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[Expo. 3.2 (2009) 209–214] Expositions (print) ISSN 1747-5368  
doi:10.1558/expo.v3i2.209 Expositions (online) ISSN 1747-5376 

Two Augustines?

DAVID P. EFROYMSON

La Salle University

Beyond the decision to keep what Christians call the Old Testament, 
probably the only positive Christian contribution to Jewish-Christian 
relations from the patristic era was Augustine’s “witness doctrine.” 
Its claim was that the dispersion of the Jews after the destruction of  
Jerusalem in 70 CE was not simply punishment for their “rejection” 
of Jesus, but also had a more positive role in God’s plan. Bearing their 
(biblical) books wherever they were forced to wander, they bore witness 
to the nations of the truth of Christianity by the prophetic content of 
the books (which they failed to understand), while the Jewishness of 
the books proved that Christians had not fabricated them. Augustine 
could then read Psalm 58:12 (59:12 in our modern bibles), “Slay them 
not…,” as God’s or Christ’s command not to harm Jews physically and 
to let them live as Jews; their continuing existence as Jews (until their 
ultimate conversion at the end of time) fulfilled a divine purpose. Bol-
stered by the inherited precedent of Roman law, and with the authority 
of Augustine behind it, the teaching helped to preserve Jewish lives and 
Judaism itself for centuries. Anyone who knows the precarious situa-
tion of Jews and Judaism in medieval Europe knows what might well 
have happened otherwise. We cannot but be grateful that worse was 
avoided. 

Paula Fredriksen’s contribution in the book under discussion is to 
show when and how Augustine arrived at his position. But her achieve-
ment goes beyond this. She situates Augustine’s thinking on this mat-
ter in the context of early Christian history and Christian anti-Judaism 
prior to him. Further, she is rightly insistent that anti-Judaism was 
not the whole story: there were individual friendships, urban social 
mingling, Christians visiting Jewish synagogues and joining in Jewish 
celebrations, all contrary to the wishes—indeed the legislation—of the 
leadership on both sides. She reinforces her case for Augustine’s contri-
bution with an astute discussion of his correspondence with the far less 



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accommodating Jerome (on the legitimacy of the Jewish practices of 
the earliest followers of Jesus) and with a cogent presentation of what 
the bishop does not say on the use of force against Jews (as compared 
to his approval of it against Donatists). Nor, as she points out, does 
he say a word about the forced conversion of the Jews on Minorca in 
418—an event he had to have known about and which certain of his 
Christian colleagues celebrated. Finally, she makes no effort to hide 
Augustine’s own anti-Jewish rhetoric. 

My part in this conversation will be to express some reservations, not 
at all about Fredriksen, but about Augustine. In a project on the fate or 
“after-life” of the Ioudaioi (usually translated “the Jews”) of John’s gos-
pel at the hands of several early Christian writers, I found Augustine as 
antagonistic as any of the writers I have examined (Efroymson 1999, 
with full documentation on what follows on Augustine on John). 

Augustine produced 124 homilies (tractatus) on John’s gospel; fully 
60 of them contain noticeable anti-Jewish material, and between 15 
and 17 are extensively or completely taken up with it. Perhaps the most 
striking thing about the Johannine Jews in Augustine’s hands is the 
sheer number and variety of crimes, vices, and other evils with which 
he characterizes them and the extent to which this practice pervades 
the homilies. Some 57 homilies have at least one dose of this anti-
Jewish rhetoric, and frequently far more. We hear of the Jews’ carnality, 
pride and impudence, envy, lies and calumnies, and culpable blindness; 
more generally, their infidelitas (both unfaithfulness and a refusal to 
believe), sinfulness, wickedness, and perversity. He is emphatic about 
their hatred of Jesus and their “raging” against him. Altogether, there 
are 250 such references.

In addition, there are some 60 further passages, in 29 homilies, refer-
ring to “the Jews” (rarely: “leaders,” etc.) having killed, crucified, or hav-
ing sought to slay Jesus. An important aspect of this last set of charges 
is the contexts in which they appear. A third of them occur in homilies 
112–118, which cover the trial and death of Jesus in John’s gospel. An-
other 15 appear in earlier homilies, commenting on references in the 
gospel to the Jews persecuting or seeking to kill Jesus. Some 23—over 
a third—appear, however, in homilies on gospel passages having no 
bearing on either Jesus’ death or any effort to bring it about. For exam-



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ple, at the end of John 3, commenting on Jesus’ hidden authority, the 
bishop says: “What the disciples saw, who loved him, that the Jews also 
saw, who crucified him” (Homily 14.12). At John 12:21, where Jesus 
is told that “some Greeks” wanted to see him: “See how the Jews wish 
to kill him, the Gentiles, to see him” (H 51.8). 

The role of John’s gospel itself in this ugliness is far from negligible. 
In the gospel, the Ioudaioi frequently criticize, attack, and seek to kill  
Jesus. At least as often, and almost as fiercely, Jesus criticizes and  
denounces them. And the author or narrator takes his own turn in dis-
paragement of the Jews. Augustine, of course, believed that Jesus said 
and did what John had narrated, and that the Jews said and did what 
John had accused them of saying and doing. He is angry about it and 
expresses that anger in these homilies. Is Augustine, then, merely a “vic-
tim” of John’s portrayal of the Ioudaioi? There is almost certainly more 
to it than that. Let us move on to other biblically-oriented material. 

We have now, after some recent discoveries, 569 of Augustine’s ser-
mons, on biblical passages as well as on various kinds of liturgical 
celebrations (Epiphany, Easter, saints’ feasts, and more). Anti-Jewish 
references or assertions have found their way into some 154 of the 
sermons. They tend to be less extensive than those in the Homilies on 
John, sometimes only a sentence or two, but often more. But given 
Augustine’s reputation by the time he became a bishop, people came 
to listen to him preach and would not likely have missed many of his 
words. 

Here again, references to the Jews killing or crucifying Jesus merit 
special attention. The assertion appears in 68 of these sermons, not a 
high percentage. Thirteen of these references come from Easter sea-
son sermons, one on Isaiah 53 and one on Samson’s sacrificing his 
own life. Thus, references to Jesus’ crucifixion are not surprising.  
Beyond the “unsurprising” 15, however, every one of the remaining 
such accusations is completely gratuitous: on the Feast of the Epiph-
any, on the Good Shepherd, on the judgment of Solomon between 
the two harlots, and far more. In Sermon 214.3, on the handing over 
of the creed to catechumens, he notes the great good conferred on 
us through the crucifixion of Jesus but insists that God achieved it 
through and despite the malice of the Jews (and the devil); the Jews 



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deserve not reward but punishment, as their will was to do harm. More 
dramatically, in Sermon 136.4, on the healing of the man born blind 
in John 9, commenting on the argument about who can see and who 
is blind: 

The defenders of the law, teachers of the law, intellectual masters of 
the law, crucified the author of the law! What blindness! … He was 
not recognized by the Jews, he was crucified by the Jews…. Becoming 
more hardened than ever, becoming blind, those who boasted they 
could see the light, they crucified the light. What colossal blindness! 

The most extensive block of Augustine’s reflections on biblical mate-
rial is the set of 208 “expositions” (enarrationes) on the 150 psalms. We 
encounter anti-Jewish material in 93 of the 208, generally longer than 
those in most of the sermons; the list of crimes and vices roughly paral-
lels that found in the Homilies on John. There are 97 references to, or 
accusations of, the Jews killing or crucifying Jesus. They occur in 54 
of the expositions, sometimes several separate times in one exposition. 
This could seem puzzling until one notes that Augustine has in these 
expositions brought to a kind of summit the patristic tradition of read-
ing the psalms as “Christian,” which is to say as spoken typically by, 
to, or about Christ. Thus the Jews who are castigated tend to be Jews 
contemporary with Jesus. If the psalmist is ridiculed, it is “really” Jesus 
being ridiculed on the cross; laments are the laments of Jesus about the 
suffering imposed on him by the Jews; a cry for justice is a cry for the 
punishment of the Jews who had crucified him, and so on. 

Is there anything characteristically Augustinian in all this? There are 
a few possibilities: his fondness for the blinding “veil” of 2 Cor. 3:15, 
for example, and his predilection, in all three blocks of material, to use 
Rom. 10:3 (the Jews’ “attempting to establish their own righteousness” 
and “not submitting to God’s”) as a divinely-sanctioned and empiri-
cal description of how “Jews” operate. But perhaps the most striking 
is Augustine’s emphasis, especially in his later preaching and writing, 
on the power, the omnipotence, of God. What God wants done gets 
done, and what does not get done is the result of God not wanting it 
done. This takes a funny turn in some gospel passages. When Jesus 
prays from the cross, “Father, forgive them, for they know not what 
they do” (Luke 23:34), Augustine is clear about which Jews Jesus is 



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praying for: “Among the many hostile people, he saw [from the cross] 
some of his own [quosdam suos]; for them he sought pardon [illis jam 
petebat veniam]”(Homily on John 31.9). Later, in Homily on John 
38.7: “Among that people by whom he was crucified…, there were 
[future] members of Christ for whom he said ‘Father, forgive them….” 
(See also Sermon 229E.1.) Finally, and more generally, in Homily on 
John 47.4, on John 10:14 and 15 (“I know mine…”), Augustine claims 
that Jesus was sent not to the Jews generally, but only to the Jews who 
would ultimately accept him. This (later) Augustine cannot have Jesus 
pray for forgiveness for those who he believes will not accept it, nor can 
he have God send Jesus in vain. Otherwise neither God nor Jesus is in 
control. Characteristically Augustine, indeed.

Are there then two Augustines? I will first repeat that Fredriksen’s 
Augustine is no fabrication. He is a towering, maybe even a courageous 
theologian who, out of his own resources and his biblical reflections 
and against the current, was able to re-imagine the relationship of God 
and Israel and find a positive role in God’s plan for Jews and Judaism. 
Augustine thereby almost certainly helped to prevent persecution and 
forced conversions, saving lives in medieval Europe in the process. Fur-
ther, Fredriksen has some real wisdom to offer on how difficult it is, 
maybe even impossible, to get at what a skilled rhetorician like Augus-
tine “really thought” or “really felt,” and the importance of context and 
intent in seeing the differences in the “rhetorical Jews” he constructs, 
e.g., between those in the Homilies on John and those in Against Faus-
tus (Fredriksen 2002, 261; 307). 

Nevertheless, the anti-Judaism is also real, and, because this material 
(the Tractatus on John, the Enarrationes, and the Sermons) tends to be 
neglected in histories and studies of early Christian anti-Judaism, it is 
imperative to point to it. Augustine is too important, and these works 
are too weighty, for them to continue to be overlooked. At the very 
least, they can serve as a warning about the critical care with which 
John’s Gospel and the “Christian” reading of the psalms should be 
treated. 

One last point (by way of “concession”?): if Augustine had not writ-
ten or preached a word of such obloquy, the Christian anti-Jewish 
tradition would still be there. If, on the other hand, he had not in-



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troduced the witness doctrine, the history of medieval Jewry would 
almost certainly have been far more tragic.1 

Note

1. It may be useful to mention here that one can find a welcome account of the way 
some heavyweight medieval theologians handled the witness doctrine in Jeremy 
Cohen’s Living Letters of the Law (1999), as well as an interesting earlier analysis 
of why he thought it did not survive the onslaught of the Friars (1982). The 
influence of the doctrine on papal policy and some attempts to circumvent it are 
treated passim in the History volume of Shlomo Simonsohn’s The Apostolic See 
and the Jews (1991).

References

Cohen, Jeremy

1999 Living Letters of the Law: Ideas of the Jew in Medieval Christianity. Berkeley: 
University of California Press.

1982 The Friars and the Jews: The Evolution of Medieval Anti-Judaism. Ithaca, 
NY: Cornell University Press.

Efroymson, David P.

1999 Whose Jews? Augustine’s Tractatus on John. In A Multiform Heritage: 
Studies in Early Judaism and Christianity in Honor of Robert A. Kraft, ed. 
Benjamin G. Wright, 197–211. Atlanta, GA: Scholars Press.

Simonsohn, Shlomo

1991 The Apostolic See and the Jews. Vol. 7, History. Toronto: Pontifical Institute 
of Medieval Studies.


