Augustine’s con­cern was not nec­es­sar­i­ly with real Jews or Judaism per se, but with the the­o­log­i­cal defense of his own vision of the Chris­t­ian church. With­in his argu­ments, the degra­da­tion of Jews and Judaism lives on unmis­tak­ably, and his defense is at best patron­iz­ing. Nev­er­the­less, based on his reflec­tions on God’s sov­er­eign­ty and free will, along with dis­sat­is­fac­tion with the way his Chris­t­ian and pagan rivals degrad­ed Catholics via their degra­da­tion of the Jews, Augus­tine pre­sent­ed a dif­fer­ent por­trait, one that under­mined some cher­ished anti-Jew­ish views with­in his own Catholic groups, includ­ing neg­a­tive view­points he had him­self expressed. 

Now Augus­tine argued that the Jews played a spe­cial role in the ser­vice of Chris­tian­i­ty as those who also wor­shipped the One God, in con­trast to pagans and heretics: by God’s sov­er­eign design, and under God’s pro­tec­tion, their scrip­tures, tra­di­tions, and prac­tices pro­vid­ed a wit­ness to the prophe­cies of Christ, even if they did not them­selves believe in them in the same way. Wher­ev­er the Jews were scat­tered, they bore wit­ness to the tes­ti­mo­ny to the claims of the Chris­t­ian church­es. Jews out­side the Church must not be sep­a­rat­ed from the prac­tice of Judaism, which God employed as a gift in ser­vice of the mis­sion of the Church to the nations. 

In addi­tion to the exten­sive treat­ment of the devel­op­ment of Augustine’s thought cul­mi­nat­ing in these argu­ments, in the first 102 pages, Fredrik­sen pro­vides an insight­ful and sophis­ti­cat­ed overview of Gre­co-Roman and Jew­ish civ­i­liza­tion as well as the ori­gins of Chris­tian­i­ty that is by itself worth the price of the book. Bib­li­og­ra­phy and indexes.