Book Reviews
The Ways that Never Parted: Jews and Christians in Late Antiquity and the Early Middle Ages
Adam H. Becker and Annette Yoshiko Reed (eds.)
(Minneapolis: Fortress), 2007
Reviewed by Adam Gregerman
First appearing in Catholic Biblical Quarterly.
This important collection of essays from a 2002 Oxford-Princeton conference, published by Mohr Siebeck in hardcover in 2003, is now available in paperback, with a new preface. The essays are: "Introduction: Traditional Models and New Directions" by Annette Yoshiko Reed and Adam H. Becker (pp. 1-33); "What 'Parting of the Ways'? Jews, Gentiles and the Ancient Mediterranean City" by Paula Fredriksen (pp. 35-63); "Semantic Differences; or, 'Judaism' / 'Christianity'" by Daniel Boyarin (pp. 65-85); "The Weighing of the Parts: Pivots and Pitfalls in the Study of Early Judaisms and their Early Christian Offspring" by Robert A. Kraft (pp. 87-94); "The Lion and the Lamb: Reconsidering Jewish-Christian Relations in Antiquity" by Andrew S. Jacobs (pp. 95-118); "Modeling the 'Parting of the ways'" by Martin Goodman (pp. 119-29); "Beyond 'Jewish Christianity': Continuing Religious Sub-cultures of the Second and Third Centuries and Their Documents" by David Frankfurter (pp. 131-43); "The Jews and Christians in the Martyrdom of Polycarp: Entangled or Parted Ways?" by E. Leigh Gibson (pp. 145-58); "Tractate Avot and Early Christian succession Lists" by Amram Tropper (159-188); "'Jewish Christianity' After the 'Parting of the Ways': Approaches to Historiography and Self-Definition in the Pseudo-Clementines" by Annette Yoshiko Reed (pp. 189-231); "A Convergence of the Ways? The Judaizing of Christian Scripture by Origen and Jerome" by Alison Salvesen (pp. 233-58); "Whose Fast is it? The Ember Day of September and Yom Kippur" by Daniel Stökl Ben Ezra (pp. 259-82); "Zippora's Complaint: Moses is not Conscientious in the Deed! Exegetical Traditions of Moses' Celibacy" by Naomi Koltun-Fromm (pp. 283-306); "Rabbi Ishmael's Miraculous Conception: Jewish Redemption History in Anti-Christian Polemic" by Raʻanan S. Abusch (pp. 307-43); "Jews and Heretics—A Category Error?" by Averil Cameron (345-60); "Did Jewish Christians See the Rise of Islam?" by John G. Gager (pp. 361-72); "Beyond the Spatial and Temporal Limes": Questioning the 'Parting of the Ways' Outside the Roman Empire" by Adam H. Becker (pp. 373-92).
The essays critique the common model for explaining the emergence of the separate religions of Judaism and Christianity, the so-called "parting of the ways." Roughly, this model holds that Christianity emerged as an independent religion, cut off from its Jewish roots, in the late first / early second century. Afterwards, most Christians were Gentiles, Christian observance of Mosaic Law ceased, and clear boundaries between "Judaism" and "Christianity" were erected. This model faces sustained attack in this work. Contributors demonstrate that "meaningful convergence" between Jews and Christians continued after the first and second centuries, well into Late Antiquity and the early Middle Ages (p. 22).
Though the contributors analyze diverse sources (Second Temple, rabbinic, inscriptional, "orthodox" and "heretical" Christian, pagan), the work coheres around three arguments. First, scholars highlight the fluidity of religious identity. They find continuing evidence for Jewish Christians or Judaizing Gentile Christians after they were thought to have disappeared, complicating assumptions about the parting of Judaism and Christianity into mutually exclusive religions. For example, Frankfurter finds approval of both worship of Christ and Law-observance in three groups of texts (the Ascension of Isaiah, 5 & 6 Ezra, and the Testaments of the Twelve Patriarchs). Reed analyzes the Pseudo-Clementine texts, and, rejecting attempts to mine them for first and second century Christian history, argues that they reveal the existence of Law-observant Christians in the fourth century. Both essays helpfully challenge scholarly assumptions about these sources, though, with such difficult and murky texts, I would welcome greater reflection on the complexity of moving from an analysis of literary and theological ideas to positing the existence of actual communities holding such ideas.
Second, scholars demonstrate continuing contact between Jews and Christians long after the first and second centuries, contrary to the wishes of (mainly Christian) elites. Fredriksen, for example, focusing on Mediterranean urban centers, emphasizes the permeability of Diaspora Judaism. She argues that "the ways were not separating," rather, "Jews, pagans, and Christians" continued "to mix and mingle" (p. 61). She utilizes mostly Christian evidence, though the argument is often inferential, drawing on hostile Christian statements and acts to reconstruct the behavior of Christians who were, by contrast, more favorable to Jews and Judaism. Similar arguments appear in essays by Salvesen and Becker. Salvesen considers Jerome's and Origen's reliance on Jews and Jewish scholarship in their translations, and the opposition this prompted from other Christians. Becker moves east, beyond the Roman Empire, to survey interactions between Jews and Christians in a region not ruled by Christians and eventually brought under Muslim control. His discussion of Aphrahat, while unearthing a few debatable examples of continuing Jewish practices in an eastern church, covers well-trodden ground. However, his argument for an unexpected increase in Christian anti-Judaism following the Muslim conquest as a response to a threat to community boundaries is provocative, and his focus on non-Roman Christianity after Constantine highlights an area probably less well-known to likely readers.
Third, scholars investigate exegetical influence between religious communities. Here, the arguments are creative and provocative, if sometimes speculative. It is one thing to identify shared themes in roughly contemporaneous Jewish and Christian texts, and another to demonstrate that authors were aware of the views of outsiders and shaped their own ideas in response. Two contributors in particular highlight possible examples of such influence, focusing on Jewish-Christian polemics: Koltun-Fromm, on Philonic, rabbinic, and Christian ideas on prophecy and celibacy, and Abusch, on rabbinic and Syriac Christian martyrologies. However, absent more precise overlap in themes or explicit mention of outsiders' views, these claims are at best intriguing. Koltun-Fromm admits that actual evidence for influence is "hard to pinpoint" (p. 296), while Abusch, from parallel themes alone, affirms more direct rabbinic responses to Christian views than the evidence allows.
This is a highly valuable work presenting creative interpretations of complex texts. Additionally, it contains a fine introduction discussing the emergence and shortcomings of the traditional model, and programmatic essays by Kraft and Gager on the study of the parting of the ways, each drawing on decades of scholarship. Furthermore, contributors utilize a variety of methods (e.g. Jacobs and post-colonial studies; Boyarin and language and dialect theory; Tropper and Hellenistic literary forms), offering scholars a buffet of methodological tools for future research.
