2
Introduction
Beginning in the second century, a series of literary works emerged in the Church Fathers that
dealt with the Jewish-Christian disagreement over the Messiahship of Jesus. One can easily follow these
writings at intervals throughout the history of the Church. Since our meetings are concerned with the
early centuries of the Christian church, we will be concerned here with describing one genre of this so-
called Contra Judaeos literature up to the sixth century.
In a chapter of a forthcoming volume on the history of Jewish believers, Lawrence Lahey
discusses all of the Christian-Jewish dialogues through the sixth century of which we are aware. He
offers the following simplified three-fold classification.
Contra Judaeos works argue for the truth of Christianity over Judaism based primarily on Old
Testament proof texts. There are approximately three forms of contra Judaeos writings:
Testimony Collections, biblical proof texts grouped by themselves, without additional
argumentation, under different headings; Tractates, argued presentations based on biblical texts
(under this category one could include some sermons and letters by church Fathers); lastly
Dialogues, back and forth discussion portrayed between a Christian and a Jew or several
participants in order to work through Christian proofs and Jewish objections.
1
We are aware of six works from this period in the Dialogue format. These are 1) Justin's
Dialogue with Trypho the Jew; and 2) The Controversy of Jason and Papiscus (JP), both from the second
century; 3) a fragment of an otherwise unknown dialogue discovered among the Oxyrynchus Papyri, from
the third century; and the dialogues of 4) Athanasius and Zacchaeus (AZ), 5) Simon and Theophilus (ST),
and 6) Timothy and Aquila (TA) from the fourth through the early sixth century. Five of these dialogues
survive in Greek while one survives in Latin, i.e., Simon and Theophilus.
Other than Justin's Dialogue, which has received great attention, this dialogue literature has been
largely neglected. The remarks of one of the few scholars working in this field are most appropriate.
A long-standing debate over the significance of polemic, both Jewish and Christian, has been
immensely renewed in recent years; on the other hand, the abundant primary sources, both Jewish
1
Lawrence Lahey, "The Christian-Jewish Dialogues through the Sixth Century (excluding Justin)," History of
Jewish Believers in Jesus (Hendrickson Publishers, forthcoming), emphases mine. My appreciation is expressed to
the author for providing me an advance copy of this chapter.