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.
Exploring the so-called “parting of the ways” marks a point of intersection between my doctoral research as a Johannine scholar and my second research focus on “early Christianity and Judaism,” which was stimulated by the title of the lectureship at King’s College London to which I was appointed in 1985, although then with few published credentials in the field![1] Although I have continued to work in both fields since, at the time this inter-connection was not my conscious motivation. Although during my career I have concentrated increasingly on textual strategies and rhetoric, my doctoral research was influenced more by the social aspects of early Christianity and by the dominant social scientific approaches at the time. Writing on 2 and 3 John in the 1970s within a Johannine trajectory, I was influenced by J. Louis Martyn and Raymond Brown, although I also harbored questions about the overall confidence of their reconstructions of the story of a Johannine community.[2] With a school background in Classics and an initial job as lecturer in Old Testament, my interests were in the “social world” alongside the then preoccupation with sectarianism, influenced by Peter Berger and by Bryan Wilson.[3] Obviously, Paul had been part of my education, and indeed one of the first courses I was assigned to teach at King’s was on Paul, but Pauline studies had (and have) never provided the framework for my thinking about the Judaism of the time. That, and the personal conversation partners I acquired, instead led me to be more interested in the “on-the-ground” evidence for the Empire-wide Judaism of my period, and in the debates within Jewish scholarship about the nature of that form of Jewishness as well as about the emergence of what would become rabbinic Judaism after 70CE.
The first paper I gave on the subject was eventually published in 1994 as ‘'The Parting of the Ways: Theological Construct or Historical Reality?’.[4] That title reflects the different layers of my preoccupations at the time. One continued to be that of social history: how far were (or are) “Jewish” and “Christian” identifiably separate signifiers recognizable to the inhabitants of the Empire as well as to contemporary scholars who attempt to categorize artifacts from the past? The evidence that appeared to be most persuasive was that which suggested that they were far from clearly differentiated – mainly material evidence but also literary evidence which by the vigor of its protests actually pointed in a contrary direction. Another preoccupation of the paper was why had this way of writing the past, i.e. as a “parting” rather than as a triumph or defeat, effectively replaced earlier accounts, if indeed it really had? Was it a result of a more dispassionate historical rigor or did it serve other ends? By then I was becoming influenced by a hermeneutic of suspicion from feminist studies such as those of Elisabeth Schüssler Fiorenza.[5] In retrospect at least, I was struggling in that paper with the question of how we simultaneously admit our positionality while also seeking to be properly self-aware and self-critical. Such questions have not ceased to be at the heart of scholarship more broadly in early Christianity and its core texts.[6] Throughout such debates, the question has been not simply the standard challenge in interfaith encounters of marrying an agnostic respect for others with a personal committed conviction, but how does that marriage project upon the historical record of the emergence of what becomes Christianity, alongside the continuing vitality of a diverse Jewishness?
Has my position changed? In some ways not; during 2020-2021 I taught a course at Harvard Divinity School on “Jews and Christians: The Parting of the ways?” For me this was revisiting (but not re-using!) a course theme devised at King’s early in my career by Professor Graham Stanton to which I had contributed. One week of my own course was entitled “blurred boundaries” and included much of the material already used in that first article, although supplemented by other similar analyses such as Eric Smith’s Jewish Glass and Christian Stone.[7] The challenges that emerged in an effort to undermine students’ default use of the label “Christian”– in most cases applied to any source or characters therein whom several identified as part of their own inheritance or trajectory – were much the same as those that I have encountered throughout the last thirty years.
One important additional aspect explored under “blurred boundaries” was the question of what many would call “Jewish Christianity” or “Jewish Christians,” even if there is little agreement as to their definition of to whom or what the labels refer. That first paper had alluded to it with reference to those charged with sheltering in the synagogue under persecution, but it had not pursued it.[8] Since then that particular field has mushroomed into a field of its own – or a “way” – whose relationship with the so-called “parting” remains contested. Can “Jewish Christian” serve to fill the muddy territory between the otherwise parted ways, leaving them with their own integrity? I am not persuaded that matters are so straightforward, but the question demands attention. Certainly, it is fascinating how in more recent scholarship “Jewish Christian” has shifted from hinting at notions of a backward-looking immaturity best forgotten to becoming something of an answer to all the divisive and disputed questions of early Christianity. Several of the students on that recent course found this whole debate one of the most stimulating dimensions of the multiform Parting of the Ways juggernaut. However, at the same time as the category has become the beneficiary of multiple attempts to defend its integrity, Matt Jackson McCabe has argued that that very multiplicity, and its inherited investment in other nineteenth century debates, render the label less than useful.[9] There was no movement, there were no identifiable groups, there are no specific configurations of ideas and behavior, that find their closest bedfellows among others sheltering under the same descriptive umbrella.
Another new intervention in the topic has been the ‘X within Judaism’ school or schools. To some extent this was anticipated in the earliest courses I taught on the topic by the example of Matthew’s Gospel. Was Matthew ‘within Judaism’ because of its Mosaic typology, the instruction of its Jesus to ‘go nowhere among the Gentiles’, and its affirmation that ‘unless your righteousness exceed that of the scribes and Pharisees you shall in no way enter the kingdom of heaven’, along with that ‘not a single iota or flourish would pass away from the law until heaven and earth had passed away’ (Matt. 10.5; 5.18, 20). Or was (is) the Gospel (or the community represented) outside Judaism because of the promise that “the kingdom of God would be taken away from ‘you’ and given to an ethnos that performed its fruits” (21.43). That particular debate had become focalized in terms of the question whether Matthew was intra muros or extra muros, within or outside the walls; my question had been, “suppose there are/ were no walls?”[10]
In these debates it was not always clear whether the walls were those around a specific local community or location or were somehow projected upon the whole edifice of what might be called “Judaism.” Putting it in these terms serves as a reminder that the question was frequently framed in terms of whether the text or the community it imagined or represented were in or outside the walls, not of whether they were engaged in building the walls that would keep others, most notably other Jews, out. What was often implicit was the assumption that it was the latter, the Jews, who were responsible for and were maintaining the walls. The metaphor of walls may have faded from common usage – although we shall return to it – but the underlying conviction, at least on the part of scholars who instinctively identify with the so-called Christian texts and participants, was and is that “the Jews,” whether of Matthew’s Gospel, where on the whole they are not so labelled, or of John’s Gospel, where they are so labelled, were engaged in manning the ramparts, that they must – a common predicate in discussions of this topic even now, – have reserved salvation for the chosen race alone, in terms of Torah alone, even where this is not explicitly stated within the text discussed. On the other hand, so it is assumed, whether by implication or explicitly, the “Christian” position was to open the gates or to provide ladders to allow all who wished to enter, or, even better, to pull down the walls – despite the correlate affirmation that ‘no-one comes to the Father except by me [Jesus]’ (John 14.6). The error here is not simply that of mirror-reading but of an overtly apologetic, self-serving, holding of the mirror.
This brings us to the three issues that arguably continue to frustrate any progress unless they are clearly addressed – although there is considerable overlap between them. The first is that of diversity. It has long been a truism that early Christianity was diverse, but over the last 30 years awareness of that diversity has become much more pronounced, not least through detailed analyses of, for example, individual tractates from Nag Hammadi. Many of us have sought to discipline ourselves into permitting such writings the label Christian, either because they themselves claim it or because there are no good grounds for differentiating them from other sources long held to represent early Christianity, but which also may not use that label. Similarly, the diversity of late second Temple Judaism has also become a truism; in particular, diaspora Judaism has moved out of the shadows cast either by the assumption that it was tainted by Hellenism, and hence a hybrid formation if not a ‘syncretistic’ — invariably a damnatory term — one, or simply by the dearth of written sources at a time when the interpretation of material remains was left to the archaeologists and not given independent voice. Yet despite the waves of new interest, including in the material record, it remains supremely difficult to provide a cohesive description of diaspora Judaism, which was after all the primary form of Judaism known to and sharing the same space and challenges as the so-called Christian texts. Here in some circles it has become something of a new orthodoxy to emphasize how unfruitful it is to label specific artifacts or artistic forms or symbols as Jewish-not-Christian or Christian-not-Jewish, or, in some cases, as “Greco-Roman-not Christian, not-Jewish.”[11] How such equivocation might map on to the lives and self-understanding of those who used, made, or commissioned these artifacts is still hidden from us, and any answer would likely be multivocal. While we do not have obvious Jewish Greek diaspora sources reflecting on their Christian neighbors or partisans, our Christian sources emanating from diaspora situations do continue to describe the ‘Jews’ and their characteristics, whether in direct polemic, in admonitory warnings, or in examples of bad and erroneous practice. However, only with the most fine and delicate instruments is it possible, if at all, to extract any persuasive nuggets of authentic information; the Jews of these writings are all too often projected from the negative polemics of the prophets or from the anxieties their authors encountered in reading the scriptures.[12]
The second issue explores a different avenue, although it may reach a similar destination. We referred earlier to the “X-within-Judaism” argument but got waylaid into the question of Matthew and the muri/walls. More recently this has been the watchword for studies of Paul and now of John.[13] In each case it is easy enough to demonstrate that the fundamental trig points by which these texts or their putative authors – more important in the case of Paul – position themselves, namely, the style of argumentation they adopt, the areas of conflict and negotiation they map, the models by which they identify themselves, the core values or principles they uphold, – perhaps the pillars depicted by James Dunn[14] – that all these are determined by the scriptural tradition and are shared with other undoubtedly “Jewish” participants. They may be reconfigured, root and branch, but neither root nor branch are foreign implants. Even the claims for the status of Jesus are made in terms internal to the tradition, albeit with an unprecedented exclusivity.[15] Further complicating (or enriching) these analyses have been the debates as to whether ‘religion’ is a viable category in antiquity, and as to whether “Jewishness” is to be categorized in terms of religion or in those of ethnicity, and equally whether “Christianity” is the “same sort of thing” — whether the question is one of “religious” parting or the boundary-construction of shared ethnicity.[16]
The difficulty entailed in this line of argumentation is its caution or difficulty in defining what would mark the decisive move from “within” to “outwith,” and where and why that is to be identified.[17] Scriptural categories and practices remain fundamental to “Christian” discourse and even practice, even if differently conceived. Justin Martyr’s debt to contemporary philosophy is no greater than that of Philo, while his appeal to the prophets is arguably greater; he claims that his ‘we’ are the true Israelite race (genos) (Dial. 135.3). Yet what would be the value of deciding that Justin, who is well aware of the term ‘Christian’, is ‘within Judaism’? Certainly, the determination of the “X within Judaism” approach to emphasize and to draw on both the breadth of available “Jewish” categories and their formative place in what comes to be Christian thought is to be welcomed; even so, the question must be asked as to who is defining the “within,” as well as what social embodiment is being envisaged.
This question of who is doing the defining is fundamental to the whole debate. On the one hand, it means that we must distinguish between the perceptions of inhabitants of either side of the putative fence, as well as between these and the perceptions of external contemporary observers within their own contexts and with their own purposes. There is sometimes a danger that proponents of one view will appeal to one perspective from a particular ancient source or location to reject that of another.[18] Another common distinction, but one that is less straightforward than might first appear, is often made between the messiness of lived experience – for example as represented by artifacts – and the aspirational rhetoric of those who were seeking to impose a clear differentiation, but whose very urgency may betray the actual fuzziness or preference for hedging bets among those they berated. This can be seen as one aspect of the “reality and image” which I explored some years ago, although even there I sought to emphasize that ‘image and reality’ are not monovalent and antithetical but that they intersect with each other.[19] A different articulation of this might be Daniel Boyarin’s description of Judaeo-Christianity as a “multiform cultural system” which was the location or “cauldron of contentious, dissonant, sometimes friendly and more frequently hostile, and fecund religious productivity” within which he also includes the efforts of what would become rabbinic Judaism and orthodox Christianity to identify and exclude variations that would be marked as heresy.[20] It seems likely that the fixation on the when and where of the parting of the ways has distracted attention from that “multiform cultural system,” preferring to line scholars up according to their position on a spectrum of “early versus late parting.”
With this we come to the third issue highlighted in this paper. What is intended by “the Parting of the Ways”? What is or was it? The course I taught at Harvard was entitled “Jews and Christians” with “the parting of the ways” as a subtitle and supplied with a question mark, in response to the suggestion that the latter term might not be familiar to potential students. In retrospect, the title “Jews and Christians” may have provided the invitation to those students who, consciously or instinctively, assumed that there were Jews and Christians at least from the resurrection if not already in Jesus’s own ministry, to continue in their assumption, at least in the language they themselves used. When I myself first embarked on this track my concern was with “the parting of the ways” as a model for talking about something, a model that had become the preferred one over the triumphalism that hovered over previous accounts of “the triumph of Christianity.” My initial essay made two arguments: first, that the model as adopted by its proponents – at that time provoked by two recent books by James Dunn[21] – was less conciliatory and certainly less neutral than might at first appear; second, that the evidence on the ground was messy and often contradictory, leading to my concluding image that what we were looking at resembled rather “a criss-crossing of muddy tracks which only the expert tracker, or poacher, can decipher.”[22] In retrospect again, I was, however, contributing there to the confusion as to what “the parting of the ways” as a model could and could not do. As a model, or, as I shall shortly suggest, as a metaphor, it is not itself that to which it is being applied: the parting of the ways is not itself an event or a process. Hence it is a mistake to say, as many do, that the parting of the ways “happened” either in the second century or in the fourth century, and equally wrong to say, as even more do, that the parting of the ways “happened” in different places at different times and in different ways.[23] First, such claims ignore the semantic status of the parting of the ways just noted; but, perhaps more seriously, they also ignore the fact that as a model or metaphor, the parting of the ways ultimately and necessarily imagines two universals. If this were not so what we would have would be multiple ways parting in different directions all over the place, ending up at probably twice as many destinations as places of origin; if “it” happened at different times, places, and ways, why should it be assumed that the end-point would be unitary?
More important, however, is what “the parting of the ways” is; namely, whether it is either a model or a metaphor. The exact relationship between models and metaphors is a much contested subject, and is complicated by the different status of models in the sciences, where they may serve to predict behaviors or outcomes, and in the humanities, where repetition and replicability are not envisaged as a means for testing the model.[24] If the “Parting of the Ways” is a metaphor, as seems most appropriate, it is implied that the cluster of ideas and experiences prompted by the image offers a productive route towards envisaging an event or a sequence of events that otherwise remain chaotic and incoherent; i.e. a metaphor is not just a poetic dressing-up but enables us to ask new questions or to make new observations. However, as a metaphor, it works both by what it reveals and by what it hides, by the inevitable failures in its productivity as well as by its successes; it can never be fully sufficient. Some would argue that a model, on the other hand, is characterized and evaluated by its explanatory or interpretive power; it requires a high degree of shared structures or of isomorphism with that to which it refers. From an a priori perspective, this is not what the epithet “the Parting of the Ways” does; rather, it imposes an understanding rather than proves itself as an effective analogy. We need only consider the arguments that in relation to communities of Jesus believers which were predominately or entirely of gentile origin, there could be no parting of the ways: hence, it pertains only to those contexts where the majority had identified or still did identify themselves as Jews, presumably in terms of their genealogical inheritance.[25] But the “presumably” in that last sentence opens a new floodgate of possibilities, while any such restriction of the metaphor (or model or analogy) fails to address the more existential questions that initially prompted this quest.
A common thread through much of what precedes here is the dilemma regarding how we negotiate the largely inaccessible patterns of life and personal interaction “on the ground” together with the inevitable degree of abstraction and narrative projection — and hence the need for descriptive terms and even labels — with which the historian must labour.[26] In my own recent research, I have become attracted to the utility of network theory for exploring the patterns of spread and of connectivity between individuals and groups of Christ-followers;[27] one advantage of such a theory (or model), although an advantage some forget, is that individuals belong simultaneously to multiple networks, and that they are able to leverage different networks as opportunity demands. In perhaps a similar manner, the fascination with individual and social identity-making which has figured so largely in our discipline over the last 15-20 years, and in which I have participated, and which has often tended towards emphasizing the processes of othering and alterity, has had to reckon with the de facto multiple, and sometimes fluid, identities of which all of us are possessed, and which can likewise be exercised as circumstances demand.[28] “Networks” and “ways” belong to different semantic and imaginary domains and so they cannot be combined;[29] yet they can be equally pertinent, reminding us that our language is always exploratory and never the final word.
Judith Lieu is the Lady Margaret's Professor of Divinity Emerita Fellow,
Robinson College, University of Cambridge
[1] Since this paper was initially billed as having an autobiographical dimension my own publications are over-represented. I am grateful to the organisers of the seminar and to colleagues who participated.
[2] As a PhD student at the University of Birmingham 1976-1979. My thesis was published as The Second and Third Epistles of John: History and Background (SNTW. Edinburgh: T.&T. Clark, 1986; reprinted for the Bloomsbury Academic Collection [London: Bloomsbury, 2015])
[3] Peter L. Berger, The Sacred Canopy: Elements of a Sociological Theory of Religion (New York: Anchor, 1967); Bryan Wilson, ed., Patterns of Sectarianism: organisation and ideology in social and religious movements (London: Heinemann, 1967)
[4] 'The Parting of the Ways: Theological Construct or Historical Reality?', Journal for the Study of the New Testament 56 (1994) 101-119; this followed an earlier paper discussing some of the same issues but not referring to ‘the Parting’, 'History and Theology in Christian Views of Judaism', in J. Lieu, J. North & T. Rajak, ed., The Jews between Pagans and Christians (London: Routledge, 1992) 79-96 (both republished in Judith M. Lieu, Neither Jew nor Greek: Constructing Early Christianity [Edinburgh: T&T Clark, 2002] 11-29, 117-34).
[5] Elisabeth Schüssler Fiorenza, In Memory of Her: A feminist theological reconstruction of Christian origins (London, 1983).
[6] Indeed, they have become more so in the wake of the broadening of methods and approaches in scholarship beyond the historical critical.
[7] Eric C. Smith, Jewish Glass and Christian Stone: A Materialist Mapping of the “Parting of the Ways” (London & New York: Routledge, 2017).
[8] See ‘The Parting of the Ways’, 24, and in more detail, with reference also to those whom to Jerome describes as wishing to be both Jew and Christian but are neither (Epist. 112.13), in ‘History and Theology’, 88-91.
[9] Matt Jackson McCabe, Jewish Christianity: The Making of the Christianity-Judaism Divide (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2020); any bibliography on ‘Jewish Christianity’ becomes dense after 2000.
[10] The model of ‘within’ or ‘outside the walls’ was championed by Graham Stanton in a number of studies on Matthew and adopted by others, with varying conclusions: see the various essays in Graham N. Stanton, A Gospel for a New People: Studies in Matthew (London: T&T Clark, 1992) Part II: the Parting of the Ways, 113-281, especially ‘Synagogue and Church’, pp. 113-145.
[11] See Jaś Elsner, ‘Archaeologies and Agendas: Reflections on Late Jewish Art and Early Christian Art’, JRS 93 (2003) 114-128; Smith, Jewish Glass; this belongs to a broader materialist turn which still requires further exploration and nuance.
[12] This was part of the project of Judith M. Lieu, Image and Reality: the Jews in the World of the Christians in the Second Century (Edinburgh: T&T Clark, 1996).
[13] From a potentially extensive bibliography see Mark D. Nanos and Magnus Zetterholm, ed., Paul within Judaism: restoring the first century context to the apostle (Minneapolis: Fortress, 2015); Wally V. Cirafesi, John within Judaism: religion, ethnicity, and the shaping of Jesus-oriented Jewishness in the fourth gospel (Leiden: Brill, 2021).
[14] James D. G. Dunn, The Partings of the Ways: between Christianity and Judaism and their Significance for the Character of Christianity (London: SCM, 1991); in the 2nd edition (London: SCM, 2006) Dunn engages with some of the criticisms and subsequent scholarship (pp. xi-xxx), including that his identification of the ‘pillars’ and of their function in Jewish belief and practice already betrays a Christianising perspective.
[15] Thus the ‘Jesus-oriented Jewishness’ of Cirafesi, John within Judaism.
[16] See the subtitle of Cirafesi, John within Judaism, and below n.28.
[17] See the nuanced discussion by Jörg Frey, ‘“John within Judaism?” Textual, Historical and Hermeneutical Considerations’, in Jens Schröter, Benjamin Edsall, Joseph Verheyden, eds., Jews and Christians – Parting Ways in the First Two Centuries CE? Reflections on the Gains and Losses of a Model (Berlin: de Gruyter, 2021) 185-215.
[18] For example, the appeal to Tacitus, who can speak of Jews and of Christians independently in different contexts (Ann. XV.44; Hist. V), or to Pliny, who makes no reference to Jews in his account of measures against Christians (Epist. X.96), as sufficient to undermine all models of a slow parting.
[19] Lieu, Image and Reality.
[20] D. Boyarin, ‘Justin Martyr invents Judaism’, Church History 70 (2001), 461.
[21] Dunn, The Partings of the Ways and James D. G. Dunn, ed., Jews and Christians: the Parting of the Ways A.D. 70 to 135 (Tübingen: Mohr, 1992).
[22] ‘”The Parting of the Ways”’, 119.
[23] So, Dunn, The Partings of the Ways.
[24] See Carl Knappet, ‘Networks in Archaeology: Between Scientific Model and Humanistic Metaphor’, in Tom Brughmans, Anna Collar & Fiona Coward, eds., The Connected Past: Challenges to Network Studies in Archaeology and History (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2016) 21-33.
[25] See Shaye J. D. Cohen, ‘The Ways that Parted: Jews, Christians, and Jewish-Christians, ca. 100-150CE’, in Joshua Schwartz & Peter Tomson, eds., Jews and Christians in the First and Second Centuries: The Interbellum 70-132CE (Leiden: Brill, 2018) 307-339. However, what are we then to make of the Gentile Christian Justin who speaks of ‘us’ as the ‘true Israelite race’ (above)?
[26] Although it would be wrong to over-press a binary distinction given the move of archaeologists and art historians to study representations or reflections of the body and practice through artifacts.
[27] Again, there is a substantial bibliography both on the model (or metaphor: see n.24), both in antiquity and increasingly with reference to early Christianity.
[28] On these debates see most recently David G. Horrell, Ethnicity and Inclusion: Religion, Race, and Whiteness in Constructions of Jewish and Christian Identities (Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans, 2020). For my initial work, Judith M. Lieu, Christian Identity in the Jewish and Graeco-Roman World (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2004).
[29] In the same way I would now suggest that poachers’ paths (or the multi-lane highways suggested by others) are further different metaphors and not a ‘more accurate’ variation of the first.