At the 2021 annual meeting of the Society of Biblical Literature, two senior scholars (Adele Reinhartz and Judith Lieu) and two junior scholars (Deborah Forger and Krista Dalton) whose work relates to the study of early Jews and Christians convened to reflect upon their career trajectories. To see the full panel of papers, visit https://www.ancientjewreview.com/read/2022/9/13/careers-in-jewish-christian-relations.
I began my graduate studies in 1975, after completing a BA in Jewish Studies at the University of Toronto. I saw graduate school as a stop gap, a way of filling in a year or two while I figured out what I really wanted to do with my life. Having studied modern and rabbinic Hebrew for four years and taken a course or two on rabbinic literature, I did not mind continuing for just a bit longer. So off I went to McMaster University, in Hamilton, Ontario, which had offered me a nice scholarship. It helped that Hamilton was only an hour by bus from Toronto, where I had grown up. I was also intrigued by the structure of the program, which required all students in the field of early Judaism to take courses in New Testament, and vice versa. I had never read, let alone studied, the New Testament, and I was curious to do so.
Departmental communication was haphazard at best, and in June of 1975 I found out, by accident, that the New Testament courses would require reading knowledge of Koine Greek. For some reason that hadn’t occurred to me before, nor had it been mentioned. After a bit of a scramble, I was able to enroll in a six-week summer course in Classical Greek at York University in Toronto, where I learned just enough to muddle through a full-year seminar on Paul’s letter to the Galatians, taught by E.P. Sanders. After two years of courses on Josephus, Philo, and, above all, the Pauline letters, I completed an MA project on the portrayal of Abraham in second temple and rabbinic sources, supervised by Al Baumgarten. I still had my eyes on other career possibilities, but continued on to a PhD, tempted, or perhaps bribed, by the promise of a year or two of study at the Hebrew University. I went off to Jerusalem in the summer of 1978, to do an intensive Hebrew language ulpan and then two years of courses in Talmud and midrash, as well as courses in Yiddish literature, just for fun.
By then I realized that McMaster was not the right place to study rabbinics, but it was the right place to study New Testament. In those years, early Jewish-Christian relations was not yet a field of study, at least not that I was aware. Even at McMaster, New Testament was taught alongside of, but largely separate from, early Judaism. Although by the 1970s scholars, such as Martin Hengel, had already challenged the dichotomy of Judaism versus Hellenism, the polarization of Jews and Christians, or Judaism and Christianity was still taken for granted.
Although at the time I knew of no other Jewish student of New Testament, I decided to switch my focus from early Judaism to New Testament. Not only could I be assured of good preparation for the field, but I also believed that my Jewish studies background would be an asset to my work as a New Testament scholar. By this point I also knew that as a Jewish professor of New Testament, I could have an impact on how my students understood ancient Jews, such as Jesus and Paul, and how they viewed modern Jews as well.
My decision to switch fields to New Testament was not warmly welcomed by the department. Unbeknownst to me, I had been admitted to the graduate program with the hope and expectation that I would be their first ever PhD graduate in early Judaism. Ed Sanders, my doctoral supervisor, did not veto the switch but he did express his concern about my career prospects. He worried that Jewish studies programs would not hire me because my dissertation was on the New Testament, and New Testament positions would be closed to me because I was Jewish.
As a rather stubborn person I did not take Ed’s well-intentioned advice. And indeed, by the time I was on the job market in the early 1980s, the field had changed, due, at least in some measure I am convinced, to the impact of Sanders’s own work. I was hired by the University of Toronto initially into a one-year contractually limited position in order to cover the courses taught by Alan Segal, who had recently moved from U of T to Barnard, and Peter Richardson, who had just taken on a major administrative role as principal of University College. This one year was extended to six years of untenured but valuable teaching experience, after which I was hired into a tenure track position at McMaster, again in order to teach courses in both Judaism and New Testament, though not specifically their interrelationships. Although much has changed in the study of early Judaism and Christianity since the 1970s, structural silos between New Testament and second temple Judaism are still in place even though the people who hold those positions are free to cross those boundaries.
Conceptual Relations
To a great extent, these silos carry over into scholarship as well. In a long-ago essay entitled “Who Cares about Caiaphas?”, I looked closely at whether and to what degree scholars in the fields of New Testament and early Judaism paid any attention whatsoever to the figure of the high priest whom the Fourth Gospel portrays as the mastermind of the plot against Jesus.[1] Although as a high priest Caiaphas presumably played an important role in the temple administration and in the organization of Jewish affairs in early first-century Judea, he is given short shrift in studies of early Judaism, perhaps because he is mentioned only briefly by Josephus. For scholars of the New Testament, historical Jesus, and early Christianity, however, Caiaphas looms large. This pattern suggested to me that these two groups of scholars have very different interests, which were reflected in turn in the very different stories they tell about the first century.
While studies of early Judaism did not focus very much on early Christianity, studies of early Christianity did not entirely ignore Judaism. The study of Paul’s life and letters, for example, always addressed questions concerning Paul’s stance towards Jewish law or halakhah, whereas studies of the Gospels often considered the historical role of Jewish leaders in the events that led to Jesus’ death. Jewish ideas and practices including messianic beliefs, attitudes to the temple, and modes of scriptural interpretation were often discussed as background to early Christianity; with the development of Christian feminist approaches came the lamentable tendency to use putative Jewish attitudes to women as a foil to the portrayal of Jesus and the Jesus movement as far superior to Judaism in this regard. The Adversus Judaeos traditions also came in for scrutiny. Jewish studies, on the other hand, often ignored early Christianity entirely, at least until the early 2000s, when Yisrael Yuval’s book, Two Nations in your Womb, arguing for the impact of Christianity on central Jewish texts and practices, hit the stands.[2] Nevertheless, the two fields remained quite separate.
Things began to change in the last quarter of the 20th century, though change has come slowly and not at all in some quarters. When I began my graduate studies in the mid-1970s, academic research into the New Testament was focused almost entirely on historical critical methods such as form, source, and redaction criticism. Accompanying these methods was a strong commitment to the notion of scholarly objectivity, due at least in part to the need for North American departments to differentiate themselves from divinity or theological schools. I drank the objectivity Kool-Aid down to the dregs, as I was determined to show that one did not have to be Christian in order to be a credible New Testament scholar. It still boggles my mind that I could write an entire dissertation, and many articles, on the Gospel of John without once acknowledging the problem of its anti-Judaism or the possible impact of the New Testament on how some continued to perceive me and all other Jews.
In the late 1970s and early 1980s, however, literary theory came along to disrupt this insular world. As a lifelong lover of novels, I was an early adopter of literary approaches to biblical texts. I was intrigued by the idea that literary theory, especially reader-oriented approaches, could help us to see ancient narrative texts in a different light. In those days literary criticism was seen as opposed and a threat to historical criticism. I never understood this. In my view, New Testament historians were first and foremost readers of texts and their work would only be benefit by becoming more self-aware of their roles, assumptions, and behaviors as readers. I still hold to this conviction.
Along with literary approaches also came critical theory, in the form of what we then called postmodernism, poststructuralism, or deconstruction. Postmodernism helped disabuse scholars of the necessity, or even the possibility, of taking an objective stance to our materials. Initially it seemed odd and inappropriate to invoke my own Jewish identity, or to reflect on how the Gospel impacted me as a Jew. As such situated scholarship, and as social location, gained popularity and legitimacy, I became more comfortable doing so. This was the perspective that permitted me to write about John from an explicitly Jewish perspective, as I did in my book Befriending the Beloved Disciple that came out some 20 years ago.[3]
The recognition that we all read from our social locations also, I believe, enables us to engage more honestly with one another, and to be more honest in our own work as well. But this move also complicates matters. Whereas I feel that the work of some of my Johannine colleagues reflects apologetic efforts to support John’s status as an authoritative text for Christian beliefs and stances, those scholars themselves might not see their work that way at all. In the same way, it is quite possible that some may dismiss my own scholarship on the grounds that it is skewed or even tainted by my Jewishness.
The advent of postmodernism or poststructuralism in the latter part of the 20th century caused a wide-ranging re-examination and critique of the binaries that had long been taken for granted. Even as many senior and junior scholars alike have embraced new approaches and pondered more complex literary and historical models, however, the modes of thinking and discourse of the past have by no means disappeared.
The very name of this SBL section, a remnant of an earlier era, presumes a binary opposition between early Judaism and Christianity, or early Jews and early Christians, even as it focuses on the intersections between these groups. Of course, in some cases, the rhetoric of our texts themselves view Jews and Christ-confessors as polar opposites. The rhetoric in the Gospel of John, for example, both establishes and depends upon the polarities between life and death, spirit and flesh, as well as between believers in Christ, who will see life, and the ioudaioi, who are destined for judgment and death.
In the historical study of early Jewish-Christian relations, however, the traditional polarity between Jews and Christians can lead us to oversimplify the identities of Jews and those whom we call Christians, to homogenize the tremendous diversity within these groups, and to dismiss or ignore the possibility of movement between and among them. Was the so-called parting of the ways something that affected all Jews and all Christians? How can or should we situate groups such as Gentile Christ-confessors within the groups we call Jews and Christians? Did Jewish Christ-confessors retain the kinship and other connections that they or their ancestors had prior to their affiliation with the Jesus movement? We would like to think of them as Jews, but did they consider themselves ioudaioi?
Indeed, as many have rightly noted, the very terms Judaism and Christianity, or Jews and Christians, that were foundational to the scholarly discussion in previous academic generations are now critiqued, deconstructed, and often discarded. This process of rethinking is important. Questioning our language helps us to think differently from the ways in which we were trained. For all that New Testament scholarship, including historical Jesus research, has embraced the Jewishness of Jesus and the movement that was created by his followers, the term “Christianity” remains in widespread use when speaking about that movement in the first century. This nomenclature is a relic of an earlier period of scholarship in which the tendency of scholars to retroject the modern distinctiveness of Judaism and Christianity (synagogues and churches) back into the first century went unchallenged, and perhaps even unnoticed.
Some scholars would also like to discard the terms “Jews” and “Judaism” when discussing the second temple or early rabbinic periods.[4] I agree in principle with the view that “Judaism” seems inappropriate on the grounds that it refers to an essentializing abstraction that could not have existed in the first century. But while there is other vocabulary that we can use for those that some have called early Christians, such as Christ-followers, Christ-believers, or Christ-confessors, it is hard to know what to call Jews other than, well, Jews. I am well aware that some have proposed Judeans as a more appropriate term for the first century ioudaioi, but, as I have argued on many occasions, the English term Judean should refer only to Jews who live in Judea and not to all ioudaioi everywhere.[5]
In my own work on the Fourth Gospel, I remain concerned about supersessionism, which is alive and well in publications on the New Testament and early Jewish-Christian relations, and will no doubt be well-represented at this very annual meeting of the SBL. While there are few who would now describe Judaism as a stagnant and moribund religion of works righteousness, numerous works by reputable scholars directly or indirectly assert that Christianity is the fulfillment or completion of Judaism, and to promote the Gospel to Jews as a path to salvation.
These types of arguments are intended to be scholarly rather than confessional, but while claiming to be historical studies, they serve certain theological perspectives. I call this theology masquerading as history. It took me many years to tune into this phenomenon. As a Jew who had come to New Testament studies via Jewish studies, I was blissfully unaware of the theological background to some of the debates I read about in graduate school, and I found the fusion and confusion between history and theology very disorienting.
I first encountered the intrusion of theological conviction into the historical study of the New Testament in the readings assigned for the seminars on Pauline literature that I took with Ed Sanders. I was, and remain, persuaded by Sanders’ conviction that Paul’s letters to the Galatians and Romans did not constitute a critique of Judaism as such. Sanders argued convincingly that Paul’s comments about Jewish law and justification in Galatians were motivated by his conviction that gentiles did not have to adopt Jewish identity markers such as circumcision in order to become Christ-followers. For the life of me I could not understand why Sanders’ position was so controversial. I understand it better now, but even now it seems to me that many scholars of early Christianity continue to conflate historical and theological issues.
On the up side, the study of early Judaism and Christianity has moved forward in important ways. Few and far between now are the those who would argue that Jesus was not a Jew. Many now also view Paul’s Jewishness as self-evident, and my hope is that this too will become axiomatic in the field. Legion are now the scholars who have developed serious expertise in the full range of texts and histories of the second temple and first century including texts outside either of the canons.
The growth in expertise, the move towards more complex and nuanced understandings of the history, text, and peoples of the ancient Mediterranean, the opening up of boundaries not only between early Christian and early Jewish studies but also with the field of classics, and the availability of new approaches and methods all bode well for the study of early Jewish Christian relations. The sky is the limit when it comes to the new questions that can be addressed, and the old questions that can be approached from new and exciting perspectives.
I conclude by mentioning two of the many issues that might lead in interesting directions. One concerns the full incorporation of the Jesus movement into the study of second temple and first century Jewish diversity. Although overviews of the history and literature of second temple Judaism now often refer to the Jesus movement, they do not necessarily give it the same sort of treatment as they give, say, to the Qumran community, or the books of Enoch or 4th Ezra. One might fruitfully consider, for example, how specific groups constructed the conceptual and social boundaries between themselves and other Jewish groups, how open were they to people moving through or across any such boundaries, and what if any would the political and/or economic implications and impacts.
A second project would be to reconsider what we actually mean by early Jewish Christian relations, especially for the period before the actual institutionalization of Christianity per se. Specifically, how might we reconceptualize this field in light of the well-developed critique of the word “religion” that has been front and centre in the field of religious studies for the past decade or more?
Here I am not referring to the argument that Judaism did not exist until the modern period, but rather the point, made by Tomoko Masuzawa and others, that our understanding of what a religion looks like is shaped by post-reformation Christianity. Perhaps the perennial focus on theological issues stems from a narrow, one might say non-Jewish, understanding of Judaism. If we instead took a more expansive view of Judaism as pertaining not to a religion in the modern sense but rather to the many aspects of life that Jews considered to be governed by Torah, we might also broaden our consideration of early Jewish Christian relations to include economic and cultural relationships. Were marriages between Jews and Christians considered intermarriages? How did non-Christ-confessing Jews manage their relationships with Christ-confessing relations and friends? Is there evidence for business partnerships between Jews and Jewish or Gentile Christ-confessors, as we have in rabbinic literature with respect to Jews and polytheists? We may or may not have the evidence to address all of these questions for the first 150 years of the common era, but even asking the questions will broaden our purview beyond the well-worn tracks of previous academic generations.
[1] Adele Reinhartz, “Who Cares about Caiaphas?,” in Identity and Interaction in the Ancient Mediterranean, ed. Zeba A. Crook and Philip A. Harland (Sheffield, England: Sheffield Phoenix Pr, 2007), 31–40.
[2] Israel Jacob Yuval, Two nations in your womb : perceptions of Jews and Christians in Late Antiquity and the Middle Ages (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2006).
[3] Adele Reinhartz, Befriending the Beloved Disciple: A Jewish Reading of the Gospel of John (New York: Continuum, 2001).
[4] Daniel Boyarin, Judaism: The Genealogy of a Modern Notion (New Brunswick [etc.: Rutgers University Press, 2019).
[5] Adele Reinhartz, “The Vanishing Jews of Antiquity,” Marginalia Review of Books, June 24, 2014, http://marginalia.lareviewofbooks.org/vanishing-jews-antiquity-adele-reinhartz/.