The Martyrdom of St Judas Cyriacus as a Christian anti-Jewish Rhetoric with Jewish Elements

In the Martyrdom of St Judas Cyriacus (MJC), Judas Cyriacus, a Jewish convert and bishop of Jerusalem, according to this story, was persecuted during the reign of Emperor Julian (361-363 C.E.). This text continues the life story of one of the main characters of the so-called Cyriacus Legend (CL), which belongs to the circle of accounts of the discovery of the Holy Cross. MJC was most probably written by the author of CL as a second part of this story. These texts originated, developed, and circulated between the end of the 4th and the middle of the 5th centuries C.E. in Palestine. They both exhibit a unique combination of anti-Jewish rhetoric and Jewish elements in the account of the life and death of Judas Cyriacus as a converted Jew. My presentation focuses on MJS and shows that, on the one hand, this text contains some typical Christian views of Judaism and regards Cyriacus as a representative of those Jews believing in Jesus and as a symbol of the conversion of the Jews in the eschatological future. His martyrdom is seen as an atonement for the Jewish rebellion against Christ and their recovery of their covenant with God. On the other hand, MJC contains Judas’s prayer in broken “Hebrew.” Some “words” of this prayer are reminiscent of the beginning of a certain Jewish blessing, which is highly unusual for a prayer in an Orthodox Christian text. This prayer can be regarded as evidence of possible religious and cultural contacts between Christian and Jewish communities in Palestine in the 4th century. All of this helps us to broaden our understanding of early Christian anti-Judaism and to take more seriously the idea of ongoing contacts between Judaism and Christianity in late antiquity in order to deepen our possibilities for Jewish-Christian dialogue in the present.