Rethinking Jewish Christianity: An Argument for Dismantling a Dubious Category (to which is Appended a Correction of my Border Lines)

It is not just to be clever that I have appropriated Michael Williams's title;¹ I want to suggest that the argument for dismantling the one (Gnosticism) is startlingly similar to the argument for dismantling the other (Jewish Christianity). Adding Karen King's important insights into the comparative mix,² I would say that the term "Jewish Christianity" always functions as a term of art in a modernist heresiology: It is a marker of the too Jewish side of the Goldilocks fairytale that is "ordinary" Christianity, to cite for the moment Oskar Skarsaune's heresiological terminology.³ I propose that any definition of "Jewish Christianity" implies an entire theory of the development of early Christianity and Judaism,⁴ and I will sketch out such a theory that, if accepted, virtually precludes, in my opinion, any continued scholarly usefulness for the term. Two recent essays introducing two volumes of new thinking on the topic of sogennante Jewish Christianity exemplify for me the pitfalls of using this terminology itself, even in the hands of very critical writers indeed. My case for abandoning this term is an argument in three movements. In the first movement, I will present evidence and discuss evidence already given for the claim that there is never in premodern times a term that non-Christian Jews use to refer to their "religion," that Ioudaismos is, indeed, not a religion (this term to be defined), and that consequently it cannot be hyphenated in any meaningful way. In the second movement, I will try to show that the self-understanding of Christians of Christianity as a religion was slow developing as well⁵ and that a term such as "Jewish Christian" (or rather its ancient equivalents, Nazorean, Ebionite) was part and parcel of that development itself and thus eo ipso, and not merely factitiously, a heresiological term of art. In the third movement, I will try to show that even the most critical, modern, and best-willed usages of the term in scholarship devolve willy-nilly to heresiology. If my arguments be accepted, there should be as little justification for continued use of the term "Jewish Christianity" as a scholarly designation as there is for the term "heresy" itself (except as the very object of heresiological discourse).

1. There is No Judaism

It seems highly significant that there is no word in premodern Jewish parlance that means "Judaism." When the term Ioudaismos appears in non-Christian Jewish writing—to my knowledge only in 2 Maccabees—it doesn't mean Judaism the religion but the entire complex of loyalties and practices that mark off the people of Israel; after that, is used as the name of the Jewish religion only by writers who do not identify themselves with and by that name at all, until, it would seem, well into the nineteenth century.⁶ It might seem, then, that Judaism has not, until some time in modernity, existed at all, that whatever moderns might be tempted to abstract out, to disembed from the culture of Jews and call their religion, was not so disembedded nor ascribed particular status by Jews until very recently.

In a recent article, Steve Mason has decisively demonstrated that which other scholars (including the writer of these lines) have been bruiting about in the last few years, namely, that there is no "native" term that means "Judaism" in any language used by Jews of themselves until modernity,⁷ and, moreover that the term Ioudaioi is almost never, if ever, used by people to refer to themselves as "Jews."⁸ In a fascinating and [End Page...