Book Note | The Ways That Often Parted

Lori Baron, Jill Hicks-Keeton, and Matthew Thiessen, eds. The Ways That Often Parted: Essays in Honor of Joel Marcus. Atlanta, GA: SBL Press, 2018.

How did Christianity, originally a sectarian movement led exclusively by Jews, become a religion not only distinct from but actively hostile to Judaism? Joel Marcus’s retirement Festschrift, The Ways that Often Parted, in approaching this question, draws together multiple strands from his long career. As well as training graduate students and teaching at Princeton Theological Seminary, the University of Glasgow, Boston University, and Duke Divinity School, Marcus wrote an exhaustive two-volume Anchor Bible Commentary on the Gospel of Mark and numerous influential articles in the field of New Testament Studies. In recent years, much of his work has addressed the so-called “parting of the ways.” This collection of essays reflects a core assumption that Marcus shares with his scholarly contemporaries: the parting between Christianity and Judaism did not happen at one definite moment, but occurred in different places and at different times in different communities. While The Ways that Often Parted contains diverse and varied contributions, the authors’ sustained engagement with Marcus’s scholarship lends the work a distinct coherence.

Timothy Wardle and Albert I. Baumgarten’s essays explore the beliefs and boundaries of Judaism before the rise of the Christian movement. Wardle’s essay approaches the question of the “parting” between Jews and Christians via discussion of an earlier rift between Jews and Samaritans. Baumgarten’s essay on Josephus examines how Josephus deals with the memory of John the Baptist’s apocalyptic message. Josephus’ reimagining of John as a non-apocalyptic political critic shows how a controversial figure could be reframed to be an acceptable figure within the Jewish world. Baumgarten supposes this could have been true of Jesus as well.

In his essay, Matthew Thiessen suggests a precedent for Paul’s claim in Galatians that Gentiles can be children of Abraham without circumcision. He argues that the idea of a Gentile seed of Abraham is first articulated in the last lines of the Animal Apocalypse (1 Enoch 85-90), a figural retelling of Israel’s history using animal forms. In this text, the messianic offspring of Israel is a bull. Upon the occasion of his birth, the other animals, both Jew and Gentile, become bulls as well. Thiessen argues that although the Animal Apocalypse expects this development to occur in the eschaton, it does assume that Gentiles can become the “seed of Abraham” without first becoming Jews.

The next collection of essays deals with Paul. Of the three, Susan Eastman’s stands out because of its lucid exploration of Moses’ veil in 2 Corinthians. Eastman focuses on a cultural assessment of the veiling of men in first-century culture and finds it denotes grief, shame, or transitions. Rather than reflecting negatively on Moses’s covenant, Eastman shows how Paul’s ministry is imbued with the somber awareness of impending death. John Barclay’s contribution picks up instead on the apocalyptic themes in Marcus’ work. New Testament texts and early Christian literature often invoke the idea of novelty, whether new people, new teaching, new covenant, or new Torah. Consequently, Barclay argues, Gentile Christians reading Jewish scriptures for the first time looked for evidence of their beliefs newly revealed in them. This creates a competitive dynamic in Christian scripture reading, in which Israel’s texts are claimed as Christian possessions. Barclay suggests a theological solution: Christians read Jewish texts Christologically but receive them as a gift from their Jewish neighbors.

Suzanne Henderson’s and Claudia Setzer’s excellent essays discuss Mark and Matthew, respectively. Setzer takes on the challenging text of Matt 27:25 by addressing the topic of “blood” in the Gospel, and thereby isolates two “innocent blood” traditions. The “Sinai/Covenant” tradition creates a strong corporate association between the people of Israel and their leaders, and the “culpable Pharisee” tradition links Pharisaic resistance to Christianity to the death of Jesus and the rejection of prophecy. In Matt 27:25, Matthew links these traditions in order to argue that the Pharisees were responsible for killing Jesus. This is because Matthew is angry that Christianity is finding little traction among Jews, and focuses on the destruction of the Temple in order to blame Israel for the death of Jesus and bolster his claims that they are committing a historic wrong.

Susan Miller, Jill Hick-Keaton, Martinus C. de Boer, and Lori Baron’s essays all deal with Johannine literature. The standout among this collection is de Boer’s “The Johannine Community under Attack in Recent Scholarship,” which evaluates Richard Bauckham’s and Adele Reinhartz’ challenges to the existence of the Johannine community. De Boer’s essay contains a spirited defense of J. Louis Martyn’s original hypothesis, including both expulsion of Christians from synagogues and persecution from mainstream Jews. de Boer’s essay is both an enjoyable defense of a hypothesis that has become something of a modern classic in Christian circles, and also a well-written essay that is pleasant and easy to read. It is particularly gratifying to read these essays that build explicitly on Marcus’ published work, particularly Lori Baron’s.

The last five essays look beyond the New Testament to explore the parting of Jews and Gentiles in the wake of the New Testament. Bart D. Ehrman argues that, even though Jews and Christians may have struggled over their identity in the first three centuries, Roman emperors apparently thought they could tell the difference. This does not mean that there was no overlap between Jews and Christians anywhere, but simply that pagans recognized a difference. Ehrman’s essay is refreshing in that he tackles the question of parting from the perspective of those who are neither Jews nor Gentiles. Dale C. Allison Jr. and Lucas Van Rompay’s essays explore Jewish and Gentile-Christian relations in under-discussed texts – 4 Baruch and Pseudo-Ephrem’s writings, respectively. Finally, Philip Alexander ends the collection with a discussion of the “anti-Gospel,” the Toledoth Yeshu. This piece of polemical literature has a complicated textual history, often printed by Christians who were fascinated by it.

Throughout these essays from his colleagues and former students one hears the echoes of Marcus’s scholarship, and in concert they trace the outlines of his scholarly interests. The editors of this volume, Marcus’s former students, Lori Baron, Jill Hicks-Keeton, and Matthew Thiessen have not only mapped the manifold trajectories of Joel Marcus’s thought, but more importantly, provided a roadmap for advancing the field. To this end, they have followed the lead of their Doktorvater well.

Laura Robinson is a Ph.D. candidate at Duke University. Her current research focuses on the parting of the ways and depictions of missionary activity in the Gospel of Matthew.