Border Lines: The Partition of Judaeo-Christianity

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University of Pennsylvania Press, 2004 - Religion - 374 pages
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. InBorder 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. Boyarin demonstrates that it was early Christian writers who first imagined religion as a realm of practice and belief that could be separated from the broader cultural network of language, genealogy, or geography, and that they did so precisely to give Christians an identity. In the end, he suggests, the Rabbis refused the option offered by the Christian empire of converting Judaism into such a religion. Christianity, a religion, and Judaism, something that was not a religion, stood on opposite sides of a borderline drawn more or less successfully across their respective populations. As a consequence, "Jewish" to this day is an adjective that can describe both an ethnicity and a set of beliefs, while Christian orthodoxy remains, perhaps, the only religion on earth.

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Contents

Introduction
1
Making a Difference The Heresiological Beginnings of Christianity and Judaism
35
Justin 5 Dialogue with the Jews The Beginnings of Orthodoxy
37
Naturalizing the Border Apostolic Succession in the Mishna
74
The Crucifixion of the Logos How Logos Theology Became Christian
87
The Intertextual Birth of the Logos The Prologue to John as a Jewish Midrash
89
The Jewish Life of the Logos Logos Theology in Pre and Pararabbinic Judaism
112
The Crucifixion of the Memra How the Logos Became Christian
128
The Yavneh Legend of the Stammaim On the Invention of the Rabbis in the Sixth Century
151
When the Kingdom Turned to Minut The Christian Empire and the Rabbinic Refusal of Religion
202
A Fragment
227
Notes
229
Bibliography
333
Index
361
Acknowledgments
373
Copyright

Sparks of the Logos Historicizing Rabbinic Religion
149

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About the author (2004)

Daniel Boyarin is the Taubman Professor of Talmudic Culture in the Departments of Near Eastern Studies and Rhetoric at the University of California, Berkeley. He is the author of Dying for God: Martyrdom and the Making of Christianity, Judaism and A Radical Jew: Paul and the Politics of Identity, and other books.

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