Border Lines

The Partition of Judaeo-Christianity

Daniel Boyarin

• Editorial: University of Pennsylvania Press
• Año: 2010
• ISBN:
  9780812203844
• Categoría: Teología y religión
• Categoría: Historia del cristianismo

The historical separation between Judaism and Christianity is often figured as a clearly defined break of a single entity into two separate religions. Following this model, there would have been one religion known as Judaism before the birth of Christ, which then took on a hybrid identity. Even before its subsequent division, certain beliefs and practices of this composite would have been identifiable as Christian or Jewish.In Border Lines, however, Daniel Boyarin makes a striking case for a very different way of thinking about the historical development that is the partition of Judaeo-Christianity.There were no characteristics or features that could be described as uniquely Jewish or Christian in late antiquity, Boyarin argues. Rather, Jesus-following Jews and Jews who did not follow Jesus lived on a cultural map in which beliefs, such as that in a second divine being, and practices, such as keeping kosher or maintaining the Sabbath, were widely and variably distributed. The ultimate distinctions between Judaism and Christianity were imposed from above by "border-makers, " heresiologists anxious to construct a discrete identity for Christianity. By defining some beliefs and practices as Christian and others as Jewish or heretical, they moved ideas, behaviors, and people to one side or another of an artificial border—and, Boyarin significantly contends, invented the very notion of religion.

Chapter 1

Introduction

Every day for thirty years a man drove a wheelbarrow full of sand over the Tijuana border crossing. The customs inspector dug through the sand each morning but could not discover any contraband. He remained, of course, convinced that he was dealing with a smuggler. On the day of his retirement from the service, he asked the smuggler to reveal what it was that he was smuggling and how he had been doing so. “Wheelbarrows; I've been smuggling wheelbarrows, of course.”

This humorous anecdote functions for me on several levels at once. First of all, I will insist that the borders between Christianity and Judaism are as constructed and imposed, as artificial and political as any of the borders on earth. I shall propose in this book that just as the border between Mexico and the United States is a border that was imposed by strong people on weaker people, so too is the border between Christianity and Judaism. Rather than a natural-sounding “parting of the ways,” such as we usually hear about with respect to these two “religions,” I will suggest an imposed partitioning of what was once a territory without border lines, much as India and Pakistan, and Israel and Palestine were artificially partitioned by colonial power. A wonderful simile of Jacques Derrida's based on such a partitioning may help develop the power of this metaphor here. Derrida wrote: “Like Czechoslovakia and Poland, [speech and writing] resemble each other, regard each other; separated nonetheless by a frontier all the more mysterious…because it is abstract, legal, ideal.”¹ We would not be wrong, I think, in appropriating this figure for another figure and applying all of these terms to the imagined frontier between Judaism and Christianity.

Second, the Tijuana border is a space for the crossing of contraband humans and contraband goods and services. Similarly, the border space between the juridical and abstract entities Judaism and Christianity, throughout late antiquity and even beyond, was a crossing point for people and religious practices. Religious ideas, practices, and innovations permeated that border crossing in both directions. There were people, as well, who simply didn't recognize the legitimacy or even the existence of the border. The Chicanos and Tejanos say: We didn't cross the border; the border crossed us. Furthermore, there were customs inspectors at the frontiers of this Christianity and Judaism. They inscribed the border lines in texts that we know of now as heresiologies. Finally, I will suggest that those very inspectors of religious customers, in their zeal to prevent any contraband from crossing the borders that they sought to enforce by fiat, were, themselves, the agents of illicit interchange of some of the most important contraband, the wheelbarrows—in this case, the very ideas of heresiology themselves.

How and why that border was written and who wrote it are the questions that drive this book. Once I am no longer prepared to think in terms of preexistent different entities—religions, if you will—that came (gradually or suddenly) to enact their difference in a “parting of the ways,” I need to ask who it was in antiquity who desired to make such a difference, how did they accomplish (or seek to accomplish) that making, and what was it that drove them? (And also, where possible, who and what resisted them?) Answers (not the answers) to these questions will be essayed in this book. My proposal here is that the discourse we know of as orthodoxy and heresy provides at least one crucial site for the excavation of a genealogy of Judaism and Christianity. The idea of orthodoxy comes into the world some time in the second century with a group of Christian writers called “heresiologists,” the anatomizers of heresy and heresies, and their Jewish counterparts, the Rabbis. “Heresiology”—the “science” of heresies—inscribes the border lines, and heresiologists are the inspectors of religious customs. Ancient heresiologists tried to police the boundaries so as to identify and interdict those who respected no borders, those smugglers of ideas and practices newly declared to be contraband, nomads who would not recognize the efforts to institute limits, to posit a separation between “two opposed places,” and thus to clearly establish who was and who was not a “Christian,” a “Jew.”² Authorities on both sides tried to establish a border, a line that, when crossed, meant that someone had definitively left one group for another. They named such folk “Judaizers” or minim, respectively, and attempted to declare their beliefs and practices, their very identities, as out of bounds.

Groups that are differentiated in various ways by class, ethnicity, and other forms of social differentiation become transformed into “religions” in large part, I would suggest, through discourses of orthodoxy/heresy.³ Early Christian heresiology, whatever else it is, is largely the work of those who wished to eradicate the fuzziness of the borders, semantic and social, between Jews and Christians and thus produce Judaism and Christianity as fully separate (and opposed) entities—as religions, at least in the eyes of Christianity.⁴

For nearly two decades now, scholars of early Christianity have been building toward a major revision of the history of Christian heresiology. The work of much of the scholarship of the first half of the twentieth century consisted of dislodging the traditional “Eusebian” account of the origins of orthodoxy and heresy, within which orthodoxy was simply the teaching of Jesus as communicated to the apostles and passed down to bishops, while heresy was the later incursion of false and wicked error into Christian tradition under the influence of the Devil or his later secularized counterpart Greek philosophy. Scholars throughout the twentieth century demonstrated that in many cases “heretical” ideas and practices were coeval—at least—with those that came to be defined as orthodox. The culmination of the scholarly direction was in the work of Walter Bauer, which had enormous impact twice, once when it was published in German in the 1930s and once again after being published in English in 1971.⁵ Bauer's work has remained, however, problematic in some respects, notably in his strange ascription of essence to heresy and orthodoxy, such that he could state that in many places, “heresy preceded orthodoxy.” Working within a Foucauldian paradigm, Alain Le Boulluec has completely shifted the research strategy.⁶ Apart from his specific historical achievements and insights, Le Boulluec's most important move has been to shift the scholarly conversation away from the question of orthodoxy and heresy understood as essences and to move the discussion in the direction of a history of the representation of orthodoxy and heresy, the discourse that we know of as heresiology, the history of the idea of heresy itself. From this perspective, it will be seen that orthodoxy cannot precede heresy (the traditional account), nor can heresy precede orthodoxy (Bauer); orthodoxy and heresy must, of necessity, come into the world of discourse together. Orthodoxy and heresy are decidedly not things, but notions that must always be defined in each other's context.⁷ In this book, “orthodoxy” means those church writers, whatever the specifics of their own doctrines, who promulgate the notion of orthodoxy, and the opposite of orthodoxy in terms of the scholarly discourse adopted here is not heresy but rather something like heterodoxy, represented by religious writers, thinkers, practitioners who do not operate with a notion of orthodoxy. This means, inter alia, that some writers defined by the Church as heretics belong to the camp of orthodoxy, insofar as they promulgate such a notion of Christian truth.

The Greek term hairesis earlier meant just a “choice,” that is an affinity group joined by common ideas, theories, and practices, without any pejorative overtones at all. Le Boulluec found that Justin Martyr, a “pagan” convert who lived in Asia Minor and Rome through the first two thirds or so of the second century, was a crucial figure (if not the crucial figure) in the Christian shift from understanding hairesis to be a “group of people, a party or sect marked by common ideas and aims” to being “a party or sect that stands outside established or recognized tradition, a heretical group that propounds false doctrine in the form of a heresy.”⁸ As Le Boulluec himself puts it, the result of his research is that “Il revient à Justin d'avoir inventé l'héresie.”⁹ Le Boulluec has been, perhaps, at more of a loss to explain the causes and functions of this invention, largely attributing them to the influence of “Judaism” and the challenge of “Gnosticism,” neither of which turns out, on balance, to be a very compelling explanation. The very practices of the Rabbis that Le Boulluec identifies as models for Christian orthodoxy are only attested—as is all of rabbinic Judaism—later than Justin, and, as Elaine Pagels has recently made clear, Justin hardly seems to know of “gnostics” at all.¹⁰ Other explanations, other ways of relating rabbinic to Christian orthodoxy, need to be sought.

Building on Le Boulluec's work, I shall argue in this book that at least a significant part of the function of heresiology, if not its proximate cause, was to define Christian identity—not only to produce the Christian as neither Jew nor Greek but also to construct the whatness of what Christianity would be, not finally a third race or genos but something entirely new, a religion.¹¹ It is no accident, I will suggest, that the alleged “inventor of heresy” is also the author of “one of the earliest texts [The Dialogue] which reflects a self-consciously independent Christianity,”¹² or, as I would prefer to put the same point, one of the earliest texts that is self-consciously engaged in the production of an independent Christianity.

Similarly, where scholars of rabbinic Judaism have looked for evidence of response to Christianity at specific points within rabbinic texts, either as denunciation in the form of minut or as imitation of or polemic against certain Christian practices and ideas, I can follow Le Boulluec's lead in taking up Foucault's notions of discourse and shift my investigation from the specifics of what was thought or said to the episteme or universe of possible knowledge within which they were said and thought. Matching, then, Le Boulluec's transformation of the study of heresiology from the reconstruction of heresies to the history of the notion of heresy in Christianity, I can try for a similar transformation in the history of Judaism, transforming my inquiry from the identification of minim to the history of the notion of minut in rabbinic texts.

To come back to my allegory one more time (perhaps to belabor it): Where till now, it might be said, scholarship has been looking for what is hidden in the sand (with more success than the customs inspector), I prefer to look at smuggled wheelbarrows as the vehicles of language within which identities are formed and differences made.¹³ A very sophisticated recent effort in the former direction has been made by Israeli historian Israel Yuval.¹⁴ It is a measure, however, of our different approaches that Yuval can write: “Whenever we find a similarity between Judaism and Christianity, we must assume that we have a case of influence by the Christian surroundings on the Jews, not the opposite, unless it can be proven that the Jewish sources are ancient and earlier than [the Christian ones].”¹⁵ While Yuval seems absolutely correct in taking cognizance of the enormous asymmetry in power between Jews and Christians in the late Roman world (as Heine famously wrote, wie es sich christelt, so jüdelt es sich), his formulation of the problematic is dependent on the assumption that there are already fully formed, bounded identities (both social and cultural) of Christianity and Judaism already in late antiquity, rather than seeing the processes of formation. This is in part, I think, an artifact of looking for goods smuggled in the sand and not the wheelbarrows. I agree completely with Yuval's claim that there is something fundamentally upside down in looking within rabbinic sources for “background” to the New Testament.¹⁶ Judaism is not the “mother” of Christianity; they are twins, joined at the hip. I am also in total agreement with his insistence that the frequently expressed scholarly notion that Jews were not concerned with Christianity until the Middle Ages is a serious error.¹⁷ Here's an example of the difference between us: Yuval provides an illuminating discussion of the rabbinic legends of the death of the Messiah, the son of Joseph. He finds remarkable parallels between the Passion midrash of the Gospels and these midrashic texts, insisting, however, that they must reflect Christian influence on Jews.¹⁸ I have no doubt that the Rabbis were aware of the use of Psalm 22 in the construction of the death of the Messiah in the Gospels and that they sometimes reflected it and even parodied it.¹⁹ It is hard for me to imagine, however, that a whole rabbinic narrative of a suffering and dying Messiah arose in response to and in a polemic against the Gospel midrash. I would prefer to think about a theme common to the two Judaic dialects, inflected differently for each, including the different weights that it received there.²⁰ This view is to be contrasted, also, with the view of Jacob Neusner who would limit such responses to the fourth century.²¹

According to the readings proposed here, in the tannaitic period (roughly equivalent to the period of ante-Nicene Christianity), rabbinic texts project a nascent and budding heresiology, different in content (in some ways complementary in content) but strikingly similar in form to that of the second-century Fathers. In their very efforts to define themselves and mark themselves off from each other, Christian writers of orthodoxy and the Rabbis were evolving in important and strikingly parallel ways. Shaye Cohen has already noticed this and wondered how and by what means were the rabbinic and Christian developments connected. In a very lucid programmatic exploration of scholarship on heresy, Michel Desjardin articulated the following desiderata for Jewish scholarship: “To what extent was the Jewish concern for heresy early, and what explains the striking overlap in heresiological perspectives between the rabbis and the fathers? The term minim has to be thrown into the heretical pot, and its use compared in detail to haretikoi. Could the Jewish treatment of Christians perhaps have led to a Christian devaluation of others as ‘heretics?’”²² I hope to be addressing some of these questions in this book. My suggestion is that it was in large part the very discursive effect of the mutual efforts to distinguish Judaism from Christianity that provided the major impetus for the development of heresiology in its different forms among the second-century church writers and the Rabbis. (Note that this is a very different formulation from Desjardin's.) Little did they suspect, I warrant, that in struggling so hard to define who was in and who was out, who was Jewish and who was Christian, what was Christianity and what was Judaism, it was they themselves who were smuggling the wheelbarrows, the very discourses of heresiology and of religion as identity.

One of the scholars who has been most active in the study of the history of the complex interactions and negotiations out of which Judaism and Christianity were formed is Judith M. Lieu. In a recent paper, she has set the question elegantly:

Both “Judaism” and “Christianity” have come to elude our conceptual grasp; we feel sure that they are there, and can quote those “others,” outsiders, who were no less sure. How else are we to understand the fiscus judaicus, how else to make sense of the death, if not of the myriads of whom Eusebius speaks, at least of some who would not let go of their conviction about Jesus as they understood it? Yet when we try to describe, when we seek to draw the boundaries which will define our subject for us, we lack the tools, both conceptual and material. It seems to me equally justifiable to “construct” “Christianity” in opposition to “Judaism” at the moment when Jesus “cleansed the Temple,” at least in the literary representation of that event, and to think of that separation only in the fourth century, stimulated by dramatic changes in access to power—and I could call to my defence advocates of both positions, no doubt determined by their own starting-points and definitional frameworks.²³

I think that Lieu has hit the nail precisely on the head. The question of when Christianity separated from Judaism is a question whose answer is determined ideologically. We need always to ask: Whose Judaism; whose Christianity? Shall we make the determining point an act of inner-Jewish hostility to certain authorities that we choose now to name “the Jews,” or are we looking for something else, and if so, what? What is revealed and concealed in this or that way of framing or defining the issues, in seeing Christianity as separate from Judaism ab ovo or in claiming that “it takes an army” to separate them? I am interested in the disclosures that await us when we take something like the second position enumerated by Lieu, that sometime around the fourth century we can begin to speak of Judaism and Christianity as separate “religions,”²⁴ and, even then, as I shall try to show, primarily (if not exclusively) when speaking from a Christian location. But a partial answer to the paradox that, as early as the first century, Christians were, nevertheless, recognizable at least in some places as not-Jews (Tacitus, the fiscus judaicus, other evidence) is to note that whether or not there were Christianity and Judaism, there were, it seems, at least some Christians who were not Jews, and, of course, many Jews who were not Christians, and the distinctions of identity/identification would, ultimately, make a difference. They hadn't, however, yet. There seems to be no absolute point, theological or otherwise, at which we could say for this early period: It is this that marks the difference between Judaism and Christianity. I don't wish to argue that this position is correct but rather consciously to make it the starting point in a search for “the boundaries that were also crossing points,” and for more glimpses of the folks, “even perhaps the majority,” who dwelt in the interstices of the texts and objected to or simply ignored the work of the religious customs officers. Moreover, adopting such a perspective—a perspective that refuses the option of seeing Christian and Jew, Christianity and Judaism, as fully formed, bounded, and separate entities and identities in late antiquity—will help us, I hope, to perceive more fully the work of those early Christian and Jewish writers as they were making the difference. Accordingly, rather than attempting (even if that were possible) a complete coverage of the texts of my period, looking for the voices and texts of the suppressed versions...