Jews and Christians in the Byzantine Empire: Problems and Prospects

Abstract

Heartening as it is for someone like myself, for whom the study of relations between Christianity and Judaism is a central concern, to see the Ecclesiastical History Society devote its annual conference to this subject, it is proper to recall that it has not been wholly neglected in the past. The very first volume of Studies in Church History (1964) contains a contribution by James Parkes under the title of Jews and Christians in the Constantinian Empire’, which is a short but well-judged summary of the attitudes to Judaism emerging from a reading of the Christian authors, Roman laws, and conciliar canons of the fourth century. I should like to begin now by paying tribute to James Parkes, partly because he was my own mentor, someone who encouraged and influenced my study of our subject, and also because he occupies an important place as a pioneer in the study of Jewish-Christian relations as a whole, and specifically in the part of the subject that concerns me today, the Byzantine phase.