An Answer to the Jews

Tertullian composed this treatise in Carthage around the year 200, working in Latin at a time when the young North African church was still defining itself against both pagan neighbors and the Jewish communities from which many of its converts, and much of its scriptural inheritance, had come. The work opens by recounting a debate between a Christian and a Jewish proselyte, and it is this kind of contest — over which people rightly reads the prophets, and to whom the promises belong — that the treatise sets out to settle.

Tertullian argues that the Law given through Moses was always provisional, suited to a particular people at a particular time, and that the promise made to Abraham preceded and outlasts it, so that Gentiles who believe are heirs of that earlier, wider promise. He works through the prophetic texts, especially the reckoning of weeks in Daniel, to argue that the timing of Christ's coming was foretold and has already been fulfilled. He treats the destruction of Jerusalem and the Temple as decisive confirmation that the old covenant has ended and cannot be restored. Scripture, on his reading, testifies against a purely national or literal fulfillment and points instead toward a new people gathered from every nation. The latter portion of the text closely parallels material in Tertullian's own Adversus Marcionem, book three, a duplication that has led scholars to question whether the treatise reached him in finished form or was completed by another hand drawing on his later work.

The treatise matters as one of the earliest surviving full-length specimens of the Adversus Iudaeos genre in Latin Christian literature, a genre that would recur for centuries and shape Christian self-understanding in relation to Judaism long after Tertullian. It is valuable to historians of early Christian exegesis, of Jewish-Christian relations in antiquity, and of the development of supersessionist argument, showing both the interpretive techniques and the polemical assumptions at work in the formation of Christian identity. It should be read as a historical and theological document of its moment, not as a fair or sympathetic account of Judaism, and readers seeking interfaith dialogue or devotional reading should look elsewhere; those studying patristics, the history of Christian anti-Judaism, or early biblical hermeneutics will find it essential.