Shortly before his “division of the Roman Empire,” Emperor Theodosius codifies the legacy of Constantine, and makes Christianity the official religion of the empire February 27, 380 CE.
Rosemary Ruether describes the Christian Roman Emperors as follows:
“In the laws of the Christian emperors enforcing a status of reprobation on the Jewish community, one notes a language of clerical vituperation. The synagogue is referred to in one early law of the Theodosian Code by a Latin slang word meaning “brothel,” a word which never before had been used for a place of religious worship in Roman law.*A The Jews are referred to constantly in the laws as a group hated by God, to be regarded by Christian society as contemptible and even demonic. The laws bristle with negative and theologically loaded epithets. Judaism is called a feralis secta and a Synagoga Satanae. Their meetings are sacrilegi coetus.*B The very name of Jew is “foul and degrading.” To marry a Jew is adultery and to be under their authority is “an insult to our faith.” It becomes common to speak of Judaism in the language of pollution, contagion, and disease. The Third Novella, which promulgated the Theodosian Code, calls it a “desperate illness” that is beyond curing. Judaism is called “dangerous,” “abominable,” “evil teachings,” “madness,” while Jews themselves are described by such terms as “sly,” “shameful,” “foul,” “insolent,” “detestible,” “blind,” and “perverse.”*C Jews are said to be the “enemies of the Heavenly Majesty and the Roman Laws,” and to break the laws against judaizing is equivalent to a crime of lèse majesté. In short, the Christian emperors do not legislate as secular rulers…. Rather, the emperors speak here as exponents of the Christian theological view of the Jews, acting in their own right as priest–kings of the Christian theocratic empire.”
*A CTh. 16, 8, 1 (13/8/339).
*B Seaver, Persecution of the Jews, p. 54
*C See the summary of Theodosian laws printed in Marcus, Jew in the Medieval World, pp. 4–6.
– Rosemary Ruether, Faith and Fratricide, Oregon: WS Publishers, © 1995, Chapter 3, pp. 194–195.
Rosemary Radford Ruether (b. 1936) is an American feminist scholar and theologian.