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Books > Social sciences > Sociology, social studies > Ethnic studies > Jewish studies
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Border Lines - The Partition of Judaeo-Christianity (Hardcover, New)
Loot Price: R2,365
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Border Lines - The Partition of Judaeo-Christianity (Hardcover, New)
Series: Divinations: Rereading Late Ancient Religion
Expected to ship within 18 - 22 working days
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"This is an imaginative--in the most positive sense--and creative
reading of the emergence of Christianity and Judaism."--Judith
Lieu, author of "The Theology of the Johannine Epistles" "A complex
and erudite rereading of the relationship between early
Christianity, rabbinic Judaism, and their respective heretics. . .
. A truly remarkable achievement."--"Stimulus" "Encourages us to
see historic Christianity as but one expression of a universalistic
potential in Jewish monotheism. . . . In a fruitful career not yet
nearly over, "Border Lines," the culmination of many years of work,
may well remain Daniel Boyarin's masterpiece."--"Commonweal"
"Boyarin's book challenges the ordinary usage of the terms
'Judaism' and 'Christianity' and juxtaposes the formation of
orthodoxy as it is formulated within rabbinic tradition and among
Christians of the patristic period. His bold thesis will no doubt
prove controversial and important."--Elaine Pagels, author of
"Beyond Belief: The Secret Gospel of Thomas" The historical
separation between Judaism and Christianity is often figured as a
clearly defined break of a single entity into two separate
religions. Following this model, there would have been one religion
known as Judaism before the birth of Christ, which then took on a
hybrid identity. Even before its subsequent division, certain
beliefs and practices of this composite would have been
identifiable as Christian or Jewish. In "Border Lines," however,
Daniel Boyarin makes a striking case for a very different way of
thinking about the historical development that is the partition of
Judaeo-Christianity. There were no characteristics or features that
could be described as uniquely Jewish or Christian in late
antiquity, Boyarin argues. Rather, Jesus-following Jews and Jews
who did not follow Jesus lived on a cultural map in which beliefs,
such as that in a second divine being, and practices, such as
keeping kosher or maintaining the Sabbath, were widely and variably
distributed. The ultimate distinctions between Judaism and
Christianity were imposed from above by "border-makers,"
heresiologists anxious to construct a discrete identity for
Christianity. By defining some beliefs and practices as Christian
and others as Jewish or heretical, they moved ideas, behaviors, and
people to one side or another of an artificial border--and, Boyarin
significantly contends, invented the very notion of religion.
Boyarin demonstrates that it was early Christian writers who first
imagined religion as a realm of practice and belief that could be
separated from the broader cultural network of language, genealogy,
or geography, and that they did so precisely to give Christians an
identity. In the end, he suggests, the Rabbis refused the option
offered by the Christian empire of converting Judaism into such a
religion. Christianity, a religion, and Judaism, something that was
not a religion, stood on opposite sides of a borderline drawn more
or less successfully across their respective populations. As a
consequence, "Jewish" to this day is an adjective that can describe
both an ethnicity and a set of beliefs, while Christian orthodoxy
remains, perhaps, the only religion on earth. Daniel Boyarin is the
Taubman Professor of Talmudic Culture in the Departments of Near
Eastern Studies and Rhetoric at the University of California,
Berkeley. He is the author of "Dying for God: Martyrdom and the
Making of Christianity" and "Judaism and A Radical Jew: Paul and
the Politics of Identity."
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