Matt Jackson-McCabe - Jewish Christianity

Jewish Christianity

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THE ANCHOR YALE BIBLE REFERENCE LIBRARY

Jewish Christianity

The Making of the Christianity-Judaism Divide

MATT JACKSON-McCABE

YALE UNIVERSITY PRESS

NEW HAVEN AND LONDON

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10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1

For friends and teachers from my Chicago days and, as always, for my family.

For the distinction between Christians and other men is neither in country nor language nor customs... This teaching of theirs has not been discovered by the intellect or thought of busy men, nor are they advocates of any human doctrine as some men are.

Epistle to Diognetus 5.13

Is there a Platonic Idea of Christianity hovering somewhere in the ontosphere?

Daniel Boyarin, Rethinking Jewish Christianity

The Christian faith did not exist in the beginning. In the beginning there existed merely the heretical Jew, Jesus of Nazareth.

Hans Dieter Betz, Orthodoxy and Heresy in Primitive Christianity

Contents

Acknowledgments

This is a project I have been sneaking up on in some sense ever since I was a graduate student at the University of Chicago in the 1990s. What eventually became a dissertation, Logos and Law in the Letter of James, was initially supposed to have been only one section of one chapter of a study arguing that the Letter of James was better interpreted as an expression of early Judaismalbeit one with great interest in a messiah, Jesusthan as a Jewish Christianity. My intention was to use James as a sort of case study in the problem of the category Jewish Christianity. Disentangling the complex exegetical issues surrounding James, however, became a job in itself. I continued thinking about the larger problem, though, and eventually came back around to it some years later in an edited volume called Jewish Christianity Reconsidered. I was shockedthough also intriguedto find my work there interpreted in some quarters as a defense of the category. I continued to dig more deeply into where this notion of Jewish Christianity came from, how it became so embedded in the scholarly imagination, and how our understanding of Jewish and Christian antiquity might look different without it.

Some of the published results of those efforts have been incorporated in one way or another into the present study. An essay published under the title The Invention of Jewish Christianity in Johns Tolands Nazarenus in The Rediscovery of Jewish Christianity: From Toland to Baur (ed. F. Stanley Jones; Society of Biblical Literature, 2012) has been revised and integrated into draw freely on an essay titled Ebionites and Nazoraeans: Christians or Jews? that I wrote at the invitation of Hershel Shanks for a volume called Partings: How Judaism and Christianity Became Two (Biblical Archaeology Society, 2013). I am grateful to the publishers of these works for their permission to use this material here.

When John Collins asked whether I would be interested in producing a volume on Jewish Christianity for the Anchor Yale Bible Reference Library, I jumped at the chance to work through the issues more systematically. I am exceedingly grateful to him for the invitationand for not balking when I came back with a proposal that was more critical history of a modern interpretive construct than analysis of an ancient phenomenon. I also owe him tremendous thanks for his patience as I wrote it, and for shepherding the whole project from start to finish. The anonymous reviewers of the initial proposal were invaluable in pushing me both conceptually and at the level of detail as I was first thinking through the project. The anonymous reviewers of the full manuscript likewise gave immensely important feedback that resulted, I hope, in a clearer, stronger argument. I am deeply grateful to them and to the books editor, John Kloppenborg, for their exacting and insightful readings of the manuscript. It goes without saying that all remaining errors and problems are my responsibility alone.

Everyone at Yale University Press has been a pleasure to work with, including Jennifer Banks, Piyali Bhattacharya, Eric Brandt, Whitney Schumacher, and Ann-Marie Imbornoni. Susan Laity provided a number of helpful suggestions that led to an improved manuscript. I am especially indebted to Jessie Dolch for her expert copyediting, and to Katherine Ulrich for her careful indexing. Above all, I cannot thank Heather Gold enough for giving me the time and space I needed to follow the project where it led me, and for reliably wise counsel at many critical junctures along the way.

It goes without saying that I owe a great debt to many scholars, past and present, named and unnamed, who have explored the same or related problems before me. By its nature, this study engages extensively in a critical analysis (of some, at least) of their work. I have undertaken this with no small trepidation. Doing my best to understand other peoples writings, ancient and modern alike, I have found evidence time and again of intellects far more capacious than mine; of philological abilities and sheer breadths of knowledge surpassing anything I will ever hope to accomplish. I have spent considerable time, for example, with the writings of F. C. Baur. The more I read him, and read about him, the more I marvel. The same goes for any number of the other authors treated in these pages, including not least those contemporary scholars with whom I engage extensively in later parts of the book. A special word of thanks goes to Annette Yoshiko Reed for generously sharing with me the page proofs of her outstanding collection Jewish-Christianity and the History of Judaism, which made it possible for me to account for it in . I have learned a great deal from her, as well as from F. Stanley Jones, Petri Luomanen, Daniel Boyarin, Edwin Broadhead, and the many other contributors to the Society of Biblical Literatures Jewish Christianity/Christian Judaism section. A number of the ideas published here were first presented to this group, and I have benefited greatly from the constructive criticism I received there. I hope I have done justice to these and other writers in my attempt to engage critically, in turn, with their work.