The subtitle of Paula Frederiksen's recent book Augustine and the Jews (NY: Doubleday 2008) caught my eye before anything else: "A Christian Defense of Jews and Judaism." I had just finished reading Barry Horner's Future Israel: Why Christian Anti-Judaism Must Be Challenged (reviewed in two recent blogs), which traces Christian anti-Judaism back to the great church father, who wrote in the fourth and fifth centuries. After all, as both Horner and Frederiksen make clear, it was Augustine who established, if not originated, the idea of Israel as a witness people living in continual exile throughout history as a testimony to the truth of God's word, which had threatened this very exile as a consequence of disobedience. Israel's exile demonstrated, throughout the Roman world of Augustine's day, the consequences of rejecting Messiah, even as Scripture foretold. Therefore, ironically, as Frederiksen writes, "Augustine insisted that Jews were not a challenge to Christianity but a witness to it. In their allegiance to their ancestral practices, he asserted, the Jews unknowingly confirmed the church's claim to their scriptures" (p. 351).

Augustine grounded this understanding of Israel as a witness people in what Horner calls his "famous, yet obviously mistaken, interpretation of Ps 59:12 (59:11 in Christian Bibles), ‘Do not kill them [the Jews]; otherwise, my people will forget. / By Your power, make them homeless wanderers'" (Future Israel, p. 3). This interpretation eventually led the church to ensure that the Jewish people were not destroyed, but also that they did not prosper or increase. Frederiksen, however, doubts that Augustine himself would have intended such an application of his words, despite the use made of them in the medieval and modern periods. Just as the rhetoric of some passages of the Gospels, particularly in John, has been misapplied to fuel anti-Semitic attitudes and actions in the Christian world, which John himself, and surely Yeshua, would never have intended, so Augustine's rhetoric fueled the idea that Jews should "survive but not thrive" in the Christian world (Horner, p. 4, citing Carroll, Constantine's Sword).

Frederiksen argues that we must understand Augustine's use of rhetoric if we are to properly assess his interpretation of Psalm 59:12. Significantly, Augustine himself interpreted the phrase, "Do not kill them," to mean "Do not cause, or even encourage, them to be separated from their laws and traditions [from the whole body of texts termed "Torah" in Jewish thinking], for that would kill them as a people." Jewish survival was not in question in Augustine's day; Jews were citizens of the Roman Empire, protected by its laws, even though these were administered in many cases by the church. Thus, Frederiksen describes Augustine's support of Licinius, a Jewish landholder, in his grievance against a bishop named Victor (pp. 312ff.), and Augustine's apparent refusal to support the coercive tactics of another bishop, Severus, against the Jews of Minorca (pp. 357ff.). In short, there is no evidence that Augustine had a problem with the relative prosperity and security that Jews still enjoyed in the recently Christianized Roman Empire of his day.

So, who is right? Is Augustine a defender of Jews and Judaism as Frederiksen writes, or one whose "teaching concerning the future of the Jews . . . both saved them from total decimation and preserved them for intentional humiliation," as Horner writes (p. 3)? The answer depends upon perspective. Frederiksen describes the historical Augustine. As a historian, she is aware of the anti-Jewish (in the sense of invalidating Jewish religious thought and practice) attitudes of Hellenistic thinkers of the late Roman period. Their anti-Jewishness, however, did not generally translate into practice, but was a rhetorical position that defended "spiritual" Christianity or Neoplatonism by contrasting it with "fleshly" Judaism. The Jews followed their Scriptures literally, refraining from work one day a week, practicing circumcision upon their infant boys, avoiding various foods, and so on. The Hellenistic perspective-whether Christian or pagan-saw such practices as meaningless in themselves, as having value only as symbols of spiritual truth. The Jews' literal application only revealed their unspiritual perspective.

Augustine in this context is a defender of Jews and Judaism. "Against the grain of late Roman Neoplatonic philosophy, he emphasized the value, even the necessity, of seeing history as vital to revelation and of seeing flesh as vital to spirit. . . .  Praxis, the ‘traditions of the fathers' as Paul calls it (Galatians 1:14), is where Judaism is at its most emphatically, distinctly, carnally, ethnically Jewish. Without this, said Augustine, you cannot have Christianity; because without this you cannot have the incarnate Christ. . . . Christ is God at his most emphatically, distinctly, carnally, ethnically Jewish" (p. 317; emphasis original). In other words, Judaism in its distinctiveness prepares the way for the distinctive historical event of the incarnation, in which God comes as a Jew among the Jews, who have been prepared for his coming through their writings and traditions.

This unwitting Jewish witness to Yeshua as Messiah and Lord is strengthened by their ongoing practice. The same Scriptures that command the Jewish people to keep Shabbat and circumcision speak of a prophet to come and a messianic age of restoration. Thus Augustine asserted that "Jews as Jews . . . were not a challenge to Christian identity but a witness to it and a support for it, confirming in their allegiance to their scriptures the validity of the Christian claim" (p. 319).

Horner, on the other hand, considers the theological Augustine, whose view of Jewish witness has influenced western Christianity to see Jews and their practice as meaningful only in a negative sense, as evidence of the consequences of rejecting the Lordship of Yeshua. Augustine's work is also one of the pillars of supersessionism, or replacement theology, as in his Expositions on the Book of Psalms: "Let therefore no Christian consider himself alien to the name of Israel. . . . The Christian people then is rather Israel. . . . But that multitude of Jews, which was deservedly reprobated for its perfidy, for the pleasures of the flesh sold their birthright, so that they belonged not to Jacob, but rather to Esau" (cited by Horner, p. 5).

One of the most striking elements in Augustine's defense of the Jews is his midrash on the story of Cain and Abel. Like Cain, the Jews have killed their brother, Yeshua, because he is the favored one of God. But, "God protects the Jews as he had protected Cain. He has placed his mark upon them, protecting their special identity by protecting their ancestral practices; and these ancestral practices are themselves God's ‘mark'" (Frederiksen, p. 319).

The practice of Torah provides protection for the Jews. And, since Augustine cannot countenance the idea of Torah-practicing Jews in the church (at least after the New Testament period­), he must leave the great majority of Jews outside it. Or, to turn this thought around, God has placed the ancestral Jewish practices as a mark of Cain upon the Jewish people, and since there is no place for such practices within the community of the redeemed (according to Augustine), the Jews will never come into that community in great numbers. Hence, Augustine would certainly condemn our Messianic Jewish vision of faith in Yeshua and loyalty to Jewish tradition and practice. His understanding of Romans 11:26 epitomizes this position. "‘[A]ll Israel' that is saved does not and cannot mean all of ‘Israel according to the flesh'-that is, the Jews. What does Paul mean then? ‘Israel according to the spirit,' Augustine concludes; verus Israel, ‘true Israel,' the Israel of God. This ‘Israel' designates the community of the redeemed, which is composed of those particular Jews and those designated Gentiles whom God, in his inscrutable wisdom, chose to save" (p. 328).

In the end, Augustine's "defense of Jews and Judaism" gives the Jewish people a continuing place in God's eschatological purposes, but still insists that that place remain one of exile and exclusion. What he terms Israel according to the flesh has been superseded by the spiritual Israel, which is the church. In his own day, Augustine was a defender of the Jewish people, perhaps, but his rhetoric will give rise to Christian attitudes far more negative than his in the following centuries.