Christian Interpretation of Bar Kokhba’s Defeat

Chrysostom John

Discourses against Judaizing Christians 5.11

Late 4th Century

[ . . . ] After the destruction which occurred under Vespasian and Titus, these Jews rebelled during the reign of Hadrian and tried to go back to the old commonwealth and way of life. What they failed to realize was that they were fighting against the decree of God, who had ordered that Jerusalem remain forever in ruins.

But it is impossible for a…

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The fourth-century church father John Chrysostom voices a common patristic theological claim concerning the Jewish revolts against Rome: that the insurrections were conducted in vain because it is God’s intention that the Jews be permanently subjugated and that the former Jerusalem—under Jewish rule and having a functioning Temple—should remain a wasteland. For Chrysostom, the renaming of Jerusalem as Aelia by the Romans signifies the perpetual banishment of the Jews from their holy city.

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