Compiled from the attached texts: Sermons for All the Sundays in the Year; The Glories of Mary; The History of Heresies and Their Refutation; The School of Christian Perfection; Theologia Moralis. All passages located by keyword search of the source texts; line numbers refer to the supplied digital editions.
Preface
Alphonsus Liguori (1696–1787), Doctor of the Church and founder of the Redemptorists, did not produce a dedicated adversus Judaeos treatise. His passages bearing on the Jews are distributed across four genres — popular sermons, a historical survey of heresies, and a manual of Christian perfection — and operate in several distinct registers:
- Deicide and collective guilt — attribution of Christ’s death to the Jews as a people, with dispersion and exile interpreted as divine punishment.
- Supersessionism — the Old Covenant as abrogated; Jewish religion as lacking salvific value after the Incarnation.
- Ritual libel — uncritical repetition of the Host desecration accusation against Jews.
- Jews as rhetorical foil — deployment of Jewish rejection of Christ as a standard of wickedness or ingratitude against which Christian sinners are measured.
- Historical blame — Jews assigned partial responsibility for heretical movements (Iconoclasm).
- Dismissal of Jewish learning — rabbinic theology characterised as trivial and nonsensical.
Thirty-one verified passages are presented below, grouped by source text. Each entry includes the passage text, its precise line-number location, and an analytical note. HOH-6 includes a supplementary continuation from the same paragraph.
Source I: The School of Christian Perfection
SCP-1. Deicide, Divine Punishment, and Dispersion
Source: “Proofs of Faith” section (line 138).
Passage
“It was prophesied that the Jews, in punishment for the deicide, would be driven from the temple and the holy land, and hardened and obstinate in sin would be dispersed throughout the world; this prophecy, we know, was literally fulfilled.”
In the same section, Alphonsus continues:
“Can the Jews, the heathens, the Mohammedans or the heretics point to a single miracle wrought in favor of their religious tenets? They have no doubt made efforts in the past to deceive the people by trickery and the seemingly miraculous; the deception was soon discovered.”
Note
The most theologically concentrated adversus Judaeos statement in the corpus. Alphonsus deploys three classical elements of the tradition in a single sentence: the charge of deicide (collective Jewish guilt for the killing of God); the interpretation of Jewish exile and dispersion as direct divine punishment for that guilt; and the characterisation of Jewish persistence in sin as “hardened and obstinate.” The accompanying denial that Jews can perform genuine miracles extends the argument into the present tense: Jewish religion is not merely superseded but actively incapable of divine authentication.
SCP-2. “They Honor Me with Their Lips but Their Heart Is Far from Me”
Source: Section on prayer (line 942).
Passage
“The Lord might well say of many Christians what He once said of the Jews: ‘They honor me with their lips but their heart is far from me.’ (Matt. 15:8.)”
Note
Alphonsus quotes Christ’s rebuke of the Pharisees (Matthew 15:8, itself citing Isaiah 29:13) as a potential verdict on distracted Christian prayer. The rhetorical structure requires Jews to serve as the original exemplars of lip-service worship — an established model of hollow religiosity against which the Christian reader is warned. Jewish observance figures as the permanent historical example of religion performed externally while inwardly alienated from God.
Source. ECatholic2000 – The School of Christian Perfection, Saint Alphonsus de Liguori, Translated by Cornelius J. Warren, 1910 by Mission Church Press, Boston, US.
Source II: Sermons for All the Sundays in the Year
SER-1. “The Jews Were Soon to Put Him to Death”
Source: Sermon XXXVIII, Ninth Sunday after Pentecost (lines 7689–7692).
Passage
“SEEING from a distance the city of Jerusalem, in which the Jews were soon to put him to death, Jesus Christ wept over it.”
Note
The opening sentence of Sermon XXXVIII and the framing device for the entire homily. Alphonsus states as plain biographical fact that the Jews were the agents who would put Christ to death, and uses this as the basis for an extended typological reading of Jerusalem’s destruction as a figure of the sinner’s soul at death. The identification of the Jews as Christ’s killers is not an aside but the load-bearing premise of the sermon’s argument.
SER-2. The “Injustice of the Jews“: The Barabbas Choice
Source: Sermon on ingratitude toward God (lines 1385–1392).
Passage
“We regard with wonder and amazement the injustice of the Jews, who, when Pilate offered to deliver Jesus or Barabbas, answered: ‘Not this man, but Barabbas.’ (John xviii. 40.) The conduct of sinners is still worse; for, when the Devil proposes to them to choose between the satisfaction of revenge a miserable pleasure and Jesus Christ, they answer: ‘Not this man, but Barabbas.’ That is, not the Lord Jesus, but sin.”
Note
A long homiletic tradition deploys the Jewish choice of Barabbas over Christ as a moral floor of ingratitude beneath which the Christian sinner has sunk. Alphonsus uses Jewish guilt as an intensifier — the point is that his congregation has done worse than the Jews — which structurally requires that guilt to be treated as established, unambiguous, and maximally serious.
SER-3. Born Among Jews: Soteriological Exclusion
Source: Sermon on the love of God (lines 5759–5764).
Passage
“See also the special love which God has shown you in bringing you into life in a Christian country, and in the bosom of the Catholic or true Church. How many are born among the pagans, among the Jews, among the Mahometans and heretics, and all are lost. Consider that, compared with these, only a few not even the tenth part of the human race have the happiness of being born in a country where the true faith reigns.”
Note
Jews are listed as one of four categories — alongside pagans, Mohammedans, and heretics — whose birth outside the Catholic Church results in damnation. The statement “all are lost” is unqualified. This is a standard expression of the extra Ecclesiam nulla salus doctrine as applied in popular preaching, but the casualness with which Jewish damnation is bundled with that of pagans and heretics is its own register.
SER-4. Crucifixion Among Jews: An Object of Malediction
Source: Sermon on the love of God (lines 5824–5827).
Passage
“They who were crucified among the Jews, were objects of malediction and reproach to all. ‘He is accursed of God that hangeth on a tree.’ (Deut. xxi. 23.) Our Redeemer wished to die the shameful death of the cross, in the midst of a tempest of ignominies and sorrows.”
Note
Alphonsus uses the Jewish law’s condemnation of the crucified — Deuteronomy 21:23 — to amplify the humiliation Christ accepted. “Among the Jews” situates crucifixion as a specifically Jewish form of social and theological disgrace: to be crucified in that context was not merely to die a criminal’s death but to be publicly marked as accursed by God. The argument requires Jewish law and Jewish social contempt to serve as the measure of maximum degradation.
SER-5. The Pharisees as Children of the Devil (John 8:44)
Source: Sermon on scandal (lines 4610–4613).
Passage
“Hence Jesus Christ said to the Pharisees, who, by their bad example, scandalized the people, that they were children of the devil, who was from the beginning, a murderer of souls. ‘You are of your father, the devil: he was a murderer from the beginning.’ (John viii. 44.)”
Note
John 8:44 is deployed as an established theological verdict on the Jewish religious leadership. The Pharisees are identified as children of the devil specifically because of their scandalous influence over the people. The application remains focused on the Pharisees as a leadership class rather than Jews collectively, but the authority of the text is treated as absolute and the identification with the devil as literal.
SER-6. The Pharisees’ “Malignant Intention” Against Christ
Source: Sermon LII, on the duties of religion (lines 10422–10425).
Passage
“ONE day, the Pharisees, with the malignant intention of ensnaring him in his speech, that they might afterwards accuse him before the ministers of Caesar, sent their disciples to ask Jesus Christ, if it were lawful to pay tribute to Caesar.”
Note
Alphonsus characterises the Pharisees’ approach not as theological inquiry but as premeditated malice. Matthew 22:15 says only that the Pharisees “consulted together to ensnare him in his speech”; the amplification to “malignant intention” and the specific goal of delivering Christ to Roman authority is Alphonsus’s own editorial gloss. This is a representative example of the homiletic tradition of darkening the attributed motives of the Pharisees beyond what the gospel text itself supplies.
SER-7. “Christ Was Scourged by the Lash of the Jews“
Source: Sermon on blasphemy (lines 10958–10961). Alphonsus cites St. Augustine, In Joannem.
Passage
“Christ was scourged by the lash of the Jews; but he is not less scourged by the blasphemies of false Christians.” (S. Aug. in Joan.)
Note
Alphonsus quotes Augustine’s comparison to indict Christian blasphemers: their verbal sin is equivalent to the physical violence the Jews inflicted on Christ. The passage presupposes the Jewish scourging as the established worst-case act of violence against Christ, against which all subsequent Christian offences are measured. He presents it approvingly as part of his own homiletic argument.
SER-8. St. Paul Reproved the Jews for Causing the Gentiles to Blaspheme
Source: Sermon on blasphemy (lines 11023–11027).
Passage
“St. Paul reproved the Jews, because by their sins they caused the Gentiles to blaspheme our God, and to laugh at his law. ‘For the name of God, through you, is blasphemed by the Gentiles.’ (Rom. ii. 24.)”
Note
Romans 2:24 — Paul’s rebuke of Jewish hypocrisy — is deployed as a precedent to heighten condemnation of Christian blasphemers: if Paul reproved Jews for causing Gentile blasphemy by their sins, how much worse are Christians who directly blaspheme themselves. Jewish sinfulness is treated as a known historical baseline, and the Pauline reproof as an authoritative verdict on the Jews as a group whose conduct dishonoured God before the world.
SER-9. “Woe to You, Scribes and Pharisees Hypocrites”: The Clean Cup
Source: Sermon on interior virtue versus external appearance (lines 10033–10037).
Passage
“For them is prepared the chastisement with which the Saviour threatened the Scribes and Pharisees, who were careful to have their cups and dishes clean, but nourished within unjust and unclean thoughts. ‘Woe to you, Scribes and Pharisees hypocrites; because you make clean the outside of the cup and of the dish; but, within you are full of rapine and uncleanness.’ (Matt, xxiii. 25.)”
Note
Alphonsus invokes Christ’s rebuke of the Scribes and Pharisees as the authoritative type of the sin he is preaching against — the Christian who cultivates an appearance of virtue while harbouring interior vice. The structure is the same as SCP-2 and SER-2: the Jewish religious leadership functions as the established, scripturally certified worst-case example, the floor beneath which the Christian hypocrite has now also fallen. “For them is prepared the chastisement” signals that Alphonsus is applying the Dominical verdict on the Pharisees directly to members of his congregation.
SER-10. “Woe to You, Scribes and Pharisees”: Tithing Minor Things, Neglecting Major
Source: Sermon on the predominant passion (lines 10137–10142).
Passage
“In this Saul was afterwards imitated by the Scribes and Pharisees, to whom our Lord said: ‘Woe to you, Scribes and Pharisees, because you tithe mint, and anise, and cummin, and have left the weightier things of the law, judgment, and mercy, and faith.’ (Matt, xxiii. 23.) They were careful to pay the tithe of things of least value, and neglected the more important things of the law: such as justice, charity to their neighbour, and faith in God.”
Note
A second deployment of the Matthaean “woe” sayings as a homiletic foil, here against the Christian who mortifies minor vices while indulging a dominant passion. The comparison is explicitly structural: King Saul’s behaviour at Amalek “was afterwards imitated by the Scribes and Pharisees.” The Pharisees are thus inserted into an already negative biblical narrative (Saul’s disobedience), compounding the charge. Alphonsus provides his own interpretive gloss — “the more important things of the law: such as justice, charity to their neighbour, and faith in God” — going beyond the scriptural text to characterise what the Pharisees lacked.
Source. Catholic Apologetics – SERMONS FOR ALL THE SUNDAYS IN THE YEAR, ST.ALPHONSUS M. LIGUORI. TRANSLATED FROM THE ITALIAN OF ST. ALPHONSUS M. LIGUORI, BISHOP OF ST. AGATHA AND FOUNDER OF THE CONGREGATION OF THE MOST HOLY REDEEMER. BY THE LATE VERY REV. NICHOLAS CALLAN, D.D., Roman Catholic College, Maynooth, EIGHTH EDITION. DUBLIN :JAMES DUFFY & SONS, 15 WELLINGTON QUAY;AND LONDON: 1 PATERNOSTER ROW. 1882.
Source III: The History of Heresies and Their Refutation
HOH-1. Host Desecration Libel (Posen)
Source: Chapter on Eucharistic miracles, §37 (lines 7764–7773). Alphonsus cites Thomas Treter, De Miraculis Eucharistiae.
Passage
“Some Jews bribed an unfortunate Christian servant woman to procure a consecrated Host for them, and when they got it, they brought it into a cavern, and cut it in little bits on a table with their knives, in contempt of the Christian Faith. The fragments immediately began to bleed, but instead of being converted by the miracle, they buried them in a field near the city of Posen, and went home. A Christian child soon after, who was taking care of some oxen, came into the field, and saw the consecrated particles elevated in the air, and shining as if made of fire, and the oxen all on their knees, as if in adoration.”
Note
Alphonsus presents this as straightforward historical fact within a systematic catalogue of Eucharistic miracles. The narrative follows the standard template of the medieval Host desecration libel: Jews obtain a consecrated Host through a corrupt intermediary; they subject it to deliberate physical violence in mockery of Christian belief; the Host bleeds; a miraculous revelation follows. This category of accusation was historically weaponised to justify anti-Jewish violence, expulsion, and judicial proceedings across medieval and early modern Europe. Of all the passages in this corpus, this is the one with the most direct connection to real-world harm done to Jewish communities.
HOH-2. Jews as Instigators of Iconoclasm
Source: Chapter on the Iconoclast controversy, §1 (lines 5764–5775).
Passage
“The first and fifth Acts of the Eighth General Council attest that the Gentiles, the Jews, the Marcionites, and the Manicheans, had previously declared war against Sacred Images… About this period, a Captain of the Jews, called Sarantapechis (or four cubits), induced the Caliph Jezzid to commence a destructive war against the Sacred Images in the Christian Churches, and promising him a long and happy reign as his reward… Constantius, Bishop of Nacolia, in Phrygia, introduced this Jewish doctrine among Christians. He was expelled from his See, in punishment of his perfidy, by his own Diocesans.”
Note
A named Jewish figure is identified as having personally manipulated the Caliph into launching the Iconoclast programme. The phrase “Jewish doctrine” is used as a term of opprobrium for the theological position subsequently adopted by the heretical bishop. Jews are identified not merely as enemies of Christianity in their own right but as the source of infection for heretical movements within the Church.
HOH-3. Jews and Saracens as Co-Patrons of Iconoclasm Through the Reformation
Source: Chapter on the end of the Iconoclast controversy (lines 6191–6193).
Passage
“those, as Danæus says, who boast of following the above-named masters, should add to their patrons both the Jews and the Saracens.”
Note
This passage extends HOH-2 by applying the Jewish-Saracen co-patronage of Iconoclasm not just to its eighth-century origins but to the entire subsequent history of the movement through the Reformation. Every tradition that rejected the veneration of sacred images — from the Petrobrusians to Calvin — is told that its true intellectual lineage runs through Jews and Muslims. Judaism and Islam are positioned as the permanent anti-devotional counter-tradition against which Catholic image-veneration defines itself.
HOH-4. Rabbinic Theology: “Puerilities and Nonsense”
Source: Section on Spinoza (lines 11486–11494).
Passage
“His parents were Jewish Merchants, who were expelled from Portugal, and, with numbers of their co-religionists, took refuge in Holland. He preferred the Jewish religion at first; he next became a Christian, at least nominally, for it is said he never was baptized; and he ended by becoming an Atheist. In his youth he studied the Rabbicinal Theology, but, disgusted with the puerilities and nonsense which form the greater part of it, he gave it up, and applied himself to philosophy.”
Note
The characterisation of rabbinic theology as consisting largely of “puerilities and nonsense” is offered as self-evident, requiring no argument. Alphonsus uses Spinoza’s rejection of Jewish learning not as a defence of Spinoza — who goes on to become an atheist — but incidentally, as background colour, which makes the dismissal of an entire intellectual tradition all the more casual. Note: “Rabbicinal” is the spelling in the source text.
HOH-5. Jewish Theological Incapacity: The Trinity Withheld
Source: Section on Trinitarian doctrine against the Socinians (lines 12483–12485).
Passage
“The distinction of the Divine Persons was not expressed more clearly in the Old Law, lest the Jews, like the Egyptians, who adored a plurality of Gods, might imagine that in the three Divine Persons there were three Essential Gods.”
Note
God deliberately withheld fuller Trinitarian revelation because Jewish theological understanding was too primitive or unreliable to receive it without lapsing into polytheism, just as the Egyptians had. The comparison of Jews to Egyptians — the paradigmatic idolaters of the Hebrew Bible — places Jews and pagan idolaters in the same category of religious incapacity, implying that even the recipients of the Mosaic revelation could not be trusted with the fullness of divine truth.
HOH-6. “The Very Jews Took It in This Sense”: The Stoning Attempt
Source: Section on the divinity of Christ against the Socinians (lines 12839–12846).
Passage
“why the very Jews took it in this sense, for they took up stones to stone him, as St. John relates, (x, 32): ‘Many good works I have shown you from my Father; for which of those works do you stone me? The Jews answered him: For a good work we stone thee not, but for blasphemy, and because thou, being a man, makest thyself God.’ ‘See,’ says St. Augustine ‘how the Jews understood what the Arians will not understand, for they are vexed to find that these words I and the Father are one, cannot be understood, unless the equality of the Son with the Father be admitted.'”
Note
Alphonsus uses the Jewish attempt to stone Christ as a polemical weapon against Arians and Socinians: the Jews, though enemies of Christ, at least correctly understood his claim to divine equality, while the heretics refuse to accept what even his persecutors recognised. The rhetorical structure is paradoxical — Jews appealed to as inadvertent witnesses to orthodox Christology — but the framing still places them firmly in the role of would-be murderers. Their correct theological understanding only deepens their guilt: they knew who he was and still tried to kill him.
The passage continues with Chrysostom’s addition, immediately following (lines 12846–12848):
“St. John Chrysostom here remarks that if the Jews erred in believing that our Saviour wished to announce himself as equal in power to the Father, he could immediately have explained the mistake, but he did not do so (8), but, quite the contrary, he confirms what he before said the more he is pressed; he does not excuse himself, but reprehends them.”
Chrysostom’s argument intensifies the paradox: even if the Jews erred in the manner of their understanding, Christ’s refusal to correct them and his continued self-assertion confirm the orthodox reading. The Jews are thus caught in a double bind — whether their perception was right or subtly wrong, the conclusion of Christ’s divinity stands. They remain the foil against which Arian error is refuted.
HOH-7. Condemned and Crucified on the Charge of Blasphemy
Source: Section on the divinity of Christ (lines 13048–13053).
Passage
“he never said a word, though the Jews were under the impression that he was guilty of blasphemy, and allowed himself to be condemned and crucified on that charge, for this was the great crime he was accused of before Pilate, ‘according to the law he ought to die, because he made himself the Son of God’ (John, xix, 7).”
Note
The Jewish charge of blasphemy before Pilate is presented as the direct legal cause of the crucifixion. The phrase “the Jews were under the impression that he was guilty of blasphemy” is notably careful — Alphonsus does not endorse the charge — but the overall framing confirms Jewish agency in the judicial process that led to the crucifixion.
HOH-8. Christ Wept Over Jerusalem: “The Crime of Putting Him to Death”
Source: Section on divine mercy and predestination (lines 17491–17493).
Passage
“Hence it was, that our Saviour, viewing Jerusalem, and considering the destruction the Jews were bringing on it, by the crime of putting him to death, ‘wept over it’ (Luke, xix, 41).”
Note
Christ’s weeping over Jerusalem is interpreted specifically as grief at the self-destructive crime the Jews were about to commit against him. Alphonsus’s gloss — “the crime of putting him to death” — encodes both deicide guilt and the theological interpretation of the destruction of Jerusalem as direct divine punishment for that crime. The word “crime” is Alphonsus’s own editorial characterisation; the scriptural text does not supply it.
HOH-9. God Permitted the Sin of the Jews in Putting Christ to Death
Source: Section on Calvinist predestination (lines 17610–17614).
Passage
“We give the same answer to that saying of St. Peter to the Jews, when he reproached them for putting Christ to death: ‘This same being, delivered up by the determinate counsel and foreknowledge of God, you, by the hands of wicked men, have crucified and slain’ (Acts, ii, 23). When they say, therefore, that it was by the counsel of God that the Jews put our Saviour to death, we answer, that God, indeed, decreed the death of Christ, for the salvation of the world, but he merely permitted the sin of the Jews.”
Note
Alphonsus argues that God decreed the salvific outcome but did not decree the Jewish sin that brought it about — he merely permitted it. The effect is to preserve both divine providence and human moral culpability. Crucially, the passage affirms Peter’s apostolic charge against the Jews — “you have crucified and slain” — as straightforwardly accurate, while clarifying only the degree of divine causation involved. The Jews‘ sin is not diminished; it is simply shown to fall outside the category of divine decree.
HOH-10. “St. Stephen Reproaches the Jews That They Resisted the Holy Ghost”
Source: Section on Calvinist predestination (lines 17298–17301).
Passage
“St. Stephen reproaches the Jews, that they resisted the Holy Ghost; but if it were true that God moved them to sin, they might answer, we do not resist the Holy Ghost, by any means, but do what he inspires us, and on that account we stone you.”
Note
Alphonsus invokes Stephen’s dying charge against the Jews (Acts 7:51: “You always resist the Holy Ghost”) as part of his refutation of Calvinist determinism. The argument runs: if God decreed Jewish sin, the Jews could not be reproached for resisting the Holy Ghost. Since Stephen’s reproach is authoritative, the sin must be genuinely their own. The passage affirms the Stephanic indictment as a correct and valid accusation, while using it to prove a point in a different theological dispute.
HOH-11. Jewish Presumption and Spiritual Blindness
Source: Section on grace and free will (lines 20162–20174).
Passage
“Where the Jews went astray was in presuming, without prayer, or faith in a Mediator to come, to be able to observe the law imposed on them… Hence it was that immediately after they forsook the Lord, and adored the golden calf. The Gentiles, who, by power of their own wills alone expected to make themselves just, were even more blind than the Jews.”
Note
Jews are introduced as the primary historical example of a people who failed through presumptuous self-reliance: they believed they could fulfil the commandments without prayer or faith in a coming Mediator, and their immediate apostasy to the golden calf is taken as proof. The phrase “even more blind than the Jews” is notable: the Gentile philosophers are compared unfavourably even to a group already characterised as having fundamentally “gone astray.” Jewish spiritual blindness functions as a known baseline of theological failure against which further comparisons are made.
HOH-12. Martin Bucer Identified as the Son of a Jew
Source: Biographical account of Martin Bucer (line 9277).
Passage
“Martin Bucer was the son of a poor Jew in Strasbourg, who left him at his death on the world, without any one to look to him, and only seven years of age.”
Note
Alphonsus introduces Bucer’s Jewish paternal origin as the opening biographical fact in his account of one of the major Protestant reformers. The placement — leading the account before mentioning his Dominican education, his learning, or his theological positions — gives the Jewish ancestry a structurally explanatory role. The reader familiar with the adversus Judaeos tradition is invited to read Bucer’s subsequent apostasy and heresy through the lens of his paternal background. This is the same logic found in HOH-4 (the Spinoza passage): Jewish origins used to contextualise an individual’s departure from orthodox Christianity.
HOH-13. Bucer’s Argument from Jewish “Hardness of Heart”
Source: Biographical account of Martin Bucer, continuation (lines 9283–9286).
Passage
“He was so taken with Luther’s doctrine on Celibacy, that he apostatized, and not only married once, but three times successively, saying, that as a divorce was allowed to the Jews, on account of the hardness of their hearts, it was also permitted to Christians of an extraordinary temperament.”
Note
Immediately following HOH-12, Alphonsus records Bucer’s own invocation of Jewish precedent as a justification for serial marriage. Alphonsus presents this without approval; but the phrase “hardness of their hearts” — drawn from Matthew 19:8, Christ’s explanation of why Moses permitted divorce — carries its standard patristic freight: Jewish incapacity for the higher moral demands of the Gospel. The passage thus does double work: it discredits Bucer’s argument by associating it with a characterisation of Jewish moral deficiency, while also transmitting that characterisation as a received truth in Alphonsus’s narrative.
HOH-14. Erasmus Called Scholastic Theology “Judaism“
Source: Section on Erasmus and the pre-Reformation controversies (lines 8057–8059).
Passage
“Erasmus, who took the lead among the Rhetoricians, began by deriding, first, the style, and, next, the arguments of the Theologians; he called their Theology Judaism, and said that the proper understanding of Ecclesiastical science depended altogether on erudition and the knowledge of languages.”
Note
Alphonsus records Erasmus’s use of “Judaism” as a term of contempt for Scholastic theology, in the context of his broader critique of Erasmus as a proto-heretic. The passage is notable in two directions. First, it shows that “Judaism” functioned as a ready insult within learned Christian discourse — synonymous with dry, external, letter-bound religion devoid of spiritual content — and that Alphonsus reports this usage without challenging the semantic force of the insult itself. Second, by placing this remark among a list of Erasmian outrages, Alphonsus implicitly treats “calling theology Judaism” as belonging to the same register of reproach as denying Papal authority and mocking the celibacy of the clergy.
HOH-15. The Puritans “as Exact in the Observance of the Sunday as the Jews Are of the Sabbath”
Source: Section on the Puritans (lines 10261–10263).
Passage
“They are as exact in the observance of the Sunday as the Jews are of the Sabbath. They are no friends to royalty, and it was through their means that Charles I. was brought to the block (as we have seen above, N. 85), in 1649.”
Note
Alphonsus uses Jewish Sabbatarianism as the comparator for extreme Puritan rigidity. The juxtaposition is pointed: the sentence linking Puritan sabbath-exactness directly to the execution of a king compounds both charges. Jewish Sabbath observance functions here as a known byword for legalistic rigidity — the opposite of Christian liberty — and the comparison is structurally pejorative: to observe Sunday “as the Jews are of the Sabbath” is implicitly to have misunderstood the nature of the Christian dispensation, substituting Old-Law literalism for evangelical freedom.
HOH-16. Second Council of Nicaea: Iconoclasm Derived from Jews, Gentiles, Manicheans, and Saracens
Source: Summary of the Second Council of Nicaea (787), Fifth Session (lines 6143–6145).
Passage
“In the Fifth, it was proved that the Iconoclasts had drawn their erroneous doctrines from the Gentiles, the Jews, the Manicheans, and the Saracens.”
Note
This is distinct from HOH-2 (which cites the Eighth General Council’s Acts on the same theme) and from HOH-3 (which extends Jewish co-patronage to the Reformation). Here Alphonsus summarises the doctrinal finding of the Fifth Session of the Second Council of Nicaea, which formally established the derivation of Iconoclasm. He reports it as a straightforward conciliar conclusion, with no qualification. The repeated linkage of Jews with Manicheans and Saracens — across three separate passages (HOH-2, HOH-3, HOH-16) — reinforces the structure in which Judaism is named as one of four permanent anti-Christian counter-traditions whose influence periodically re-infects the Church.
HOH-17. “The Very Pharisees Knew” that God Alone Forgives Sins
Source: Section on the divinity of Christ against the Socinians (lines 13033–13036).
Passage
“Now, God alone has the power of forgiving sins, and the very Pharisees knew this, for they said : ‘Who is this who speaketh blasphemies ? who can forgive sins but God alone ?’ (Luke, v, 21).”
Note
The rhetorical structure is identical to that of HOH-6: the Pharisees are invoked as inadvertent theological witnesses to orthodox Christology. Their charge of blasphemy against Christ — intended as an accusation — is turned into evidence for his divinity: even his enemies acknowledged that forgiving sins was a divine prerogative, and therefore Christ’s act of forgiveness proves his divinity. The phrase “the very Pharisees knew this” is Alphonsus’s own editorial framing; it functions as a concessive that deepens heretical culpability. If even the Pharisees knew this, the Socinians have no excuse.
HOH-18. “Christ Himself Said to the Jews That He Was Eternal”
Source: Section on the divinity of Christ against the Socinians (line 14702).
Passage
“Christ himself said to the Jews that he was eternal : ‘Amen, amen, I say unto you, before Abraham was I am’ (John, vii, 58).”
Note
The phrasing “Christ himself said to the Jews” is Alphonsus’s own editorial introduction to John 7:58. The Jews are constructed here as the original audience for Christ’s most direct self-identification as eternal — a claim they rejected and that ultimately contributed to the decision to crucify him. The adversus Judaeos dimension is embedded in the framing: Jews are the first refusers of the proclaimed eternal Word, making their unbelief the paradigmatic act of rejection against which all subsequent heterodoxy is measured.
HOH-19. Isaiah’s Lament Refers to “the Iniquity of the Jews of That Day”
Source: Section on grace and merit against the Lutherans (lines 16699–16701). Alphonsus cites St. Cyril.
Passage
“But, as St. Cyril explains this text, the Prophet here is not speaking of the works of the just, but of the iniquity of the Jews of that day.”
Note
Isaiah 64:6 — “we have all become as one unclean, and all our justices are as a polluted garment” — is quoted by Lutheran opponents as proof that all human works, even the just, are sinful before God. Alphonsus, following Cyril, deflects the universalist reading by restricting the reference: the “we” of Isaiah’s lament is not humanity generally but specifically the Jews of Isaiah’s own era and their particular iniquities. The argument requires that “the iniquity of the Jews of that day” be treated as a fixed, identifiable historical category of transgression, categorically distinct from the works of the just. Jewish sin becomes the interpretive container into which an apparently universal scriptural indictment is redirected, both exonerating Gentile Christians and reinforcing the image of the Jewish people as a historically sinful collective.
Source. Saints Books – THE HISTORY OF HERESIES, AND THEIR REFUTATION; OR, THE TRIUMPH OF THE CHURCH. TRANSLATED FROM THE ITALIAN OF ST. ALPHONSUS M. LIGUORI, BY THE REV. JOHN T. MULLOCK, OF THE ORDER OF ST, FRANCIS. DUBLIN: PUBLISHED BY JAMES DUFFY, 10, WELLINGTON-QUAY. 1847. PRINTED BY WILLIAM HOLDIN, 10, Abbey-street.