Relations with Christians in Sasanian Iran

Of all the religious communities that dwelled alongside Babylonian Jewry, Mesopotamian Christianity has provided scholars with the largest cache of texts, which survive in medieval manuscripts. The primary language used by the Eastern Church was Syriac, a branch of Eastern Aramaic close to the Babylonian Jewish Aramaic spoken by the Jewish community. A variety of Syriac texts mention Jews and Judaism, including canons (legal texts) and martyrologies. Most of the texts express tension between Jews and Christians. Arguably, the same texts reflect the fact that the communities lived in proximity to each other, which in turn led their respective authorities to try to erect boundaries between them. However, many of the texts recycle old tropes about Jews as killers of Christ and thus may bear little direct evidence for contemporaneous tensions between Jews and Christians in the Sasanian Empire. 

Jews in Christian Canons 

A canon from the sixth century CE rules that Christians should no longer celebrate non-Christian festivals with their neighbors—including Jews. Another canon, dated about a century later, castigates Christians for frequenting Jewish shops and mixing with Jews after church services. These canons portray Jewish-Christian interaction very negatively, yet they both reflect a world in which the two communities did business, fraternized, and even celebrated religious holidays with each other—thus the need to establish canons to prevent such engagement.

The Jews as False Witnesses

The anti-Jewish theme of Jews as false witnesses comes up in the Persian Martyr Acts, a large Syriac collection of martyrologies, compilations that tell of Christian confrontations with the authorities that led to death in the name of religion. One such text is a late fourth- or early fifth-century CE account of a fourth-century martyrdom. Simeon bar Sabba‘e, a Christian bishop of Seleucia-Ctesiphon, was martyred in 339 CE. His martyrology and that of his sister, Tarbo, both depict Jews as the instigators of their arrests. Both of the passages here also refer to an event in which the Jews followed a false messiah, a decision that ultimately led to a “destruction of many thousands.”