ABSTRACT
When the orthodoxy of Nicaea was enforced by the Emperor Theodosius I in the last decades of the fourth century, the Christian production of polemical dialogues in Greek already had a long tradition behind it,1 including texts such as the Ad Theopompum attributed to Gregory Thaumaturgus,2 the De Resurrectione by Methodius of Olympus or the Adamantius, probably by one of his disciples. As far as dialogues Adversus Iudaeos are concerned, one can recall, among several texts, the well-known Dialogue against Trypho of Justin or the lost Dialogue by Aristo of Pella. However, no matter how interesting this early production might be, it is just a small avant-goût of what came next. Still, within the limits of the dialogues Adversus Iudaeos, at least fourteen texts in Greek written between the end of the fourth century and the beginning of the ninth have been preserved, at least partially, as illustrated in Table 4.1 below. This list would be much longer if one included the various remodellings of these texts within their tradition, or the many other now-lost texts one knows about because they are mentioned in other works or can be inferred as sources of extant texts.3
