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Recent scholarship has stressed Augustine's positive appraisal of the Jews and Judaism. In particular, Paula Fredriksen has presented Augustine's "witness doctrine" as an approbation of the Jews in their Jewish identity after the time of Christ, drawing especially on Answer to Faustus. An alternate interpretation of Augustine's theology arises from City of God, where Augustine recounts a comprehensive history of humanity as divided according to contrasting loves, whether for self and earthly goods, or for God and heavenly reward. The Jews constitute a kind of third thing between the two cities: a slave people unduly concerned with earthly reward that nevertheless worships the one true God. Despite some exceptions, the Jews mostly failed to receive Jesus in the incarnation and now persist as blind librarians who cannot read the Scriptures before them. Still, ethnic Israel will be restored en masse in the eschaton through repentance and faith in Christ. This interpretation affirms Fredriksen's argument that Augustine elevates the Jews over other non-Christian communities while challenging her depictions of Answer to Faustus and Augustine's policies toward actual Jews.
INTRODUCTION
The 2008 publication of Paula Fredriksen's Augustine and the Jews: A Christian Defense of Jews and Judaism marked a high point in the growing number of studies and generally positive appraisals of Augustine's theology of the Jews and Judaism.1 In recent years, Jeremy Cohen has found in Augustine's doctrine the basis for a medieval policy of Jewish toleration.2 Alban Massie has examined Augustine's innovative depictions of Old Testament Israel as a prophetic people and contemporary Jews as a witness nation.3 And Lisa Unterseher has stressed Augustine's contribution to a Christian rationale for ongoing Jewish practice of Jewish ancestral customs.4
Fredriksen's particular contribution has been to narrate Augustine's treatment of Judaism as a break from the early Christian adversus Iudaeos tradition, witnessed especially in the writings of Justin Martyr, Melito of Sardis, and Tertullian. These authors tended to depict the Jews as a particularly recalcitrant people, the law as a form of chastisement for sin, and the ceremonies as of no ongoing value given the fulfillment of these practices in Christ. Augustine's innovative response was to highlight the goodness of the law and the propriety of the Jews in practicing the law during Old Testament times. Circumcision,...