pruning the parting

8/3/2019 Pruning the Parting

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[email protected] [email protected]

Pruning the Parting of the Ways

Introduction.........................................................................................................2

Part I....................................................................................................................3

The Backdrop. Locales: Places, Times ................................................................3

What is this Parting of the Ways?.......................................................................7

Part II.................................................................................................................11

The Language of the Parting...............................................................................11

Braided Expressions of belief in the One God......................................................13

Not Alone Did New Thoughts Rise........................................................................15

Part III...............................................................................................................19

Parting with the Parting......................................................................................19

Conclusion.........................................................................................................22

Bibliography......................................................................................................23

Notes...................................................................................................................24

Adrian Hove-Kreutzfeldt 1 Hebrew U, Spring, 2011
mailto:[email protected]:[email protected]:[email protected]:[email protected]:[email protected]:[email protected]:[email protected]:[email protected]:[email protected]:[email protected]:[email protected]:[email protected]:[email protected]:[email protected]:[email protected]:[email protected]


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Introduction

The question what seems to be meant by the Parting of the Ways? is sought

answered in this paper, while especially by way of the anthology The Ways That

Never Parted the dismantling of the model of the Parting that has been taking

place is traced:

The first part will outline the historical background of late antiquity, and of the

terminology related to the Parting.

The second part highlights the multiplicity of offspring that sprang from the

Second Temple, their interactions through hostile polemic, fruitful competition and

exchange of ideas; a criss-cross of relations dependent on locales of time and place

that does not fit the two distinct monoliths claimed by the Parting.

The third and concluding part could be phrased now what? How should we,

observers of the remains of old, describe what we find without resorting to the

language of only some of the involved, biased, parts?



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Part I

The Backdrop. Locales: Places, Times

Judaism prior to the fall of the Second Temple was not singular, but rather a

vying mass of Judaisms philosophies as Josephus calls the three major branches

nearly all of which had communion at the Temple. Their, the Diaspora at the

moment discounted, disagreements pertained to e.g. salvation: the awakening of the

dead on the day of reckoning, the role of the Law, but they the upper class was for a

large part the priestly Sadducees, the majority of practitioners accounted for so-called

common Judaism,i the Pharisaic lay-movement centred on the practices of the

Fathers, the Jesus-movement is an example of an outspoken Messianic hope had

more traditions in common than what separated them. The purity-oriented Qumran-

communities stands a little out, for even as they rejected the Wicked Priest at the

defiled Temple, they agreed on the Scriptures employed by him. The authority they

didrecognise was their Teacher of Righteousness, an whose account they awaited the

coming end-of-time-battle that would reveal the predestination of each Son of Light

vis--vis Son of Darkness. (Risnen, 2010:32-36)

Neither was Judaism after the fall of the Second Temple a mono-vocal entity,

but an embodiment of various beliefs that all attested some heritage to the authorities

of old as shown via examples above. Whether focus was pinpointed towards Scripture

or oral tradition as the guide towards the God of the Fathers, or a priestly way of life

that would uphold the purity of the individual as well as the community the tradition

of discussion and competition on differences and agreements that had been in

function prior to the physical destruction of the religious hearth of the Jews was

carried on by the offspring following the two Jewish-Roman wars; it would be to play

down the state of affairs to say that these heirs did not always get along well.



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Who has the right to deem others out and away from Jewishness? Did the

Essenes part ways with Judaism when they would not recognise the High Priest, and

chose to withdraw to proto-monastic seclusion whether in the desert or in the cities?

They did not survive long enough to make an impact as such upon our world today

except in an indirect fashion following the discovery of their textual remains near the

Dead Sea which might explain why they would not seem overtly relevant to the

discussion of how the Jesus-movement that became Christianity entered the

picture. The model coined the Parting of the Ways has been the way to explanation

the process: that Christianity as we know it today and Judaism as we know it today

sprang from the common root of Second-temple-Judaism, but ceased interaction after

their break-up into two distinct entities.

But the issues concerning the Essenes and common Judaism is similar to the

present case: the perspective we posit, as Martin Goodman writes, is what to a large

degree determines our answer about when, how, why, and indeed whether, the ways

of Judaism and Christianity parted. (Goodman, 2007:119) In short: what does it take

to talk about a Parting having taken place? That it is possible to find variances

between a sub-group and the umbrella from which it stemmed, or that more issues

divide than unite the parties? That one side no longer accepted common ground?

What then of less outspoken voices? A community might, as Daniel Stkl Ben Ezra

points out in his paper, have many pools from which to draw inspiration, but choose

to present this process in another way entirely. Hence, we should not too quickly

accept what one group says of itself without taking into consideration the opinions of

the others. Judith M. Lieu notes that from the New Testament period there is a

consciousness of being a single body, the church, (Lieu, 1994:109) but concurrently

she points out: from some perspectives Jews and Christians were but variants of the



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same commitment to blind faith, a unity more significant than any divisions between

them. (Lieu, 1994:113)

A common denominator in the centuries prior and posterior to the beginning of

our timeline whether in the world at large, i.e. in the eastern or western provinces,

or in the various local communities was Hellenism. It was a force to be reckoned

with, promoted as it had been by the all-conquering Macedonians, then adopted by the

all-pervading Roman Empire.iiA multifaceted mindset, entailing philosophy, magic,

culture and especially religiosity, since no culture, city or state were without

demanding Gods akin to the later Augsburgian principle cuius regio, eius religio.

Where the Romans found their way, so did Hellenism, and the upper classes of

society, the Sadducees in the Jewish context, (Risnen, 2010:34) would take on the

fashion of their rulers and spread the new ways to the populace. The interchange and

adoption of ideas from the surroundings was a continual matter of fact, as Raanan

Boustan portrays in his careful browsing of the Rabbi of salvation: Ishmael, the

stories of whom rely on the Greek-Roman science of the day, the miracle-narratives

associated with heroes, and a certain amount of dialogical polemic with the

iconoclasm that the Christians of Byzantium faced in the seventh to tenth century AD.

The implementation of ideas and concepts was not always a peaceful process, as

the Maccabean Martyrs (2 Macc 2:22) attest: they died to uphold theirJudaismos, but

even as they did, they adopted their oppressors use of ethnicity, his Hellenismos, as

encompassing all straits of life. cf. Daniel Boyarin. (Boyarin, 2007:67) Likewise, one

would be as hard pressed if one were to isolate Jewish from Hellenistic traits in

e.g. the writings of Philo or the New Testament. And precisely the Middle-Platonist

Philo is an example that the globalisation was not a mono-directional push, but a

criss-cross exchange whereby other cultures found their way to the hearts of



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civilisation: Alexandria, Rome and other metropols. Here, to live their lives at peace

with their neighbours, people would adapt to the ways of the place, pragmatically so

as Lieu (1994:114) points to, or with Paula Fredriksen and the Jews as the example:

they lived, and lived thoroughly, in their cities of residence throughout the

Diaspora. (Fredriksen, 2007:43) Amicability was not guaranteed though; the foreign

other though an intriguing mirror in which to reflect merits and flaws was a

potential enemy, and as such detestable.iii

It might not be worth noting, but the vastness of the Empire, the means of

transportation and hence communication were not exactly as apt as those in our

present globalised age. Difference in distance coupled with difference in surroundings

language not the least of these barriers, though Greek (and Latin) were the lingua

franca should prove some obstacle for any universal event to have taken place.

To extract the Jewishness from those we in hindsight and to a certain extent

based on their, as Philippa Townsend has argued in Who Were the First Christians?,

appropriated terminology term Christians by way of a Parting of the Ways, seems to

me the same project as pruning Hellenism from the Jewishness of some Scripture-

users in late antiquity: both isms are integral and inherently dialogical elements.

Each writer may have taken an explicit stand for or against the values of one side or

the other, but the reader, to a large extent, determines how to read a text.

The church of the antique authors should not be understood qua our present

religious institutions of ChurchSynagogue; and this set of either/or-lenses should

definitely not be applied to every piece of evidence, textual and archaeological, from

the early period pertaining to the development of Christian and Jewish characteristics.

In doing so, the errand of the writers whom we know of now as heresiologists

(Boyarin, 2007:85) would be run, and those between categories neglected again.



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What is this Parting of the Ways?

How much amendment can a model cope before it has been so diluted that it no

longer resembles what it started out as? Adam H. Becker, with a different phrase,

ends his paper on that note, having undermined the model from especially the

geographical point of view, that the world of late antiquity was more than the Roman

Empire, and that events perforce has to happen at different place at different times

according to local factors.

The original map of the Parting as summarised in the introduction to The

Ways That Never Parted outlined a blur of Jewishness that crossed a line of

demarcation after which (1) Judaism and Christianity developed in relative isolation

from one another and (2) the interactions between Jews and Christians after the

second century were limited, almost wholly, to polemical conflict and mutual

misperception. (Reed&Becker, 2007:2) James Dunns (Dunn, 2006[1991]: xxiii-

xxiv) revision of the Parting traces it

Over a lengthy period, at different times and places, and as judged by different people

differently, depending on what was regarded as a non-negotiable boundary marker

and by whom. So, early for some, or demanded by a leadership seeking clarity of self-

definition, but for many ordinary believers and practitioners there was a long

lingering embrace which was broken finally only after the Constantinian settlement.

(Heemstra, 2009:224)

Lieus comment though engaging conclusions that only in the Holy Land, and

no earlier than the fourth century, did a Parting between Judaic Christianity and the

Judaism that would become Rabbinic really take place fits here: such a timescale

makes the model even more problematic in its usefulness, and leaves unanswered the

question why it must be 'Parting' that we are seeing. (Lieu, 1994:116)

According to Heiki Risnen, the Parting is the end of a long intra-Jewish

process of liberties taken with regard to the practical observance of the Torah, the

result of which is that The parting of the ways is a fact in the second century: by the



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time of Pliny it is clear that Christian are not Jewswhether they saw themselves as

the true Israel or how much they drew on Jewish traditions. (Risnen, 2010:247)

A main problem related to the Parting is addressed by Marius Heemstra in his

thesis How Rome's administration of the Fiscus Judaicus accelerated the parting of

the ways between judaism and Christianity:

First of all there does not seem to be a clear definition of the issue. On the one hand,

there are scholars trying to answer the question when did Judaism and Christianity

become mutually exclusive or totally distinct from each other?, on the other hand,

there are scholars investigating the question when did all interaction between

Christianity and Judaism cease?. Furthermore, representatives of the latter group

seem to suggest that because we can still observe interaction between Christianity and

Judaism in the fourth century (and possibly beyond) there was no early break andthere is no point in looking for one. (Heemstra, 2009:232)

A broad respond to the when of the Parting is set by Wolf-Dieter Hauschild:

that the Definitive Ablsung des Christentums vom Judentum (Hauschild,

20073:57) took place between 70 and 135, whereas Heemstras arguments with a

minor change to the scheme of the Parting, i.e. that the split did not occur between

Jews and non-Jews, but among Jews, Jesus-believing and Jesus-ignorant

respectively are more elaborated, and his date is clear-cut: the year 96AD. I have

found that he brings an interesting point of view in which to reflect the opinions

amassed in The Ways That Never Parted.

The quotes above are brought to highlight the agenda common to users of the

model; a main criticism levelled by Lieu and others is that the Parting operates

essentially with the abstract or universal conception of each religion, Judaism and

Christianity, when what we know about is the specific and local. (Lieu, 1994:108)

that demonstrates itself in the search for an unanimous explanation to when and how

the Jesus-movement that began within Judaism wound up as a separate entity. Lieu

states: it is driven by a theological need to maintain the unity between Israel and the

church. (Lieu, 1994:119)



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Historically speaking,iv the vocabulary relating to a Parting is an inheritance

from authors such as Ignatius who would reject any overlap between the identity of

theIoudaioi and their own identity as Christianoi. (Runesson, 2008:73) These early

proponents saw themselves as superseding the Jews as the people of God, an attitude

re-surfacing with the scholarship of German Protestantsvwho read the triumphalism

of ancient Christian literature as an expression of historical fact. (Reed&Becker,

2007:7) In their rendering, Jesus brought the new religion of the 1st century that

spelled the end for the law-focused, stagnating Sptjudentum; the Jesus-movement

formed of Jewish and non-Jewish ethnicities by Paul and the other apostles

conflicted and dialogued with non-Jesus-believing Jews until, at latest, the second of

the two Jewish uprisings. Afterwards the flock separated in the two self-containing,

self-defining institutions of the Rabbinical-Jewish Synagogue and the Gentile Church.

What the Christians retained from their Mother was the Old Testament and the

image of the Jew as Other, while theology and rituals were derived from the Greco-

Roman surroundings via (cultural) exchange. By labelling Jewish-Christians and

heretics as anomalies with syncretizing or Judaizing tendencies, the muddy ground

between the two more clearly marked and well-trodden paths, (Lieu, 1994.118) and

hence, divergents were practically not to be accounted for.

Following the Second World War, the more or less outspoken anti-Semitism in

the scholarship of the day was recognised, and the works of especially James Parkes

(1896-1981) grounded a new direction for the study of the relationship between early

Christianity and Judaism, since the latter was acknowledged as a living and authentic

religion. Marcel Simon and others have since revised and reworked, time and again,

how the two religions related, as Andrew S. Jacobs gives a colourful illustration of in

The Lion and the Lamb: Reconsidering Jewish-Christian Relations in Antiquity .



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Heemstra attests to most of the classic pointers of the Parting, and describes

it as effectuated on two fronts: inside the Jewish communities in the Diaspora and in

Palestine under the tutelage of Gamaliel II as one of the leading Rabbis at the

Council of Yavneh,vi the traditional dating of the birkat ha-minim, (Heemstra,

2009:211) whereby non-complying Jews were expelled from the synagogue. This

agrees with Lieus note: a min is an insider even when being treated as an outsider,

(Lieu, 1994:114) i.e. certain overlaps are recognised, but important issues are too

diverging for the community to cope with. On the governmental and empire-wide

level, Emperor Nervas revision of Domitians tax-legislation, the fiscus Judaicus,

was implemented, after which it became illegal to follow the Jewish tradition without

paying the state its tribute.



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Part II

The Language of the Parting

Are there alternatives to a language that we have inherited from the scriptural

elite, the winners of history? To Lieu it does not matter if the name of the theologian

is Harnack or Origen, (Lieu, 1994:108)vii the ideological construct they present does

not, as Fredriksen writes, reflect the people on the ground, or with Lieu again:

theological boundaries and social boundaries are not necessarily co-terminus. (Lieu,

1994:109)

The description a certain group provides of itself and others is necessarily

biased, and this terminology ought to be kept in mind when describing the adherents

of said group; but to fit the broad spectra of reality of, in this case, late antiquity to the

categories of certain interpreters, thereby leaving out others from the equation, is akin

to self-deceival. Various lenses applied to the textual and archaeological material that

we possess yields an assortment of explanations, more or less valid dependent on the

degree of reflection this or that interpreter has given to hermeneutics and personal

interests involved. Annette Yoshiko Reeds discussion of her own use of the often

misused and/or misleading term Jewish Christianity winds up indicting that

scholars largely follow the lead of the heresiologists, by minimizing, marginalizing,

and explaining away the evidence to the contrary (Reed, 2007:195)

Identity-formation is a process of give-and-take; Boyarin pays more than a little

heed to this, not least by calling attention to that Jewishness was an ethnic marker

on par with Greekness and Persianness encompassing the religious duties and

obligations inherited. With regard to the phenomenon martyrdom that appears in

Christian as well as in Jewish settings/writings he has proposed that the best way

to account for the many features of these texts was the assumption of shared cultural,



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religious innovations flowing in both directions, providingeven continuity.

(Boyarin, 2007:74) Fredriksen has described how religion ran in the blood,

(Fredriksen, 2007:39) the explanation, as both she and Anders Runesson sees it, for

Ignatius of Lyons martyr-death: not for the name of Christ, but because of his

refusal to attend to his duties in relation to his ethnos, city, and

empire. (Runesson, 2008:85) Not earlier, nor later than when

Christianity separatedcult from culture, (Boyarin, 2007:72) did an epistemic

shift take place, and Ioudaismos was transformed into a religion containing

important national, ethnic and cultural elements. (Boyarin, 2007:71)

A unified explanation for the development of expressions of religiosities in late

antiquity is bound to have a hard time if every piece of evidence must be scrutinised

on its own terms; but notto do so would be negligence to the duty of the historian, i.e.

to showcase the processes as objectively as possible while paying heed to subjective

utterances of the those involved. The non-admittance of cooperation or contact

between one group and the other, or with Robert A. Kraft the claim that To be a

Christian involved in part not being a Jew, and vice versa (Kraft, 2007:87) might

be true on the subjective level of the writer, but the questions then queue up: what

does it take to be 'intra muros' v. 'extra muros,' (Lieu, 1994:116) and how far if at

all would this definition have any relevance on a more pragmatic level of lived

life,viiii.e. did a label exclude the labelled from dealings with the other and to what

extent were the definition of the other the same for both parties? Rarely would

anyone call their own group heretics, whereas true congregation is more user-

friendly. Various examinations ofTheMartyrdom of Polycarp allow us to grasp and

question! the motives at play in the writing:

o the question of authority that ascertains Polycarp as ranking high according to his



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imitatio Christo, following the Gospel-passions and Stephen in Acts 7; Polycarps

quartodecimanism and his arrest on a Great Sabbath might be said to belong to

this category too. (Gibson, 2007:157)

o the Eusebian recension, traceable from the various editions of the writ, ix making

them [the Jews] responsible for a greater portion of the ensuing action, (Gibson,

2007:155)

o The role and identity of the persecutors, i.e. why the Jews were partaking in

harassing the Christians, Lieus discussion of the theological reasons of why

they wereperceivedas such, (Lieu, 1996:59 and 281) Fredriksens rephrase: why

were they [the authors] compelled to present them [the Jews] in this way

(Fredriksen, 2007:59 n.76), and Gibsons suggestion that the Jews ought to be

seen as a remnant of the battle within second-century Smyrnean Christianity

about the implication of Jesus-following for the observation of Jewish custom,

only later enrolled in the direct confrontations between Jews and Christians.

(Gibson, 2007:146 and 158)

Braided Expressions of belief in the One God

The changed use of a given text as MPoly above from an internal dispute on

how to manage the heritage, to enrolment in the literature against the Jews is no less

important when attention is focused to other areas than Smyrna and Asia Minor,

though the authors associated with that region has demanded the attention of many

contributors ofThe Ways That Never Parted; the Revelation of John is mentioned in

passing by Gibson, but treated more fully by David Frankfurter whose conclusion that

Revelation should certainly be read as a Jewish document, (Frankfurter, 2007:137)

at first might sound surprising. Though if it is kept in mind that the and the

did not necessarily start out as the two impenetrable blocks we know the



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Synagogue and the Church to be today, but were two words for the same: the place to

meet for the adherents of Scripture Jew and Godfearer alike clustered according to

agreement and opposition. This broad palette of vying beliefs would naturally include

competition, and where would such be fiercer than where opponents agreed on the

heritage to be interpreted, but read the sources differently? Revelations curse on the

Synagogue of Satan, the direct talk about Jews (Rev.2:9; 3:9), the concern with purity,

and the indebtedness to the genre of Jewish apocalyptics leads Frankfurter to

highlight the common ground of this writ, the Ascension of Isaiah and 5 & 6Ezra in

order to posit the authorship, not as Jewish-Christian, but as valid exponents of

Jewish culture. He, following the Dutch scholar De Jonges approach, defies splitting

these apocryphal texts into their respective parts of either Jewish orChristian, but

views them as a moment in the evolution of some community or scribal

conventicle. (Frankfurter, 2007:141) Since both Revelation and the apocrypha that

Frankfurter treats represent a status between Jewish and Christian, (Frankfurter,

2007:140) what, then, are their differences? Mainly that one text made it into the

Christian corpus, the others were safeguarded with Jeromes words as edifying,

but not authoritative for doctrine, (Salvesen, 2007:236) even as the apocryphal

material that this church-father had in mind was that which in his days did not belong

to the Old Testament according to the Hebrew canon: the books of the Maccabees,

Tobit, Ben Sira et.al. There are vast differences between the milieu of the New

Prophecy of Asia Minor that intrigues Frankfurter, and the rabbinical discussion of

the canonical content in Roman Palestine that Allison Salvesen shows Origen and

Jerome to have translated since that was what these scholars of old did by way of

the Hexapla and the Iuxta Hebraeos respectively to their communities; but the

common ground must be noted: that there indeed was lively contact between these



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wings of tradition, even as the Christian theology was being developed out of and

even away from the originally Jewish Scriptures. (Salvesen, 2007:233)

Not Alone Did New Thoughts RiseThe development of the two religions, or as Boyarin would have it: the system

of orthodoxies that comprised both the church and the rabbinic formation, evolved

not in ever-hostile exclusivity, but via shared cultural, religious innovations flowing

in both directions, providing social contiguity and contact and even cultural

continuity, (Boyarin, 2007:73+74) as he has shown in studies of martyrdom. when

Christianity separatedcult from culture, an epistemic shift took place after which

the ethnic term Ioudaismos was transformed into a religion containing important

national, ethnic and cultural elements; (Boyarin, 2007:72+71) a process of hybridity.

Heemstra would agree that Jesus-following was the reason for the parting, but the

label Jew which changed from an ethnic term to a religious one, (Heemstra,

2009:210) was transformed as such by the Roman fiscus Judaicus as of the year 96.

The hybridity of Boyarin fits Frankfurters plea: recognition of the beginning of our

timeline, where religion was practiced rather than thought, as a period of blur and

flux in religious boundaries, (Frankfurter, 2007:131) attested by texts that reflect a

sectarian Jewish identity while at the same time positioning Christ as a central part of

the heavenly world, among these such subspecies as Hebraistic Christianity

(Frankfurter 2007:134) an example ofinvented tradition that do not easily fit the neat

categories imposed by the Parting.

The contacts traceable between the different communities ranging from Jesus-

followers to Christ-ignorant are manifold, though many points only to Christians

as gathering inspiration from Jews. Salvesens study draws attention to the repeated

re-turns to Hebraisms and Judaic colouring initiated almost a century later than the



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earlier of the traditional datings of the Parting, i.e. some time between 160 and

180CE, Melito of Sardis presents a list of Old Testament books [that] corresponds to

the contents of the rabbinic biblical canon except for the omission of the book of

Esther. (Salvesen, 2007:235) Stkls essay on the sources for the roman Solemn

Fast of the seventh month argues for contacts to and inspiration from the Jews of

Rome and their as both Stkl and Fredriksen remarksx public and visible practice

of religiosity. Stkl, looking beyond the apostolic guise that the appropriated heritage

has been given so as not to be just Jewish, discusses the value of multifaceted

explanations that pay heed to variances in calendars and locales, and thus instead of

positing Christians as being either inspired by the scriptural heritage shared with the

Jews, or in competition with three pagan Roman festivals (Stkl, 2007:262) he

lends voice to traces of a real conflict between his [Pope Leos] Jewish neighbors

who observed their fast, those Christians who observed the Fast of the Seventh

Month, and those Christians who regarded this practice as illicit Judaization.60 (Stkl,

2007:274-5)

Christians being part of their societies to a large extent appropriated tools

and explanations to solve difficulties from both pagan and Jewish contemporaries. As

Fredriksen has argued, Gentile Christian writers iterate their distance from the Jews,

time and again, in the contra ioudaios-literature, (Fredriksen, 2007:62) a literary

tradition that is something else entirely than a mere continuation of the xenophobic

comments made by the Graeco-Roman elite on other peoples. These authors used the

construct of the foreigner as a mirror for their readers to see their own flaws and

merits in attaining romanitas, (Fredriksen, 2007:41-43) whereas bishops et al. applied

Jew in their exegetical rhetoric to purge unwanted elements a remedy to define the

group the author belonged to: an ideological ideal of total separation. (Fredriksen,



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2007:47) Read at face value, such texts attest that relations between Jews and

(Gentile) Christians irretrievably, unambiguously (Fredriksen, 2007:35) broke down.

Read critically and in their context, they tell a vastly different story about the people

on the ground who had lived in civic, intermingling, social patterns established well

before the inception of the new literary elite, and who, continued in their social

(including religious) interactions. (Fredriksen, 2007: 61+43)

But at several points of interaction the Jewish contemporaries also took note of

the Christians: late examples are the Jewish martyrological accounts treated by

Boustan,xi earlier cases of this tug of war are given by Naomi Koltun-Fromm: all of

these late ancient Semitic exegetes focus their attention on the same biblical passages

and share an extrabiblical tradition (Koltun-Fromm, 2007:283) that they use to

dispute expounded with the help of Philo their sexual behaviour as the way of life

for the chosen people: Aphrahat both polemicizes against Jewish marriage practice

and establishes a hierarchy of spirituality for his Christian readersWhile the Rabbis

never specifically counter Aphrahats conclusions. (Koltun-Fromm, 2007:306)

Common ground coined Convergence of the Ways by Salvesen can also be

found in the 13th Chapter of the Letter of Severus (St. Stephens Bones: The

Conversions of Minorca: 1996), where Jews and Christians sing the same song Their

memory has perished with a crash and the Lord endures forever, each community

having their opponents in mind of course.

Complex and ongoing relations continuing in the middle of the fifth century and

beyond in lieu of an early and finite separation of the two religions of Judaism and

Christianity one is tempted to find connections and issues to compare all around, but

Amram Tropper warns of cautiousness: As the institutionalising communities

developed, i.e. Church and Rabbinic Synagogue, they indeed had a common Greco-



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Roman inspiration from the succession-lists of the philosophical schools, but these

were employed for quite different purposes. Dialogue and conflict is not guaranteed

even as a similar tool is used at a more or less similar time, xiisince the drive in this

case differed: early Christian heresiology was designated to bolster and spread proto-

orthodox beliefs, tannaitic literaturewould have been preaching for the converted.

(Tropper, 2007:186)

And here we are again, with the intellectual, Christian elite that due to

religious competition both inside and outside the circle of faithful classified their

opponents in a rigid manner of Others, as Cameronxiiisums up: The Jews were both

part of and a model for writing about Christian deviants. (Cameron, 2007:359)



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Part III

Parting with the Parting

Emotions are avid when Risnen comments on "Boyarin's (Dying, 8) extreme

suggestion that we should not think of Christianity and Judaism in late antiquity as

different religions at all, but only as 'points on a continuum,'" (Risnen, 2010:386n1)

even as Risnen has asserted that the noun Christiandoes not imply that there

already was in existence a distinct new religion. (Risnen, 2010:1-2) There really

does not, as I cited Heemstra earlier, seem to be agreement on the meanings attached

to the phrase the Parting of the Ways. Heemstras critique of Fredriksen is an

example: interaction and exchange between Christians and Jews didcontinue after the

Parting that didhappen,xivsince it was possible for individual [Gentile] Christians

to attend synagogue services, because thesewould not have been regarded as

heretical Jews by the synagogues, butas having the same status as God-fearers and

other sympathizers. (Heemstra, 2009:229)

Heemstras focus for the Parting is intra-Jewish, Risnens sees a longwinded

process finalised in the Parting of Christianity and Judaism, while Runesson would

place the responsibility for the Parting in the hands of the seeds of present-day

Christianity, i.e. first Ignatius adaptation of Judaism to fit the structure of mystery-

cults, and then Theodosius Is edict of 28 th of February 380 that Nicene Christianity

was to be the religion of the empire to the exclusion of all other forms of religion,

including other forms of Christianity. (Runesson, 2008:86). Common ground among

the three is that they in one way or other do speak of parted ways. Certainly, an

either-or, a before-and-after is alluring, but mostly so for the winners of history for

whom the two-party-system provided by the Parting is an integral component,

e.g. in the tale of identity of church history, which Since its inceptionhas been



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under the (at times) baneful influence of the Ecclesiastical History of Eusebius.

(Becker, 2007:373) Eusebius, who saw the Constantinian turn as the pinnacle of

salvation-history: the formerly chosen Jews being replaced by the new people: the

Christians. Contrary to such a simplistic model we have an abundance of Jewish-

Christian (or Christian-Jewish?) testimonies insisting, as John G. Gager gives them

voice beyond the grave, that there was no need to choose between being Christians

or Jews. Indeed for them it was an altogether false choice. (Gager, 2007:370)

How do we describe late antiquity apart from the Eusebian model, without

discriminating and generalising? We cannot in any meaningful way speak of two

entities that universally so broke off contact at a certain point in late antiquity. We

have to leave a model that one-sidedly describes a transition from Judaism(s) to

isolated Jews and Christians, have to leave a mindset that focuses on one religion,

region or field of study without paying heed to others, be it the era before or after our

main interest, or the geographical isolation that e.g. has focussed on Christianity of

the West orEastern Rabbinical Judaism.xv The certainty of well-defined groups are no

longer viable what options are we left? With Andrew S. Jacobs we must ask How

we can write responsible history from biased literary documents. (Jacobs, 2007:105)

Krafts suggestion is to retain the Parting as an analogy to be weighed against the

variant, sometimes competing, forms within and sometimes somewhere between

each tradition, (Kraft, 2007:89) i.e. recognise the language of the winners and the

cluesscattered along the path. (Kraft, 2007:93)

Boyarins sentence, though in passing, struck me with a certain horror and

dawning conviction of its truth: I suspect thatmuch human violence is generated

simply by resisting the fuzziness of our own categories of socio-cultural division.

(Boyarin, 2007:82) A history of violence then,xvi

where the red thread of survival of



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the fittest (group/ideology) is depicted on the background of the pagan world

painted with individual, intertwined stories each contributing to a fragmented whole;

not a parting of the ways, but many struggles and bends along the road, where the

various clusters of identities define themselves in competition and contradistinction

according to the given setting: a dynamic interchange of dominance and relations.

(Jacobs 2007:96+n5)



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Conclusion

To sum up: What, then, seems to be meant when the Parting of the Ways is

employed? Too much and too little, I am afraid, and confusingly so, as Goodmans

nine figures illustrate especially when they are viewed together. How can one thing

mean in at least nine ways? Too little, since the Parting is but an overview of

two parts apart from the complexity of inter-arguing voices. Too much since it

generalises everything to fit just these two categories or requires amendments ad

infinitum to cope with evidence that does not suit the definitions of the heresiologists.

Could agreement be reached on the particular points involved parts, years,

reasons etc. of the Parting, we would still be left with the problematic outline that

the buzz-word poses: the history of late antiquity may very well be modelled as

agonistic again with Boyarin: physical means, and to this belongs martyrologies, is

the most direct to differentiate us from others but we cannotreplicate history as

two blocks opposing one another; and that, that is what the Parting first and

foremost has done, does and still means: that history is coloured by if not directly

written from the perspective of the successful elites; not from that of the involved

singulars as they saw themselves, but as their writings were re-interpreted by a later

audience who translated old material e.g. The Martyrium of Polycarp and

Revelation into new con-texts, just as we fit all into our inherited categories of

either/or.

As a whole, the contributors to The Ways That Never Partedhave highlighted a

broad variety of locales and peoples, and they have argued for recognition of

differences and divergents; as such we should not even speak of partings but of

parts of polyform jigsaws, the master plan of which we, tentatively, may hintat.



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Bibliography

Ed. Becker & Reed.

Contributors: Paula Fredriksen; Daniel Boyarin; Robert A. Kraft; Andrew S.

Jacobs; Martin Goodman; David Frankfurter; E. Leigh Gibson; Amram

Tropper; Anette Yoshiko Reed; Alison Salvesen; Daniel Stkl Ben Ezra; NaomiKoltun-Fromm; Raanan S. Abusch; Averil Cameron; John G. Gager; Adam H.

Becker.

2007 The Ways that Never Parted, Jews and Christians in Late Antiquityand the Early Middle Ages. Fortress Press: Minneapolis.

Bowersock, G. W.

1995 Martyrdom and Rome(New York: Cambridge University Press) 1-21.

Boyarin, Daniel

2001 Justin Martyr Invents Judaism

Church History, Vol. 70, No. 3 (Sep., 2001), pp. 427-461

1998 Martyrdom and the Making of Christianity and JudaismJECS6.4 (1998) 577-627.

Goodman, Martin

1989 Nerva the Fiscus Judaicus and Jewish IdentityThe Journal of Roman Studies, Vol. 79 (1989), pp. 40-44

Hauschild, Wolf-Dieter

2007 Lehrbuch der Kirchen- und Dogmen-geschichte, Band 1: Alte Kirche

und Mittelalter. Gtersloher Verlagshaus: Gtersloh. 2007, 3.Auflage)

Heemstra, Marius

2009 How Rome's administration of the Fiscus Judaicus accelerated the

parting of the ways between judaism and Christianityhttp://dissertations.ub.rug.nl/FILES/faculties/theology/2009/m.heemstra/00-titlecon.pdfLieu, Judith M.

1994 'The Parting of the Ways: Theological Construct or HistoricalReality?Journal for the Study of the New Testament 56

1996 Image and Reality: The Jews in the World of the Christians in theSecond Century

2006 Christian Identity in the Jewish and Graeco-Roman World.(Oxford University Press: Oxford & New York)

Risnen, Heiki

2010 The Rise of Christian Beliefs. The Thought World of Early Christians.(Fortress Press: Minneapolis) esp. 19-76

Runesson, Anders

2008 Inventing Christian Identity. Paul, Ignatius, and Theodosius I

Exploring Early Christian Identity, ed. B. Holmberg. W.U.N.T. 226

(Tbingen: Mohr Siebeck) 59-92.

Townsend, Philippa

2008 Who Were the First Christians? Jews, Gentiles and the Christianoiin E. Iricinischi & Holger M. Zellentin (eds.),

Heresy and Identity in Late Antiquity(Tbingen: Mohr Siebeck, 2008) 212-230.

ENCYCLOPAEDIA JUDAICA, JEWISH IDENTITY

http://dissertations.ub.rug.nl/FILES/faculties/theology/2009/m.heemstra/00-titlecon.pdfhttp://dissertations.ub.rug.nl/FILES/faculties/theology/2009/m.heemstra/00-titlecon.pdf


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Notes



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i (Risnen, 2010:326n68) A term used by E.P.Sanders, Judaism, 47-303, to denote what the

priests and the mass of the people agreed on.

ii Hellenism, it must be remembered, was not a fixed entity, but an adaptable label, the content of

which would vary depending on the one describing it: Epiphanius Hellenism was not the same as

Tatians. (Cameron, 2007:358)

iii Boyarins citation of Mary Louise Pratt (2007:34n32) comes to much the same effect as Edward

Saids term of Othering; Fredriksen (2007:38-48) Gentiles on Jews and Judaism; Lieu

(2004:269-297) The Other. Jacobs, in The Lion and the Lamb, describes the mechanics of that

Others construction, (Jacobs, 2007:118) in order to grasp the comprehensiveness of the worlds

behind, and constructed by the text. A dating of a Parting seems to be irrelevant to him for the

status of the individual text is dependent upon the interpretation of its reader.

iv Based on (Reed&Becker,Introduction, 2007:1-24), (Kraft, 2007:87-94) (Jacobs, 2007:95-118),

and (Lieu, 1994)

v Adolf von Harnack (1851-1930) and Wilhelm Bousset (1865-1920) are but two grand names.

vi However, Peter Schfer, Daniel Boyarin, and others have convincingly established that the

Council of Yavneh was a much later construct rather than a historical event. 13 (Reed&Becker,

2007:5)

vii The list of ancient authors having contributed to the Parting continues with Melito of Sardis

sermon On the Pascha, Justin MartyrsDialogue with Trypho, especially when seen juxtaposed to

the early adversaries of Christianity: Celsos Jew, Porphyros and Justinian.viii Ignatius is a prime example of a literary construction of identity that may have been sharply

divorced from the experience of those to whom he wrote, but that was to become foundational for

later readers. (Lieu, 2004:234) my italics.

ix Leigh Gibson reads various manuscripts to highlight contrasts and similarities.

x The Ways That Never Parted:2007, pp.274 If Leo personally observed Jews in the custom of

walking barefoot on Yom Kippur and 51 As with contemporary Mediterranean paganism, much


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of ancient Jewish religious activity (dancing, singing, communal eating, processing, and as

Chrysostom mentions with some irritation building and feasting insukkot) occurred out-of-doors,

inviting and accommodating the participation of interested outsiders.49 respectively.

xi

G.W.Bowersock, Martyrdom and Rome, Boyarin, Martyrdom and the Making of Christianity and

Judaism are relevant too.

xii Tropper quotes and comments J. Z Smith,Drudgery Divine: On the Comparison of Early

Christianity and the Religions of Late Antiquity (London: U. of London, 1990), 114, and comments:

the question is not which is first?, but rather, why both, at more or less the same time?

(Tropper, 2007:179) The solution to which is to abandon the attempt to draw a line of influence

from one group to another, but focus instead on the broad historical setting, on the discursive space

which all these communities shared. (Tropper, 2007:179)

xiii See further references in Note ii.

xiv instigated by the joint forces of a decision by representatives of mainstream Judaism (exclusion

of Jewish Christians, who were members of mixed Christian communities, from the congregation

of Israelites), (Heemstra, 2009:212) and Emperor Nervas revisedfiscus Judaicus that marked

Christianity as asuperstitio illicita, with the result that Roman authorities are not found to make

any distinction between Jewish and Gentile Christians, (Heemstra, 2009:87) but beingChristian or

not.

xv E.g. Stkls article confronts the (general) assumption, that relations between Jews and Christians

mostly happened in Syrio-Palestine, and thus has been neglected in the study of Roman-

Christianity.

xvi More often than not attested by a Christian cf. (Jacobs, 2007:110, Origenes; 112, Jerome; 114,

The Pilgrim; 116, Strategios)

pruning the parting

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