The Jewish Annotated New Testament (158 page)

The more careful reading of the ancient texts has moved the supposed date of the actual separation between Judaism and Christianity from its initial dating at the end of the first century CE to the current one that places it at the end of Late Antiquity (ca. 200–700 CE), or later. Not even the Roman emperor Constantine’s conversion in the early fourth century signals the end of Jewish and Christian enmeshing, since the Christianization of the empire and the institutional boundaries that this produced took centuries longer.

In this discussion, so-called hybrid groups variously labeled Jewish Christians, Christian Jews, Judaizers, and in early rabbinic texts
minim
(a generic Hebrew term for sectarians) play a central role. Such groups, we assume, blurred the boundaries between the two major religious traditions, much like the Antiochian Christian synagogue-goers that so enraged Chrysostom. The persisting problem with these labels, however, is that none of the people to whom they are applied would have recognized them or chosen them. In most cases, such terminology is used either by early Christian and rabbinic polemic writers, declaring those who do not follow their guidelines to be heretics, or by modern scholars who seek to clarify the story of Jewish and Christian identity formation. Furthermore, in many cases we cannot even be sure whether such a group or groups existed, since ancient authors may have concocted them in order to shore up their own control over their own presumed authentic and pure version of Christianity or Judaism. In other words, these terms cannot easily work as descriptive terms and thus may have outlived their usefulness.

The category of “Jewish Christian” is used often in the effort to understand the impact of Paul’s mission to the Gentiles (Gk
ethnē
, lit., “nations”). The early Judean and Galilean followers of Jesus, minus Paul, might have formed nothing more than a group of Jews who believed that Jesus’ life and death had significance for their lives, not much different from, say, Jews who followed the Jewish messianic pretender Sabbatai Zvi in the seventeenth century or other messiah figures in later Jewish history.

Paul differentiates between the “gospel for the circumcised,” of which Peter, the “apostle to the circumcision” (Gal 2.8), is in charge, and the “gospel for the uncircumcised” (Gal 2.7). Equally, in the later book of Acts, the leaders of the earliest community of Jesus’ followers in Jerusalem, James and his colleagues, address the newly established community of Antioch—with its many non-Jewish members—as “the brothers
of Gentile origin
in Antioch and Syria” (Acts 15.23, my emphasis), versus the “circumcised believers” (Acts 10.45; 11.2; etc.). Scholars subsequently restate this distinction by referring to the two types of early believers as Jewish (as opposed to Gentile) Christians. However, no New Testament author uses the terminology “Jewish Christian.”

The Petrine mission, the “gospel for the circumcised,” would appear to have produced Jewish Christians, Jews who are also Jesus-believers (and who may still understand themselves to be Jews). What about the people whom Paul seeks to convert, the “Gentiles”? Are these simply Gentile Christians, former “pagans” who have become followers of Christ, as opposed to the Jewish Christians that Peter produces? This distinction appears to be an ethnic one.

Things become messy, however, as the two groups merge to form one community, as is the case in Antioch. Initially, Peter and his “Jewish Christians” get along just fine with Paul and his “Gentile Christians,” and share meals. But when James sends emissaries from Jerusalem to Antioch to check up on what is going on, Peter apparently prefers to draw a clearer line again, at least in Paul’s account of the conflict, by “separating” himself and presumably his group from Paul’s people during common meals. This is the only time the New Testament refers to “Judaizing,” as Paul accuses Peter (Cephas) of wanting Paul’s “Gentile Christians” to “Judaize” (Gk
ioudaizein
, Gal 2.14), literally, behave or live like Jews. This term is found in the Septuagint (Esth 8.17), in Josephus (
J.W
. 2.17.10 §454 and 2.18.2 §§462–63), and in Plutarch (
Cic
. 7.6) to refer to Jewish practices. Later Christian writers used the term in this way, such as Ignatius, the Antiochian bishop at the end of the first century ce, who provides a whole list of Sabbath observances that would be considered “Judaizing” (
Magn
. 9), down to John Chrysostom, who labels the attendance at or veneration of synagogues “Judaizing.” It is generally used with reference to non-Jews who observe Jewish customs,
without thereby necessarily becoming Jewish
. Thus, given the context, Paul’s complaint about Peter is that he seeks to turn Paul’s Gentile Christians into Judaizers, namely “Jewish-acting Gentiles,” presumably by modeling a be havior that aims to persuade them into following some kind of Jewish food rules.

When contemporary scholars describe James or Peter as Judaizers, they use the term inappropriately from a historical perspective, since James and Peter are Jews, in however complicated a way, and as such the term did not apply to them. Paul does not call Peter a Judaizer; he just blames him for turning the Gentiles in the Antiochean group into a Judaizing kind of people, rather than allowing them to be something else. Indeed, a description of James and Peter as Judaizers reflects the polemical use of the term in later Christian literature, namely as a label for people who inappropriately propagate Jewish behavior. Thus, by the time we get to Chrysostom’s sermons against the Jews, the Judaizers among his audience, i.e., the Christians who frequent the synagogues, are described with military metaphors such as enemy infiltrators, or alternately with metaphors of disease, as people who infect the community with some Judaizing virus. Indeed, the polemical echo that this term bears renders it potentially offensive to contemporary Jewish ears. It cannot possibly operate as a culturally neutral term.

Compared to Judaizer and Judaizing, the term “Jewish Christian” may seem more straightforward. It may lack the polemical overtones that Judaizer has acquired, but whether it is descriptive is another question. The “Jewish” in “Jewish Christian” is not so easy to determine. If it is intended to serve as an ethnic term, how is this ethnic identity determined? A mere reference to birth seems insufficient, since at least with the onset of Diaspora, birth is not a self-evident means of establishing identity. For example, the earliest evidence for the matrilineal principle is found in the Mishnah at the end of the second century CE (e.g.,
m. Qidd
. 4.1). A case that brings this problem to the fore is Paul’s disciple Timothy, who is “the son of a Jewish woman, but [whose] father was a Greek” (Acts 16.1), and whom Paul has circumcised, ostensibly to placate local Jews.

Or, alternately, would the word “Jewish” in Jewish Christian refer to
practice
, to a certain level of observance of Jewish customs and law such as submitting to circumcision? Here also a host of follow-up questions emerges: is circumcision sufficient to establish Jewishness? Is a circumcised man unquestionably Jewish, regardless of other observances? What about observant (circumcised) Jews with beliefs such as holding Jesus to be the messiah, the Son of God, or the like? Does their observance keep them within the category of Jewish? Or are they now something other than Jewish?

Finally, is the criterion for determining Jewish identity recognition by other Jews, and if so by which Jews? Paul knew who the believers (“the church of God”) were (Gal 1.13), and he persecuted them. Would he have considered them as heretical Jews or as Jewish Christians?

To add another level of complication, the term “Jewish Christian” is also used to describe the character of certain texts and interpretive practices. This particular use is perhaps the most fraught one, as it tends to make assumptions about patterns of thought as essentially Jewish. If an early Christian text uses a particular strategy that we assume might appeal to a supposedly more Jewish-oriented audience, such a text is easily considered as a Jewish Christian one. For instance, it is often suggested that the audience of the Gospel of Matthew consisted of, or at least contained, Jewish Christians, because (for example) this Gospel’s author, more than the others, emphasizes that Jesus has come to fulfill biblical prophecies: Matthew quotes (the Septuagint’s version of) prophetic texts and explains how Jesus has come to fulfill them. Is this Gospel therefore a Jewish Christian text, rather than a Christian text, or for that matter rather than a Jewish text? Is it aimed at Jewish Christians, because we assume that biblical quotations are for Jews who became Jesus followers (and of course, so this argument goes, all Jews know their Bible)? And can we extrapolate from a text to the social makeup of its audience or the identity of its writer? These questions are crucial, because the same kind of arguments are applied again and again to early Christian texts (after most or all of the New Testament writings are completed) that are more rule- or law-oriented, such as the
Didache
(end of first/early second century), and the
Didascalia Apostolorum
(third century). Since Jews, so the argument goes, have a predisposition toward law, the audience for these writings or the authors of such texts must be Jewish Christian. The point is not that this identification is necessarily wrong, but that we have to be aware of the assumptions that we make as we study the beginnings of Christianity.

The lesson we may learn is perhaps that there is no master narrative to be told with two clearly delineated characters, Christianity and Judaism, and then a third one that cannot decide what it is. In the past scholars have tried to consider “Jewish Christianity” as the third force in such a story, as a social group that eventually atrophied, with its own tradition and literature beginning with the Gospel of Matthew. In this version, all the people declared heretics of a Jewish Christian sort by our authoritative writers in early Christianity and Talmudic Judaism—groups with labels such as the rabbis’
minim
, the Ebionites mentioned by Irenaeus (at the end of the second century CE), Jerome’s Nazarenes (who believed in Jesus in some way “but do not cease to observe the old law”), and more—were part of “Jewish Christianity.” This understanding became largely discredited as we learned to identify the practice of heresiology (the effort of identifying heresy and heresies) as a rhetorical technique of polemic rather than as an ethnography of existing groups. It is easier to define boundaries of identity, Jewish or Christian, by invoking that which one is
not
. Thus, Christian beliefs that rely on biblically inspired ideas and Jewish views that include a belief in a messiah essentially remain implicated in each other in some way, and the early struggles for winning followers were acutely marked by figuring out where to draw the boundaries. Only the forces of institutionalization, with the church on one side and the study houses of the rabbinic sages that would formulate the Mishnah and the Talmud on the other, would allow for certain versions of Judaism and Christianity to win out. This process of institutionalization enabled structures of authority to produce and enforce canons of permitted and prohibited texts, which in turn shored up stronger boundaries between Judaism and Christianity as two very different religious traditions.

THE CANON OF THE NEW TESTAMENT

Michael R. Greenwald

The collection of documents that we today call “The New Testament” came into being over a prolonged period that extended from the second through the fourth centuries in the West of the Roman Empire and through the sixth century in the East. The word “canon” itself derives from a Greek word meaning “measuring rod,” “rule,” or “standard”; however, when applied to the Christian Bible, it has, since the fourth century CE, come to mean a list of books sanctioned by the majority Christian church as having divine authority and in which each book is understood in light of all of the others. For most of the period since the sixth century, the canon of the New Testament has been the same in every Christian tradition although Christian churches still differ about the contents of their Old Testament canons (see chart, p.
600
). During the Protestant Reformation, though, the canon even of the New Testament was called into question and is, in some places, questioned again today.

The earliest collections of Christian documents were very probably small collections of Paul’s epistles in various places in the Roman Empire. Clement of Rome (ca. 96) certainly had Romans, 1 Corinthians (which he cites in 1
Clem
. 47), and probably Ephesians. He also had the so-called Epistle (actually more an exhortation or sermon) to the Hebrews, but he shows no clear indication of having used any other specifically Christian documents. Similarly, Ignatius of Antioch (ca. 110–117), in his
Letter to the Ephesians
(Ignatius,
Eph
. 12.2) says, “Paul … mentions you in Christ in all his epistles.” Furthermore, in both of these cases, the authority claimed is no more than that of the writer or perhaps of Paul himself. The second letter of Peter, probably the latest document in the New Testament (possibly as late as the second quarter of the second century) in what is almost certainly the first reference to Christian documents as “scripture,” says, “the ignorant and unstable twist [the epistles of Paul] to their own destruction as they do the other scriptures” (3.16b), thereby attesting to a collection of Paul’s epistles, albeit of unknown scope, that is now being accorded the status of “scripture,” that is, equal to the Tanakh. Beyond this statement in 2 Peter, the first significant collection of Christian documents for which we have evidence is that of Marcion, who flourished in Rome ca. 140. Marcion rejected Christian use of the Tanakh and in its place, offered an abbreviated version of Luke’s Gospel and a collection of ten Pauline epistles identical to our current collection minus Ephesians and the Pastoral Epistles (1 and 2 Timothy and Titus). In place of Ephesians, Marcion included an epistle to the Laodiceans, which the African church father Tertullian (late second/early third century) identified as our Ephesians.