Anti-Judaism and Christian Orthodoxy: Ephrem's Hymns in Fourth-Century Syria. By CHRISTINE SHEPARDSON.

Abstract

In the first edition of his Symbols of Church and Kingdom (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1975), Robert Murray wrote that Ephrem ‘hated the Jews’ (p. 68). He was not the first scholar to notice Ephrem’s anti-Jewish rhetoric that some have likened to modern day anti-Semitism (see K. H. Kuhlmann, ‘The Harp out of Tune: The anti-Judaism/anti-Semitism of St. Ephrem’, The Harp 17 [2004], pp. 177–83). For several decades now, scholars have studied Ephrem’s works in order to discern the historical context that drove his anti-Jewish polemic. Murray thought Ephrem feared ‘the Rabbis’ influence with his flock’ (p. 67). H. J. W. Drijvers (‘Jews and Christians at Edessa’, JJS 36 [1985], p. 87) concluded that Ephrem was addressing Christians who were drawn to Jewish customs. I have argued that the anti-Jewish remarks in the Commentary on the Diatessaron stem from his awareness of competing Jewish interpretations of particular Old Testament passages (C. E. Morrison, ‘The Jews in Ephrem’s Commentary on The Diatessaron’, JCSS 8 [2008], pp. 23–43). Now Shepardson, who has been part of this conversation for several years, examines Ephrem’s hymns and the Homily on Our Lord, in this revision of her Duke University dissertation (2003) that was written under the direction of Elizabeth A. Clark and Lucas Van Rompay. She argues that Ephrem’s ‘anti-Jewish writings emerged in the context of the complex Trinitarian controversy that consumed Roman Christianity during the fourth century’ (p. 6). Ephrem used ‘the familiar figure of “the Jew” more broadly as an anti-type of an orthodox Christian’ (p. 6). His underlying objective was ‘to establish clear Nicene boundaries around his community’ (p. 68).