Book Reviews
A Portable God: The Origin of Judaism and Christianity
Risa Levitt Kohn and Rebecca Moore
(Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield), 2007
Reviewed by Adam Gregerman
First appearing in Journal of Ecumenical Studies
This book, a study of the emergence of early Judaism and Christianity, was written by two religion professors, one Jewish (Kohn) and one Christian (Moore). Instead of dividing the writing according to their specialties, they co-wrote the book. This reflects their main assumption: both traditions are rooted in Israelite religion and share many features. It builds on the current scholarly consensus that Judaism is not the "father" of Christianity. Rather, both claim the heritage of Israel and emerged around the same time, from the unsettled world of the late Second Temple period.
While balanced in its treatment of the two religions, the book never seems like it was written collaboratively. The authors' distinctive voices are not heard, nor do they reflect on the challenges of their jointly writing about long-estranged traditions, which would have increased the book's relevance to modern interreligious relations. Perhaps their insistence "that the similarities between Judaism and Christianity far outweigh their differences" hints at a tendency to downplay the most divisive issues between Jews and Christians (xvi); for example, there is far too little on ancient Jewish-Christian polemics.
They emphasize the destruction of the Jerusalem Temple in 70 CE as a major historical turning point. However, the loss of this religious and political center plays only a minor part in their analysis, which largely focuses on the pre-destruction period. A disorganized introduction to the Hebrew Bible provides the background to a series of chapters on different topics. These are often (though not always) focused on the theme of the "portable God" (38), meaning a shift away from religious life centered on one cult site and capital city. They convincingly illustrate how creative re-interpretation of biblical ideas of priesthood, sacrifice, divine presence, and religious authority made this possible. The Qumran sectarians, the Pharisees, Philo, and others are prominent, for their ideas paved the way for later Jews and Christians.
Though the authors say they will cover the first few centuries BCE and CE, rabbinic Judaism gets treated superficially and sporadically. They also say little about the spread of Christianity after Paul. Tensions between Gentile and Jewish Christians and between Jews and Christians are minimized. Encyclopedia-style entries at the start describing, for example, rabbinic literature and the New Testament, do not remedy this. This first section is an awkward introduction to a book not written as a reference work, and is both too short and too specific to be of much help for later topics.
This book breaks little new scholarly ground, but it rests on sound scholarship and would be a useful college-level survey, especially for students who had taken a class on the Hebrew Bible. They could skip the introduction and would be less discomfited by the sometimes disorienting jumps between different historical periods. The topical chapters three through eight are the strongest and could be read individually for succinct overviews of important issues.
