Freethought & Rationalism Archive

mountainman · 11-17-2007, 09:17 PM

The Christian Invention of Judaism:
The Theodosian Empire and the Rabbinic Refusal of Religion

DANIEL BOYARIN

Quote:

ABSTRACT

In this paper, it is argued that a significant development takes place in the second half of the fourth century and the beginning of the fifth, a development that we might call the orthodox Christian invention of religion. The paper examines effects of this development as it touches on Jewish religious history as well.

Has anyone access to, or read this article?

Best wishes,

Pete Brown

Toto · 11-18-2007, 01:09 AM

It sounds like it is related to his book, Border Lines (or via: amazon.co.uk), which you can find excerpted on google books.

Quote:

"Boyarin proposes that by constructing the categories of religious orthodoxy and heresy, second-century Gentile Christians created the concept of religion which pervades the Western world to this day. ...."

Quote:

There were no characteristics or features that could be described as uniquely Jewish or Christian in late antiquity, Boyarin argues. Rather, Jesus-following Jews and Jews who did not follow Jesus lived on a cultural map in which beliefs, such as that in a second divine being, and practices, such as keeping kosher or maintaining the Sabbath, were widely and variably distributed. The ultimate distinctions between Judaism and Christianity were imposed from above by "border-makers," heresiologists anxious to construct a discrete identity for Christianity. By defining some beliefs and practices as Christian and others as Jewish or heretical, they moved ideas, behaviors, and people to one side or another of an artificial border--and, Boyarin significantly contends, invented the very notion of religion. Boyarin demonstrates that it was early Christian writers who first imagined religion as a realm of practice and belief that could be separated from the broader cultural network of language, genealogy, or geography, and that they did so precisely to give Christians an identity. In the end, he suggests, the Rabbis refused the option offered by the Christian empire of converting Judaism into such a religion. Christianity, a religion, and Judaism, something that was not a religion, stood on opposite sides of a borderline drawn more or less successfully across their respective populations. As a consequence, "Jewish" to this day is an adjective that can describe both an ethnicity and a set of beliefs, while Christian orthodoxy remains, perhaps, the only religion on earth. Daniel Boyarin is the Taubman Professor of Talmudic Culture in the Departments of Near Eastern Studies and Rhetoric at the University of California, Berkeley. He is the author of Dying for God: Martyrdom and the Making of Christianity and Judaism and A Radical Jew: Paul and the Politics of Identity.

Penn Press Review

ETA: You can buy the article for $12. But it looks like you would do better to spend your money on the book, or find it in a library.

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