Book description
The historical separation between Judaism and Christianity is often
figured as a clearly defined break of a single entity into two
separate religions. Following this model, there would have been one
religion known as Judaism before the birth of Christ, which then took
on a hybrid identity. Even before its subsequent division, certain
beliefs and practices of this composite would have been identifiable
as Christian or Jewish. In Border Lines, however, Daniel
Boyarin makes a striking case for a very different way of thinking
about the historical development that is the partition of Judaeo-Christianity.
There were no characteristics or features that could be
described as uniquely Jewish or Christian in late antiquity, Boyarin
argues. Rather, Jesus-following Jews and Jews who did not follow Jesus
lived on a cultural map in which beliefs, such as that in a second
divine being, and practices, such as keeping kosher or maintaining the
Sabbath, were widely and variably distributed. The ultimate
distinctions between Judaism and Christianity were imposed from above
by "border-makers," heresiologists anxious to construct a
discrete identity for Christianity. By defining some beliefs and
practices as Christian and others as Jewish or heretical, they moved
ideas, behaviors, and people to one side or another of an artificial
border-and, Boyarin significantly contends, invented the very notion
of religion.
"Encourages us to see historic Christianity as but one
expression of a universalistic potential in Jewish monotheism. . . .
In a fruitful career not yet nearly over, Border Lines, the
culmination of many years of work, may well remain Daniel Boyarin's
masterpiece."-Jack Miles, Commonweal
Daniel Boyarin is the Taubman Professor of Talmudic Culture in the
Departments of Near Eastern Studies and Rhetoric at the University of
California, Berkeley. He is the author of Dying for God: Martyrdom and
the Making of Christianity, Judaism and A Radical Jew: Paul and the
Politics of Identity, and other books.
