Dying for God: Martyrdom and the Making of Christianity and Judaism (review)

The Jewish Quarterly Review, XClI, Nos. 3-4 (January-April, 2002) 586-588 Daniel Boyarín. Dyingfor God: Martyrdom and the Making of Christianity and Judaism. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1999. Pp. xi + 247. It is increasingly accepted among scholars that at the end of the 1st century ce there were not yet two separate religions called "Judaism" and "Christianity." Rather, there was a far-flung Jewish people, among whom widely diverse interpretations of a shared religious heritage could be found, and there were small but growing numbers of people of gentile background who were attracted to one group of such interpretations. It took a very long time, several centuries in fact, before a more or less uniform "Judaism" and a slightly less uniform "Christianity" faced each other across a seemingly unbridgeable divide. The earlier, more fluid situation is hard to reconstruct, in part because later writers, loyal to one or the other of the surviving "traditions," often tried to obscure the earlier reality. The book under review lifts the cover from that reality and puts forth some quite engaging suggestions. Boyarín writes that, until the 4th century, there was no clear difference between "Judaism" and "Christianity." That is, significant numbers of people saw no difficulty in simultaneously identifying with both religions. Of course, earlier efforts had been made to separate the two: by the 2nd century the so-called Apostolic Fathers had begun to speak of the need to avoid "Judaism " in all its varieties, and the canonical Gospel of John notoriously seethes with hostility toward the ill-defined "Jews." Abundant though less well-known evidence, however, reveals Christians continuing to join the religious activities going on in synagogues (much of this evidence consists of vehement denunciation of such behavior by church leaders). More surprisingly , we also see the existence of early rabbis who were interested in teachings ascribed by his followers to Jesus and were not necessarily inclined to write off such teachings as in principle beyond the pale. Boyarín examines with great interest a story (tHul 2.24 = bAZ 16b) that purports to report an incident from the late 1st century. Rabbi Eliezer b. Hyrcanus was arrested for "heresy" (minut) but managed to dodge the charges with an ambiguous expression of trust in "the judge"; later, troubled by his narrow escape and uncertain how he had gotten himself into such a fix, he remembered that a teaching ascribed to "Yeshu ben Pantiri" had once given him pleasure. Taking this narrative at face value (for the moment), it appears that the lst-century master had not originally seen anything wrong with learning from the followers of Yeshu, but that on reflection (that is, as later narrators completed the tale), he realized that BOYARÍN, DYING FOR GOD—GOLDENBERG587 this misjudgment had come close to costing him his life. Boyarín takes this sequence as emblematic of the theme of his book: it took a while for rabbis to see "Christians" as other (and vice versa, of course), but by the 4th century , by the time the classic rabbinic texts and stories they contain were reaching their final form, it had become very important to distinguish between Judaism and Christianity, to get people to stop wandering between them, and to render the intervening border zone permanently uninhabitable. Boyarín specifically examines martyrdom as an arena in which this willed separation was expressed. Over the course of time, Jews (that is, rabbis) and Christians developed distinctive discourses of martyrdom. As presented in their increasingly separate environments, Jews (that is, rabbis) were martyred for refusing to abandon the study and teaching of Torah, whereas Christians were martyred for refusing to abjure Christ. Christian martyrologies place heavy emphasis on the interrogation of prisoners and their defiant rejection of the Empire's claims; Jewish stories tend to lack this element. Christians told stories of heroes who gave up their lives rather than sully their virginity, Jews did not. Many Christian martyrs were women, whereas all rabbinic martyrs (by definition) were men; and for Jews (that is, for rabbis) a young girl's virgin death was not a triumph but a tragedy. For them, a girl's religious fulfillment lay in...