Christian Interpretation of Bar Kokhba’s Defeat

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.