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

Daniel Boyarin. Dying for God: Martyrdom and the Making of Christianity and Judaism. Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1999. Pp. xi + 247. $49.50.

Daniel Boyarin has written a welcome book. Dying for God stands as a new species in the field of early Jewish/Christian relations. This is a field chock-full of tomes that attempt more or less comprehensive reviews of the topic. Several have stood the test of decades of time, others twist in the wind, and still others continue to appear fifty and more years after Marcel Simon's Verus Israel (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1986 [1948]) really got the conversation going. There is even at least one major effort at metacriticism in this area: Miriam Taylor's Anti-Judaism and Early Christian Identity: A Critique of the Scholarly Consensus (Leiden: E.J. Brill, 1995). In short, it is high time for a change in direction, and Dying for God sets out on just such a new tack.

Typical of the usual expeditions into this field is a bid to delineate the moment(s) of parting between Judaism and Christianity in late Antiquity. Some shoot emphatically and early, pegging the destruction of the Temple as the catalyst to schism; others shoot vaguely and late, pushing the parting well into the fourth century. It is on this very hook that Boyarin hangs his thesis. No longer is it appropriate, he says, to seek the precise moment of parting. Instead, he speaks of a continuum that covers a range of levels of interaction, affinity and dependence. Moreover, he opts out of the popular kinship metaphors to describe the relationship between rabbinic Judaism and orthodox Christianity and writes instead of "shared and crisscrossing lines of history and religious development" (8). This idea of an indistinct border for several centuries is not entirely novel, but Boyarin's dedicated pursuit of it is.

This "much annotated" book (fully 114 of the 247 pages contain the endnotes, the bibliography, and the index) is in fact the published form of the Lancaster/Yarnton lectures on Judaism and the Other Religions delivered in early 1998--parts have appeared in this journal ("Martyrdom and the Making of Christianity and Judaism," JECS 6.4 [1998]: 577-627). The heart of the book is four lectures. The first three use textual anecdotes as springboards to some Boyarin play with his martyrdom theme. Peppered with the vocabulary of the post-modern literary critic, these chapters are sensitive, even fun, readings of the Jewish and Christian stories, all ushering forward his hypothesis that surface insistence on separation between Jews and Christians in fact betrays concealed proximity, or even attraction. A fourth lecture takes a step back to "test the model" (20) of its predecessors against the martyrdom paradigms of Frend (Christian martyrdom emerges from Jewish roots) and Bowersock (Christian martyrdom emerges from Roman roots). Boyarin's reading of martyrdom as a "discourse" undercuts these paradigms.

Boyarin's little book is not comprehensive or mega- in any way (although it is on occasion meta-), nor does it pretend to be. His is rather a small, unconventional thematic study. What Boyarin does is bob into an eclectic group of the primary texts of this huge field, listening for the leitmotif (as he puts it) of Jewish and Christian discourse on martyrdom. He meanders--now in the Babylonian Talmud, now in the Acts of Paul and Thecla, now in a sixth-century Syriac source, now in Eusebius--and were he trying to paint a precise, clear picture he would be vulnerable to charges of inappropriate procedure. But he is not: he is dabbling in some fuzzy impressionism and his lurching about is sensible.

If there is a weakness of Dying for God, it may well be its title and classification. Its Library of Congress primary appointment is BM [Judaism] 176 [History--Post-exilic period, 586 b.c.-210 a.d.]. This makes...