Border Lines: The Partition of Judaeo-Christianity (Divinations: Rereading Late Ancient Religion)

392 Pages·2004·11.22 MB·English

by  Daniel Boyarin

DIVINATIONS: REREADING LATE ANCIENT RELIGION
Series Editors
Daniel Boyarin
Virginia Burrus
Charlotte Fonrobert
Robert Gregg
A complete list of books in the series is available from the publisher.
Border Lines
The Partition of Judaeo-Christianity
Daniel Boyarin
PENN
University of Pennsylvania Press
Philadelphia
Copyright © 2004 University of Pennsylvania Press
All rights reserved
Printed in the United States of America on acid-free paper
10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 21
Published by
University of Pennsylvania Press
Philadelphia, Pennsylvania 19104-4011
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Boyarin, Daniel.
Border lines : the partition of Judaeo-Christianity / Daniel Boyarin.
p. cm. — (Divinations: Rereading Late Ancient Religion)
Includes bibliographical references and index.
ISBN 0-8122-3764-1 (cloth : alk. paper)
1. Christianity—Origin. I. Title: Border lines. II. Title. III. Series.
BR129.B69 2004
296.3'96'o90i5—dc22
2003065753
Ghermii pel crine il desiderio alatol
Arrigo Boito

Contents
Preface: Interrogate My Love ix
List of Abbreviations xvii
1 Introduction 1
Part I Making a Difference: The Heresiological Beginnings of
Christianity and Judaism
2 Justin's Dialogue with the Jews:
The Beginnings of Orthodoxy 37
3 Naturalizing the Border:
Apostolic Succession in the Mishna 74
Part II The Crucifixion of the Logos: How Logos Theology
Became Christian
4 The Intertextual Birth of the Logos:
The Prologue to John as a Jewish Midrash 89
5 The Jewish Life of the Logos:
Logos Theology in Pre- and Pararabbinic Judaism 112
6 The Crucifixion of the Memra:
How the Logos Became Christian 128
Part III Sparks of the Logos: Historicizing Rabbinic Religion
7 The Yavneh Legend of the Stammaim:
On the Invention of the Rabbis in the Sixth Century 151
8 "When the Kingdom Turned to Minut":
The Christian Empire and the Rabbinic Refusal
of Religion 202
viii Contents
Concluding Political Postscript: A Fragment 227
Notes 229
Bibliography 333
Index 361
Acknowledgments 373
Preface
Interrogate My Love
As long as I can remember I have been in love with some manifes­
tations of Christianity (not always ones that my Christian friends would them­
selves love or even approve). Tennessee Ernie Ford singing on television the
hymn "The Garden" moved me to tears when I was a child. For an oddly gen­
dered teenager, St. Francis, the Sissy, proved an incredibly tantalizing figure of a
man. Later on it was medieval Christian art and architecture, the cathedrals of
Europe, the spirituality of Meister Eckhart and Jakob Bohme. Still later, and
most significantly, it has been the writings of the Fathers of the Church (and
their excluded others, the Christian heretics) that have been most riveting for
me, pulling me into a world so close to that of my own beloved Rabbis of late
antiquity and yet so foreign as well, a world in which oceans of ink (and rivers
of blood) could be spilt on questions of detail in the description of the precise
relationships between the posited persons of a complex godhead, a world, as
well, in which massive numbers of men and women could choose freely and en­
thusiastically to live lives without the pleasures of sex and the joys of family. I
find this world endlessly moving and alluring, even when at its most bizarre to me.
For the last decade or so I have devoted much of my time and spirit to learning
the languages of and understanding something of the inner and outer worlds of
those early Christian men and women who wrote such texts and lived such lives.
Some Jews, it seems, are destined by fate, psychology, or personal history to
be drawn to Christianity.1 This book won't let me be done with it, or so it seems,
until I come clean and confess that I am one of those Jews. I cannot, of course,
deny the problematic aspects of that desire; desire is frequently unruly and
problematic. Christians, of course, have been bloody rotten to Jews through
much of our histories, and Jews, when occasionally given the chance, have taken
their turn at being rotten to Christians. This desire seems sometimes to be not
entirely unlike the "love" that binds an abusive couple to each other. Neverthe­
less, it is there. The question is, then, what creative use can be made of prob­
lematic desire—not only what pleasures can it engender but also what utile can
it be in the world?
Some Jews who are so absorbed by Christianity have been induced by that
x Preface
affection to convert and become Christians. I have not, held back by an even
more powerful libidinal commitment to the religion, the memories, the thick
history, the literature and liturgy of diasporic rabbinic Judaism as practiced for
nearly the last two millennia. In earlier work, I have attempted to express and
make some sense of that greater love.2 In this preface, I want to make some sense
of my other love and show how it drives the text that follows. Perhaps, better
than "greater" or "lesser" in characterizing these investments, I should distin­
guish between a love of who I am, diasporic rabbinic Jew, and a desire for a dif­
ferent other, the subject of Christianity.
Years have gone into the making of this book (more, indeed, than any of
my other books), and during those years the work has been presented in many
venues. On one occasion, when I had delivered a lecture based on some of the
work below on the Gospel of John, a very upset undergraduate arose from the
audience to inquire: Who are you and why are you trying to take our Gospel
away from us? On another occasion, a group of Christian ministers asked me
why I was not a Jew for Jesus (not in an effort to convert me to that movement
but rather to understand what it is that makes me not one). At still another time,
in Jerusalem on one memorable occasion, I was asked explicitly by the organ­
izer of a conference, Dr. Alon Goshen-Gottstein, to reflect on the implications
of this work for the present and future. On all of those occasions, I disengaged
from the question that was being asked, falling on the last resort of the scholarly
scoundrel: "I'm just trying to figure out what really happened!" In a more on­
going sense, I have experienced the work on this book as a pleasing withdrawal
from cultural wars in which I have been engaged for so long, for once not seek­
ing (so I thought) to defend or attack, to apologize or polemicize, but simply to
describe and analyze. But the book would not get done; it would not let me fin­
ish. In particular, certain parts of the writing felt, even more than usual, pecu­
liarly unsatisfying, feeble and flabby in their rhetoric, even, oddly, when I was
more or less pleased with what I had to say. The penny dropped when my dear
colleague Chana Kronfeld observed that this was the first of my books that did
not begin with a personal letter, as it were, to the readers and the first, as well,
in which I, at least occasionally, lapsed into a first-person plural subject, not
quite an authorial we but still a voice that was seeking to distance myself from
what I was saying. Overnight it became clear to me that I could not evade the
good and hard questions that the undergraduate at Grinnell asked, that the
ministers asked, that Alon had asked of me. The book is, once again, an attempt
to justify my love, to explain it, to ask that it be understood by others, but also,
once again, to make it just, just to the Jews and Christians and their discourses
that are its subjects. But I have allowed myself to see my investment in this book,
let alone reveal it, only in extremis, at the end of the writing, at the eleventh