"The Law Keeps its Hold Over the Weaker Ones": (Jewish) Law and Body in Fifth Century Christian Monasticism

The rhetorical use of the Jews – by emphasizing the connection between Jewishness and fleshliness and misreading of Scripture, is understood mainly as an intra-Christian tool, used by Christian authors in late antiquity to establish authority, to shape boundaries of Orthodoxy, and to negate the authority of rival Christian groups.

However, it seems that proper attention has not been given yet to instances in which, although their symbolic function continues, the Jews are given a more complicated representation, which is not intended to negate other Christians but rather to confirm or take account of the growing Christian existence within the flesh. This anxiety regarding the Jewish body and Law is not in relation to real Jews - it is mainly intra-Christian, and even intra-monastic, and yet it takes a very real form: Cassian, for example, tells of a monk whose austere asceticism led him finally to circumcision and to Judaism. John of Apamea tells of the arrival of two monks, who only following John`s teachings realize that until than their monastic conduct was too similar to the Jewish way of life. Thus, they describe their coming to him as parallel to Paul`s conversion from Judaism to Christianity and from body and law to freedom.

I will argue that these stories, together with other writings, reflect the growing need to address the "embodiment in the flesh" in 5th century Christianity, especially within monastic context. Both Cassian and John, although writing from a different cultural and theological context, use Jewish Law and body to legitimize, if only partially, all the multitudes of Christians who remain at what they classify as a legitimate, yet low, level of the body. I intend to show how Law and body play an important role in the legitimization of both bodily Christians and more advanced `spiritual` Christians, but also in creating distinctions within the monastic community itself, which in this period was shaped by the new phenomenon of binding canons.