Heresy, Forgery, Novelty: Condemning, Denying, and Asserting Innovation in Ancient Judaism by Jonathan Klawans (review)

This is a concise book about heresy—or, more precisely, about the origins of Christian heresy in ancient Judaism. Whereas one might think of heresy as a Christian invention of the late second century c.e. and associate it with the Fathers of the Church, figures like Tertullian and Irenaeus, Klawans sets out to demonstrate that this is not so. Instead, he argues, the idea of heresy has deep roots in, and ultimately derives from, Judaism of the late Second Temple period. K. defines heresy as “the condemnation of novelty” (p. 159): Christian heresy valorizes antiquity and shuns religious innovation. And it is precisely this “demonization of novelty” (p. ix), an anxiety about any form of religious innovation, that the Church Fathers inherited from the Jews of the late Second Temple period. These Jewish intellectuals went to great lengths to deny, conceal, or otherwise disguise their own novel religious beliefs and practices—hence the main argument of the book, that the origins of Christian heresiology are to be found in the literature of early Judaism.

The book consists of two main parts, a theoretical frame that comprises chap. 1 and the conclusion, in which K. lays out his main theses about the ancient aversion to religious novelty, and three core chapters, one each on Josephus/the rabbis, the Dead Sea Scrolls, and the NT, in which K. turns to the ancient texts in order to provide the evidence for his theses. The aim of K.’s close textual reading is to detect the ubiquitous anxiety of religious innovation that is at the core of his argument, and to uncover the manifold attempts by the ancients to disguise it.

From the beginning, K. asks readers to accept several of his premises, long before we get to the main argument of the book. He claims, for example, rather than demonstrates, that Christian heresy ought to be defined as the condemnation of novelty (he also writes that there is heresy without orthodoxy, but that is for another discussion). The Christian heresiologists make passing appearances in the book, to be sure, but their writings are never closely examined. One is left to wonder what prompts K. to define heresy exclusively in terms of the disapproval of newness. Similarly, K. repeatedly refers to the rhetorical technique of pseudepigraphy, found widely in ancient Jewish literature, which for him “serves one clear function above all: the denial of novelty by feigning antiquity” (p. viii). Pseudepigraphy has, of course, been the subject of substantial scholarly interest lately. K.’s position, here again stated rather than argued, contradicts much of the recent discourse and decidedly returns to the position of figures such as Johann Albert Fabricius of the early eighteenth century. Other claims include the assertion that, with the followers of Jesus, we see for the first time an embrace of newness, a valorization of novelty, that, before long, denigrated the old and turned into Christian supersessionism. In K.’s reading, this is expressed most clearly, and for the first time, in the Epistle to the Hebrews. Supersessionism was born as a hardened response to Jews who rejected Jesus and his followers because of all their novel ideas. “For those Jews who rejected Jesus altogether, presumably all this newness was just too much” (p. 5).

Writing a book about religious novelty, in antiquity or at any other moment, is a risky business. What exactly does innovation mean in the context of Second Temple Judaism, which is characterized above all by variability and diversity? New compared to what? And who determines what passes as new, the ancient authors, their readers, the modern critic? K., who is aware of this intractable methodological difficulty, explains that he is not interested in what was objectively innovative but that his focus is on the rhetorical claims of novelty made by the authors themselves. A fair point. This leads him to conclude that the repeated reference to a “new covenant” in the...