








































© Equinox Publishing Ltd. 2009, Unit 6, The Village, 101 Amies Street, London SW11 2JW

[Expo. 3.2 (2009) 185–195] Expositions (print) ISSN 1747-5368  
doi:10.1558/expo.v3i2.185 Expositions (online) ISSN 1747-5376 

Academic Roundtable

Paul, Faustus, and Augustine’s Evolution toward Anti-anti-
Semitism

JONATHAN P. YATES

Villanova University

Most New Testament scholars, historians of Late Antiquity, and His-
torical Theologians know the work of Paula Fredriksen. For more than 
thirty years, by weaving together the (often) much too disparate and 
disconnected world of Biblical Studies on the one hand and the schol-
arly world of Late Antiquity on the other, she has published some of 
the English-speaking academy’s finest work on early Christians’—with 
special emphasis on Paul’s and Jesus’—relationship to Judaism, on Au-
gustine, and, most particularly, on Augustine’s reading and understand-
ing of Paul. Notwithstanding her well-deserved plaudits for her two 
most recent books Jesus of Nazareth, King of the Jews and From Jesus to 
Christ, it seems safe to say that with the appropriately revisionist Au-
gustine and the Jews she has managed to place a clear and much needed 
milestone on the road that is the study of Judaism and Christianity in 
the Late Antique period. This book, which is as readable as it is learned, 
is certain to change both popular and scholarly conceptions of both the 
history and the evolution of anti-Semitism in the Christian West.

Briefly put, Fredriksen’s thesis is that, despite the sweepingly negative 
way in which most history textbooks, to say nothing whatsoever about 
prevailing popular assumptions, treat Christian-Jewish relations—
especially following the legalization and eventual mainstreaming of 
Christianity in western society by the end of the fourth-century—we 
misunderstand both Augustine and the complex history of these rela-
tions if we fail to recognize that the Bishop of Hippo was far from 
being anti-Semitic tout court. On the contrary, while Fredriksen does 
make it clear both that Augustine was no pluralist and that Augustine’s 



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employment of certain features of Late Antique rhetoric were often 
misconstrued by later readers, she is at pains to show how Augustine, 
for a whole host of ideological and contextual reasons, was both “pro-
Jewish” and deeply respectful of the Jews’ history, their traditions, and 
what he understood to be their present and future roles in God’s salvific 
plan for humanity.

Her explanation of the phenomenon is as eloquent as it is accurate. 
Page 98 sums up both her position—in its broadest form—and the 
presuppositions she wishes to help counter:

We are unprepared to look at the evidence [in favor of close and har-
monious interaction between Jews and non-Jews] positively because, 
first of all, good relations are not what we expect to see. We approach 
antiquity through the cultural memory of a millennium of violent 
Christian anti-Jewish hostility, from the massacres of the Crusades to 
the death camps of the last century. Our retrospect can prompt us to 
perceive Jews as segregated, perhaps even self-segregated outsiders in 
their ancient societies, and perhaps to presuppose that the traditions of 
anti-Judaism so characteristic of late Roman Christian rhetoric trans-
lated, as it did in the later medieval and modern periods, into active 
and generalized anti-Semitism.

With respect to Augustine’s role within this much broader tradition, 
Fredriksen’s argument, which is most clearly expressed in her “Part 
Three,” proceeds in the following four steps. First (cf. pp. 227 and 
261), she explains how any reader who fails to give the proper weight 
to Late Antique rhetorical conventions cannot but misunderstand 
much that is said about Jews and Judaism by Late Antique Christians. 
She notes that, for the writers of what became the New Testament as 
well as more than a few of the most important Christian voices of the 
second and third centuries, the labeling of various groups as “Jews … 
[is] first of all a rhetorical strategy. They are conjured in order to assist 
their authors in positioning themselves advantageously within the agon 
of intra-Christian theological dispute….”

Her second step (cf. p. 235), with which she turns exclusively to 
the thought of Augustine, is to show how the late 390’s marked a 
key turn for the Bishop of Hippo with respect to his thinking about 
the role the Nation of Israel plays in God’s all-important program of  



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Heilsgeschichte. According to Fredriksen, “impelled by all his hard 
thinking in the 390’s—on the figure and the theology of the Apostle 
Paul, on Tyconius and his views of the positive correspondence of Law 
and Gospel, on divine justice and human freedom, on understand-
ing the Bible ad litteram as well as secundam spiritum—Augustine had  
begun to think about God, time, and scripture in new ways. And these 
new ideas, in turn, spurred him to rethink received ideas about Chris-
tianity’s relationship with Judaism, and about Judaism itself, both past 
and present.”

The third step in Fredriksen’s argument is even more specific and 
even more context dependent. In a word, she contends that Augustine 
was driven to new thinking as well as to new conclusions about both 
the Jews and Judaism as he divorced himself from his past involvement 
with Manichaeism. In Fredriksen’s reconstruction, the pivotal moment 
came ca. 399 when Augustine responded in writing to the theological 
views of the Manichaean leader Faustus (cf. pp. 240, 350 and 365). 
This response is Augustine’s longest anti-Manichaean work and was 
intended, at least in part, as a reply to a work of Faustus known as 
the Capitula. The Capitula were apparently written a few years prior 
to this; that they survive even in part is due to the fact that Augus-
tine quoted from them in his Against Faustus. Fredriksen interestingly 
points out that Faustus’s impact on Augustine—at least with respect 
to the latter’s thinking about the Jews and their role in God’s plan—
was directly proportional to Faustus’s own mastery of the by then 
conventional North African Adversus Iudaeos tradition that was preva-
lent within many North African Christian communities. She writes 
that, “[t]hanks to Faustus’s ingenuity, these familiar, biblically based 
critiques ricocheted off their original rhetorical targets back onto the 
church that had launched them.… [A]nd it was Augustine’s defensive 
confrontation with Faustus and, via Faustus, with traditional catholic 
anti-Judaism, that combined with the new directions in [Augustine’s] 
own thought to propel the vigorous originality of his lengthy riposte, 
Against Faustus.” In other words, because Augustine knew that he had 
to distance himself from Faustus, it followed that he had to distance 
himself from many of the positions that Faustus claimed were integral 
to Faustus’s theological vision—even if some of those positions had 



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their roots in the non-Manichaean Christian tradition.
The fourth and climactic step in this argument is taken most deci-

sively on pages 288 and 289. Here, Fredriksen observes that Augus-
tine—in terms that were quite antithetical to those used by many of 
his Christian predecessors and contemporaries—asserted that, when 
viewed from God’s perspective, the Jews who remained Jews after the 
resurrection of Jesus of Nazareth and the subsequent proclamation of 
him as God’s long awaited Messiah were actually no worse off than 
were those who had never heard the Christian gospel. Indeed, like all 
non-believers, any and every Jew could establish a salvific relationship 
with God if she or he would believe and confess Christ’s claims about 
himself and, on the basis of that faith, begin to live the life of a true 
disciple. After quoting a longish section of Against Faustus 22.78, a 
passage that, according to Fredriksen, “provides the larger theological 
context for Augustine’s…defense of Judaism…and for his…defense of 
the Jewish praxis of Judaism,” she goes on to observe that, for Augus-
tine, “no other nation was like Israel. Only Israel had received God’s 
revelation. Only Israel had worshipped God alone, utterly without 
images. Only Israel had safeguarded, both in word and deed, those 
divine mysteries that had pointed ahead to the incarnation and resur-
rection of God’s son, and that pointed ahead still to his redemption of 
humanity. By crucifying Christ, Israel had helped to bring salvation 
to the nations.” In a word, Augustine’s new view was that “Israel, all 
unknowing, was the servant of the church.… Israel, secundum carnem 
witnessed to God’s redemptive acts in history.”

In much of the explanation of this fourth step, any reader familiar 
with the New Testament will recognize much that has been borrowed 
“chapter and verse” from Paul—and especially from his Letter to the 
Romans. Fredriksen acknowledges this throughout this section, often 
referencing Romans 9 and 11. However, conspicuous by its absence is 
any reference to Romans 1–3, the chapters that serve to set up Paul’s 
argument about the significance for humanity of Christ’s advent, min-
istry, death, and resurrection. Paul’s ineluctable logic as found in Rom 
1–3, and especially in its crescendo (cf. 3:21–31), remains difficult to 
appreciate in full even after two millennia: “[I]s God the God of Jews 
only? Is He not the God of Gentiles also? Yes, of Gentiles also, since in-



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deed God who will justify the circumcised by faith and the uncircum-
cised through faith is one” (3:29–30, NASB). Despite its difficulty, 
it seems certain that one of the conclusions Paul wanted to compel 
here is that, while Jews are no worse off than Christians, they are no 
better either. Again, as Fredriksen points out, Augustine follows Paul 
closely. The Bishop of Hippo gives the Jews much credit for their col-
lective “chosenness” and for their sporadic and occasional obedience, 
before noting that they are ultimately in the same boat as everyone else. 
Indeed, at the very end of this chapter, Fredriksen summarizes a senti-
ment of Augustine’s that makes the link between Paul and Augustine 
abundantly clear: “As regards salvation, Jews were no better and no 
worse off than was the rest of humanity’s massa damnata. Jews too were 
trapped in the penal condition of ignorance and difficulty that marked 
all human experience after the Fall. Jews too languished sub lege, not 
wanting to sin but not able, of their own will, not to sin. Whether God 
chose to leave them there or to bring some from among them sub gra-
tia, to himself, he would do so, for them as for anyone, for inscrutable 
reasons, but justly.”

A major question that arises from this final “step” in Augustine’s 
thinking is: If this new position is only a slightly modified version of 
what had been argued by Paul in Romans, why is it that it took Chris-
tians in general, Latin-speaking Christians in particular, and Augus-
tine most particularly of all, so long to “connect these dots”? In other 
words, is not this the same as arguing that Augustine’s revolutionary 
and thoroughly minority position on the Jews is really a direct result 
of a close and careful reading and clear understanding and acceptance 
of (much of ) Paul’s argumentation as found in Romans? If so, then it 
follows that Fredriksen’s book should have explicitly attempted a plau-
sible explanation of how Paul’s direct and overt claim was overlooked 
by multiple generations of highly-educated and rhetorically-trained 
Latin Christians. It is true that the fourth-century “rediscovery” of Paul 
in several quarters of the Christian world has long occupied scholars, 
but, at least to my knowledge, it is also true that this particular aspect, 
namely, the degree to which this “rediscovery” spawned a newfound  
respect for the Jews and their place in God’s historic and salvific plan 
for humanity in the writings of those “rediscoverers,” has not been  



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directly addressed, much less adequately documented. How, to men-
tion just one of many interesting questions, can we account for  
Augustine’s new take on the Jews in the midst of a rediscovery of Paul 
that apparently did little or nothing to change the attitudes of others 
toward the Jews? How could it be that Augustine, like so many others, 
went back to Paul but emerged with not only a deeper appreciation of 
Pauline theology, but, unlike so many others, also a deeper, if less than 
perfectly Pauline, sense that the Adversus Iudaeos tradition had gotten 
it all so wrong?

Fredriksen’s work also exhibits—at least passim—a few signs of  
inconsistency. While it nowhere leaves the reader with the impression 
that she or he cannot trust what the text is imparting, one is left with 
the vague and indefinite sense that the book’s latter chapters rest on a 
foundation that is less firm than that of the initial chapters.

Two specific aspects of this reduced rigor of the second half are (1) 
the propensity toward overstatement or oversimplification with regard 
to the conclusions of biblical and historical scholarship and (2) the fre-
quency with which chronological claims with respect to certain works 
of Augustine are accepted and included but not supported. In other 
words, the second half of the book would have been improved by the 
inclusion of details, argumentation, and/or footnotes that would help 
convince both the wary reader and the reader unfamiliar with the state 
of scholarship on Augustine that this particular reconstruction is as 
reliable as it seems to be.

An example of Fredriksen’s propensity to oversimplify issues of bibli-
cal scholarship can be found in her not infrequent references to the  
attitudes of early Christians toward the Jewish sacrificial system gener-
ally and the role that this system assigned to blood in particular. On 
page 73, and in support of the claim that “the fourth-century church” 
and “fourth-century imperial Christianity” had continued earlier theo-
logical traditions that emulated both the “high god” and the “divine 
Son” by “utterly [renouncing] Jews and Judaism,” Fredriksen writes: 
“In this ecclesiastical understanding, Jesus…, Moses…, and all of the 
prophets in the period before the incarnation…had denounced the 
Temple and its blood sacrifices, had condemned fleshly circumcision, 
had criticized the Jewish observance of the Sabbath, and had censured 



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Jewish practices generally. So too had Paul, and so too had the other 
apostles of the first generation.” Comments on pages 249 and 250 
elaborate this theme with respect to Augustine. In Fredriksen’s recon-
struction, the catholic Augustine was not slow to offer an answer to the 
questions of “Why blood sacrifices in particular? Indeed, why blood 
sacrifices at all?” (p. 249; emphasis in original) Then, on page 250, 
she notes that Augustine’s answer was simultaneously historical and 
typological. “All the Old Testament, but particularly the laws regard-
ing offerings, [Augustine] asserts, are typological references to Christ’s  
redemptive death. ‘These [Jewish] sacrifices typified what we now  
rejoice in, for we can be purified only by blood, and we can be recon-
ciled with God only by blood’ (Against Faustus 18.6).”

It seems that this tension between the views of fourth-century Chris-
tians who (a) rejected the Jews’ blood sacrifices altogether and (b) 
claimed that the first generation of Christians had set this precedent 
for them, and Augustine’s new conviction that the Jews’ blood sacri-
fices, while real and worthy of respect in their own day, were no longer 
necessary since their true typological significance had finally become 
clear, is little more than the debate about the authority and the cano-
nicity of the Epistle to the Hebrews. It is true that in the first half of the 
book (cf. p.159) Fredriksen includes references to Hebrews 8:5 and 
9:11–28 and the letter’s profound appreciation for “typological alle-
gories,” but it is also true that this one paragraph is the only place in 
which her text explicitly references Hebrews. Of the debate and discus-
sion that took place in the fourth-century over the book’s value—to say 
nothing whatsoever of the debates about its authorship—and, hence, 
its authority, Fredriksen says nothing. Particularly conspicuous is the 
absence from her book’s second half of any references to chapters 9–13 
and to the insistence those chapters repeatedly make that it was in fact 
blood that had made God’s program of reconciliation possible.

An example of included but unsupported chronological claims is 
the book’s treatment of the evolution of Augustine’s exegesis of Psalm 
59:12. In Augustine’s version of the Psalter as provided by Fredriksen 
this verse reads: “Slay them not, lest they forget your law; scatter them 
by your might.” Psalm 59 is discussed in more than twenty locations 
in this book; indeed, it is discussed with greater frequency than is any 



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other biblical passage (cf. the index pp. 471–476). Fredriksen claims 
that a close study of the appearances of verse twelve in Augustine’s 
works will help us document the evolution of his thought regarding 
the verse’s meaning and application. She also claims that this knowl-
edge about the changes in the verse’s interpretation will, by extension, 
provide us with helpful evidence regarding exactly where and when 
Augustine’s thinking about the Jews and Judaism changed. In this par-
ticular case, one of the primary shifts in Augustine’s exegesis appears 
to be rooted in whether or not a given text couples Psalm 59—and 
especially 59:12—with Genesis 4—and especially the “mark” that the 
Lord put on Cain in order to protect him (cf. Gen. 4:15).

While, in general, such assumptions are logical enough and while, 
in general, such assumptions can provide us with more or less reliable 
results, reconstructions of this sort must be carefully conducted and, 
indeed, must carefully and accurately qualify any conclusions that they 
produce. In this regard, Fredriksen’s reconstruction suffers on at least 
two levels. First, it suffers from loose and imprecise prose. Consider the 
following lines from page 347, just five pages prior to the book’s “Epi-
logue”: “Cain drops out when Augustine quotes Psalm 59:12 only in his 
two later, undated sermons; and I think that this is so because Augustine 
delivered them only after he had conceived and become committed to 
his vision in City of God (italics added).” (See also page 349 where these 
same two sermons are again labeled as “late” and, without explanation, 
as “within Augustine’s own lifetime, relatively unimportant….”) Upon 
reading these claims, the question that springs immediately to mind 
is: How exactly can a work be both “later” and “undated”? Surely the 
reader deserves some further explanation at this point. Second, her 
reconstruction suffers from faulty or, at least, incomplete reasoning. 
Even if one acknowledges that Fredriksen has here qualified her con-
clusion with the words “I think,” does not this sentence, at least as it is 
written, draw a thoroughly unwarranted, if not also illogical, conclu-
sion? Does not Fredriksen seem to be claiming that these two sermons 
must be later because, if they are later, then they fit the reconstruction 
she has already made of Augustine’s exegesis of Psalm 59:12?

The vague, if not muddled, chronological reconstruction of Au-
gustine’s thought as presented by Fredriksen is continued when one 



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investigates her claims with respect to the way particular books of 
City of God used Psalm 59. Fredriksen rightly notes that City of God 
was written over the course of thirteen or fourteen years, i.e., in fits 
and starts between 413 and 426. However, elsewhere she notes that 
two sermons on Psalm 59, which were penned at some vague point  
between the years 410 and 415 as part of Augustine’s monumental 
Enarrationes in Psalmos project, linked Genesis 4:15 and Psalm 59 to-
gether just as Augustine had been doing for the previous ten or fifteen 
years. From here, she goes on to discuss Letter 121 and Letter 149. 
Both of these letters revolve around the meaning of Psalm 59 and/or 
Psalm 59:12. However, according to Fredriksen, these two missives can 
only be dated to between “410–415?” and “414–420?” respectively. 
The whole discussion leaves the reader a bit unsure about the exact 
nature of Fredriksen’s chronological claim(s) and about how the vari-
ous pieces fit together. Then, from this already unsure standpoint and 
without a clearer qualification than “[a]t some point after this exchange 
with Paulinus,” the man who wrote Letter 121 and who received Letter 
149, Fredriksen goes on to discuss a small handful of works that are 
“undated” but that are presumably late because of something that they 
lack: they nowhere mention Cain or Genesis 4. “Cain, Augustine’s pre-
mier biblical figure for the Jews, is suddenly and strangely absent” (cf. 
p.331). This crucial difference, according to Fredriksen, is all because 
of a change that Augustine’s thinking underwent as he composed the 
latter books of City of God (cf. the quote from p.347 supra).

Interestingly, with a bit more care, Fredriksen’s reconstruction can be 
shown to be more specific than her discussion ever lets on. Elsewhere, 
she claims that this key exegetical turn took place sometime between 
the composition of Book XV, which she does not venture to date, and 
Book XVIII, which she very tentatively, but without argumentation, 
places “sometime around 425?” (cf. p.339). Fredriksen says noth-
ing else about the chronology of the individual books, a chronology 
that, it would seem, holds within it much that might be of value for 
undergirding her claims about this crucial component of her overall 
thesis. In the end, Fredriksen has (most likely) convinced the reader 
that something important shifted in Augustine’s exegetical thinking at 
some point between ca.410 and ca. 427. However, if the reader re-



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lies only on Fredriksen’s text and is unwilling (or unable) to do some  
extra reconstructive work on her or his own, she or he would not know 
anything more precise about this important shift. (In fact, assuming 
the accuracy of Fredriksen’s textual data, a little extra chronological 
work reveals that this shift in Augustine’s thinking probably occurred 
between 420 and 425.)

Less central, but still not insignificant, is the claim found on page 
349 with respect to  Augustine’s relationship to Proverbs 8:35, a verse 
that in the Septuagint or LXX version known to Augustine contains 
the provocative claim that “[t]he will is prepared by the Lord.” Fre-
driksen makes mention of this verse, which, incidentally, appears only 
here in her book and which is not labeled either here or in the volume’s 
index as hailing from the LXX, in support of the sweeping (not to 
mention not easily proven) claim that Augustine’s “… identifying of 
proof texts … often came considerably after he conceived and devel-
oped the ideas that they served to sum up.” The support for this claim 
takes the form of a brief summary of what many scholars acknowledge 
as a key turn in Augustine’s thinking about grace, the human will, and 
God’s salvific activity that occurred in the late 390’s as Augustine wrote 
his To Simplicianus. This is followed by the comment that “Only later, 
after 411, did [Augustine] discover Proverbs 8:35. ‘The will is prepared 
by the Lord.’ He used it repeatedly thereafter” (cf. p. 349). While the 
available scholarship does back up Fredriksen’s claim about the date 
of the first appearance of this verse in Augustine’s extant oeuvre, none 
of that scholarship—to say nothing of that scholarship’s nuances—is 
discussed or made available to the reader. In fact, there are at least two 
easily accessible publications that deal with the role this verse played in 
Augustine’s theology: an article published by Sage in 1964 and a mon-
ograph-length study published by La Bonnardière in 1975. Neither 
finds its way into Fredriksen’s endnotes to this section, just as both are 
absent from the book’s bibliography. Also noteworthy is the fact that 
Sage’s article hypothesizes that it was Ambrose, the Bishop of Milan 
who died in 397 and who played a crucial role in Augustine’s return 
to catholic Christianity, who, “semble-t-il, … a fixé l’attention de saint 
Augustin sur Prov. 8:35.”

Interestingly, if Sage is correct, his hypothesis would seem to  



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undermine Fredriksen’s claim that, for Augustine, the ideas often came 
first and the prooftexts second. However, if Sage is incorrect, those  
inclined to accept Fredriksen’s aforementioned claim would be reas-
sured were they offered a plausible explanation as to why Sage’s hypoth-
esis is wrong. Either way, this omission, which cannot be chalked up to 
having overlooked either very recent or very obscure secondary studies, 
demonstrates the tendency of the book’s second half to move forward 
with what sometimes amounts to less than fully convincing argumenta-
tion or comprehensive support.

Once all the claims, arguments, and data have been sifted, the reader 
of this book will doubtless be left with questions—some general and 
many specific. And this same reader may well be left wondering if she 
or he has been presented with all of the facts and details that are neces-
sary to support every claim or to comprehend every point of argumen-
tation fully. However, it is highly likely that the attentive reader will 
come away convinced of (at least) two things: Augustine of Hippo did 
not substantially contribute to the Christian West’s frequently sad and 
sometimes thoroughly slanderous conduct vis-à-vis Judaism, nor did 
Augustine of Hippo encourage hostility toward Jews, either individu-
ally or collectively, as enemies of Christ or of Christ’s church. And, of 
course, those are the convictions that Professor Fredriksen’s book has 
attempted to cultivate among its readers from the very beginning.

References

LaBonnardiére, A-M. 

1975 Le Livre du Proberbes. Biblia Augustiniana (A.T.) 7. Paris: Études Augus-
tiniennes. 

Sage, A.

1964 “Praeparatur voluntas a Deo.” Revue des Études Augustiniennes X.1, 1–20.




