Heresy & Identity in Late Antiquity

413 Pages·2008·21.98 MB·English

by  Holger M. Zellentin

Heresy and Identity
in Late Antiquity
Edited by
Eduard Iricinschi. and Holger M. Zellentin
Mohr Siebeck
EDUARD IRICINSCHI, born 1968; MA in Philosophy from Bucharest University, and MA
in Religious Studies from New York University; is finishing a doctorate in the Depart
ment of Religion at Princeton University.
HOLGER M. ZELLENTIN, born 1976, is an Assistant Professor of Rabbinics at the Richard
S. Dinner Center for Jewish Studies at the Graduate Theological Union in Berkeley,
California.
ISBN 978-3-16-149122-1
ISSN 0721-8753 (Texts and Studies in Ancient Judaism)
Die Deutsche Nationalbibliothek lists this publication in the Deutsche Nationalbiblio
graphie; detailed bibliographic data is available in the Internet at http://dnb.d-nb.de.
© 2008 Mohr Siebeck, Tiibingen, Germany.
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The book was printed by Guide-Druck in Tiibingen on non-aging paper and bound by
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Printed in Germany.
Preface
The colloquium held on January 16-18 2005, "Making Selves and
Marking Others: Heresy and Self-Definition in Late Antiquity," follows
in the steps of two earlier Princeton colloquia and volumes, which have
gained wide academic attention. The series of colloquia was initiated by
Peter Schafer in 2000, with generous funding from the Princeton
University Graduate School, and continued in the following years under
his tutelage.* Each year, two graduate students in the Department of
Religion at Princeton University choose a topic of interdisciplinary
interest and organize a semester-long workshop on the selected theme,
followed by a colloquium. During the workshop, graduate students
present their papers to colleagues and faculty from a variety of fields, and
rework them into a formal presentation. At the concluding colloquium,
the participants discuss their revised work with recognized scholars from
Princeton University and other institutions, invited by the organizers to
present their views on the same topic.
We take this opportunity to express our sincere gratitude to our
contributors, and to all who so generously supported the colloquium and
this publication. As representative of all those who ensured our success,
we have space to name only the most prominent ones. It is hardly
possible to exaggerate Peter Schafer's initiative and support for this
project. Annette Yoshiko Reed has considerably facilitated our task by
providing us with invaluable academic and editorial advice. Bam Saul
and Lorraine Fuhrmann have ensured a pleasant stay at Princeton for all
participants of the colloquium. At Princeton University, the Center for the
Study of Religion, the Department of Religion, and the Program in Judaic
Studies generously provided office space and funding for the colloquium
and the publication. Finally, Henning Ziebritzki and Tanja Mix from
Mohr Siebeck guided the project to its present form.
Holger Zellentin and Eduard Iricinschi
* Adam H. Becker and Annette Y. Reed, eds. The Ways that Never Parted: Jews and
Christians in Late Antiquity and the Early Middle Ages, TSAJ 95 (Tiibingen: Mohr
Siebeck, 2003); and Ra'anan Boustan and Annette Y. Reed, eds., Heavenly Realms and
Earthly Realities in Late Antique Religions (Cambridge, UK; New York: Cambridge
University Press, 2004). See now also Gregg Gardner and Kevin L. Osterloh, eds.,
Antiquity in Antiquity: Jewish and Christian Pasts in the Greco-Roman World
(Tiibingen: Mohr Siebeck, forthcoming); and the colloquium organized in January 2007
by Philippa Townsend and Moulie Vidas, "Revelation, Literature, and Community in
Antiquity."
Table of Contents
Preface ...................................................................................................... V
EDUARD IRICINSCHI & HOLGER M. ZELLENTIN
Making Selves and Marking Others: Identity
and Late Antique Heresiologies .................................................................. 1
KAREN L. KING
Social and Theological Effects of Heresiological Discourse ..................... 28
WILLIAM E. ARNAL
Doxa, Heresy, and Self-Construction: The Pauline Ekklesiai
and the Boundaries of Urban Identities ..................................................... 50
AVERIL CAMERON
The Violence of Orthodoxy .................................................................... 102
Y ANNIS P APADOYA NNAKIS
Defining Orthodoxy in Pseudo-Justin's "Quaestiones
et responsiones ad orthodoxos" ............................................................... 115
CAROLINE HUMFRESS
Citizens and Heretics: Late Roman Lawyers on Christian Heresy .......... 128
RICHARD LIM
The Nomen Manichaeorum and Its Uses in Late Antiquity ..................... 143
KEVIN LEE OSTERLOH
Judea, Rome and the Hellenistic Oikoumene: Emulation
and the Reinvention of Communal Identity ............................................ 168
JOHNG. GAGER
Where Does Luke's Anti-Judaism Come from? ...................................... 207
PHILIPPA TOWNSEND
Who Were the First Christians? Jews, Gentiles and the Christianoi ...... 212
VIII Table of Contents
ELAINE PAGELS
The Social History of Satan, Part III: John ofPatmos and Ignatius of
Antioch - Contrasting Visions of "God's People" .................................. 231
EDUARD IRICINSCHI
If You Got It, Flaunt It: Religious Advertising
in the Gospel of Philip ........................................................................... 253
ANNETTE YOSHIKO REED
Heresiology and the (Jewish-)Christian Novel:
Narrativized Polemics in the Pseudo-Clementine Homilies .................... 273
BURTON L. VISOTZKY
Goys '5I'n't Us: Rabbinic Anti-Gentile Polemic
in Yerushalmi Berachot 9: 1 .................................................................... 299
GREGG GARDNER
Astrology in the Talmud: An Analysis of Bavli Shabbat 156 ................. 314
HOLGER M. ZELLENTIN
Margin of Error: Women, Law,
and Christianity in Bavli Shabbat 116a-b ............................................... 339
ISRAEL JACOB YUVAL
The Other in Us: Liturgica, Poetica, Polemica ........................................ 364
List of Contributors ................................................................................. 387
Modern Author Index ............................................................................. 389
Subject Index .......... ,. ................................................................ :. ............. 397
Making Selves and Marking Others: Identity and Late
Antique Heresiologies
EDUARD IRICINSCHI & HOLGER M. ZELLENTIN
"The Other may not be very other at all."
Kwame Anthony Appiahl
As influential catchwords, "heresy" and "identity" have recently acquired
the sense of entitlement and hazard that only a dominant academic
paradigm would impart. In a famous manifesto of the 1970s, for instance,
sociologist Peter Berger associates modernity with the "universalization of
heresy." According to Berger, the freedom to choose among different
versions of plausibility characterizes the post-Enlightenment person. Under
these new .circumstances, heresy surrenders itself to the imperative of
multiple worldviews and becomes the very label of modern religious life:
"For premodern man, heresy is a possibility - usually a rather remote one;
for modern man, heresy typically becomes a necessity."2
Academic success has not been easy on "identity" either. In the last
three decades of shifting cultural geographies, identity has become an ever
present theoretical tool in the Humanities and Social Sciences to the point
where Sinisa Malesevic has invoked the utopia of an identity-less world.3
A number of social scientists and historians concur that the birth of
* We would like to thank Adam Becker, Ra'anan Boustan, Gregg Gardner, Martha
Himmelfarb, Annette Yoshiko Reed, Jeffrey Stout, Philippa Townsend, and Moulie Vidas
for their careful reading, insightful critiques, and helpful suggestions for improving this
text.
1 Kwame Anthony Appiah, The Ethics of Identity (Princeton: Princeton University
Press, 2005).
2 Peter L. Berger, The Heretical Imperative: Contemporary Possibilities of Religious
Affirmation (Garden City, NY: Anchor Press, 1979), 28. Closer to our disenchanted
twenty-first century, Arthur Versluis identifies the origins of totalitarianism in "the
emergence of historical Christianity," more precisely, in its incipient heresiology and the
unabated history of witch-hunting in Christianity; The New Inquisitions: Heretic-Hunting
and the Intellectual Origins of Modern Totalitarianism (Oxford: OUP, 2006), ix.
3 Sinisa Malesevic, Identity as Ideology: Understanding Ethnicity and Nationalism
(Basingstoke U.K.; New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2006), 13-14.
2 Eduard Iricinschi & Holger M Zellentin
"identity" must be located at the advent of modernity.4 Anthony Giddens,
for instance, argues that it was only "late" or "high modernity" that
brought with it "transformations in self-identity."5
This raises the question: How legitimate is the search for identity
formations in pre-modern texts?6 What are the benefits of projecting
modern theoretical concepts of "identity" back into the Mediterranean and
Near Eastern worlds of Late Antiquity? And, if modernity is indeed an age
of heresy, then how might this skew our images of those deemed "heretics"
in our pre-modern sources? What is the work that the categories of
"heresy" and "identity" do, when applied to times so distant from our own?
To these questions, the essays in the present volume offer a broad array
of answers, drawing on sources ranging from Second-Temple Jewish and
New Testament literature to late antique Christian and Rabbinic writings.
They explore, in particular, how discourses of "heresy" relate to the
formation of religious identities by Jews, Christians, and others. Taken
together, they map the multiple functions of the discourse of "heresy" in
late antique religions and their shifting relationships to "identity." Some
essays focus on the ways in which (re )imagined dissenters are perceived,
described, grouped, categorized, and/or disqualified in our late antique
sources. Others consider the power of labels such as "heretic," "min,"
"Je w," "Christian," "gnostic," and "Manichean."
The volume thus seeks to open a vista onto the varied ways in which
late antique groups and communities defined their own socio-political
borders and secured in-group identities by means of discourses about
"heresy" and "heretics." The papers collected here put to work the
methodological tools provided both by the recent scholarly emphases on
textuality and by the social study of heresiology in order to reach a more
4 Roy F. Baumeister begins his research on basic conceptual issues with Descartes'
dubitative formula and expands it to the development of the "hidden self' in the sixteenth
century; see his Identity: Cultural Change and the Struggle for Self (Oxford: OUP, 1986),
11-50.
5 Anthony Giddens, Modernity and Self-Identity: Self and Society in the Late Modern
Age (Cambridge: Polity Press, 1991), 33. Critics of the now-popular notion of "identity"
have drawn attention to its lack of analytical value. Malesevi6 holds that the malleability
and vagueness of this "conceptually, operationally and politically seriously troubled
idiom" causes identity to be just an "operational phantom" (Identity as Ideology, 56). In
the most thorough critique to date, Rogers Brubaker and Frederick Cooper advocate a
complete dismissal of the project that attempts to strike the right chord between a "hard,"
essentialist conception of identity and a "soft," constructivist version of it ("Beyond
'Identity'," TS 29.1 [2000]: 1-47). See also Mervyn F. Bendle, "The Crisis of 'Identity'
in High Modernity," BJS 53.1 (2002): 1-18; and Richard Jenkins, Social Identity (2d ed.
London: Routledge, 2004).
6 On pre-modern attempts at self-understanding and identification, see e.g. Judith M.
Lieu, Christian Identity in the Jewish and Graeco-Roman World (Oxford: OUP, 2004);
and discussion below.
Making "Selves and Marking Others 3
integrative understanding of late antique religious movements. They shift
the focus away from "heretics" and "heresy" to heresiological discourse,
by adopting literary approaches and by contextualizing the late antique
Jewish and Christian groups that produced our extant literature.
In the following section, we review recent developments on ancient
heresiology and orthodoxy, connecting them to current discussions on the
concept of "identity" in the study of religion. Finally, we introduce the
papers in this volume with a focus on their novel approaches.
Hairesis in Modern Scholarship
Early Christian hairesis emerged in part from the broader context of Greek
Hellenistic culture. John Glucker describes the word's development,
beginning with the classical Greek verb haireomai, "to choose." Its root
underwent a series of different modifications. For instance, in the third
century BCE, hairesis could mean a person's "attitude" or "disposition,"
and often had political connotations, while later Polybius applied the term
to individuals as well as groups.7 Heinrich von Staden traces the transition
from individual to group applications first in the medical schools, then in
philosophical schools of Hellenistic Alexandria. According to von Staden,
in the Ptolemaic Alexandrian medical hairesis literature:
[A] group with a fairly coherent and distinctive theories, with an acknowledged founder
[ ... ], and with publicly identifiable leaders who articulate (a) their rejection of rival
theories through theoretically founded polemics, as well as (b) their own systematic
alternatives, would qualify as a hairesis. [ ... ] It is worth noting that, no later than the
second century BCE, hairesis begins to occur in non-medical literature, too, as a
designation for a group that is thought to be doctrinally distinctive, especially for a
philosophical schooL ... In some of these non-medical texts "doctrine," "school," and
"sect" all might be defensible translations of hairesis, but in each case it refers to a group
phenomenon, not to individual choice.8
The Alexandrian classification left a lingering imprint on the term hairesis.
From the second century BCE onwards, hairesis had mostly referred in
Greek literature to a group, usually associated with its founder. The term
hairesis appeared in the titles of books concerning the opinions of
philosophers or their respective doctrines, yet it did not initially signify the
institutionalized schools.9 The meaning of the term "heresy" as
7 John Glucker, Antiochus and the Late Academy (Gottingen: Vandenhoeck und
Ruprecht, 1978), 168, 172-3.
8 Heinrich von Staden, "Hairesis and Heresy: The Case of the haireseis iatrikai, " in
Jewish and Christian Self-definition, v. 3, Self-definition in the Greco-Roman World (ed.
Ben F. Meyer and E.P. Sanders; Philadelphia: Fortress Press, 1982),76-100, esp. 80.
9 Glucker, Antiochus and the Late Academy, 174-5.
4 Eduard Iricinschi & Holger M Zellentin
"philosophical school" became more common in the subsequent decades,
and by the first century BCE it came to characterize precisely these
philosophical institutions.10
As early as 1979, Marcel Simon registered the similar use of orthodoxy
and hairesis in Judaism and incipient Christianity. He pointed to the
trajectory between the New Testament book of Acts (24: 14 and 26:5) and
Justin Martyr's Dialogue with Trypho, and most notably to a passage in the
latter that describes Justin's branch of Christianity as a Jewish hairesis
(Dial. 62.3; ca. 140-150 CE).l1 Semantically, hairesis remained an open
term all through third century CE, according to Simon. Yet the
consequences of such "choice" varied from case to case. For Origen,
hairesis designated the necessary tools of paideia in the most relevant
areas of human life, such as medicine, philosophy and Judaism; in the
writings of Clement and Hippolytus, pagan philosophical schools receive a
clearly better assessment than Christian heresies; finally, in Hellenistic
philosophical writings, hairesis designates a highly qualitative choice.12
Von Staden suggests that the relational character of haireseis in early
Christian contexts divorced it from its more independent uses in
Alexandrian medicine or in philosophical schools, such as "doctrine,"
"school," or "sect." Whereas these neutral descriptions underlined the
discrete character of each philosophical or medical group and its leader,
hairesis received new meanings in Patristic writings that described degrees
of separation from the true church, such as "falling away," "breaking
away," "separation," "estrangement," "alienation. "13
Even after hairesis developed into "heresy" in early Christianity, one of
the term's most important denotations remained Hellenistic philosophy and
its numerous schools. Consequently, ancient Greek thought provides
modem scholars with one of the main contexts for most of the research on
heresy. Understanding "heresies," however, in connection to philosophical
schools has led scholars to describe them as real and concrete social
movements, rather than as perceptions of a specific religious group or
individual. In this sense, the history of the term "heresy" has long directed
most scholars' analysis towards the study of genuine, discrete groups.
10 Glucker, Antiochus and the Late Academy, 182-184, cf. Alain Le Boulluec, La
notion d 'heresie dans la litterature grecque, IT- IIT sieeles (Paris: Etudes
Augustiniennes, 1985),47.
11 Marcel Simon, "From Greek Hairesis to Christian Heresy," in Early Christian
Literature and the Classical Intellectual Tradition: In Honorem Robert M Grant,
TMologie historique 54 (ed. William R. Schoedel and Robert L. Wilken; Paris: Editions
Beauchesne, 1979), 101-116, esp. 105-6.
12 Origen Contra Celsum 3.12-3; cf. 2.27; 5.61, Diogenes Laertius used it as a praise
in Vito Phi/os. Introd; see Simon, "From Greek Hairesis to Christian Heresy," 108-111.
13 Von Staden, "Hairesis and Heresy," esp. 81,97-98.