The Jewish Gospels Read Online Free PDF

ritual as well, although it is unclear from Jerome’s statement precisely what it was. Jerome denied them their claim of being Christian, because they claimed to be Jews; he denied them their claim to be Jews, because they claimed to be Christians. And he certainly denied them the possibility of being both, because that was an impossibility in Jerome’s worldview. For him (and for us as well), these were mutually exclusive possibilities. However, for these Jews who confessed the Nicene Creed, there was no contradiction. Just as today there are Jews who are Hassidic—some of whom believe that the Messiah has come, died, and will be resurrected—and Jews who reject the Hassidic movement entirely but all are considered Jews, so in antiquity there were Jews who were believers in Christ and Jews who weren’t, but all were Jews. To use another comparison that is evocative if not entirely exact, it is as if non-Christian Jews and Christian Jews were more like Catholics and Protestants today than like Jews and Christians today—parts of one religious grouping, not always living in harmony or recognizing each other’s legitimacy but still in a very important sense apprehensible as one entity.
    In order to protect the orthodox notion that there is an absolute distinction between Jews and Christians,Jerome had to “invent” a third category, neither Christians nor Jews. Jerome, backed up by the fiats of Emperor Constantine’s Council of Nicaea and the law of the Roman Empire, the code of the Emperor Theodosius, rather imperiously declared that some folks were simply not Christians; even more surprisingly, he claimed he could decide that they were not Jews either, because they didn’t fit his definition of Jews. No one before Constantine had had the power to declare some folks not Christians or not Jews.
    Jerome tells us something about the synagogue leadership here as well: they also condemned these people as not Jews, thus applying a similar type of checklist to read people out of a group.
    But there’s more yet. Jerome gives fascinating names to this sect of not-Jews, not-Christians. He calls them, as we’ve seen, minei and Nazarenes. These names, mysterious as they seem at first, are really not mysteries at all. They refer to two terms used in the rabbinic prayer against the sectarians, which is, in fact, first firmly attested in Jerome’s fifth century (although earlier forms of it are known from the third century). In this prayer, repeated in the synagogues, Jews used to say: “And to the minim and to the Notzrim , let there be no hope.”
    The term minim means, literally, “kinds.” Jews who don’t belong to the group that the Rabbis wish to define as kosher are named by them as “kinds” of Jews, notentirely mainstream. This included Jews who are not quite halakhically/theologically correct, such as followers of Jesus, but still Jews. The second term, Notzrim (Latinized as Nazarenes ), is much more specific, referring as it does to Nazareth and thus explicitly to Christians. This is plausibly the very prayer to which Jerome is referring in his letter, since his alleged condemnation by the Pharisees comprises precisely these two names for the group. The word minim seems just to mean sectarians in a general sense, including such as these who follow the Jewish law but confess the Nicene Creed. The word Notzrim (Nazarenes) would be a specific reference to that Christian character of these Jews. But according to Jerome’s report, even this is not a Jewish condemnation of Christians in general but rather applies to those poor folks who couldn’t tell the difference properly and thought that they were both. 7 The total delegitimation that Jerome seeks to accomplish of the both-Jews-and-Christians in his letter to Augustine by declaring them “nothing,” the Rabbis (whom he calls anachronistically “Pharisees”) seek to accomplish