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Justin Martyr Invents Judaism

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  28 July 2009

Daniel Boyarin
Daniel Boyarin
Affiliation:
Daniel Boyarin is Taubman Professor of Talmudic Culture in the departments of Near Eastern studies and rhetoric at the University of California at Berkeley.
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Abstract

The historiography of Judaism in the rabbinic period (together with its implications for the history of Christianity) had been, until quite recently, founded on the assumption that the kind of historical information that rabbinic legends could yield was somehow directly related to the narrative contents that they displayed, which were understood as more or less reliable depending on the critical sensibility of the scholar. This scholarship was not, of course, generally naïve or pious in its aims or methods. A recurring question within such research had to do with the question of the credibility of a given text or passage of rabbinic literature or the recovery of its “historical kernel.” For the method or approach that I take up, all texts are by definition equally credible, for the object of research is the motives of the construction of the narrative itself, that is taken to attest to the political context of its telling or retellingrather than to the context of the narrative's content. All texts inscribe the social practices within which they originate, and many also seek to locate the genealogy of those social practices in a narrative of origins, producing a reversal of cause and effect. This reversal is a mode of narration that is particularly germane to the project of replacing traditional patterns of belief and behavior (“We have always done it this way”) with new ones that wish nevertheless to claim the authority, necessarily, of hoary antiquity—in short, to the invention of orthodoxies.

Type
Articles
Information
Church History , Volume 70 , Issue 3 , September 2001 , pp. 427 - 461
Copyright
Copyright © American Society of Church History 2001

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References

1. Neusner, Pace Jacob, passim throughout his works since the 1960's, although I wish to say right here that it was Neusner's work that largely was responsible for dislodging the previously regnant paradigm, his rhetorical excess notwithstanding.Google Scholar

2. This is the fundamental insight of the “New Historicism.” See most recently Gallagher, Catherine and Greenblatt, Stephen, Practicing New Historicism (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2000).Google Scholar

3. Boyarin, Daniel, “The Diadoche of the Rabbis; or, Rabbi Judah at Yavneh,” in Jezvish Culture and Society under the Christian Roman Empire, eds. Kalmin, Richard and Schwartz, Seth (Louvain: Peeters, 2002).Google ScholarSee, making a closely related point, Neusner, Jacob, “Judaism After the Destruction of the Temple: An Overview,” in Formative Judaism: Religious, Historical, and Literary Studies, 3d series, Torah, Pharisees, and Rabbis, Brown Judaica Series 46 (Chico, Calif.: Scholars, 1983), 83–98.Google ScholarFor the impact that this revisionist work has already had on New Testament studies, see, for example, Motyer, Stephen, Your Father the Devil?: A New Approach to John and “the Jews,” Paternoster Biblical and Theological Studies (Carlisle, U.K.: Paternoster, 1997), 75.Google ScholarMotyer, however, seems too readily to assume that Neusner's conclusions have been generally accepted, not noticing that the very example he gives of work done under the “old paradigm” was published quite a bit after Neusner's. Moreover, at least in Neusner's “The Formation of Rabbinic Judaism: Yavneh (Jamnia) from A.D. 70 to 100,” in Principat: Religion (Judentum: Pälastinisches Judentum [Forts.I), eds. Aufstieg, Wolfgang Haase and Welt, Niedergang der Römischen (Berlin: Walter de Gruyter, 1979), 3–42, Neusner seems prepared to ascribe a much greater role to a real, historical Yavneh than I would.Google Scholar

4. I prefer to use the formulae b.c. and A.c. for “Before Christ” and “After Christ” respectively, rather than the colonialist b.c.e. and c.e. or the theologically loaded a.d.Google Scholar

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6. Mimouni, Simon Claude, Le judéo-christianisme ancien: essais historiques (Paris: Cerf, 1998), 161–88 reached me too late to be fully incorporated into this discussion. Quick perusal, however, of 185–88 suggests that vis-à-vis the issue of the “curse of the heretics,” the author is working from entirely different historiographical assumptions than I am (that is, “believing” the sources), although I wish to emphasize that I am making this statement only with regard to this particular matter and nothing else in his book, which seems to be the fullest and most sophisticated study of so-called “Jewish Christianity” to date.Google Scholar

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8. “It was especially the influential work History and Theology in the Fourth Gospel by Martyn, J. Louis that has given this theory an almost canonical status,”Google Scholarvan der Horst, P. W., “The Birkat Ha-Minim in Recent Research,” in Hellenism, Judaism, Christianity: Essays on Their Interaction, Contributions to Biblical Exegesis and Theology (Leuven: Peeters, 1998), 113.Google Scholar

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11. My student Millstein, Henry has shown that such usage is first attested in the mid-third-century Tosefta. This is not to deny the possibility that minim may be Jewish-Christians this early.Google Scholar

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13. See, for instance, Flusser, David, “Some of the Precepts of the Torah from Qumran (4QMMT) and the Benediction Against the Heretics,” Tarbis 61 (1992): 371 (in Hebrew, with English summary). In 1993, P. W. van der Horst published a critical survey of the entire question, “Birkat Ha-Minim.”Google Scholar

14. Wilson, , Related Strangers, 180;Google ScholarSanders, Jack T., Schismatics, Sectarians, Dissidents, Deviants: The First One Hundred Years of Jewish-Christian Relations (Valley Forge, Pa.: Trinity Press International, 1993), 58–61,Google Scholarstill reflects, however, the older views, as does the otherwise so canny and critical Dunn, James D. G., The Partings of the Ways Between Christianity and Judaism and Their Significance for the Character of Christianity (Philadelphia: Trinity Press International, 1991), 222.Google ScholarI am also in obvious disagreement with Pearson, Birger, “1 Thessalonians 2:13–16: A Deutero-Pauline Interpolation,” in The Emergence of the Christian Religion: Essays on Early Christianity (Harrisburg, Pa.: Trinity Press International, 1997), 72–73, n. 74, although only on this point.Google Scholar

15. Motyer, Your Father, 93.Google Scholar

16. Stemberger, “Synode,” 16.Google Scholar

17. And yet, on the basis of these data, Skarsaune is prepared to conclude, “The prayer was introduced between 70 and 100 A.D., and had for its purpose to prevent Jewish Christians and other heretics from staying within the synagogue community,” Skarsaune, Oskar, The Proof from Prophecy—a Study in Justin Martyr's Proof-Text Tradition: Text-Type, Provenance, Theological Profile (Leiden: E. J. Brill, 1987), 290. Skarsaune insists that “the patristic evidence cannot easily be dismissed,” but, as I hope to show, there simply is no patristic witness that counts as evidence for the given proposition!Google Scholar

18. Lieberman, Saul, Order Zeraim, Vol. 1 of The Tosefta According to Codex Vienna, with Variants from Codices Erfurt, London, Genizah Mss. and Editio Princeps (Venice, 1521) (New York: The Jewish Theological Seminary of America, 1955), 17–18.Google Scholar

19. Not a euphemism, the “blessings” are that which Jews pray for; the curse is a curse on our enemies and thus a blessing to us, so to speak.Google Scholar

20. It is not impossible to imagine, even, that it is the Qumran sectaries who were originally so designated.Google Scholar

21. Horst, Van der, “Birkat Ha-Minim,” 116.Google Scholar

22. That is, prayer in the general sense. Although it is highly significant that Justin does not mention that this “curse” took place during the central liturgy of the synagogue, the “eighteen blessings,” it is nevertheless the case that he emphasizes that the cursing took place in synagogue, that is, most plausibly at some point in a prayer service in the broadest sense.Google Scholar

23. Williams, A. Lukyn, ed. and trans., Justin Martyr: The Dialogue with Trypho, Translations of Christian Literature (London: SPCK, 1930), 33;Google ScholarJustin, , Dialogus Cum Tryphone, ed. Marcovich, Miroslav, Patristische Texte und Studien Bd. 47 (Berlin: Walter de Gruyter, 1997), 97.Google ScholarSee Goldfahn, A. H., “Justinus Martyr und die Agada,” Monatschrift fur Geschiclite und Wissenschaft des Judentums 22 (1873): 56;Google ScholarSkarsaune, , Proof from Prophecy, 290;Google ScholarStrack, Hermann and Billerbeck, Paul, Kommentar zum Neuen Testament aus Talmud und Midrasch (München: C. H. Beck, 1924), 4: 212.Google Scholar

24. Williams, , Dialogue, 94;Google ScholarJustin, , Dialogus Cum Tryphone, 147–48.Google Scholar

25. Williams, , Dialogue, 202;Google ScholarJustin, , Dialogus Cum Tryphone, 235.Google Scholar

26. Horbury, William, “The Benediction of the Minim and Early Jewish-Christian Controversy,” Journal of Theological Studies 33 (1982): 20Google Scholar summarizes the history of scholarship on this issue, from Samuel Krauss who initiated this argument (1893) to its acceptance by virtually everyone from Ismar Elbogen to W. D. Davies and W. H. C. Frend. For a critique of this view akin to mine, see Setzer, ClaudiaJewish Responses to Early Christians: History and Polemics, 30–150 C.E. (Minneapolis: Fortress, 1994), 141.Google Scholar

27. Wilson, , Related Strangers, 182.Google Scholar

28. Wilson, , Related Strangers, 180.Google Scholar

29. See also Goodman, Martin, State and Society in Roman Galilee, A.D. 132–212 (Totowa, N.J.: Rowman and Allanheld, 1983), 86, implying as well such a denial.Google Scholar

30. Reuven Kimelman has suggested that the assumption that the so-called curse of the minim denotes automatically Christians “is behind the oft-repeated assertion that about the year 100 the breach between Judaism and Christianity became irreparable,” (Kimelman, “Birkat Ha-Minim”).Google Scholar

31. Horbury, , “Benediction,” 24, 26. Kimelman has interestingly interpreted the notice in Justin Martyr that the Jews “scoff at the King of Israel” after their prayers as owing to the Jewish need to demonstrate to the Romans, at the time of Justin, precisely that they are not Christians, for purpose of escaping martyrdom and persecution (Kimelman, “Birkat Ha-Minim,” 235). Once again, we should remember that in texts from Pliny's famous letter to Trajan to the martyrdom of Polycarp, precisely, cursing or reviling Christ was an effective means to acquittal of the “crime” of being named Christian.Google Scholar

32. In addition to Justin, such texts as Melito's Peri Pascha and the martyrdoms of Polycarp and Pionios attest to both the closeness and the tenseness of the contact in that area. See Judith Lieu, “Accusations of Jewish Persecution in Early Christian Sources, with Particular Reference to Justin Martyr and the Martyrdom of Polycarp,” in Tolerance and Intolerance in Early Judaism and Christianity, eds. Stanton, Graham N. and Stroumsa, Guy G. (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998), 279–95.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

33. Note that my position is somewhat different from Kimelman's in that I am denying that there is any evidence for this “blessing” at all before the mid-third century, while he accepts its existence from the first century but argues that it was only against the Jewish-Christian minority and not all Christians. Van der Horst essentially accepts Kimelman's argument, claiming as well that the alleged early birkath hamminim was not directed against Gentile Christians, but, “in all probability it was only in the course of the fourth century (probably the second half) that the rapidly deteriorating relation between Christianity and the government on the one hand, and Judaism on the other, eventually led to the insertion of the curse against Christians in general into the Eighteen Benedictions. This curse is not the cause but the effect of the ever growing separation between the two religions. The original Birkat ha-minim, whatever its text may have been, was never intended to throw Christians out of the synagogues—that door always remained open, even in Jerome's time—but it was a berakhah that served to strengthen the bonds of unity within the nation in a time of catastrophe by deterring all those who threatened it” (van der Horst, “Birkat Ha-Minim,” 124 [emphasis added]). Although van der Horst's hypothetical reconstruction is somewhat different from my conjecture, it is compatible as well with the revision of Judaeo-Christian history that I am proposing herein.Google Scholar

34. Kimelman, “Birkat Ha-Minim,” 6. Note that the collocation, “minim and nosrim” is precisely matched in Jerome's peroration to Augustine: “Usque hodie per totas Orientis synagogas inter Judaeos haeresis est quae dicitur Minaeorum, et a Pharisaeis nunc usque damnatur: quos vulgo Nazraeos nuncupant” (Jerome, Correspondence, ed. Hilberg, Isidorus, Corpus Scriptorum Ecclesiasticorum Latinorum [Vienna: Verlag der Osterreichischen Akademie der Wissenschaften, 1996], 381–82).Google Scholar

35. Boyarin, Daniel, “A Tale of Two Synods: Nicaea, Yavneh and the Making of Orthodox Judaism,” Exemplaria 12 (2000): 21–62.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

36. In a forthcoming paper, “Pious Fictions: The Theodosian Code, the Letter of Severus of Minorca, and the ‘Curse of the Christians,’” I shall be arguing further for a particular fifth-century context for this curse as part of a general, empire-wide (and beyond) discursive move on the part of both Christian and Jewish orthodox authorities to effect a final, thorough break between the religions.Google Scholar

37. I wish to thank Karen King for making this point to me. Runia, David T., “‘Where, Tell Me, is the Jew?’: Basil, Philo and Isidore of Pelusium,” Vigiliae Christianae 46 (1992): 172–89, shows this explicitly in the work of Isidore of Pelusium, who uses Judaism and polytheism in a topos similar to that of Gregory Nyssa, who in turn describes orthodoxy as the perfect mid-point between Sabellianism and Arianism.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

38. This is a somewhat different hypothesis from that of Alan Segal (to whose work I am nevertheless very much indebted) who writes of rabbinic talk of “two powers in heaven” as “the Jewish witness to the rise of Christianity,” while I am seeing it as part of the process of the Jewish construction or invention of Christianity (Segal, Alan F., Two Powers in Heaven: Early Rabbinic Reports About Christianity and Gnosticism, Studies in Judaism in Late Antiquity 25 [Leiden: E. J. Brill, 1977], 267).Google Scholar

39. By this term, I am only mobilizing the self-understanding of Christians (except for Marcion and his ilk) in the early period.Google Scholar

40. Boulluec, Alain Le, La notion d'hérésie dans la littérature grecque IIe–IIIe siècles (Paris: Études Augustiniennes, 1985).Google ScholarSee especially, partially in the wake of Le Boulluec, Burrus, Virginia, The Making of a Heretic: Gender, Authority, and the Priscillianist Controversy, Transformations of the Ancient World (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1995);Google ScholarLyman, J. Rebecca, “The Making of a Heretic: The Life of Origen in Epiphanius Panarion 64,” Studia Patristica 31 (1997): 445–51.Google Scholar

41. See also, partially anticipating Le Boulluec, Altendorf, H.-D., “Zum Stichwort: Rechtgläubigkeit und Ketzerei in ältesten Christentum,” Zeitschrift für Kirchengeschichte 80 (1969): 61–74.Google Scholar

42. This lucid summary of Le Boulluec's thesis is given by Runia, David T., “Philo of Alexandria and the Greek Hairesis-Model,” Vigiliae Christianae 53 (1999): 118.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

43. Le Boulluec, La notion, 110. Runia, “Philo and Hairesis,” 126, thinks to have unsettled Le Boulluec's claim via evidence that in Philo the term hairesis “implies condemnation,” however I do not see his argument at all. Philo writes in the text cited by Runia: “All the philosophies that have flourished in Greece and in other lands sought to discover the principles of nature, but were unable to gain a clear perception of even the slightest one. Here is the clear proof, namely the disagreements and discords and doctrinal differences of the practioners of each hairesis who refute each other and are refuted in turn.” This extract does not in my opinion show that the term hairesis had undergone the semantic transformation to “heresy.” What Philo is saying here is that all of Greek philosophy is invalid, as evidenced by the dissensio philosophorum. All hairesis means here is philosophical school; it is Greek philosophy itself that is being condemned, not “heresy.” Interestingly enough, Runia's own argument throughout the paper militates against seeing the shift to “a heretical group that propounds false doctrine” already in Philo.Google Scholar

44. Goranson, Stephen, “Others and Intra-Jewish Polemic as Reflected in Qumran Texts,” in The Dead Sea Scrolls: A Comprehensive Account, eds. Flint, P. and Vanderkam, J. (Leiden: E. J. Brill, 1999), 535.Google Scholar

45. Goodman, Martin, “The Function of Minim in Early Rabbinic Judaism,” in Geschichte— Tradition —Reflexion: Festschrift für Martin Hengel zum 70. Geburtstag, eds. Cancik, H., Lichtenberger, H., and Schäfer, P. (Tübingen: Mohr Siebeck, 1996), 503–504.Google Scholar

46. Mason, Steve, Flavins Josephus on the Pharisees: A Composition-Critical Study, Studia Post-Biblica 39 (Leiden New York: E. J. Brill, 1991), 202.Google Scholar

47. The problem of dating of new developments within rabbinic Judaism remains a thorny one. For an extreme version of the claim that first attestation equals first appearance in the discourse, see Neusner, Jacob, The Canonical History of Ideas: The Place of the So-Called Tannaite Midrashim, University of Southern Florida Studies in the History of Judaism (Atlanta: Scholars, 1990),Google Scholarand for critical discussion Boyarin, Daniel, “On the Status of the Tannaitic Midrashim,” Journal of the American Oriental Society 113 (1993): 455–65.Google ScholarSee also Kalmin, Richard, Sages, Stories, Authors, and Editors in Rabbinic Babylonia, Brown Judaica Studies 300 (Atlanta: Scholars, 1994).Google ScholarFirst occurence in the literature, even when we can reasonably project a date for that first occurence, constitutes, of course, only a terminus ante quem for the ideologeme at issue; the question is, of course, to what extent the silence of prior sources where one might expect the term or concept to appear constitutes a terminus post quem. I am arguing here that the total absence of any term for “heretic”—together with the usage of hairesis in the older sense of “choice” or school—or any practice of formal anathematizing in both the Hebrew and Greek Jewish literature before the late second century, in contexts where it might be expected, as well as the apparent development of these notions in the closely associated Christian circles of that time, constitutes a fairly strong indication that something significant was happening around this issue in the discourse of that time. This should not be taken as a strong claim that the notion of heresy had no antecedent or nascent moments prior to this attestation.Google Scholar

48. Finkelstein, Louis, Introduction to Tractates Fathers and The Fathers of Rabbi Nathan, (New York: Jewish Theological Seminary of America, 1950), 206 (in Hebrew)—in slightly disguised allusion to a formulation like “the Apostles’ Creed.”Google Scholar

49. It is for that reason that Epicureans are the archetypical heretics within much of rabbinic literature as well. This interpretation is similar to that of Élie Bikerman [= Elias Bickerman], “La chaîne de la tradition pharisienne,” Revue biblique 59 (1952): 47, n. 4,Google Scholarcontra Albeck, Hanoch, Mishna (Jerusalem: Mossad Bialik, 1953), ad loc, who writes: “One who follows the system of the Greek philosopher Epicurus, who taught the people to seek pleasure, and this is a designation for anyone who despises the Torah and the Sages, who command the person to take upon himself the yoke of the Kingdom of Heaven” [my translation],Google Scholarand contra Danby, Herbert, ed. and trans., The Mishnah (London: Oxford University Press, 1974), 397, n. 4. See, too, “Aristotle is blamed because his cosmology endangered the idea of divine providence and his theory of the fifth element the immortality of the soul. These are however fundamental dogmas of Schulplatonismus which regarded Aristotle and Epicurus as the representatives of ‘godlessness’ par excellence See Origen, Cels. I. 21; VIII. 45,”.Google ScholarBarnard, Leslie W., Justin Martyr: His Life and Thought (London: Cambridge University Press, 1967), 9. Interestingly enough, one of the primary categories of heresy for Justin also is those who negate resurrection and are called by him “godless, impious heretics” [Dialogue 80].Google ScholarSee also with reference to Philo, “the Epicureans were regularly attacked for destroying divine providence,” Pheme Perkins, “Ordering the Cosmos: Irenaeus and the Gnostics,” in Nag Hammadi, Gnosticism, and Early Christianity, eds. Hedrick, Charles W. and Hodgson, Robert Jr. (Peabody, Mass.: Hendrickson, 1986), 224. This usage would be, on my view, similar to the accusation by Christians of other Christians that they were “Jews.”Google Scholar

50. For Torah in the sense of the traditional learning of the Pharisees/Rabbis, see Oppenheimer, Abraham, The ‘Am Ha’ ares: A Study in the Social History of the Jewish People (Leiden: E. J. Brill, 1977), 69.Google Scholar

51. For the issue of the afterlife as a major issue between Sadducees and Pharisees, see Josephus Antiquities XVIII and Wars II, and passim, Acts 23:6–10, and the evidence of the Pseudo-clementines as discussed in Baumgarten, Albert I., “Literary Evidence for Jewish Christianity in the Galilee,” in The Galilee in Late Antiquity, ed. Levine, Lee I. (New York: Jewish Theological Seminary of America, 1992), 39–50; and for the “paradosis,” which I take to be the meaning of “Torah” in this mishnaic passage, see Josephus Antiquities 13.298; Matthew 15:1–2. Pace Saldarini, I would be inclined to connect Paul's report of having been a Pharisee in Philippians 3:5 with his statement in Galatians 1:14 that he was advanced in the paradosis of the fathers.Google ScholarCompare with Saldarini, Anthony, Pharisees, Scribes, and Sadducees in Palestinian Society (Edinburgh: T & T Clark, 1989), 135–41, who does not seem to make this connection. One wonders, then, how the Christians would have fit into this typology. Interestingly enough, there is nothing in this creed that would exclude Christians per se from orthodoxy in “Israel.”Google Scholar This is a vitally important point, particularly when we remember that there were Christians as late, at least, as the third century who themselves identified as Pharisees and considered Sadducees (and certainly Epicureans) as heretics, (Baumgarten, “Literary Evidence”). See also Davies, William David, The Setting of the Sermon on the Mount (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1976), 259,Google Scholarand, for an earlier adherent of the view that the Mishna produces a heresiology, see Bokser, Ben Zion, Pharisaic Judaism in Transition (New York: Jewish Theological Seminary, 1935), 1–6.Google Scholar

52. See, for example, Kannengiesser, Charles, “Alexander and Arius of Alexandria: The Last Ante-Nicene Theologians,” Compostellanum 35 (1990): 391–92.Google Scholar

53. The specifics of this process and in particular its gendered aspects are further analyzed in Daniel Boyarin, “Women's Bodies and the Rise of the Rabbis: The Case of Sotah,” Studies in Contemporary Jewry 16 (2000): 88–100.Google Scholar

54. “[W]here there is heresy, orthodoxy must have preceded. For example, Origen puts it like this: ‘All heretics at first are believers; then later they swerve from the rule of faith’ (Origen, Origen, The Song of Songs: Commentary and Homilies, trans. Lawson, R. P., Ancient Christian Writers 26 [Westminster, Md.: Newman, 1957], 3)”Google Scholar(Bauer, Walter, Krodel, Gerhard, and Kraft, Robert A., Orthodoxy and Heresy in Earliest Christianity., ed. Krodel, Gerhard [Philadelphia: Fortress, 1971], 13–14). A neat bit of illustration of this with respect to the Pharisees is to be found in Matthew 15, where the halakhot of the Pharisees are taken to be innovations; that is, the Christians are the traditionalists and the Pharisees the deviators, but the Pharisees, of course, object that the Christians are “transgressing the traditions of the elders” (v. 2) by not washing their hands ritually before eating. When Jesus says there that it is not “what goes into the mouth that defiles a man, but what comes out of the mouth, this defiles a man” (11), he is not deprecating the laws of kashruth and abrogating them but resisting the halakhic innovations of the Pharisees that these wish to impose as traditions of the elders. With respect to the hand-washing ritual before eating, the evangelist surely has the upper hand historically. Rabbinic literature was still at some pains hundreds of years later to justify this relatively new (and apparently sectarian) practice (see BT Berakhot 62b; for the fraughtness of this issue even late in rabbinic times see BT Sota 4b; and most strikingly: “Washing of the hands is a commandment. What is the commandment? Said Abbaye [fourth century], the commandment to obey the Sages!” BT Hullin 106a.) The battle of Jesus with the Pharisees over this issue was apparently still being fought within “Jewish” circles nearly half a millenium later. The Pharisees with their halakha that goes back to the oral (and thus esoteric) communication of God with Moses at Sinai are the object of the contemptuous Qumran term “dorshe halaqot,” “promulgators of unctuous things,” almost surely a cacophemism of “dorshe halakhot,” “the promulgators of laws,” which the Pharisees would have used as their own self-designation; Goranson , “Intra-Jewish Polemic,” 542.Google Scholar

55. According to the versions preserved in the textus receptus of the Sanhedrin Mishna, it would be the case there too that the deviants are excluded from the name “Israel,” for in the talmudic version and in the prints we read: “All Israel have a place in the next world, and these are they who have no place, etc.” The most straightforward interpretation of the mishnaic passage on this reading seems to be that the three who are denied a place in the next world are indeed not Israel. Otherwise the text logically contradicts itself. Traditional interpretations involve complex and forced interpretations to maintain both halves of what seems like a self-contradiction, such as adding the word “potentially” in the first stich, which completely denudes the text of meaning. For a similar reading to mine, see Hayes, Christine E., “Displaced Self-Perceptions: The Deployment of Mînîm and Romans in B. Sanhedrin 90b-91a,” in Religious and Ethnic Communities in Later Roman Palestine, ed. Lapin, Hayim (Lanham, Md.: University Press of Maryland, 1999), 276: “After all, the mishnah's formulation makes it clear that those who doubt resurrection are those outside the community of Israel, and they are by definition minim of various types.” I am grateful to Hayes for sharing her work with me prior to its publication. However, this exegetical point is only strictly valid with respect to the later reworking of the Mishna as we find it in the Talmuds and the prints of the Mishna. I wish to thank Aharon Shemesh for preventing me from making an embarrassing error here.Google Scholar

56. See Fonrobert, Charlotte, “When Women Walk in the Ways of Their Fathers: On Gendering the Rabbinic Claim to Authority,” Journal of the History of Sexuality (forthcoming). I had originally translated here “ancestors” and “Sadducean women,” but am persuaded by Fonrobert that the father/daughter relation is very important to the text. Fonrobert's work suggests (very carefully) that we might even discover these “daughters of the Sadducees” among Jewish-Christian women. In later chapters of the current research, the crucial role of gender in the construction of rabbinic authority will be taken up.Google Scholar

57. Cohen, Contra Shaye J. D., “The Significance of Yavneh: Pharisees, Rabbis, and the End of Jewish Sectarianism,” Hebrew Union College Annual 55 (1984): 39, n. 30. To be sure, I agree with Cohen (ad loc.) that the usage becomes more prominent in later rabbinic texts, which I would associate with the growing strength of a Jewish heresiology, mutatis mutandis, analogous to the Christian one, and this is precisely my point.Google Scholar

58. Interestingly, in an earlier paper, Shaye Cohen had captured this nuance quite precisely (Cohen, Shaye J. D., “A Virgin Defiled: Some Rabbinic and Christian Views on the Origins of Heresy,” Union Seminary Quarterly Review 34 [1980]: 4). In his later paper, which I am about to cite, Cohen retreats somewhat from this insight.Google Scholar

59. Once again, the Epicureans here are very likely simply Jews who deny, in traditional fashion, the eternity of the soul.Google Scholar

60. Cohen, , “Yavneh,” 45.Google Scholar

61. Cohen, , “Yavneh,” 42.Google Scholar

62. See also now Goodman, “Minim” for an important dissent from Cohen's position. For more extensive discussion of Cohen's intervention and responses to it, see Boyarin, “Synods.” The difference between my position and that of the “pre-Cohen” status quaestionis is that they were dealing with a “real Yavneh,” whereas I am suggesting a series of discursive constructs named “Yavneh” and shifting complexions in different stages of the development of the rabbinic legends. Thus, I agree (in the cited paper) with Cohen's description but try to show that it belongs to the latest and Babylonian talmudic stage of Yavneh-legend making.Google Scholar

63. Janowitz, Naomi, “Rabbis and Their Opponents: The Construction of the ‘Min’ in Rabbinic Anecdotes,” Journal of Early Christian Studies 6 (1998): 460 accurately perceives that the category of the “min” is about the construction of an orthodox, rabbinic Judaism—at the time of Rabbi Judah the Prince—analogous to the production of Christian orthodoxy, and see Hayes, “Minim and Romans.”CrossRefGoogle Scholar

64. See also Segal, Powers, 153 for a related point.Google Scholar

65. See also Segal, Powers, 6.Google Scholar

66. Cohen, , “Yavneh” and see Goodman, “Minim.” I discuss the positive significance of Cohen's argument in Boyarin, “Synods.”Google Scholar

67. Thus leading us to somewhat revise Le Boulluec's own compelling account, a point that I will take up elsewhere. Compare: “It may well be that —which, when applied to people, has only the negative and never the neutral sense of άιρεσις—did not exist in Hebrew until the Greek term had developed its negative sense in Christian use,” Goranson, “Intra-Jewish Polemic,” 536.Google Scholar

68. It is fascinating and troubling to observe how almost invariably these battles for male hegemony are fought over the sexual bodies of women. I have treated this issue at greater length elsewhere.Google Scholar

69. Le Boulluec, La notion, 65 and see 33–34. Compare with the death of James the Just, clearly marked as the execution of a false prophet by stoning in Eusebius 11.23. Lawlor, Hugh Jackson and Oulton, John Ernest Leonard, trans, and eds., Eusebius, Bishop of Caesarea, the Ecclesiastical History and the Martyrs of Palestine (London: Society for Promoting Christian Knowledge, 1927), 58.Google Scholar

70. Williams, Dialogue, 174. See also the explicit association of heresy and false prophets at 51.1, Williams, Dialogue, 102.Google Scholar

71. The “false prophet” model is vital for the development of early Christian heresiology, as it is for the Rabbis as well, for otherwise precisely the name hairesis and even the diadoche suggest one legitimate grouping among others, as in the case of the philosophical schools, and not the one true way from which all others deviate. Athanasius is still struggling with this issue at the beginning of his Orations Against the Arians: “For though we have a succession of teachers and become their disciples, yet, because we are taught by them things of Christ, we both are, and are called, Christians all the same” (see Ar. 1.3), as opposed, of course, to the Arians, who are called “Arians.” See also Burrus, Virginia, Begotten, not Made: Conceiving Manhood in Late Antiquity, Figurae (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2000), 52.Google Scholar Christine Hayes points out appropriately that there is a difference between Christian and rabbinic heresiology in that the anathematizing of ‘Aqabya (and of Rabbi Eli'ezer) were occasioned more by differences of halakha than credo. We agree, however, that this does not invalidate the underlying comparison. According to Guy Stroumsa, the term “false prophet” first appears in Hebrew at Qumran and then “reappears later, in the midrashic literature of late antiquity,” which supports my general point (Guy Stroumsa, “False Prophets in Early Christianity: Montanus, Mani, Muhammad,” conference presentation [Hartford, Conn., 1999], photocopy). See, too, Reiling, Johannes, “The Use of Pseudoprophètès in the Septuagint, Philo and Josephus,” Novum Testamentum 13 (1971): 147–56.Google Scholar

72. I am, of course, playing on the title of another essay of Cohen's here: Cohen, Shaye J. D., “‘Those Who Say They Are Jews and Are Not’: How Do You Know a Jew in Antiquity When You See One?” in Diasporas in Antiquity, eds. Cohen, Shaye J. D. and , Ernest S., Brown Judaic Studies 288 (Atlanta: Scholars, 1993), 1–45, alluding, of course, in turn to Revelation.Google Scholar

73. Note that at least according to the Babylonian Talmud, the ‘Am Ha'ares is explicitly awarded a place in the next world, in contradistinction to the minim and the excluded figures of the Sanhedrin Mishna, TB Ketubbot 111b.Google Scholar

74. Oppenheimer, , The ‘Am Ha'ares; Levine, Lee I., “The Sages and the Synagogue in Late Antiquity: The Evidence of the Galilee,” in The Galilee in Late Antiquity, ed. Levine, Lee I. (New York: Jewish Theological Seminary of America, 1992), 201–24;Google ScholarLevine, Lee I., The Rabbinic Class of Roman Palestine in Late Antiquity (New York: Jewish Theological Seminary of America, 1989), 40–42. And see especially Levine, Rabbinic Class, 112–13, for highly cogent arguments that these were not/could not have been a sectarian group but represent, rather, the masses of non-rabbinic population. On the other hand, it is impossible to imagine that these rural Galilean masses did not have their own religious leadership and religious customs and traditions; that is, we cannot simply go along with the rabbinic view that dubs them as ignoramuses. Thus when the baraita informs us that “one who engages in the study of Torah in front of an ‘Am Ha'ares is like one who has intercourse with his bride in front of him,” this cannot simply refer to ignorant masses, for the very cure for their ignorance would be engaging in the study of Torah in their presence.Google Scholar This is a group that had, somehow, to be kept out, because of their different practices or attitudes, deviant from the rabbinic perspective, including perhaps greater closeness to or tolerance of Jewish Christianity (Hasan-Rokem, Galit, “Narratives in Dialogue: A Folk Literary Perspective on Interreligious Contacts in the Holy Land in Rabbinic Literature of Late Antiquity,” in Sharing the Sacred: Religious Contacts and Conflicts in the Holy Land First-Fifteenth Centuries CE, eds. Stroumsa, Guy and Kofsky, Arieh [Jerusalem: Yad Ben Zvi, 1998], 109–29).Google ScholarIn this Cynthia Baker, “Neighbor at the Door or Enemy at the Gate? Notes Toward a Rabbinic Topography of Self and Other,” paper presented at American Academy of Religion (New Orleans, 1996) must surely be right. According to the nicely made point of Martin Goodman, rabbinic law for the Sabbath was followed precisely because it was derived from “local custom sanctioned by local elders,” Goodman, State and Society, 98.Google Scholar

75. See Cohen, “Yavneh,” 41; Boyarin, “Synods.”Google Scholar

76. Cohen, Shaye J. D., The Beginnings of Jewishness: Boundaries, Varieties, Uncertainties, Hellenistic Culture and Society 31 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1998), 69–106.Google Scholar

77. This Jewish development was, however, just as its Christian counterparts, only to reach its more or less successful conclusion centuries later, and perhaps then too only in another country, Babylonia, and with a curious turn to “pluralism” in its final form. In the meantime, Christian orthodoxy was to shift from “general conformity to tradition to the enforcement of credal norms” (Lyman, J. Rebecca, “Ascetics and Bishops: Epiphanius on Orthodoxy,” in Orthodoxie, Christianisme, Histoire, eds. Elm, Susanna, Rebillard, Eric, and Romano, Antonella, Collection de l'école Françhise de Rome 270 [Rome: École française de Rome, 2000], 149–61).Google Scholar It is at this moment that the characteristic difference between (medieval) “Judaism” and “Christianity” would come into focus. I will be developing this point elsewhere, deo volente. See on this Cohen, Shaye J. D. and Frerichs, Ernest, Diasporas in Antiquity (Atlanta: Scholars, 1993).Google Scholar

78. As argued by Cohen himself in another context (Cohen, “Virgin”). It should be remembered that Christian heresiology included a component that had to do with different practice as well as different creed too, for instance, the Quartodeciman controversy or the question of Eucharist on Saturdays.Google Scholar

79. Williams, , Dialogue, 129; Justin, Dialogus Cum Try-phone, 176–77, emphasis added.Google Scholar

80. Simon, Marcel, “From Greek Hairesis to Christian Heresy,” in Mélanges R. M. Grant, Early Christian Literature and the Classical Intellectual Tradition, eds. Schoedel, W. R. and Wilken, R. L., Theologie Historique 53 (Paris: Beauchesne, 1979), 106.Google Scholar

81. I am grateful for Erich Gruen's and Chava Boyarin's help with construing this passage, although neither are responsible for my interpretation of it. See the old translation in the Ante-Nicene Fathers edition: “For I would not say that the dogma of that heresy which is said to be among you is true, or that the teachers of it can prove that [God] spoke to angels, or that the human frame was the workmanship of angels” (Martyr, Justin, Dialogue with Trypho, Vol 1: The Apostolic Fathers—Justin Martyr to Irenaeus, of The Ante-Nicene Fathers: Translations of the Writings of the Fathers Down to A.D. 325, eds. Roberts, Alexander and Donaldson, James [Grand Rapids: William B. Eerdmans, 1989], 228).Google ScholarDavid Runia for his part translates: “For personally I do not think the explanation is true which the so-called sect among you declares, nor are the teachers of that sect able to prove that he spoke to angels or that the human body is the creation of angels” (Runia, “Where is the Jew,” 178).Google Scholar

82. For Luke, see Cancik, Hubert, “The History of Culture, Religion, and Institutions in Ancient Historiography: Philological Observations Concerning Luke's History,” Journal of Biblical Literature 116 (1997): 677, 688.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

83. Compare Simon, “Hairesis,” 106 and Le Boulluec, La notion, 78, who both consider Justin's “hairesis” here as unidentifiable. Furthermore, David Runia writes, “If Justin's evidence is taken seriously, at least one branch [of minim] represents a Gnosticizing group within Judaism, whose negative attitude to material creation encourages them to introduce angels into the interpretation of the creation account” (Runia, “Where is the Jew,” 179). See also Urbach, Ephraim E., The Sages: Their Concepts and Beliefs, trans. Abrahams, Israel (Jerusalem: Magnes Press, 1975), 203–208, who cites the Justin passage but seems not to have seen the relevance of the Mekhilta to it.Google Scholar

84. Lauterbach, J. Z., ed. and trans., Mekilta DeRabbi lshmael (1934; reprint, Philadephia: Jewish Publishing Society, 1961), 1: 248.Google Scholar

85. See Kahana, Menahem, “The Critical Editions of Mekhilta De-Rabbi lshmael in the Light of the Genizah Fragments,” Tarbis 55 (1985): 499–515 (in Hebrew), who shows that ancient mss. preserve traditions from which it appears that Papos/Papias maintained “gnosticizing” views, a not irrelevant point for our comparison here with Justin. Note that it is precisely with reference to Gen. 3:22 that the “heretical” view is attributed in both Justin and the Mekhilta, while the interpretation that Gen. 1:26, “Let us make man” is addressed to angels can be found in the “orthodox” rabbinic voice of Bereshit Rabba 8, as pointed out in the important Runia, “Where is the Jew.” This makes the Justinian attribution of such a related view to a hairesis as well as Rabbi Akiva's sharp rejection of it somewhat puzzling.Google ScholarI believe however that the key is to be found in a passage in Philo, wherein it is implied that it is the human body that is the work of angels, because a body would be beneath the dignity of God to create (Chadwick, Henry, “Philo and the Beginnings of Christian Thought,” in The Cambridge History of Later Greek and Early Medieval Philosophy, ed. Armstrong, A. H. [Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1967], 164).Google ScholarIndeed we find this view explicitly in, for example, Philo, “On Flight and Finding,” in Loeb Classics Philo, vol. 5, trans. Colson, F. H. and Whitaker, G. A. (London: Heinemann, 1934), 47–48. This would be, of course, a potentially “dangerous” dualistic position from the point of view of the Rabbis. For a partial anticipation of this interpretation of the passage, see Kahana, “Critical,” 507, who, nevertheless, was not aware of the pendant from Justin. Basil of Caesaria also attributes this view simply to “the Jews” in the passage discussed at length by Runia in this article, as does Tertullian. Justin's knowledge of distinctions among Jewish views seems much more precise than that of either of the other church fathers. Inspection of the Bereshit Rabba passage reveals that while assenting to the notion that God consulted with the angels here, at the same time, it totally negates any notion that the angels actually participated in the creation of the man. In fact, the Bereshit Rabba text can be read as a refutation of the Philonic view, since according to Philo, the angels created the Man because God could not create anything with the potential for evil, while according to Bereshit Rabba, God concealed humanity's potential for evil, in order that the angels would not interfere with his sole creation! The two rabbinic texts do not, therefore, contradict each other but rather are congruent in their denial of dualism.Google Scholar For more on this Papos/Papias as a figure for Jewish liminality—and at a certain point for Christianity— see Boyarin, Daniel, “Martyrdom and the Making of Christianity and Judaism,” Journal of Early Christian Studies 6 (1998): 577–627. Rabbi Akiva's own midrash here remains something of a mystery to all commentators on the Mekhilta. The best guess is that he reads “one of us,” as if it meant, “one of them,” that is, one of those who choose the way of death, but, as the commentators admit, “this needs further thought.” See Kahana, “Critical,” 505, n. 84 for bibliography and his own remarks there, 505–6.CrossRefGoogle Scholar It is, in any case, fascinating that however he arrives at it, what Rabbi Akiva produces as an interpretation of the verse is a statement of the “two ways,” a homiletical topos that was virtually ubiquitous in second-century Christian writings and seemingly especially in those circles of Jewish-Christians, the “Petrine” Christians, most closely associated with the Rabbis (Aldridge, Robert E., “Peter and the ‘Two Ways,’” Vigiliae Christianae 53 [1999]: 233–64).CrossRefGoogle ScholarAlso Flusser, David, “There Are Two Ways,” in Jewish Sources in Early Christianity: Studies and Essays (Tel Aviv: Sifriat Poalim, 1982), 235–52 (in Hebrew);Google ScholarFlusser, David, “‘Which is the Right Way That a Man Should Choose for Himself?’ (Sayings of the Fathers, 2:1),” Tarbis 60 (1991): 163–78 (in Hebrew, with an English summary). Once more, the canon that we find the greatest points of contention between “Judaism” and “Christianity” at the greatest points of similarity and intimacy is instanced here. For another indication that Rabbi Akiva himself was portrayed as holding quite strongly “dualist” positions, see BT Hagiga 15a. hi that passage, the “heretic” of the Rabbis, par excellence, Aher, quotes Rabbi Akiva in support of his own heretical position against the “orthodox” Rabbi Me'ir. Moreover, as I shall show elsewhere, the good Rabbi himself was not beyond being told to “shut up” for holding these seemingly “heretical” views, thus providing evidence against Segal's notion that since “aspects of opposing dualism were subsumed by the rabbinic movement, it is less likely that any ethical or opposing dualism per se would become the target of the ‘two powers’ polemic” (Segal, Powers, 22–23).Google Scholar

86. It might fairly be objected at this point that I am violating my own canon, established above vis-à-vis the blessing of the heretics, and using a later text to interpret Justin. The cases seem different to me for the following reason: There we have positive reasons not to believe that a blessing of minim could have comprehended Gentile Christians in Justin's time and the texts seem, therefore, not connected with each other. Here there is no reason to assume a priori that the ascription to Papos and Rabbi Akiva does not represent memory of an earlier conflict between second-century Rabbis and “gnostics.” If I did not have the evidence of Justin, I would hardly assume that that conflict was earlier than the redaction of the Mekhilta, but with Justin's precise parallel, this conjecture seems tolerably robust. This is particularly attractive when paired with the parallel between Justin's genistai, meristai and the Tosefta's minim, paroshim—virtually exact cognates.Google Scholar

87. Even in his Marcel Simon, Jewish Sects at the Time of Jesus (Minneapolis: Fortress, 1967), 85–107, where he discusses the entire Justinian catalogue of Jewish heresies, Simon ignores Justin's mention of the Pharisees, so set is he on his notion that orthodox Judaism at this time is consubstantial with Pharisaism.Google Scholar

88. Who also deny the resurrection of the dead and are therefore singled out. See Le Boulluec, La notion, 71–72.Google Scholar

89. Following the conjecture Έλληλιι (accepted in Justin, Dialogus Cum Tryphone, 209) that gives “Hellelians” and not “Hellenians” as Williams has it. To this, compare the above text from the Tosefta, which refers to the Shammaites and the Hillelites as having divided the Torah into two Torahs. See also for discussion Gershonson, Daniel and Quispel, Giles, “‘Meristae,’” Vigiliae Christianae 12 (1958): 19–26;Google ScholarBlack, Matthew, “The Patristic Accounts of Jewish Sectarianism,” Bulletin of the John Rylands Library 41 (1959): 285–303;CrossRefGoogle ScholarSimon, Sects, 74–85; Barnard, Justin, 49–52.Google Scholar

90. Williams, Dialogue, 169–71; Justin, Dialogus Cum Tryphone, 208–9. For the crucial (Platonic) distinction between being called a Jew and being one, see Cohen, Jewishness, 60–61. See on this passage Le Boulluec, La notion, 71, who considers that “[l]a représentation hérésiologique a cependant besoin de déformer la conception juive des divers courants religieux pour attendre son efficacité entière.” In my view, this is less of a deformation than Le Boulluec would have it.Google Scholar

91. Cohen, , “Yavneh,” 29.Google Scholar

92. Cohen, , “Yavneh,” 49.Google Scholar

93. Black, “Patristic”; Barnard, Justin, 50–52.Google Scholar

94. See also Le Boulluec, La notion, 72: “La suggestion de M. Black … est tout à fair fantaisiste.”Google Scholar

95. Burrus, 52. Earlier, Justin's explanation of the origins of the philosophers' haireseis bears some relation to this topos: “But the reason why [philosophy] has become a hydra of many heads I should like to explain. It happened that they who first handled philosophy, and for this reason became famous, were followed by men who made no investigation after truth, but were only amazed at their patience and self-restraint and their unfamiliar diction, and supposed that whatever each learned from his own teacher was true. And then they, when they had handed on to their successors all such things, and other like them, were themselves called by the name borne by the originator of the teaching” (Dialogue 2.2; Williams, Dialogue, 4). The implication of this statement is, of course, that there is “philosophy” and there are the haireseis (although the term is not used here), named after the divergent originators of each school. See also the same topos vis-à-vis Christian heresies: “And they say that they are Christians. … And some of them are called Marcionites, and some Valentinians, and some Basilidians, and some Saturnalians, and others by other names, each being named from the originator of the opinion, just as also each of those who think they are philosophers, as I said already in the beginning (of my discourse), thinks it right to bear the name of the father of that system” (Dialogue 33.6; Williams, Dialogue, 70). Of course, from the point of view of the Rabbis, the name “Christian” would be just such an “other name.”Google Scholar

96. Pointed out to me by Shamma Boyarin.Google Scholar

97. In Boyarin, Daniel, “The Gospel of the Memra: Jewish Binitarianism and the Crucifixion of the Logos,” Harvard Theological Review (forthcoming), I analyze this process in detail with respect to a very central issue that ultimately differentiates “Judaism” from “Christianity,” to wit logos theology, or more broadly binitarianism, ubiquitous in Judaism in the first century but rejected as heresy by the Rabbis by the third century, a somewhat different perspective than that exemplified by Segal, Powers.Google Scholar

98. Derrida, Jacques, Glas, trans. Leavey, John P. Jr and Rand, Richard (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1990), 189b.Google Scholar

99. See, for example, Boyarin, “Martyrdom,” in which an argument is made for people attending both synagogue and church in third-century Caesarea as the “smugglers” who transported discourses of martyrology in both directions across the “abstract, legal, and ideal” frontier between Judaism and Christianity.Google Scholar

100. Trakatellis, Demetrios, “Justin Martyr's Trypho,” Harvard Theological Review 79 (1986): 287.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

101. Trakatellis, “Justin Martyr's Trypho,” 297. A recent scholar from the side of rabbinics, Marc Hirshman, argues however that Justin's knowledge of rabbinic exegesis is “on the whole unimpressive” (Marc Hirshman, A Rivalry of Genius: Jewish and Christian Biblical Interpretation in Late Antiquity, trans. Batya Stein, SUNY Series in Judaica: Hermeneutics, Mysticism, and Religion [Albany: State University of New York Press, 1996], 65). My preliminary assessment is that Hirshman's somewhat skeptical remarks derive in part from an attempt to find in Justin the echoes of what are really later, detailed developments in rabbinic exegesis per se, while Trakatellis is essentially right that the general kind of Judaism that “Trypho” represents (and the voice of Justin himself telling Trypho what “your teachers say” even more so) is not far from what we can imagine as the religious ethos of nascent forms of Judaism close to the Rabbis in the second century.Google Scholar

102. For more excellent examples, see Hannah, Darrell D., Michael and Christ: Michael Traditions and Angel Christology in Early Christianity, Wissenschaftliche Untersuchungen Zum Neuen Testament (Tübingen: Mohr Siebeck, 1999), 111–12.Google ScholarNote that for our purposes it does not make any difference whether Trypho is a “real” person or one made up; the only significant point is whether the Judaism that he expresses—and that, therefore, Justin knows—can be shown to be a realistic possibility. See also Goldfahn, “Justinus,” and see Hirshman, Rivalry of Genius, 31–42, 55–66. In spite of the recent work on this subject, this is a matter that will repay further research.Google Scholar

103. Rokéah, David, Justin Martyr and the Jems, “Kuntresim”: Texts and Studies 84 (Jerusalem: The Hebrew University: The Dinur Center for Research in Jewish History, 1998), 34–39 (in Hebrew). Since many interested in Justin will not have access to Rokèah's text, I would like to point out that one of his most interesting results in the monograph is what I, at any rate, take to be a compelling demonstration of Justin's careful reading and reliance on Galatians and Romans, a position decidedly against the prevailing winds of much Justin scholarship (Rokèah, Justin Martyr and the Jews, 40–47).Google Scholar

104. Skarsaune, Proof from Prophecy, 316–20; Rokèah, Justin Martyr and the Jews, 48–50. What remains, however, is to consider the questions of the dating of that source, its possible connections with rabbinic or associated traditions, and the dating of those traditions. Both Skarsaune, who accepts such connections, and Rokeah, who rejects them, rely on the assumption that material attributed to second-century Rabbis in fifth-century (and even eighth-century!) texts can be dated to the second century (Skarsaune, Proof from Prophecy, 319; Rokèah, Justin Martyr and the Jews, 49).Google Scholar

105. Baumgarten, , “Literary Evidence,” 46–47.Google Scholar

106. Williams, , Dialogue, 21.Google Scholar

107. Williams, , Dialogue, 74–75.Google Scholar

108. As Williams points out in a note ad loc, the Gospel is represented in rabbinic literature only with cacophemisms: for example, ‘Awen Gilayon (The Scroll of Falsehood) or ‘Awon Gilayon (The Scroll of Sin). The contrast with Trypho's “admirable and great” is striking, although vitiated somewhat by the fact that Williams is too credulous by far in accepting the ascription and therefore the dating of this talmudic notice, which may be much later. One's confidence in this ascription to early Palestinian sources is certainly not raised by the fact it seems only to occur in this Babylonian talmudic citation and in a context that shows much Babylonian diction. See also Manns, Frédéric, Essais sur le Judéo-Christianisme (Jerusalem: Franciscan, 1977), 131. I cannot imagine on what grounds Barnard determines that after “A.D. 100,” Palestinian Jews were forbidden to read the Gospels (Barnard, Justin, 24). The prohibition on conversation with Christians is not attested in rabbinic texts redacted before the mid-third century and, even then, clearly was honored as much in the breach (within Palestinian and even rabbinic circles) as in the observance (Barnard, Justin, 40, 45, who at least understands that the Dialogue is indicative of “closer intercourse between Christians and Jews in the first half of the second century than has usually been supposed,” but still imagines that the “rabbis of Jamnia” had sought to “enforce a pattern of Pharisaic orthodoxy which forbad contacts with the Minim, that is, Christians.”)Google Scholar On this last point, see also Boyarin, Daniel, Dying for God: Martyrdom and the Making of Christianity and Judaism, The Lancaster/Yarnton Lectures in Judaism and Other Religions for 1998 (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1999), chap. 1.Google ScholarSee also Barnard's crucial point that “[Trypho] warns us against identifying the linguistic frontier between the Greek and Semitic worlds with the cultural frontier between Hellenism and Judaism” (Barnard, Justin, 42). All Judaism is, by definition, Hellenistic, precisely under the definition of Hellenism itself as the creative adaptation of Greek to Asiatic (and therefore also, ipso facto, Semitic) cultural forms and societies (Levine, Lee I., Judaism & Hellenism in Antiquity: Conflict or Confluence, The Samuel & Althea Stroum Lectures in Jewish Studies [Seattle, Wash.: University of Washington Press, 1998]).Google Scholar For a compelling general argument that binary oppositions between Judaism and Hellenism are a (problematic) scholarly construct, see also Gruen, Erich S., Heritage and Hellenism: The Reinvention of Jewish Tradition, Hellenistic Culture and Society 30 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1998). Rather, one could imagine that the existence of law-abiding Jews who read the Gospels and were in close contact (and perhaps even communion) with Gentile Christians, such as Justin, would have been one factor in the production of the above-mentioned prohibitions; thus, once again, much later than the point of origin that the myths project.Google Scholar

109. Baumgarten, , “Literary Evidence”;Google ScholarJones, F. Stanley, An Ancient Jewish Christian Source on the History of Christianity: Pseudo-Clementine Recognitions 1.27–71, Texts and Translations: Christian Apocrypha Series (Atlanta: Scholars, 1995). See also Dunn, Partings, 233.Google Scholar

110. I am in full agreement with Joan E. Taylor that the term “Jewish Christian” is very problematic and would insist that we conceive of those people who were both Jewish and Christian, even as late as the fourth century, not as “combining two religions,” but as representing one form on a continuum of Judaeo-Christian religious identity and praxis. See Taylor, Joan E., “The Phenomenon of Early Jewish-Christianity: Reality or Scholarly Invention,” Vigiliae Christianae 44 (1990): esp. 314–15.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

111. Williams, , Dialogue, 93–94. All Christian heresiologists other than Justin himself seem to have immediately realized this “danger.” Justin himself realizes that he is unusual in this respect.Google Scholar

112. For more extensive discussion of this model, see introduction to Boyarin, Dying for God. Dunn, Partings, 5 has also spoken of “first-century reality … as a more or less unbroken spectrum across a wide front from conservative Judaizers at one end to radical Gentile Christians at the other.” I would emend this statement by substituting for “conservative Judaizers,” non-Christian Jews, thus also answering to Dunn's own call for a recognition of “the importance of the continuing Jewish character of Christianity,” within the very same model, and also I would consider this situation as obtaining quite a bit after the first century. For the literalness of my Jespersenian conceit, see Codex Theod. 16.1.2, Theodosiani Libri XVI Cum Constitutionibus Sirmondianis et Leges Novellae Ad Theodosianum Pertinentes, ed. Mommsen, Theodor (Dublin: Apud Weidmannos, 1970), 1.2, 833.Google ScholarSee Lim, Richard, Public Disputation, Power, and Social Order in Late Antiquity, Transformations of the Classical Heritage 23 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1994), 177.Google Scholar

113. Boyarin, , Dying for God.Google Scholar

114. This is kindred to Barnard's conclusion that “the Dialogue is proof that, in certain circles, there was a close intercourse between Christians and Jews” (Barnard, Justin, 52). This would also seem to be the position of Rokéah, Justin Martyr and the Jews, 17–20, who agrees with Theodore Stylianopoulos, Justin Martyr and the Mosaic Law, Society of Biblical Literature Dissertation Series 20 (Missoula: Scholars, 1975), 10, 14, that the Dialogue was written for the purpose of proselytizing Jews.Google Scholar