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Chapter 1 Introduction Every day for thirty years a man drove a wheelbarrow full of sand over the Tijuana border crossing. The customs inspector dug through the sand each morning but could not discover any contraband. He remained, of course, convinced that he was dealing with a smuggler. On the day of his retirement from the service, he asked the smuggler to reveal what it was that he was smuggling and how he had been doing so. "Wheelbarrows; I've been smuggling wheelbarrows, of course." This humorous anecdote functions for me on several levels at once. First of all, I will insist that the borders between Christianity and Judaism are as constructed and imposed, as artificial and political as any of the borders on earth. I shall propose in this book that just as the border between Mexico and the United States is a border that was imposed by strong people on weaker people, so too is the border between Christianity and Judaism. Rather than a naturalsounding "parting of the ways:' such as we usually hear about with respect to these two "religions:' I will suggest an imposed partitioningof what was once a territory without border lines, much as India and Pakistan, and Israel and Palestine were artificially partitioned by colonial power. A wonderful simile of Jacques Derrida's based on such a partitioning may help develop the power of this metaphor here. Derrida wrote: "Like Czechoslovakia and Poland, [speech and writing] resemble each other, regard each other; separated nonetheless by a frontier all the more mysterious ... because it is abstract, legal, ideal,"! We would not be wrong, I think, in appropriating this figure for another figure and applying all ofthese terms to the imagined frontier between Judaism and Christianity . Second, the Tijuana border is a space for the crossing of contraband humans and contraband goods and services. Similarly, the border space between the juridical and abstract entities Judaism and Christianity, throughout late antiquity and even beyond, was a crossing point for people and religious practices. Religious ideas, practices, and innovations permeated that border crossing in both directions. There were people, as well, who simply didn't recognize the legitimacy or even the existence of the border. The Chicanos and Tejanos say: We 2 Introduction didn't cross the border; the border crossed us. Furthermore, there were customs inspectors at the frontiers of this Christianity and Judaism. They inscribed the border lines in texts that we know of now as heresiologies. Finally, I will suggest that those very inspectors of religious customers, in their zeal to prevent any contraband from crossing the borders that they sought to enforce by fiat, were, themselves, the agents of illicit interchange of some of the most important contraband , the wheelbarrows-in this case, the very ideas of heresiology themselves . How and why that border was written and who wrote it are the questions that drive this book. Once I am no longer prepared to think in terms of preexistent different entities-religions, if you will-that came (gradually or suddenly ) to enact their difference in a "parting of the ways;' I need to ask who it was in antiquity who desired to make such a difference, how did they accomplish (or seek to accomplish) that making, and what was it that drove them? (And also, where possible, who and what resisted them?) Answers (not the answers ) to these questions will be essayed in this book. My proposal here is that the discourse we know of as orthodoxy and heresy provides at least one crucial site for the excavation of a genealogy of Judaism and Christianity. The idea of orthodoxy comes into the world some time in the second century with a group of Christian writers called "heresiologists," the anatomizers of heresy and heresies , and their Jewish counterparts, the Rabbis. "Heresiology"-the "science" of heresies-inscribes the border lines, and heresiologists are the inspectors of religious customs. Ancient heresiologists tried to police the boundaries so as to identify and interdict those who respected no borders, those smugglers of ideas and practices newly declared to be contraband, nomads who would not recognize the efforts to institute limits, to posit a separation between "two opposed places;' and thus to clearly establish who was and who was not a "Christian;' a "Iew,"?Authorities on both sides tried to establish a border, a line that, when crossed, meant that someone had definitively left one group for another. They named such folk "Iudaizers" or minim, respectively, and attempted to declare...

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