Saint Asterius of Amasea on the Jews

Saint Asterius of Amasea is the name of a little known, but important fourth/fifth century Christian bishop whose work has been cited from the Second Council of Nicaea onwards on the subject of religious icons and ecclesiastical artwork. He is one of several select primary sources that are both a treasure trove of important information for scholars (especially around the religious practices of polytheists in the later years of the Roman Empire) and are yet a literary delight to the modern reader.

Saint Asterius' ability to stay interesting and to make informative if rhetorical points very well largely stem from his upbringing and education which schooled him in rhetoric and its use in the law courts of the Roman Empire. Saint Asterius puts this to good use and utilizes all the tools of his trade in the sixteen orations of his that have come down to us, but one in particular is of interest to us as it mentions Saint Asterius' views on the subject of the jews.

This oration - usually numbered as five - is on the somewhat odd (as far as mentioning jews goes) subject of divorce and is one of six of Saint Asterius' sermons that have been translated into English. (1) I have decided to take the somewhat elderly translation of the fifth sermon from Anderson and Goodspeed's edition of 1904 due to the sheer lack of other English language translations. (2)

Now Saint Asterius' discussion of the jews in his fifth oration is as follows:

'And I have fixed my attention on the disputatious and tempting Pharisees; and I have pitied them exceedingly for the depravity of their dispositions, inasmuch as they sought to outwit even the Fountain of wisdom by their questions and failed in their attempt; the divinity of the Only-begotten son ever turning their questions against themselves. It was of them, as it seems to me, that Isaiah prophesied, when he said, "I am the Lord that turns wise men backward, and makes their knowledge foolish; that confirms the word of his servant." And again David says, "They flatter with their tongue; Hold them guilty, O God; let them fall by their own counsels.” But thanks be to them, hostile though they were, that they moved Wisdom to answer, in order that he might leave behind in writing for us, his servants, instruction for our profit. For, behold, marriage, the chief affair of human life, is regulated by him, and the limits of this union and the conditions of its dissolution are exactly determined. Let each one earnestly attend to the two ordinances of marriage, in order that women may be instructed as to their duties and men in the duties which belong to them.

"Whether it is lawful for a man to put away his wife for every reason?" This, then, is the problem of the Jews. I see the aim of their asking this question in the presence of the others. For since women are more ready to believe than men and are more susceptible to the magnificence of miracles, and inclined to the acceptance and belief of the divinity of Christ, (thus even behind the murderers who were dragging the Lord to the cross, was the multitude of women who bewailed his sufferings, and, following the Saviour, piteously lamented him) in order that they might lead him to offend and alienate all women, the Jews, by their crafty question, laid a trap and snare for him. But the Lord, through the power of his divinity, seeing what villainy they were devising, defeating their treachery, and, at the same time, laying down beneficent rules of life, makes reply, pleading the cause of women, and sending away empty those hungry wolves of Pharisees who in vain had snapped at him with their questions. "The creation itself," says he, "shows its aim to be union, not separation." The Creator was the first bestower of the bride in marriage, since he joined the first human beings in the marriage bond, giving to those who should come after, the inflexible ordinance of the conjugal life, which must be recognized as the law of God; and they who are thus associated with one another are no longer two, but one flesh, so that "What God has joined together, let not man put asunder."

These things were spoken to the Pharisees; but do you hear them now, you who do such things as these: you who change your wives as readily as your garments; who build bridal chambers as often and as easily as you build booths for feasts; who marry money, and deal in women; who if provoked a little immediately write a bill of divorce; you who leave many widows while you are yet alive; believe me, marriage is terminated only by death or adultery. For it is not as in the case of mistresses, a companionship for a few days only, nor a mere quest for pleasure, but like most other things is subject to rule and regulation.' (3)

The first thing we should note in the above is what Saint Asterius says first in that he has had his 'attention [brought to] the disputatious and tempting Pharisees' or put another way: he is talking about the jews who in Christian writing are often referred to as the descendants of Pharisee opponents of Jesus.

Saint Asterius' reference to the jews being 'disputatious' is interesting to us particularly because the jewish religion and culture have long been strongly oral traditions and the halakhic decisions of the jewish religious teachers ('Rabbis' and in this particular case 'Sages') that formed the Mishnah and Gemara (i.e., the Talmuds) were only written down by necessity due to the increasing Roman use of death squads to hunt down the jewish religious teachers who were inciting rebellion and expounding the belief that it was a divine directive that the jews attempt to conduct world conquest.

A central feature of this oral culture has been the religious disputation between different jewish religious teachers and this in turn gave rise to the massive literature of rabbinical responsa on every point and sub-point that can be drawn out of the Torah. This is tradition of a disputatious nature that Saint Asterius is referencing and his point in doing is fairly obvious in that he is referring to the jewish religious teachers arguing - as they frequently do in both the Mishnah and Gemara - (4) for the sake of argument (i.e., for egoistic reasons to try and find fault with each other).

This disputatious nature also leads to the other descriptive characteristic that Saint Asterius ascribes to the jews in that he suggests that they are 'tempters'. If we think about this for a moment then it becomes obvious from whence this derives in so far as if one is in an argument - or a disputation - then it is one of the oldest tricks in the debaters play book to try and lure your opponent into an unorthodox position that you feel you have strong case to disprove if they can be lured to defend that position.

Saint Asterius is essentially saying that the jews frequently - then as now - try to lure their opponents onto intellectual ground they feel they can attack them unreservedly on without their opponent being able to put much of a defence. To simplify this yet further it is the same tactic that jewish debaters today use in trying to draw critics of Israel into making comments about the jews themselves so the jews in turn can call them anti-Semitic, which in turn forces most detractors of Israel into a proverbial defensive intellectual tailspin to try and rebut that charge rather than focusing on the question at hand (i.e., Israel).

Saint Asterius then uses the example of the jews who tried to beguile Jesus into an unorthodox position on the subject of divorce to bring out the fact that the jews were not any more the divine representatives of the all-powerful creator of the universe than the ass whose mouth said god allegedly spoke to his creation out of was.

In fact, Saint Asterius in doing so points out that the jews are the very opposite of the 'chosen people' in that they sought to argue with Jesus for the sake of it, which if they were indeed the 'chosen people' who were uniquely close to the all-powerful creator of the universe then they would not have done. The Saint also briefly alludes to the fact that the jews are doubly guilty in his view in so far as they not only sought to out-argue the Messiah, but then - when they in Saint Asterius' view had their arguments destroyed - promptly had said Messiah crucified by the Romans so they could save face.

Further we should notice that in Saint Asterius' last paragraph he states that:

'These things were spoken to the Pharisees; but do you hear them now, you who do such things as these: you who change your wives as readily as your garments; who build bridal chambers as often and as easily as you build booths for feasts; who marry money, and deal in women; who if provoked a little immediately write a bill of divorce; you who leave many widows while you are yet alive; believe me, marriage is terminated only by death or adultery.' (5)

This - in relation to the permanent nature of the marital union - can be taken to attack two different targets at once in that Saint Asterius is attacking the relaxed polytheist attitude to marriage and divorce (which fits with his anti-pagan themes such as those found in Sermon 4 which are aimed at attacking the Syrian pagan neo-Platonist philosopher Libanius) as well as that the Pharisees (i.e., the jews) are not obeying their own injunction about divorce in so far as they taken a relaxed attitude to divorce (which they still do this day in the jewish divorce custom of the Bet [which is profoundly hostile to women as the husband has to agree while the wife does not in most computations of halakhah]).

We should note that this double point interpretation also fits most admirably with Asterius' attitude that the jews are inordinately disputatious but also disputatious without any purpose as while they would dispute with Jesus on the matter of divorce: they have no kept to this injunction themselves (i.e., they are hypocrites).

This then begs the question of what is driving the jews to behave so contrarily and it is a question that is easy to answer if we but consider that to Saint Asterius the acts of the jews are not those of a people who have been 'chosen' by god, but rather a people who have themselves chosen to act like they are gods.

This assumption of individual near-personal divinity - which does after lie at the heart of much of Judaism - jewish culture and jewish intellectual productions is what causes the jews to try and intellectually execute their Messiah with a thousand pointless questions as well as what causes the jews to then have him physically executed when a thousand pointless question doesn't trip him up and then when this fails again they persecute Jesus' followers with a thousand libellous accusations.

In essence Saint Asterius is placing the jews as being the earthly representatives of the adversary (i.e., the devil) who will stop at nothing in their opposition and persecution of Christians. As such then we can see in Saint Asterius' a prefiguration of Luther's retort that the jews were the biological children of the devil who generally refused to accept Jesus and warred on his followers whenever they found them.

References

(1) The original text has been ably edited and published with annotations and commentary in Cornelius Datema (Ed.), 1970, 'Asterius of Amasea: Homilies I-XIV', 1^st Edition, E. J. Brill: Leiden.

(2) Galusha Anderson, Edgar Johnson Goodspeed (Eds and Trans.), 1904, 'Ancient Sermons for Modern Times', 1^st Edition, Pilgrim Press: New York

(3) Ibid., pp. 134-138

(4) A favourite example is the rabbinic debate in the Talmuds about what to consider the act of a man falling off a ladder and falling in such a way as to accidentally impregnate a passing jewish woman as well as what the offspring of such a union should be considered as in the jewish caste system. The example is obviously ludicrous, but from it we can see the disputatious nature of jewish religious teachers.

(5) Anderson, Goodspeed, Op. Cit., p. 138