Antiquity
Council of Elvire
v. 300-306·Elvire (Bétique)
The toll is reproduced exactly as the source states it — never rounded, never added to another. Tolls overlap from one event to the next.
mixed marriages, shared meals and blessing of harvests by Jews forbidden to Christians — first canonical corpus of separation
The council convened at Elvire, near present-day Grenade, in the Roman province of Baetica, is the oldest assembly of bishops whose canons have come down to us. It was held at a time when Christianity was not yet a lawful religion within the Empire.
Four of its canons target Jews. They forbid Christians from giving their daughters in marriage to a Jew, from sharing his table, from committing adultery with a Jewish woman, and from having their harvests blessed by a Jew — this last prohibition implying that the practice was widespread among the landowners of Hispania. The prescribed sanction is exclusion from communion, for a time or permanently.
These texts persecute no one: they separate. They form the first Christian normative corpus devoted to the daily relations between the two communities, and they furnished the model for the Gallic and Visigothic councils of the following centuries, down to the canons of Toledo.
- Period :
- Antiquity
- Type :
- Persecution
- Region :
- Western Europe
- Country :
- Espagne
Canons du concile d'Elvire ; collections canoniques hispaniques.