Church Canons

In the fourth century, the Roman Empire witnessed the rise of church councils. These convened periodically for the purpose of negotiating the standards of sound Christian doctrine and the church’s proper relationship to non-Christian religious groups, among other matters. They also reflected the attitudes of church leadership toward the Jewish people in the first centuries after Christianity had become the official faith of the empire.

Questions abound. Was Judaism really influential enough within the Roman Empire to have inspired official church prohibitions regarding Jewish practices? Was Judaism attracting Christians and competing for potential converts? Or were the prohibitions simply further expressions of Christian literary representation of Judaism, a conjured threat that was more imagined than real? Did Christianity’s status as a state religion mark a major turning point in Christian attitudes toward Judaism, as compared to those under a predominantly pagan Rome? Some scholars have argued that earlier Roman anti-Judaism reflected a general contempt for most things foreign, whereas later Christian anti-Judaism legislated a much stronger degree of separation, the result of competing religious identities.

The church council texts here span the fourth through sixth centuries CE and focus mainly on forbidding Christians from mixing with Jews. The Council of Laodicea, for example, which assembled sometime between 345 and 381 CE, devotes four of its sixty canons to interactions between Christians and Jews.