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Position, the Jews (or Cain) deny knowledge of their hand in the death of the younger, identifying not as the older brother, but specifically not as the younger brother’s keeper. Cain, the older brother, the one who has walked with God longer, the one who has faithfully offered fruit sacrifices for many years finds himself cast out, unable to reconcile his change in fortune, and so kills his younger brother, representative of the head of the Church: Jesus. Through this event, and despite not using the specific phrase, Augustine presents the Jews (as a whole) as ‘Christ-killers’. Cast out, and upset at the newfound favour of his younger brother, Cain murders Abel. God not only rejected the lesser sacrifices of fruit (earthly ordinances of the Jews) for a superior sacrifice (Jesus, God’s son), but also-Augustine argues-has rejected the Jews. Augustine, through analogy, argues that this represents the Jews’ denial of God’s rejection of them. In recognition that his sacrifice is not acceptable to God, Cain kills his younger brother Abel. Thus, the Jews (Cain) refuse the perfect sacrifice, a sacrifice from which the only benefactor is the Church. While this perfect sacrifice was intended by God to be offered for (and by) both Cain and Abel, Cain’s refusal to accept God’s rejection of his fruit sacrifice leads to a spiteful refusal to offer meat like Abel’s. In this analogy, as Cain’s sacrifice of fruit was rejected by God upon Abel’s offering of sheep, so the Jews’ earthly ordinances were rejected by God upon the offering of a superior sacrifice: that of Jesus (Lamb of God) on the cross for the Church. Cain’s offering of the fruit, therefore, is analogous to the earthly observances required of religious Jews while Abel’s sacrifice of his sheep and the fat thereof is analogous to the faith of the New Testament which (Augustine purports) is acceptable to God through the doctrine of divine Grace. The offerings of the two brothers are types, or symbolic representations, of worshipping God. On the first level of Augustine’s analogy, Cain is identified as representing the Jews and Abel as Christians, or the Church. In his Writings Against the Manichaeans, Augustine uses the story of Cain and Abel to present his view that the Jews have woefully failed in fulfilling their purpose as the light of the world. Likewise, Augustine’s understanding of the Jewish nation is to be “the light of the world”: to be a witness of the true light (God) to the world. A town built on a hill cannot be hidden,” meaning that the Church’s mission is to witness Christ to the world. spiritual body of Christian believers)-with the missional identity, “You are the light of the world. In Matthew 5:14, following the delivery of the beatitudes, Jesus charges the crowds below-which would come to form the Church (i.e. Augustine’s understanding of the role of witness is similar to that of being the “light of the world”. This mission was to be undertaken by the practice of divinely appointed ordinances which are recorded in the Torah. He understood the Jews as being charged with an eternal purpose of witnessing to the glory of God. St Augustine (354 – 430) is widely viewed as one of the most important Church Fathers in Western Christianity.
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By exploring early Church Fathers’ understandings of the identity of Israel, we can deepen our understanding of the strained history of our relationship with the Jews. The official IBR website can be found at. The Institute for Biblical Research is an organization of evangelical Christian scholars with specialties in Old and New Testament and in ancillary disciplines. We invite the response of our readers, and contributions from any scholar who is engaged by the meanings one encounters in the discipline of exegesis. The concern of the Institute is not to force all the articles it publishes into a single program, but to accord due interest to the religious sources and purposes of our texts. Yet current practice often does not acknowledge that religious meaning was the obvious context in which scriptural documents were produced, and the medium within which they were transmitted and received. It is assumed as a matter of course that strictures of literary and historical reading apply in biblical exegesis. The aim is to publish articles which are both fully critical and generally accessible to the scholarly community. Published by the Institute for Biblical Research, the Bulletin for Biblical Research acts as an instrument for understanding the religious senses of scripture.