed in the keep, not swimming with the rest, but lie in the debris below.
(Barn. 10.1–5; cf. Lev. 11; Deut. 14)
According to Barnabas, other elements of the law were likewise misunderstood. The people failed, he claims, to understand that the commandment to circumcise primarily referred to the circumcision of the heart. While Abraham’s circumcision was a prefigurement of Christ, conventional practices of circumcision in general were an indication of how the people were led astray by an evil angel (Barn. 9). Likewise, they misinterpreted the commandment about the sabbath, for they did not understand that the sabbath referred not to human time, but to an eschatological sabbath in which God will rest after the Son has ended the time of the anti-Christ (Barn. 15).14
Whatever the circumstances that motivated the author of Barnabas to deny conventional interpretations of the commandments in Deuteronomy and Leviticus might have been, in his constructions of the relationship between “the people” and the followers of Jesus he claims that the commandment to practice circumcision refers to moral behavior (Lev. 26:41; Deut. 10:16, 30:6; Jer. 4:4, 9:26).15 Though Philo advocates the literal performance of circumcision, we see a similar claim in De specialibus legibus 1.304. Criticisms of the Jerusalem temple were likewise prevalent in Second Temple Judaism, such as we find in the Dead Sea Scrolls and the discussions of the heavenly temple in the Enochian literature.16 As John Gager has observed in his study of how intra-Judaic polemic played a formative role in early Christian self-definition, Barnabas’ allegorical approach to the laws also finds precedent among certain Jews, criticized by Philo, who maintained that the ritual observances were not intended literally (unlike, for example, what we find in Philo himself or the Epistle of Aristeas, where observance of the literal prescriptions of the laws is not mutually exclusive with an allegorical interpretation).17 His invective against “the people” therefore occurs within the context of an appropriation of Jewish forms of self-definition that were redeployed in the articulation of Christian difference from Jews.
It is perhaps worth noting that, aside from his allegorization of the sabbath, “Barnabas” does not offer a theorization of the decalogue as such, though its commandments are included as part of the characterization of the way of light, as opposed to the way of darkness (Barn. 18–20; cf. Ps. 1). In this sense, he differs from those authors who maintained that the decalogue was still binding while other elements of the law were not. His allegorical approach to elements of the law such as circumcision, temple sacrifice, the dietary laws, and the sabbath perhaps renders a theorization of the difference between the commandments of the decalogue and other portions of the law unnecessary, as, on his account, all elements of the law have significance for the followers of Jesus, if not the significance “the people” gave to them. This strategy of justifying the law distinguishes Barnabas’ approach from that of Justin Martyr, who drew a distinction between the different parts of the law in his Dialogue with Trypho.
Justin’s Trypho, as a dialogue between a Christian (“Justin”) and a Jew (Trypho), is an important representative of a literary tradition now otherwise lost to us. It is notable for the fact that while “Justin’s” Jewish interlocutor, Trypho, has often been taken as a literary representation constructed by the author, he is no mere straw man, but a challenging debate partner.18 In these debates, the character “Justin” divides the law into three parts, that which was given to instruct human beings i...
