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Conflicting Narratives in Late Antique Law Concerning Jews
Abstract It is often seen as a given that literature follows certain narratives that shape its form and the choice of content. The same is not naturally assumed for legislative or administrative texts because they are supposed to be hardly more than a slightly stylised collection of data, descriptions or arguments. This paper argues that, since legal decisions have to be justified to the recipients and the arguments used for that purpose have to be, to some degree, consistent, legislative texts are actually prone to recurring motives and standardised modes of explanation and affirmation that are, in fact, small narratives of their own. They suggest recurring problems and the actions and reactions of rulers to the reader, transcending the merely descriptive or argumentative. The aim of this paper is to provide an example of narratives in a non-literary late antique genre and to demonstrate how acknowledging these narratives can lead to a better understanding of the relation between form and content in the texts concerned. This investigation will focus on the handling of Jewish subjects by late antique Christian lawgivers.
