 | | religious community. The removal of sexualityor, more humbly, removal from sexualitystood for the state of unhesitating availability to God and one's fellows, associated with the ideal of the singlehearted person.
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| | (Brown 1987, 26667)
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Although in this passage Brown sets up the opposition between a reified Judaism and Christianity, he himself has made us aware that this is not the relevant taxonomy, for the
gran rifuto
is just as Jewish in its social origins as the acceptance of sexuality (however ambivalent) by the Rabbis. Brown has made this point explicitly in a passage near the one cited:
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| | It is claimed that a disgust for the human body was already prevalent in the pagan world. It is then assumed that when the Christian church moved away from its Jewish roots, where optimistic attitudes toward sexuality and marriage as part of God's good creation had prevailed, Christians took on the bleaker colors of their pagan environment. Such a view is lopsided. The facile contrast between pagan pessimism and Jewish optimism overlooks the importance of sexual renunciation as a means to singleness of heart in the radical Judaism from which Christianity emerged.
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| | (Brown 1987, 266)
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In this book, I will focus more intensively on the Jewish side of this equation than Brown has done, sketching the culture of the body both in that "radical Judaism" and in the rabbinic reaction to it. I suggest, however, that Brown's "radical Judaism" was not so radical at all but, in fact, rather typical of the ideologies of various Jewish subcultures around the Mediterranean.
4
Further, in the first century these orientations to the body cannot yet be separated out as "Jewish'' and "Christian"; Pauline religion should be understood as contiguous with other Hellenistic Judaisms, and a separation between Jewish and Christian religio-cultural formations
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| | 4. Brown may have been referring to apocalyptic sects, such as the one at the Dead Sea. The archaeological evidence suggests, however, that despite undergoing periods of withdrawal from sexual relations, they were
not
a celibate community. Whatever Paul's spiritual origins, the Christian community as it developed did not grow out of Palestinian Jewish apocalyptic. In support of my notion that the attitudes toward sexuality among the Fathers owe more to the Greek-speaking Judaism of Philo and his congeners than to Semitic-speaking apocalyptics stands the fact that both Philo and Josephus
describe
the Essenes as a celibate group. There may or may not have been such a group, but, in any case, these two Greek-speaking Jews have testified to their values by that declaration.
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