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Jewish Flesh and Christian Spirit in Athanasius of Alexandria

Brakke, David.

Journal of Early Christian Studies, Volume 9, Number 4, Winter

2001, pp. 453-481 (Article)

Published by The Johns Hopkins University Press

DOI: 10.1353/earl.2001.0055

For additional information about this article

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BRAKKE/JEWISH FLESH AND CHRISTIAN SPIRIT 453

Journal of Early Christian Studies 9:4, 453–481 © 2001 The Johns Hopkins University Press

Jewish Flesh and Christian Spirit in Athanasius of Alexandria

DAVID BRAKKE

This paper examines Athanasius’ construction of the Jews as symbols of

difference within the Christian community, specifically as the embodiment of the particularity or locality of heresy (“flesh”) in opposition to the catholicityor universality of orthodoxy (“spirit”). Athanasius developed his notion of Judaism as particularity during his efforts to reform the Alexandrian (local)practices of Lent and Easter along more international (catholic) lines. Anti- Jewish rhetoric served to stigmatize Christians who resisted these efforts. Oncein place, the model of Jewish fleshliness could be applied to other “heretical”Christians, especially the Arians, whose biblical hermeneutic was allegedlycharacterized by a similar attention to the local at the expense of the global.The rhetorical contrast of fleshly particularity with spiritual universality was,

in its Athanasian incarnation, one ideological aspect of the fourth-centuryproject of creating a “catholic” Church.

Around Epiphany (6 January) 329, the new bishop of Alexandria,Athanasius, wrote his first Festal Letter announcing the date of Easter. Inhis intial attempt at this genre, Athanasius makes no explicit reference tohis election the preceding June, which took place under dubious circum-

stances and resulted in the election of a rival Melitian bishop of Alexan-dria. Appearing to eschew politics, he muses on the importance of per-forming the appropriate actions for each time and season and on thespiritual benefits of fasting. But the argument then takes a less irenic turn:

I am grateful to Daniel Boyarin and Guy Stroumsa for their invitation toparticipate in the Hartford Colloquium and to the participants, especially VirginiaBurrus, for their criticisms, suggestions, and fellowship; to Kirsti Copeland and the

members of the Philadelphia Seminar on Christian Origins for good discussion; toDaniel Boyarin (again) for his patient and supportive editorial work; and to myreaders near and far: James Ernest, Bert Harrill, Michael Satlow, Mary Jo Weaver, andSteven Weitzman.



454 JOURNAL OF EARLY CHRISTIAN STUDIES

Therefore, my beloved, since we have our souls nourished with divine food,that is, the Word, according to God’s will, and we are fasting bodily withrespect to external things, let us keep this great and saving feast as is fittingfor us. Even the ignorant Jews received this divine food, through thepattern, when they ate a lamb in the Passover. But since they do notunderstand the pattern, they eat the lamb even to this day, going astraysince they are without the city and without the truth.1

Athanasius goes on to explain that the Passover celebrated by the Jews

was a “shadow” of the true Christian Passover: it was limited to one city,

Jerusalem, precisely to indicate its temporary character; when that city

was destroyed, the shadow should have come to an end. Christians must

beware of “ Jewish fables” and slay not “a fleshly lamb,” but “the true

Lamb that was slain, even our Lord Jesus Christ.”2 Not willing to mounta frontal rhetorical assault on his opponents, the insecure young bishop

turned to a perennial means of uniting divided Christians: he attacked

Jews, a practice he would follow numerous times in the remaining 45

years of his life. He could lump together Jews, Arians, Melitians, and all

other “heretics” as those who do not “share in the festival.”3

Because they are not the most sophisticated of Athanasius’ works, few

scholars have studied the Festal Letters closely. Schwartz famously dis-

missed them as a “conglomeration of homiletic trivialities combined with

wholesale biblical citations.”4 Scholars undeterred by Schwartz’s warninghave had to come to grips with the pervasive anti-Jewish polemic in the

Letters and have done so in various ways. One approach is denial. The

polemic is not really anti-Jewish: since he attacks Jews, heretics, and

1. Ep. fest. (syr.) 1.7 (ed. William Cureton, The Festal Letters of Athanasius[London: Society for the Publication of Oriental Texts, 1848], 17.8–13). The Festal Letters survive fragmentarily mostly in their Syriac and Coptic versions. An English

translation of the Letters in Syriac (and the few Greek fragments), along with most of Athanasius’ other writings, is available in Archibald Robinson, ed., Select Writingsand Letters of Athanasius, Bishop of Alexandria, NPNF, 2nd ser. 4. A Frenchtranslation of most of the Coptic fragments is provided by L.-Th. Lefort, ed. and tr.,S. Athanase. Lettres festales et pastorales en copte, CSCO 151. I have used thesetranslations in making my own from the Syriac and Coptic texts.

2. Ep. fest. (syr.) 1.7–9 (Cureton 17.13–18.22).3. Ep. fest. (cop.) 41 (ed. Coquin, IFAO Copte 25, f. 9v, b.23-f. 10r, b.5).4. Eduard Schwartz, Zur Geschichte des Athanasius (1911; reprinted as vol. 3 of

his Gesammelte Schriften [Berlin: de Gruyter, 1959]), 188. Whether due to Schwartzor not, many studies of Athanasius simply ignore the Festal Letters. For example, Uta

Heil discusses Athanasius’ anti-Judaism without any reference to the Letters: theresult is that Athanasius’ anti-Jewish polemic appears “moderate” and only a meansto the end of defaming the Arians (Athanasius von Alexandrien: De SententiaDionysii, Patristische Texte und Studien 52 [Berlin: de Gruyter, 1999], 107–9).




schismatics “quite bluntly and in all sincerity, Athanasius shows that he is

not anti-Jewish, but that he simply condemns all opposition to Christ,

whether Jewish or gentile.”5 Another interpretation minimizes it as “con-

ventional literary procedure,” in which Athanasius “does not add anyantisemitic emphases of his own to the traditional theme, but finds his

own way of repeating in a narrative style the common Christian opin-

ion,” while “his real interest” lies elsewhere.6 A third approach attributes

the attacks on Jews/Arians/Melitians to the lower literary character of the

Letters, which are aimed at the common folk as well as their leaders:

“polemics and pastoralness come together in the elaboration of a simple

and effective message destined for the entire orthodox community.”7

Finally, several scholars accept that much of Athanasius’ rhetoric is tradi-

tional, but assert that in Athanasius’ time the Jews of Alexandria “werestill very active and belligerent” and thus the Letters often appear to be “a

kind of challenge to Jews, which frequently takes the form of a harsh

exchange.”8

5. George Dion Dragas, “St. Athanasius on Christ’s Sacrifice,” in Sacrifice and Redemption: Durham Essays in Theology, ed. S. W. Sykes (Cambridge: CambridgeUniversity Press, 1991), 73–100, at 83.

6. Charles Kannengiesser, “The Homiletic Festal Letters of Athanasius,” in

Preaching in the Patristic Age: Studies in Honor of Walter J. Burghardt, S.J., ed. DavidG. Hunter (New York: Paulist, 1989), 73–100, at 78, 82. In general, scholars invoketoo easily the terms “conventional” or “traditional” as historical explanations, as if conventional or traditional materials reproduce themselves without human agents.“Materials designated ‘traditional’ are . . . always a selection from those that could beso designated. The ones selected are those that figure centrally in the organization of Christian materials favored by the party that puts them forward: therefore, what islabeled ‘tradition’ always has links to a preferred course of Christian behaviors now”(Kathryn Tanner, Theories of Culture: A New Agenda for Theology, Guides toTheological Inquiry [Minneapolis: Fortress, 1997], 163).

7. Annick Martin, Athanase d’Alexandria et l’église d’Égypte au IVe siècle (328–

373), Collection de l’École française de Rome 216 (Rome: École française de Rome,1996), 692.

8. Pius Merendino, Paschale Sacramentum: Eine Untersuchung über die Oster-katechese des hl. Athanasius von Alexandrien in ihrer Beziehung zu den frühchristlichenexegetisch-theologischen Überlieferungen, Liturgiewissenschaftliche Quellen undForschungen 42 (Munich: Aschendorff, 1965), 16. Robert L. Wilken seems to acceptMerendino’s picture, adding, “we get the impression that Athanasius’ involvementwith the Jews was not limited to riots and fighting over the control of the churches,but must also have included debate over the correct interpretation of the Scriptures”( Judaism and the Early Christian Mind: A Study of Cyril of Alexandria’s Exegesis and Theology [New Haven: Yale Univ. Press, 1971], 48). Earlier, Leopold Lucas had

stressed the “personal motives” behind Athanasius’ attacks on the Jews, whomAthanasius saw as his active opponents (Zur Geschichte der Juden im vierten

Jahrhundert: Der Kampf zwischen Christentum und Judentum, Beiträge zur Geschichteder Juden 1 [Berlin: Mayer & Müller, 1910], 4–7).




With the exception of denial, each of these observations may have

some explanatory value, although the last one requires additional investi-

gation (for example, on what evidence the Jews may be characterized as

“belligerent”). Still, no Christian bishop, even one writing to the massesof ordinary Christians, after centuries of Christian anti-Jewish rhetoric,

in a city shared with a living Jewish community, was required to fill his

Easter letters—or his other writings for that matter—with attacks on

Jews. No matter how “intrinsic to Christian teaching” such anti-Judaism

was, Athanasius chose to use anti-Jewish rhetoric for particular ends.9

Historians should try to elucidate these ends and to give such rhetoric its

social, political, and ideological context, if not its subjective motivations.

“The place of difference,” Daniel Boyarin has observed of Christian

discourse, “increasingly becomes the Jewish place, and thus the Jew be-comes the very sign of discord and disunity in the Christian polity.”10

Taking its cue from Boyarin’s cultural analysis of Paul’s critique of Juda-

ism, this paper examines Athanasius’ construction of the Jews as symbols

of difference within the Christian community, specifically as the embodi-

ment of the particularity or locality of heresy (“flesh”) in opposition to

the catholicity or universality of orthodoxy (“spirit”). I argue that

Athanasius developed his notion of Judaism as particularity during his

efforts to reform the Alexandrian (local) practices of Lent and Easteralong more international (catholic) lines. Anti-Jewish rhetoric served to

stigmatize Christians who resisted these efforts. Once in place, the model

of Jewish fleshliness could be applied to other “heretical” Christians,

especially the Arians, whose biblical hermeneutic was allegedly character-

ized by a similar attention to the local at the expense of the global.

Although the presence and practices of contemporary Jews in Alexandria

indirectly contributed to Athanasius’ anti-Jewish rhetoric in the Easter

controversy, his picture of Judaism was more “image” than “reality”:

“. . . Christian authors constructed an image of the Jew which wouldmeet their own needs, social, theological, or political . . . .”11 The rhetori-

9. The quoted phrase is from Miriam S. Taylor, Anti-Judaism and Early ChristianIdentity: A Critique of the Scholarly Consensus, Studia Post-Biblica 46 (Leiden: Brill,1995), 196. I find Taylor’s criticism of the “conflict model” as an explanation forChristian anti-Judaism acute and several of her categories helpful (as will be seenbelow), but at times she appears to resist any attempt at sociohistorical contextualizationof anti-Jewish rhetoric: cf. Albert I. Baumgarten, “Marcel Simon’s Verus Israel as aContribution to Jewish History,” HTR 92 (1999): 465–78, at 477.

10. Daniel Boyarin, A Radical Jew: Paul and the Politics of Identity (Berkeley:University of California Press, 1994), 230.

11. Judith M. Lieu, Image and Reality: The Jews in the World of the Christians inthe Second Century (Edinburgh: T & T Clark, 1996), 289.




cal contrast of fleshly particularity with spiritual universality was, in its

Athanasian incarnation, one ideological aspect of the fourth-century project

of creating a “catholic” Church.

PASSOVER REFORM:

FROM THE LOCAL TO THE UNIVERSAL

The juxtaposition of two Passovers, the Jewish and the Christian, in the

religious life of Alexandria provided Athanasius with the raw materials

for his construction of Judaism as difference. Confronted nearly every

winter with the need to produce a theological reflection on the Christian

Pasch in a Festal Letter, Athanasius found in the comparison with Jewish

practices a productive means both of articulating the universally salvificqualities of Easter and of stigmatizing Christians who celebrated Easter in

ways that he wished to change. While Athanasius’ anti-Jewish rhetoric in

these letters was aimed primarily, if not exclusively, at internal Christian

dissent, it nonetheless reflected a religious trend of the fourth century that

Jews and Christians shared and which brought them into conflict: the

drive to standardize local practices in line with universal norms.

The bishops of Alexandria had been tinkering with the date of Easter

since the early decades of the third century, mostly in an attempt both toremain somehow faithful to the biblical mandate that Passover be cel-

ebrated on Nisan 14 and to keep the Christian Pasch separate from the

Jewish Passover.12 There are signs that this issue was still a live one in

Athanasius’ time, as we shall see. But Athanasius’ episcopate was marked

by a reform nearly as significant: the introduction of the pre-Easter forty-

day fast, later called Lent. Athanasius’ role in this striking innovation

was, until recently, obscured by the disordered transmission of his Festal

Letters, several of which were mistakenly assigned in antiquity to the

wrong years.13 When these problems are corrected, one can see thatAthanasius’ first five Easter letters, for the years 329 through 333, do not

12. On this notoriously complicated issue in Egypt, see M. Cha î ne, La chronologiedes temps chrétiens de l ’É gypte et de l ’Éthiopie (Paris: Paul Geuthner, 1925), andM. Richard, “Le comput pascal par octaétéris,” Mus 87 (1974): 307–39; in general,August Strobel, Ursprung und Geschichte des frühchristlichen Osterkalenders, TU 121 (Berlin: Akademie, 1977).

13. The definitive study is Alberto Camplani, Le lettere festali di Atanasio di

Alessandria: Studio storico-critico (Rome: C.I.M., 1989). A. Jülicher in 1913 andE. Schwartz in 1935 had seen that the transmitted dates required revision, but in 1955L.-Th. Lefort argued otherwise, and his view held the field, with a few exceptions,until the 1980s.




mention a forty-day fast preceding Easter, but only a six-day one, which

he calls “the holy fast” or “the holy fast of Pasch.”14 This fast, which

began on the Monday before Easter, was the result of a gradual extension

of the overnight Paschal fast observed by the Quartodecimans and isattested in the third century in Syria as well as in Alexandria.15 Distinct

from Lent, which originated as final training for catechumens, this six-

day Paschal Fast retained its identity when the forty-day fast became

widespread, so much so that some fourth-century church orders, includ-

ing one from Egypt, enjoin observing both fasts separately: the forty days

of Lent were to be completed before the six days of the Paschal fast

began.16 In contrast, when Athanasius’ Festal Letters mention both fasts,

the Paschal Fast forms the final week of Lent, although Christians are said

to “begin again” to fast on the Monday that begins the six days.17

The evidence for how and when the forty-day fast of Lent arrived in

Alexandria is ambiguous. In 334 Athanasius announced for the first time

not only the six-day fast, but the forty-day one as well.18 The bishop

justified fasting for forty days by appealing to the forty-year wandering of

the Israelites during the Exodus:

But just as Israel, when it was going up to Jerusalem, was first purified in thewilderness, being trained to forget the customs of Egypt, by which the Word

wished to symbolize for us the holy fast of forty days, (so) let us first bepurified and freed from defilement, so that when we depart from here, sincewe have been diligent about fasting, we may be able to ascend to the upperroom with the Lord, to dine with him; and we may be partakers of the joywhich is in heaven. For in no other way is it possible to go up to Jerusalem,and to eat the Passover, except by observing the fast of forty days.19

14. Epp. fest. (syr.) 1.10; 14(=3).6; 4.5; 5.6. Ep. fest. 24(=2) (330) does mention aforty-day fast, but this is an interpolation (Rudolf Lorenz, Der zehnte Osterfestbrief

des Athanasius von Alexandrien: Text, Ü bersetzung, Erlaüterungen [Berlin: deGruyter, 1986], 27–28).

15. Thomas J. Talley, The Origins of the Liturgical Year, 2nd ed. (Collegeville:Liturgical, 1991), 27–31, citing Did. Apost. 5.18 and Dion. Al. Ep. fest. apud Eus.Hist. eccl. 7.20.

16. Talley, Origins, 171, 191–92, citing Ap. Const . 5.13 and Can. Hipp. 20–22.17. Talley, Origins, 169.18. “We begin the fast of forty days on the first day of Phamenoth (25 February).

When we have prolonged it until the fifth of Pharmuthi (31 March), resting from it onthe Sundays and the Saturdays preceding them, we then begin again on the holy daysof the Pasch, on the sixth of Pharmuthi (1 April), and cease on the eleventh of the

same month (6 April), late in the evening of the Saturday, from which dawns on us theholy Sunday, on the twelfth of Pharmuthi (7 April), which extends its beams, withunfailing grace, to all the seven weeks of the holy Pentecost”: Ep. fest. (syr.) 6.13(Cureton 6*.15–22).




The letter for 335 likewise speaks of two fasts—“the fast of forty days”and “the holy fast of the blessed feast”—but does not offer any special

justification for the fast of forty days.20 Athanasius spent about seven of

the following ten years in two separate exiles, and thus several lettersfrom this period are missing and most likely were not written at all. The

ones that do survive follow the same pattern: a “fast of forty days,”followed by a six-day fast, the title for which varies, but nearly always

includes the terms “holy” and “Pasch.”21 But during one of his years of

exile—scholars disagree over whether it was 337, 339, or 340—Athanasius

wrote a special note to his close ally, Bishop Serapion of Thmuis, charging

him to handle certain dif ficulties in Egypt, including the forty-day fast.

Athanasius tells Serapion to make sure that Egyptian Christians observe

the forty-day fast: it is not right, the exiled bishop laments, that Egyptiansshould feast while “the entire inhabited world” fasts.22 All of the remain-

ing Festal Letters whose concluding sections on dates survive follow the

two-fast pattern mostly without any special pleading for the forty-day

fast.23

How is this evidence to be understood? Was the forty-day fast not

observed in Egypt until 334? Or was it observed, but just not endorsed by

Athanasius until that year? Did Athanasius himself introduce the practice

of Lent into Egypt, perhaps after experiencing its observance while inexile in the West?24 Of the several hypotheses that scholars have offered,25

I consider most likely one first suggested by René-Georges Coquin in 1967

and recently revived by Thomas Talley.26 Coquin followed an account

offered by Abu ’l-Barakat, a fourteenth-century scholar of the Coptic

19. Ibid., 12 (Cureton 6*.9–15).20. Ep. fest. (syr.) 7.11 (Cureton 15*.9–10).21. Epp. fest. (syr.) 10.12; 11.15; 13.8; 3(=14).6. Missing years (it seems): 336,

337, 340, 343, 346.22. Ep. fest. (syr.) 12.1 (Cureton 25*.23–26*.10). So it is called, although it is not

a Festal Letter.23. But see Ep. fest. (syr.) 19.9; cf. Fug. 6 (SC 56:139).24. This scenario would seem to require redating Epp. fest. 6–7 (334–35) to 345–

46 since these letters include the forty-day fast and Athanasius did not go into exile inthe West until 335. So claimed Lorenz (Zehnte Osterfestbrief , 8–37), but AlbertoCamplani argues persuasively that the themes and rhetoric of these letters, especiallytheir anti-Jewish language, require that they be included with the earlier letters (“Sullacronologia delle lettere festali di Atanasio: La proposta di R. Lorenz,” Aug 27 [1987]:617–28). And so the western influence hypothesis must be abandoned.

25. Camplani, citing a passage in Origen (as translated by Rufinus) and a homilyof Eusebius of Caesarea, argued that the forty-day Lent was observed in Egypt beforethe episcopate of Athanasius, who simply in 334 expanded the purview of the Festal Letters beyond Easter proper to include Lent (“Sulla cronologia,” 624–25). This




church, in his The Lamp of Darkness (and found in other writers as well).

According to Abu ’l-Barakat, the earlier Alexandrian practice was to fast

for forty days immediately after Epiphany (6 January), which was con-

nected to Jesus’ baptism by John, in imitation of Jesus’ forty days in thewilderness; at the end of this fast, catechumens were baptized on a day

celebrating the baptism of the apostles by Jesus. The Pasch, preceded by

its own six-day fast, would then have followed later.27 More than one

source reports that it was Bishop Demetrius of Alexandria (189–232)

who moved the forty-day fast from after Epiphany to before Easter: he

was a good candidate since he was credited with one of the earliest

attempts to calculate the date of Easter on a solar basis so that it would

always fall after the Jewish Passover. But the fasting confusion in

Athanasius’ Festal Letters convinced Coquin that it was in fact Athanasiuswho initiated this reform, prodded most likely by the Council of Nicea’sapparent acceptance of the western Lenten practice (in canon 5).28

Athanasius, then, probably did not introduce a forty-day fast into

Egypt, but initiated its transfer to a new season, one associated not with

the baptism and desert withdrawal of Jesus, but with the Passover and

desert sojourn of Israel. Thus Athanasius never connects the Lenten fast

with Jesus’ forty days in the wilderness, since that symbolism would lend

credence to the continued observation of the older Alexandrian prac-tice.29 Rather, in 334, he associates it with Moses, with Daniel, and above

all, with the Israelites’ forty years of “being trained” and “purified” in the

wilderness. In this way, Athanasius more closely conformed the Christian

proposal is unconvincing because the Origen and Eusebius evidence is weak, andbecause the special arguments offered for the forty-day fast in Ep. fest. 6 (334) and inthe memorandum to Serapion (Ep. fest. 12) indicate genuine resistance to the practice

in Egypt (cf. T. D. Barnes in JTS, n.s. 41 [1990]: 258–64, at 261–62). Theseconsiderations speak against also Martin’s proposal that Athanasius did not “intro-duce” Lent into Egypt, but rather “institutionalized” it or “made it of ficial” by“giving to the bishops the authority to organize this long period of preparation” andso “to train and form” their congregations (Athanase d ’Alexandrie, 156–70, esp. 166,169).

26. René-Georges Coquin, “Les origines de l’Épiphanie en Égypte,” Lex Orandi 40(1967): 140–70; Talley, Origins, 189–202. Martin once accepted this thesis, but laterrejected it (Athanase d ’Alexandrie, 157–58 n. 178).

27. Talley explains this practice clearly (Origins, 201–2) and remarks that it isattested in Celtic monasticism ca. 800 (193). Ingeniously he reconstructs for thisliturgical calendar a hypothetical lectionary based on Morton Smith’s Secret Gospel of Mark (203–14).

28. Coquin, “Origines,” 151–53.29. Ibid., 153.




Pasch to its model, the Jewish Passover. Of course, he claimed the exact

opposite, that the Jewish Passover was modeled after the Christian Pasch:

“When in the former time the children of Israel acted in this way, they

were considered worthy to receive the pattern. For that [feast] existed onaccount of this one; it is not the case that this feast is introduced now on

account of that one.”30 In accord with Christian typology, the later Chris-

tian Easter is portrayed as more real than its Jewish predecessor, Passover:

“The confounding of temporal logic is a central element in Christian

thought and representation, closely bound up with the way in which

Christianity had understood its relation to the Judaism it appropriated

and hoped to supplant.”31

Athanasius’ promotion of a Christian Lent/Easter by enhancing its

“symbolic” basis in the biblical, i.e., Jewish, tradition required heatedattacks on the contemporary ritual that had a more “literal” basis in that

tradition, the Jewish Passover. The bishop repeatedly contrasts the Jewish

adherence to an actual (literal, material) place, food, and date with the

Christian freedom from such particularist constraints. Place. The Chris-

tians do not “go up to the lower Jerusalem to sacrifice the Passover” since

the gospel has been preached everywhere and knows no geographical

limits. It is “in every place,” not just one.32 Freed from geographical par-

ticularity, Christians can “go up to Jerusalem” wherever they live throughthe spiritual purification of the forty-day fast.33 They are “children of the

higher Jerusalem, of which the one that Solomon built was a pattern.”34

In fact, God’s restriction of the Jewish Temple and its sacrifices to only

one city, Jerusalem, indicated their temporary character.35 Food . While

the Jews continue to eat “the flesh of irrational animals,” the Christians

eat “the rational nourishment of the true Lamb, our Lord Jesus Christ.”36

Jesus “was transferring them [the disciples] from the symbolic one to the

spiritual one and promising that they would no longer eat the flesh of a

lamb, but his own, when he said, ‘Take, eat, and drink. This is my bodyand my blood.’”37 Date. The Jews celebrate Passover “contrary to the

30. Ep. fest. (syr.) 14(=3).3 (Cureton 34*.20–22).31. Catherine Gallagher and Stephen Greenblatt, Practicing New Historicism

(Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2000), 77.32. Ep. fest. (syr.) 4.4 (Cureton 34.18–35.10), citing Mal 1.11.33. Ep. fest. (syr.) 6.12 (Cureton 6*.14–15)34. Ep. fest. 45 (Cosm. Ind. Top. 10.13.3–4 [SC 197:253]).35. Ep. fest. (syr.) 1.7 (Cureton 17.10–12).36. Ep. fest. (cop.) 24(=2) (CSCO 150:39.20–30).37. Ep. fest. (syr.) 4.4 (Cureton 35.7–9).




time.”38 Contrary, even though they are following what is commanded in

Exodus 12:

At that time Moses proclaimed the beginning of the feast, saying, “Thismonth is the beginning of months to you” [Exod 12.2]. But the Lord, whocame down at the end of the ages [Heb 9.26], proclaimed a different day,not as though he would abolish the Law—by no means!—but so that hemight establish the Law and be the end of the Law [cf. Matt 5.17;Rom 10.4].39

In any event, the particular date is not important since “the feast is not for

the sake of the days, but for the sake of the Lord,” who is “our Passover”(1 Cor 5.8); after all, God himself said to the Jews, “Your new moons and

your sabbaths my soul hates” (Isa 1.14).40

In every instance, the Jewscling to what is “fleshly” (terrestial, material, temporal) while the Chris-

tians look to what is “spiritual” (heavenly, immaterial, eternal). In other

words, the Jewish Passover is “unseasonable and parochial”; the Chris-

tian, “timely and universal (ecumenical).”41

Athanasius’ Easter letters are, of course, addressed to Christians, not

Jews, and so their immediate targets are Christians not convinced of the

legitimacy of the innovative Christian practices. The faithful, Athanasius

says, must be “restrained from Jewish myths.”42 Christians must not

“betray the truth through Jewish thoughts and myths, like the wretched Judas,” who did not keep the Passover properly.43 Having turned away

from the Jews because they kept the ritual but rejected Jesus, the Lord

now rebukes “those who keep the Passover in like manner” to the Jews;

Christians “must not be occupied with foods.”44 Christians should come

to Easter and neither to “the old shadows,” that is, Jewish Passover, since

it has been “fulfilled,” nor to the “common feasts,” that is, pagan rituals,

which are “full of greed and complete indolence.”45 How might Alex-

andrian Christians have followed “ Jewish thoughts and myths” in their

Easter practices? It is dif ficult to imagine that any advocated celebrating

the Pasch in Jerusalem. It seems plausible that some ate lamb and other

traditional foods of the Jewish Passover. But the crucial point appears to

38. Ep. fest. (cop.) 24(=2) (CSCO 150:39.26–27).39. Ep. fest. (syr.) 14(=3).4 (Cureton 35*.20–23).40. Ep. fest. (syr.) 6.2 (Cureton 42.4–13); cf. 19.1.41. Dragas, “Athanasius on Christ’s Sacrifice,” 81.

42. Ep. fest. (syr.) 1.8 (Cureton 18.12–13).43. Ep. fest. (cop.) 25 (CSCO 150:14.3–5).44. Ep. fest. (syr.) 6.2–4 (Cureton 42.7–43.5).45. Ep. fest. (syr.) 14(=3).5 (Cureton 36*.13–17).




have been that some observed a date more closely aligned to the Jewish

calendar. Controversy over the date of the Pasch plagued ancient Chris-

tians all over the Mediterranean, in Alexandria (and perhaps elsewhere)

even into the fourth century.46 Questions about observation of a solar,lunar, or combined solar/lunar calendar persisted into the episcopate of

Peter (304–11), whose On Easter argued that pre-70 Jews always ob-

served Passover after the vernal equinox: Christians who imitate contem-

porary Jews by following a calendar that allows the Pasch to fall either

before or after the equinox do so “erroneously and through utter careless-

ness.”47 According to Epiphanius of Salamis, Bishop Alexander, Athanasius’immediate predecessor, had to address this issue yet again, in debate with

a Crescentius.48

That all Egyptian Christians were still not observing the same calendarin Athanasius’ day is suggested by a fragmentarily preserved letter of the

bishop addressed most likely to Bishop Epiphanius of Skhedia in the last

years of Athanasius’ episcopate. It reads in part:

Pray that the Church may henceforth enjoy a secure peace, that the heresiesmight stop their murderous conduct, and that these contentious peoplemight stop who pursue among themselves disputations, ostensibly for thesake of the salvific Pasch, but actually for the sake of their own discord. For

while they seem to be from us and confidently say that they are Christians,they imitate the practices of the traitorous Jews. For what sort of plausibledefense might they have, inasmuch as it is written, “On the first day of Unleavened Bread, when the Passover is sacrificed . . . ” [Mark 14.12]?While at that time it was done properly (kal«w), now, according to what iswritten, “they always err in their heart” [Ps 94(95).10].49

The final sentence of the excerpt suggests that Athanasius’ letter dealt

with the same problem addressed by Peter’s On Easter: Athanasius seems

to be saying, as Peter did, that “at that time” (sc. during the ministry of

Jesus, before 70) the Jews celebrated the Passover “properly,” but “now. . . they err.” Athanasius’ transfer of the forty-day fast from after Epiphany,

which everyone agreed was January 6, to before Easter, the date of which

46. See Strobel, Ursprung und Geschichte.47. Peter of Alexandria, On Easter (PG 18:512–20); tr. Tim Vivian, St. Peter of

Alexandria: Bishop and Martyr, Studies in Antiquity and Christianity (Philadelphia:Fortress, 1988), 135–37.

48. Epiphanius, Pan. 70.9.9 (ed. Holl-Dummer 3:242)

49. Athanasius, Ep. Epiph. apud Chronicon Paschale, ed. L. Dindorf (Bonn:Weber, 1832), 9.10–20. On the authenticity, extent, and addressee of the fragment,see David Brakke, “Athanasius’ Epistula ad Epiphanium and Liturgical Reform inAlexandria,” SP 36 (2001): 482–88.




Christians contested, must have exacerbated and complicated the long-

running calendar debate, in which “the Jews” already functioned with

rhetorical power. Athanasius’ proposed reform enhanced the Christian

Pasch’s Passover/Exodus symbolism, while forcing the issue of gettingthose Christians who “imitate the practices of the . . . Jews” to follow

Athanasius’ calendar.

Was Athanasius right to claim that his Christian opponents were imi-

tating the Jews in their Easter practices? That is, were such Christians

simply strict biblicists, or were they influenced by their Jewish neighbors?

Did they find an alternative to Athanasius’ Lent/Easter (and thus a model

for their own worship) in the biblical narrative alone, or did they find

attractive contemporary practices of Pesach that they observed close at

hand? Certainly the Jews were one of the variety of subcultures in urbanAlexandria that were jockeying for shares of the civic space during a

period when the Christian patriarch was attempting to consolidate his

position of leadership in the city. Some neighboring Christians could have

invoked Jewish Passover practices as justification for their own at a time

when the Jews, like the Christians, were reforming local traditions in light

of more international norms.

The case for Christian knowledge and imitation of Jewish ritual re-

quires situating fourth-century Alexandrian Jews both historically andgeographically, in the face of a discouraging lack of evidence. Historically,

the Jews of Athanasius’ day lie on a trajectory that brought their commu-

nity from near extinction in 117 to a population in the early fifth century

so large that it required multiple synagogues and provoked attacks from

episcopally organized Christian thugs.50 According to Christopher Haas,

the meager evidence from our period suggests a community in the later

stages of re-formation: we find renewed signs of a wealthy professional

class (e.g., physicians) and reports of Jewish involvement, along with

other groups, in the socioreligious disputes and violence that ancients sawas characteristic of Alexandria.51 More to the point, there are indications

50. On Jews in Alexandria during the fourth century, see Wilken, Judaism and theEarly Christian Mind , 39–53, and Christopher Haas, Alexandria in Late Antiquity:Topography and Social Conflict (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1997),91–127. On Jews in Upper Egypt, see Roger Bagnall, Egypt in Late Antiquity(Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1993), 275–78. The church historian Socratesreports that around 415 there were multiple synagogues in Alexandria and thatBishop Cyril led Christian gangs in anti-Jewish violence that drove many Jews from

the city (Hist. eccl. 7.13; Haas, Alexandria, 295–316; Wilken, Judaism and the EarlyChristian Mind , 54–68).

51. Professionals: Haas, Alexandria, 113–16. Involvement: Ath. Apol. c. Ar. 83;Ep. encycl. 3.




of a conforming of Jewish life to the emerging international paradigm of

“rabbinic Judaism.” While the ethnarch of the Jewish politeuma led the

community in Philo’s day, the most prominent figure now is the archi-

synagogos, and a number of Hebrew papyri were found in Oxyrhynchus.52

According to a famously obscure passage in the Historia Augusta, “en-

voys” (apostoloi) of the Palestinian patriarch journeyed to Egypt regu-

larly to collect tithes. “On one occasion in the fourth century, the Alex-

andrian community sent questions concerning different feast days to the

Amoraim in Palestine,” while elsewhere the Talmud comments on the

manner in which Alexandrian Jews prepare Passover breads.53 Here are

hints that, like their Christian neighbors, at least some Jews were bringing

their local practices into conformity with an emerging international norm,

subordinating their Alexandrian particularity to a rabbinic universalism.54

Geographically, the Jewish quarter of the city remained on the east side,

along the shore of the Great Harbor toward Cape Lochias.55 This concen-

tration of the Jewish community in one area may have, paradoxically,

enhanced the visibility of their customs and rituals to interested Gentile

observers: such was the case in the days of Philo, who claimed that Jewish

rituals addressed their meaning to Gentile spectators as well as Jewish

participants.56 Located near the harbor, Jews were active in maritime

commerce: their exemption from compulsory duties related to the impe-rial grain fleet may have caused friction with Christian sailors, known to

be the clients of the Alexandrian patriarchs, including Athanasius, who

was infamous for his threats (denied by him) to interfere with grain

shipments.57 Moreover, this Jewish quarter was not far from the Christian

parish church at Baucalis, whose most famous priest was Arius.58 Atha-

nasius’ polemical associations of the Arians with the Jews may have had

additional force within the topography of urban Alexandria.

These considerations suggest that contemporary Jewish Passover prac-

tices may indeed lie behind Athanasius’ anti-Jewish rhetoric in the Festal

52. Haas, Alexandria, 110–11, 120–21.53. Ibid., 119–20, with references on p. 419 n. 65. In general, see Jean Juster, Les

Juifs dans l ’empire romaine: Leur condition juridique, économique et sociale (2 vols.;Paris: Paul Geunther, 1914), 1:385–90, 405.

54. I prefer to phrase it this way rather than, as Tcherikover did, as “Hebraization”and “de-Hellenization,” a characterization nicely critiqued by Haas (Alexandria,120–21).

55. Ibid., 116.

56. See Steven Weitzman, “From Feasts Into Mourning: The Violence of Early Jewish Festivals,” JR 79 (1999): 545–65, at 558–62.

57. Haas, Alexandria, 117–18.58. Ibid., 268–77.




Letters, albeit indirectly. It is possible that the Alexandrian Christians

who resisted Athanasius’ liturgical reforms pointed to the biblically based

practice of their Jewish neighbors. The Festal Letters, then, were not a

“challenge” to a “belligerent” Jewish community; rather, they were partof Athanasius’ effort to standardize Christian practice in a city whose

diversity extended fully into the Christian community. At a time when

Christians were not a commanding majority in the city and were them-

selves divided along multiple lines, Athanasius was trying to make his

episcopal organization dominant in the civic space. He did so by con-

structing and augmenting church buildings, controlling a network of

patronage, and creating a right way to celebrate festivals.59 Both Jews and

Christians in Alexandria were involved in projects of international consoli-

dation and standardization: while Jews were seeking to conform theirliturgical practices to an emerging rabbinical norm, Athanasius was seek-

ing to standardize Christian liturgical practice, sometimes by appealing to

what “the entire inhabited world” was doing. These analogous efforts

intersected at Passover: facing the overlap between Pesach and Pasch,

Athanasius vilified Jewish practice precisely to represent competing Chris-

tian rituals as “ Jewish” and therefore fleshly, local, and heretical.

While I have emphasized the intra-Christian function of these attacks, I

do not discount their divisive interreligious effects. As Jean Juster pointedout in his classic work on the Jews in the Roman Empire, the development

and elaboration of Easter as the Christian “Passover” required the depre-

cation of the Jewish Passover as illegitimate, which could not have failed

to shape negatively the attitudes of ancient Christians toward their Jewish

contemporaries.60 Christian leaders typically justified reform of Easter

practice by appeals to anti-Jewish sentiment.61 Such reform gained further

impetus during the fourth century, thanks to the Constantinian catholi-

cizing program. Thus Constantine himself on the date of Easter:

In the first place it was decreed [at Nicaea] unworthy to observe that mostsacred festival in accordance with the practices of Jews; having sullied theirown hands with a heinous crime, such blood-stained people are as one

59. For a general discussion of this effort, see David Brakke, “Athanasius,” in TheEarly Christian World , ed. Philip Esler (London: Routledge, 2000), 1102–27, at1114–19.

60. Juster, Juifs dans l ’empire romaine, 1:304–15.61. S. G. Wilson, “Passover, Easter, and Anti-Judaism: Melito of Sardis and

Others,” in “To See Ourselves as Others See Us”: Christians, Jews, and “Others” inLate Antiquity, ed. Jacob Neusner and Ernest S. Frerichs, Scholars Press Studies in theHumanities (Chico: Scholars, 1985), 337–55, collects many examples, not justMelito.




might expect mentally blind. It is possible, now that their nation has beenrejected, by a truer system which we have kept from the first day of thePassion to the present, to extend the performing of this observance intofuture periods also. Let there be nothing in common between you and thedetestable mob of Jews!62

Athanasius’ anti-Jewish polemics and the liturgical reform that he de-

manded supported the Constantinian program of the fourth century, the

creation of a uniform catholic Church, without disruptive local practices,

which were characterized as “ Jewish.”

CHRISTIAN “ JEWS”:

RESISTANCE TO SPIRITUALIZING ORTHODOXYAthanasius’ conflict with fellow Christians over Easter observances pro-

vided the crucible for associating Jews with particularity: unlike Catholic

Christians, the Jews were attached to a specific land, city, and date, to

temporal rather than to eternal realities. Christians with non-Athanasian

Easter practices were like the Jews in that they resisted the new universal

spirituality of Athanasian orthodoxy. This characterization could be ab-

stracted from the Passover controversy and “the Jews” made the rhetori-

cal model for Christians who manifested this same resistance in otherways, most notoriously the Arians. This phenomenon is an example of

what Miriam Taylor calls “associative anti-Judaism”: “in associating an

opponent with Jewish faults or characteristics, the authors of the church

symbolically associated a position with the typical traits known from

salavation history as characteristic of that which was archetypically obso-

lete and typically wrong.”63 If Athanasius labeled some Christian Easter

practices as “archetypically obsolete” by labeling them as “ Jewish,” what

did he consider “typically wrong” about Jews, Arians, and Melitians?

Needless to say, the answer to this question will tell us little if anythingabout the actual teachings of or intellectual influences on his opponents;

rather, it reveals “the complex dialectic of differentiation and identity” by

which orthodoxy imagined itself.64

Athanasius joined a long tradition of Christian discourse, rooted in

Paul’s famous discussion of the “spirit” and the “letter” in 2 Corinthians

62. Eusebius, V. Con. 3.18.2 (GCS 7.1:90); tr. Averil Cameron and Stuart G. Hall,Eusebius: Life of Constantine, Clarendon Ancient History Series (Oxford: Clarendon,

1999), 128.63. Taylor, Anti-Judaism and Early Christian Identity, 181.64. The quoted phrase is from Stephen Greenblatt, “Towards a Poetics of Culture,”

in The New Historicism, ed. H. Aram Veeser (New York: Routledge, 1989), 1–14, at 7.




3, that identified the basis of Jewish error as hermeneutical: “By reading

the Law externally, they became once and for all estranged from every-

thing.”65 Christians, he argued, have transcended the particularities of the

biblical story: “We will be liberated from the works of Pharoah and histaskmasters, not with respect to what is written on the narrative level

(HnoYHistoria), for they are no longer present, but with respect to the

works that those things signify (shma¤nein), for through them we have

been taught the truth.”66 The Jews’ alleged failure to move from the literal

reading of the Bible to that which the text signified corresponds to their

failure to enlarge their vision of God’s salvation from their own ethnic

group to all humanity:

All these [examples from the Septuagint] are shadows of the withdrawal“from darkness to his marvelous light” [1 Pet 2.9] and the ascent to the cityin heaven. They are patterns [tÊpoi] of the true joy and the eternal feast.Even the ignorant Jews did not understand these things, and by their failureto recognize the pattern of the heavenly Jerusalem, they led astray theirthoughts and the city, and they stumbled on the stumbling stone, who hasbecome the cornerstone for everyone by binding to one another twopeoples, the Jews and the Greeks, and indeed the entire race of humanity[cf. Ps 117.22; Matt 21.42; Eph 2.11–12]. The ignorant and fleshly Jews donot believe in him even until now; for, “being ignorant of the righteousness

of God, they seek to establish it themselves, for they have not submitted tothe righteousness of God. The end of the Law is Christ for the righteousnessof everyone who hopes in him, the Jews first and the Greeks” [Rom 10.3–4;1.16].67

The ignorance and fleshliness of the Jews are rooted in their failure to

recognize the symbolic nature of their embodied tradition and in their

resistance to the new human unity that includes “everyone.” While the

Jews persist in observing their own ritual, “the whole creation” celebrates

Easter, which Christians observe not “as if we were keeping a feast on

earth, but as if were celebrating in heaven with the angels.”68 Working

65. Ep. fest. (cop.) 24(=2) (CSCO 150:39.18–19). The Jews of Jesus’ day rejectedhim while “they wandered around the Scriptures”: Ep. fest. (syr.) 11.5 (Cureton17*.19).

66. Ep. fest. (cop.) 24(=2) (CSCO 150:39.30–34).67. Ibid. (CSCO 150:38.24–39.3). “The Passover does not belong to the Gentiles

nor to those who are still Jews in the flesh”: Ep. fest. (syr.) 7.3 (Cureton 9*.18–19).68. Ep. fest. (syr.) 6.10, 12 (Cureton 4*.22–23, 5*.26–27). “The Jews do not

realize what has happened to them. They became senseless and so gave away the fruitsof the vineyard that was entrusted to them and chose for themselves the pleasures of earth rather than the call of heaven” (cf. Matt 21.33–41; Phil 3.14): Ep. fest. (cop.) 27(CSCO 150:45.30–46.11).




from the Parable of the Great Supper (Matt 22.1–14/Luke 14.16–24),

Athanasius identifies the Jews as those who refused the dinner invitation

for earthly reasons: “They gave heed to the transitory more than to the

eternal, having offered as excuses pairs of oxen, fields, and a wedding.”69

Their refusal led to a more expansive, universal salvation: “When they

rejected the dinner, the voice of proclamation went forth in every place,

and its word reached the ends of the inhabited world. Then the fullness of

the Gentiles came in so that God’s love for humanity might not extend to

only a single nation.”70 “Feigning compliance with what is written but

not assenting to the spirit,” the Jews “hypocritically made a pretence of

adherence to the plain text and made this the basis of their belief.”71 It

was, Athanasius claimed, a literalist, plain-sense reading of the Bible, one

facet of an excessive attention to earthly and temporal matters, thatprevented Jews from participating in the new spiritual universalism of

orthodox Christianity.

Likewise the Arians: they too perversely clung to the plain sense of

individual biblical passages and resisted conformity to Athanasian ortho-

doxy, revealing themselves thereby to have been “taught” by the Jews.72 It

was not, however, this hermeneutical angle that Athanasius pursued in

one of his earliest constructions of the Jews-“Arians” genealogy in the

winter of 338. Writing after his return from exile in the West and in thewake of yet another council (in Antioch) that had voted to depose him,73

Athanasius devotes most of his Festal Letter to the subject of “af flictions”in the lives of the righteous (10.1–3, 6–8), which are instances of the

Word of God’s various dealings with the diversity of human beings and

their capabilities (10.4). He invokes the example of Jesus, “who was

persecuted by the Pharisees,” but these “Pharisees” become simply “ Jews.”So he writes, “Those Jews who had conspired against the Lord died,

having rejoiced a little in these temporal things, and having fallen away

from those which are eternal. They were in error about this: that theimmortal promise does not apply to temporary pleasure, but to the hope

for those things that are everlasting.”74 The Arians, then, are like the

biblical Jews because, oriented toward “temporary pleasure,” they persecute

69. Ep. fest. (cop.) 27 (CSCO 150:48.11–17).70. Ibid. (CSCO 150:47.14–30). Cf. Merendino, Paschale Sacramentum, 31,

suggesting that Athanasius interprets the parable “in its literal meaning.”71. Ep. fest. (syr.) 19.2 (Cureton 40*.15, 23–25).

72. Ep. fest. (cop.) 37 (?) (CSCO 150:14.24–25).73. Timothy D. Barnes, Athanasius and Constantius: Theology and Politics in the

Constantinian Empire (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1993), 35–45.74. Ep. fest. (syr.) 10.5 (Cureton 47.15–19).




the righteous. Athanasian Christians, in turn, should model themselves

after Christ and persevere in their loyalty to Athanasius despite Arian

persecution.75 Taylor calls this practice “fortifying anti-Judaism,” used

“for purposes of internal fortification, in efforts to strengthen the moralfibre of their congregations through the promotion of Christian virtues,

and through exhortations to steadfastness in Christian practice.”76

Athanasius moves on from this hortatory mode of anti-Judaism into

the more polemical “associative” one when he turns to an explicit attack

on “the Ario-maniacs”—the first time that he uses this memorable epi-

thet—who “have denied his [the Word’s] essential divinity.” The Arian is

an “ungrateful opponent of Christ, entirely wicked, the killer of his Lord,

blind in his soul’s eye, and a Jew in his mind.”77 Here the association is the

denial of Christ’s divinity, a mental defect that is equivalent to beingChrist’s “killer.” Alexander, Athanasius’ predecessor as bishop of Alexan-

dria, had already made this analogy, without the “killer” motif, at the

beginning of the Arian crisis.78 Athanasius more elaborately spun the web

associating Jews, Arians, denying Christ’s divinity, and killing Christ in

his letter for the following year:

We keep the feast then, not considering it according to the deceit of the Jews, nor according to the teaching of the Arians, which takes the Son away

from divinity and reckons him among the creatures, but we look to thereformation that has come from the Lord. For the deceit of the Jews andthe uncontrolled impiety of the Arians cause nothing but reflectivelamentation, for the former at the beginning killed the Lord; but these lattertake away his position of having conquered that death to which the Jewsbrought him, in that they say that he is not the Creator, but a creature [cf.Rom 1.25]. For if he were a creature, he would have been held captive bydeath; but if he was not held captive, according to the Scriptures [cf. Acts2.24], he is not a creature, but the Lord of creatures and the subject of thisimmortal feast.79

75. Cf. David Brakke, Athanasius and Asceticism (1995; reprinted Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1998), 165–66.

76. Taylor, Anti-Judaism and Early Christian Identity, 178.77. Ep. fest. (syr.) 10.9 (Cureton 49.27–50.4, 11–12).78. The Arians “speak against all pious and apostolic opinion in a Jewish fashion”:

their “impious opinion concerning Christ . . . is held by the Jews and Greeks,” whose“approval” the Arians “strive to gain” (Alexander of Alexandria, Ep. Alex. 1 [PG

18:548]).79. Ep. fest. (syr.) 11.13 (Cureton 23*.18–26); cf. Ar. 1.44 (Athanasius Werke, ed.

Martin Tetz, vol. 1, pt. 1, Die dogmatischen Schriften [Berlin: de Gruyter, 1998],1:154).




When the Arians deny Christ’s divinity and make him a creature, they

deny the resurrection and leave Christ dead, which the Jews hoped to

accomplish; hence, the Arians are the contemporary equivalent to Jews.

There is, of course, no evidence that any of Athanasius’ opponents deniedthe resurrection: Athanasius invented this logic in order to persuade his

followers that, in the case of the Arian, being “a Jew in his mind” is the

same as being “the killer of his Lord.”The Judaizing theme runs through Athanasius’ directly anti-Arian writ-

ings, with the hermeneutical charge of literalism emerging at crucial

moments. Of course, Athanasius sees the denial of the Word’s full divinity

as the fundamental point of analogy.80 At other times he compares the

Arians’ behavior to that of biblical Jews, as when the Arians, like the

Corinthian Jews in Acts 18, turn to governmental force when their at-tempts at persuasion fail.81 Many of the references to Jews, however, are

simply examples of name-calling, without any attempt to justify the connec-

tion. For example, the Arians, when their arguments are refuted, “invent

for themselves other Jewish and foolish speculations, and as if truth were

their enemy, they contrive new ideas, so that they demonstrate themselves

to be rather Christ’s opponents in all things.”82 They are “modern Jews.”83

Occasionally Athanasius tries to explain how Arian “speculations” are

“ Jewish.” For example, the Arian objection that the Word’s co-eternitywith the Father would make him not the Father’s Son, but his Brother, is

a “ Jewish pretence” (prÒfasiw ÉIoudaÛkÆ) because “it is not an objection

that comes from persons who are ignorant,” but from “persons who

want, as Solomon said, ‘to be separate’ (xvr¤zesyai) from the truth” (cf.

80. Ar. 1.8 (Werke, 1:117); 3.16 (ed. William Bright, The Orations of St.Athanasius According to the Benedictine Text [Oxford: Clarendon, 1873], 170); Ep.

Serap. 1.21, 28 (PG 26:580, 596). Like most scholars, I accept the authenticity of thethird Oration. As Virginia Burrus has examined in an important paper, in the 19thcentury John Henry Newman seized upon Athanasius’ single reference to Zenobia, “a

Jew,” as Paul of Samosata’s patron to construct a direct Jews-Arians genealogy viaAntioch (“Looking for Jews in All the Wrong Places: From Athanasius’s Alexandria toNewman’s Oxford”). Ironically, Athanasius’ reference to Zenobia constructs acontrast between his Arian opponents and the “ Jewish” queen. Unlike Constantius,who has turned over the church buildings in Alexandria to the Arians, “Zenobia wasa Jew and a patron of Paul of Samosata, but she did not give up the churches to the

Jews for synagogues”; thus, Constantius’ action is “a novel impurity” (H. Ar. 71 [PG25:777]).

81. H. Ar. 66 (PG 25:772).82. Ar. 3.58 (Bright, Orations, 211); cf. ibid., 1.39; 2.1 (Werke, 1:149, 177); 3.8,

67 (Bright, Orations, 161, 221); Ep. Max. 1 (PG 26:1085–88).83. Decr. 27 (PG 25:465); H. Ar. 61 (PG 25:768).




Prov 18.1) even as “they themselves see the truth.”84 Here what is Jewish

about the Arians is a stubborn desire to separate themselves from ortho-

dox faith even when they recognize its truth, reminiscent of the Jewish

resistance to participation in the new universal humanity in Christ.This stubborn desire to separate from the truth manifests itself in a

Jewish style of interpreting the Scriptures. At times the Arian hermeneutic

resembles that of the Sadducees, whose literal and unimaginative reading

of the Scriptures prevented them from admitting that there is a resurrec-

tion of the dead (Mark 12.18–27; Acts 23.8; etc.): “The Arians, turning

toward themselves and thinking like the Sadducees that there is nothing

more than or beyond themselves, received the divinely inspired Scripture

with human thoughts.”85 But more often the Arians are like the Pharisees

in their feigned scriptural diction and literally minded reading and appro-priation of individual scriptural passages or phrases (l°jeiw). Arius’ liter-

ary skills, evident in his Thalia, serve as one inspiration for this analogy:

Indeed, that crafty one [sc. Arius; cf. Gen 3.1] did not escape notice; but,despite constantly twisting himself this way and that, like the serpent, henevertheless fell into the error of the Pharisees. They, wanting to transgress[the Law], pretended to be anxious about the words [=Æmata] of the Law,and wanting to deny the expected and present Lord, pretended to nameGod, and were convicted of blaspheming when they said, “Why do you,being human, make yourself God and say, ‘I and the Father are one’?” [cf. John 10.30–33] So too this counterfeit and Sotadean Arius pretends tospeak about God, introducing the phrases [l°jeiw] of the Scriptures, but isconvicted on all sides as atheistic, denying the Son [cf. 1 John 2.23] andreckoning him among the creatures.86

The presence of “certain phrases [l°jeiw] from the divine Scripture in the

Thalia” should not be taken as evidence against that work’s “blasphe-

mies”; rather, when the Arians “see the Jews of today also reading the

Law and the Prophets, they too will for this reason deny Christ withthem.”87 The Arian mode of scriptural interpretation follows the Jewish

model: Arians repeatedly point to passages in both the Old and New

84. Ar. 1.14 (Werke, 1:124). So too the Arians, when they are refuted, always comeup with new questions: “an imitation, as I have said, of Jewish malevolence, for theytoo, when convicted by the truth and unable to confont it, used evasions, saying,‘What sign do you do that we may see and believe in you?’”: Decr. 1 (PG 25:416,425).

85. Ep. Serap. 2.1 (PG 26:609); cf. Decr. 10 (PG 25:441); Syn. 35 (PG 26:753).

86. Ar. 1.4 (Werke, 1:113). Arius’ twisting of himself “this way and that” (ênv ka‹kãtv) is echoed later when the Arians are said to “bring forward” supportive biblicalpassages “this way and that” (ênv ka‹ kãtv); ibid., 53 (Werke, 1:163).

87. Ibid., 8 (Werke, 1:116).




Testaments that indicate the created status of the Word (Prov 8.22; Acts

2.36; Heb 1.4; 3.1). In so doing, they “deceive the thoughtless by propos-

ing as their pretext the literal words [tå =htã] and by sowing the peculiar

poison of their heresy in place of the true sense [≤ élhyinØ diãnoia].”88

The “true sense” that the Arians’ literalism causes them to miss is these

passages’ reference not to the Word as he is by nature, but to the Word as

incarnate in created flesh. “If,” Athanasius writes, the Arians, “having at

last openly adopted the manner of Caiaphas, have decided to Judaize to

the extent that they do not recognize what is written, that ‘God will truly

dwell upon the earth’ [1 Kgs 8.27], let them not investigate the apostolic

phrases [l°jeiw], for that is not characteristic of Jews.”89 Like the Jews,

the Arians do not recognize that the Old Testament speaks of the incarna-

tion of God, and so they should, like the Jews, give up interpreting theNew Testament, which is about that incarnation. In these passages the

Arians and the Jews are alike in their (genuine or feigned) attention to

individual words, phrases, or passages and their literal meanings, while

ignoring or denying the larger truth to which these point.

This larger truth of Scripture, to which individual passages must be

conformed, Athanasius called the diãnoia of the text or the skopÒw of the

faith, which his modern interpreters have translated as the “mind,” “in-

tention,” or “general drift” of Scripture. It is “the whole narrative of theincarnation of the Word for our salvation.”90 The distinction operative

here is not really between a literal, plain-sense reading and an allegorical,

symbolic one; rather, between a reading that looks at individual words,

phrases, or passages in isolation (l°jeiw, =htã) and one that subordinates

such individual lexical items to the overall message about the Word that

Scripture as a whole seeks to communicate (diãnoia, skopÒw).91 The Jew-

ish-Arian tendency, then, is not merely to stick to the literal sense of

scriptural passages, but to insist on the particular (and so diverse) mean-

ings of such passages and so to neglect the more universal (and so uni-form) meaning of the Bible as a unity.92

88. Ibid., 53 (Werke, 1:163).89. Ibid.90. James D. Ernest, “Athanasius of Alexandria: The Scope of Scripture in

Polemical and Pastoral Context,” VC 47 (1993): 341–62, at 347.91. Ibid.; T. E. Pollard, “The Exegesis of Scripture in the Arian Controversy,”

Bulletin of the John Rylands Library 41 (1958–59): 414–29, esp. 422–23; Frances M.Young, Biblical Exegesis and the Formation of Christian Culture (Cambridge:

Cambridge University Press, 1997), 29–45.92. How Alexandrian (and other) Christians who opposed Athanasius’ Nicene

christology themselves actually construed scripture, canon, and their interpretation isa different matter. Doubtless some agreed with Athanasius that the Bible forms a




Athanasius repeatedly pointed to this failure to recognize the (i.e., his)

“scope” of Scripture as the source of Arian error. The Arians, for ex-

ample, “take offense” at passages that show Jesus weeping and being

troubled because they “have not recognized the ecclesiastical scope as thefaith’s anchor.”93 In this respect, the Jews and the Arians are, so to speak,

mirror images of one another: passages that show Jesus’ humanity lead

the Jews to ask, “How, being human, can he be God?”; the Arians, “How,

being true God from God, can he have become human?”94 The Arians are

“disguising Judaism with the name of Christianity.”95 The Jewish-Arian

hermeneutic does not recognize that Scripture as a whole communicates

the “double” truth that the Word of God is fully divine and became

incarnate as a human being, and so fails to subordinate particular pas-

sages to this overall message.96 When the Jews read that the human Jesus“wept” (John 11.35) or the Arians that God’s Wisdom was “created”

unity with an overall “scope,” just a scope that was not Athanasius’. Alternatively,some may have followed differing scriptural practices, which may have construedinterpretive authority differently. See David Brakke, “Canon Formation and SocialConflict in Fourth-Century Egypt: Athanasius of Alexandria’s Thirty-Ninth Festal Letter,” HTR 87 (1994): 395–419.

93. Ar. 3.58 (Bright, Orations, 211).94. Ibid., 27 (Bright, Orations, 182).95. “Inasmuch as such insanity is Judaic, and Judaic in coming from the traitor

Judas, let them openly confess themselves to be disciples of Caiaphas and Herod andstop disguising Judaism with the name of Christianity. Let them deny absolutely, aswe have said above, the Savior’s coming in the flesh, for this opinion is suited to theirheresy. Or if they are afraid to Judaize openly and to get circumcised out of obsequiousness to Constantius and because of [possible offense to] the persons whomthey have deceived, let them not say what belongs to the Jews. For it is only right thatif they deny the names [of Jews], they should turn away from their opinion as well.

“For we are Christians, o Arians: it is we who are Christians! It belongs to us to

understand rightly the Gospels concerning the Savior and neither to stone him with Jews, should we hear of his divinity and eternity, nor to take offense with you at suchhumble words as he may speak as a human being for our sake. If, then, you too wantto become Christians, put aside Arius’ madness, and with the discourses of pietycleanse your hearing, which has been defiled by blasphemous words. Know that whenyou cease being Arians, you will cease from the malignancy of today’s Jews as well”(ibid., 28 [Bright, Orations, 182–83]).

96. “That they [sc. the Arians] have been convicted of understanding badly whatliteral words [=htã] they allege as pretext, it should be possible to learn from what hasbeen briefly said above. That they are revealed to have an unsound understanding[diãnoia] in those passages that they now allege from the Gospels, it is easy to see,

especially if we now take the scope [skopÒw] of the faith that belongs to us Christiansand, using it like a canon [kan≈ n], ‘we devote ourselves,’ as the Apostle said, ‘to thereading of the divinely inspired Scripture’ [cf. 1 Tim 4.13; 2 Tim 3.16]. For theenemies of Christ, because they are ignorant of this [scope], ‘have wandered astray




(Prov 8.22), they cling to the meaning that these passages have in isola-

tion, rather than referring them to the wider “scope.” The common

element that ties this characterization of Arianism as Judaism to the anti-

Jewish polemic of the Festal Letters is resistance to catholic truth, anadherence to literalizing particularity instead of spiritualizing universal-

ity. The Arians’ biblical intepretation represents “their own private un-

derstanding” (tÚn ‡dion noËn) in opposition to “orthodox sense” (ÙryÆdiãnoia).97

Athanasius’ associations of the Melitians with the Jews are few and

tend to cluster in his Festal Letters from the 360s and 370s, a period in

which the Melitians, although crippled by the lack of a real ecclesiastical

structure, enjoyed some resurgence of popularity in Upper Egypt.98 Al-

though he increasingly called them “heretics,” Athanasius in generalunderstood that the Melitians, as “schismatics,” were not precisely of the

same ilk as the Arians.99 Their connection with the Jews, then, was not

doctrinal or hermeneutical, as much as social, the perverse intention to be

“separate.” We have seen this charge leveled at the Arians,100 but it

usually appears to Athanasius’ mind to be a fault distinct from heretical

error. Consider this discussion of the consequences of Jewish rejection of

Jesus:

The entire service of the Law has been abolished from them [the Jews], andsince then and forever they remain without the feast. They do not observethe Passover, for how can they? They have no place, but they wandereverywhere. And they eat unleavened bread contrary to the Law, since theyare unable first to sacrifice the lamb, as they were commanded to do whenthey are going to eat unleavened bread. But everywhere they transgress theLaw, and the judgments of God require that they keep days of grief insteadof gladness. Now the cause of this to them was the killing of the Lord and

from the path of truth’ [Wisd 5.6] and ‘have stumbled on the stumbling stone’ [Rom9.32], thinking ‘contrary to what should be thought’ [Rom 12.3].

“Now the scope and character of the holy Scripture, as we have said many times,is that in it the promise concerning the Savior is double [dipl ∞]: that he was alwaysGod and Son, being the Father’s Word, Radiance, and Wisdom; and that later on, forour sake, he took flesh from a virgin, Mary the Mother of God, and became human.And this [scope] is to be found indicated throughout the entire divinely inspiredScripture, as the Lord himself said: ‘Search the Scriptures, for it is they that testifyconcerning me’ [John 5.29]” (ibid., 28–29 [Bright, Orations, 183–84]).

97. Ibid., 1.37 (Werke, 1:146–47); cf. ibid., 1.52–53; 2.1; 3.10; Ernest, “Athanasius

of Alexandria,” 344.98. Camplani, Lettere festali, 262–82.99. Ibid., 266–68.100. Ar. 1.14 (Werke, 1:124), quoted above.




the lack of reverence toward the Only Begotten. At this time the completelywicked heretics and ignorant schismatics suffer the same thing: the formerin that they kill the Word, the latter in that they rend the coat [cf. Mark15.24 par.]. They too remain expelled from the feast because they livewithout piety and knowledge, and emulate the conduct shown in the matterof Barabbas the robber, whom the Jews desired instead of the Savior.Therefore the Lord cursed them under the sign of the fig tree.101

Here “rending the coat,” that is, dividing the Church, is distinguished

from “killing the Word,” that is, holding heretical christological doc-

trines, but both place their practitioners outside the Passover, with the

Jews, whose position of exclusion is indicated by their “wandering every-

where” with no “place.” Similarly, when Athanasius criticized the Melitians

for “carrying out” martyr bodies away from catholic churches in order to“lead astray” ordinary Christians, he contrasted the unity of orthodoxy

with the fragmentation of heresy:

Therefore, neither the Jews nor the Arians nor the Melitians nor the hereticsshare in the festival . . . just as the Apostle wrote: “Christ our Passover hasbeen sacrificed for us” [1 Cor 5.7]. He did not say: “Our portion is dividedup for small groups of people, for it is not fitting for us to proclaim it.”Rather, it belongs to everyone to say like the Apostle, “Nothing willseparate us from the love of Christ” [Rom 8.39]. God testifies to these

things to everyone: “You are with me always” [Luke 15.31]. Moreover, hepromises them all together, saying: “You are the ones who have enduredwith me in my trials. I myself establish for you, as my Father established forme, a kingdom, so that you will eat and drink with me at my table in mykingdom” [Luke 22.28–30].102

The wandering away from the places of the catholic Church exemplified

in the Melitian use of martyr bodies resembles the Jews’ “wandering

everywhere” with no “place.” Intentional separation (“small groups”)

from the worldwide unity of the Church (“everyone”) is the link between

the Jews and the Melitians.

Most likely in the winter of 364, as he prepared to return to Alexandria

openly after yet another exile (this one under Julian), Athanasius once

again reflected on his af flictions and turned to Christ as the model for

endurance of persecution.103 The bishop leaves the analogy between Christ

101. Ep. fest. (syr.) 6.6 (Cureton 44.17–45.1).102. Ep. fest. (cop.) 41 (ed. Coquin, IFAO Copte 25, f. 9v, b.23-f. 10r, b.5). See

David Brakke, “‘Outside the Places, Within the Truth’: Athanasius of Alexandria andthe Localization of the Holy,” in Pilgrimage and Holy Space in Late Antique Egypt ,ed. David Frankfurter (Leiden: Brill, 1998), 445–81, at 466–67.

103. Date: Camplani, Lettere festali, 237–38.




and himself implicit (at least in the surviving fragment), but not so the

analogy between Christ’s persecutors and his own:

When he [Jesus] had accepted suffering on our behalf, he sat at the well of Samaria [John 4], and he was pursued as he went from place to place.Taking up our weakness, he suffered on our account, offering his back tolashes and his cheeks to slaps. He did not turn his face away from theshame of spittings [cf. Isa 50.6]. Finally, the Jews killed him on the cross. Itwas they who taught the Arians, for the latter say the very same words. The Jews passing by him mocked him, saying, “You who would destroy theTemple and build it in three days, save yourself! If you are the Son of God,come down from the cross!” And likewise the chief priests and the elderstoo mocked him, saying, “He saved others. Is he unable to save himself? Let

the King of Israel come down now from the cross, and we will believe inhim. If he trusted in God, let God now save him if he is willing, for he said,‘I am the Son of God’” [Matt 27.40–43]. The Arians and their parasites theMelitians envied these evils, for they procured for themselves the ignoranceof the Jews. For when they meet their brothers [viz., Athanasian Christians],they say, “If you believe rightly, why are you persecuted, and why is theChurch so often disturbed? We, however, are at rest and think as we wantto think, and have become rich without anyone opposing us.”104

Athanasius, so often “pursued as he went from place to place,” con-

structed a genealogy of opposition to Christ (and thus to himself): the Jews “taught” the Arians, whose “parasites” were the Melitians.105 The

Jews taught the Arians to deny the Word’s divinity through particulariz-

ing exegesis; the Melitians shared with both of them intentional separa-

tion from the truth.

104. Ep. fest. (cop.) 37 (?) (CSCO 150:14.18–15.10).105. An obvious flaw in this genealogy would appear to be the placement of the

Melitians as chronologically subsequent to the Arians, when in fact the Melitianschism preceded the Arian controversy by more than a decade (so too in Ep. fest.[cop.] 41 [Brakke, “Outside the Places, Within the Truth,” 475]). Probably Athanasiussaw the Melitians as having transformed from merely schismatics to full-blownheretics under Arian influence, and the Melitians remained a problem in Egypt longerthan the Arians did. It is, of course, unlikely that Jews literally “taught” Arians(although it made sense to Athanasius to imagine and to try to persuade his readersthat they did), but scholars have taken seriously the more general question of possible

Jewish or Jewish-Christian influence on Arian thought: see Rudolf Lorenz, Arius judaizans? Untersuchungen zur dogmengeschichtlichen Einordnung des Arius, For-schungen zur Kirchen- und Dogmengeschichte 31 (Göttingen: Vandenhoeck &Ruprecht, 1980).




THE UNIVERSALITY OF THE FLESH

Athanasius’ anti-Judaism put a distinctly fourth-century spin on tradi-

tional Christian rhetoric. In the post-Constantinian era, Jews and Chris-

tians pursued parallel projects of international standardization, in which

competing rhetorics of legitimacy invoked the “biblical” in debates over

christology, the sacred character of the land of Palestine, and ritual prac-

tices. Already in the second and third centuries “ Jewish” and “Christian”leaders, whether teachers or bishops, used such rhetorics to differentiate

their still entangled communities and to legitimate emerging forms of

authority. The fourth century added to these institutional goals the claim

that all people across the Empire ought to be one: “small groups” violated

the harmonious universality shared by “everyone.” In his own contribu-tion to this discourse, Athanasius created the Judaism that he needed, a

static and uniform entity with these characteristics: first, a devotion to

earthly (material, temporal, local) things rather than to heavenly (imma-

terial, eternal, universal) things; second, a stubborn desire to be separate,

both socially and theologically; finally, particularizing exegesis as a pecu-

liar manifestation of these traits in its attention to the literal and local at

the expense of the figurative and global. A chain of binary oppositions

underlies this constructed Judaism:

Flesh Spirit

Jews ChristiansDevotion to earthly things Devotion to heavenly thingsDiverse local practices Single universal practiceOne nation All peoplesIndividual passages of Scripture Overall sense of ScriptureSeparated in small groups All togetherHeretics (Christians with different Orthodox

Easter practices, Arians, Melitians)

Athanasius constructed this contrast between Jewish flesh and Chris-

tian spirit in order to mark as clearly different from Christian orthodoxy

others, whether Jews or “heretics,” that were disturbingly both similar

and different to it. In so doing he had to emphasize or suppress selective

aspects of both of these emerging religions. For example, Athanasius

attributed to all Jews the hopes of some for a return to Jerusalem and the

reestablishment of a Jewish state, doubtless held at varying levels of

intensity, and made them a defining feature of a homogenous Judaism; hedenigrated such hopes as merely political and earthly, “fleshly” not “spiri-

tual,” denying their genuinely religious nature and biblical basis. Mean-




while, he suppressed and left unsaid the rapidly growing devotion of

some Christians to those same particular places (“holy places” and “life-

giving places,” he says elsewhere),106 doubtless held at varying levels of

intensity, so that Christian hopes could appear only heavenly and “spiri-tual.” To construct and universalize the orthodox Christianity that he

wanted, Athanasius needed to construct a certain image of Judaism (and

Arianism and Melitianism). This is not necessarily a peculiarly Christian

procedure: we have seen evidence suggesting that Alexandrian Jews of

Athanasius’ day were involved in their own project of consolidation and

universalizing, and this observation invites analysis of how rabbinic au-

thors constructed “the nations” that they needed.107

Athanasius’ rhetorical construction of the Jews served the fourth-cen-

tury project of universalizing one particular mode of Christian thoughtand practice and presenting it as the “scope” of Christian faith, to which

competing interpretations were to be subordinated. To be “ Jewish” or

“fleshly” was to resist this program of unity and hierarchically ordered

difference, whether as Jew or Christian dissenter.108 But, as I have said,

this rhetoric had to suppress certain “fleshly” characteristics of Christian

practice, and flesh itself turned out to be stubbornly persistent, both in the

face of, and in the heart of, spiritualizing orthodoxy. For at the center of

Athanasian unity was the flesh of a particular body, that of the incarnateChrist, who “was clothed in the flesh”: “we all were liberated according

to the kinship of the flesh and for the future were joined, even we, to the

Word.”109 The new humanity from which the “fleshly” Jews were sepa-

rated found its solidarity in Christ’s universal flesh, where the flesh vs.

106. Ep. virg. 2.5 (Brakke, Athanasius, 294).107. “It should also be noted that the ‘nations’ in rabbinic writings do not

represent an observable reality ‘out there’, but rather a logical opposite to the identityof Israel, thus defined in rabbinic writings in purely self-referential terms” (SachaStern, Jewish Identity in Early Rabbinic Writings, Arbeiten zur Geschichte desantiken Judentums und des Urchristentums 23 [Leiden: Brill, 1994], 137).

108. “The typical cultural strategy of dominant actors and institutions is not somuch to establish uniformity as it is to organize difference. They are constantlyengaged in efforts not only to normalize or homogenize but also to hierarchize,encapsulate, exclude, criminalize, hegemonize, or marginalize practices and popula-tions that diverge from the sanctioned ideal. By such means, authoritative actorsattempt, with varying degrees of success, to impose a certain coherence onto the fieldof cultural practice” (William H. Sewell, Jr., “The Concept(s) of Culture,” in Beyond

the Cultural Turn: New Directions in the Study of Society and Culture, ed. Victoria E.Bonnell and Lynn Hunt, Studies on the History of Society and Culture 34 [Berkeley:University of California Press, 1999], 35–61, at 56).

109. Ar. 2.69 (Werke, 1:246).




spirit contrast collapses. The paradoxical combination of salvific univer-

sality and fleshly particularity has troubled Athanasius’ later interpreters,

who have resolved the tension in one direction or the other.110 If Athanasius

truly sought to transcend the flesh in his thought (which I doubt), he wasnot successful.

More mundane flesh persists in Christian discourse in another way.

Just as later Christians (usually Protestants) have turned Paul’s criticisms

of circumcision and Torah observance by Gentile believers into criticisms

of Christian “ritualism and legalism” (i.e., Roman Catholicism), so mod-

ern Athanasian scholars have turned against each other Athanasius’ jux-

taposition of Christian spirituality and Jewish particularity, replicating

Athanasius’ use of it against the Arians and Melitians. In 1965, the

Catholic scholar Pius Merendino emphasized the cultic aspects of Atha-nasius’ Festal Letters, which he saw as filled with rich typological inter-

pretation of the sacraments of baptism and the Eucharist. In his view, not

the Christian messsage in general, but “the Christian Passover ritual is the

true exegesis of the Jewish Passover and of the entire Old Testament” in

Athanasius’ thought.111 Twenty years later, Protestant Rudolf Lorenz la-

mented that in Merendino’s account “the cult of the catholic Church has

pushed aside the saving act of Christ. This stands in opposition not only

to the rediscovery of the Gospel made by Martin Luther, but also toAthanasius himself.” Citing passages that speak of the “spiritual” charac-

ter of the Christian Pasch (while ignoring their anti-Jewish formulation,

e.g., Ep. fest. [syr.] 5.4), Lorenz concludes that “from the Festal Letters of

Athanasius it is not the incense cloud of the cultic mystery that smothers

us . . . rather there wafts the sober breath of the orthodox speech of

Christ.”112 Athanasian rhetoric that was developed to contrast Christian

110. “Athanasius’s language often suggests that he conceived of human nature,after the manner of Platonic realism, as a concrete idea or universal in which allindividual men participate. From this point of view, when the Word assumed it andsuffused it with his divinity, the divinizing force would be communicated to allmankind, and the incarnation would in effect be the redemption” (J. N. D. Kelly,Early Christian Doctrines, rev. ed. [San Francisco: Harper & Row, 1978], 378,emphasis added). “Yet the assertion that the Logos assumed tÚ ≤m°teron s«ma, sounderstood, excludes Kelly’s interpretation after the manner of Platonic realism. ForChrist’s body, being one with the bodies of every other human being, is, like those of all others, a particular body which distinguishes each from the other” (Alvyn

Pettersen, Athanasius and the Human Body [Bristol: Bristol Press, 1990], 36,emphasis original).111. Merendino, Paschale Sacramentum, 23.112. Lorenz, Zehnte Osterfestbrief , 88–89.




and Jewish rituals serves here to contrast the sensual irrationality of

Catholic ritual and the intellectual rationality of Protestant preaching. It

appears that, among warring Christians, defining oneself as more spiri-

tual than the fleshly other is nothing if not universal.

David Brakke is Associate Professor of Religious Studies at

Indiana University

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Athanasius Jews