Law and Lawlessness in Early Judaism and Early Christianity (Wissenschaftliche Untersuchungen Zum Neuen Testament) 9783161567087, 9783161567094, 3161567080

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Wissenschaftliche Untersuchungen zum Neuen Testament Herausgeber / Editor

Jörg Frey (Zürich) Mitherausgeber / Associate Editors Markus Bockmuehl (Oxford) · James A. Kelhoffer (Uppsala) Tobias Nicklas (Regensburg) · Janet Spittler (Charlottesville, VA) J. Ross Wagner (Durham, NC)

420

Law and Lawlessness in Early Judaism and Early Christianity edited by

David Lincicum, Ruth Sheridan, and Charles Stang

Mohr Siebeck

David Lincicum, born 1979, is the Rev. John A. O‘Brien Associate Professor of Theology at the University of Notre Dame. Ruth Sheridan, born 1980, is a senior research fellow at Western Sydney University affiliated with the Religion and Society Research cluster and working within the Translational Health Research Institute. Charles M. Stang, born 1974, is Professor of Early Christian Thought and Director of the Center for the Study of World Religions at Harvard Divinity School.

ISBN 978-3-16-156708-7 / eISBN 978-3-16-156709-4 DOI 10.1628 / 978-3-16-156709-4 ISSN 0512-1604 / eISSN 2568-7476 (Wissenschaftliche Untersuchungen zum Neuen Testament) Die Deutsche Nationalbibliothek lists this publication in the Deutsche Nationalbibliographie; detailed bibliographic data is available on the Internet at http://dnb.dnb.de. © 2019  by Mohr Siebeck, Tübingen, Germany. www.mohrsiebeck.com This book may not be reproduced, in whole or in part, in any form (beyond that permitted by copyright law) without the publisher’s written permission. This applies particularly to reproductions, translations and storage and processing in electronic systems. The book was typeset by Martin Fischer in Tübingen, printed by Gulde Druck in Tübingen on non-aging paper and bound by Buchbinderei Spinner in Ottersweier. Printed in Germany.

Dedicated with gratitude to Dr. h.c. Manfred Lautenschläger and Seniorprofessor Dr. Dr. Dres. h.c. Michael Welker

Preface The essays in this volume were originally presented at the “Lautenschlaeger Colloquium on Law and Lawlessness in Early Judaism and Christianity,” which met at Mansfield College, Oxford from 5–7 August, 2015. The colloquium was generously supported by funds from the Manfred Lautenschlaeger Award for Theological Promise, overseen by Prof. Dr. Michael Welker of the Forschungszentrum für Internationale und Interdisziplinäre Theologie at the University of Heidelberg. Five participants (David Lincicum, David Moffitt, Michael Peppard, Ruth Sheridan, and Charles Stang) were awarded the Lautenschlaeger Award in 2013, and we are indebted to those colleagues who agreed to share their work with us in the Oxford meeting. Above all, we are deeply indebted to Manfred Lautenschlaeger and Michael Welker for their visionary partnership in supporting early career theological scholars, and we are pleased to dedicate this volume to them as a small token of our thanks. We also express our thanks to Dr. Henning Ziebritzki of Mohr Siebeck and to Prof. Dr. Jörg Frey and his colleagues for including this collection in the Wissenschaftliche Untersuchungen zum Neuen Testament. Michael Ennis under­took the laborious task of standardizing the essays. Angela Roskop Erisman put her excellent editorial skill to use in crafting the index. The production of the index was made possible by support from the Institute for Scholarship in the Liberal Arts, College of Arts and Letters, University of Notre Dame. David Lincicum Ruth Sheridan Charles Stang

Contents Preface . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . VII Introduction . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 1 Lutz Doering Law and Lawlessness in Texts from Qumran . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 9 Grant Macaskill Law and Lawlessness in the Enoch Literature . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 29 Joshua D. Garroway Paul: Within Judaism, Without Law . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 49 Paula Fredriksen Origen and Augustine on Paul and the Law . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 67 David M. Moffitt Weak and Useless? Purity, the Mosaic Law, and Perfection in Hebrews . . . . 89 David Lincicum Against the Law: The Epistle of Barnabas and Torah Polemic in Early Christianity . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 105 Paul F. Bradshaw The Ancient Church Orders: Early ecclesiastical law? . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 123 Steven D. Fraade Rabbis on Gentile Lawlessness. Three Midrashic Moments . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 135 Michal Bar-Asher Siegal Law Corpora Compared: Early Collections of Monastic Rules and Rabbinic Literature . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 157

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Christopher Rowland “By an immediate revelation … by the voice of his own spirit to my soul”: A perspective from Reception History on the New Testament and Antinomianism . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 173 Michael Peppard Law and Liberty: Circumcision Discourse from Galatia to Germany . . . . . . 193 List of Contributors . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 215 Index of Ancient Sources . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 217 Index of Modern Authors . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 226 Subject Index . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 230

Introduction David Lincicum, Ruth Sheridan, and Charles Stang According to a persistent popular stereotype, early Judaism is viewed as a “legalistic” religious tradition, in contrast to early Christianity, which seeks to obviate and so to supersede, annul, or abrogate Jewish law. Although scholars have known better since the surge of interest in the question of the law in post-holocaust academic circles, the complex stances of both early Judaism and early Christianity toward questions of law observance have resisted easy resolution or sweeping generalizations. The essays in this book aim to bring to the fore the legalistic and antinomian dimensions in both traditions, with a variety of contributions that examine the formative centuries of these two great religions and their legal traditions. More broadly, this book explores how law and lawlessness are in tension throughout this early, formative period, and not finally resolved in one direction or the other. In this way, we hope this book will in some small way serve as a resource for interreligious dialogue today. In the later Second Temple period, the Torah came increasingly to be conceived as ‘law’ and was accordingly elevated to a central place in the formation of Jewish identity and practice.1 The centrality of the Torah did not naturally translate into unanimity of perspective on the question of what it meant to faithfully fulfill the law, and the remarkable proliferation of sects and movements in the lively centuries around the turn of the common era attests to the vitality of debate and the importance with which the Torah was viewed. If at one time it had been common, at least among Christian scholars of Judaism and early Christianity, to categorize Second Temple Judaism as crassly legalistic, the discovery of the Dead Sea Scrolls and subsequent recognition of the complex diversity of Jewish stances toward the covenant and the law troubled this unsophisticated consensus. Similarly, seminal work on the Apostle Paul by Krister Stendahl and E. P. Sanders called into question the prevailing, often Lutheran, understandings of Judaism in the first century, and so opened the floodgates in subsequent decades of rethinking the poles of law and lawlessness.2 1 See esp. John J. Collins, “The Transformation of the Torah in Second Temple Judaism,” JSJ 43 (2012): 455–474; idem, The Invention of Judaism: Torah and Jewish Identity from Deuteronomy to Paul (Oakland, CA: University of California Press, 2017); note also Francis Borchardt, “Lawless, Lawlessness III. Judaism,” EBR 15 (2017): cols. 1045–1049. 2 Particularly Krister Stendahl, “The Apostle Paul and the Introspective Conscience of the West,” HTR 56.3 (1963): 199–215 and E. P. Sanders, Paul and Palestinian Judaism (Philadelphia:

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In fact, the specter of antinomianism has haunted both Jewish and Christian tradition since antiquity. The New Testament itself offers us an early window into Jewish grappling with the problems posed by messianic sensibilities in dialogue with nomistic tradition. Broadly speaking, in the New Testament, the lawless (ἄνομος) one, or the one who practices lawlessness (ἀνομία), is denounced as an aberrant rebel flouting the will of God. Both the Gospel of Matthew and the Apostle Paul are stringent in their denunciation of lawlessness, which is connected to the signs of the last days (e. g., Matt 7:23, 23:28, 24:12; 2 Cor 6:14; 2 Thess 2). Paul, however, can also describe his activities among Gentile populations as involving a certain suspension of his halakhic practice: “to those outside the law (τοῖς ἀνόμοις) I became as one outside the law (ὡς ἄνομος) – though I am not outside the law of God but rather under the Messiah’s law (ἔννομος Χριστοῦ) – in order that I might win those outside the law (τοὺς ἀνόμους)” (1 Cor 9:21).3 And in addressing his Gentile converts, Paul stridently opposes any acceptance of Jewish Torah observance. For all their shared resistance to antinomianism as such, Matthew and Paul evince sharply divergent perspectives on the question of Gentiles and the law, and some have even seen Matthew as writing to oppose Pauline legal thought in particular.4 These early attempts to achieve some delicate middle between extremes were bound to topple in the decades and centuries following these first Jewish Christian writings, and subsequently we find a broad range of stances in both Jewish and Christian tradition on questions of the law and its observance.5 In the period of the Reformation, Luther’s repristination of Pauline teaching and his prioritization of the “law vs. gospel” dialectic led to an uneasy stance toward the law among Luther’s own followers and in his own lifetime.6 The seventeenth Fortress, 1977). Note the assessment in Kent L. Yinger, “The Continuing Quest for Jewish Legalism,” BBR 19.3 (2009): 375–391. 3 For the New Testament evidence, see A. Sand, “Die Polemik gegen ‘Gesetzlosigkeit’ im Evangelium nach Matthäus und bei Paulus,” BZ 14 (1970): 112–25; David Wenham, “A Note on Matthew 24:10–12,” TynB 31 (1980): 155–62; Alberto Maggi, “Nota Sull’uso di  τῷ σῷ ὀνόματι e ἁνομία in Mt 7:21–23,” Filología neotestamentaria 3.6 (1990): 145–49; J. E. Davidson, “Anomia and the Question of an Antinomian Polemic in Matthew,” JBL 104 (1995): 617–35; K. Haacker, “Der ‘Antinomismus’ des Paulus im Kontext antiker Gesetzestheorie,” in Geschichte – Tradition – Reflexion, vol. 3: Frühes Christentum FS Martin Hengel; ed. H. Cancik et al. (Tübingen: Mohr Siebeck, 1996), 387–404; Katie Atkinson, “Lawless, Lawlessness, II. New Testament,” EBR 15 (2017): 1044–45. 4 For example, David C. Sim, “Matthew’s Anti-Paulinism: A Neglected Feature of Matthean Studies,” HTS 58.2 (2002): 767–783. 5 For early debates about Paul, see Judith L. Kovacs, “Was Paul an Antinomian, a Radical Ascetic, or a Sober Married Man? Exegetical Debates in Clement of Alexandria’s Stromateis 3,” in Asceticism and Exegesis in Early Christianity ed. Hans-Ulrich Weidemann; NTOA/SUNT 101 (Göttingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, 2013) 186–202. For early Judaism, see Ines Pollmann, Gesetzeskritische Motive im Judentum und die Gesetzeskritik des Paulus NTOA/SUNT 98 (Göttingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, 2012), 25–179. 6  Joar Haga, “Lex manens?: Some Problems in the Interpretation of the Law in Early Prot-

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century witnessed the outbreak of the Antinomian Controversy on both sides of the Atlantic, as some among the Calvinist Puritans teased out the implications for Christian practice of a strong doctrine of divine sovereignty, in conjunction with a radical priority of grace over against the law.7 In a subtle and sophisticated treatment, Shaul Magid has demonstrated how forms of ‘soft antinomianism’ in some Hasidic tradition can preserve the halakhic system of legal judgments at the same time that system is transcended by messianic or mystical sensibilities that authorize a suspension of the usual: “In order to be an antinomian inside Judaism, one must be a pietist. To live outside the law one also has to live beyond the letter of the law”.8 The complicated historical stances of both Judaism and Christianity toward the law, obedience to it, and the suspension of that obedience, continue to shape contemporary understandings of the two major faiths in their mutual conversation.9 The essays in this book attempt to relate the themes of ‘law’ and ‘lawlessness’ dialectically in the literatures of early Judaism and Christianity. They reveal a great diversity in the ways in which both ‘law’ and ‘lawlessness’ were understood and deployed within these literatures. Significantly, the concept of ‘lawlessness’ is understood not only as the supersession, or lack, of legal stipulations in the context of Christian religious praxis, but also as something equivalent to ‘immorality’ or injustice. This finding precludes the simple equation of Christian conceptualizations of ‘lawlessness’ with antinomianism, positioning it closer to Jewish formulations, as traditionally understood. Even so, these essays reveal the gradual ways in which Christian understandings of ‘lawful’ behavior came to be generalized as moral conduct, so that Christianity evolved as a non-Torah-observant movement only gradually, and in some rare cases across history, not at all. Finally, several of the essays set the questions of early Christian and Jewish ‘law and lawlessness’ in conversation with later texts and historical events – to illuminating effect.

estantism,” Neue Zeitschrift für systematische Theologie und Religionsphilosophie 54.2 (2012): 205–220; cf. David S. Yeago, “Gnosticism, Antinomianism, and Reformation Theology: Reflections on the Costs of a Construal,” Pro Ecclesia 2 (1993): 37–49. 7 For example, Stephen Hampton, “Richard Holdsworth and the Antinomian Controversy,” JTS 62 (2011): 218–250; Deborah Lucas Schneider, “Anne Hutchinson and Covenant Theology,” HTR 103.4 (2010): 485–500; David R. Como, Blown by the Spirit: Puritanism and the Emergence of an Antinomian Underground in Pre-Civil-War England (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2004); David D. Hall, ed., The Antinomian Controversy, 1636–1638: A Documentary History; 2nd ed. (Durham: Duke University Press, 1990). 8  Shaul Magid, Hasidism on the Margin: Reconciliation, Antinomianism, and Messianism in Izbica and Radzin Hasidism (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 2003), 205–248 (quotation from 220). 9  David Novak, “Avoiding Charges of Legalism and Antinomianism in Jewish-Christian Dialogue,” Modern Theology 16.3 (2000): 275–291.

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In “Law and Lawlessness in Texts from Qumran,” Lutz Doering examines the centrality of law-abidance in the documents from Qumran, arguing that on the whole the texts display a general ethos of law-abidance and a similar conceptualization of sin and transgression. The Qumran documents do not understand the term ‘lawlessness’ as an exemption from the law for the sectarians; rather, lawlessness is taken as disregard for, or disobedience to the law by Israelites. As such, it features largely in three respects in the Scrolls: first, as the historic lawlessness of Israel, from which the initiate to the group had to return to the Torah of Moses; second, as the (re)lapse of group members or initiates into various kinds of lawlessness; and third, as the present lawlessness of others, such as those whose practices are guided by a ‘wrong’ calendar, a corrupt legal tradition, or a faulty understanding of the Torah. Grant Macaskill takes up the theme of “Law and Lawlessness in the Enoch Literature.” Macaskill notes that recent scholarly discussion of the early Enochic literature has paid significant attention to the question of whether these writings represent a distinct species of “Enochic Judaism,” one marked by a changing, sometimes hostile, stance toward the writings associated with Moses, and particularly toward the law. He goes on to argue that the authors of the various Enochic works may share a generally positive view of the law with their siblings and compatriots, but in the context of a soteriology that ascribes pivotal significance to something else. The essay explores these points in what follows, with respect to the various major Enochic works that might be traced back to the period of early Judaism: 1 Enoch, Jubilees, and, with less certainty about its origins, 2 Enoch. Next Joshua Garroway considers “Paul: Within Judaism, Without Law.” The study of Paul has been turned on its head over the past fifty years. Where once it was taken for granted that Paul abandoned the Law, and therefore that he could not be reckoned a Jew, the latest perspective on Paul takes for granted that Paul was an observant Jew, and therefore that he could not have abandoned the Law. This turnabout, Garroway suggests, results from the fact that Paul appears at one and the same time to be committed to the Jewish God, scriptures, and people, and thus a Jew, but committed also to a radically antinomian vision of Judaism for which there exists no ancient analogue – but perhaps a near-contemporary one. Through a comparison of Paul with the nineteenth-century German rabbi and founder of radical Reform Judaism in America, Samuel Holdheim, this essay contends that each man in his own way arrived at what might be called an unfinished antinomianism. Each was committed in principle to revoking the authority of the Law, but neither carried this conviction through to its ultimate conclusion – to wit, dismissing the Law unconditionally as a relevant expression of God’s will. Paula Fredriksen next takes up the reception of Paul’s view of the law in some influential early Christian theologians in her essay, “Origen and Augustine on Paul and the Law.” For scholars, whether ancient or modern, the question of

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“Paul and the Law” entails a host of other considerations. How did Paul relate to the original Jerusalem community and, thus, to traditions stemming from Jesus of Nazareth? How had Jesus in his turn related to Jewish law, and how had his attitudes and practices affected Paul’s? How did Paul’s diaspora setting contour his message, and/or alter what he had inherited? When he says ‘Law,’ does he always mean the same thing by it? And, finally – the primary question this essay takes up – did Paul practice what he preached? In other words, did Paul himself live according to the so-called ‘Law-free’ gospel that he (putatively) urged on Gentile ekklesiai? This essay examines how Origen (185–254) and Augustine (354–430), two towering geniuses of the ancient church, wrestled with all of these issues through their own readings of Galatians, of Acts, and of the Pauline corpus more generally. They shared a common scriptural canon; and they each self-identified with Roman orthodoxy. They were similarly situated polemically: Origen wrote against the views of Paul’s mission and message offered by Marcion’s church; Augustine, against those of his former Latin Manichaean community, a dualist Christian sect influenced by Marcion. For these reasons, their respective solutions to the puzzle of Paul’s own Jewish practice share several elements in common. Yet, finally, they contrast significantly with each other. David Moffitt next turns from Paul to the Epistle to the Hebrews, in his essay “Weak and Useless? Purity, the Mosaic Law, and Perfection in Hebrews.” One aspect of the Epistle to the Hebrews that is sometimes identified as a clear indicator of the text’s fundamentally supersessionist character is the author’s apparent disdain for the Law’s external rituals: the Law, being “weak and useless” (7:18), was never able to perfect anything (7:19). Moffitt examines the scholarly assumption that the author of Hebrews rejects the Law and its sacrificial logic because the rituals required by the Law were only effective for external matters and could not effect internal purification. The author’s close connection between perfection, purity, and one’s ability to approach God’s presence, especially in the case of Jesus, indicate instead that the very concerns of both moral and ritual purity lie at the center of his thinking. The author of the Epistle confesses that Jesus, although he is the Son and is without sin, had nevertheless to be made perfect in order to become the heavenly high priest and to return to the heavenly realms. Such a concept of perfection, Moffitt argues, overlaps significantly with Jewish purity concerns. The next essay, “Against the Law: The Epistle of Barnabas and Torah Polemic in Early Christianity” by David Lincicum, moves beyond the New Testament to one of the earliest extra-canonical Christian texts. Lincicum examines some of the argumentative strategies that early Christians used in contending that the Torah no longer had its binding force over the lives of their movement’s adherents, over the first two centuries or so CE. The essay follows with an attempt to use that map in order to locate one specific, early polemical tract, the so-called Epistle of Barnabas. A heuristic typology of early Christian strategies for law criticism in roughly the first and second centuries might include at least the following four

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sets of approaches: (1) Halakhic disputes about the interpretation of the law; (2) Salvation-historical approaches; (3) Substantive criticisms of the Torah itself; and (4) Hermeneutical approaches. The Epistle of Barnabas fits largely into this fourth category. But in the end, Barnabas’s stance toward the law is distinctive among other early Christian approaches: principally, Barnabas leverages the Golden Calf event as a hermeneutical turning point, reifies prophetic anti-cultic hyperbole, and accuses the entire Jewish tradition of an overly literal misreading of the Torah. In “The Church Orders and Christian Law,” Paul Bradshaw surveys the range of texts from the first to the fifth centuries that have come to be called “church orders”: texts that purport to be apostolic and presume to give directions on communal Christian life, including ecclesiastical and liturgical practices. Debate persists as to whether these texts constitute their own proper genre, but Bradshaw argues that they should be considered together not only because a literary relationship exists among some of them but also because even in antiquity they were seen to have some affinity with one another and were assembled together in collections. Rather than regard them only as “propagandistic,” Bradshaw suggests that we interpret them as a kind of “living literature,” that is, texts that accumulate and expand as they circulate among the communities that read and appeal to them. While the oldest church orders do seem to be the genuine rules and regulations of particular Christian communities, later instances reveal a more propagandistic edge, intended to promote and defend particular theological and liturgical views by way of a selective preservation of an imagined (apostolic) past. Pivoting to Rabbinic traditions, Steven Fraade next takes up “Rabbis on Gentile Lawlessness: Three Midrashic Moments.” In Hebrew scriptural theology, what most distinguishes Israel from the other peoples or nations is that Israel has had God’s Torah, both as text and teaching, and especially its covenantal laws, revealed to it alone. However, the question remains: how could God be the creator and ruler of all creatures, and yet prefer for his law to “reside” among one people alone, especially if, we might presume, others would similarly benefit from its guidance and redemptive power? In order to explore these questions this essay looks at three clusters of rabbinic narratives regarding the availability of the Torah, especially its laws, to non-Jews. The fact the rabbinic literature preserves multiple versions of these stories, with significant variations between them, is itself a sign of the ambivalent attitudes that they encompass. Ultimately, in these midrashim, what differentiated Israel from the lawless nations, who had proven themselves incapable of abiding by even the minimal, universal, moral laws of the Noahides, was not only their possession of the written laws of the Torah, but also, and even more so, the oral laws of rabbinic tradition. In “Law Corpora Compared: Early Collections of Monastic Rules and Rabbinic Literature,” Michal Bar-Asher Siegal asks what benefit there is in comparing

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Rabbinic legal traditions with monastic rules, specifically passages from, on the one hand, the Babylonian Talmud and, on the other, the Asketikon of St. Basil and the Rule of Pachomius. Such a comparison tells us much about how religious societies create and regulate laws, and about the communities for which these laws were written and in which they functioned. For instance, Bar-Asher Siegal looks at the centrality of scripture functions in both legal literatures, suggesting a similarity between monastic reading circles and a rabbinic beit midrash. She explores how a range of quotidian acts – such as putting on a belt, riding a donkey bareback – reveal a range of shared anxieties calling for legal regulation. Her exercise becomes an invitation for a broader, and deeper, comparison of these two religious, legal traditions. The next two essays consider later receptions of early Christian discourses about the law. Christopher Rowland brings the study of later antinomian traditions to bear on the New Testament in his essay, “‘By an immediate revelation … by the voice of his own spirit to my soul’: a perspective from Reception History on the New Testament and Antinomianism.” He attempts to move beyond the usual summary rejection of antinomianism by probing aspects of the reception history of the Bible. The essay questions the adequacy of ‘antinomianism’ as being primarily ‘anti-law’ or indeed about the promotion of ‘immoral’ behavior. By focusing on one aspect of antinomianism from the perspective of mostly post-sixteenth century sources, namely, the primacy of what was believed to be immediate access to understanding the divine, through dreams, visions, and insight, Rowland proposes an alternative construal of antinomianism: a stance may be ‘anti-nomian’ in the sense of relegating the authority of Scripture and received wisdom to a secondary position, another medium and source of authority. The examples of Anne Hutchinson and the writings of William Blake demonstrate that subjection to an external law has mutated so that the external code is internalized, ‘written on the heart’ or ‘the spirit within’, influenced by passages from Ezekiel 36:25–7 and Jeremiah 31:33–4, so that the individual has no need any longer of resort to law as an external authority. Returning to the New Testament, these later examples shed a heuristic light on the unsettling emphasis on direct experience of the Spirit found above all in Paul’s correspondence to the Corinthians. The final essay of the collection bridges the legal debates of the first and the twenty-first centuries. In “Law and Liberty: Circumcision Discourse from Galatia to Germany,” Michael Peppard analyzes the influential discourse about religiously motivated circumcision in contemporary Europe, focusing on the flashpoint of the 2012 court ruling in Cologne, which temporarily outlawed the prescribed ritual partially on the grounds that circumcision should be understood as an issue about the human right to bodily integrity, and positioned within discourse about the rights of the child. As such, the competing stance of circumcision’s viability in light of the religious rights for a minority group was pushed aside. During the

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process of the debate in Europe, a still predominantly Christian continent, one might expect Christian engagement with the New Testament to play a role, since it involves a tangible contemporary issue of Gentile-Jewish respect about which Christian scriptures speak definitively. The arguments made by Paul regarding circumcision are some of the most frequently studied in the New Testament. This essay draws on Paul’s arguments to analyze the aforementioned legal rulings in Europe; following this, the essay isolates and evaluates some unsettling strands in the German discourse – dark reminders of the legacy of anti-Semitism that runs through the “law vs. liberty” debate. Collectively, these eleven essays demonstrate that there is still more light to be shed on the Torah’s reception in early Judaism and Christianity (one that continues to have an effect on contemporary religious communities). This reception is variegated and complex, resisting easy resolution or sweeping characterization. Legal traditions sit alongside impulses to criticize, limit, suspend, or transcend the Torah in fascinating juxtaposition. These essays are offered in the hope of furthering in some small way our communal understanding about law and lawlessness, in both antiquity and the contemporary world.

Law and Lawlessness in Texts from Qumran Lutz Doering Introduction Law-abidance is of utmost importance in the texts from Qumran. This is already evident in certain texts that in my view precede the full formation of the Yaḥad. Thus, in the Book of Jubilees the Torah is inscribed into the texture of creation. The book develops this prominently with respect to the Sabbath: not only is God’s example of resting from all his works cited, as in Genesis, but God chooses future Israel on Creation Sabbath and destines her for the disclosure of Sabbath laws, a first series of which is already mentioned subsequent to the rewriting of the creation narrative in Jub 2:24–33.1 Already the protoplasts – cast as Israelites  – observe the purification periods after childbirth,2 perhaps following an older practice that infants would keep these periods together with their mother (who, as a matter of course, was absent in this case).3 Other laws are read off the Heavenly Tablets, on which the halakhah held by the milieu of Jubilees is recorded. As presented in Jubilees, the Torah known to us from the Pentateuch – the “first law” (Jub 6:22; cf. 30:12) – is a less detailed version of the divine law, not superseded but rather supplemented and informed by Jubilees’ additional laws. It is expected that Israelites abide by the laws as specified in Jubilees. Thus, any transgressor of the Sabbath laws given in Jubilees is threatened with capital punishment. Whether this really was meant to be carried out, or was actually carried 1 For the structure of the section of Sabbath laws and its connection with its narrative frame see L. Doering, “Jub 2,24 nach 4QJuba VII,17 und der Aufbau von Jub 2,17–33,” Biblische Notizen 84 (1996): 23–28. For analysis of the conceptual grounding of the Sabbath in Jubilees see Doering, “The Concept of the Sabbath in the Book of Jubilees,” Studies in the Book of Jubilees, ed. M. Albani, J. Frey and A. Lange, TSAJ 65 (Tübingen: Mohr Siebeck, 1997), 179–205. 2 The same tradition, perhaps dependent on Jubilees in one form or another, is also present in 4Q265; see J. M. Baumgarten, “Purification after Childbirth and the Sacred Garden in 4Q265 and Jubilees,” New Qumran Texts and Studies: Proceedings of the First Meeting of the International Organization for Qumran Studies, Paris 1992, ed. G. J. Brooke with F. García Martínez, STDJ 15 (Leiden: Brill, 1994), 3–10. 3 For evidence for the notion that not only the mother but the infant, too, has to observe the purification period cf. possibly Luke 2:22 (αἱ ἡμέραι τοῦ καθαρισμοῦ αὐτῶν) and George Syncellus, Chronographia 9 (ἐπειδὴ καὶ Ἀδὰμ τῇ μ´ ἡμέρᾳ τῆς πλάσεως αὐτοῦ εἰσήχθη ἐν τῷ παραδείσῳ, οὗ χάριν καὶ τὰ γεννώμενα τῇ μ´ ἡμέρᾳ εἰσφέρουσιν ἐν τῷ ἱερῷ κατὰ τὸν νόμον) (ed. A. Mosshammer, BSGRT [Leipzig: Teubner, 1984], pg. 9).

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out at any time, is open to question. Jubilees is not a criminal law code and may express an ideal rather than a set of practical regulations. But the bar is high here: Israel is to abide by the law in its rigorous form as it is represented in this book.4 Only on account of law-abidance will Israel meet her destined place in a hostile world – a world, Israel is to understand, that in fact was created for her. Lawlessness appears as a sign of conflict and crisis, as in Jub 1:7–17 (fragmentarily attested in 4QJuba i 17–ii 17), which in the tradition of Deuteronomistic theology presents a historical overview of Israel’s lawlessness, forgetfulness, and idolatry,5 then its dispersion among the peoples, and finally the transformation of the people as a “plant of righteousness,” with God building his temple among the people: he is their God, and they are his true and righteous people. It ought to be noted that the metaphor of “planting” here is used, not unlike its deployment in 1 En 10:16, with a view to the people of Israel:6 it is a reconstituted form of Israel, not a sect, which is expected to arise from the historic lawlessness of the people. Lawlessness features also in Jub 23. According to Jub 23:9–15, the decreasing lifespan of humans correlates with the sins they cause the earth to commit through the impurity of fornication, through contamination and abominable deeds (23:14). Thereafter, children will challenge the injustice of their fathers, and internal struggle will arise with much bloodshed, triggering the involvement of the sinful nations (23:16–25). Then, “the children will begin to study the laws, to seek out the commands, and to return to the right way” (23:26), which will lead to increase in number and lifespan, as well as the ultimate absence of evil forces (23:27–31). It is debated with which historical events, if any, these initiatives by the “children” (vv. 16, 26) might be correlated. Again, however, even though the initiatives are attributed to discrete groups, there is no indication that the program envisioned by Jubilees entails any sectarian form of organization.7 4  While Hebrew Jubilees in its final form might date from the Hasmonaean period, it seems to reflect earlier halakhic tradition, as argued in Doering, “Concept,” 182, 201. This would somewhat moderate the claim made by J. J. Collins, “The Transformation of the Torah in Second Temple Judaism,” JSJ 43 (2012): 455–474, that Torah “as law” became the focus of Jews only in the Hasmonaean period, as a response to the “attempt to displace the traditional Torah in the time of Antiochus Epiphanes” (474). Although he is aware of the possible links with the time before the Hasmonaeans (473), these seem to me to be stronger than Collins allows for (see now also his The Invention of Judaism: Torah and Jewish Identity from Deuteronomy to Paul [Oakland: University of California Press, 2017]). While Hasmonaean-period sectarianism was intimately connected with halakhic debate, detailed halakhah as such originated earlier. To be sure, the details of this earliest halakhah were still little refined by comparison with later halakhah, as the Sabbath laws in Jubilees show; see for details L. Doering, Schabbat: Sabbathalacha und ‑praxis im antiken Judentum und Urchristentum, TSAJ 78 (Tübingen: Mohr Siebeck, 1999), 51–118. 5  Cf. also 4Q390 1 8, which foresees forgetting “of statute and festival and Sabbath and covenant.” 6  Cf. P. Tiller, “The ‘Eternal Planting’ in the Dead Sea Scrolls,” DJD 4 (1997): 312–35 (here, 315–21). 7  Here with J. J. Collins, The Apocalyptic Imagination: An Introduction to Jewish Apocalyptic Literature, 3rd ed. (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 2016), 105: “… Jubilees lacks any indication of or-

Law and Lawlessness in Texts from Qumran

11

A similar emphasis on law-abidance permeates the various rule texts from Qumran, on which this paper will focus; but its resolve is now sought in forms of sectarian communities. I am not assuming that all texts reflect one and the same group at one and the same time, but they show a general ethos of law-abidance and a similar conceptualization of sin and transgression, as we shall see. For the Laws of the Damascus Document it is necessary for a person to “impose upon himself (a vow) to return to the Law of Moses, for in it everything is specified” (CD-A 16:1b–2a). And when a man imposes this oath upon himself, “the angel of hostility (‫ )מלאך המשטמה‬will leave him, if he keeps his words” (16:4b–5).8 This already suggests that lawlessness might have something to do with demonic disturbance, and that community members are threatened by it but under certain circumstances can escape it. The sincerity with law-abidance is also suggested in another detail in the Damascus Document Laws: “Anything a man imposes on himself to depart from the Torah (‫)לסור ׄמ[ן התו]רה‬ ׄ he shall not keep, even at the price of death” (CD-A 16:8–9). Similarly, 1QS 9:9 states that “they should deviate from none of the counsels of the Torah, so as to walk in all the willfulness of their heart.” This opposition between keeping Torah and the willfulness of one’s heart (‫ שרירות לב‬+ suffix) will be a recurring theme in the texts surveyed here. A final aspect should be mentioned here: In the Admonition of the Damascus Document, in a passage to be discussed in greater detail below, it is stated that God erected “with those who held firm to the commandments of God” his “covenant with Israel forever, revealing to them things hidden, in which all Israel had erred”; the text gives as examples Sabbath and festivals and less determined items as “his righteous testimonies and his reliable ways” (CD-A 3:12b–16a). Thus, the community described here is the remnant of those who are both law-abiding and the recipients of legal revelation that finally sets straight in what ways most of Israel had previously erred. These preliminary reflections lay the foundations for the following discussion of lawlessness. The term itself and its applicability to our texts, however, deserve a brief comment. According to the Oxford English Dictionary, “lawless,” used of persons, has the following two main meanings: (1) “Exempt from law, … above or beyond the reach of law”; (2) “Regardless of, or disobedient to law.”9 Of these, our texts address chiefly the second meaning: there is no reflection on any exganization in a separate community and is concerned with the full nation of Israel, although the “children” who study the laws are a distinct group within it.” Though proximity to the ideology of the Qumran Yaḥad is undeniable, I do not think that Jubilees was composed or, at least for most of its parts, redacted within the Yaḥad. Here is not the place to engage recent views of the textual growth of Jubilees, which in my view do not overturn this general placement of Jubilees. 8  A parallel to both passages is preserved in 4QDf 4 ii 4, 6–7; to the latter only, in 4QDe 6 ii 18. 9  In detail: 1a. “Without law, having no laws; ignorant of, or not regulated by law. Of a law: Not based on principles of right. Now rare”; 1b. “Exempt from law, not within the province of law, above or beyond the reach of law. Also, in the position of an outlaw”; 2a. “Of persons, their actions: Regardless of, or disobedient to law. Occas. of an action: Illegal, unlawful (obsolete). Of

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emption from the law for Israelites, although Gentiles were understood not to be under the rule of Torah and to be idolatrous.10 Lawlessness taken as disregard for, or disobedience to the law by Israelites, on which this paper will focus, features largely in three respects in the Scrolls: first, as the historic lawlessness of Israel, from which the initiate to the group had to return to the Torah of Moses; second, as the (re)lapse of group members or initiates into various kinds of lawlessness; and third, as the present lawlessness of other Israelites, such as those whose practices are guided by a “wrong” calendar, a corrupt legal tradition, or a faulty understanding of the Torah. We shall review each of these in turn.

The Historic Lawlessness of Israel The Damascus Document Admonition is well aware of the historic lawlessness of Israel, which it describes at great length in two successive rounds (CD-A 1:1–2:1; 2:14–4:12a), interspersed by a predestinarian discourse (2:2–13), which provides theological depth.11 The two successive rounds, as Philip Davies has argued,12 are parts of discourses that disclose an ongoing dispute (riḇ) between God and Israel. In the first one, Israel’s faithfulness is mentioned head-on, without much further ado: “For when they abandoned him by being treacherous (‫)במועלם אשר עזבוהו‬, he turned away from Israel and from his sanctuary and gave them up to the sword.”13 From the remnant left at the time of the Babylonian exile, the covenant community traces its own roots: God “has let sprout from Israel and from Aaron a root of planting, to inherit his land and to grow fat in his good soil.”14 Initially, this community shared in the guilt of Israel; what sets them apart, however, is that subsequently they “understood their transgression and knew that they were guilty, and they became like blind groping for the way for twenty years, and God made them understand their works because they sought passions, etc.: Uncontrolled by law, unbridled, licentious”; 2b. “said of animals and inanimate objects.” http://www.oed.com/view/Entry/106432#eid39487459 (accessed 10 December 2018). 10  Cf. Jub 2:31: “The creator of all blessed but did not sanctify any people(s) and nations to keep sabbath on it except Israel alone.” See also CD-A 12:6–11 par. 4QDb 9 iii 2–4, where the laws against contact with Gentiles presume that the latter “blaspheme” and “sacrifice to idols.” – In the following, I shall not discuss in any detail the lawlessness of Gentiles as alleged in the Scrolls. 11  For a recent diachronic view of these passages (and CD-A 5:20–6:11a) suggesting that they disclose information both about the community and its parent group, see C. Hempel, The Qumran Rule Texts in Context, TSAJ 154 (Tübingen: Mohr Siebeck, 2013), 65–78. 12  P. R. Davies, The Damascus Covenant: An Interpretation of the “Damascus Document,” JSOTSup 25 (Sheffield: JSOT Press, 1982), 57. Davies is in close conversation with the redactioncritical and historical studies of a number of scholars, particularly with J. Murphy-O’Connor, “An Essene Missionary Document? CD II,14–VI,1,” RB 77 (1970): 201–229 and H. Stegemann, Die Entstehung der Qumrangemeinde (Bonn: Bonn University, 1971), esp. 130–165. 13  CD-A 1:3–4a par. 4QDa 2 i 8–9; 4QDc 10–11. 14  CD-A 1:7–8 par. 4QDa 2 i 11–12; 4QDc 14–15.

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13

him with their entire heart; and he let rise for them a righteous teacher, to guide them in the way of his heart (‫)להדריכם בדרך לבו‬.”15 The next statement has caused considerable debate: “And he made known to the later generations what (God) had done in the last generation to a community of traitors (‫ ;)בעדת בוגדים‬they are the ones who deserted the (proper) way (‫)סרי דרך‬.”16 The phrase “in the last generation” (‫ )בדור אחרון‬is often considered a gloss that should be bracketed from the text; alternatively, it has been understood to be a variant of ‫“ בדור החרון‬in the generation of wrath.”17 Most likely, therefore, the “community of traitors” is none other than the Israel that abandoned God; from the positive as well as negative vocabulary used in this passage one may infer that their misdoing could be described as “lawlessness.” In the second discourse (CD-A 2:2–13), rebellion against God and his law18 are presented in a predestinarian fashion. God had known the ways of the rebellious ones before he created them. Consequently, he rejected these generations until they were gone. However, … in all of these times, he has arranged that there should be for himself people called by name, so that there would always be survivors on the earth, replenishing the surface of the earth with their descendants. He taught them through those anointed by the holy spirit, the seers of truth. He explicitly called them by name. But whoever he had rejected he caused to stray. (CD-A 2:11–13)

Lawlessness here is the flipside of rejection. God is in control even as far as the lawlessness of earlier generations is at stake. In the third discourse, the longest of the three (CD-A 2:14–4:12a; with parallels in 4QDa, 4QDd and 4QDe),19 the addressees, in sapiential tradition spoken of as “children” whose eyes are to be opened, are called “to choose what God pleases and to reject what he hates, to walk perfectly in all his ways and not to follow thoughts of sinful inclination and indecent eyes” (CD-A 2:15–16). The discourse then states that “many have gone astray in them, and heroes of might have fallen in them, from earlier times until now” (2:16–17). Ultimately, this began with the Watchers who “went in the willfulness of their hearts” (‫)בלכתם בשרירות לבם‬ ׄ and “did not observe the commandments of God” (‫ ;לא שמרו מצות אל‬CD-A 2:17–18). Important to note is the explicitly nomistic interpretation of the Watchers story: while the Book of Watchers is characterized by a “striking lack of attention to the  CD-A 1:8–11a par. 4QDa 2 i 12–15a; 4QDc 15–17.  CD-A 1:11b–13a par. 4QDa 2 i 15b–16a. 17  Cf. the interpretative possibilities discussed by Davies, Damascus Covenant, 68–69. 18 See especially line 6: ‫“ סררי דרך ומתעבי חק‬those who are rebellious against the (proper) way and despise the law.” 19  For the 4Q fragments of the Damascus Document I consider both the edition by J. M. Baum­garten, Qumran Cave 4. XIII: The Damascus Document (4Q266–273) (DJD 18; Oxford: Clarendon, 1996) and the revised readings and reconstructions by E. Qimron, The Dead Sea Scrolls: The Hebrew Writings, 3 vols. (Jerusalem: Yad Ben-Zvi, 2010–14), 1:1–58. 15 16

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Sinaitic covenant and the Mosaic Torah”20 and conceptualizes the Watchers’ transgression in terms of defilement, impiety and revelation of “magic” skills to humans (1 En 7:1; cf. 8:1–4; 9:1), the Damascus Document, more specifically, accuses the Watchers of lawlessness.21 In the aftermath of the Giants, all flesh died because “they did their own will and did not keep the commandments of their maker” (‫ ;ולא שמרו את מצות עשיהם‬CD-A 2:20–21). Even after the flood, it is insinuated, the sons of Noah and their families “went astray by it” – “it” probably being the willfulness of their heart – “and were cut off” (3:1). In contrast, Abraham “did not walk in it” and became considered “(God’s) friend in his keeping the commandments of God” (‫ ׄ;ב ׄש ׄמרו מצות אל‬3:2). He “passed (them?) on to Isaac and Jacob, and they kept (them?) and were written down as (God’s) friends and covenant partners forever” (3:3–4). In contrast, “the sons of Jacob erred in them and were punished in the face of their straying, and their sons in Egypt walked in the willfulness of their heart, (instead of) planning on the commandments of God”; they even ate blood, and their memory was cut off in the desert (3:4–7). In a passage slightly defective in CD-A, for which 4QDd preserves a fuller reading, it is also mentioned in this respect that “they did not hear their maker’s voice /or listen to/ the commandments of their teacher” (3:7–8; ‫ולא שמעו‬ ‫ מצות יוריהם‬/+/ ‫עשיהם‬ ׄ ‫)לקול‬.22 In fact, in 3:9–12a “the whole pre-exilic world is described as having been given over to the sword because it forsook the covenant and pursued its own desires.”23 This leads into the passage about the remnant already cited above (3:12b–16a), introduced with emphatic contrast: “But with those who held firm to the commandments of God, as many of them as there remained, he erected his covenant with Israel forever, revealing to them things hidden, in which all Israel had erred: his holy Sabbaths and his glorious festivals, his righteous testimonies and his reliable ways, and the desires of his will, which a person should carry out and so have life in them, /a word missing?/24 he opened up to them.”

20  G. W. E. Nickelsburg, “Enochic Wisdom and Its Relationship to the Mosaic Torah,” The Early Enoch Literature, ed. G. Boccaccini and J. J. Collins, JSJSup 121 (Leiden: Brill, 2007), 81–94 (here, 82–83). Nickelsburg has carefully chosen his wording: the Book of Watchers is familiar with the Pentateuch and not necessarily anti-Torah; nonetheless, the lack of attention to covenant and Torah is striking. Cf. Collins, “Transformation of Torah,” 456–57. 21 Although Nickelsburg translates 1 En 7:6 as “Then the earth brought accusation against the lawless ones,” the latter expression being rendered as κατὰ τῶν ἀνόμων in Codex Panopolitanus, the Aramaic in 4Q201 1 iii 22 has the less specific “wicked” (‫)ר]שי[עין‬ ֯ here. Also, for 1 En 9:1, in Syncellus given as πᾶσαν ἀσέβειαν καὶ ἀνομίαν (in one version, the two terms are inverted), 4Q201 1 4 8, as reconstructed by Milik, has ‫“ ֯ר[שעה ו]חמסה‬wickedness and violence.” Thus, in both cases the Aramaic has no lexical relation with “law” or its absence. 22 4QDd 2 2 ‫ ו֯ ֯לוא האזינו‬can be filled in at the place indicated by /+/; cf. Qimron, Hebrew Writings, 1:8, apparatus. 23  Davies, Damascus Covenant, 77. 24 The Genizah manuscript has a vacat here, which might reflect an illegible word or a material defect in its Vorlage; cf. Qimron, Hebrew Writings, 3:9.

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15

This remnant, which arises from the exile and continues in the covenant community that the Damascus Document has in view, stops the cycle of disobedience and death, and the covenant lives on in the passing on of its legal tradition. The text expresses this with the image of the well: “So they dug a well, yielding copious water; those who reject them25 he will not allow to live” (3:16b–17a). Davies considered this phrase to be a gloss inspired by the earlier “… which a person should carry out and so have life in them.”26 However, it can be well understood as stating the new conditions of the covenant, which continues solely in the community and its legal tradition. This is followed by a somewhat puzzling remark in 3:17b–18, “And although they had wallowed in the sin of humanity and in impure ways and said, ‘Surely it is ours,’ God in his wonderful mysteries atoned for their iniquity and forgave their transgression.” Some have taken this as reflective of a certain subgroup that had been pardoned; others have suggested that part of the statement has been interpolated. However, it is more likely that this statement as a whole refers to the members of the covenant, whose historic lawlessness is admitted but who received forgiveness27 (with the phrase ‫“ ברזי פלאו‬in his wonderful mysteries” perhaps carrying predestinarian meaning, see above). This then leads to the establishment of a “sure house in Israel” (3:19–20), in which atonement will be worked for the members of the community (4:6–10), as is developed in an interpretation of Ezekiel 44 (CD-A 3:21–4:4). A further historiographical discourse is found at CD-A 5:15b–6:11a (with parallels in 4QDa, 4QDb, 4QDd and 6QD). It begins with a reference to the times past, in which God “punished their deeds, and his wrath burned against their misdeeds”; for “Moses and Aaron stood up in the power of the Prince of Lights and Belial raised up Jannes and his brother” to do harm to Israel (5:15b–19). This is followed by a reference to the “period of destruction of the land” when “the boundary-shifters stood up and led Israel astray”; this in fact made the land desolate “because they had spoken rebellion (4QDb 2 5: rebellious counsel) against the commandments of God through Moses and also through the anointed of the holy (sc. spirit),28 and they prophesied falsehood to turn Israel from behind God” (CD-A 5:20–6:2a). The identity of the “boundary-shifters” is uncertain, but they are clearly associated with the exile. However, the emphasis is not on a distinct period of time; rather, the entire period from the exile to the most recent  Probably the water(s) (plural in Hebrew) rather than the diggers. Damascus Covenant, 89, who, however, takes ‫ יחיה‬as qal whereas it might be pi’el (e. g. CD-A 7:6 par. CD-B 19:1). 27 So Davies, Damascus Covenant, 88–90. In contrast, S. Hultgren, From the Damascus Document to the Covenant of the Community: Literary, Historical, and Theological Studies in the Dead Sea Scrolls, STDJ 66 (Leiden: Brill, 2007), 493–504, claims that this piece is a retrospective from the Qumran community to the earlier new covenant. 28  A reference to the prophets; see A. P. Jassen, Mediating the Divine: Prophecy and Revelation in the Dead Sea Scrolls and Second Temple Judaism, STDJ 68 (Leiden: Brill, 2007), 95–96, also for the logical supplementation “spirit.” 25

26 Davies,

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past appears as a time of desolation.29 A core issue of these past adversaries is their rebellion against God’s law as mediated by both Moses and the prophets. This is then contrasted with another, more expanded variant of the well vignette (6:2b–11a). Whereas in the Damascus Document the historic lawlessness of Israel occupies a prime place in the various rounds of recounting the prehistory of the community, in the first columns of Serekh ha-Yaḥad the emphasis is on the conversion of the initiates from this lawlessness. Thus, while the priests recite God’s gracious acts, the Levites “shall rehearse the wicked acts of the children of Israel and all their guilty transgressions and their sins (‫את עוונות בני ישראל וכול‬ ‫ )פשעי אשמתם וחטאתם‬committed during the dominion of Belial.” Upon this the initiates are to confess, “We have been wicked, transgressed, [sin]ned, and done evil (‫חט]אנו הרשענו‬ ׄ [ ֯‫)נעוינו ֯פ ׄש ׄענ֯ ו‬ – we and our fathers before us – walking [in rebellion to the laws] of truth” (reconstructed as ‫ ;בלכתנו [קרי בחוקי ]אמת‬1QS 1:22–26). Here, the initiates present themselves as agents of the earlier transgressions, from which they now turn away. In this respect, our text continues, God has also “requited us with his favoring mercy” (2:1); that is, he has forgiven the confessing initiates. Similarly, 1QS 5:7–12 prescribes that the initiates take a binding oath to return to the Torah of Moses, to all that has been revealed of it to the community and its leaders, and thereby to separate themselves from the wicked men. Here, the individual initiate stands at the interface of the historic lawlessness of Israel and that of the adversaries of the community;30 from both he turns away to “return” to the Torah of Moses, something that therefore is his original property. Such a concept would tie in with predestinarian views, according to which (only) the elect come into their own domain, that of Torah observance. A similar oath is mentioned in CD-A 15:5–16:2 (with additional extant text in 4Q266 8 i and 4Q271 4 ii 1–4, partly filling the lacuna at the bottom of CD-A 15 and the top of CD-A 16). Shortly thereafter, it is stated that on the day that person keeps (that is, fulfils) the oath to return to the Torah of Moses “the angel of hostility (‫ )מלאך המשטמה‬will leave him, if he keeps his words” (CD-A 16:4–5 par. 4Q271 4 ii 6–7). The pragmatic difference between the Serekh and the Damascus Document is a gradual one, one between an initial conversion and its renewal: As Steven Fraade in particular has pointed out,31 the Damascus Document may be understood as a performative script for the maskil, probably to be used during the covenant renewal ceremony, that ranges from the admonition “to separate 29  Cf. Davies, Damascus Covenant, 120–122, who, inter alia, engages and dismisses the thesis of Stegemann, Entstehung, 160–165 that the section references the origins of the Qumran community. 30  On the latter see below, p. 24–27. 31  S. D. Fraade, “Law, History, and Narrative in the Damascus Document,” Meghillot 5–6 (2008): *35–*55.

Law and Lawlessness in Texts from Qumran

17

from the way[s of wickedness” (thus the beginning of the Damascus Document, compositionally preceding CD-A 1:1 and preserved in 4QDa 1 1),32 through the historic reviews discussed above, to the Catalogue of Transgressions probably to be located between the Admonition and the Laws, and the Expulsion Ceremony at the conclusion of the Damascus Document, both to be discussed in the following section. It thereby confirms the members gathered at the ceremony in their turning away from lawlessness, both in historic perspective and as a present commitment.

The (Re)lapse of Group Members into Lawlessness Unfortunately, the predestined status of a person is not always immediately matched by the apparent course of events. The first case in point to mention here, at the entrance to the community, is the insincere initiate. In Serekh ha-Yaḥad, after the Levites have cursed “all men of the lot of Belial” (1QS 2:4–5), the priests and Levites curse the unrepentant initiate “with an impure heart,” who “enters this covenant and sets up the obstacle of his sin before himself to turn away over it” (2:11–12). Such a person is to be cut off from the Sons of Light (2:12–17). There is a further section on the unrepentant (2:25–3:6); notably, it is stated that “he cannot be righteous by what the willfulness of his heart allows” (‫ולוא יצדק‬ ‫ ;במתיר שרירות לבו‬3:3). Thus, the unrepentant initiate still participates in the former lawlessness. In the Damascus Document, there is a lengthy section of warning that uses scriptural citations to elaborate on God’s vengeful visitation. This section occurs in two recensions, one in CD-A 7:9–8:2a, the other one in CD-B 19:5–14. At the beginning of each, we find the succinct phrase, still more elaborate in CD-B, about “all those who reject the commandments and the laws” (CD-B 19:5–6). As Davies suggests, this may be a warning directed towards prospective members lest they backslide.33 At the end of the section, we find the statement, “And such is the verdict on all those who enter the covenant who do not hold firm to these (CD-B adds: laws): they are condemned to destruction by Belial.”34 In between, there are two different elaborations on God’s retribution: CD-B, quoting Zechariah and Ezekiel, is looking forward to the eschatological visitation when the “Messiah of Israel and Aaron” comes, and compares it with the first visitation 32 And cf. the whole – albeit fragmentary – passage 4QDa 1 1 – 2 i 5 par. 4QDb 1 i 1–8; 4QDc 1 1–8, all of which precedes the text represented by CD-A 1:1. In both 4QDa and 4QDc the equivalent to CD-A 1:1 is preceded by a vacat. Within this introductory passage to the document, 4QDc 1 5 ]‫“ ו֯ ֯ה[וא] חקק קצי ֯ח[רון לעם לוא ידעהו‬and he inscribed times of wrath for a people who knew him not,” reconstructed with the help of 4QDa 2 i 3, might relate to former as well as contemporary lawlessness and steer the audience away from it. 33  Cf. Davies, Damascus Covenant, 148–150. 34  CD-A 8:1–2a par. CD-B 19:13b–14.

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when “the rest were given over to the sword.” In contrast, CD-A focuses on a previous visitation “when the backsliders were given over to the sword” and mentions the historic flight to Damascus of “those who held firm.” Menahem Kister has argued that the differences between the recensions here are driven by a different deployment of the Hebrew verb ‫ מלט‬nif ’al ‫מלטנ‬, used in the sense of “escape” in CD-A and in the sense of “be saved” in CD-B.35 In each case, the character as warning is obvious: the elect are always a minority, and both those who consider joining the covenant and those already being members will face severe punishment in case they backslide, an act that is – most clearly in CD-B – understood as disobedience to the commandments and the laws. At the end of the section, punishment is specified as being given over to destruction by Belial. Moreover, in CD-B we find a few additional passages on different types of backsliders. First of all, CD-B 19:33b–20:1a states that “all the people who entered the new covenant in the land of Damascus but turned back and betrayed and turned away from the well of living water shall not be reckoned among the council of the people” from the time of the death of the “unique teacher” (‫היחיד‬ ‫)מורה‬36 until the time that the Messiah from Aaron and from Israel arises. The imagery of the well suggests that these people abandoned the specific legal tradition of the community, probably as embodied by the (sc. Righteous) Teacher, and the verbs suggest that their renunciation is overt. The reference to the “teacher” suggests that this stage of the document was redacted by the community formed by the Righteous Teacher (cf. CD-A 1:11); there are various suggestions as to the identification of the “new covenant,” with which we need not occupy ourselves in detail here.37 This can be compared with the section CD-B 20:8b–13a, which deals with members who apparently have not overtly separated but rather “reject among the former and among the later” (‫)המאס בראשונים ובאחרונים‬, a phrase that Davies thinks refers to the laws of the parent community and those of the Teacher, respectively;38 while this must remain open, the use of ‫ מאס‬points towards rejection of certain laws,39 and their straying from the law is mentioned in the same 35  M. Kister, “The Development of the Early Recensions of the Damascus Document,” DSD 14 (2007): 61–76. 36  This is either a mistake for, or a play on, “the teacher of the yaḥad,” that is the Righteous Teacher. 37  According to J. J. Collins, Beyond the Qumran Community: The Sectarian Movement of the Dead Sea Scrolls (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 2011), 38–39, the “new covenant” was either a parent group of the yaḥad that preceded the teacher or, more likely, a group formed by the teacher of which the yaḥad was a later outgrowth. According to Davies, Damascus Covenant, 176–81, the term “new covenant in the land of Damascus” is a Qumranic reinterpretation of the earlier “covenant in the land of Damascus.” Conversely, according to Hultgren, From the Damascus Document, 53–62, 533, “the new covenant” is the Damascus covenant, whereas “the covenant” is the pre-Qumranic community that boycotted the temple. 38 Davies, Damascus Covenant, 182–84. 39  See CD-A 7:9; 8:19, and above.

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literary context (CD-B 20:11–12). Their rejection is initially expressed by two actions: first, “they put idols on their hearts”; second, “they went in the willfulness of their hearts.” While the first charge pertains more to their sentiments and intentions, the second charge chimes with the well-known cantus firmus of lawlessness in the Scrolls. In this aspect, the present passage is similar to the one on the insincere initiate in Serekh ha-Yaḥad. Davies speaks of “covert traitors,”40 but the form and extent of their rejection is sufficient for them not to be “part of the house of Torah.” Furthermore, they will be judged together with the “scoffers” (a sobriquet for a Jerusalem-based group occurring also in 4Q162 2 6, 10) because “they have spoken error about the just laws and rejected covenant and regulation” instituted by the “new covenant” in “Damascus.” Between these passages, CD-B 20:1b–8a deals with anyone who “entered the community of men of perfect holiness” but who “became loath to enact the precepts of the upright” (‫)ויקוץ מעשות פקודי ישרים‬. The expression “walking in perfect holiness” has already been mentioned in CD-A 7:4b–6a, where a life of thousand generations is promised to those who do so.41 Whether or not CD-B 20:1b–8a is literary-historically connected with this earlier mention, it is clear that it is a discrete passage describing a community in similar terms as Serekh ha-Yaḥad (see below). It is in the context of this specific community that the issue of backsliding is raised here. However, the punishment mentioned in the continuation is characterized by some tension that likely points to a later interpolation: Initially, the provision is made that, once the culprit’s actions emerge (‫בהופע‬ ‫)מעשיו‬, this person is to be “sent away from the congregation (‫ )ישלח מעדה‬as one whose lot did not fall among those taught by God” (CD-B 20:3–4a). This is clearly a case of definitive expulsion, as the “ontological” rationale of the person not being predestined to be a member of the congregation underlines (more on expulsion anon). It is therefore surprising to see that CD-B 20:4b–5a mentions the possibility of reproof and reintegration. This is probably a marginal gloss (reconsidering this particular case), which has crept into the main text.42 It may even have been the medieval scribe who incorporated the gloss, since his subsequent reiteration and deletion of the words “whose lot did not fall among th …” (20:5b– 6a) might signal some confusion. The continuation in 20:6b–8a, somewhat parallel to 20:3–4a, but explicitly viewing the appearance of the person’s deeds “in accordance with the interpretation of the Torah in which the men of perfect holiness walk,” bars members of the congregation from sharing with this person in wealth or labor. That this is an irredeemable separation is clear from the cursing of this person by “all the holy ones of the Most High.”  Davies, Damascus Covenant, 182.  Cf. the fragmentary section, which differs in detail, in CD-B 19:1–2a. 42  Cf. A. Shemesh, “Expulsion and Exclusion in the Community Rule and the Damascus Document,” DSD 9 (2002): 44–74 (here, 50–51). 40 41

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There is also a similar section on transgressions in a community of “men of perfect holiness” in Serekh ha-Yaḥad. 1QS 8:20–9:2 deals with the problem that a member of the “holy yaḥad” transgresses “even one commandment from the Law of Moses willfully or deceitfully” (‫אשר יעבר דבר מתורת מושה ביד רמה או‬ ‫)ברמיה‬: such a person “is to be expelled from the congregation of the yaḥad, never to return.” No member of the community is allowed to interact with him in a matter of business or counsel. If, however, the transgression was inadvertent (‫ ;ואם בשגגה יעשה‬1QS 8:24), the sinner is to be tested over two years by the many “for the perfection of his way and counsel” (‫)יבחן שנתים ימים לתמים דרכו ועצתו‬, and then he may be enrolled at the appropriate rank within the yaḥad. This distinction between expulsion in the case of willful transgression and temporary exclusion in the case of inadvertent transgression will be discussed further below in connection with the Penal Code. However, the passage preceding the present one, 1QS 8:16b–19 (with a parallel in 4QSd 6 but lacking from 4QSe) seems to disturb this neat distinction. There we read that anyone of the “men of the covenant of the yaḥad” (so 4QSd) who “shuns anything from any commandment willfully” (‫ )אשר יסור מכול המצוה דבר ביד רמה‬is to be excluded from the pure food of the holy men. He is further excluded from all deliberations “until all his works have been cleansed from evil”; but then he is readmitted by the decision of the many and registered according to his rank. One wonders whether this could refer to a deliberate transgression of the Law of Moses because, as we have seen, for this a much severer punishment is ordained. We ought to be cautious here and not assume complete coherence since the materials might ultimately derive from different sources and contexts; but, on the other hand, we should also bear in mind that ancient readers would have read the redacted document as a whole and would thus have compared the different examples mentioned. In this case, this section and the following one are missing from the textual recension represented by 4QSe, which might mean that they were an accrual to the original form of the Serekh but not taken up in this somewhat later manuscript.43 Alternatively, one might consider the possibility that the inclusion of the expression

43  Thus according to the theory developed by S. Metso, The Textual Development of the Qumran Community Rule, STDJ 21 (Leiden: Brill, 1997); cf. Metso, “The Primary Results of the Reconstruction of 4QSe,” JJS 44 (1993): 303–08. There has been some confusion about the date of this manuscript, the restated palaeographical sequencing of S manuscripts by Cross (PTSDSSP 1:57) pointing to a date of 50–25 BCE, thus later than 1QS, dated to 100–50 BCE. This therefore would mean that a palaeographically somewhat later manuscript contained an older textual form. Differently, see P. S. Alexander, “The Redaction-History of Serekh ha-Yahad. A Proposal,” RevQ 17/65–68 (1996): 437–456. According to the model developed in A. Schofield, From Qumran to the Yaḥad: A New Paradigm of Textual Development for The Community Rule, STDJ 77 (Leiden: Brill, 2009), 280, the passage from 1QS was not considered by the specific scribal milieu that produced manuscript 4QSe, “partially, if not wholly, outside of Qumran.”

Law and Lawlessness in Texts from Qumran

21

‫ ביד רמה‬is due to textual corruption, which would bring this passage in line with the other evidence regarding temporary exclusion.44 This can be compared with the punishment of someone transgressing Sabbath and festival regulations in the Laws of the Damascus Document (CD-A 12:3b–6a par. 4QDf 5 i 19–21): “But everyone who errs (‫ )יתעה‬to desecrate the Sabbath and the festivals is not to be put to death, but on human beings shall fall his custody. And if he is healed from it they are to keep him in custody until (sc. completion of) seven years, and thereafter he shall come into the congregation.” Unlike the preacher of apostasy, mentioned in the preceding phrase (CD-A 12:2a–3a), who is seen under the influence of Belial and to be punished like the “necromancer and diviner” (‫)האוב והידעוני‬, that is, by death, the one who desecrates the Sabbath or festivals in the aforementioned manner is not to be executed. This is a remarkable difference over against the Book of Jubilees (and also Philo) where Sabbath transgressions by default carry the death penalty. As mentioned above, this may have been an issue of rhetoric more than of practice; but the D-community deliberately wished to distinguish between different kinds of transgressions. In this respect, the meaning of ‫ יתעה‬is crucial. While some have taken this as denoting simply inadvertent transgression,45 the use of the verb ‫( יתעה‬and not ‫ שגג‬as in 1QS 8:24) and the concept of “healing” suggest a more serious kind of perpetration. More probably, what is at stake here is an error in the specific Sabbath regulations as developed in the community (see e. g. CD-A 10:14–11:18a);46 this might be corroborated by the use of ‫ תעה‬in conjunction with nistarot, the revealed halakhah of the community, in 1QS 5:11–12 and CD 3:14.47 Again, we should be careful not to harmonize the laws for the Sabbath transgressor in D and for the inadvertent violation of a law from the Torah of Moses in S: while somewhat comparable they may not necessarily agree in all the details and may, after all, not come from one and the same group. Another aspect of a “relapse” into some form of lawlessness is evident in the Penal Codes of the Damascus Document,48 of Serekh ha-Yaḥad,49 and of Miscellaneous Rules.50 These cannot be discussed with all their details here. However, two main observations should be stated. First, the majority of penalties concern temporary exclusion from both the pure food and the assemblies of the commu44 Thus

Shemesh, “Expulsion,” 72–74 with detailed argumentation.   E. g. L. H.  Schiffman, The Halakhah at Qumran, SJLA 16 (Leiden: Brill, 1975), 78; E. Qimron, “‫ עיון במונחים המשמשים לציונם‬:‫ ”על שגגות וזדונות במגילות מדבר יהודה‬PWCJS 10 (1990): 103–110 (esp. 106, 109–110). 46  Cf. Doering, Schabbat, 210–215. 47  Contra Qimron, “‫על שגגות‬,” 108–109 who claims that the terms niglot and nistarot denote intentional and unintentional actions, respectively. 48  CD-A 14:18b–23, with more extensive parallels in 4QDa 10 i–ii; 4QDb 9 vi; 4QDd 11 i–ii; 4QDe 7 i. 49  1QS 6:24–7:25. 50  4Q265 Frg 4. 45

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nity, partly connected with an additional punishment (probably a reduction in food). Across the Penal Code versions this can vary to some degree. Only a smaller number of more severe transgressions is punishable by definitive expulsion from the community; these concern the misuse of the divine name,51 bearing a grudge in a capital issue,52 slandering the Many,53 grumbling against the leadership,54 being a member of ten years and then betraying the Yaḥad55 or despising the judgment of the Many, respectively,56 fornicating with one’s wife57 and grumbling against the Fathers of the community.58 As Aharon Shemesh has shown, (temporary) exclusion and (definitive) expulsion are two categorically different forms of punishment. Shemesh proposes that the dividing line between the two is analogous to the one between “inadvertent” (‫ )בשגגה‬and “willful” (‫ביד‬ ‫ )רמה‬in Num 15:27–31, and that willful transgression is ultimately taken as suggesting that the transgressor, to speak with CD-B 20:4, is a person “whose lot did not fall among those taught by God.” This division certainly plays some role, as the section on the Expulsion Ceremony in the Damascus Document shows (see below). At times unintentional transgressions are viewed as caused by mental derangement, as in 1QS 7:18 (cf. 4QDe 7 i 8), speaking about a person “whose spirit deviates from the foundation of the Yaḥad” (‫)תזוע רוחו מיסוד היחד‬.59 However, the issue might be somewhat more complex: 1QS 7:2–3 distinguishes between plainly speaking “in anger (‫ )בחמה‬against one of the priests inscribed in the book” and doing so “inadvertently” (‫)בשגגה‬, both being punished with temporary exclusion, albeit of different length. This suggests that transgressions punishable with exclusion rather than expulsion are thought of, in the first place, as less severe, some attaining this quality due to being committed inadvertently, others due to being of a lighter kind, for which one might again distinguish between intentional and inadvertent transgressions. Second, in another study Shemesh has suggested that the Penal Codes have been organized with a view to certain biblical texts, particularly Lev 19 (concerning the holiness of the people of Israel), Num 16–17 (concerning complaints), and Deut 23 (concerning the holy camp).60 I wish to focus here on the first  1QS 6:27–7:2.  4QDa 10 ii 1. 53  1QS 7:16–17; 4QDe 7 i 7. 54 1QS 7:17. 55  1QS 7:22–24. 56  4QDe 7 i 11 par. 4QDb 9 vi 1–2. 57  ‫ ;לזנות לאשתו‬4QDe 7 i 12–13 par. 4QDb 9 vi 4–5. It is unclear which practices this might have in view and how they might be brought to wider attention. 58  4QDe 7 i 13–14. 59  Cf. Shemesh, “Expulsion,” 66–68, referring to Qimron, “‫על שגגות‬,” 109–110, who states that ‫ שגג‬may also refer to “madness.” 60  A. Shemesh, “The Scriptural Background of the Penal Code in the Rule of the Community and Damascus Document,” DSD 15 (2008): 191–224. Shemesh thereby questions the grouping of the Penal Codes with “community organization,” allegedly independent from scripture, as 51 52

Law and Lawlessness in Texts from Qumran

23

and the last passage, both dealing with holiness. By applying the notion of the “holy people” and the “holy camp” to the community, the Penal Codes adopt a benchmark, by which those not really belonging to the community are definitively expelled, whereas any imperfection of the elect is perfected by temporary measures. Thus, even the “Sons of Light,” to mention one self-description of the community, are threatened by milder or inadvertent forms of lawlessness, but these can be redeemed by temporary exclusion and punishment. The Expulsion Ceremony at the end of the Damascus Document61 takes up the distinction between inadvertent and willful transgression. In its first section (4QDe 7 i 15–19a par.), it deals with those who have inadvertently transgressed:62 they are advised to come and disclose their sins to the priest set over the Many and to accept their punishment, which is seen as a temporary replacement for sin offerings in the temple.63 The second section (from 4QDe 7 i 19b par.) concerns anyone who “despises these judgments according to all the statutes found in the Torah of Moses.” Such a person “shall not be counted among the children of his truth for he (literally: his soul, ‫ )נפשו‬has loathed all the instructions of righteousness,” and consequently “shall be sent away from the Many for rebellion.” Again, we see how the sect keeps lawlessness at bay by removing those who “in essence,” as it were, do not belong to it. The hymnic section that follows reviews the election of the Fathers and the entrustment with the divine statues; it contrasts those who transgress the boundaries, being cursed by God, with the group speaking here, characterized as “people of your deliverance and flock of your pasture” and as “upholding” the commandments. Thus, once more the historic dissociation from lawlessness leads to the current enactment of a separation from the lawless: “and the person being sent away shall depart,” and if anyone keeps company with, or asks for the wellbeing of, the expelled, this must be reported to the meḇaqqer. A final section to discuss here is the so-called Catalogue of Transgressors, which presumably ought to be placed between the Admonition and the Laws of the Damascus Document,64 although its precise connection remains debated.65 proposed by C. Hempel, The Laws of the Damascus Document: Sources, Tradition, and Redaction, STDJ 29 (Leiden: Brill, 1998), 141–148. 61  4QDe 7 i 15 – ii 15 par. 4QDa 11 1–20; very fragmentarily also 4QDd 16. 62 The restoration ‫]ר‬ ֯ ‫ ]שגג בדב‬suggested by Qimron, Hebrew Writings, 1:56 for 4QDa 7 i 16 appears reasonable in view of the reference to inadvertent sins two lines thereafter. The restoration ‫ ישוג‬proposed by Kister (see the following note) would be possible as well. 63 Cf. M. Kister, “Jerusalem and the Temple in the Writings from Qumran,” The Qumran Scrolls and their World, ed. M. Kister, 2 vols. (Jerusalem: Yad Ben-Zvi, 2009), 2:477–496 (here, 491) (in Hebrew). 64 4QDe 2 i 9 – ii 21; lines 17b–21 form a conclusion to the list of transgressions. 65  Cf. Hempel, Laws, 163–164, 170; Qimron, Hebrew Writings, 3:22. Against Hempel (“Catalogue of Transgressions”) I retain the label of the edition in DJD 18, not least because the list is worded in such a way that it speaks of persons doing certain things (“he who …,” ‫ אשר‬+ 3rd pers. sg. imperf.).

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This catalogue lists those whose transgressions are of the severest kind. Some of the transgressions, fragmentary though they are, merit extirpation (√‫)כרת‬, curse (‫ )ארור‬or capital punishment in Pentateuchal legislation.66 Further culprits, such as the one approaching his wife on the day of the Sabbath (or: of Atonement) or the one revealing “the secret of his people to the Gentiles,” have no immediate scriptural counterpart. However, the list does not specify punishments, apart from the concluding statement that God has somehow “inscribed” to “bring” the transgressors “into his wrath.”67 Performatively, the following exhortation directed to “all who know righteousness,” separates the group addressed from the lawless transgressors mentioned before.

The Lawlessness of Contemporary Others Apart from the historic lawlessness of Israel and the (re)lapse of community members into lawlessness, the Scrolls make ample reference to the lawlessness of various contemporaries. At times it is difficult to decide whether the lawlessness targeted is historic or contemporary, and the point of some texts appears to be precisely to draw a connection between the two. Thus, a passage in the Damascus Document68 first levels criticism against the “princes of Judah,”69 most likely a group of people outside the community but difficult to identify, who are accused of a number of offenses that can partly be found in other passages of the Admonition as well,70 particularly in CD-A 4:12b–5:11, the passage on the three nets of Belia (see further below): lust, wealth, incest; in addition to this, the passage under discussion mentions, lack of separation from the people and lack of love of their brethren and neighbors. As in previous passages, their actions are described as each doing “what he considers right” and opting “for the willfulness of his heart” (‫)ויעשו איש הישר בעיניו ויבחרו איש בשרירות לבו‬. In CD-A 8:12b–13 par. CD-B 19:24b–26a, we find inserted a remark about the “builders of the wall,” a group also featuring in the passage on the nets of Belial (see presently): they are said to “have understood nothing” about the crimes of the “princes of Judah” and 66  Extirpation: e. g., lying with a menstruant, with an animal (thus reconstructed by Qimron, Hebrew Writings, 3:23), with a man as one lies with a woman (4QDe 2 ii 15–17) cf. Lev 18:19, 22–23; asking a necromancer or soothsayer (4QDe 2 i 10) cf. Lev 20:6; cf. Deut 18:11 (considered an abomination); capital punishment: e. g., idolatrous worship of sun, moon or stars (4QDe 2 i 9–10, reconstructed) cf. Deut 17:3–5. Baumgarten, DJD 18, 143 has pointed to the similarity of the Catalogue with the list of curses in Deut 27:15–26. 67  4QDe 2 ii 18; 6QD 5 4 reads ‫“ להבעיר‬to burn.” 68 CD-A 8:2b–19 par. CD-B 19:15–33a. 69  CD-A 8:2b–12a par. CD-B 19:15–24a. 70  Cf. Davies, Damascus Covenant, 161–164. Differently: G. Jeremias, Der Lehrer der Gerechtigkeit, SUNT 2 (Göttingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, 1963), 110–114, who thinks that the “princes of Judah” are former members of the community.

Law and Lawlessness in Texts from Qumran

25

God’s vengeance. They are further contrasted, at the end of the passage, with the “repentant of Israel:” while God loves these, he “hates and despises the builders of the wall, and his anger burns against them and all those following them.”71 The concluding statement decrees: “And the same verdict applies also to all who despise the commandments of God and abandon them and turn to the willfulness of their heart.”72 The reference to the “builders of the wall” is likely redactional, and it shows that various groups outside the community, clearly including contemporary ones, were connected with both one another and the tradition of Israel’s lawlessness, and were presented as lawless people. This is developed in greater detail with respect to the “builders of the wall” in CD-A 4:12b–5:11, a passage already mentioned. The “builders of the wall” are probably “a rival group, but a group which is considered as representative of the whole of Israel outside the community.”73 The passage in question first states (4:12b–19a) that Belial is “unrestrained” (‫ )משולח‬in Israel; this is corroborated with a reference to Isa 24:17: “Fear and pit and snare are upon you, O inhabitant of the earth.” This verse, in turn, is interpreted to refer to “the three nets of Belial” (‫)שלושת מצודות בליעל‬, which are specified as sexual indecency (‫)הזנות‬, wealth (‫)ההון‬, and defilement of the sanctuary (‫)טמא המקדש‬. In the next sub-section, the “builders of the wall” are accused of being caught “in two.” In my view, this should be taken to mean in two nets of Belial, namely, sexual indecency and defilement of the temple.74 The details of the accusation cannot be discussed within the limits of this article; suffice it to summarize my view of the passage here.75 The “builders of the wall” are accused of taking “two wives in their lifetime,” which most likely refers to polygyny. Critique of this practice is corroborated with reference to Gen 1:27c, whereby the phrase “(sc. one) male and (one) female he created them” is established as “the principle of creation,” and Gen 7:9a, stating that the animals entered the ark “two by two.” A third proof-text comes from Deut 17:17, according to which the king may not multiply wives. David, who obviously did so, is curtly exculpated because “he did not read in the sealed book,” which was unavailable at his time. In addition, the “builders of the wall” are accused of defiling the temple because they “do not distinguish (sc. between pure and impure) according to the Torah and sleep with the one who sees her  Thus CD-B 19:31–32a; the wording in CD-A 8:18 is abbreviated.  CD-A 8:18b–19 par. CD-B 19:32b–33a. 73 Thus F. García Martínez, “Man and Woman: Halakhah Based upon Eden in the Dead Sea Scrolls,” Paradise Interpreted: Representations of Biblical Paradise in Judaism and Christianity, ed. G. Luttikhuisen, TBN 2 (Leiden: Brill, 1999), 95–115 (here, 103). 74 The alternative would be to assume that they were “caught twice in sexual indecency”; thus some of the translators and commentators. For a potential hint that ‫ בשתים‬should be taken as “in two” (sc. of the nets), see García Martínez, “Man and Woman,” 104. 75  Cf. in greater detail L. Doering, “Marriage and Creation in Mark 10 and CD 4–5,” Echoes from the Caves: Qumran and the New Testament, ed. F. García Martínez, STDJ 85 (Leiden: Brill, 2009), 133–164. 71 72

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menstrual blood;” they further marry their nieces, although the prohibition to marry one’s aunt, according to the Damascus Document, excludes also the converse relationship in the same degree, thus any marriage between uncle and niece. It has often been remarked that the practice of the “builders of the wall” reflects wider practices in ancient Judaism, and that the preference for (certain) uncle-niece marriages is later found in rabbinic literature.76 Such practices might have been endorsed by Pharisees, although they are not distinctively Pharisaic. For our purposes suffice it to summarize that outsiders following practices that deviate from the community’s halakhah are labelled as lawless (even though they might simply represent a variant halakhic practice). The ultimate blame for this deviance falls on Belial, in whose net the “builders of the wall” became ensnared. That halakhic polemics with Jews outside the community featured the charge of lawlessness might also be seen in a fragmentary passage in 4Q513 (4QOrdinancesb) frg. 3–4. There, we find references to “waving of the ‘omer” (‫)הנף עמר‬, “on the day of the Sabbath” (‫)ביום שבת‬, “apart from the Sabbaths[” (]‫מלבד‬ ‫)שבתות‬, “to make a memorial of” (‫)ל[לעשות זכרון ע‬, all of which very likely establish that the issue here is the question of whether the ‘omer sheaf is to be reaped and waved on Shabbat. According to the interpretative and halakhic tradition of the sect (and related groups), Lev 23:11 ‫“ ממחרת השבת יניפנו הכהן‬the priest is to wave it on the morrow of the Sabbath,” is interpreted as referring to the weekly Sabbath, so that the waving of the ‘omer would always fall on a Sunday and thus never coincide with the Sabbath. In the 364-day calendar tradition embraced in the Scrolls, this Sunday would always be the Sunday subsequent to the Pesach/Maṣṣot week. In contrast, the tradition represented by Philo, Josephus, the “Pharisees” in rabbinic literature and the rabbis themselves, probably widely observed in the late Second Temple period,77 took “Sabbath” to refer to the first holiday of Pesach/Maṣṣot. The day after this holiday, according to the usual Jewish lunisolar calendar, may well coincide with a Sabbath, on which the sheaf is therefore reaped (see m. Men. 10:3). It seems that this position is targeted in our fragment.78 In this respect, it is noteworthy that the phrases “error of blindness” (‫ )תעות עורון‬and “not from the Torah of Moses” (‫)ולא מתורת משה‬ appear on subsequent lines. If these phrases were to be related directly to the issue of the waving, we would have here an example of castigating divergent halakhic and calendrical practice outright as lawlessness. 76 On the latter see A. Schremer, “‫’ כינויי שארות ונישואי פנים בתקופת המשנה והתלמוד‬:‫אחות‬-‫”’בן‬ Zion 60 (2005): 5–35. 77 See the passages given in Doering, Schabbat, 249–50, with further references. This view is also reflected in LXX Lev 23:11 τῇ ἐπαύριον τῆς πρώτης “on the morrow of the first” (sc. holiday of the Pesach/Maṣṣot week). 78  Cf. J. M. Baumgarten, “Halakhic Polemics in New Fragments from Qumran Cave 4,” Biblical Archaeology Today: Proceedings of the International Congress on Biblical Archaeology Jerusalem, April 1984, ed. J. Amitai (Jerusalem: Israel Exploration Society, 1985), 390–399; Doering, Schabbat, 249–250.

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The lawlessness of those outside the Yaḥad is also a major topic in 1QS 5:1–13a, with a different recension represented in 4QSd 1:1–7a (marking the beginning of this manuscript) and 4QSb 9:1–8a. In both recensions, the members of the Yaḥad are to separate from the “community of the men of wickedness.” While the two 4Q manuscripts are shorter here, one of the tasks of the Yaḥad in 1QS is to “condemn any who transgress the statute” (‫ ;להרשיע כול עוברי חוק‬5:7). Whereas both recensions agree that the entrant to the “council of the Yaḥad” (i. e. simply the Yaḥad?)79 must take upon himself a binding oath “to turn to the Torah of Moses” and to “separate from all men of wickedness,” it is in 1QS where the latter are further characterized as those “who are not reckoned with his covenant for they have not sought nor inquired in his statutes, so as to know the hidden things in which they erred to their guilt; and the revealed things they did willfully, to stir (God’s) anger for judgment and for implementation of vengeance by the curses of the covenant, so that mighty judgments will be delivered upon them for eternal destruction, leaving no rest” (1QS 5:11–13).

The men of wickedness thus have not only failed to study the Torah in order to discover the hidden laws, that is, the legal interpretation by the sect (which they probably could not do outside the sect anyway), but they have also intentionally transgressed the revealed laws, for which they will be punished according to the curses of the covenant.80 The continuation in both recensions,81 though different in detail, applies to the (Jewish) outsiders from the community commandments of separation that are similar to those applied to Gentiles in Jub 22:16–20. On account of their lawlessness, other Jews become like Gentiles to the community.82

Conclusion We have seen that the historiographical overviews in the Damascus Document as well as further references in various texts from Qumran establish the historic lawlessness of Israel, partly presented as pre-exilic disobedience, partly seen in continuation of even earlier lawlessness that commenced with the Watchers, continued with the sons of Noah and then further with lawless Israel and Judah before the exile. The communities recognizable in the Scrolls view themselves as originating in exile, where a remnant of law-observant Israelites was left, which was bestowed with further revelation of “hidden” laws. While initially sharing in the guilt of Israel, the “root of planting” has been given means of atonement by  Thus the suggestion by Collins, e. g. idem, Beyond the Qumran Community, 71.  For which see Deut 28:15–68. 81  1QS 5:13b–20; 4QSd 1:7b–13 par. 4QSb 9:8b–13. 82  Cf. A. Shemesh, “The Origins of the Laws of Separatism: Qumran Literature and Rabbinic Halacha,” RevQ 18/70 (1997): 223–241. 79 80

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God. This communal repentance has to be matched by the individual member: as is particularly emphasized in Serekh ha-Yaḥad, each initiate into the community had to turn away from the lawlessness of Israel, both historic and personal. However, the communities emerging in the Scrolls have always been vulnerable to defection and relapse. Thus, several sections particularly in the Damascus Document target the insincere convert, the factual traitor, the covert (potential) traitor, and the one who backslides from the standards of holy perfection. Their actions are portrayed as lawlessness; characteristic phrases like “walking in the willfulness of their heart” appear time and again. The communities were encouraged to separate from such slackers and to exclude permanently any deliberate transgressor of the Law of Moses. Measures of temporary exclusion and punishment (probably reduction in food) were imposed on those who were “lawless” in the lighter sense of threatening the holiness of the community by their demeanor (in the Penal Codes). Finally, outsiders to the community and opponents can be polemically portrayed in the Scrolls as lawless people, as transgressing specific commandments, and as not complying with the Mosaic Torah. The charge of lawlessness ultimately helped shape the identity of the communities envisioned in the Scrolls: it characterizes the past left behind by these groups, the current threats and challenges they face, and the “otherness” against which they position themselves. Underlying the Scrolls in different degrees is a predestinarian worldview, according to which the elect are those who turn to the Law of Moses, whereas the rest wallow in lawlessness. The rest are simultaneously under the dominion of Belial (or occasionally his more modest relative, the “angel of hostility”).83 Consequently, the threats posed to the communities by potential defection and relapse are more often than not blamed on the involvement of Belial: the transgressions from which the initiates turn away have been committed under his dominion;84 initiates are warned that if they backslide they will be given over to Belial for destruction;85 the preacher of apostasy is seen under the rule of Belial;86 and the “builders of the wall” have been ensnared by two of the tree “nets of Belial” during the time in which he himself has been let loose.87 In sum, lawlessness in the Scrolls serves largely as a means of “othering”: temporally, socially, and halakhically. It is seen as a deviation from which the law-abiding community has to be preserved; this strengthens the identity of this community. Ultimately, all true Sons of Light will be preserved from this feature of the rule of Belial. 83 See

above, at n. 8. 1:23–24. 85  CD-A 8:1–2a par. CD-B 19:13b–14. 86 CD-A 12:2a–3a. 87  CD-A 4:12b–5:11. 84 1QS

Law and Lawlessness in the Enoch Literature Grant Macaskill Behind the disarmingly simple title of this volume  – Law and Lawlessness in Early Judaism and Early Christianity – lies a set of more complex identifications and questions that require exploration. Of which law are we speaking? Are the “lawless” so labelled because they live without any code, or rather because the validity of their particular code is not accepted by another group? Is the importance attached to law something necessarily recognizable on the surface of a text, or is it sometimes assumed or tacit? Conversely, does explicit interest in law necessarily reflect the importance ascribed to law in general or, rather, does it reflect very particular issues of legal debate, fine-grained matters of inner group dynamic? And, of course, how does law relate to issues of justice and forgiveness? The failure to differentiate such complex issues lies behind many of the problems that have afflicted modern treatments of law in ancient Jewish and Christian thought and the attentiveness to them in the present volume will constitute a significant response to this. This essay is narrowly focused on the texts that we now refer to as 1 Enoch and 2 Enoch, which are commonly (if problematically, in the case of the latter) traced back to the late Second Temple Period. I will largely bypass the literature that is connected to the primary Enoch literature, but distinct from it, such as Aramaic Levi and Jubilees, touching on this only where relevant to the reading of the primary literature. I also will avoid any discussion of the work often referred to as 3 Enoch, which requires the competencies of a specialist in rabbinic writings.1 While my discussion will involve a number of discrete observations on the complex of issues noted above, there will be a certain theme running through it: namely, that many of the efforts to identify diversity in attitudes towards the Mosaic Law have distorted the evidence, by seeking to understand it within binary schemes of opposition. Rather than properly affirming diversity, these schemes actually flatten it and in so doing lose sight of the coherence that can exist even within variety. In itself, this is not an original proposal, but this essay will push this observation beyond its usual confines in the discussion of 1 Enoch, Qumran and early Judaism into the space occupied by 2 Enoch which, as we will see, introduces a further set of complexities to the discussion. 1  For a discussion of this text, and the challenges involved in its study, see Philip Alexander “3 (Hebrew Apocalypse of) Enoch,” in The Old Testament Pseudepigrapha, ed. J. H. Charlesworth (New York: Doubleday, 1983), 1: 223–316.

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On Enochic Judaism Recent scholarly discussion of the early Enoch literature has paid significant attention to the question of whether these writings represent a distinct species of “Enochic Judaism,” one marked by a changing, sometimes hostile, stance towards the writings associated with Moses, and particularly toward the law. Indeed, this hypothetical ancestor is seen by some as a key contributor to the conceptual genetics of the emergent Christian group and its own attitude to the law. My claim is that Enochic Judaism is the modern name for the mainstream body of the Essene party, from which the Qumran community parted as a radical, dissident, and marginal offspring. Subsequently, Enochic/Essene Judaism polemically rejected the ideas of the Qumran Essenes, continued to exist side by side with its radical progeny, contributed to the birth of the parties of John the Baptist and Jesus, and even survived Qumran for some time after the destruction of the temple in 70 CE.2

That question frames much of what we will consider in this essay and in this volume, as we reflect on the diversity of attitudes to the law encountered in the witnesses to early Judaism. It has, however, already been debated in detail, particularly in the context of the various meetings of the Enoch Seminar held over the last 15 years, and while there is no real consensus, the starkness of some of the early accounts proposed have generally given way to more nuanced discussions  Gabrielle Boccaccini, Beyond the Essene Hypothesis: The Parting of the Ways Between Qumran and Enochic Judaism (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1998), 16. In the broader study, Boccaccini develops the thesis (already emergent in his previous study Middle Judaism: Jewish Thought, 300BCE-200CE [Minneapolis: Fortress Press, 1992]) that a distinct species of Judaism associated with traditions concerning Enoch, which was originally hostile to the Zadokite traditions that cherished the law of Moses but eventually hybridized with these, was parent both to the Qumran sect and to early Christianity. Boccaccini was not the first to have proposed the existence of an “Enochic Judaism”; the idea was already well established and, in particular, his study drew heavily upon Paolo Sacchi’s study of it (L’apocalittica giudaica e la sua Storia [Brescia: Paideia, 1990]; translated as Jewish Apocalyptic and its History, trans. W. J. Short, JSPSS 20 [Sheffield: Sheffield Academic Press, 1996]). This work, in turn, represents a particular development of the theories previously developed concerning apocalyptic groups in Judaism, by figures such as Otto Plöger (Theokratie und Eschatologie [Neukirch: Neukirchener Verlag, 1959]) and P. D. Hanson (The Dawn of Apocalyptic: The Historical and Sociological Roots of Jewish Apocalyptic Eschatology [Philadelphia: Fortress, 1975]), and their intellectual forerunners in the 19th and early 20th centuries. But Boccaccini’s detailed theory pressed the concepts further than Sacchi and others had done and explored their explanatory potential in a way that had not been done before. Boccaccini’s proposals lay at the heart of the discussions that took place at the various meetings of the Enoch Seminar and while few have supported his basic proposal (and he has qualified this in the conference proceedings), the debates have proved fertile for the refining of our knowledge of diversity and coherence in early Judaism. An excellent entry point – one providing useful context to the present paper – is found in the collection of essays published as G. Boccaccini and J. J. Collins, eds., The Early Enoch Literature (Leiden/New York: Brill, 2007). The articles are generally of greater depth and technical detail than those found in the publications of the Enoch Seminar, and represent the debates well. 2

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that recognize the complexity of early Jewish thought and culture. Theories that center on polemics often require straightforward oppositions; allowing for a greater degree of complexity in the character of early Judaism, where differences may be fine matters of shade rather than the difference between black and white, actually leaves room for a greater degree of coherence than sometimes allowed. VanderKam makes the point forcefully: The number two has proved popular among the scholars who have mapped Jewish thought in the early second century … But is the evidence sufficiently clear to be this precise and are the categories properly defined? Or, to put it differently, are the categories neater than what is being classified?3

With regard to our question, this opens the possibility that the authors of the various Enochic works may share a generally positive view of the law with their siblings and compatriots, but in the context of a soteriology that ascribes pivotal significance to something else, or of a group that differs from its siblings/parents on some very specific issues and turns to an ancient authority for support. As we consider the texts themselves, we will see further evidence for this reading of the material beginning to emerge.

1 Enoch: Book of Watchers, Astronomical Book, Dream Visions, Epistle of Enoch What we often designate as 1 Enoch is a collection of distinct works that are found together completely only in the Ethiopic tradition. The Similitudes (or Parables) of Enoch are missing from the Qumran finds and the question of whether they are of early Jewish authorship remains a matter of some debate, though the balance of opinion now favors this.4 The remaining parts of the collection are, however, attested in the Qumran finds, albeit in fragmentary form, and the manuscript evidence suggests that they may have been treated as some kind of unified tradition, possibly a testament of sorts.5 Alongside the fragments of 1 Enoch found at Qumran, one can identify a number of texts that appear to be related in some way to them, containing parallel traditions or language, all supporting the view that the Enochic traditions were influential at Qumran. 3 J. VanderKam, “Mapping Second Temple Judaism,” in Boccaccini and Collins, eds., Early Enoch Literature, 16. 4 See the various contributions to James Charlesworth and Darrell Bock, eds., Parables of Enoch: A Paradigm Shift (London: Bloomsbury T&T Clark, 2013). 5 See the introduction to G. Nickelsburg, 1 Enoch 1: A Commentary on the Book of 1 Enoch, Chapters 1–36; 81–108, Hermeneia (Minneapolis: Fortress, 2001). Nickelsburg’s suggestion of a testamentary form has been heavily critiqued, but there is broader agreement that the texts were seen as unified in some way. See my discussion in Grant Macaskill, Revealed Wisdom and Inaugurated Eschatology in Ancient Judaism and Early Christianity (Leiden: Brill, 2007), 27–30.

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The earliest parts of the collection are generally held to be represented by the core of the Book of the Watchers, and by the Astronomical Book: paleographical analysis suggests that the manuscripts themselves are pre-Maccabean, and the composition of the core works was probably significantly earlier.6 A number of scholars have seen these works as reflecting disinterest in, or even a polemical silence towards, the law traditions associated with Moses and the stories to which they are attached.7 For Boccaccini, this reflects a particular understanding of the etiology and nature of evil: the account of the Watchers’ descent is held to provide an alternative explanation for the origin of evil to that found in the biblical story of Adam and Eve, bringing about a state of cosmic disorder and impurity that cannot be restrained by regulation and law: Evil and impurity are uncontrollable, and human beings, including the proud priests of Jerusalem, are powerless. The only hope is in God’s intervention. The Enochians completely ignore the Mosaic Torah and the Jerusalem temple, that is, the two tenets of the order of the universe.8

That closing statement alludes to the general recognition that the (Zadokite) creation account of Genesis 1 links the cosmic order by which things are kept in their right place to both law and temple.9 That order, though, is fundamentally compromised by the descent of the watchers to marry human women, by which the boundaries between zones are crossed, and as a result of which the world is polluted by their offspring, the giants. That this structural corruption takes place prior to the flood – and hence prior to the stories of the Exodus – is also considered important: Enoch himself is untainted by it, unlike his “rival Moses,”10 who is caught in its wake. Boccaccini follows Himmelfarb in seeing Enoch as represented in priestly terms and links this further to the polemics of the text: the Enochic priesthood, also connected to the true priesthood of the closely related Aramaic Levi Document, is set in opposition to the Zadokite priesthood.11 The superiority of Enoch is thus maintained over both Moses and the Zadokite priesthood honoring him. The calendrical concerns of the Astronomical Book parallel these polemics: boundaries have been crossed, temporal spaces have been compromised, and  6 Boccaccini, Beyond the Essene Hypothesis, 70. See Michael E. Stone, “Enoch, Aramaic Levi and Sectarian Origins,” JSJ 19 (1988): 159–70.  7  Some, indeed, have suggested that the Enoch books function as a kind of alternative Pentateuch but the redaction into a fivefold form is fairly late and there is little evidence for it in the Second Temple period.  8 Boccaccini, Beyond the Essene Hypothesis, 74.  9  See, for example, the discussion in W. P. Brown, The Ethos of the Cosmos (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1998), 35–52. 10 Boccaccini, Beyond the Essene Hypothesis, 74 11  For a more recent articulation and examination of the evidence, see Martha Himmelfarb, “The Book of the Watchers and the Priests of Jerusalem,” Henoch 24 (2002): 131–135, and her discussion “Temple and Priests in the Book of the Watchers, the Animal Apocalypse and the Apocalypse of Weeks,” in Boccaccini and Collins, eds., The Early Enoch Literature, 219–236.

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the universe has fallen out of sync with the created pattern – the Zadokite calendar fails to understand this, and thus fails to observe the festivals at their right time. This tendency to identify polemics lying behind or beneath the surface detail of the Enochic text is quite widely found in scholarship and it can claim some warrant from what we now know of the diversity of Second Temple Judaism; we are clearly not dealing with a perfectly unified culture. But might the texts themselves reflect a less polemical, less oppositional diversity? As I have noted already, the polemical approach requires a fairly simple binary arrangement of hostile parties and their cherished texts; the required simplicity is arguably more than can be justified by the texts. A few further observations may be added. First, there is a danger in assuming that silence is necessarily polemical, particularly when there are other ways of explaining that silence. Given that the early Enoch material occupies a narrative location that is, in any case, prior to the giving of the Law to Moses, one might expect that nothing would be said on the matter.12 To see the silence as polemical is, arguably, to impose some very modern assumptions on to the text. Second, applying the very title of this volume to the text yields some interesting results. Repeatedly through the text of the Book of the Watchers, the problem of evil (or “wrong”) is represented precisely as “lawlessness,” with this corresponding to “sin” and “impurity”; interestingly, the state to which this is opposed, and by which it is ultimately replaced is one of “righteousness.” The commission to Michael provides an excellent example of this: Cleanse the earth from all impurity and from all wrong and from all lawlessness and from all sin, and godlessness and all impurities that have come upon the earth, remove. And all the sons of men will become righteous, and all the peoples will worship (me), and all will bless me and prostrate themselves (1 Enoch 10:20–21).13

This is neither an isolated nor a marginal example: the language of “lawlessness” is central to the representation of evil and its remedy in the Book of the Watchers. Thus, in 7:6, “the earth brought accusation against the lawless ones” after the descent of the angels and the birth of the giants. Thus, too, the particular place of judgment described in 22:13 is prepared for the “sinners, the godless,” who were “companions with the lawless.” This deployment of “lawlessness” is picked up in later parts of the Enochic collection, notably in the Epistle, where the judgment scene itself involves the reading out of the acts of lawlessness (97:6) and the removal of those same deeds, all being represented as the ultimate answering of 12 This point is made by R. J. Bauckham, “Apocalypses,” in Justification and Variegated Nomism, Volume 1: The Complexities of Second Temple Judaism, ed. D. A. Carson, P. T. O’Brien and M. Seifrid, WUNT 2:140 (Tübingen: Mohr Siebeck, 2002), 135–187. 13  All quotes from 1 Enoch are taken from J. VanderKam and G. Nickelsburg, 1 Enoch: The Hermeneia Translation (Minneapolis: Fortress Press, 2012).

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the “prayer of the righteous,” thus ensuring that righteousness and lawlessness are seen as fundamentally contrastive. However, and this is the vital point, there is no Enochic law revealed within the corpus by which such terms and contrasts can be filled with meaning. There are, indeed, references to particular laws and commandments being given, but these are extremely specific and relate to the calendar and the prescribed movements of the heavenly timekeepers (e. g., 82:9, in the Astronomical Book, where the “law of the stars” is described). There is also the promise of an eschatological Law revealed to all humanity in the Apocalypse of Weeks, but that remains in the future, even for those who consider themselves to belong to the inaugurated eschatological community. So, we have the interesting situation that evil is represented fundamentally as “lawlessness,” but no effort made to identify the law in question. As Bauckham notes: The apostasy is described only in general terms (5:4), while it is left entirely unstated what is entailed by being righteous. The righteous are evidently not sinless, since they are promised that they will be sinless after the judgement, as a result of God’s gift of wisdom to them (5:8–9). What is at stake seems to be a fundamental attitude and practice of loyalty to God and his law, contrasted with a fundamental refusal of obedience.14

As I noted in a previous study of law in 1 Enoch that drew on Bauckham’s arguments: If we return to the Book of the Watchers and develop Bauckham’s approach, we can see a number of points where “righteousness” is employed as a concept but left undefined. This is most obvious in the commissioning accounts of the archangels. Sariel is to teach Noah, the “righteous one,”15 (10:3) from whom a plant will come. The plant imagery is expanded in 10:16: it will be “the plant of righteousness.”16 In the verses that follow this one, “righteous/ righteousness” language occurs three times: the deeds of righteousness will be planted with joy (10:16), the righteous will escape and sire thousands (10:17), the earth will be tilled in righteousness (10:18) and all the sons of men will become righteous (10:21). Conversely, this language is set against the language of impurity and defilement (9:8, 10:11, 20, 22) and that of sin and iniquity (9:6, 9, 10; 10:8, 16, 20). Again, the language of defilement and iniquity is left undefined, although the core elements of the Shemihazah and Asael stories are mentioned in 9:7–9. It is interesting that at two points, at least, in chapters 6–10 there seem to be assumptions of Levitical law: the reference to the giants drinking blood (7:3)17 and the depiction of the giants as hybrids (half-breeds or bastards; 9:9; 10:9).18  Bauckham, “Apocalypses,” 142–44.  The qualifying δίκαιον occurs only in the longer reading of Gs which Nickelsburg supports. See his 1 Enoch 1, 216. 16  The two occurrences of “righteousness” in 10:16 are followed by “and truth” in the Ethiopic and Ga. 17 This has an obvious connection with Noachic principles, as distinct from Mosaic ones, but nevertheless, the specific sin seems to reflect the Levitical arrangement, in which it is not merely the eating of meat that has not been properly drained that is condemned but much more the eating of blood. See Lev 3:17, 7:26–7, 17:10–14. 18 The quote is from my article, “Priestly Purity, Mosaic Torah and the Emergence of Enochic Judaism,” Henoch 29 (2007): 67–89. 14 15

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Third, the reception of the core Enoch material by its earliest tradents and redactors reflects a tendency to assimilate that material to the textual traditions of Moses and the Law, suggesting that they, at least, understood the references noted above to “lawlessness” in relation to the Torah of Moses, perhaps now understood as something that pre-existed its revelation through Moses. Lars Hartman’s study of the introduction to the Book of the Watchers (chapters 1–5) highlights precisely this: the opening theophany is located at Sinai and is dense with covenantal allusion.19 Similarly, Moses appears in a positive light in the Animal Apocalypse: in his time, eyes are opened to the truth (89:28), even if the transformation proves to be temporary and even if nothing is said about the receiving of the law.20 The point is an important one: if the original traditions were polemical, then the polemics were so subtle as to be lost on their earliest readers, who saw the Enoch traditions as compatible with the Moses ones, and appeared to see the law in question as the Torah. Fourth, the argument that Enoch is represented in priestly terms is questionable, and with it the polemical overtones that such a representation is meant to carry. Enoch is principally represented as a sage or scribe, not as a priest;21 space for a legitimate Zadokite priesthood remains. The last point, concerning the priesthood, actually opens the way for an interesting discussion of possible halakhic debate in the core narrative of the Book of the Watchers. While the identification of Enoch as a priestly figure is questionable, the identification of the Watchers as representative of the priesthood has more support, with Nickelsburg numbered among the proponents of such a theory.22 They are figures associated with the heavenly sanctuary, who cross the zonal boundary to earth and marry human women. Not all scholars support the view that this is intended as a representation of inappropriate priestly activity, but it is a well-established theme in scholarship. At its heart is the identification of the inappropriate marriage of Watchers and human women. It is important that we are not dealing with bad sexual relations, simply, but bad marriage. This has occasioned much discussion about the nature of the problem and how it relates to the debates during the Second Temple Period on legitimate marriage, and 19  Lars Hartman, Asking for a Meaning: A Study of 1 Enoch 1–5, CBNTS 12 (Lund: Gleerup, 1979). See my comments in Revealed Wisdom and Inaugurated Eschatology (Leiden: Brill 2007), 37. 20 Boccaccini makes much of this (Beyond the Essene Hypothesis, 83), seeing Mosaic covenant and the law as “simply ignored.” The reference to “the path that it had shown them” might suggest the law, however; at any rate, Boccaccini probably makes too much of the silence. 21 J. J. Collins, “Theology and Identity in the Early Enoch Literature,” Henoch 24 (2002): 57–62. 22  See the various essays in Henoch 24 (2002) for access to the debate, or those published in Boccaccini and Collins, eds., The Early Enochic Literature. The interpretation that centers on priestly marriage is key to Nickelsburg’s approach to the Watchers’ story in his magisterial Hermeneia commentary (1 Enoch 1).

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how these bear differently on the general populace, the priesthood, and the high priestly families. Those debates did not principally concern the marriage of Jew and Gentile; instead, a key point of debate appears to have been with the marriage of members of the priestly tribes, and the high priestly family, with those outside of those tribes. A “holy seed” rationale appears to have been developed, linked to the idea of priestly “genealogical purity,” though there is some evidence of the language involved being extended to the question of Jew-Gentile relations.23 Those familiar with the debates about purity and marriage in the Second Temple Period will be aware of the interactions of Milgrom, Hayes, Cohen and others on these issues, and will know that much of this is controversial.24 The relevance of the debate to 1 Enoch, however, can be recognized even without taking sides, or without requiring resolution, for what is most important is that the concepts of purity were both established and controverted on the basis of textual combinations derived from sections of the Mosaic Torah, specifically the Holiness Code of Leviticus 17–26 and parts of Deuteronomy. That is, while there is evidence that marriage regulations were debated in the Second Temple Period, and that some groups were more or less stringent on these, the degree of stringency depended on a particular interpretative tradition, rather than on a distinct textual tradition. If the Watchers story does indeed represent priestly marriage practices, then, it supports a level of halakhic activity that is indicative of close knowledge of Mosaic Torah and high regard for its authority. This ties in well with the evidence on the calendrical matters, where debates over the precise timing of festivals reflect a strong commitment to the laws that those festivals represent. The point can be developed further into a much more subtle differentiation. While the law appears to remain in the background of the discourse, as some assumed or undefined standard of righteousness, precise details of its interpretation come to the foreground of the story – albeit in the form of symbolic narrative – only in the context of debate over highly specific issues. All of this fits well with what we might expect from division within a group that still shares its core legal material, and that differs only over its interpretation. These points suggest that we should treat the polemical approach with some caution, but that is not to say that we are dealing with a straightforwardly positive view of the law. I have suggested elsewhere that the various parts of 1 Enoch are jointly characterized by an inaugurated eschatology that involves the revelation of wisdom to an elect remnant, an act that involves both an objective revelation and a subjective transformation, the latter enabling the former to be grasped. The need for such a revelation is connected to the manifest failure of God’s people to live righteously under the conditions of the law, and the state of blessing that it 23  See my discussion, which draws on the more detailed studies of the issue by Hayes, Cohen and others, in Mackaskill, “Priestly Purity.” 24  For bibliographic details, see my “Priestly Purity.”

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brings about is represented in terms consistent with the law. Taken by itself, the law is not capable of bringing about genuine transformation, but that deficiency is addressed by the new revelation that has now been made. Let me outline the key evidence for this. In the superscription to the book (1:1), Enoch blesses the “righteous chosen,” specified to be a “far-off generation.” The verse is generally seen to parallel Balaam’s blessings of Israel (Num 23:7, 21, 23 and 24:5, 17, 18), but with the striking replacement of the term “chosen” for Israel. A similar move is made at 1:8, where the terms of the Aaronic blessing on Israel are now applied to this same group.25 The point is important for it highlights a shift away from the source texts, in which Israel as a whole is the object of blessing, towards the identification of a more specific group, the “chosen.” That this group corresponds to a remnant, or righteous minority, is suggested by the imagery of the “plant (of righteousness).” This imagery is first encountered in 10:3 and 10:16. The first refers to the group escaping the flood; the latter, though, refers to the group escaping the final judgment. The image hence establishes a typology of sorts: the minority saved from the flood corresponds in some sense to the minority that will be delivered from the judgment. The imagery recurs again in the Dream Visions (84:6), where there is once again a certain collapsing of the flood and the final (i. e., eschatological) judgment, and then again in the Apocalypse of Weeks (93:10). It is, then, imagery that recurs through the different sections of 1 Enoch. The image of the plant is derived from Isaiah 61:3 (echoes of other parts of Isaiah, notably Isaiah 65:20, can also be heard in 5:9) and is encountered quite widely with such a sense in the literature of the Second Temple Period.26 It is, I think, significant that the term is qualified at several points in the 1 Enoch collection, with the addition “of righteousness” functioning as an expansion that potentially gives it a covenantal connotation. The observation is not one that I would want to press too far, but it is suggestive of the potential for the text to be read in covenantally conservative ways. Strikingly, the typically paired opposite group is labeled as “the sinners.” To the chosen, a body of wisdom is revealed (5:8, cf. 93:10, 94:1–5), with the result that they “live” and “sin no more” (5:8). In the same verse, this group is represented as enlightened and wise, and their enlightened condition is linked again to their moral transformation: they “will transgress no more.” The language is suggestive of a state of obedience to some external standard, but is this constituted by what is now revealed, or does what is revealed rather facilitate obedience to a standard already known? I would like to suggest tentatively the latter, for the problem of “transgression” is precisely what is addressed by the revelation: they will transgress no more. I will return to this point below.  See Hartman, Asking for a Meaning, 32–38, 44–48.  See Patrick Tiller, “The Eternal Planting in the Dead Sea Scrolls,” DSD 4 (1997): 313–35.

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The revealing of wisdom to the chosen does not merely involve the disclosure of the object to be known; it also involves the transformation of the cognitive faculties of the subjects of this knowledge. The most explicit example of this is found in the Dream Visions, with its repeated motif of the opening and blinding of the eyes of the lambs and sheep. Significantly this is attached positively to prior stages in the history of Israel, but not simply to moments of objective revelation; rather, effectively, the imagery conveys something of the periodic revival and declension of the moral state of the nation: “sometimes their eyes were opened, and sometimes they were blinded” (89:41). The eschatological revelation, though, is accompanied by a more definitive opening of eyes (90:6), even if it is one that does not instantaneously take hold of the wider population (90:7, “Their eyes were extremely and excessively blinded”). The generally passive27 forms used throughout may suggest that the key agencies are external to themselves: the blinding powers of evil, and the illuminating power of God. The Dream Visions and the Apocalypse of Weeks both retell the story of Israel, in quite particular ways. One point that is worth noting is that they use the motifs of understanding and enlightenment – of remnant and revival – in relation to the periods of general obedience that are the highlights of the biblical storyline, as well as the times of “revival” in the Hellenistic period.28 I want to suggest that this may have implications for how we differentiate the polemical from the explanatory across the Enochic corpus: the representation of calendrical issues and, perhaps, of the marital issues discussed above may well be polemical, since they involve the opposition of different regulative accounts, but the imagery of remnant, revival and revelation is explanatory. That is, it explains the failure of the nation as a whole to remain faithful and to enjoy blessing, and articulates the grounds for hope in the face of this. The polemics are narrowly focused around certain issues; the explanations are more universal in character. Lawlessness and Structural Violence Having made some general observations about the representation of the law, I want now to explore two more specific issues in the representation of righteousness and lawlessness in 1 Enoch. The first concerns the close link between lawlessness and what is sometimes labelled as structural violence: the injustice with which the poor are treated by the rich. This issue emerges most clearly and extensively in the Epistle of Enoch, particularly in the sections in which woes are pronounced upon sinners. These are introduced by a block of text involving a 27 Generally, but not exclusively: note 90:6 where the lambs themselves are active in the opening of their eyes. We should probably be careful about pressing this evidence too far, but it may suggest a greater sense of personal responsibility. 28  See Nickelsburg’s discussion of this last point in his excursus on “Traditions about a Religious Awakening in the Hellenistic Period,” in 1 Enoch 1, 398–400.

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classical “two-ways” wisdom motif: Enoch’s children are exhorted to love righteousness and walk in its paths (94:1), and they are told of the revelation that will take the place of “paths of violence and death” (94:2), which they are to avoid. The essential contrast, then, is between righteousness and violence/death. As the woes begin to be pronounced in 94:6, their targets are those who “build iniquity and violence and lay deceit as a foundation,” who “build their houses with sin” (94:7), who “have acquired gold and silver” (94:7) and who trust in their riches (94:8). These themes continue in the second list of woes in chapter 95, with the language of injustice explicitly used in 95:7 and elaborated in 96:4–8. In particular, the injustices involved include the unfair distribution of wealth – those condemned have eaten the finest wheat and drunk the best water and wine (96:5–6)  – and a measure of deception: the rich lie and “weigh out injustice” (95:6, suggesting either the role of the judge or of the unjust employer). Along the way, there is a certain challenge to what some might label as the conventional wisdom29 of act-consequence: Woe to you sinners, for your riches make you appear to be righteous, but your heart convicts you of being sinners; and this word will be a testimony against you, a reminder of (your) evil deeds (96:4).

What this text represents is a dialogue with conventional wisdom, rather than a polemic, and the distinction is achieved through the centralizing of the eschatological judgment that characterizes the collection as a whole. From the story of the Watchers onward, the constituent parts of 1 Enoch are characterized by an eschatology that looks towards a future judgment, from the standpoint of those who consider themselves to belong to the inaugural period of the eschaton, the recipients of revealed wisdom, capable of right evaluation of the world. Their eschatological perspective – which is hardly novel,30 but is nevertheless distinctively dominant of their thought – allows them to see the truth that others may overlook: that the rich have acquired their wealth by lawless acts, and not by lawful ones. I use the label “structural violence” to capture the sense that the problem is seen to be wrapped up with the stratification of society and the distribution of wealth: the “rich” are faceless and nameless, they are guilty as a segment of society; there is no real differentiation of one from another. Further, as already 29 This standard designation is widely found in scholarly literature, but the biblical wisdom traditions are fluid things, marked by dialogue and reflection. 30 This is one of the key points made by Rowland against those who have made a distinctive eschatology the essence of apocalyptic thought: “Evidence from the apocalypses themselves indicates that, apart from a handful of passages, their doctrine of the future hope appears to be pretty much the same as that found in other Jewish sources.” Christopher Rowland and Christopher Morray-Jones, The Mystery of God: Early Jewish Mysticism and the New Testament (Leiden: Brill, 2009), 15.

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noted, their evil operates through structures: through the courts, through the wage system, etc. There is, of course, an interesting point to be explored in the background of this, which is the fact that the text itself is the product of a highly literate group, one likely to have enjoyed a significant degree of wealth. We need to be careful of categorizing this literature too simplistically as the product of the marginal or oppressed. Regardless of the possible ironies that this represents, it remains the case that what we encounter in 1 Enoch, particularly in the Epistle of Enoch, is a representation of “lawlessness” as generating injustice, with real awareness of the danger that present earthly success will be misread as blessing, because of the failure to take into account the full eschatological perspective. This is indicative of an attitude to law that is not legalistic – in the sense of a commitment to keeping the code for its own sake, or simply to secure the blessing of God – but is deeply concerned with justice. In this regard, what we encounter in 1 Enoch has much in common with Isaiah, from which much of the core language appears to be drawn. This, indeed, is one of the key issues of which we should be aware: the fluidity and ambivalence of attitudes to the law from the Second Temple literature onwards has important antecedents in the prophetic literature of the Hebrew Bible. Righteousness and Forgiveness I close this discussion of 1 Enoch with a brief note concerning forgiveness. There are only four occurrences of the word “forgiveness” in 1 Enoch (all in Book of the Watchers): in 5:6, 12:5, 13:4 and 13:6. Of these, the last three are applied to the Watchers, who ask Enoch to intercede for them, that they might have forgiveness, a request that is not granted. By contrast, the first reference is to the elect, to the righteous, who do indeed enjoy God’s forgiveness, mercy and clemency. The point is interesting, since this positive reference to forgiveness is found in the prologue to the Book of the Watchers, and not in the story of the angels themselves. Some may, therefore, argue that it reflects later developments in Enochic theology. But we may also note that, in the form of the book that is actually attested by fragments, and not reconstructed by scholars, it establishes a distinction between the fate of the angels and that of humans and gives a certain priority to the notion of divine grace, in the context of a work that articulates evil in terms of lawlessness.31

31  Similar points could be made concerning “mercy,” which is apposed to “forgiveness” in 5:6 and occurs by itself in 1:8 and, in the Epistle, in 92:3. Again, mercy is withheld from the rebel Watchers.

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1 Enoch: The Similitudes of Enoch I have avoided comments on the Similitudes up to this point because of their debated provenance and connections to the material attested by the Qumran finds. There are, however, some close connections with (and some interesting differences from) what we have seen in the rest of 1 Enoch. It is perhaps worth beginning by noting the prominence of the messianic figure, the Son of Man, in the Similitudes, and his relationship to the community of the chosen (or elect). Specifically, given what we have seen to be the case about “righteousness” in 1 Enoch, it is striking that the Son of Man is “the Righteous One” and “the Chosen One” (the two titles are hybridized in 53:6).32 As such, he is a particular individual, with a particular representative function in relation to those designated as “the righteous ones” and “the chosen ones.” These plural designations occur throughout the text of the Similitudes (for example, in 45:5–6 or in 58:1–4), and it is legitimate to say that the book essentially concerns the fate of those designated in such terms by contrast to those designated “the sinners,” or “the unrighteous.” Always, though, their destiny is pivotally determined by the individual figure of the Son of Man, the Righteous One, the Chosen One. The representation of the Son of Man and the titles that are applied to him, including these particular designations, are generally recognized to be derived from the imagery used of the Isaianic Servant, so that the figure is essentially a hybrid of this individual and the Danielic Son of Man. There are, of course, important points of correspondence with the representation of Jesus, particularly in Matthew, where the image of the judging Son of Man seated on the throne of his glory, parallels directly the language of 1 Enoch (62:2; cf. 45:3; 51:2; 61:8). Here, as there, social justice is a prominent theme, but here the focus is on “the kings and the mighty ones of the earth” (e. g., 38:5; 53:5; 62:9). What we saw to be directed quite generally towards “the rich” in the Epistle of Enoch is here focused specifically, then, on the representatives of political power. At the same time, the horizon is explicitly internationalized: these are the mighty ones of the earth. The framing of their evil in the schema of righteousness/unrighteousness corresponds well to what we have seen to be the case in 1 Enoch: here, as there, we find no standard by which righteousness is defined and, again, that standard must be assumed. We do encounter the figure of Wisdom and the myth of her descent to earth and return to heaven (42:1–3), along with some references to the heavenly “secrets” (notably, the “secrets of righteousness” in 58:5), but interestingly the opposite figure to Wisdom is Iniquity, who “went forth from her chambers” and “dwells among them, like rain in a desert” (42:3). The imagery, then, personifies obedience and disobedience, righteousness and iniquity – that is, it personifies 32 For bibliography on the scholarly discussion, see my “Matthew and the Parables,” in Charlesworth and Bock, eds., The Parables of Enoch, 218–230.

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conditions or states of being – rather than representing a body of hidden law.33 As we move through the rest of the Similitudes, wisdom is closely connected to the identity of the Son of Man, likely through the influence of Isaiah: from his mouth “the secrets of wisdom will go forth” (51:3). Hence, the motif of revealed wisdom that we noted in the rest of 1 Enoch is taken up here and, again, connected to the flourishing of righteousness. Now, though, that revealed wisdom is identified with a particular person, the Son of Man. As noted already, the language of forgiveness is used only in the Book of the Watchers and does not occur in the Similitudes. The language of “mercy,” however, does occur, and in quite interesting ways. In 51:2–3, a group responds to the revelation of the Lord of Spirits by repenting and abandoning the works of their hands. They are saved “in his name” and the Lord has “mercy upon them, for great is his mercy.” The text immediately, though, affirms his righteousness and the fate that awaits the unrepentant, who shall be shown no mercy (51:4–5). The opposition, then, is not between justice and mercy, but between justice/mercy and unrepentance over acts of injustice. Earlier in the Similitudes, in 39:5, the holy and righteous ones are depicted as dwelling with the angels, “petitioning and interceding for the sons of men, and righteousness was flowing like water before them, and mercy like dew upon the earth” (39:5). Righteousness and mercy are closely linked in this verse, and both are associated with the intercessory activities of the saints.

2 (Slavonic) Enoch While 1 Enoch – with the possible exception of the Similitudes – can straight­ forwardly be dated to the Judaism of the Second Temple Period, the origin of 2 Enoch continues to be a matter of debate. Milik famously (or notoriously) regarded the book as a Christian text inspired by 1 Enoch, the handiwork of a 10th century Byzantine monk.34 Few, if any, today would support such a late date, 33  Where the “secrets” do appear to correspond to previously undisclosed regulations, they are strikingly limited to the movements of the heavenly bodies. That is, the only revealed laws are those of the calendar, echoing what we have seen to be the case in the rest of 1 Enoch. 34  J. T. Milik, with the collaboration of Matthew Black, The Book of Enoch: Aramaic Fragments from Qumran Cave 4 (Oxford: Clarendon, 1976). The astronomer A. S. D. Maunder was even more skeptical, arguing on the basis of calendrical details that the work was composed in the Slavonic environment. See her article, “The Date and Place of Writing of the Slavonic Book of Enoch,” The Observatory 41 (1918): 309–316. The calendrical details that she discussed are all secondary interpolations, rendering the conclusions false, and her work is now little more than a window into the development of 2 Enoch studies. André Vaillant, Le Livre des Secrets d’Hénoch: Texte slave et Traduction française, Textes publiés par l’Institut d’Études slaves 4 (Paris: L’Institut d’Études slaves, 1952) presented a more modest assessment, that the book was a Christian reworking of 1 Enoch.

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but despite the careful work of some – most notably Christfried Böttrich35 – a consensus of even the broadest sort is lacking: some argue for an early date and Jewish authorship, some for a late date and Christian authorship, some (myself included) remain undecided. Much of the difficulty, of course, stems from the fact that the book is preserved only in late Slavonic manuscripts that date from the 14th–17th centuries; fragments of the book may exist in Coptic, dateable to an earlier period, but a debate continues as to whether these do, in fact, correspond to 2 Enoch and not to some other work.36 The challenges involved in tracing the provenance of what we find only in these late manuscripts are obvious. Much also stems, though, from the odd character of what we find in 2 Enoch. In the introduction to his celebrated translation of the book, F. I. Andersen wrote: If the work is Jewish, it must have belonged to a fringe sect.37… In every respect 2 Enoch remains an enigma … by the very marginal if not deviant character of their beliefs, its users could have been gentile converts to moral monotheism based on belief in the God of the Bible as Creator, but not as the God of Abraham or Moses.38

Andersen’s observations are based on the recognition of three things that will run through our subsequent discussion. First, there is no obvious interest in the covenant(s) or in the stories attached to them; 2 Enoch lacks the kind of textual allusions that we have seen to be present in 1 Enoch or the kind of programmatic interest that marks a text like Jubilees. Second, the ethical system found in 2 Enoch is stringently monotheistic but otherwise very basic: there is nothing that explicitly reflects the range of ethical areas covered by the Law of Moses and nothing (arguably, at least) that reflects halakhic interest.39 Again, this contrasts with what we have seen to be the case in 1 Enoch. Third, and perhaps most sig35  See his meticulous consideration of the evidence in C. Böttrich, Weltweisheit, Menschheitsethik, Urkult, WUNT 2:50 (Tübingen: Mohr Siebeck, 1992) and Böttrich, Das slavische Henochbuch, JSHRZ V 7 (Gütersloh: Gütersloher Verlaghaus, 1996). 36 See Joost Hagen, “No Longer ‘Slavonic’ Only: 2 Enoch Attested in Coptic from Nubia,” in New Perspectives on 2 Enoch: No Longer Slavonic Only, ed. Andrei Orlov, Gabrielle Boccaccini, and Jason Zurawski (Leiden/New York: Brill, 2012), 7–34 and the response in C. Böttrich, “The Angel of Tartarus and the Supposed Coptic Fragments of 2 Enoch,” Early Christianity 4 (2013): 509–521. 37  Francis I. Andersen, “2 (Slavonic Apocalypse of) Enoch,” in J. H. Charlesworth, ed., The Old Testament Pseudepigrapha Volume 1: Apocalyptic Literature and Testaments (New York: Doubleday, 1983), 96. 38  Andersen, “2 Enoch,” 97. 39  This point is a matter of debate. See the quite divergent findings of Lawrence Schiffman, “2 Enoch and Halakhah,” and Daniel Stökl Ben Ezra, “Halakhah, Calendars, and the Provenances of 2 Enoch,” in Orlov et al., New Perspectives on 2 Enoch, 221–228 and 229–242, respectively. The evidence used by the latter is intrinsically problematic, since the textual evidence for the calendrical material varies significantly between manuscripts and may be simply the corrupted vestiges of the calendar of 1 Enoch; similarly, there are problems in deeming the regulations on proper binding of a sacrificial victim to be halakhic (see below). Consequently, to make a positive case for halakhic interest in 2 Enoch remains a somewhat speculative exercise.

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nificantly, there is no space in the text for repentance and forgiveness; the simple ethical schema is maintained with what we might identify as a stringent legalism. For present purposes, this is really what makes the text interesting: it is an example of legalistic thinking, in which strict adherence to a moral code is central to salvation, but one that reflects marginal or fringe thought. As such, it provides an interesting contrast to the treatment of law elsewhere in early Jewish thought. As we have seen, there is a certain emphasis in the Book of the Watchers and in the Similitudes on forgiveness (or mercy) and on repentance. At least, this is the case for human beings; at a number of points, the possibility of forgiveness for the Watchers appears to be excluded. In 2 Enoch, what is true of the rebel angels becomes true of all human beings: there is no room for repentance, no place for forgiveness. Enoch is, at one point (64:5) described as the one who “takes away the sins of mankind,” but this appears to be connected to his role as revealer or “corrector,” rather than to anything more akin to a concept of atonement: “He has appointed you to be the one who reveals, who carries away our sins.”40 That there is no place for human repentance is indicated by the simple and straightforward identification of the places of eschatological judgment as being prepared for those who commit the prohibited acts and, as I have noted elsewhere, this is represented in quite individual terms: each person acts in a particular way and is sent to the destiny appropriate to their acts.41 There is little of the corporate identity that we noted in 1 Enoch, at least in relation to judgment. As with 1 Enoch, we find the language of righteousness being used through 2 Enoch of those who are morally good. Should we extend the same principles that we applied to 1 Enoch (of the assumed Mosaic standard) to this text? Perhaps, but perhaps not. The language of righteousness here might be explained quite simply as a vestige of the influence of the primary Enoch traditions on which 2 Enoch is obviously dependent. That is, while the language is meaningful in the primary traditions, here it is arguably used simply by inherited convention, without much real significance. This claim could be falsified if we could find examples of halakhic debate or real legal interest (including cultic prescriptions) in the text, but examples of these are difficult to find and the instances rather tenuous. In 2 Enoch 59, for example, the text speaks of a prescribed method of binding animals for sacrifice, but if a parallel to this can be identified in Jewish writings, it is actually in a practice that is condemned as that of the heretical minim.42 The language of 2 Enoch 59 is echoed in the description of the festival 40 Andersen,

“2 Enoch,” 188.

41 G. Macaskill, “Personal Salvation and Rigorous Obedience: The Soteriology of 2 Enoch” in

This World and the World to Come: Soteriology in Early Judaism, ed. D. Gurtner (London: T&T Clark, 2011), 134–35. 42  See S. Pines, “Eschatology and the Concept of Time in the Slavonic Book of Enoch,” in Types of Redemption: Contributions to the Theme of the Study-Conference Held at Jerusalem 14th to 19th July 1968, ed. R. J. Zwi Werblowsky and Claas J. Bleeker (Leiden: Brill, 1970), 72–87. The evidence surveyed by Pines, both in 2 Enoch and in Rabbinic texts is limited, and his conclu-

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held at the end of the book, where Nir offers a sacrifice in the prescribed way, but there is again little that reflects detailed awareness of the regulations for sacrifice in the Mosaic law.43 Similarly, while there are numerous mentions of offerings being made, there is nothing that points to these being specific fulfillments of the regulations in the Mosaic Law. Even the references to where these offerings are made provide too little for us to identify the Jerusalem (or Alexandrian) temple, as against another cultic center or shrine.44 In his contribution to the 2009 Enoch Seminar, which was devoted to the study of 2 Enoch, Lawrence Schiffman found nothing in the text that could legitimately be considered halakhic.45 Furthermore, 2 Enoch differs from 1 Enoch in the extent to which Enoch does actually instruct his sons in moral matters and in the connections that can be made between this material and the content of what Enoch saw as he ascended through the heavens (chapters 3–22) and what was then revealed to him in heaven (chapters 23–32). In other words, where 1 Enoch largely assumes a moral standard, 2 Enoch provides it. This moral standard centers on the identification of God specifically as Creator (never as redeemer or God of Israel), and Enoch as the one who reveals the secrets of the cosmos (which include eschatological places connected to the destiny of the cosmos and its inhabitants). Taken together, these elements weave a picture of Enoch as a reliable source for true understanding of the cosmos. Attention is drawn to the precision and accuracy of his knowledge in 43:1. The witnesses differ here, with the shorter recension actually providing much more detail, but all versions emphasize Enoch’s scribal duties of recording and the extra content of the shorter recension, with its emphasis on “measurement” is supported by parallels with the abbreviated juridical text Merilo Pravednoe. There is, then, a real significance to 43:1, with its grammar calling attention to Enoch’s own role: I, even I have measured and noted the hours, and I have distinguished every seed on the earth, and every measure and every just scale. I, even I have recorded them.46

Andrei Orlov has noted the development of this text in Merilo Pravednoe and the description there of Enoch as “governor” or “manager” of earthly arrangements, provocatively suggesting that the obscure term that follows this in the Slavonic sions should be treated with some caution; nevertheless, the suggestion that the binding practice reflected in 2 Enoch 59 is that of the heretical minim is provocative. 43  Andersen suggests that Enoch’s second ascension may be deliberately connected to the date of the Festival of Firstfruits (68:3, longer recension. See Anderson, “2 Enoch,” 196, note 68.c), but the reference is not universally attested. 44  The text does refer to visiting the temple (51:4), but there is nothing in the context that requires us to see this as the Jerusalem: the word used in most manuscripts (khram) could refer to any cultic center. Interestingly, some manuscripts depart from this by substituting the word for “church,” reflecting the lack of contextual specificity. 45  See Schiffman, “2 Enoch and Halakhah.” 46 This translation broadly corresponds to that of Andersen (“2 Enoch,” 171) though I have brought it into line with my own reading of the text.

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text – the word or title prometaya – may be linked to verbs of measurement in Greek and Latin and may reflect a potential background to the name of Metatron.47 Whether or not he is correct is this suggestion, Orlov rightly stresses the accumulation of titles and descriptions of Enoch that stress his comprehensive scribal knowledge of the cosmos: the patriarch’s revelation is the only reliable guide for the conduct of those who acknowledge the Creator and wish to live according to his will.48 What we are left with, as a result, is a fairly simple moral code that centers on monolatrous service of the one Creator (which requires the rejection of witchcraft and idolatry) and respectful behavior towards his creation, particularly human beings, who are “facsimiles” of God and must, therefore, be treated justly (30:8, 44:1–4; 60:1–4; 65:1–5). Although of lower status than humanity, animals are also accorded a dignity simply by being creatures.49 All, then, is ultimately an outworking of monotheistic commitment, but not necessarily one conditioned by Torah; rather, it is conditioned by Enoch’s knowledge of the workings of the cosmos. This is, in my view, a better explanation for the simple ethics of the text than Böttrich’s suggestion that the ethics of the text are distinctively Noachic, reflecting the Noachide covenant.50 That proposal does not, I think, adequately account for the saving role that Enoch plays in the text or for the emphasis on the rigor of his knowledge. But this leaves us with the question of how (and where) such a moral account may have developed. To return to Andersen’s observation: the hard legalism of the text, albeit defined by a simple moral code and not the detail of Torah, and the absence of any concept of forgiveness are hardly compatible with either Jewish or Christian authorship. Perhaps, though, to set the question in such terms is also to be too simplistic. Perhaps, instead, we might consider the possibility that the work is the product of something else, something marginal (or “fringe,” to use Andersen’s term). Perhaps 2 Enoch gives us a window onto the transmission of Jewish traditions by non-Jewish groups, committed to monotheism, but otherwise unconditioned by the richness of biblical tradition.51

47  A. Orlov, “The Origin of the Name ‘Metatron’ and the Text of 2 (Slavonic Apocalypse of) Enoch,” Journal for the Study of the Pseudepigrapha 21 (2000): 19–26. 48  Quote from G. Macaskill, “Personal Salvation,” 132–134. 49 The regulation noted above for tying legs may, in fact, reflect a concern to limit the harm done to animals during their sacrifice. 50 Böttrich, Weltweisheit, Menschheitsethik, Urkult, 184–189. 51 The complexity of this issue is explored by M. Goodman, “Jews and Judaism in the Mediterranean Diaspora in the Late-Roman Period: the Limitations of Evidence,” in Judaism in the Roman World: Collected Essays (Leiden: Brill, 2007), 233–259. Goodman’s discussion particularly concerns polytheistic groups reverencing the Jewish God, but it is relevant to our argument insofar as it explores the problematic nature of the evidence and the complexity of the issues involved.

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Concluding Reflections Rather than rehearsing the points made throughout this discussion, I will close with some synthetic and comparative reflections. First, the “tacit” or even “traditional” character of the moral standards reflected in 1 Enoch is more readily seen when we compare it to a work like 2 Enoch, where the standards are made explicit through the patriarch’s instructions, closely tied to the content of what he sees in the course of his heavenly ascent and is taught while resident in heaven. If we were to search for actual ethical guidance in the primary Enoch literature, we would find little, for so much is assumed; there is little even by way of instruction. But what is assumed is immeasurably richer in ethical value, and immeasurably broader in range, than the rather simplistic moral framework of 2 Enoch. Functionally, it is hard to see how the primary Enoch literature could ever have operated without the Mosaic Torah – or parts of it, at least – being assumed. That, in itself, may be interesting as a point of reflection on the textual witnesses to the diversity and coherence of early Judaism; it may also be interesting as a comparator to what we encounter in the New Testament. Second, if 1 Enoch does bear witness to divergence between Jewish groups, this lies more obviously in the interpretation of a common law source than in subscription to a different law. Where polemics arguably emerge in the narrative is in relation to quite specific matters of marriage or calendar, not the broader matter of the code itself. Third, as we have seen, the demonstrably Jewish Enoch books and the Similitudes share a framework in which divine mercy and forgiveness have a certain priority and in which the righteousness that accords with the law is possible only by the gift of revealed wisdom. This is not to diminish the importance of the law, but to recognize that it is always contextualized by narratives of revival and declension, restoration and hope, in which the saving work of God takes priority. In the context of narratives concerned to explain the moral failure and to articulate the grounds for hope, the law itself can remain in the background (or in the implied foreground), for it is not the substance of the problem under consideration. That this can be the case at all, that the law can be a background matter, says something about the difference between a religion shaped by law and one that is “legalistic.” By contrast, 2 Enoch is marked by a stark moralism, with no place for forgiveness and restoration. Third, the existence of a work like 2 Enoch, considered in relation to the complex transmission history that it passed through en route to the Slavonic context, provokes some reflection on the “borderlands” around what we would conventionally identify as early Judaism or early Christianity. Potentially the text provides a window onto the existence of communities that interacted with Jewish ones, sharing in their monotheism, sharing elements of their morality and their rejection of idolatry, yet lacking the rich covenantal framework of Torah.

Paul: Within Judaism, Without Law Joshua D. Garroway Born in the century’s first decade, he lived nearly sixty years. Although little is known about his youth, it is clear he received the education typical for a diaspora Jew. He soaked in the Law and the traditions of the fathers, ultimately outstripping his peers and meriting recognition as one of the most knowledgeable and enthusiastic legal experts of his day. A promising career as a Jewish scholar was on the horizon. Everything changed in his thirties, however. Convinced that the messianic age had dawned and history’s final hour was at hand, he concluded that the new age demanded a radically new way of understanding Jewish Law and life. The ceremonial laws that for so long had separated Jews from Gentiles – dietary restrictions, holiday observances, even circumcision – he viewed as matters of indifference, customs a Jew might perform if he so desired but for which there remained no legal requirement. Not ceremonialism but loving one’s fellow was for him the essence of Mosaic legislation. Indeed, to observe the Torah’s peculiar commandments might even be considered deleterious, for in separating themselves from Gentiles Jews might forestall the climactic reconciliation of the children of Abraham, the brotherhood of mankind which would culminate human history. His antinomianism naturally elicited enemies in the Jewish community, even among those Jews who shared his messianic outlook. Thus, in the last twenty years of his life he gained the reputation as a fearless polemicist, articulating and audaciously defending his new vision of Judaism. Despite an untimely death, his preaching and writing became the inspiration for a religious movement still thriving today. Such was the career of the German rabbi Samuel Holdheim (1806–1860).1 It sounds eerily like that of Paul, of course, especially when framed to sound as such. Similarities run up and down the line. Paul and Holdheim were both stellar students of Jewish law in their youth, at least insofar as Paul’s boast in Gal 1:14 can be trusted. Holdheim, who cut his teeth in a Kempen yeshiva, was by all 1 Many of the standard works devoted to the life and thought of Holdheim are now more than 100 years old: Immanuel Heinrich Ritter, Samuel Holdheim: Sein Leben und seine Werke (Berlin, 1865); David Philipson, Samuel Holdheim, Jewish Reformer (1806–1860) (Cincinnati, OH, 1906). The most recent, and possibly the most valuable, treatment of Holdheim is found in Christian Wiese, ed., Redefining Judaism in an Age of Emancipation: Comparative Perspectives on Samuel Holdheim (1806–1860) (Leiden: Brill, 2007).

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accounts a prodigy.2 Each man nevertheless abandoned the ongoing validity of Jewish law following his recognition that history was in its final stage: Paul in the wake of his vision(s) of Christ, Holdheim after his studies at the University of Prague and his arrival at the conviction that the emancipation and enlightenment of European Jewry marked the dawn of the Messiasreich. For each, the demands of the Torah could be reduced to Menschenliebe. Each endeavored mightily to justify his antinomianism in public discourse; each faced ridicule as a result; yet, each became an inspiration for later generations – Paul to various strains of early Christianity, Holdheim to the radical strain of Reform Judaism that dominated American, if not German, Jewish life for nearly a century. Given these similarities, I have often wondered why these innovative Jewish thinkers are not juxtaposed more routinely. The only two attempts at such with which I am familiar are brief remarks by Jewish historians who invoke the age-old Jewish prejudice against Paul in order to pass judgment on Holdheim. Heinrich Graetz, the student of Holdheim’s rival Zacharias Frankel, famously disparaged Holdheim by likening him to the notorious apostate: “Since Paul of Tarsus Judaism had not known such an enemy in its midst, who shook the whole edifice to its very foundation.”3 The Reform rabbi David Philipson, naturally more sympathetic, sought to undo that association: “Whatever he may or may not have been, [Holdheim] was certainly a Jew with all his heart and soul; he had no intention or purpose to undermine Judaism and replace it by another religion as did Paul.”4 Among New Testament scholars, reservations about the comparison would no doubt center on the time and space separating the two men, a fair concern seeing as eighteenth-century Germany is a far cry from the first-century Roman Empire (notwithstanding the declaration of a Kaiserreich in 1871). Analogies to Paul’s thought are more understandably sought among his contemporaries, and therefore Philo, Josephus, the so-called Apocrypha and Pseudepigrapha, and the Scrolls pepper the indices of monographs on Paul. Invaluable as these ancient sources are, however, none offers anything resembling Paul’s antinomian proclamations about, for example, the obsolescence of the Law (e. g., Gal 3:6–29), the Law’s promoting of sin (Rom 5:20), or its capacity to kill (2 Cor 3:6). Historians search in vain for so antinomian a Jew as Paul.5 Accordingly, until 50 years ago 2  Michael A. Meyer, Response to Modernity: A History of the Reform Movement in Judaism (Detroit: Wayne State University Press, 1988), 80–81. 3 Heinrich Graetz, History of the Jews, vol. 5 (Philadelphia: Jewish Publication Society of America, 1895), 680. 4 Philipson, Samuel Holdheim, Jewish Reformer, 12. 5 As John M. G. Barclay, Jews in the Mediterranean Diaspora: From Alexander to Trajan (323 BCE–117 CE) (Edinburgh: T & T Clark, 1996), 381–95, puts it, Paul was an “anomalous Jew.” Perhaps a parallel to Paul might be found in the so-called radical allegorizers described by Philo (On the Migration of Abraham, 89–93), those intellectual Jews in Egypt whom Philo accuses of renouncing the performance of certain commandments (e. g., circumcision), but no firsthand

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Paul’s abandonment of the Law was considered tantamount to an abandonment of Judaism itself. Following his journey to Damascus, it was held, Paul gave up Judaism for an altogether different religion, Christianity. Paul the Christian was no longer Paul the Jew.6 Objecting to the anachronisms inherent in this view of Paul, and to the misrepresentations of Judaism that invariably accompanied it, commentators in the 1980s and 1990s espied a so-called new perspective on Paul in which the apostle’s turn to Christ was not understood to be an abandonment of Judaism.7 Paul the Christian remained Paul the Jew. The crux for these interpreters, then, was how best to render Paul’s apparent antinomianism. How could Paul, a Jew, speak so disparagingly of the Law? The answer was found by shifting the target of Paul’s disdain. Paul did not object to the Law as such, according to the new perspective, but only to certain (Jewish) misunderstandings of it. In Paul’s view, ancient Judaism misguidedly clung to the idea that membership in God’s covenant was secured by the boundary-marking “works of the Law” (Dunn) or by the hereditary privilege (Wright) described in the Torah. Objecting to the notion of a Paul so critical of Judaism, if not the Law, a recent batch of interpreters has envisioned a still newer perspective on Paul. Now the claim is that Paul the Christian remained Paul the Jew so much so that Paul saw no need to alter the general contours of Judaism at all – at least not for Jews. Mark Nanos, Magnus Zetterholm, Pamela Eisenbaum, Paula Fredriksen, Matthew Thiessen, and others contend that Paul’s statements about the inadequacy

evidence from these Jews survives. Other antinomian parallels to Paul might be found by looking a century or two further back. Though we know of them only through their unfavorable representation in Hasmonean literature, the advocates for Hellenistic reform in early secondcentury BCE Jerusalem may have supported the abrogation of Torah to one degree or another. Similarly, if Gabriele Boccaccini, Beyond the Essene Hypothesis: The Parting of the ways between Qumran and Enochic Judaism (Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans, 1998), 68–117, is correct, then the advocates of the Enochic Judaism that gave rise to the community at Qumran may have been critical of the Torah’s capacity to deal with the problems of evil and impurity. 6 Magnus Zetterholm, Approaches to Paul: A Student’s Guide to Recent Scholarship (Minnea­ polis, MN: Fortress, 2009), 69–94, refers to this approach as the “standard view of Paul.” Its roots, he argues, stretch back to Augustine and Luther, but its modern formulation came at the hands of Rudolf Bultmann (1884–1976) and his disciples. 7  One might consider the three “pillars” of the new perspective to be E. P. Sanders, James D. G. Dunn, and N. T. Wright. Among their classics are E. P. Sanders, Paul and Palestinian Judaism: A Comparison of Patterns of Religion (Minneapolis: Fortress, 1977); and Paul: the Apostle’s Life, Letters, and Thought (Minneapolis: Fortress, 2015); James D. G. Dunn, Jesus, Paul and the Law: Studies in Mark and Galatians (Louisville: Westminster John Knox, 1990); and The Theology of Paul the Apostle (Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans, 1997); N. T. Wright, The Climax of the Covenant: Christ and the Law in Pauline Theology (Minneapolis: Fortress, 1993); and Paul and the Faithfulness of God (Minneapolis: Fortress, 2013). For recent evaluations of the new perspective, see Magnus Zetterholm, Approaches to Paul, esp. 95–126; and Kent L. Yinger, The New Perspective on Paul: An Introduction (Eugene, OR: Cascade, 2011).

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of the Law apply only to the Gentiles among whom he ministered.8 The Law has become obsolete, yes, but only for Gentiles. It promotes sin for Gentiles. It fails to offer justification for Gentiles. For Jews, on the other hand, the Law remains in force as the terms of their covenant with God. The study of Paul has thus been turned on its head over the past fifty years. Where once it was taken for granted that Paul abandoned the Law, and therefore that he could not be reckoned a Jew, the latest perspective on Paul takes for granted that Paul was an observant Jew, and therefore that he could not have abandoned the Law! This turnabout, in my view, results from the fact that Paul appears at the same time to be committed to the Jewish God, scriptures, and people, and thus a Jew, but committed also to a radically antinomian vision of Judaism for which few, if any, ancient analogues exist. This apparent inconsistency in Paul’s thought is precisely why comparing him with Holdheim is profitable. Paul’s simultaneous commitment to Judaism and to the annulment of Jewish Law may have been unique in his own time, but it is not so in the broader sweep of Jewish history. Holdheim shared Paul’s messianic outlook, his universalism, and his insistence that a new era had dawned in which the Torah, as an expression of the terms of God’s covenant with Jews (and Gentiles), was outmoded. As a result, Holdheim also dealt time and again with the basic theological conundrum expressed by Paul in Gal 3:19, “Why then the Law?” Both men found themselves at pains to explain what purpose the Law had served prior to its displacement and what role, if any, the Law still had in the messianic age. My contention is that each of these Jews in his own way arrived at what might be called an unfinished, or incomplete, antinomianism. Each wished in principle to revoke the authority of the Law, but neither carried this conviction through to its ultimate conclusion, to dismissing the Law unconditionally as a relevant expression of God’s will. Holdheim proved unwilling to pursue the course eventually charted by Felix Adler, who proposed an ethical monotheism denuded of any Jewish particularities9 Holdheim maintained that the Torah and Talmud, despite their human origin, were troves to be consulted for the treasures of on8  For a summary of this so-called radical new perspective, or “Paul within Judaism,” now see Mark D. Nanos and Magnus Zetterholm, eds., Paul Within Judaism: Restoring the First-Century Context to the Apostle (Minneapolis: Fortress, 2015). See also Zetterholm, Approaches to Paul, 127–63; Pamela Eisenbaum, Paul Was Not a Christian: The Original Message of a Misunderstood Apostle (New York: HarperOne, 2009); Mark D. Nanos, The Mystery of Romans: The Jewish Context of Paul’s Letter (Minneapolis: Fortress, 1996); Matthew Thiessen, Paul and the Gentile Problem (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2016); Paula Fredriksen, Paul: The Pagans’ Apostle (New Haven, CT, and London: Yale University Press, 2017); Carlos A. Segovia, Por una interpretación no Cristiana de Pablo: El redesubrimiento contemporáneo de un judío mesiánico (Carlos A. Segovia, 2013). 9  E. g., Felix Adler, An Ethical Philosophy of Life, Presented in its Main Outlines (New York/ London: D. Appleton and Company, 1918).

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going validity contained therein. Moreover, he insisted, these texts preserved the historical experience of the Jewish people, if not God’s directives for them, and could therefore serve as inspiration for the preservation of Judaism as a historical religion moving forward. Paul, for his part, proved unwilling to pursue the course eventually charted by Marcion, who renounced the significance of the Law tout court. Paul instead developed a paradoxical view of the Law in which believers fulfill it by not observing its ordinances. By allowing their lives to be guided by the Spirit they received at baptism, believers in Christ conduct themselves in accordance with God’s command to love one’s neighbor. Through such conduct, Paul reckons, believers fulfill the entire Law. Fulfilling the Law thus remains a desideratum for Paul, even if observing its ordinances does not.

Sein und Zeit Studies of the German Reform movement often juxtapose Holdheim not with Paul, but with Abraham Geiger (1810–1874).10 Geiger is cast as the moderate reformer who believed change comes to Judaism as the result of organic evolution, while Holdheim is the uncompromising radical who insisted that modernity marks a rupture with the past. Appreciation for the radical newness of die Zeit is indeed the foundation of Holdheim’s thinking. He held that modern Jews, sprung from the ghetto and awash in enlightened religious ideas, found themselves in an utterly unprecedented moment which, in turn, demanded an utterly new mode of being. Modernity was simply incompatible with medieval Judaism, and therefore Jews faced the stark choice, as he phrased it in 1845, “entweder rabbinischer Jude zu sein und außer der Zeit zu leben, oder in der Zeit zu leben und aufzuhören, rabbinischer Jude zu sein.”11 For Holdheim, the choice was clear. Abandoning rabbinic Judaism was justified, he figured, because its entire legal system had been a mistake. When the Second Temple was destroyed, the rabbis should have recognized what enlightened Jews like Holdheim now understood – that the civil, political, and ceremonial laws of the Torah had become obsolete and that Judaism ought to continue as a religion, rather than a state, in which only the moral laws of the Torah remain valid. Instead, the rabbis preserved and even elaborated on the civil and ceremonial laws, producing what Holdheim rancorously referred to as the “legal bonds of Judaism,” or worse, the “rotten 10 E. g., Jakob Petuchowski, “Abraham Geiger and Samuel Holdheim  – Their Differences in Germany and Repercussions in America,” Year Book of the Leo Baeck Institute 22 (1977), reproduced in Jakob Petuchowski, Studies in Modern Theology and Prayer (Philadelphia: JPS, 1998), 257–82. Alternatively, Holdheim is paired with Samson Raphael Hirsch, the founder of Neo-Orthodoxy, as “the poles of modernization.” So Meyer, Response to Modernity, 77–84. 11  Samuel Holdheim, Das Ceremonialgesetz im Messiasreich; als Vorläufer einer grössern Schrift über die religiöse Reform in Judenthum (Schwerin: C. Kürschner, 1845), 123–24.

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principles of Talmudic-orthodox Judaism.”12 At times Holdheim offered more generous estimations of Talmudic Judaism, praising it for preserving the Jewish people during the dark days in medieval Europe. There is also his well-known declaration that “der Talmud spricht aus seinem Zeitbewußtsein, und für dasselbe hatte er Recht; ich spreche aus einem höheren Bewußtsein meiner Zeit und für dasselbe habe ich Recht.”13 But even if the Talmud had at one time been “right,” Holdheim never suggested that the Talmud was right any longer. He urged enlightened Jews to cast off the Talmud and repair to the Torah – more specifically, to the moral kernel of the Torah liberated from its ceremonial husk. To persist in Jewish ceremonialism was for Holdheim doubly problematic. On one hand, it constituted a regression to an “embryonic stage of Judaism” (die Entwickelungsgeschichte des Judenthums) incompatible with the mature religious consciousness of the age; on the other, it impeded the messianic aspirations of emancipated, enlightened Jews.14 “Human history does not revolve in a perpetual circle,” Holdheim insisted; rather, history advances toward a universal brotherhood of mankind, a time when all men – or Jews and Christians, at least – will jettison particularism and embrace the genuine root of all religion, which is love for God and for one’s fellow.15 Holdheim unabashedly proclaimed that humanity had reached the brink of that grand historical culmination. He and his enlightened Jewish peers, “as proclaimers and harbingers of the messianic age,” were therefore obligated to discard “the remnant of legal particularism that had been destroyed forever by God” in order to secure “the victory of truth and love.”16 Holdheim’s antinomianism, then, was rooted in his conception of messianic time. With the age of universal brotherhood nigh, Jews were to lead humanity into the new dawn by radically reforming their religion. To continue living under the Law, as it were, would be to situate oneself in the wrong era, to ignore the designs of Providence (Die Planen der Vorsehung), which all along had intended for the civil, political, and ceremonial Law to serve merely as a preliminary stage in the development of Jewish history.17 The ancient rabbis had failed to see those laws as such; modern rabbis must not make the same mistake. It is no wonder that Graetz would later liken Holdheim to Paul, for so much of what Holdheim says resembles mutatis mutandis what his Jewish predecessor proclaimed 18 centuries earlier. Holdheim’s stark alternative between living as a Rabbinic Jew or living in the messianic present sounds like Paul’s distinction between living “under Law” or “under grace” (Rom 6:14; cf. Rom 11:6). Hold12 Michael A. Meyer, “‘Most of My Brethren Find Me Unacceptable’: The Controversial Career of Rabbi Samuel Holdheim,” Jewish Social Studies 9 (2003): 1–19, cited here at 6. 13 Holdheim, Das Ceremonialgesetz im Messiasreich, 50. 14 Holdheim, Das Ceremonialgesetz im Messiasreich, 7. 15  Holdheim, Das Ceremonialgesetz im Messiasreich, 7. 16  Holdheim, Das Ceremonialgesetz im Messiasreich, 73–74. 17  Holdheim, Das Ceremonialgesetz im Messiasreich, 7.

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heim’s relegation of the ceremonial Law to a temporary stage in the development of Judaism brings to mind Paul’s comparison of the Law to the custodian whose supervision over a child becomes unnecessary once the child comes of age (Gal 3:24 f.). Holdheim’s reduction of the Law to its moral requirement could have been taken directly from Rom 13:8: “Owe nothing to anyone except to love one another, for the one who loves another has fulfilled the Law.” Like Holdheim, Paul believed history’s messianic culmination was at hand. Christ’s death and resurrection had inaugurated the final hour, which would be consummated upon his imminent return. Paul likewise insisted that the radically new era demanded a radically new mode of being. The contrast between “new” and “old,” between “now” and “no longer,” pervades Paul’s epistles, and often with respect to the present obsolescence of the Law. In Christ, Paul tells the Corinthians, a believer becomes a “new creation” (2 Cor 5:17) – a new creation that, according to Gal 6:15, exists outside the legal requirement of circumcision (Gal 6:15). The new creations participate in a “new covenant” (2 Cor 3:6) in which they serve in the “newness of the spirit” rather than in the “oldness of the letter” (Rom 7:6). The Law held authority in the past, Paul concedes in Rom 3:1–20, “but now the righteousness of God has been made manifest without the Law” (Rom 3:21), which is no doubt why Paul later says “but now we have been released from the Law, having died to that by which we were bound” (Rom 7:6). The refrain “but now” appears time and again in Paul’s letters, often drawing attention to the dramatically new circumstances obtaining in the messianic present.18 In the past, sin condemned men through the Law, “but now in Christ Jesus there is no condemnation” (Rom 8:1); in the past, men were drowned in sin, “but now Christ has been raised from the dead” (1 Cor 15:20); “now is the time of acceptance, now is the day of salvation” (2 Cor 5:2). For Paul, then, the Law was a thing of the past, not the “now.” Its authority had ceased with the dawn of the new reality, and therefore Paul’s listeners faced the stark choice, as he might have framed it in 45 rather than 1845, “entweder unter dem Gesetz zu sein, und außer der Christus zu leben, oder in Christus zu leben und aufzuhören, unter dem Gesetz zu sein.” It is true that Paul’s apparently antinomian statements to the Romans, Gala­ tians, and Corinthians come in epistles encoded explicitly for Gentile readers. Moreover, Paul styles himself the “apostle to the Gentiles,” making it reasonable to wonder, as does the most recent perspective on Paul, whether his undermining of the Law’s authority was intended exclusively for Gentiles. When he disparages 18  As James D. G. Dunn, Romans 1–8 (WBC 38a; Dallas, TX: Word, 1988), 164, says regarding Rom 3:21: “‘But now,’ is a characteristic feature of Paul’s style, sometimes denoting a logical contrast [7:17; 1 Cor. 12:18; 13:13] but usually with a clear temporal force [as in 15:23, 25; 2 Cor. 8:22; Philem 9, 11]. Here [in Rom. 3:21] it clearly marks a significant transition point, a contrast with what has just been described [1:18–3:20] – not just the before and after contrast of individual conversion …, but more the transition from one epoch to another, where a decisive new element has transformed the circumstances which previously pertained …, i. e., the eschatological ‘now’.”

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Gentiles for ignoring the present reality by becoming circumcised or seeking justification through the Law, Paul is not necessarily implying that Jews who remain observant are similarly out of touch. After all, Paul never says explicitly that the view of the Law he expresses to his Gentile readers applies also to Jews. He never says it does not, but he never says it does. Abundant evidence nevertheless indicates that Paul’s statements about the obsolescence of the Law are universally applicable. To begin with, there are Paul’s descriptions of his own behavior. He, a Jew, readily admits to becoming “one without the Law” when ministering among “those without the Law” (1 Cor 9:21), an abandonment of the Law while among Gentiles that may be reflected in Paul’s appeal to the Galatians to “become like me, as I have become like you” (Gal 4:12).19 To the Galatians Paul also relates his censure of Peter at Antioch, in which he indicates that not just he, but Peter and other Jews too, were “living like a Gentile and not like a Jew” (Gal 2:14). In the same rant he says he has “torn down” – and refuses to “rebuild” – an indeterminate object widely understood as the Law (Gal 2:18).20 Granted, these statements might simply reflect an expedient approach to evangelizing, such that Paul (and Peter and others) disregarded the Law only when it was necessary to secure Gentile believers rather than as a matter of course.21 Then again, in Galatians Paul also says he has “died to the Law” (Gal 2:19), which has a ring of permanence.22 The two key metaphors with which Paul describes the Law in Galatians further suggest that the Law has become obsolete for Jews as well as Gentiles. In Gal 3:24–25, Paul compares the Law to a paidagogos, the custodian who escorted boys to their studies and disciplined them before their coming of age. Building upon Gal 3:15–20, in which he explains that the Law was a secondary, temporary 19  So Heikki Räisänen, Paul and the Law (Philadelphia: Fortress, 1983), 75; Hans Dieter Betz, Galatians: A Commentary (Minneapolis: Fortress, 1979), 222; Richard N. Longenecker, Galatians, WBC 41 (Dallas: Word, 1990), 189. According to David J. Rudolph, A Jews to the Jews: Jewish Contours of Pauline Flexibility in 1 Corinthians 9:19–23, WUNT II 304 (Tübingen: Mohr Siebeck, 2011), 204–208, Paul’s claim to become “one without the Law” means that he shared table fellowship with Gentiles while remaining within what he understood to be appropriate parameters of Torah observance. 20  Betz, Galatians, 120–21; Longenecker, Galatians, 90–91; J. Louis Martyn, Galatians, AB 33A (New York: Doubleday, 1997), 256. 21  On the expedient, or tactical, interpretation of 1 Cor 9:19–22 in particular, see Mark D. Nanos, “Paul’s Relationship to Torah in Light of His Strategy ‘to Become Everything to Everyone (1 Corinthians 9:19–22),” in Reimund Bieringer and Didier Pollefeyt (eds.), Paul and Judaism: Crosscurrents in Pauline Exegesis and the Study of Jewish-Christian Relations (London: T & T Clark, 2012), 106–40. 22 Paul’s declaration of death to the Law generally escapes the notice of commentators of the radical new perspective. Fredriksen (Paul: The Pagans’ Apostle, 110) acknowledges that Gal 2:19 is often marshaled by advocates of the standard approach to Paul, but she does not offer an alternative interpretation of it. Zetterholm (Approaches to Paul, 132) likewise concedes that Paul’s statement might lead one to conclude that “he no longer considered himself bound by the Torah.”

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measure added to the abiding covenant with Abraham in order to promote (or curb, or cause awareness of) sin, Paul suggests that Christ’s consummation of that covenant rendered the Law unnecessary.23 Just as young men have no need for their custodian once they reach maturity, so those who were subject to the Law are released from the Law when they reach maturity – to wit, when they fulfill the Abrahamic covenant through faith. The first-person plural verbs and pronouns in Gal 3:23–25 surely refer to Jews: we Jews received the Law 430 years after Abraham; we Jews had been hemmed in by the Law until faith arrived; and thus, Paul says, “the Law was our custodian until Christ came” (Gal 3:24) but now “we [Jews] are no longer under the custodian” (3:25). No one disputes that Pau’s ostensible aim in Gal 3:1–29 is to demonstrate for Gentiles why they should not yoke themselves to the Law, but he does not make his case by suggesting that the Law has lost its significance for Gentiles alone. On the contrary, Paul constructs his argument around the historical experience of the Jews, concluding that faith has replaced the Law as the mode by which Jews relate to God. All the more so, Paul intimates, Gentiles would be foolish to pursue the Law. Likewise, when Paul addresses Gentiles who imprudently “desire to be subject to the Law” in Gal 4:21–5:1, his case emphasizes the obsolescence of the Law for Jews. Hagar and Sarah, according to Paul, stand for two covenants, probably the “old” and “new” covenants to which Paul alludes in 2 Cor 3:6. Hagar represents the old covenant, identified explicitly with Mount Sinai. This covenant is rooted in the earthly Jerusalem and enslaves its children. The other covenant, with which Paul beseeches his readers to identify, corresponds to a heavenly Jerusalem and its free children. The upshot of the allegory is clear: Gentiles become the free, promised children of Abraham by means of faith, not by submission to the yoke of the Mosaic legislation delivered at Mount Sinai; however, the way Paul couches the allegory makes it equally clear that Jews would be no less misguided to endure in their enslavement under the Law delivered at Sinai.24 23  The ambiguity of the expression “because of transgressions” (Gal 3:19) has led to endless speculation about the role between the Law and sin. Does the Law cause sin? Does it create awareness of sin? Does it condemn sin? Is it a supervisor that curbs sin? For a discussion of the variety, see Eisenbaum, Paul Was Not a Christian, 23–26; Räisänen, Paul and the Law, 140–50. I am partial to the assessment of Longenecker (Galatians, 139): “Probably the phrase ‘because of transgressions’ is to be understood broadly to include all such matters as signaled in both the cognitive and the causative understandings of the purpose of the law, but also … in the law’s condemnatory and supervisory functions.” 24 Thiessen, Paul and the Gentile Problem, 73–101, is one of the few advocates of the Paul within Judaism perspective who has tried to grapple with Gal 4:21–4:31. See now also Fredriksen, Paul: The Pagans’ Apostle, 129. Thiessen argues that the women represent two missions. Hagar stands for Paul’s Galatian adversaries who proclaim that Gentiles can enter the covenant of Abraham through circumcision. Paul objects to this view because he, like the author of Jubilees and certain other contemporary Jews, believes that only eighth-day circumcision secures admission into that covenant. Adult Galatians who circumcise would, like Ishmael, fail to gain entry, and instead find themselves again enslaved to the cosmic elements (Gal 4:9).

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To these metaphors in Galatians could be added Paul’s stinging attack on the Law in 2 Corinthians 3. Paul aspires primarily to commend himself and his colleagues as credentialed ministers of a new covenant, but by comparing his ministry to that of Moses, Paul makes apparent his negative estimation of both the Law and those Jews who continue to observe its ordinances. His first point, a straightforward argument from the lesser to the greater, presumes the inferiority of the Law: if the revelation at Sinai was so glorious that it caused the face of Moses to shine, and it was a covenant of “death” and “condemnation”, then surely the covenant of the Spirit, which consists of life and mercy, abounds with glory. Indeed, Paul goes on to say, the Mosaic covenant has lost its glory because of the surpassing glory of the new one. Again, though, the extinguished glory of the commandments chiseled in stone does not affect Gentiles alone, as Paul explains through the metaphor of the veil in 2 Cor 3:12–15. Moses wore a veil, Paul says, so that the Israelites would not notice his fading glory. Today that veil of ignorance rests metaphorically on the minds of Jews who read the Mosaic Law and fail to recognize in it the ministry of death and condemnation which, when read properly, foretells its eventual obsolescence. Only when a Jew turns to Christ, Paul explains, is the veil removed.25 So it is true that Paul’s immediate concern when discussing the Law is either to demonstrate the glory of his own ministry or the folly of Gentile submission to the Law. But the manner in which Paul couches those arguments implies that the Law offers an obsolete mode of being for Gentiles precisely because it also has lost its claim on Jews. That is not to say Paul forbade the observance of the commandments, or at least certain of them, even by Gentiles. He seems to have understood how difficult it was for some Jews, and for some Gentiles now associated with the God of the Jews through Christ, to forsake observances so closely identified with Jewish life. Food was an especially thorny issue, as 1 Corinthians 8–10 and Romans Sarah, alternatively, stands for Paul’s mission, which teaches that Gentile admission to the covenant has been made possibly only through the miraculous intervention of God through Christ. Ingenious as this interpretation is, I cannot see how it squares with Paul’s assertion that “these women are two covenants” (Gal 4:24). On Thiessen’s reading, which covenant do adult Gentiles join when they are circumcised? There is, after all, no biblical covenant with Ishmael. One might say that the women represent two covenants, the real Abrahamic covenant and a bogus (non‑)covenant, but this seems to me like a strained interpretation. Paul says they are two covenants because he thinks there are indeed two covenants – the old Abrahamic covenant determined by circumcision and the Law (Hagar), and the new Abrahamic covenant determined by faith (Sarah). 25 I know of but one sustained treatment of this passage from the Paul within Judaism perspective: Paul B. Duff, Moses in Corinth: The Apologetic Context of 2 Corinthians 3 (Boston, MA: Brill, 2015). Fredriksen, Paul: The Pagans’ Apostle, 166, speaks of the removal of the veil (2 Cor 3:14–15) in conjunction with Paul’s alleged belief that Israel’s widespread rejection of Christ, and hence its misunderstanding of the Law, would one day be reversed. But no mention is made of Paul’s description of the Sinaitic revelation as a “ministry of death” whose “glory is now set aside” (2 Cor 3:7).

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14 attest. In the former, Paul exhorts Corinthian believers to refrain from consuming meat sacrificed to idols, if necessary, lest other believers mistake such consumption for infidelity against Christ. He similarly advises Romans willing to eat meat to refrain from doing so in the presence of more scrupulous brethren who might be scandalized. In both cases, however, Paul makes abundantly clear that scruples about eating, while tolerable, constitute an unenlightened, “weaker” perspective. One abstains from idol meat for fear of scandalizing his fellow, not because there is anything wrong with eating such meat per se. On this point his emphasis is unmistakable. In 1 Cor 10:23, in a slogan whose validity he seems to acknowledge, he proclaims that “all things are permissible.” Eating idol meat, in other words, is permissible. Doing so may not “profit” or “build up” believers who find such consumption repugnant, but it is hardly wrong in itself. So in Rom 14:14 Paul declares that “nothing is unclean in itself.” Pork might be considered unclean in the opinion of “weak” believers – perhaps those who read Leviticus with veiled minds – and care ought to be taken to avoid scandalizing them, but in the company of “strong” believers eating any sort of meat is, according to Paul, entirely acceptable. For Paul, as for Holdheim, extraordinary times called for extraordinary measures. With the messianic culmination to history underway, both men held that the Law had run its course. “Freedom” became their clarion cry – freedom from authoritative structures of the past, submission instead to the new demands of the messianic age. For Holdheim that meant freedom of conscience, “free conviction against the tribal religion, against the innate and inalienable obligation … against the fetters and the tyranny of the old historical Judaism.”26 Such freedom would enable Jews to lead the modern march toward a universal humanity. For Paul, freedom meant the life in Christ, a life under grace rather than under the Law. “Christ freed us for freedom,” he tells the Galatians (Gal 5:1), and such freedom is the opposite of submission to the Law as Jews experience it. For, as he tells the Corinthians, the veil benighting Jewish readers of the Law will be removed only when they turn to the Lord, whereupon they shall find “the spirit of the Lord, which is freedom” (2 Cor 3:16–17).

26 Samuel Holdheim, “Volksgenossenschaft und Religionsgenossenschaft. Mit Rücksicht auf die literarische Fehde zwischen Dr. Einhorn and Prof. Delitzsch,” Der Israelit des neunzehnten Jahrhunderts 9 (1848), 180, as translated in Christian Wiese, “Samuel Holdheim’s ‘Most Powerful Comrade in Conviction’: David Einhorn and the Debate Concerning Jewish Universalism in the Radical Reform Movement,” in Wiese, ed., Redefining Judaism in an Age of Emancipation, 341.

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Libertas non est gratis Freedom is not free, however, and the cost of freedom from the Law is the foundational role of the Law in Jewish life and identity. Perhaps no Jew in the nineteenth century understood this cost better than Felix Adler, who was willing to pay it in full. Adler, the son of the acclaimed German Reformer Samuel Adler, had been expected to succeed his father as the rabbi of New York City’s Temple Emanu-El, but he returned from his rabbinical training in Berlin with different plans. Convinced, as Holdheim had been, that the ultimate goal of Judaism was the realization of a universal moral society, Adler believed the appropriate next step for Jews was to abandon religious particularism entirely. He therefore founded the New York Society for Ethical Culture, from which perch he became a leading advocate for social change and, at times, a critic of Reform Judaism. In a famous 1885 lecture, he pointed out the irresolvable tension at root in radical Reform Judaism: In taking away the law of Sinai, in declaring that there never was a law directly revealed by God, Reformed Judaism has taken away the underpinning of the whole system of Jewish religion …. The Reformers when they took away the old Law should have substituted a new Divine Law in its stead. But where is the new Law which they have to offer in place of the old? Where are the new institutions which they have founded? Where is the new practice which they have created? Where are the new rules of conduct which they have formulated? Reformed Judaism has been impotent to accomplish any of these results.27

Accordingly, Adler continued, Reform Jews ought to acknowledge that by removing the Law from Judaism they had eviscerated any distinction between themselves and other ethical monotheists. This criticism hardly differed from the rebukes Reformers had received from Orthodox authorities over the years. What differed was Adler’s remedy: Reform Jews ought not revert to Orthodoxy, but rather fuse themselves with the Unitarians or join his own Ethical Culture movement. Reformers in Adler’s time by and large refused this invitation. They continued to insist that Judaism must remain a historical religion even if the Talmud and the Mosaic Law, or at least much of it, had surrendered their claim on Jewish life. A generation earlier, Holdheim would have agreed. Historians routinely observe that Holdheim, especially later in his life, was acutely aware of the conclusion to which his thinking appeared headed, but invariably refused to take the final step by abandoning Jewish particularism altogether.28 As Mordecai Kaplan put it, “somehow, there was a tendency on Holdheim’s part to recoil from this apparent-

27  Gunther W. Plaut, The Growth of Reform Judaism (New York: World Union for Progressive Judaism, 1965), 39. 28  E. g., Meyer, Response to Modernity, 80–84.

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ly inevitable conclusion.”29 Holdheim insisted that the moral vision of Judaism, though to some extent separable from Jewish texts, identity, and historical experience, could never be dislodged entirely. Thus in 1852 he could write: Judaism is not the acknowledgement of the existence of the One God, the way an occasional philosopher might arrive at such a concept, but Judaism is this acknowledgement of the One God as it has been demonstrated and testified to by almost four thousand years of history in the spirit and in the life of the Jewish people.30

And in 1857: Least of all does Judaism want to extinguish the peculiarities of the Jewish people, and to destroy those phenomena of life which were produced by the interaction between the Jewish spirit and the destiny of the Jewish people …. Israel must never cease to be a historical people. Judaism must never cease to be a historical religion!31

Holdheim seemingly wished to have his cake and eat it too. He rejected the authority of nearly the entire Mosaic Law, deeming valid only its (alleged) monotheism and moral dicta, but at the same time he named possession of the Mosaic Law to be the defining characteristic of the Jewish people. Whereas the Torah provided the Noachide commandments as the foundation of morality for Gentiles, he explained, Jews alone enjoy the privilege of having the entire Torah, which he dubbed “the indelible historical particularity of the Jewish people, Judaism’s specific spiritual life.”32 Moreover, Holdheim was hardly reluctant to tap that Jewish inheritance often – his sermons and writings teem with allusions to the Torah (and Talmud!), the very texts whose authority he ostensibly rejected. The unresolved tension between freedom and tradition, between messianic present and historical past, that so marked Holdheim’s life and thinking is perhaps best expressed in the well-known, but possibly apocryphal, anecdote related by S. Y.  Agnon.33 At Holdheim’s Reformgemeinde in Berlin, Agnon notes, a long break separated the morning service from the concluding service on Yom Kippur. Holdheim allegedly spent the intervening time at a local café. He was not there to eat or drink, however, which would have violated the day’s fast, but to pore over the many prayers traditionally recited in synagogues on Yom Kippur

29  Mordecai M. Kaplan, The Greater Judaism in the Making: A Study of the Modern Evolution of Judaism (New York: Reconstructionist, 1960), 230. 30  Samuel Holdheim, Predigten über die jüdische Religion, vol. 2 (Berlin, 1853), 149, as translated in Petuchowski, Studies in Modern Theology and Prayer, 266. 31  Samuel Holdheim, Jüdische Glaubens‑ und Sittenlehre (Berlin, 1857), 125, as translated in Petuchowski, Studies in Modern Theology and Prayer. 267. 32 Holdheim, Predigten über die jüdische Religion, 159, as translated in Ralph Bisschops, “Samuel Holdheim and Sigismund Stern: The Clash Between the Dogmatic and Historicist Approach in Classical German Reform Judaism,” in Wiese, ed., Redefining Judaism in an Age of Emancipation, 275. 33  As reported by Petuchowski, Studies in Modern Theology and Prayer, 266.

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afternoon – prayers that had been expunged from the liturgy of the Reformgemeinde with Holdheim’s own approval. What Paul did on Yom Kippur is anybody’s guess. If his description of Christ’s death as a hilasterion in Rom 3:25 alludes to the annual ritual of atonement at the Temple, then perhaps Paul believed Yom Kippur had become one of those “days” a person in Christ no longer observes (Gal 4:10). If so, then perhaps Paul, like Holdheim, spent the day nostalgically reminiscing about Yom Kippur as it was before the messianic age. Who knows. Paul’s writings do indicate, however, that whatever internal turmoil Paul experienced over abandoning the Law, theologically he shared Holdheim’s desire to have his cake and eat too. For as much as Paul celebrated the freedom from the Law secured through Christ, he chose not to pursue the course likely offered by the libertines in his midst – and the one charted by Marcion a century later  – which stripped the Law of any ongoing significance whatsoever.34 Nor did Paul heed the advice coming from his right demanding reversion to the Law. Paul charted rather a middle course, insisting that the life in Christ, while freeing the believer from the demands of the Law, also enabled the believer to fulfill the Law – indeed, to fulfill the whole Law in a manner impossible for those outside of Christ. For Paul, fulfilling the Law remained a desideratum. It was just that one fulfilled the Law precisely by not observing it. Such a paradoxical view of the Law should not be surprising in light of Paul’s penchant for rendering paradoxically several other terms of Jewish identity.35 To be circumcised in the flesh, for example, is not to be reckoned circumcised in the flesh. Paul declares as much in Rom. 2:26, when he says that putatively uncircumcised persons who keep the righteous statutes of the Law are reckoned circumcised, whereas the putatively circumcised who stumble are reckoned as uncircumcised. (And obviously the “righteous statutes of the Law” do not include actual circumcision, for otherwise it would be impossible for putatively uncircumcised persons to observe them.) Likewise, Paul claims, to be descended from Abraham, even according to the flesh, is not to be reckoned a descendant of Abraham, even according to the flesh. This point Paul develops in Rom 4:1–12 and Rom 9:7. To be a Jew is not necessarily to be reckoned a Jew, according to Rom 2:28–29; to be an Israelite is not necessarily to be reckoned an Israelite, according to Rom 9:6 and, I would contend, Rom 11:26. Whatever a person’s actual physical appearance or pedigree, Paul reckons him or her to 34 It seems as though the Corinthian libertines offered the left-wing version of Paul’s antinomian gospel. As Jerome Murphy-O’Connor (Paul: A Critical Life [Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1996], 252) disapprovingly puts it, “virtually every statement he made took root in their minds in a slightly distorted form, and from this defective seed flowered bizarre approaches to different aspects of Christian life.” 35  Joshua D. Garroway, Paul’s Gentile Jews: Neither Jew nor Gentile, But Both (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2012).

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be a circumcised, Israelite, Jewish descendant of Abraham only by dint of his or her standing “in Christ.” Fulfillment of the Law, then, is just one more Jewish characteristic reevaluated by Paul. In his view, fulfilling the Law remains essential, but one who does its ordinances is not reckoned as having fulfilled it. As H. D. Betz and Stephen Westerholm have demonstrated, Paul maintains a careful distinction between “doing” the Law and “fulfilling” the Law.36 Doing the Law places one under a curse (Gal 3:10); it fails to provide justification (Gal 3:11–12); and it is the opposite of faith (Gal 3:12; Rom 10:5–6). Doing the Law is the doomed endeavor to which no believer should aspire. This assumption no doubt accounts for Paul’s curious addition of dikaiōma in the contrast between the circumcised and uncircumcised in Rom 2:25–26. The person who comes under the Law by becoming circumcised tries to “do” the Law (Rom 2:25), but if he fails – and Paul’s discussion in Romans 7 suggests that he inevitably will – then the entire effort is undermined. By contrast, the uncircumcised believer “observes the righteous statutes of the Law” (Rom 2:26), the observance of which must constitute something different from “doing” ordinances such as circumcision. The observance of righteous statutes in Rom 2:26 corresponds to what Paul says in Rom 8:4 about the relationship of believers to the Law – to wit, that the “righteous statute of the Law” is fulfilled in believers who walk “according to the Spirit.” The key to such fulfillment is love, as Paul explains in Rom 13:8 and Gal 5:14. Because the entire Law can be reduced to the love commandment set forth in Lev 19:18, to fulfill that commandment is to fulfill the entire Law. Moreover, fulfilling that commandment is made possible when submits to the life “in Christ.” No doubt that is why Paul can refer to bearing another’s burden, an act of love, as fulfilling the “Law of Christ” (Gal 6:2). The Law of Christ is not some alternative Law, revealed by Christ, that has replaced the Law of Moses, but rather the irreducible essence of the Mosaic Law which, when fulfilled, constitutes fulfillment of the entire Mosaic Law. In other words, as Paul puts it in Rom 3:27–31, faith supports rather than destroys the Law. Persons in faith who desist from trying to “do” the Law, whether Jews or Gentiles, will be deemed justified by God on account of their faith. The “Law of faith” (Rom 3:27) therefore terminates any ongoing distinction between Jews and Gentiles with respect to a historic advantage. Jewish boasting over 36  Betz, Galatians, 275–76. Stephen Westerholm, “On Fulfilling the Whole Law (Gal. 5:14),” Svensk Exegetisk Arsbok 51–52 (1986–87): 229–37. Räisänen (Paul and the Law, 63–64, n. 104) objects to this distinction largely on the basis of Rom 2:13–14, which speaks of Gentiles who “do the things of the Law”: “The Gentiles Paul had in mind could not ‘do’ the law (or its ἔργον) in any other sense than the Christians ‘fulfilled’ it, i. e. by living according to its central principle(s).” In response to which Westerholm (233–34, n. 16) writes: “For all practical purposes this may be so, but Paul is bent on scoring a theological point in insisting that Christians (and only Christians) ‘fulfill’ the law. The pattern of his usage is too striking to be downplayed.”

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Gentiles is excluded because their proprietary claim to the Law of Moses, and their observance of its statutes, has lost its significance. That does not mean that faith has abolished the Law, however, as Paul insists in Rom 3:31. Indeed, faith upholds the Law. Possibly Paul is referring back to Rom 3:21, in which he proclaimed that the righteousness of God through faith was attested by the Law and Prophets. More likely, he is drawing on the same notion of fulfillment described in Galatians and again later in Romans. The Law of faith (Rom 3:27) is nothing other than the Law of Christ (Gal 6:2) and obedience to the Law of faith and Christ constitutes fulfillment of the Law of Moses. Faith thus upholds the Law of Moses (Rom 3:31). Paul says much the same thing in 1 Cor 9:20–21, in what might be the most revealing passage about his relationship to the Law. Amid his admission to the Corinthians that he is at times inauthentic in order win believers, Paul clarifies parenthetically what he considers himself authentically to be. He concedes that he comes to those “under the Law” as one under the Law, all the while insisting that he is not under the Law. He experiences freedom from the Law in Christ. Yet, when he concedes that he comes to those “without the Law” (ἄνομος) as one without the Law, he reminds the Corinthians that he is in fact not without the Law – not without “God’s Law” at least, as he specifies in 1 Cor 9:21. He is subject to God’s Law because he is subject to the Law of Christ (ἔννομος Χριστοῦ). Thus, in Paul’s careful description of his authentic relationship to the Law, he distinguishes between the Mosaic Law and Christ’s Law (or God’s Law). He is not subject to the Mosaic Law; he is subject to God’s Law, which is Christ’s Law, which is the Law of Faith, which is the love commandment expressed in the Mosaic Law, and through which the Mosaic Law is fulfilled.

Conclusion Does all this make Paul antinomian? As with Holdheim, the answer is both yes and no. Inasmuch as both men held that the Mosaic Law no longer held a claim on Jews – or Gentiles wishing to become Jews – then yes, they might reasonably be called antinomian; yet, inasmuch as one can point to contemporaries who proved more antinomian, for lack of a better expression, then one must acknowledge that there remained something “nomian” about Paul’s and Holdheim’s approaches to Judaism in a messianic age. For Holdheim, Judaism remained Law-bound to extent that the Torah was still considered the unique possession of the Jewish people, to be combed for its pearls of wisdom and for its reflection of God’s desire for a just and moral society. Modern Jews were free from the requirements of the Law, but not free from the Law itself – not free from the obligation to preserve it, study it, and preach its moral message. For Paul, Judaism in the messianic age remained Law-bound to the extent that the capacity to love

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afforded by the life in Christ made it possible at last to fulfill the Mosaic Law, something doers of the Mosaic Law had ineluctably failed to achieve. Both approaches proved tenuous enough to keep Holdheim and Paul counterpunching from their heels throughout their careers. Two issues dogged them: first, why had God revealed a Law in the first place that God eventually repealed? Holdheim alleged that all but the moral laws had been intended only for the period of Israel’s political existence, a period God all along intended to terminate in 70 CE with the destruction of the Jewish nation. As Jacob Petuchowski observes, in this way Holdheim responded to Moses Mendelssohn’s claim that the ceremonial law could be repealed, but only in a manner as public and spectacular as it had been given.37 The destruction of Judea provided Holdheim such an event, though he fails to explain adequately why it took the rabbis eighteen centuries to discern God’s will in this regard. For Paul, the spectacular act of annulment was obviously the death and resurrection of Christ, but his effort in Gal 3:6–29 to show the subordination of the Law to the Abrahamic covenant, and the intention of God to fulfill the Abrahamic covenant in Christ, is widely regarded as strained exegesis. More importantly, perhaps, each man had to account for the vacuum created by dismissing the Torah as an authoritative code of conduct. The concerns expressed above by Adler are apt: without the Mosaic Law, how is a Jew to know how to behave, which communal rituals to perform, or how to worship God appropriately? How does one create a synagogue or ekklesia united in common convictions and mores in the absence of an objective authority? These questions were as challenging for Paul as they were for the Reformers, as 1 Corinthians makes clear. When believers in Corinth engaged in licentiousness with the justification that “all things are permissible” (1 Cor 6:12), Paul was at a loss to explain why the Corinthians should do otherwise. As Heikki Räisänen puts it, “he knows that fornication is incompatible with the life in Christ, but he has no code to which he could appeal to persuade the Corinthians about this, so that all he can do is to show how the slogan is correctly interpreted. Everything is lawful, to be sure, but everything is not ‘useful.’”38 Elsewhere Paul instructs his readers to “discern what is best” (Phil 1:10) or “discern what the will of God is – the good, the pleasing, and the perfect” (Rom 12:2), but how such determinations are made is left to the imagination. These fragile attempts to abandon yet preserve the Law are understandable in light of the messianic perspectives that generated them. Neither Paul nor Holdheim thought the current state of affairs would long endure. The return of Christ or the rise of universal brotherhood was on the horizon, and if the status of the Law had to remain unresolved for the time being, then so be it. In both cases, of  Petuchowski, Studies in Modern Theology and Prayer, 262.  Räisänen, Paul and the Law, 48–49.

37 38

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course, the messianic hour became the messianic week, year, century, and more. Christians in the wake of Paul, and Reform Jews in the wake of Holdheim, continued to deliberate and debate over the role of the Law, authority, and related topics, a legacy that continues unabated to the present day. The goal of this essay, however, has not been to consider similarities and differences in the development of Christianity and Reform Judaism vis-à-vis the Mosaic Law. Our subject rather has been two of the men at the root of those developments, and our object has been to demonstrate that juxtaposing Paul with Holdheim offers us a way to think about Paul as being “within Judaism” while at the same time critical of the Law and its ongoing validity for both Gentiles and Jews. Such a perspective on Paul is, I suppose, “old” in that it considers Paul to be critical of the Law, yet “radically new” in that it considers Paul to have been a Jew “within Judaism,” no less than was Samuel Holdheim eighteen centuries later. Age-old and yet radically new – Paul and Holdheim would no doubt approve.

Origen and Augustine on Paul and the Law Paula Fredriksen For scholars whether ancient or modern, the question “Paul and the Law” entails a host of other considerations. How did Paul relate to the original Jerusalem community and, thus, to traditions stemming from Jesus of Nazareth? How had Jesus in his turn related to Jewish law, and how had his attitudes and practices affected Paul’s? How did Paul’s diaspora setting contour his message, and/or alter what he had inherited? When he says ‘Law,’ does he always mean the same thing by it? And, finally – the primary question that will occupy us here – did Paul practice what he preached? In other words, did Paul himself live according to the so-called ‘Law-free’ gospel that he (putatively) urged on gentile ekklesiai?1 Our historical Paul depends in part upon how we read the rhetorical Paul. Paul often presented his ideas through pulsing pairs of binary opposites: spirit/flesh, gospel/law, grace/sin, life/death, circumcision/foreskin, Jew/gentile, Jew/Greek, freedom/slavery. To what degree do we map these verbal syzygies onto each other? And what happens as the contrasting pairs come to seem like opposing poles? In the history of interpretation, as we know, very often the negative terms were clustered together (sin, death, flesh, slavery) and opposed the positive terms, identified with Paul’s own message (grace, life, spirit, freedom). Where do we place – or claim that Paul placed – “Law,” “works of the Law,” and “circumcision” within this polarized rhetoric? Does “Law” correspond to or map onto these negative terms? Those who have read Paul this way have made a strong case for the apostle’s own post-Damascus “lawlessness.”2 In the second century, these questions were further compounded by fundamental problems of theology. Who was Paul’s god? How did he relate to the one high god of Graeco-Roman paideia? To the god who gave the Torah? How, in turn, did this high god relate to the material cosmos, especially as described in the opening chapters of Genesis (LXX)? The wildly various answers given to these problems of divine identity led to the splintering of the Christian movement post-100 into a family of warring sects, comprised almost exclusively of 1  Full disclosure: I think that neither Paul’s gospel nor his personal behavior was “Law-free:” see Paula Fredriksen, “Why Should a ‘Law-free’ Mission Mean a ‘Law-free’ Apostle?” JBL 134.3 (2015): 637–650. 2  For a recent statement of this sort of reading, arguing that the Christian Paul rejected the Law, see John Barclay, Paul and the Gift (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 2015).

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ex-pagan gentiles. As these groups contested with each other over what constituted sacred (thus revelatory) texts, and over how to read these texts, they derided gentile Christian rivals by reactivating derogatory terms from the older, intra-Jewish polemics that were available in Paul’s letters, in various gospels, and most especially in the LXX. In this way and for these reasons, the intra-Christian exchange of anti-Jewish insults, polemics contra Iudaeos, became one of the drive-wheels of patristic theology.3 Contra Iudaeos rhetoric in turn conjured a charged interpretive atmosphere around the question of Paul and the Law. Origen (185–254) and Augustine (354–430), two towering geniuses of the ancient church, wrestled with all of these issues of historical reconstruction, interpretive coherence, and the Christian derogation of Judaism (most especially of Jewish practice) when they each worked out their own readings of Galatians, of Acts (which foregrounds a Law-observant Paul), and of the Pauline corpus more generally. They shared a common scriptural canon, Old Testament and New; and they each self-identified with Roman orthodoxy, the “universal” church of the catholica. Finally, despite the century-plus that stands between them, they were similarly situated polemically: Origen wrote especially against the competing views of Paul’s mission and message offered by Marcion’s church; Augustine, against those of his former Latin Manichaean community, a dualist Christian sect much influenced by Marcion. For these reasons, their respective solutions to the puzzle of Paul’s own Jewish practice have several elements in common. Yet, finally, they contrast significantly with each other. Before we embark on this comparison of each man’s Paul, however, we need to have a general sense of what both had inherited from the second century. Neither Origen nor Augustine painted on a blank canvas; rather, each filled in their respective portraits of Paul against a background of the theologies, polemical postures, and traditions of reading laid on by the formative controversies of the earlier period. An initial glimpse at the second century, then, before we look to the third and the fourth.

3  Two overviews of these intra-Christian developments: Paula Fredriksen, Augustine and the Jews (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2010), 41–102 and 367–75; D. Nirenberg, Anti-Judaism: The Western Tradition (New York: W. W. Norton & Co., 2013), 87–134. This insight  – namely, that rhetoric contra Iudaeos served immediate needs internal to forming gentile Christian identities  – traces back to D. P. Efroymson’s fundamental essay, “The Patristic Connection,” in Anti-Semitism and the Foundations of Christianity, ed. A. T. Davis (New York: Paulist Press, 1979), 98–117. Dated but still very valuable is Marcel Simon’s great study, Verus Israël: Études sur les relations entre Chrétiens et Juifs dans l’empire romain (Paris: Éditions E. de Boccard, 1948; E. T. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1986).

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The Second-Century Framework For ancient Christian authors, historical issues (the relation of Jesus, and of the Jerusalem community, to Paul), hermeneutical issues (which texts were revelatory of Christianity, and how should these texts be read?), and theological issues (the identity of God and his relationship to various sacred texts, and to the Jews) all bore on the question of Paul and the Law. But by the second century, what had most dramatically and decisively shifted between Paul’s day and theirs – and thus what especially affected their answers – was God’s ethnicity. For Paul, God the father of Christ was the highest god, the universal deity, “the god of the Gentiles also” (Rom 3:29); but he was emphatically the god of Abraham, Isaac and Jacob, the god of Jewish scripture and of Jewish history. The Jewishness of God is, indeed, the pivot upon which Paul’s vision of impending final redemption turns (e. g., Rom 9–11, esp. 11:25–35; 15:4–12).4 In the second century, however, within the context of developing gentile Christianities, God the Father is himself no longer “Jewish.” He is conceived rather as the high god of Graeco-Roman paideia: perfect, changeless, radically stable, incorporeal, ungenerated (that is, contingent upon no other and, thus, uniquely self-generated), utterly transcendent; the source of everything else but not its maker (since creation as such implied action, thus change).5 The constraints of paideia had the effect of removing the One a long step from the Law: to have authored and communicated the Law would have involved the high god too intimately in time and change. What then, or who, was the source of the Law? Second-century theologians concurred with each other that the high god was the father of Christ, who himself was therefore (and by definition) another, lower divinity. What then was Christ’s relationship to and with the Law? According to the Valentinian Ptolemy, the question was complicated. The Law itself, he explained, had been established by yet a third deity, “a god who is just and who 4  On this issue of divine ethnicity and Paul’s construal of it, see my study, “How Jewish is God? Divine Ethnicity in Paul’s Theology” JBL 137 (2018): 193–212. 5  Thus, the Valentinian Ptolemy observed, “The nature of the ungenerated Father of All is incorruption and self-existent, simple, and homogeneous light” (Ep. ad Floram, apud Epiphanius, Pan. 33.7,7); similarly Justin, “That which always maintains the same nature, and in the same manner, and is the cause of all other things – that indeed is God,” (Dial. 3); God is unbegotten and without passion (1 Apol 25.2), without form (9.1), unchanging (13.4) without a name (10.1). Two excellent introductions to ancient philosophical theology: John Dillon, The Middle Platonists: A Study of Platonism 80 BC to AD 200 (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1977) and R. T.  Wallis, Neoplatonism (New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1972). E. R. Dodds’ graceful classic, Pagan and Christian in an Age of Anxiety (New York: WW Norton, 1965), narrates the afterlives of Plato’s cosmogony, the Timeaus, in various Roman Christian and pagan theologies and practices. More recently, with much relevant bibliography, Frederick E. Brent, “Plutarch’s Middle-Platonic God,” in Gott und die Götter bei Plutarch, ed. R. Hirsh-Luipold (Berlin: Walter de Gruyter, 2005), 27–49; and Jan Opsomer, “Demiurges in Early Imperial Platonism,” ibid., 51–99.

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hates evil” (Pan. 33.4,6), neither the perfect god nor the Devil, but rather the maker of this material cosmos, the demiurgos (7,4; this lower deity is himself of course contingent upon the high god, 7,6). And the Law was composite: some legislation was from the demiurge, some from Moses, some from the Jewish elders (4,1–2). Further, the demiurge’s laws are themselves composite: some are good but imperfect, requiring fulfillment (5,1); others base and unjust (like the lex talionis, Lev 24:20; Pan. 33.5,4), and still others purely exemplary and symbolic (5,1–2 and 8). Christ came to fulfill only the demiurge’s good laws (5,1; cf. Mt 5:17); the bad laws he came to destroy (5,1 and 7). The symbolic laws, finally, Christ came to decode for his followers, who now understand “circumcision,” for example, to refer to a spiritual and moral state, not a physical one (5,11; so similarly the true meaning of Sabbath rest, fasting, and Passover, 5,12–15, specifically referencing 1 Corinthians 5:7). When Paul pronounced the law holy and the commandments just and good (Rom 7:12), he clearly had only the “good” laws in view (6,6). Equally obviously, the Christian, understanding the true meaning of the symbolic laws, had little reason to enact them literally: their spiritual and ethical fulfillment was her goal (5,11–15). For Justin as for Ptolemy, the high god and father of Christ was radically transcendent and changeless, the prime deity of Middle Platonism. The god who appeared in the narratives of the LXX therefore, thus the god who gave the Law, for Justin as for Ptolemy cannot have been the high god. (The Jews’ philosophically naive insistence otherwise – that is, that it was indeed the high god who spoke to Moses – irritates Justin no end, 1 Apol 63.1–15; cf Dial. 60; 127.) No: the source of the Law, the busy narrative character of the LXX, was a heteros theos, “another god” (Dial. 56). But unlike Ptolemy, Justin holds that this law-giving agent was not some middle deity somewhere on the spectrum between the high god and Satan. Rather, he was none other than the pre-existent Christ, before his incarnation (56–62; cf. 38; cf. 1 Apol 63.1,14). Jewish law in its entirety thus had a much wider range of application for Justin than it did for Ptolemy. Since Christ was the source of the Law, the Law itself (not just some small portion) is a code for Christ; accordingly, the Jewish scriptures themselves become the texts of the (that is, of Justin’s) church (Dial. 29), which in turn represents the true Israel (123). All of the laws must be understood spiritually, in their allegorical sense, whether as symbols or as prophecies of Christ. This deeper understanding had evidently escaped the vast majority of fleshly Israel. It is on this account that many of the laws, “laws that were not good,” were mandated (Ezek 20:25; Dial. 21). Their purpose was pedagogical and punitive. Why? The answer was of a piece with Justin’s ethnic reformatting of his scriptural patrimony. Just as its high god is “re-ethnicized” to be non-Jewish (indeed, to be non-ethnic), and just as its messiah is “re-ethnicized” to be the timeless champion of Justin’s gentile church, so also the premier sin of scriptural tradition, the worship of idols (especially worship through blood sacrifices) is ethnically

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reformatted too. In Justin’s reading, idolatry becomes the hallmark sin not of ta ethnē, the gentile nations, but of Israel according to the flesh. The Jews’ abiding blindness and spiritual obduracy were displayed from their beginning as a nation, when they made and worshiped the Golden Calf (Dial. 19–23). The whole reason that the god of the LXX – that is, the pre-existent Christ – gave the laws about sacrifices and Sabbaths and foods and circumcision was to distract carnal Israel from their own fleshy, demon-driven behaviors (19–22). This legislation ended in and with the incarnate Christ (43), when its true, spiritual meanings were finally and definitively revealed. In the writings that we have from him, Justin never directly addresses issues arising from the Pauline materials. We can only infer from his critique of fleshly Jewish practices that his Paul would not have been traditionally Law-observant. The case for the non-Law-observant Paul, however, was made much more strongly by Paul’s premier second-century interpreter, Marcion.6 Marcion took the contrasting pairs of Pauline rhetoric – law and gospel, flesh and spirit, Jew and gentile – as pointing to two different moral and cosmic domains. The high god, the father of Christ, had been revealed for the first time by Christ: Jewish scriptures had no direct revelatory function, whether as embedded Christian allegory or as historical background, to the gospel. Jewish scriptures, rather, belonged to the Jews, whose creator god, justice-obsessed, harsh, bellicose, and much given to animal sacrifices, was the (lower) deity described in their holy books.7 The previously unknown high god, a god of light and love, was revealed uniquely through and by Christ. Those places in his letters where Paul seemed to speak positively of Jewish law, Marcion accordingly argued, were Judaizing interpolations placed in the manuscripts by Paul’s enemies. For, as Galatians, “the primary epistle against Judaism” clearly taught (Tertullian, Marc. 5.2), and as Paul clearly knew, the law had nothing to do with the gospel. Textually instantiating these theological points of principle, Marcion proceeded to champion a new scriptural canon for the Christian: a collection of ten Pauline letters together with a gospel (possibly some version of Luke).8 6  In the year between my framing of the current essay (2015) and my finishing it (2016), Judith Lieu has produced a definitive study, Marcion and the Making of a Heretic: God and Scripture in the Second Century (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2015). She notes there the difficulty of reconstructing Marcion’s teaching from the hostile witness of Mediterranean heresiological writers (15–142), and thus analyzes her material in two cycles, heresiological (Part 1) and synthetic (Part 2). 7 Marcion’s particular contribution to these second-century theological debates, Lieu notes, “is in his radical separation and degrading of the Creator,” Marcion, 434; for her full discussion, 323–66, summarized 434–36. See also Frances M. Young, Biblical Exegesis and the Formation of Christian Culture (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997), 63–7, on Marcion’s reading of the LXX. 8  On Marcion’s “canon,” see Lieu, Marcion, 183–233 (Marcion’s gospel), 234–69 (on his Pauline collection), 398–432 (on his scriptural hermeneutics).

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For our purposes, what matters most about Marcion’s arguments is the counter-argument that they drew from Tertullian.9 Amplifying Justin’s earlier critique of Judaism in Dialogue with Trypho, and (through clenched teeth) occasionally agreeing with Marcion (“We too [quoque] claim that the primary epistle against Judaism is that addressed to the Galatians, for we receive with open arms that abolition of the ancient law,” Marc. 5.2), Tertullian turned his defense of his church’s double canon and single divine hierarchy into a massive indictment of traditional Jewish practice and, thus, of the Jews.10 Those “troublesome scrupulosities” about cult, for example, that had made Israel’s god seem like a bad god to Marcion, had actually been given by a good god, Tertullian explained, and for a good purpose (deflection from idol-worship), though to a bad people (fleshly Israel, Marc. 2.18,3; 4.31,3–7). Marcion was wrong: Reading the Jewish scriptures in a fleshly way – reading, indeed, said Tertullian, like the Jews (3.7,1) – Marcion had missed the condemnation of Jews and of Judaism that stood in the Jewish scriptures themselves (e. g., 5.2,1). No need to posit two different deities, then, a “Jewish” one and a “Christian” one: God the Father was the same deity proclaimed in both revelations. The positive significance of the Old Law for the true church, Tertullian repeated, lay in its secret and figurative meanings (3.19,2; 22.1). Jesus and the first generation of the church correctly understood these scriptures, and so repudiated fleshly Jewish practices (e. g., 4.12,1, on Jesus’ teaching against the Jewish observance of the Sabbath). The apostles turned aside from “Judaism itself” (ipso Iudaismo, 3.22,3). And the apostle Paul certainly understood that the gospel abolished the Law (5.2,1). By the turn of the third century, then, shaped by the energetic diversity (and correspondingly energetic arguing) of gentile Christianities, the positions of the proto-orthodox – that stream in which Origen and Augustine will stand – had clearly emerged. Jewish scriptures were really Christian scriptures, once read with the higher, spiritual understanding of allegory; the texts of the New Testament completed the witness of the Old. The Jewish fleshly misreading of the Old Testament Jewish texts was literally embodied in fleshly Jewish practice – actual circumcision, resting one day out of seven, avoiding certain foods and keeping certain holidays. Both this style of reading and this tradition of practice had been repudiated by Jesus and by his disciples after him. And the apostle who had issued the clearest clarion of the gospel’s freedom, who had insisted upon it and who had himself lived it was, of course, Paul.

 For Lieu’s analysis of Tertullian, Marcion, 50–85.  On this rhetorical/theological move, see Efroymsen, “Patristic Connection,” 100–6.

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Origen’s Paul In any discussion of Paul and the Law, certain New Testament passages will jump to the fore: Galatians 2:11–14, Paul’s argument in Antioch when he accused Peter of hypocrisy; 1 Corinthians 9:20 (Paul’s becoming “to the Jews as a Jew”), the apostle’s modus operandi when dealing with his own people (was he not then a hypocrite himself?); Romans, both on the status of the Law (ch. 7) and on the status of Paul’s syngeneis, ethnic Israel (9:4; 11:26); Acts 21:26, with its presentation of a Law-observant Paul who sacrifices in the Jerusalem temple. As thoughtful pagan critics such as Celsus and Porphyry came to know these texts better, Paul’s account of his fight with Peter in particular caused special embarrassment: their rift implied a crack in the very foundations of the movement.11 Jerome in his own commentary on Galatians had credited Origen with finding a solution to the problem of the apostolic face-off depicted in Galatians 2.12 How could Peter, who by this point must have known that Law-observance was nugatory, have capitulated to the men from James? How could there be such fundamental disagreement among the founders? How could Paul – the younger man and the newer apostle – have dared to reprimand Peter in public?13 It was not a true fight, Jerome claims Origen claimed: rather, like two attorneys, each apostle usefully pretended to fight (utilis simulatio, a “useful deception”) for the edification of their audience. Peter knew full well that Law-observance was of no positive value, especially for the Christian. He pretended to go along with James’ men in order to give Paul the opportunity to publicly declaim the right position. In writing up his account of this episode, Paul continued this pedagogical deception, describing Peter as erring and, thus, as rightly subject to Paul’s rebuke. In Origen’s extant works no such interpretation of Galatians 2 appears. So much has been lost of his corpus that this fact in itself does not tell against Jerome’s attribution. As we will shortly see, however, such a reconstruction of apostolic utilis simulatio does stand in some tension with what Origen seems to say, specifically on the topic of Peter’s orientation toward the Law and Paul’s observance of it, in his Contra Celsum and in his commentary on Romans. 11  In his commentary on Galatians (praef. I), Jerome reports that Porphryry’s strategy, in focusing on this episode, was “to brand [Peter] with error and [Paul] with impudence, and to bring against us as a body the charge of erroneous notions and of false doctrine, on the grounds that the leaders of the churches differed among each other.” 12  Ep. 75.3,4 Jerome to Augustine (in the Augustinian numbering). Jerome there mentions having drawn on Origen’s five books of commentary on Galatians, and on book ten of Origen’s Stromateis. Jerome also claimed Chrysostom as another allied authority, but Chrysostom’s interpretation of Galatians was more complicated: see Margaret M. Mitchell, “Peter’s ‘Hypocrisy’ and Paul’s: Two ‘Hypocrites’ at the Foundation of Earliest Christianity?” NTS 58 (2012): 213–34. 13  This was not only a question of disrespect; Paul’s behavior also flies in the face of Jesus’ instruction that rebukes are to be tendered quietly: “If your brother sins against you, go and correct him privately,” Matt 18:15.

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Origen composed these two works in Caesarea within a few years of each other, the commentary sometime shortly before 244, the work against Celsus around 246. In both, he positioned himself clearly against Marcion: the god who made the laws and who gave them to Moses, he asserts against the earlier theologian, is the creator of the world (Cels. 1.18: by “creator” Origen seems to mean the preincarnate Christ, whom he describes as the founder of Judaism as well as of Christianity: Cels. 3.14; cf. Comm. Rom. 2.13,10 [2.9,12]).14 Unlike Justin, however, who, using similar arguments, had urged that the LXX’s god had always been understood by Septuagintal heroes such as David or Isaiah to be the Christ, Origen insisted on the ‘Jewish identity’ of the high god as well. “The supreme god is called ‘the god of the Hebrews’ even by people alien to our faith,” he notes approvingly (Cels. 5.50).15 The first position (that is, that Christ gave the Law and was thus the founder of Judaism) and the second (that Christ’s father the high god is also the god of Abraham, Isaac and Jacob, 4.33) together combine to support Origen’s positive estimate of the Law more generally. Put differently: the more positive the Law’s source, and the more positively both Christ and God are associated with historical Israel, the more scope for viewing Jewish law positively. This in turn opens up more room to imagine the apostles as actually Law-observant – an argument that Origen will make. Like Justin, however, and indeed like every ancient theologian known to us with the possible exception of Marcion,16 Origen too holds that the deeper or truer or fundamental meaning of the Law is available only through spiritual or typological readings of it. “The laws were written with the very intention that they should be allegorized” (4.49). The Jewish enactment of these laws, “fleshly” or “literal,” actually had deeper import: their rites symbolized profound mysteries (4.23; these ceremonies were typoi for more profound truths, 2.2). Still, Origen insists, Jewish literal-mindedness does not take away from the Jews’ religious accomplishment both in the past and even currently. On the Sabbath, it was 14  There are two major chapter and section numbers of Origen’s commentary on Romans. Sources Chrétiennes uses the numbering system of the standard critical edition, Der Römerbriefkommentar des Origenes: Kritische Ausgabe der Übersetzung Rufins, ed. C. P. Hammond Bammel, 3 vols. (Freiburg im Breisgau: Herder, 1990–98). While Thomas P. Scheck’s English translation (2 vols., FC 103–104 [Washington: CUA Press, 2001–2002]) relies on this same text, he uses the chapter and section numbering system of Migne. In order to allow the reader to quickly locate both the English and a critical edition, this article provides both citations – the ET first, the Latin second. 15  This god’s magical efficacy also seems for Origen to bespeak his supremacy over lower gods, that is, daemons: 3.22; 4.33; 5.45. 16 Tertullian accused Marcion of not reading scripture “spiritually” (= allegorically) – thus, of reading it like “the Jews” (Marc. 3.6–7): “Let the heretic now give up borrowing poison from the Jew!” (3.8,1). How much of this is clever rhetorical invective, how much an actual description (as Harnack took it to be) is less than clear. Lieu opines that “it is evident that Marcion did read ‘symbolically’ in some sense; however, he does not seem to have applied this technique systematically to the scriptural narratives of God’s behavior,” Marcion, 365. See too her Index, s. v. “allegory,” 496.

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possible to see the entire nation ‘studying philosophy’ (that is, the Law, 4.32); and even to this (that is, to Origen’s) day, “the [pagan] philosophers in spite of their impressive teachings fall down to demons, while even the lowest Jew looks only to the supreme god” (5.43). The Law’s double layers of meaning, superficial vs. profound (2.4 superficial being a ‘Jewish’ reading), or literal vs. spiritual (7.18, the mistake pagans make in interpreting the Law; cf. 2.2, the mistake of the Jews) in turn describes the field of Jesus’ mission and message. Jesus, himself the Law’s author, came to do away not with the Law per se, but rather with the Jewish interpretation of the Law: “Jesus did away with the customs of the Jews while reverencing their prophets” (1.29, my emphasis). He thereby revealed their true meaning (5.60). Now, however, the “doctrines of the Jews,” meaning their behavioral observances, “are myths and trash” (2.5). Thus “it does not follow, since [Christ] was a Jew, that every believer, whether from the gentiles or from the Jews, must keep the laws literally,” Origen teaches (2.4), especially since believers now understand the Law’s mystical meanings (5.60). The truth having been made known, such ‘literal’ behaviors should be left behind, though Jews and even some Christian Jews continue in them (2.1 and 3; 5.61). Still, as Celsus observes, the gospels describe a law-observant Jesus: “Jesus kept all Jewish customs and even took part in their sacrifices” (2.6). At what point, then, did Jesus teach against Jewish practice? And why did Peter evidently miss the lesson? “Peter seems to have kept the customs of the Jews for a long time,” notes Origen, pointing to Acts 10. “He had not yet learned from Jesus to ascend from the letter of the Law to its spiritual interpretation” (2.1. He then refers as well to Peter’s behavior in Gal 2:12). Origen solves this puzzle by invoking John 16:12–13, where Jesus says to his disciples that he still had “many things to say to you, but you cannot bear them now.” The question in this passage is, what were the many things that Jesus had to say to his disciples, which at that time they were not able to bear? This is my view. Perhaps because the apostles were Jews and had been brought up in the literal interpretation of the Mosaic law, he had to tell them what was the true law, and of what heavenly things the Jewish worship was only a pattern and a shadow. … But he saw that it is very difficult to eradicate from a soul doctrines with which he was almost born and brought up … He perceived that it is hard to prove that they are ‘dung’ and ‘loss’ (Phil 3:8). … He therefore put it off until a more suitable time after his passion and resurrection. … By ‘many things’ [Jesus] means the method of explanation and exegesis of the Law according to the spiritual sense, and somehow the disciples could not bear them, because they had been born and brought up among the Jews. (Cels. 2.2, my emphasis)

The timing of Jesus’ instruction resolves the tension between the evangelists’ depiction of his own Law observance and the message of freedom from the Law that defines the kerygmatic gospel. And it also accounts for the long period, post-resurrection, during which the disciples continued to maintain their tra-

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ditional observance. Peter’s vision at Joppa revealed that Peter still adhered “to Jewish customs about clean and unclean things” (Cels. 2.1; Acts 10:9–15). At that point and thereafter, the Spirit of truth “taught him the many things [about spiritual exegesis] which he could not bear to hear when Jesus was still with him according to the flesh” (Cels. 2.2). In short: The spiritual exegesis of the Law came in phases, post-resurrection. This phased instruction allows for the disciples’ continuing Law observance. But what about the situation in Antioch, when Peter and Barnabas and the other Jewish believers withdrew from believing gentiles, fearing the men from James (Gal 2:12)? And what about Paul’s allowing circumcision, and acting as a Jew among Jews so that he could win Jews (1 Cor 9:20)? Here a certain pastoral pragmatism governs both Origen’s remarks, and the motives of the apostles as he reconstructs them. “It was appropriate that those sent to the circumcision should not abandon Jewish customs” (Cels. 2.1), in order to encourage and enable their kinsmen to join the new community. And Paul himself became a Jew to the Jews, so that he might gain Jews (Cels. 2.1; 1 Cor 9:20). It was for the same reason – to gain Jews for the church – that Paul also even offered sacrifices (Cels. 2.1; Acts 21:26). “In the beginning phase of our faith,” Origen notes in his commentary, Paul permitted Jewish Christians to circumcise their sons, an option that he did not extend to gentile believers (Comm. Rom. 2.13,3 [2.9,4]). The true meaning of circumcision is spiritual, its true ritual expression baptism (2.11,9 [2.8,1]). Paul certainly knew this, as he himself taught it (2.11,4–13,23 [2.8,3–9,28]). But fleshly circumcision as practiced by Jews was an indigenous mark of their own nation, deeply ingrained as custom. Paul understood that Jews would not come into the church unless they could circumcise their sons: a blanket interdiction, in other words, would have impeded the spread of the gospel (2.13,3 [2.9,4]). No utilis simulatio here: the apostles continued to observe Jewish tradition for eminently practical, even laudable, reasons. For the same practical and pastoral reason, says Origen, Paul actually proscribed circumcision for gentile believers: requiring circumcision of gentiles would also have impeded the spread of the gospel. This was in part because gentiles (and especially gentile heretics, like Marcion, who repudiate the Old Testament) regard circumcision with derision as a “mutilation of shameful places” (2.13,27 [2.9,32]). Between this cultural contempt, and a real fear of pain, gentiles would have been hindered in their way to God (loc. cit.). The “shameful deformity” as practiced by Jews before the advent of Christ, however, was itself a useful prefiguration of the future redemption: both required the shedding of blood (2.13,27–29 [2.9,32–34]: Origen suggests that Satan demanded “blood as our price,” 2.13,29 [2.9,34]). Now that baptism has been revealed as the true circumcision of the inner man, [Christian] gentiles ‘become’ Jews by receiving ‘circumcision’ with a mystical meaning (2.14,4 [2.10,2]). In this sense, Christian gentiles are ‘law-observant’ too.

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To sum up: For Origen, the true value and meaning of Jewish practices always rested at the allegorical or mystical or spiritual level; and the laws that seemed to mandate literal (“fleshly”) practices had actually always been meant to be interpreted kata pneuma, according to their mystical – that is, their gentile Christian – meanings. With the coming of Christ – not his advent kata sarka, but his advent post-resurrection kata pneuma – these true meanings of the Law were revealed. For pragmatic pastoral reasons, however, both circles of disciples, those around James and those around Paul, those who went to the circumcision and those who went to the gentiles, permitted Jewish Christians to continue their fleshly observance of the Law, as occasionally Paul did himself (though for strategic reasons, not principled ones).17 And this legal latitude seems to have been restricted to “the beginning phase of our faith” (2.13,3 [2.9,4]), that is, to the first apostolic generation of the church. What then of that larger group, Israel according to the flesh, that still observes and guards fleshly Jewish practice up to Origen’s own day? While dismissing current Jewish practices and doctrines, Origen in both writings ends on a high note: acceding to Paul’s statement in Romans 11:26, Origen too affirms that “all Israel” – meaning ethnic Israel, not just ‘spiritual Israel’ – “will be saved” (Cels. 6.80; Comm. Rom. 8.12,3–8 [8.11,2–8], with reference to 1 Tim 2:4, “God wants all men to be saved”). When? Once the “fullness of the gentiles” comes into the church (Cels. 6.80; cf. Comm. Rom. 8.2,2 [8.2,1], in “the last days”). We will defer consideration of the scope of Origen’s vision of final redemption, however, until after we consider Augustine on the Law, on Paul’s attitude toward the Law, and on Paul’s personal observance of the Law.

Augustine’s Paul For more than ten years, the formative period of his young adulthood, Augustine had been a member of, and an active advocate for, the Manichaean church. This dualist Christian sect, originally Persian, had drawn much from the theological legacy of Marcion, with his derogation of Jewish law based on his close reading  – and de-Judaizing purgations  – of Paul’s letters.18 Augustine would have been intimately familiar with this de-Judaized, anti-legal Paul. In the first flush of intellectual brio following his conversion to Roman Christianity in Milan, 17 Note: in neither of these writings does Origen discuss the reason for Paul’s reprimanding Peter, or the offending element of Peter’s activity that led Paul to accuse him of “hypocrisy.” 18 On the similarities and differences between Marcion’s and Mani’s views on New Testament scriptures, especially the Pauline letters, see M. Tardieu, “Principes de l’exégèse manichéenne du Nouveau Testament,” Les règles de l’interprétation, ed. M. Tardieu (Paris: Éditions du Cerf, 1987), 123–146, esp. 142–44, on Paul. As Tardieu explores – and as Augustine’s magnum opus, contra Faustum, makes clear – Western Latin Manichees were exceedingly familiar with orthodoxy’s double canon, well armed with honed critiques of both Old and New Testament texts.

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Augustine had viewed Paul’s message as fundamentally compatible with that of [pagan] Neoplatonism.19 But Augustine’s Paul underwent a rapid  – and thorough – re-“scripturalization” once Augustine was back in North Africa (387), inducted into Hippo’s clergy (391), elevated to the position of sole bishop (396), and forced to confront his former co-religionists publicly, especially on the issue of how to read Paul’s letters. His pastoral, political, and polemical contexts directly affected Augustine’s reconstruction of the ‘historical’ Paul. These contexts were themselves compounded by circumstance. Augustine’s works that specifically attempt to retrieve Paul from the Manichees20 span from 392 (his debate with his former Manichaean colleague Fortunatus) to 399/400 (his massive refutation of Latin Manichaeism, the c. Faustum), efforts called forth by energetic missionary activities on the part of his former co-religionists. Against the sectarians’ position, Augustine urged that Paul be seen as a spokesman for the freedom of the will and the goodness of the Law, hence his special concentration on Romans and on Galatians at this time.21 Concurrently, and separately, another project of interpretation engaged him: how the Bible could be read not only in a spiritual way, but also in a way that respected its “historical” or “literal” (ad litteram or secundum historicam proprietatis) or “specific” (proprie) meanings no less than its deeper, figural, Christian ones (doctr. 19  Peter Brown, Augustine of Hippo (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1967) reviews this period of Augustine’s life in chapters 9 and 10, “The Platonists,” and “Philosophy;” see esp. his comments on Paul and philosophy, 113. For a very different perspective on these same years (384 to 388), Jason BeDuhn, Augustine’s Manichaean Dilemma, vol. 1: Conversion and Apostasy, 373–388 CE (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2010), 165–302. Fredriksen, Augustine and the Jews, 122–32, traces Augustine’s shifting intellectual horizon line during the years in Milan; for a more detailed analysis, Fredriksen, “Beyond the Body/Soul Dichotomy: Augustine on Paul against the Manichees and the Pelagians,”RA 23 (1988): 87–114. 20  For an analysis of the ways that North African Manichaeism based itself on Paul’s letters, F. Decret, “Utilisation des épîtres de Paul chez les Manichéens de l’Afrique,” in Le epistole paoline nei Manichei, i Donatisti e il primo Agostino. (Roma: Instituto Patristico Augustinianum, 1989), 29–83. 21  His public debate with Fortunatus – when the Manichee ran circles around Augustine in quoting obliging sentences from Paul’s letters – put Augustine on notice: the high tone of his philosophical learning, acquired in Milan, was not going to impress the locals back in Africa, who orientation toward biblical texts was much less sophisticated. Simply by quoting NT texts so much more often than did Augustine, Fortunatus put his opponent in an awkward situation. On the centricity of Paul to this debate, see W. H. C. Frend, “The Gnostic-Manichaean Tradition in North Africa,” JEH 4 (1953): 13–27, at p. 21; further on the debate, Fredriksen, Augustine, 142–54; Jason BeDuhn, Augustine’s Manichaean Dilemma, vol. 2: Making a “Catholic” Self, 388–401 CE (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2013), 122–63. Augustine’s Pauline commentaries cluster in 394/95: expositio quarundam propositionum ex epistolae ad Romanos; expositio ad Galatas; epistolae ad Romanos inchoate exposition. In the period immediately following, he turns repeatedly to Romans in smaller essays, qu. 66–68 of de diversis 83 quaestionibus and finally, capping this period, he writes his response to Simplicianus of Milan (ad Simplicianum, 396; question 2 focuses on Romans 9, and the choice of Jacob over Esau), and begins – and, perhaps, completes – the Confessions (397).

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Chr. 3.10,15–23,33).22 And, finally, Augustine became engaged in a long-running and rancorous argument with Jerome over the ethics of deceit, thus over the correct construal of the apostles’ behavior, and Paul’s account of it, as given in Galatians 2. What emerged from the intersection of all of these efforts, as we shall see, was Augustine’s insistence on a Paul who always lived according the Jewish law, and who did so out of a principled piety. Paul’s Jewish practice, interestingly, was rehabilitated well before that of Jesus. Both in epistulae ad Galatas expositio (394/5) and in de doctrina Christiana (397), Augustine had presented a Jesus whose mission had defied the Law. Augustine writes: Jesus Christ did not follow certain observances to the letter. [Augustine then refers to Mt 12:1–8 and parr, Jesus’ disciples picking grain on the Sabbath.] And so by not observing those things [viz.: the Law’s commands] in a carnal way, Jesus incurred the hatred of carnal people and indeed received the punishment laid down for those not observing them, but he did so in order to set those who believed in him free from the fear of such punishment. (Exp. Gal. 22.1–2) The people who resolutely held fast to these signs [by interpreting them as halachkic practices] were unable … to tolerate the Lord, who disregarded them … [and they refused to believe in him] since he refused to follow these practices in the way that they were observed by the Jews. (de doct. Chr. 3.6,23)

Jesus had publicly enacted his disdain for the Jewish understanding of the Law, says Augustine, not in order to somehow communicate the Law’s mystical or spiritual meanings, but in order to free his Jewish hearers from their fear of not enacting the Law. The Law was indeed meant to be ‘fulfilled,’ by which Augustine seems to mean “enacted,” but genuine fulfillment is possible only through love, never through fear. And the Law in and of itself, Augustine emphasizes, is good. “The Law is not to blame [for carnal understandings of it]. For the law is spiritual [Rom 7:14] and does not force anyone to understand it carnally” (Exp. Gal. 7.3–4). Thus both apostles, Paul and Peter, had continued to live according to their native customs, understanding their symbolic or Christological meanings, but abiding in them not out of fear, but out of love – a love oriented in part around pastoral concerns to reach out to other Jews.23 22  Augustine’s interest in a “historical”/ad litteram reading of scripture balances against his (no less great) commitment to typological and allegorical (“spiritual”) interpretation. In the 390s, he was searching for a way to meaningfully construe a biblical passage within its own timeframe (that is, within the timeframe of the given episode, incident or story set in the past). The Bible, for Augustine, could not be only a repository of infinite symbols and mystical meanings: it also had to relate things that “actually happened” (facta narratur, as he will say in 399, Faust. 12.7). This hermeneutical principle will inform his position as he jousts with Jerome over how to understand Pater and Paul’s argument in Galatians 2. See further Fredriksen, Augustine, 190–96 (de doctrina christiana), and 240–48 (there against Faustus, in defense of Jewish blood offerings in the days of the temple). 23  Thus, addressing the issue of Paul’s circumcising Timothy, whose mother was Jewish,

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If both Peter and Paul were Law-observant, for what reason did Paul reprimand Peter in Antioch? In the background of Augustine’s reconstruction, first framed in his Galatians commentary of 394/5, stands his distaste for the solution to this question that he had read in Jerome’s. In Jerome’s account of the apostles’ simulatio, Peter’s withdrawal from gentile believers, prompted by the visit of men from James, had led these gentiles to assume that they, too, were required to follow Jewish law (something that Peter knew not to be the case). Paul had then ‘lied’ when he performed his reprimand of Peter (since the two had arranged for this by agreement and in advance), and Paul lied yet again when he knowingly reported this incident in a false way, as if it had been a real confrontation, in Galatians 2. Augustine, acutely aware of the Manichees’ theory of interpolations in Paul’s letters (namely, that any passages seeming to speak positively about the Law or more generally about Jewish scriptures were inserted later by Paul’s Judaizing opponents), could not tolerate the erosion of scriptural authority that he felt Jerome’s reconstruction entailed. Writing to Jerome as he worked on his own commentary, Augustine warned: I think that it is extremely dangerous to entertain the idea that the sacred books contain any lie anywhere; that is, the idea that the men who composed and wrote the Scriptures may have lied in their own books. … If we allow into that supreme authority even a single ‘useful lie,’ nothing will remain of those books because, whenever anyone finds something in them difficult to do or to believe, he will appeal to this same idea and attribute the passage to the plan or purpose of a lying author. (Ep. 28.3,3)

Augustine’s letter never reached Jerome. Ep. 28 wandered. However, in the interval between this letter and Ep. 40, his next effort to engage Jerome on these issues, Augustine had become more committed to reading biblical texts quam littera sonat, “according to just what the words say” or “historically.” These two concerns combined to make his second letter in defense of the Law and of Paul’s Law-observance even more sharply worded (Ep. 40, c. 397). Pointing to 1 Cor 9:20 (“I have become to the Jews like a Jew in order that I may gain some”), Augustine insisted against Jerome that the apostle did not mean that he acted “as if,” living by Jewish custom as some sort of ploy (simulatio fallaciae) to entice fellow Jews to the gospel. Paul “was, after all, a Jew; but having become Christian, he had not abandoned the sacramenta of the Jews, which that people had suitably and rightly received in that period when they were necessary. Therefore, he undertook their observance when he was an apostle of Christ” (Ep. 40.4,4). And he did so sincerely. The Law was not a problem, and keeping it was not a problem: the only problem was thinking wrongly about the Law, namely, that it when the latter was already Christian (Acts 16:1–30), Augustine insists that Paul “did to avoid scandalizing his own people. He did not act hypocritically (simulans) in any way, but rather he acted out of that indifference with which he says, ‘Circumcision is nothing, and uncircumcision is nothing’” (1 Cor 7:19; Exp. Gal. 41.6).

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was necessary for salvation (the position taken by the men from James; loc. cit.; cf. Exp. Gal. 41.7). Paul’s personal Law observance demonstrated to other Jews drawn to the gospel that there was nothing dangerous or wrong in keeping their beloved inherited traditions: hope for salvation should not be placed in them, however, for that salvation signified by these sacramenta had been revealed already through Christ. The Law, in brief, was no longer necessary for salvation (though before Christ, as in the days of the Maccabees, it had been, Ep. 40.4,6). For that reason, Paul forbore from imposing these observances on gentile believers, whose unfamiliarity with them “would hold them back from faith” (40.4,4). Therefore, concluded Augustine, the reason for Paul’s rebuke to Peter had nothing to do with the latter’s own Law-observance per se (40.4,5). Rather, Paul spoke out against Peter’s acting as if keeping these customs were necessary for gentile believers, “forcing the gentiles to live like Jews” (Gal 2:14; so also Exp. Gal. 15.1–8). But gentiles were never obligated to Jewish law. Further, Augustine continued: When Paul spoke of looking at aspects of his former life as “loss and rubbish” (Phil 3:8), he certainly did not mean by this statement that he disdained the ceremonies of the Law, but only the errors and vices (like his persecution of the ekklesia) that his own, formerly unenlightened Law-observance had led him into (Ep. 40.4,6). But his sincerity in respecting Jewish custom could not be questioned, Augustine urged; otherwise If [Paul] observed those sacraments because he pretended that he was a Jew in order to gain some Jews, why did he not also sacrifice with the gentiles, since he became like someone without the Law for those who were without the Law so that he might gain some, too? Rather, he observed the [Jewish] sacraments like someone who was a Jew by birth, and he said all this not in order that he might deceitfully pretend that he was what he was not, but because he thought that he should mercifully help [other Jews] in this way … out of compassionate love. (Ep. 40.4,6)

Alas, Ep. 40 to Jerome also wandered. Meanwhile, in late 398, a powerful local initiative against North African catholics emerged in the newly-published and circulating Capitula, a writing by the Manichaean electus and bishop, Faustus. A brilliant work of apology and invective, the Capitula was designed to serve Manichaean missionaries in their disputes with catholic Christians (Faust. 1.2), primarily through a critique of both Old and New Testament texts. Manichees had their own scriptures, five books of Mani’s teachings and visions. For them, the New Testament served more or less as apocrypha; and its writings, they said – and here Manichees took a page from Marcion – had long ago been compromised by Judaizing interpolations (e. g., 33.3). The Old Testament was much, much worse: its god, its heroes, its prophets, and its laws were literally beyond redemption (e. g., 22.4–5). In short, (Jewish) law could have nothing to do with (true, Christian – that is, Manichaean) revelation; true Christianity could only be that church wholly untainted by carnal Judaism.

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To make his case, Faustus ingeniously combined two originally quite different traditions contra Iudaeos. The first was that of the dualist-Marcionite stream, with its critique of the morally unsavory Jewish god, of the unelevating Jewish texts, and of the gospel and the Pauline epistles corrupted by Judaizers. These positions would have been well known to Augustine, given his own decade-long allegiance to the sect. But together with this invective Faustus combined the contra Iudaeos polemics originally conceived to counter Marcion: the arguments of Justin, of Tertullian, and of catholic tradition more broadly. These had refuted Marcion’s position by turning his critique of Jewish texts and of the Jewish god into a critique of the Jews themselves. Thus, the Jewish god was not morally obtuse: the Jews were. The Jewish laws were not carnal: the Jews were. And their carnality was exhibited nowhere more clearly than in the fleshliness of Jewish practice – interpreting “circumcision” as if the commandment were about body parts, not sexual modesty; interpreting Sabbath as if it meant literally a day of rest; interpreting laws about animal sacrifices as if God wanted blood, and laws about food ways as if God cared about food, and so on. By holding onto these carnal Jewish books – by which he meant the gospels (written by nescio quibus … semi-iudaeis, “obscure half-Jews,” Faust. 33.3) and Paul’s corrupted letters, as well as to the Old Testament  – catholics, Faustus argued, condemned themselves by being too much like the Jews, caught up in fleshly beliefs and practices of their own. And by not performing the Laws in the Jewish manner while insisting that the Jews’ books were really theirs, he continued, catholics further revealed themselves as hypocrites. “I reject circumcision as disgusting,” wrote Faustus, “and so do you … I reject sacrifice as idolatry; so do you. … Both of us regard Passover and Sukkot as useless and needless … Both of us despise and deride the various laws against mixing types of cloth, or species of animals … You cannot blame me for rejecting the Old Testament, because you reject it as much as I do. … You deceitfully praise with your lips what you hate in your heart. I’m just not deceitful, that’s all,” (6.1). “Your Christianity, just like mine, is based on the belief that Christ came to destroy the law and the prophets. You prove this by what you do, though you deny it by what you say” (18.1). “You sip so daintily from the Old Testament that your lips are scarcely wet!” (32.7). By these accusations Faustus suavely insinuated that catholics and Manichees did, after all, unite in common cause: both churches were joined by their principled and mutual contempt for the teachings and the practices of Judaism. Faustus’ deft appropriation of catholic traditions contra Iudaeos, combined with his own concern to divine a way to read the Bible ad litteram, “historically,” spurred Augustine to astonishing originality. In the thirty-three books of his contra Faustum, Augustine mounted a fervent defense of the catholic double canon of scripture and of “fleshly” catholic doctrines  – creation, incarnation, bodily resurrection – by mounting, as well, a defense of Jews and of Judaism. He did so by reclaiming, or rehabilitating, the idea of “flesh:” far from always and every-

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where signaling moral turpitude and spiritual deficiency, Augustine now urged that “flesh,” its creation and its ultimate redemption, gave the measure of true Christianity. This rehabilitation of “flesh” in turn led him to recast his “historical Jesus,” who emerges as more scrupulously Law-abiding than were the Pharisees he tangled with (16.4, 29–30, 32). Christ rigorously kept God’s commandments not only in life but even in death, taking care to lay down his fleshly body before the Sabbath began, and to raise it only on Sunday, long after the Sabbath had passed (16.29). And the Jews of the first generation of the church – the apostles and Paul emphatically included – also continued to keep the Law according to Jewish custom, for as long as the Temple stood (19.16). And it was pastorally important that these Jewish apostles be seen to live the Law, Augustine explained, not only to recruit fellow Jews, but more importantly, so that they could enlighten converting pagans. These gentiles, turning to Christ, had been instructed both that they had to abandon their old gods and that they were not to assume Jewish practices. But keeping the Law was not at all like worshiping idols, and the reasons for not worshiping idols had nothing in common with the reasons why these gentiles need not live like Jews. The source of Jewish practice was God; the source of pagan practice, demons. Indeed, Augustine insisted, the first gentile generation of the church even went so far as to Judaize, voluntarily assuming some Jewish dietary restrictions in order to accommodate the sensitivities of Jewish Christians (32.12; cf. Acts 15:29). Finally, Augustine even defended current Jewish practice. “It is a miracle to be greatly respected (revera multum mirabile),” he continued, “that while all the nations subjected to Rome went over to the rituals of Roman worship, … the Jewish nation under foreign monarchs whether pagan or Christian has never lost the sign of their law, by which they are distinguished from all other nations and peoples” (12.13). Some divine initiative must continue to preserve and to protect Jewish practice (12.13) – in fact, Augustine concluded, any monarch whether pagan or Christian who tries to impede Jews from living according to their traditions will meet with divine vengeance seven-fold. By so continuously enacting and preserving the antiquity and integrity of their own tradition while refusing to turn to Christ, Augustine concluded, the Jews, under God’s protection, performed as well a vital act of witnessing to the integrity and antiquity of (orthodox) Christian tradition, since their not receiving Christ was itself predicted in the church’s Old Testament. Thus the Jews qua Jews “testify to the truth [that is, the Christian interpretation of Jewish texts] by their not understanding it” (16.21).24 It was in the course of his energetic rethinking of the merits of continuous Jewish practice that Augustine received, finally, Jerome’s response to his interpretation of Galatians 2 (Ep. 75, c. 403). Jerome had exploded. Invoking again the authority of Origen (75.3,4), Jerome proceeded to warn Augustine, darkly, against  Summarizing Fredriksen, Augustine, 235–89.

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Judaizing – the endpoint, he insinuated, of Augustine’s position. The apostles, and especially Peter and Paul, only pretended when they observed the Law, for various situational reasons: but they certainly knew that such observances were nugatory (75.3,9 and 10). “It is on account of fear of the Jews that Peter and Paul both equally pretended to observe the commandments of the Law” (75.3,11). “How well you succeed in defending Paul! He did not ‘pretend’ to hold the Jews’ error: he actually did hold it! … What an original sense of mercy the Apostle demonstrates! When he wanted to turn Jews into Christians, he made himself into a Jew … How pathetic, how deplorable are those [like Augustine] who, on account of their own belligerence and their love for the abolished Law, make the apostle of Christ into a Jew!” (75.4,17). It is in his Ep. 82 (c. 405), his reply to Jerome’s hectoring, that Augustine gives his longest and fullest discussion and description of Paul the Law-observant apostle to the gentiles. Warning Jerome again of the dangers of imputing a “useful lie” to Paul and Peter,25 Augustine proceeds to assert vigorously that Paul always and everywhere denied that gentiles should observe the Law like the Jews; but that he himself, as a Jew who was a Christian, always and everywhere observed the Law. “At that time, the [Christian] Jews were not to be kept from those rites as if they were wicked; and the [Christian] gentiles were not to be forced to those rites as if they were necessary” (82.2,9). The Law, God-given, was to be observed during “the time of the presence of the Lord in the flesh, and during the apostolic generation” (82.2,15). Or, asked Augustine, was Jerome saying that Paul and all the other Law-observant apostles were right to keep the Law, but only if they did so as a pretense? If so, he continued, then Jerome was introducing a new heresy, worse even than that of the Ebionites or the Nazareans,26 “since it arises not from error, but from a desire to deceive” (82.2,16). (Besides, he continued, a person motivated to take on Jewish practices chiefly by a love of deceit would have to be crazy: insanire.) Turning finally to Paul’s confrontation with Peter as described in Galatians 2, Augustine repeated firmly the interpretation that he had given against Jerome almost ten years earlier, in his commentary: Paul rebuked Peter not for keeping Jewish customs, but for trying to impose them on gentiles (Ep. 82.2,22; cf. Exp. Gal. 2.11,15). Both apostles were Law-observant, Augustine concludes; and Scripture abounded with examples where Paul in particular respected Jewish rites. 25  “The Manichees claim, when they cannot twist the lucid teachings of the holy scriptures to some other meaning, that very many passages in these same scriptures must be false …. And yet even they do not attribute this falsity to the apostles who wrote them [as Jerome’s reading did], but rather to persons unknown who later corrupted the manuscripts. … Does not your holy wisdom understand how great an opportunity would lie open to their malice were we to say that the apostles’ letters had been falsified not by others, but by themselves?” Ep. 82.2,6. 26  These were two sects of Law-observant Jewish-Christians. It is unclear to me whether these terms – certainly by the fifth century – represent actual groups, or whether they are heresiological constructs used to define deviance from orthodoxy.

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Conclusion Christ’s purpose in coming, according to Origen, was precisely to separate “the ceremonies of Jewish law” from the Bible (see above, p. 75). Jewish practice literally embodied defective Jewish readings of scripture: superficial, literal, fleshly. Christ, however, taught the spiritual meanings of the Law for the most part only after his resurrection. The apostles, and Paul himself, nonetheless (though perhaps only occasionally) honored these observances, though for an eminently practical reason: they wanted to draw Jews into the movement, and knew that a demand to their kinsmen to abandon the Law would work against the mission to Israel. At the end of the day, however (looking at Romans 11:26), Origen asserted, all Israel – meaning all Jewish Israel – would be included in final redemption. Christ’s purpose in coming, according to Augustine, was to educate his followers to love the Law rather than to fear it, or to fear those who policed compliance with it: Law can be truly fulfilled only through love. But traditional Jewish practice was itself appropriate, and Christ himself, as well as the apostles and Paul, sincerely preserved their rites and traditions for the length of first generation of the church. Their piety addressed a practical pastoral goal: to educate gentile converts that the Law itself was good, though no longer necessary for salvation; and that Jewish practices had nothing in common with pagan ones, which had to be at all times and places repudiated. At the end of the day, however (looking at Romans 11:26), Augustine asserted, all ‘Israel’ – meaning not ethnic Israel, but that eschatological body of Jews and gentiles within the church of the saints who were predestined to salvation – would be included in final redemption.27 Of the two theologians, it was Augustine who conceived the more robust and resoundingly positive endorsement of Jewish observance, thus of a Paul who was ‘lawful’ rather than (as Marcion, Tertullian, Jerome, and Faustus all urged) ‘lawless.’ His position was all of a piece with his larger projects: to read scripture ad litteram, and as facta narratur (Faust. 12.7), “historically;” to insist on the flesh as the locus and focus of Christian redemption; to insist on history itself as the primary arena of God’s creative and redemptive acts. We see this more clearly 27  After Adam’s sin, wrote Augustine, “the whole of mankind is a condemned lump, for he who committed the first sin was punished, and along with him all the stock which had its roots in him. The result is that there is no escape for anyone from this justly deserved punishment, except by merciful and undeserved grace. Humanity is divided between those in whom the power of merciful grace is demonstrated, and those in whom is shown the might of just retribution. Neither of these could be displayed in respect of all mankind, for if all had remained condemned … then God’s merciful grace would not have been seen … and if all had been transferred from darkness to light, then the truth of God’s vengeance would not have been made evident. Many more are condemned by vengeance than are released by mercy,” Civ. 21.12. On Rom 11:26 specifically (“all Israel will be saved”), and the way that Augustine limits “all Israel” to the saints, Jews and Gentiles both, see Ep. 149.2,19, to Paulinus of Nola; discussed in Fredriksen, Augustine, 325–28.

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by framing his earlier writings, which discuss Paul explicitly, with his two latter masterpieces, On the Literal Interpretation of Genesis and The City of God. In those two huge works, Augustine set out his ideas of the soul’s relation to the body (both had been created together, and would be together forever in eternity), of the souls’ relation to time (souls were born as bodies were born, serially and through time), and of time’s relation to eternity (time began with creation, and would end only in and as the eschaton, swallowed up in the eternity of redemption – and of damnation). And it is within those two works that Augustine frames his theology of predestination. Little wonder that only a small portion of Israel according to the flesh will be saved: only a small portion of catholics will be saved (and no Christians outside of the true – that is, the catholic – church will be saved). How much of humanity will be saved? Only that much that will show forth God’s mercy. How much will be damned? Enough to showcase God’s justice. It is a bleak vision, and a sad one.28 Origen’s remarks on Paul, on Jewish observance, and on the redemption of all Israel in turn have to be framed by a prior and broader work of his, his shattered masterpiece On First Principles, the first systematic theology in Christian history (c. 225). There Origen set out his views on God, creation, time, and revelation. Unlike Augustine, Origen held that all souls eternally preexisted with God. God loves every soul equally – his fairness is the index of his justice – and God wants all souls to be saved. When all souls but that of Jesus slipped away from God in the time before time, God summoned out of nothing another order of creation, the world of time and of matter, to serve as a school for souls (Princ. 2.1, 1–4). Placed by divine providence in exactly the right learning situation, each soul – those of demons, stars, and planets as well as of humans – will eventually realize the error of its previous ways, repent, and (re)turn in love to God. Each soul and every soul, because God loves his whole creation and wants all to be saved. Even Satan will repent and so be saved (1.6, 5–9; 3.5, 5–6). When that happens, taught Origen, matter will sink back into the nothingness from which it was called, and souls will abide in eternal beatitude with God, just as they had been before the start of their long sojourn in matter and in time. In eternity, gender, social class and ethnicity are sloughed off: the soul is beyond and above such distinctions (cf. Gal 3:28). If everyone is saved, if even Satan is saved, then it is no surprise that all ethnic Israel is saved as well.29 Origen’s is a commodious vision, and a profoundly optimistic one. 28 For a review and a comparison of Augustine’s and Origen’s respective ideas about final redemption, Paula Fredriksen, Sin: The Early History of an Idea (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2012), 97–134. 29  The scope of Origen’s vision, which exempts no soul from salvation, makes his endorsement of ethnic Israel’s redemption a little less extraordinary, a point missed evidently by Jeremy Cohen, “The Mystery of Israel’s Salvation: Romans 11:25–29 in Patristic and Medieval Exegesis,” HTR 98 (2005): 247–81.

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What is the lesson for us from our quick tour of the patristic Paul, as we quest for the Paul of history? What emerges from these ancient quests for the historical Paul is the way that the theology of the individual thinker, in intense relation to other rival theologies, had a determinative effect on many of their results. Would either Origen or Augustine have asserted their respective “lawful Pauls” were they not contesting Marcionite (or Marcion-influenced) “lawless” constructions? How much of the legacy of contra Iudaeos rhetoric influenced, for good and for ill, their respective readings? Despite these extra-historical considerations and priorities, though, both men presented an apostle who in many ways conforms to what some 20th‑ and 21st-century New Testament scholars now argue, namely, that Paul himself always continued to live as a Jew.30 The positions of these two ancient theologians are of course neither critically nor historically validating. But still – how bad a thing can it be, to have both Origen and Augustine (in some sense!) on one’s side?

30 See the essays assembled in Mark Nanos and Magus Zetterholm, eds. Paul within Judaism (Minneapolis: Fortress Press, 2015); also Matthew Thiessen, Paul and the Gentile Problem (New York: Oxford University Press, 2016). The argument was already made by Albert Schweitzer in 1931: “[Paul] himself – we must not allow his protestations that he had become a Greek to the Greeks to introduce any confusion on this point – continued to live as a Jew,” The Mysticism of Paul the Apostle (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1953), 196.

Weak and Useless? Purity, the Mosaic Law, and Perfection in Hebrews David M. Moffitt Introduction In the opening chapter of the Epistle to the Hebrews, the author approvingly cites LXX Ps 44:8 with reference to the heavenly Son. God says to the Son in Heb 1:9, “You loved righteousness and you hated lawlessness (ἐμίσησας ἀνομίαν).” This very love of righteousness and hatred of lawlessness is identified as the rationale for God’s anointing the Son and thereby elevating him beyond his peers. Despite this claim about hating lawlessness, one aspect of Hebrews sometimes identified as a clear indicator of the text’s supersessionist character is the author’s presumed disdain for the Mosaic Law’s external rituals. The author avers in Heb 9:9–10 that these rituals cannot “perfect the conscience of the worshiper, but deal only with food and drink and various baptisms, regulations for the body imposed until the time comes to set things right” (NRSV). The Law, being “weak and useless” (7:18), was never able to perfect anything (7:19). The author’s appeal to Ps 40 in Heb 10 even seems to suggest that God has no desire for external, earthly sacrificial rituals.1 Now that Jesus has offered a better sacrifice than anything prescribed by the Law, the Law and its external rituals have been replaced. Jesus’ once-for-all sacrifice means the Law and its sacrifices have become outmoded and can be discarded. Indeed, some have argued that the implications of Hebrews’ claims about Jesus’ sacrifice so destabilize and subvert the Law’s sacrificial logic that in the course of making these claims, the author saws off the very theological branch upon which his argument rests when he maintains that Jesus’ death was the ultimate sacrifice.2 On the one hand, the author affirms in 9:22 that the aspersion 1  For example, Wilfried Eisele argues that Christ’s full obedience to God’s will in Heb 10 renders earthly rituals and offerings useless: “Denn alle Heiligungsversuche unsererseits müßten sinnlose, weil irdische Veranstaltungen bleiben” (Ein unerschütterliches Reich: Die mittelplatonische Umformung des Parusiegedankens im Hebräerbrief, BZNW 116 [Berlin: De Gruyter, 2003], 105). Hugh Montefiore suggests the critique of sacrifice in Heb 10 cannot be limited to particular rituals, but indicates a more general “divine disapproval of the Law itself” (A Commentary on the Epistle to the Hebrews, HNTC [San Francisco: Harper & Row, 1964], 168). 2  A. J. M. Wedderburn, “Sawing off the Branches: Theologizing Dangerously Ad Hebraeos,” JTS 56 (2005): 393–414.

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of blood is necessary for forgiveness. On the other hand, his interpretation of Ps 40 in Heb 10 appears to obviate the whole notion that God wants sacrifice at all.3 “Hebrews,” A. J. M. Wedderburn comments, “seems to persist resolutely with cultic terminology even after it has, to all intents and purposes, dealt the cultic way of thought a coup de grâce.”4 For Wedderburn, the fundamental contradictions in Hebrews result from the collision of apocalyptic and Platonic worldviews that are constitutive of the somewhat confused thought world of the epistle. The idea that the preexistent Son could become human and then, at the decisive salvific moment of his death, leave his body and the material realm to return to heaven while still being thought to offer his blood in that heavenly realm deconstructs both the author’s sacrificial theology and his supposed Platonic foundations. Such arguments are clearly supersessionist and antinomian, relegating the very logic of the Law with its material concerns and rituals to the dustbin of history. They are also, according to Wedderburn, incoherent. How can Jesus leave the material realm but still have his blood with him? How can the cross be both a historical event and a heavenly/spiritual one? In fact, Wedderburn suggests, the more seriously the author of Hebrews takes his claims that the crucifixion is the heavenly moment of Jesus’ high-priestly offering, the more unstable and incoherent his entire theological project becomes. I have argued elsewhere that this sort of reading of Hebrews is mistaken on several levels. Hebrews does not presuppose a dualism or cosmology that is essentially Platonic.5 In my view, the author also does not claim that the atoning sacrifice Jesus offered is reducible to the historical event of the crucifixion. Rather, the author thinks that the atoning sacrifice Jesus offered culminated in the presentation of himself alive in his resurrected humanity when he ascended to the Father and entered the heavenly holy of holies.6 I will not rehearse those arguments here. I want instead to examine the assumption that the author rejects the Law and its sacrificial logic because the rituals required by the Law were only effective for earthly, external matters and could not effect internal purification. Hebrews’ claim that the Law only produced limited and external purification is shocking. I am persuaded that Susan Haber is correct when she suggests that such a claim limits the purifying force of the cultic elements of the Mosaic economy to the realm of ritual purification.7  Wedderburn, “Sawing off the Branches,” esp. 401–4.  Wedderburn, “Sawing off the Branches,” 409. 5  David M. Moffitt, “Serving in the Tabernacle in Heaven: Sacred Space, Jesus’s High-Priestly Sacrifice, and Hebrews’ Analogical Theology,” in Hebrews in Contexts, ed. Gabriella Gelardini and Harold W. Attridge, AJEC 91 (Leiden: Brill, 2016), 259–80. 6 See, esp., David M. Moffitt, Atonement and the Logic of Resurrection in the Epistle to the Hebrews, NovTSup 141 (Leiden: Brill, 2011). 7  Susan Haber, “From Priestly Torah to Christ Cultus: The Re-Vision of Covenant and Cult in Hebrews,” JSNT 28 (2005): 105–24. For my own detailed engagement with and critique of Haber’s essay see, David M. Moffitt, “Wilderness Identity and Pentateuchal Narrative: Distin3 4

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I am also persuaded, however, that Haber, Wedderburn, and others go wrong when they deduce from this polemic that the author must therefore reject ritual purity concerns and even the entire logic of Levitical sacrifice, and replace these with a preformed Christology centered on the death of Jesus as the ultimate saving event. I argue here that the author’s close connection between perfection, purity, and one’s ability to approach God’s presence, especially in the case of Jesus, indicates instead that the very concerns of both moral purity/sin and ritual purity, which is not sin, lie at the center of his soteriological reflection. The author confesses that Jesus, although he is the heavenly Son and is without sin, had nevertheless to be made perfect in his humanity in order to become the great high priest, return to the heavenly realms, and minister there on behalf of his brothers and sisters. Such a concept of perfection, I argue, overlaps significantly with Jewish ritual purity concerns. Yet if this is correct, then the author’s arguments about the Law’s limited powers of purification do not support the further inference that he rejects entirely sacrificial ritual and external purification, replacing or superseding them with something wholly other, something inimical to the Levitical rituals – the claim that Jesus’ death is the means of inner, moral purification for others. Rather than rejecting the logic of sacrifice and external purification found in the Mosaic Law, the author has instead pushed that logic to what he takes to be its ultimate conclusion – purification that makes one fit to enter fully and permanently into the sacred space of God’s heavenly presence. The author of Hebrews, I suggest, speaks of this kind of purification in terms of perfection. Before examining Hebrews directly, however, it will be helpful to consider some of the important work on the concepts of Jewish ritual and moral purity that has been done in the last few decades.

Conceiving Ritual and Moral Purity In his book Impurity and Sin in Ancient Judaism, Jonathan Klawans advances the thesis that the biblical conception of purity, as well as the conception found in some expressions of Second Temple Judaism and later Rabbinic Judaism, is best understood as consisting of two parallel purity systems – the ritual and the moral.8 Klawans is engaging in an argument whose full scope lies outside the

guishing between Jesus’ Inauguration and Maintenance of the New Covenant in Hebrews,” in Muted Voices of the New Testament: Readings in the Catholic Epistles and Hebrews, ed. Katherine M. Hockey, Madison N. Pierce, and Francis Watson, LNTS (London: Bloomsbury T&T Clark, 2017). 8  Jonathan Klawans, Impurity and Sin in Ancient Judaism (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000), esp. 21–32.

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purview of this study. Nevertheless, a brief summary of his understanding of these two systems will be useful here. The biblical ritual purity system has to do with those events and activities delineated in the Bible (see esp. Leviticus 12–15) that render persons or inanimate objects impure, as well as with the particular ritual means by which this impurity can be rectified. Importantly, ritual impurity is only skin deep. That is to say, this kind of purity has nothing to do intrinsically with the purity of the interior self, but only with the purity of one’s body. By the time of the late-Second Temple period, a number of situations and activities were considered to render a person or thing ritually impure.9 For example, stepping over a grave, touching a corpse, or even being in the same “tent” as a corpse would render a person ritually impure. Sexual intercourse, menstruation, and the emission of semen also rendered people and objects they come in contact with impure. The birth of a child made a woman ritually impure. Various skin ailments would make a person impure. Moreover, in many cases persons or objects that are in an impure state can further transmit that impurity to those who came into certain kinds of contact with them. Notably, none of these activities necessarily involved any kind of sin or moral fault. Birthing a child, preparing a corpse for burial, developing a skin disease, menstruating, emitting semen – none of this was deemed to be sin. All of these things, however, created some kind of contaminating force that infected, as it were, people and things and made them impure, usually by way of direct, physical contact. By the same token, touching a corpse, or a person who had a skin disease, or a woman who was menstruating, or a man who had recently ejaculated made one impure, but again, to touch and thereby contract impurity was not to sin. The solution for these ritual impurities generally involved the passage of time and washings.10 Semen emission, for example, made a Jewish man impure. He and those with whom he came into certain kinds of contact could become pure by immersing and waiting until sunset (Lev 15:1–11). The removal of impurities contracted by the birth of a child, or from a skin disease, or from a corpse required more complicated and interesting processes. A woman who bore a male child, for example, was impure for a period of seven days, as with her menstruation, and then for an additional 33 days bringing her time of impurity to a total of 40 days (Lev 12:1–5). At the end of this period she was required to bring a burnt offering and a so-called “sin” offering (Lev 12:6–8). Only then would she be fully purified from the act of giving birth (Lev 12:8). The fact that blood sacrifices formed a component of purification in certain cases such as the birth of a child is a matter to which I return below. The central point for the moment is  9  For a well-reasoned discussion on the kinds of activities and circumstances that were likely considered to render one ritually impure in the Second Temple period see E. P. Sanders, Judaism: Practice and Belief, 63 BCE–66 CE (London: SCM Press, 1992), 217 ff. 10  See esp. Sanders, Judaism, 72.

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that the preceding examples prove that the contraction of ritual impurities was not necessarily a matter of moral transgression/sin. This is not to say that ritual impurity matters could not cross over into the realm of sin. They could, particularly in cases where certain actions caused one who was ritually impure to transgress a prohibition. One of the primary places where such transgression became possible was the sacred space of the temple. Leviticus 12:4, for example, makes it abundantly clear that a woman who is impure on account of giving birth must not touch any holy thing or come into the sanctuary while in her impure state. Corpse impurity was also to be kept out of the sacred precincts. The underlying principle seems to be that ritually impure persons were not allowed to draw near to God’s presence.11 This likely explains the logic behind the curious fact that the high priest was the one person whom Leviticus explicitly says must avoid being contaminated by a corpse (Lev 21:10–11). Indeed, relative to the average person, the rules for priests were also much more stringent in this regard, though they are not bound by the strict prohibition that applies to the high priest (Lev 21:1–3). The rationale for these stricter rules seems to be that because the priests, and the high priest in particular, came closest to the presence of God, they were required to be far more careful about their ritual purity status.12 If they were to become impure and then come close to God’s presence, they would be guilty of sin. The preceding discussion implies that the primary point at which ritual impurity became a major concern or crossed over into the realm of sin concerned coming into the sacred space of the sanctuary and thus also drawing near to the presence of the God who dwelt there. God did not allow ritually impure persons to come too near his presence. But why was this? Jacob Milgrom, among others, makes a cogent case that a core concern in matters of ritual impurity was the presence and problem of death. Ritual purity concerns often had to do with the presence or appearance of decay. Loss of blood, semen, the deterioration of the body in the case of skin diseases, and, of course, the human corpse all suggest the diminution of the body’s life force and thus the presence of death. God will not tolerate death being brought into his presence.13 Yet death cannot be the only factor in play. Hyam Maccoby notes that if death were the only concern at the center of ritual impurity then it is strange that while the loss of vaginal blood makes a woman impure, presumably by loss of life force, bleeding from a wound, something that could actually lead to death, does not.14 11  Sanders (Judaism, 70–72), among several others, makes a compelling case that proximity to God’s presence in the temple served as the primary rationale underlying purity concerns. 12  So Sanders, Judaism, 71–72. 13  See his discussions of this in, e. g., Jacob Milgrom, Leviticus 1–16: A New Translation with Introduction and Commentary, AB 3 (New York: Doubleday, 1991), 46, 767, 1002–3. 14  Hyam Maccoby, Ritual and Morality: The Ritual Purity System and Its Place in Judaism (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999), 31.

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Why, moreover, does giving birth make a woman impure? Obviously the process of birth involves the issue of vaginal blood, but if that were all that were going on, it is odd that the woman would be considered impure for several weeks beyond the normal seven days of menstruation impurity. It seems that the birth of the child itself somehow increases the magnitude of the woman’s impurity. Maccoby therefore suggests, I think correctly, that the problem is not death alone, but the cycles of mortality in general – sex, birth, decay, and death, functions that relate to and are even definitive of mortality, lie at the center of ritual purity.15 The realm of moral impurity, to continue with Klawans’ terminology, differs in significant ways from that of ritual impurity. I noted above that Klawans is addressing a much larger argument than can be fully discussed here. Essentially the debate centers around whether or not sin produces a real defiling force as ritual impurity does, or if the language that speaks of sin producing some kind of impurity amounts only to a metaphorical application of ritual impurity language to the abstract realm of moral infraction. Klawans argues, persuasively in my view, that the category of “impurity” should properly be applied to sin because sin, like the ritual matters mentioned above, produces real defilement. Thus, it is appropriate to speak of a system of moral purity, just as it is to speak about one of ritual purity. This system is not, however, identical to that of ritual purity. Whereas ritual impurity need not be, indeed could not be, ultimately avoided, one was to seek to avoid moral impurity because this kind of impurity resulted from violating a divine prohibition or failing to perform a divine command. The discussion above showed that ritual impurity was only external and involved a great deal of contagion by physical touch. This is not the case for moral impurity. Sinful acts result in moral impurity that defiles the sinner inwardly, but this impurity does not defile other people. Thus, one cannot pass along moral impurity to another person or thing by contact. This is not to say, however, that moral impurity does not convey defilement. Moral impurity conveys defilement to the land of Israel (see esp. Lev 18:24–25), something ritual impurity never does. Furthermore, the defilement caused by some sin seems to transfer an impurity directly to the sacred space of the sanctuary, even from a distance (see, e. g., Lev 20:3 where the abominable sin of an Israelite sacrificing a child to Molech, presumably at one of Molech’s temples, nevertheless defiles God’s sanctuary). Moral defilement therefore attaches to the sinner in some internal sense, the land, and the sanctuary simply by the commission of the prohibited act. This defilement is not external and not visible to the human eye, but it is nevertheless real and brings real consequences. In yet another way this kind of defilement differs from that of ritual impurity: neither time nor washing can purge the stain of sin. Moral purification involves repentance, recompense, and the offering of sacrifices. Ultimately, however, the  Maccoby, Ritual and Morality, 49–50, 207; cf. Sanders, Judaism, 217.

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defilement of the land and temple that results from moral impurity can build to the point that the land reacts by “vomiting out” the people who dwell upon it (e. g., Lev 18:26–30), and the presence of God can depart from the sanctuary.16 Thus, there are key differences between these two systems, but there are also key parallels. Klawans summarizes the situation well when he writes, [W]e ought to understand that with both kinds of impurity, we are dealing with perceived effects that result from actual physical processes. In the case of ritual impurity, a real, physical process or event (e. g., death, menstruation) has a perceived effect: impermanent contagion that affects people and certain objects within their reach. In the case of moral impurity, a real, physical process or event (e. g., child sacrifice or adultery) has a different perceived effect: a noncontagious defilement that affects persons, the land, and the sanctuary.17

In short, both systems of purity have to do with real impurities that convey to real objects, even if the ways in which these impurities convey and the things to which they are conveyed differ markedly from each other. There is, however, a curious fact about these two systems of purity that Klawans says little about: while many cases of ritual impurity require no sacrifice for purification, some cases do. Also curious is the fact that the sacrifices for purification in both the ritual and moral systems are the same – the so-called “sin” offerings. That is to say, when a moral infraction needed to be rectified, the guilty party had to offer a “sin” offering. This sacrifice was essential for atonement (see, e. g. Lev 4:27–35). In certain cases of ritual impurity, however, the person in need of purification also had to offer a “sin” offering that also effected atonement for them (see esp. Lev 12:6–8 where the woman who has given birth has to offer a “sin” offering by which the priest makes atonement for her). Jacob Milgrom’s theory about ritual impurity mentioned above accounts for this strange situation by positing that, like moral impurity, some ritual impurities also convey a stain to the sanctuary. While not universally accepted,18 this theory makes a great deal of sense at this point. Milgrom argues that both severe ritual impurities (such as giving birth and corpse impurity) and sins/moral impurity defile the sanctuary and its altars even from a distance. The more serious impurities penetrate more deeply into the sacred precincts than the more minor ones. This would explain the need for blood sacrifices in cases of sin and of certain ritual impurities such as birth. Blood, Milgrom argues, has the power to cleanse or purify the altars and the sacred precincts from the impurities that cling to them as a result of moral and ritual impurities.19 16  This last point is made with particular force in Jacob Milgrom, “Israel’s Sanctuary: The Priestly ‘Picture of Dorian Gray,’” RB 83 (1976): 390–99. 17  Klawans, Impurity and Sin, 34. 18  See, for example, the multiple criticisms of Milgrom’s theory in Maccoby, Ritual and Morality. 19  See esp. Milgrom, Leviticus 1–16, 254–58, 711–12.

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As evidence Milgrom points to cases where sacrificial blood is applied to an altar or other part of the sanctuary and the object of the verb for atonement, kipper, is the sanctuary or the altar to which the blood is applied. In Lev 16:15–20, for example, the holy place, the tent of meeting and the altars are “atoned for” by way of blood application. The atoning action, in other words, is that of purification. The detergent or agent that effects that purification is blood. Importantly, Lev 16:16 identifies both the uncleanness (i. e., ritual impurity) and the sins of the people as the sources of defilement that make the annual purification necessary. The clear implication of this is that both the peoples’ ritual and moral impurities have defiled the sacred precincts, which are consequently in need of cleaning/purification. This regular cleansing was essential to the covenant relationship. If this ongoing maintenance were not performed, the level of impurity would build to the point that God’s presence would depart (see, e. g., Ezek 5:11). Blood application in this sacred space was a necessary means for effecting the sanctuary’s purification. Where Milgrom’s theory seems weakest, however, concerns the relationship between the purification of the altars and sacred spaces, and that of the people for whom sacrifices are being offered. Milgrom argues that blood purifies objects by way of direct, physical application. Since blood is not applied to the person bringing the sacrifice, Milgrom reasons that sacrifice does not play a role in purifying the offerer. Sacrifice is necessary only to purify the altars contaminated by the peoples’ sins and ritual impurities. The offerer, in the case of sin, is purified from the defilement of sin by experiencing guilt and repenting.20 In ritual matters, the offerer is purified by time and washings. Roy Gane has levelled a trenchant critique against Milgrom at just this point.21 Gane points to texts that do in fact link the offering of sacrifice with the purification of the offerer. In Lev 12:7, for example, the woman who gave birth is finally rendered pure from (min) her ritual impurity by means of the sacrifices she offers. Similarly, in Num 8:12, 21 the Levites are purified by their sacrifices. Sacrifice, in other words, does seem to remove impurity from the offerer. This evidence suggests that Milgrom’s theory is only half right. Milgrom’s theory of the conveyance of impurities to the holy places from a distance is correct, but suffers from being unidirectional. Just as one need not be in contact with the sacred spaces to convey impurity to them, so also, Gane argues, the purity effected by blood application to the altars can have the effect of purifying the offerers too. Blood, that is, need not be applied directly to the people in order for the purity it effects on the sacred appurtenances to be reciprocally conveyed to them.

 Milgrom, Leviticus 1–16, 254–56, 1056–58.  Roy Gane, Cult and Character: Purification Offerings, Day of Atonement, and Theodicy (Winona Lake, IN: Eisenbrauns, 2005), esp. 106–43. 20 21

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One more conversation partner is worthy of mention here. In his book Sin, Impurity, Sacrifice, Atonement: The Priestly Conception, Jay Sklar notes that while Klawans rightly highlights distinctions between the systems of ritual and moral impurity, the fact that the same sacrifices (esp. the “sin” offering) are required in the case of some ritual impurities as are required for moral impurities suggests that at this point the two systems converge.22 This becomes even clearer when one considers the end results of both kinds of impurities. That is to say, both ritual impurity and moral impurity create defilement that puts the people in danger with respect to God, and threaten God’s willingness to remain present in the sanctuary. Sklar argues further that the term kipper, which is used to resolve both kinds of impurity, should not be pressed too hard to mean only purification in matters of ritual purity and only ransom in matters of moral purity. In sacrificial contexts, the means for effecting both ransom and ritual purification is the application of sacrificial blood, especially the blood of the “sin” offering. Thus, Sklar suggests, sacrificial atonement cannot be reduced to either ransom or purification, but should be understood as including both ransoming and purifying effects.23 This cursory discussion of the ritual and moral purity systems depicted in the Hebrew Bible can now be summarized. Ritual purity is primarily a matter of one’s external condition. This kind of defilement is contagious and usually spread by contact. At its core, ritual impurity appears to be about matters of mortality. Further, ritual impurity is a major obstacle when one tries to come close to God’s presence. God does not permit ritually impure persons to come close to his presence. To bring impure mortality into God’s sacred space is to be guilty of sin. The need for people to be in a ritually pure state therefore appears to be primarily about rendering mortal humanity fit to draw near to God’s presence. Moral purity has to do with obeying God’s commands. The violation of divine directives results in moral defilement. A person’s moral impurity is not external and is not contagious. Nevertheless, while ritual and moral purity are distinct, both problematize the relationship between God and his people. Ritual impurity prevents the people from approaching God. Moral impurity threatens their ability to dwell in the land, which is defiled by sin, and threatens them with God’s punitive wrath. Both kinds of impurity further stand in the way of God and his people dwelling together because both convey defilement to the sanctuary. The sanctuary needs regular purification if God’s presence is to remain there. It further appears to be the case that sacrificial atonement in the fullest sense – that is, the state that results from solving the problems of moral and ritual impu22 Jay Sklar, Sin, Impurity, Sacrifice, Atonement: The Priestly Conceptions, HBM 2 (Sheffield: Sheffield Phoenix, 2005), 144–50, esp. 149. 23  For a condensed version of his argument see Jay Sklar, “Sin and Impurity: Atoned or Purified? Yes!” in Perspectives on Purity and Purification in the Bible, ed. Naphatali S. Meshel, et al, LHB/OTS 474 (London: T&T Clark, 2008), 18–31.

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rity such that God and humanity can dwell together – requires the removal of the threat of God’s wrath by way of redemption or ransom and the purification of the people, the land, and the sanctuary. Full atonement, in other words, is effected when the defilement from both moral and ritual impurities is purged. But what does any of this have to do with Hebrews? I demonstrate next that the meaning of perfection language in Hebrews overlaps at points with both of these concepts of purity. To be more specific, the author at times uses perfection language to mean the complete and enduring rectification of the impurities that separate God and humanity. If this is right, then the fact that Jesus needed to be perfected suggests that the writer has purity concerns in view. Yet, the fact that Jesus, who was without sin/moral impurity, nevertheless needed to be perfected implies that, even though he is the heavenly Son, his mortal humanity required purification before he could approach the Father in the sacred heavenly space and serve there as the high priest for his people. This, however, implies that the writer has not dismissed the importance of the kinds of external matters so central to the ritual purity system detailed in the Law.

Perfection as Purity in Hebrews That the author of Hebrews thinks in terms of moral purity is abundantly clear in Heb 1:3. There he states that “after making purification for sins” (καθαρισμὸν τῶν ἁμαρτιῶν ποιησάμενος), the Son took his place at God’s right hand. Given Hebrews’ portrayal of Jesus as the high priest who enters the heavenly holy of holies, the collocation of the terms “purification” and “sin” probably signals an allusion to the statement in OG Lev 16:30 that the high priest’s atoning work on the Day of Atonement serves to purify the people from all their sins (καθαρίσαι ὑμᾶς ἀπὸ πασῶν τῶν ἁμαρτιῶν ὑμῶν). Equally clearly the writer employs a concept similar to that described above as ritual purity. As was noted, one of the oddities in Hebrews is the author’s claim that the sacrifices prescribed in the Law did not effect moral purification, but only brought about a limited purification of the body. Hebrews, as Haber has stated, appears to have reduced purification in the Law to ritual purification. But does this mean that the author goes on to reject the logic of ritual purification and its concern for external and bodily things? The author’s use of perfection language indicates that this is not the case. The close link between perfection and immortal life made by the author in Heb 7 is, as I have argued elsewhere, one among many clues that the author assumes Jesus’ bodily resurrection in his argument.24 The logic of the argument in this chapter works by way of a contrast between the Law, which links priestly legiti Esp. Moffitt, Atonement and the Logic of Resurrection, 194–208.

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macy and authority with Levitical tribal lineage, and the power of Jesus’ enduring resurrection life. The Law’s linkage of tribal lineage/genealogy and legitimate priestly succession is bound up with the reality of death. The writer stresses this point explicitly in 7:8 and 7:23, and implicitly gestures towards it when he argues that the kind of life that Melchizedek and Jesus have legitimates their priestly status in spite of their genealogies (cf. 7:3, 16, 24–25). The point seems to be that Jesus, as a human being, became the great high priest he is confessed to be when, in his humanity, he was raised from the dead never to die again. As the author wraps up the argument of ch. 7 and transitions to another point, he restates this critical contrast between the Law and Jesus’ enduring life in different terms when he says, “The Law appoints men as high priests who have weaknesses, but the word of the oath, which came after the Law, appoints as high priest a Son who has been made perfect forever” (7:28). Given the contrast in the preceding argumentation of Heb 7, one can gloss 7:28 as follows: The Law appoints as high priests men who are subject to death, while the oath of Ps 110:4 appoints Jesus, the Son, who is not subject to death and thus lives forever. The Law’s emphasis on genealogy as much as proves that the Levitical priests could not escape death, because the very logic of genealogy presupposes the reality of death. This is a major element of their and the Law’s “weakness.” By way of contrast, the perfection of the Son means he does not share this weakness. He now lives in such a way that he will never again be subject to death. By linking the Law with death and Jesus with life the author makes a move analogous to that of Paul as he thinks about the Law. It appears that both Paul and Hebrews agree that the Law was unable to bring life to God’s people. Paul goes beyond Hebrews when he argues that the Law, though good, became a tool of death. Like Paul, however, Hebrews seems to be working with an apocalyptic dualism that views the created realm as somehow separated from God’s presence because it is tainted with sin, death and corruption. The Law is inextricably connected to the pole of this dualism that is subjected to death and the one who holds the power of death – the devil (cf. Heb 2:14). If this is basically right, then when the author of Hebrews argues that the Law never made anything perfect, he is claiming that the Law was never able permanently to move God’s people from their present condition into the fullness of God’s presence. The Law, to put the point differently, never fully solved or dealt with the problem of death. In fact, the problem of death is in some sense hardwired into the very logic of the Law, particularly in the ritual purity codes and the genealogical stipulations regarding priestly service. This further means that the Law never purified people to the point that their subjection to mortality was no longer a problem that prevented them from entering the fullness of God’s presence. This, I suggest, is what the author means when he says that the Law’s regulations regarding genealogy and priesthood are “weak and useless.” What the Law in its weakness could not do, however, the author of Hebrews argues

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the Son has accomplished by rising again and ascending into the heavens as the great high priest. I do not intend to imply here that the meaning of perfection in Hebrews is exhausted by or reducible to the idea of enduring life. I am, however, suggesting that these nuances in the author’s argument indicate that ritual purity concerns lie close to hand in some of his uses of perfection language. Indeed, the presence of a notion of purity is already hinted at in his contrast in 7:19 between the Law’s inability to perfect anything and the better hope in Jesus that enables his followers to approach God. As noted above, the ritual purity codes in Leviticus are designed to enable people to approach God by rendering their mortality fit to draw near to his presence. Hebrews 9:9 and 9:14 provide substantive confirmation that perfection and purity overlap for the author. In these verses the terms perfection and purification are used interchangeably. In 9:9 the author claims that the gifts and sacrifices offered under the Law could not perfect the conscience of the worshippers. In 9:14, by way of contrast, he points out that the blood of Christ purifies the conscience. This is solid evidence that perfection and purity can be used synonymously in Hebrews. Equally clearly, though, these statements imply a concept of moral purity (as in 1:3), not ritual purity. Yet the situation is different in the case of Jesus himself. The author characterizes Jesus’ life as being “without sin” (4:15). In the midst of his testing, Jesus was sinless. Jesus, in other words, was morally pure. He had no need to offer any sacrifice for himself in order to deal with his own sin (7:27). Nevertheless, the author plainly states throughout the epistle that Jesus was perfected, implying a need for this perfecting (2:10; 5:9; 7:28). What could it mean that Jesus, the preexistent Son of God, had to be made perfect? Many arguments have been offered in the past to explain this language.25 Given the linkage of perfection and purity in Hebrews noted above, I suggest that 25  E. g., Paul J. Du Plessis argues that perfection language in Hebrews primarily relates to Jesus’ priestly consecration, though not to the exclusion of his subjective, existential development as a human being (ΤΕΛΕΙΟΣ: The Idea of Perfection in the New Testament [Kampen: J. H. Kok, 1959], esp. 212–17, 243). David Peterson pushes back on this and other ideas by suggesting instead that Jesus’ incarnate suffering, saving death and exaltation should be viewed as a process that makes Jesus fit for the vocation of being a merciful high priest who can fully save his people (Hebrews and Perfection: An Examination of the Concept of Perfection in the “Epistle to the Hebrews,” SNTSM 47 [Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1982], esp. 49, 67, 73, 103). David A. DeSilva links Jesus’ perfection with his “arrival at his heavenly destiny” (Perseverance in Gratitude: A Socio-Rhetorical Commentary on the Epistle “to the Hebrews” [Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 2000], see 197–99, here 199). Kevin B. McCruden, on the basis of the documentary papyri, has more recently argued that perfection language could carry the notion of public, definitive/official attestation of a transaction (Solidarity Perfected: Beneficent Christology in the Epistle to the Hebrews, BZNW 159 [Berlin: DeGruyter, 2008], 26–37). In the context of Hebrews this implies that perfection language is mainly language intended to comment in a public and definitive way on the beneficent, personal character of Jesus’ high-priestly sacrifice (69, 117–21, 139).

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perfection language as applied to Jesus also verges into the realm of purity.26 Yet, in the case of Jesus, the Son of God, the purity in play is not in the moral realm but in the realm of ritual. If, as I have argued, Jesus’ perfection has to do with his resurrection to immortal humanity,27 then the concept of purity that does apply to Jesus would have to do with the purity of his body. Although he was the Son, in his humanity he was fully mortal and, as such, was subject to ritual impurity. Prior to his resurrection, Jesus, the Son of God, was subject to death and did in fact die as a human being. To put the point differently, the ultimate problem of mortality and the way in which death hindered humanity from fully entering God’s presence applied to Jesus’ imperfect/mortal humanity. This logic looks remarkably similar to the logic of ritual purification. Thus when, after his death, Jesus was perfected, the point seems to be that he was made fully, ritually pure. Jesus’ humanity was, in other words, given the better resurrection promised in Heb 11:35. At this moment of perfection, Jesus’ humanity was no longer mortal, no longer subject to death. Jesus is, therefore, never again subject to the problem of ritual impurity. Because of this perfection, that is to say, because his humanity has been fully and irrevocably purified, he was able to do what no other high priest has done – ascend into the sacred space of the heavenly sanctuary, draw close to the fullness of God’s presence, and importantly, remain there.

Hebrews, the Law, and Supersessionism If the preceding conclusions are properly tapping into the author’s logic, then they hold important implications for the larger questions of supersessionism in Hebrews and the author’s apparently disparaging language about the Law. I have already suggested that for the author of Hebrews the Law’s limitations follow from the fact that the Law is in some sense itself subject to death and corruption. Hebrews seems to work with an understanding that the Law’s sphere of authority and legitimacy is circumscribed by the fact that it is bound up with an age that will pass away once the world/age to come arrives. This is a significant point, because it implies that the author’s comments about the Law’s limitations with respect to perfection are not a dismissal of the legitimacy and authority of the Law within its proper sphere. In fact, in one of the more overlooked verses in modern Hebrews commentary the writer notes that the Law’s authority prevents Jesus from being a priest on earth. Hebrews 8:4 reads 26 This has been noted at various times. William G. Johnsson, for example, argues that from a cultic perspective perfection language in Hebrews has partly to do with allowing access to the heavenly cult (Defilement and Purgation in the Book of Hebrews [Ph.D. diss., Vanderbilt University, 1973], 260–63). 27  Moffitt, Atonement and the Logic of Resurrection, 198–214.

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that “If he [i. e., Jesus] were on earth, he would not even be a priest because there exist those who offer the gifts in accordance with the Law.” The writer takes seriously the fact that Jesus has now passed through the heavens and entered God’s presence. This is one of the reasons that Hebrews so consistently locates Jesus’ priestly work in the heavens. On earth, the Law forbids him from legitimately holding priestly office and thus serving in priestly ministries (Heb 8:4). Such a claim indicates that the author has not simply dismissed the authority of the Law. In the heavenly sphere and in the coming age, the Law’s limitations, particularly in the realm of ritual purity, do not apply. In a way not unlike Paul in Gal 3, this argument relies on Jewish apocalyptic periodization to bracket the Law by locating it within a particular period/age, a circumscribed place and time that precedes the eternal age. At least some of the Law’s regulations will, therefore, go the way of the rest of the corruptible realm with which it is so closely bound (cf. Heb 1:13–14; 8:13; 12:27). When the earthly realm is finally shaken for the last time, such that only the unshakable realities remain, the Law will be “metathesized” or changed (cf. Heb 7:11–12, 18–19; 8:13). But the language of “supersessionism” does not accurately describe this kind of logic. The idea that perfection entails the purified and enduring life of the resurrection and the eternal age to come would obviate the Law’s ritual purity codes in some notable ways. What contamination by death and corruption is present or even possible for one who lives in such an immortal state? When there is no possibility of impurity from mortality, the need for rituals of bodily purification disappears.

Conclusion Within the Mosaic economy, both moral and ritual impurity prevented full communion and fellowship between God and his people. These problems were mitigated by way of sacrifice and other rituals. But, the author of Hebrews reasons, how much better would be the situation in which moral defilement/sin was fully erased never to accrue again, and in which ritual impurity could never even be contracted? This situation is at points called “perfection” in Hebrews. Sacrifices are good in their time and place. God was pleased with the sprinkled blood that Abel offered him (Heb 12:24). So also, God is pleased with the sacrifice that the Son offered him. But how much better would the situation be in which sacrifices for forgiveness and purification were no longer necessary because the problems they solve are no longer problems at all? This, I suggest, is the logic of Hebrews’ argument. The ritual elements of the Law are surely relativized, but that does not mean that they are somehow bad, inherently negative, or that Hebrews does not apply the logic of such sacrifices to Jesus. The Mosaic rituals are limited, but nevertheless good. The point for the author of Hebrews seems to be that once

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one has been perfected and has been able to enter fully into the fullness of God’s presence, the need for the Law’s rituals of purification and forgiveness disappears. In sum, Jesus was the sinless Son of God but nevertheless was bound by the limitation of the Law when on earth and had to be perfected in his humanity before he could return to the heavenly realms. Therefore, the links between perfection, purity, and resurrection in Hebrews suggest that the concerns that lie at the center of ritual purity as detailed in the Law are foundational for, not in opposition to, the Christology and soteriology of Hebrews. There is here a polemic against viewing the Law in absolute or eternal terms, but not one which dismisses or denigrates the Law. As with the angels, Moses, Aaron, the priesthood, the Law is good and revelatory for the author of Hebrews, but neither the Law nor these other figures opened the way for God’s people to enter the fullness of the inheritance the writer of Hebrews thinks they were ultimately promised. This is a central aspect of what the author means when he highlights Jesus’ perfection and the ways in which what he offers is better than what came before.

Against the Law: The Epistle of Barnabas and Torah Polemic in Early Christianity David Lincicum One of the major questions to confront the student of Christian origins is how it is that a predominantly Gentile, non-law-abiding movement emerges out of a Jewish law-observant sect with apocalyptic tendencies. The question is impossibly large, and enough for several lifetimes of work. Rather than attempting to answer the question in its cumbersome entirety, the present essay approaches it from one particular vantage point by examining some of the argumentative strategies that early Christians used in contending that the Torah no longer had its binding force over the lives of their movement’s adherents, over the first two centuries or so CE, and then attempting to use that map in order to locate one specific, early polemical tract, the so-called Epistle of Barnabas. Over the first few centuries of its existence, the early Christian movement appropriated for itself Jewish Scriptures in an increasingly non-Jewish context. Christians came to designate these as the “Old Testament” by the late second century, and thereby signaled some of the complexity of their hermeneutical stance toward these texts, read as they were in tandem with the “New” Testament.1 Even before such a linguistic demarcation, they found themselves with a continued loyalty to the Jewish Scriptures on the one hand, but understood them in ways that signaled a radical transformation in their response to the ethical commandments in the Torah in particular, on the other.2 In what follows I suggest a typology of early Christian arguments about the law. This is a typology of arguments rather than of texts or authors, so some authors provide multiple argumentative strategies. Two caveats should be borne in mind: first, to examine the rarefied discourse of early Christian literati, from whom the extant texts from this period on the whole seem to come, will not amount to an account of how Christians stopped observing the Jewish law in its 1  See W. Kinzig, “ Ἡ καινὴ διαθήκη: The Title of the New Testament in the Second and Third Centuries,” JTS 45 (1994): 519–544. 2 For a broad overview, see L. T. Johnson, “Law in Early Christianity,” in Christianity and Law, ed. John Witte, Jr. and Frank S. Alexander (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2008), 53–69. Part of the slippage in early Christian appropriation may also have involved the semantic shifts from Torah to nomos; for a review of positions that is not, however, uncritical of assigning too much stress to the shift, see Stephen Westerholm, “Torah, nomos, and Law: A Question of ‘Meaning’,” SR 15 (1986): 327–36.

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totality. Argumentation is an important aspect of the process of self-definition and the rationalization of religious beliefs and practices, but it would be naïve to assume causal links atwork, as though action followed straightforwardly from argument in a linear fashion. The two are of course inextricably intertwined, with each arising from and leading toward the other, and to reduce one simply to the other would be a mistake. There has also been a longstanding debate, since at least the days of Harnack, about whether various literature directed adversus Iudaeos should be seen as arising from actual contact with Jewish interlocutors, or whether the arguments function primarily as internal discourses of self-definition over against a merely “symbolic Judaism.”3 It is an argument that lies beyond my scope to adjudicate, but totalizing explanations should be here avoided, and rather allowance made for variations across time and social context.4 As it happens, whatever we make of the social history these texts attest, on either understanding the same argumentative strategies could have been deployed. Second, one should bear in mind that a minority of Christians persisted in Torah observance through the centuries. The phenomenon of so-called Jewish Christianity is a slippery one, and attempting to pin down a precise definition of it in the early centuries is an elusive task.5 Nevertheless, it seems clear that a variety of groups of Christ-believing Jews continued in their adherence to Torah. We find evidence of this in the New Testament particularly in the Gospel of Matthew, with its emphasis on fulfilling the weightier matters of the law, without neglecting the lesser matters, like tithing mint, dill and cumin (23:23). Or in the Epistle of James, with its emphasis on being a “doer of the law” (cf. 1:22–25 with 2:8–13). Likewise, in the second century and onward we see an emphasis on keeping the law particularly in texts that seem to reflect a Syrian provenance – the Didache, for example, or the later Ps.-Clementine literature. Indeed, John Chrysostom in the fourth century urges his hearers not to attend both the church and the 3  For the term “symbolic Judaism”, see Miriam S. Taylor, Anti-Judaism and Early Christian Identity: A Critique of the Scholarly Consensus (Leiden: Brill, 1995). 4  Cf. G. Stroumsa, “From Anti-Judaism to Antisemitism in Early Christianity?,” in Contra Ioudaeos: Ancient and Medieval Polemics between Christians and Jews, ed. Ora Limor and G. G. Stroumsa, Texts and Studies in Medieval and Early Modern Judaism 10 (Tübingen: Mohr Siebeck, 1996), 1–26. 5  For attempts at definition and discussion of the difficulties involved, see, e. g., J. Carleton Paget, “Jewish Christianity,” in The Early Roman Period, vol. 3 of The Cambridge History of Judaism, ed. W. Horbury, W. D. Davies and J. Sturdy (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999), 731–775; Carleton Paget, “The Definition of the Term ‘Jewish Christian’/ ‘Jewish Christianity’ in the History of Research,” in Jewish Believers in Jesus: The Early Centuries, ed. O. Skarsaune and R. Hvalvik (Peabody, MA: Hendrickson, 2007), 22–54; repr. in Jews, Christians and Jewish Christians in Antiquity, WUNT 251 (Tübingen: Mohr Siebeck, 2010), 289–324; M. Jackson-McCabe, “What’s in a Name? The Problem of ‘Jewish Christianity’,” in Jewish Christianity Reconsidered, ed. M. Jackson-McCabe (Minneapolis: Fortress, 2007), 7–38, 305–310; C. Colpe, “Das deutsche Wort, ‘Judenchristentum’ und ihm entsprechende Sachverhalte,” in Colpe, Das Siegel der Propheten. Historische Beziehungen zwischen Judentum, Judenchristentum, Heidentum und frühen Islam, ANTZ 3 (Berlin: Institute Kirche und Judentum, 1990), 38–58.

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synagogue, which suggests that the so-called “parting of the ways” between Judaism and Christianity was never quite as pronounced or as final as some of its exponents have suggested.6 Indeed, one could trace the phenomenon of Jewish Christianity throughout the middle ages into the early modern period in groups like the marranos in Spain to Messianic Jewish groups like “Jews for Jesus” today.7 The assumption of a teleological progression from law-observant Jewish Christianity to law-hostile Gentile Christianity should be problematized, even if in general terms one does see a shift in convictions over time.

A Taxonomy of Early Christian Law Criticism After these more general remarks, we turn now to a taxonomy of early Christian critiques of Torah observance. A heuristic typology of early Christian strategies for law criticism in roughly the first and second centuries might include at least the following four sets of approaches.8 These are not necessarily mutually exclusive, as we shall see, and the examples of the argumentative strategies are intended to be illustrative rather than exhaustive. 1. Halakhic disputes about the interpretation of the law Much of what has traditionally been understood in New Testament studies as criticism of Torah observance can be shown to involve rather differences in interpretation of the Torah. Disputes about how best to understand and practice the Mosaic Law were widespread in Second Temple Judaism, and divergent answers to these questions provoked schism much more readily than divergent theology per se. Our ability to reconstruct the teaching and views of the so-called historical Jesus is limited, and all our methods problematic in one way or another, but these difficulties notwithstanding it remains the case that the most plausible picture is that “the historical Jesus is the halakhic Jesus.”9 In some cases, we detect a certain indifference to the Torah’s allowance of divorce and prescription of oaths, 6  See, rightly, Adam H. Becker and Annette Yoshiko Reed, eds., The Ways that Never Parted: Jews and Christians in Late Antiquity and the Early Middle Ages (Minneapolis: Fortress, 2007 [orig. 2003]). 7  This is not to suggest an unbroken genealogy among these highly varying groups, but simply to indicate that Christians have at times continued to observe the Torah. 8  In a fuller investigation, one might also note the Jewish antecedents to some of these positions that have been discussed by, for example, Ines Pollmann, Gesetzeskritische Motive im Judentum und die Gesetzeskritik des Paulus, NTOA/SUNT 98 (Göttingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, 2012), who looks at the example of Simri in Josephus, Ant. 4.141–55; 4 Ezra 8.20–36; Philo, Migr. 89–93 and Ios. 28–31, although not all her examples are equally strong, nor do they easily suggest a precedent for Paul’s position (as she contends). 9  John P. Meier, Law and Love, vol. 4 of A Marginal Jew: Rethinking the Historical Jesus, Anchor Yale Bible (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2009); on the difficulties of reconstruction,

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for example, but nothing amounting to a fully-fledged critique of the Torah as such.10 The traditions in the synoptic Gospels can mostly be understood as containing (in Matthew’s case and much of Mark’s) disputes about the interpretation of Torah rather than criticism of the Torah. On the whole, one could perhaps suggest that Jesus is portrayed as offering a hierarchy of demands of Torah that put a premium on love of neighbor, rather than on, say, purity or Sabbath observance. But it is remarkably difficult to demonstrate direct contradiction of or violation of the Torah. Matthew is best seen as a Jewish Christian Gospel, and the so-called “antitheses” of 5:21–48 best understood as “hypertheses” in which Jesus offers a clarifying intensification of the demands the law has already made.11 In Mark and Luke, we see a certain “decentering” of Torah as the evangelists accommodate the Gentile mission, but still few direct criticisms of the law as such, as opposed to its interpretation. Perhaps the text from Mark’s Gospel that least fits this characterization, is 7:19, in which Jesus “declares all foods clean.”12 One most often encounters the topos of “law criticism” in early Christianity in discussions of the apostle Paul’s convoluted stance toward his ancestral Torah. But arguably the map of early Christian stances toward the Torah has been revised and redrawn over the past several decades, and it is not at all as obvious today as it once was that Paul could accurately be described as offering a “law free gospel”, at least in any undifferentiated sense. Relatively strong cases have been made to suggest that Paul’s stance toward the law in his letters can be understood as a halakhic debate about whether Gentiles should be asked to keep the Torah, rather than as disembodied reflections on the nature of the law as such.13 We have no letters from the apostle addressed directly to Jewish congregations, and it is remarkably difficult to demonstrate that Paul required Jews not to keep Torah. Rather, his arguments seem to be for a calculated pluralism of praxis, in which Gentiles must not be forced to keep Torah as a condition of entry into the community, but Jews may continue to observe, at least insofar as this allows for the unity of the community. It is beyond the scope of this essay to argue it, but one can without difficulty imagine Paul circumcising his own Jewish son, unpalatable though that may sound to certain Lutheran traditions of interpretation. see Dale Allison, Constructing Jesus: Memory, Imagination, and History (Grand Rapids: Baker Academic, 2010). 10 So Meier, Law and Love, inter multa alia. 11  P. Lapide, The Sermon on the Mount (Maryknoll: Orbis, 1986), 45–46; cf. B. Viviano, “The Sermon on the Mount in Recent Study,” in Matthew and His World: The Gospel of the Open Jewish Christians. Studies in Biblical Theology, NTOA 61 (Fribourg: Academic, 2007), 51–63. 12 The protestations of some scholars, such as James Crossley, The Date of Mark’s Gospel: Insight into the Law in Earliest Christianity, LNTS 266 (London: Bloomsbury, 2004) or Yair Furstenberg, “Defilement Penetrating the Body: A New Understanding of Contamination in Mark 7.15,” NTS 54 (2008): 176–200, notwithstanding. 13  For a recent collection of essays with reference to previous work, see M. Nanos and M. Zetterholm, eds., Paul within Judaism: Restoring the First-Century Context to the Apostle (Minneapolis: Fortress, 2015).

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Paul’s solution is still radical or distinctive in its own way, but is certainly not as totalizing in its critique of the law as has sometimes been assumed. Halakhic disputes about the proper application of the Torah live on in Jewish Christian circles throughout the second century and beyond. This first category, then, is not a matter of law criticism stricto sensu, but rather a category of interpretation that is often erroneously considered law-critical. Statements made, however, by both Jesus and Paul come very quickly after their lifetimes to be understood as more robustly law-critical than they might have been initially, and so they can be seen to lend hostages to fortune, as it were, by pronouncing judgments that were to be re-read and alternatively understood in competing contexts, especially as the halakhic context faded from view. Nevertheless, in spite of these halakhic beginnings, law-critical motifs do arise in early Christianity, though strategies for limiting or criticizing the law are not as clearly differentiated from one another as they might usefully be. The Pauline tradition itself displays evidence of a flattening out of the apostle’s delicate halakhic resolution (compare Eph 2:11–22 and 1 Tim 1:8–11 with Paul’s own statements), and as the movement found itself flourishing in Gentile soil it became increasingly difficult to sustain the early precision. All of which is to say that recent scholarship has suggested that we cannot simply lay the responsibility for law criticism at the feet of early Christianity’s two most prominent figures, Jesus and Paul, so we must look beyond them as well. 2. Salvation-historical approaches Second, we find a group of approaches that have in common an emphasis on the decisive significance of the Christ-event for the ongoing role of the Mosaic Torah. This group of approaches sees an original validity to the Torah, and sees it as given by God for the benefit of his people, but of only limited temporal application. Here some of Paul’s arguments, particularly in Galatians 3 – arguments that go beyond anything else in the authentic Pauline letters – may be mentioned, as it is here that Paul goes furthest in his temporal limitation of the validity of the law with his image of the Torah as a “pedagogue” or tutor who looked after its charges only until the Messiah came. Other New Testament authors, such as the author of Luke and Acts, and possibly Hebrews,14 also emphasize the transformation resultant from the in-breaking of the new age. For example, in Luke 16, we have the statement, “The Law and the Prophets were until John [the Baptist]. Since that time, the good news of the kingdom of God has been proclaimed” (16:16). In the early second century, Ignatius presses the shift in temporal situation to great lengths in contesting those who wish to root everything in written 14 Though note the important work of David Moffitt for this question in relation to Hebrews, including his essay in hoc voluminis.

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Scripture, arguing instead that “for me, the ‘archives’ [probably a reference to the Scriptures] are Jesus Christ, the unalterable archives are his cross and death and his resurrection and the faith that comes through him” (Ign. Phld. 8.2), although elsewhere Ignatius does show some sympathy for the Jewish Scriptures. Likewise, Justin Martyr allows that the laws that were given by Moses did have a validity – for example, the laws given after the incident of the Golden Calf are not punitive but remedial15 – but now he stresses that Christians should not keep the Torah, even if he is grudgingly aware of the persistence of law observance among some Jewish Christians (Dial. 46–47). Or one might mention the so-called Gospel of the Ebionites, fr. 6 (via Epiphanius, Pan. 30.16.5) in which Christ says “I am come to do away with sacrifices.”16 Or again, Melito of Sardis might be mentioned, who argues that “when the church came on the scene, and the gospel was set forth, the type lost its value by surrendering its significance to the truth, and the law was fulfilled by surrendering its significance to the gospel” (Peri Pascha 42).17 This approach lives on in Irenaeus and in later Adversus Iudaeos literature. Irenaeus suggests that the temporal shift requires a new understanding of the Torah, but “when at the present time the law is read to the Jews, it is like a fable; for they do not possess the explanation of all things pertaining to the advent of the Son of God … but when it is read by the Christians, it is a treasure” (Haer. 4.26.1). The salvation-historical approach is thus closely tied with a history-of-revelation schema, and so a temporal point divides how one should respond to the Torah’s demands. Likewise, we find in the testimonia of Ps-Gregory of Nyssa the contention that “circumcision did not exist from the beginning, but arose in time, just as it ceases in time” (ἡ περιτομὴ οὐκ ἦν ἐξ ἀρχῆς, ἀλλ᾽ ἐν χρόνῳ ἐγένετο, ὡς καὶ ἐν χρόνῳ παυσομένη), here again with elements of Paul’s arguments from chronology in Galatians 3 looming in the background. The same compilation picks up Paul’s argument that the law was added “because of transgressions” and applies this to the Sabbath, in contrast to the rationale offered in Exodus 20 itself: “The Sabbath was given to them in order to check their desire for money” (Τὀ Σάββατον ἐδόθη αὐτοῖς, τοῦ καταπαῦσαι τὴν φιλοχρήματον αὐτῶν ἐπιθυμίαν; Testimonia 13; cf. also the general tenor of the argument in Justin, Dial. 19.6–20.1).18 15  Dial. 18.2; 19.5; 20.4; 22.1; 27.2; 67.8; cf. J. Carleton Paget, The Epistle of Barnabas: Outlook and Background, WUNT 2.64 (Tübingen: Mohr Siebeck, 1994), 241. Note also Irenaeus, Haer. 4.15.1. 16  Cf. R. Hvalvik, The Struggle for Scripture and Covenant, WUNT 2.82 (Tübingen: Mohr Siebeck, 1996), 123. 17  Following the translation of G. F. Hawthorne in Kerux 4 (1989): 5–35; on Melito, see Alistair Stewart Sykes, “Melito’s Anti-Judaism,” JECS 5 (1997): 271–83. 18  The anti-Jewish tradition of the testimonia collections continues, as in Cyprian’s Ad Quirinum; see Edwina Murphy, “‘As Far as My Poor Memory Suggested’: Cyprian’s Compilation of Ad Quirinum,” VC 68 (2014): 533–550, arguing for the authenticity of this, against Charles Arnold

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As in some of the argumentative strategies that follow, this family of approaches allowed the early Christians simultaneously to affirm the validity of the Jewish Scriptures as divinely given, and also to explain why they did not abide by their practical requirements. 3. Substantive criticisms of the Torah itself In a third category, we find a number of texts that do in fact seem to criticize the content of the Torah or the institutions it is seen to authorize, often with implicit appeal to external norms by which such judgments can be made. We can subdivide this further among a number of claims: a) division within the law. Most commonly we find authors drawing a division within the law, and singling out a certain subsection – usually ritual or ceremonial19 and purity laws – as invalid. In some authors, Ezek 20:25 (“I gave them laws that were not good”) is used to justify the criticism of the Torah, e. g., in Justin Martyr, the mid-second century apologist, in his Dialogue with Trypho (21.4).20 Justin mentions, though does not consistently implement, a tripartite division of the law in Dial. 44.2: “I mean that one commandment was appointed for piety and the practice of righteousness, and another command and action was in the same way spoken either as referring to the mystery of Christ or on account of the hardness of your people’s heart.” As one commentator glosses this, “some parts of the law provide ethical teaching valid for everybody everywhere and at all times, other parts are to be interpreted as prophecies of Christ and his salvation, while, finally, there are commandments intended only for the Jewish people which needed extra rules and checks because of its obduracy.”21 In this sense, circumcision for Justin in part was given to identify the Jewish people, so that, for example, they could be kept from returning to Jerusalem after its partial Bobertz, “An Analysis of Vita Cyprian 3, 6–10 and the Attribution of Ad Quirinum to Cyprian of Carthage,” VC 46 (1992): 112–128; cf. Bobertz, “ ‘For the Vineyard of the Lord of Hosts Was the House of Israel’: Cyprian of Carthage and the Jews,” JQR 82 (1991): 1–15, esp. 3–5. The latter article argues that Cyprian’s Jews are almost entirely biblical rather than contemporary; contrast W. Horbury, Jews and Christians in Contact and Controversy (Edinburgh: T&T Clark, 1998), chap. 7, who sees an actual dialogue with Jews envisaged by the treatise. 19  While the Torah itself draws no such neat divisions, they were sometimes justified, as William Horbury points out, by the Vulgate’s translation of Deut 4:14 using the word caerimoniae; cf. Horbury in S. Krauss, The Jewish-Christian Controversy, rev. and ed. W. Horbury (Tübingen: Mohr Siebeck, 1996), 1:13–19. 20 Cf. P. W. van der Horst, “‘I Gave Them Laws that Were Not Good.’ Ezekiel 20:25 in Ancient Judaism and Early Christianity,” in Hellenism, Judaism, Christianity: Essays on Their Interaction, 2nd ed., CBET 8 (Leuven: Peeters, 1998), 135–156. 21  M. de Jonge, “The Pre-Mosaic Servants of God in the Testaments of the Twelve Patriarchs and in the Writings of Justin and Irenaeus,” VC 39 (1985): 157–170, here 162; cf. more broadly T. Stylianopoulos, Justin Martyr and the Mosaic Law, SBLDS 20 (Missoula, MT: Scholars, 1975).

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destruction at the hand of the Romans (Dial. 16). Therefore, “[t]he ritual law is thus at once punitive and preventive.”22 The Latin-speaking North African author Tertullian half a century later seems to combine a salvation-historical approach with a division within the Torah, by prioritizing the Decalogue and connecting this with the law given in the Garden of Eden in Gen 2:16–17: but first in paradise (was) a more ancient (law), subsequently given at definite periods, when he wished, to the patriarchs, and so again to the Jews, and reformed at certain times: so that we are not to give heed to Moses’ Law as to the primitive law, but as to a subsequent, which at a certain time God has set forth to the Gentiles too and, after repeatedly promising to do so through the prophets, has reformed for the better; and has forewarned that it should come to pass that, just as “the law was given through Moses” at a certain time (certo tempore), so it should be supposed to have been observed and kept only for a time (temporaliter). And let us not annul this power that God has, which reforms the law’s precepts according to the circumstances of time for humanity’s salvation.23

In an interesting twist here, Tertullian seems to draw on the idea of a law in paradise that can also be found in Jewish literature, but rather than see a continuity between that law and the Mosaic Torah, Tertullian argues for a series of changing formulations of that original law, with the result that the Mosaic dispensation is merely one passing phase of that chain of legal reformations.24 One of the most elaborate and interesting theories of law criticism is found in Ptolemy’s Letter to Flora [preserved in Epiphanius, Pan. 33], where Ptolemy, a Valentinian, distinguishes among parts of the law: some words in the law are from God – for Ptolemy, the demiurge or maker of this world – some from Moses under the influence of his own ideas, and others from the elders of the people; the distinction between God’s words and Moses’s words is proven by quoting Matt 19:8: “Because of your hard-heartedness Moses permitted a man to divorce his  M. Simon, Verus Israel, trans. H. McKeating (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1986), 166.  Adv. Jud. 2.9–10; translation following S. Inowlocki, “Tertullian’s Law of Paradise (Adversus Judaeos 2): Reflections on a Shared Motif in Jewish and Christian Literature,” in Paradise in Antiquity, ed. M. Bockmuehl and G. Stroumsa (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2010), 103–119, here 106. Latin text: sed antiquiorem primum in paradiso, post deinde patriarchis atque ita et Iudaeis certis temporibus datam quando voluit et certis temporibus reformatam, ut non iam ad Moysi legem ita adtendamus quasi ad principalem legem, sed ad subsequentem quam certo tempore deus et gentibus exhibuit [et] repromissam per prophetas et in melius reformavit et praemonuit futurum, ut, sicuti certo tempore data est lex per Moysen, ita temporaliter observata et custodita credatur. Nec adimamus hanc dei potestatem pro temporum condicione legis praecepta reformantem in hominis salutem (text from Herman Tränkle, Q. S. F.  Tertulliani Aduersus Iudaeos [Wiesbaden: Franz Steiner, 1964], 6) 24 Elsewhere in the treatise (which is probably composite, only the first nine chapters being original; cf. G. Dunn, Tertullian [The Early Church Fathers; London: Routledge, 2004], 43–73), Tertullian invokes the topos of circumcision as a mark of preventing the Jews from entering Jerusalem, as in Justin Martyr (Adv. Iud. 3), draws on Hebrews to indicate a distinction between “a sabbath eternal and a sabbath temporal” (chap. 4) and suggests that the cessation of sacrifices was already foretold in the Cain and Abel story (chap. 5). 22 23

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wife; from the beginning it was not so; for God made this marriage, and what the Lord joined together, humans must not separate.” The second distinction is proven by citing Matt 15:4–9. Even the law of God is further subdivided into three parts – one which is pure and so completed by Jesus, identified with the Decalogue, the next destroyed because it was interwoven with injustice (illustrated by appeal to the lex talionis), and finally what “is allegorical and symbolic.” This last category is said to refer to “offerings and circumcision and the Sabbath and fasting and Passover and unleavened bread and other similar matters.”25 This may well be an anti-Marcionite move designed to salvage parts of Scripture while conceding some ground to his critiques. Finally, one might also note the solution in the Ps-Clementine Homilies of suggesting that God or an angel has allowed “false pericopae” in the law to test the people (2.38–40; 3.41–51, 54). These seem to refer to a number of objectionable texts in the Pentateuch that could impugn God’s goodness, omniscience, fairness or foreknowledge, but which the enlightened interpreter – Simon Peter in the Homilies – can recognize as non-original and so excise.26 b) distance from God. A related criticism seeks to distance the law by suggesting its origin might not be entirely divine, but is rather due to angelic intermediaries. 25 G. Quispel, “La lettre de Ptolémée à Flora,” VC 2 (1948): 17–56, here see pp. 34–37 (Letter of Ptolemy to Flora, apud Epiphanius, Pan. 33.4.1–4; cf. Irenaeus, Haer. 3.2.1). Quispel stresses the hermeneutical role that secret knowledge plays in achieving this interpretative sifting. Cf. also Ptolemy to Flora, 33.5.1–3 with Justin, Dial. 44: three unequal parts to the law, and note the tripartite division in Iraen. Haer. 1.7.3. F. T. Fallon, “Law in Philo and Ptolemy: A Note on the Letter to Flora,” VC 30 (1976): 45–51, notes that Philo also retains a special place for the Decalogue (cf. David Lincicum, Paul and the Early Jewish Encounter with Deuteronomy [WUNT 2.284; Tübingen: Mohr Siebeck, 2010], 100–116), though on the whole the parallels between Philo and Ptolemy are very inexact. Further on Ptolemy, cf. W. Löhr, “Gnostic and Manichaean Interpretation,” in The New Cambridge History of the Bible, Volume 1: From the Beginnings to 600, ed. James Carleton Paget and Joachim Schaper (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2013), 596–97. 26  Cf. N. Ellis, The Hermeneutics of Divine Testing: Cosmic Trials and Biblical Interpretation in the Epistle of James and Other Jewish Literature, WUNT 2.396 (Tübingen: Mohr Siebeck, 2015), chapter 7; Karl Shuve, “The Doctrine of the False Pericopes and Other Late Antique Approaches to the Problem of Scripture’s Unity,” in Nouvelles intrigues pseudo-clémentines / Plots in the Pseudo-Clementine Romance: actes du deuxième colloque international sur la litterature apocryphe chrétienne, ed. Frederic Amsler (Prahins: Publications de l’Institut Romand des Sciences Bibliques, 2008), 437–445. It is possible that Rabbinic discussions about the status of the Ten Commandments (in, e. g., b. Ber. 12a; y. Ber. 1:4) reflect an ongoing controversy about prioritizing one section of the Torah above others, but it is difficult to press this for firm conclusions in the Tannaitic period; see some brief discussion in Lincicum, Paul and the Early Jewish Encounter, 43–44; note also Michael Chernick, “Some Talmudic Responses to Christianity, Third and Fourth Centuries,” Journal of Ecumenical Studies 17 (1980): 393–406, here 399–400; but for cautions about the identification of the minim in Tannaitic sources as Christians in particular, see Adiel Schremer, Brothers Estranged: Heresy, Christianity and Jewish Identity in Late Antiquity (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2009), 69–86.

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Something like this probably lies behind Paul’s enigmatic statement in Gal 3:19– 20: “The law was given through angels by the hand of a mediator. Now a mediator implies more than one, but God is one.” Here one might also consider Stephen’s speech in Acts 7, in which he criticizes the Temple and suggests that “you are the ones that received the law as ordained by angels, and yet you have not kept it” (7:53), although one should note that he concedes the propriety of circumcision (cf. Ps.-Clementine Recognitions 1.33–71). More radically, in the second century Apology of Aristides we find the statement, “Meanwhile they [i. e., the Jews] too have gone astray from the truth, for they imagine themselves to be paying honor to God, whereas what they do is directed rather toward angels than towards God, when they observe Sabbath and New Moon, the Passover of Unleavened Bread and the great fast, circumcision and the food laws.”27 Here the law is not simply given by angels, but rather angels receive the veneration of its appointed holidays. Or finally, we could note Augustine’s claim, although attesting a later time, that the Manichees “say that the law given through Moses, the servant of God, did not come from the true God, but from the Prince of Darkness.”28 c) Torah as superstitious. By contrast, the enigmatic text known as the Epistle to Diognetus merely ridicules the Torah as superstitious, in arguing that I really doubt that you need instruction from me concerning their worries about food, superstitions about the Sabbath, boasting about circumcision, and charade about fasting and new moons  – absurdities unworthy of discussion. For how is it not illegitimate to accept some things that God made for human use as created good and to reject others as worthless and unnecessary? … Christians do well to keep away from the general silliness and deceit, officiousness and arrogance of Jews.29

Apparently untroubled by the implications of this disdain for the broad acceptance of the Jewish Scriptures as Christian inheritance, the Epistle to Diognetus is tantalizingly underdeveloped here, leading some scholars to argue that this reflects the influence of Marcion or Valentinus. Whether it is possible to describe Diognetus as gnostic in some sense, it clearly capitalizes on traditional anti-Jewish sentiment among Greek and Roman intellectuals, and the charge of “superstition” in particular recalls a common polemic among these authors.30 Horacio  Apol. Arist. 14.4; cf. Simon, Verus Israel, 86  Ep. 263.2; Parsons trans. 29  Diogn. 4.1, 6; ed. Jefford; cf. chs. 3–4 in particular, but also, as Poirier has argued, 5–6; see Paul-Hubert Poirier, “Éléments de polémique anti-juive dans l’Ad Diognetum,” VC 40 (1986): 218–225. Elements of the polemic are also in evidence in Apol. Arist. 14.4. 30 Note Agatharchides of Cnidus (via Josephus, C. Ap. 1.205–11 (cf. Menachem Stern, Greek and Latin Authors on Jews and Judaism [hereafter, GLAJJ], 2 vols. [Israel Academy of Sciences and Humanities, 1974] no. 30A); Cicero, Flac. 28.67, calls it a “barbaric superstition” (barbara superstitio), on which see Stern, GLAJJ no. 68; Strabo, Geogr. 2.37 (GLAJJ no. 115); Horace, Sat. 1.5, 100–101 (GLAJJ no. 128); Quintilian, Inst. 3.7.21 (Moses as “primus Iudaicae superstitionis auctor”; GLAJJ no. 230); and Plutarch’s essay, De Superstitione, which features the Jews on two 27 28

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Lona is certainly correct in noting that, while the author shares with the apostle a conviction that Gentiles should not be circumcised, “die theologische Distanz zu Paulus ist unübersehbar.”31 d) coherent but attesting an inferior god. Finally, as one of the most radical forms of substantive criticism of the law in early Christianity, there is Marcion himself, who flatly rejected the entire Hebrew Bible as a product of an inferior god. Interestingly, Marcion does not so much suggest that this or that part of the law is falsified or invalid, or a poor revelation of its god Rather, for Marcion “[t]he Jewish Scriptures represent a true revelation of the Creator, but they do not speak of or for the God whom alone Christians ought to worship.”32 In his lost work, the Antitheses, Marcion placed in contrast passages from the Jewish Scriptures with those in his gospel, to the disadvantage of the former.33 Marcion, for example, criticized the “first law” in Eden, arguing that the promulgation of such a law cannot prevent sin but rather implicates the creator god in the creature’s fall.34 While Sebastian Moll contends that Marcion required the Hebrew Bible’s witness to its god to maintain the antithetical structure of his theology, and to that extent it would be erroneous to say that he “rejected” it,35 this technicality does not grant the Hebrew Bible a place in Marcion’s canon. The Jewish Scriptures occasions (3.166A and 8.169C; GLAJJ nos. 255 and 256 respectively); Tacitus, Hist. 5.8.3, 5.13.1 (GLAJJ no. 281) and Annal. 2.85.4 (GLAJJ no. 284); Suetonius, Tib. 36 (GLAJJ no. 306); Apuleius, Florida 6 (GLAJJ no. 362). Note also the new fragment of Diogenes of Oinoanda, discovered in 1997, that describes the Jews and the Egyptians as “the most superstitious” of nations: Martin Ferguson Smith, “Excavations at Oinoanda 1997: The New Epicurean Texts,” Anatolian Studies 48 (1998): 125–170; New Fragment 126 III.7–IV.2 (text on p. 132; comment on pp. 140–141); cf. further Pieter W. van der Horst, “‘The Most Superstitious and Disgusting of All Nations’: Diogenes of Oenoanda on the Jews,” in Jews and Christians in Their Graeco-Roman Context: Selected Essays on Early Judaism, Samaritanism, Hellenism, and Christianity, WUNT 196 (Tübingen: Mohr Siebeck, 2006), 227–233; Krystyna Stebnicka, “‘Superstitious and Abominable’: Jews in the Epicurean Account of Diogenes of Oinoanda,” Scripta Judaica Cracoviensia 12 (2014): 25–32. 31  Horacio E. Lona, “Beobachtungen zu ἀλαζονεία und εἰρωνεία in Diog 4,1.4–5,” ZNW 90 (1999): 282–289, here 284. 32  J. Knox, as quoted in J. Barton, “Marcion Revisited,” in The Canon Debate (ed. L. M.  McDonald and J. A. Sanders; Peabody, MA: Hendrickson, 2002), 71. 33  For recent work on the Antitheses, note Eric W. Scherbenske, “Marcion’s Antitheses and the Isagogic Genre,” VC 64 (2010): 255–279; Heikki Räisänen, “Marcion,” in A Companion to Second-Century Christian ‘Heretics’, ed. A. Marjanen and P. Luomanen (Leiden: Brill, 2005), 100–124; Gerhard May, “Markions Genesisauslegung und die ‘Antithesen’,” in Die Weltlichkeit des Glaubens in der Alten Kirche: FS für Ulrich Wickert zum siebzigsten Geburtstag. ed. Barbara Aland et al. (Berlin: de Gruyter, 1997), 189–198; cf. also Judith M. Lieu, “‘As Much My Apostle as Christ is Mine’: The Dispute over Paul between Tertullian and Marcion,” Early Christianity 1 (2010): 41–59, on Marcion’s Paulinism. But see the cautions against over-emphasizing Marcion’s anti-Judaism in Heikki Räisänen, “Marcion and the Origins of Christian Anti-Judaism: A Reappraisal,” Temenos 33 (1997): 121–135. 34  Tertullian, Marc. II.4–5 and IV.38 on which see May, “Genesisauslegung,” 192–193. 35  S. Moll, The Arch-Heretic Marcion, WUNT 250 (Tübingen: Mohr Siebeck, 2010), 78–83.

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remain coherent and a true reflection of their god, even if they are to be rejected as the product of the demiurge rather than the one true God revealed in Jesus. e) riddled with error and not divine in any real sense. All this stands in some contrast with Marcion’s erstwhile disciple, Apelles. Apelles was a rough contemporary of Irenaeus, active ca. 140–185 in Rome and Alexandria, one of whose main works, the Syllogismes, was devoted to the refutation of the Jewish Scriptures.36 The work is lost, but from the surviving fragments it seems that he proceeded by calling attention to moral or theological difficulties in the law and the prophets, and drawing theological conclusions from them. For instance, Apelles noted that the dimensions of the ark were impossibly small to accommodate the animals, and concluded: ψευδὴς ἄρα ὁ μῦθος· οὐκ ἄρα ἐκ θεοῦ ἡ γραφή: “the myth is false, and therefore the Scripture is not from God.”37 He impugns the logic of the command not to eat of the tree in the garden, on the grounds that the first humans, having no experience of death, could hardly have understood the creator’s warning (Ambrose, Parad. 5.28). As Junod points out, Marcion and Apelles are united in their rejection of allegorical or symbolic reading strategies for the accommodation of such difficulties,38 but it may be that Apelles was motivated by a stricter monotheism than Marcion and so, rather than viewing Scripture as a coherent product of a lesser god, chose to see its faults as indications that it did not come from God at all. In this sense, he represents the most extreme Christian approach to the Law. 4. Hermeneutical approaches Finally, while of course all of these approaches are hermeneutical in some way or another, a fourth category designates those approaches which depend for their criticism on a reinterpretation of the Torah itself, and so might be seen as criticizing the law by the precise means of the law’s authority – or sometimes on the basis of the broader authority of Scripture. This, I suggest, is where we should locate the so-called Epistle of Barnabas, and its law polemic.39 36  The fragments related to Apelles are collected in Harnack, Marcion: Das Evangelium von fremden Gott, 2nd ed. (Leipzig: J. C. Hinrichs, 1924), 403*–420*; on Apelles and his views of Scripture, see esp. E. Junod, “Les attitudes d’Apelles, disciple de Marcion, à l’égard de l’Ancien Testament,” Augustinianum 12 (1982): 113–133; Katharina Greschat, Apelles und Hermogenes. Zwei theologische Lehrer des zweiten Jahrhunderts, VCSup 48 (Leiden and Boston: Brill, 2000), 17–134. 37  Origen, Hom. Gen. II.2, cited in Junod, “Les attitudes d’Apelles,” 120. 38 “Les attitudes d’Apelles,” 122, 125. Junod goes on to suggest that ultimately Apelles approximates the position of Ptolemy and the Ps-Clementine literature of drawing lines of division within Scripture in his other (probably later) major work, the Phaneroseis (130–131). 39  Cf. Simon Tugwell, The Apostolic Fathers, Outstanding Christian Thinkers (London: Geoffrey Chapman, 1989), 25–26 for some suggestive thoughts on approaches to the problem of the ongoing authority of the Old Testament; further, note, inter alia, Ferdinand R. Prostmeier, “Anti-

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Barnabas40 writes problematically, offensively even, of ancient Judaism and casts the coming of the Messiah as effectively the end of God’s covenant with the Jews. But it offers a fascinating window into the development of an early Christian hermeneutics for appropriating Jewish Scripture as the Christian Old Testament. Barnabas is clearly a traditionalist in some ways, but he is neither unthinking in his traditionalism nor wholly novel in his radicalism. Barnabas probably comes from Alexandrian circles – a commonplace in scholarly literature on the basis especially of Barnabas’s allegorical hermeneutic and its early reception by Clement and Origen, though admittedly this evidence is somewhat weak, given the fact that Alexandria certainly has no monopoly on allegory and the relatively easy circulation of early Christian texts [instance the Shepherd of Hermas41] relativizes the usefulness of reception as a tool for specifying origin. Though the evidence has been endlessly debated, and certainty is far from possible on this matter, I tentatively date Barnabas during or just after Nerva’s brief reign (96–98 CE) when Jewish hopes for the rebuilding of the Temple may possibly have been heightened in some circles after the reversal of Flavian policies toward the Jews instituted by Vespasian and continued by Titus and Domitian.42 This may also have led some Gentiles to consider taking on Jewish observances, whether for reasons of political expediency or genuine attraction. Whatever the precise circumstances in view, Barnabas writes a polemical letter-essay to dissuade some Christians from taking on these Jewish practices. In the course of making his appeal, he comes perilously close to denying the very source of authority on which he bases his advice. It is this balancing act – criticizing the Jewish law on the basis of the Jewish law – that I would like to examine in some judaismus im Rahmen christlicher Hermeneutik: zum Streit über christliche Identität in der Alten Kirche. Notizen zum Barnabasbrief,” ZAC 6 (2002): 38–58; James N. Rhodes, The Epistle of Barnabas and the Deuteronomic Tradition, WUNT 2.188 (Tübingen: Mohr Siebeck, 2004). 40  I use the traditional ascription of the tractate to Barnabas without suggesting this is in any sense accurate; the text is formally anonymous but early ascribed erroneously to Barnabas. For discussion of these introductory matters, see D. Lincicum, “Barnabas, Epistle of,” in the Brill Encyclopedia of Early Christianity (forthcoming). 41  Cf. L. Hurtado, The Earliest Christian Artifacts: Manuscripts and Christian Origins (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 2006), 32–33. 42 Note the competing estimations of the nature and significance of the fiscus Judaicus in M. Goodman, “Nerva, the fiscus Judaicus and Jewish Identity,” JRS 79 (1989): 40–44; Goodman, Mission and Conversion (Oxford: Clarendon, 1995), 45; Marius Heemstra, The Fiscus Judaicus and the Parting of the Ways, WUNT 2.277 (Tübingen: Mohr Siebeck, 2010), 67–84, on the one hand, and the change of position in M. Goodman, “The Meaning of ‘Fisci Judaici Calumnia Sublata’ on the Coinage of Nerva,” in Studies in Josephus and the Varieties of Ancient Judaism. Louis H. Feldman Jubilee Volume, ed. S. J. D. Cohen and J. J. Schwartz, AJEC 67 (Leiden: Brill, 2007), 81–89, on the other. On Nerva’s brief reign more generally, see Charles Leslie Murison, “M. Cocceius Nerva and the Flavians,” TAPA 133 (2003): 147–57. For this general dating of Barnabas, see Carleton Paget, The Epistle of Barnabas, 9–30; Peter Richardson and Martin B. Shukster, “Barnabas, Nerva, and the Yavnean Rabbis,” JTS 34 n.s. (1983): 31–55; A. Lukyn Williams, “The Date of the Epistle of Barnabas,” JTS 34 (1933): 337–46; F. X. Funk, Die Apostolischen Väter (Tübingen: Mohr, 1901), etc.

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detail. Setting it within the context of broader Christian approaches to the Torah sheds some light on Barnabas’s individuality. Like the third century Didascalia,43 Barnabas achieves interpretative mileage from the Golden Calf episode. He argues that Israel “lost [the covenant] completely” (4.6) at the episode of the Golden Calf. When Moses descended, he “hurled the two tablets from his hands, and their covenant was shattered, in order that the covenant of the beloved Jesus might be sealed in our heart” (4.8). When Barnabas wants to investigate “whether this people or the former people is the heir, and whether the covenant is theirs or ours” (13.1), the reversal of the right of primogeniture that he finds in Genesis serves his supersessionist purposes well.44 Hadn’t God sworn to give the covenant to the patriarchs? According to Barnabas, he did in fact give it, but Israel was unable to receive it because of their sins (14.1–4). This basic conviction then sets up an interpretative lens through which the Torah is read. Much of Barnabas could be seen as constructing a contrast between things that are φανερά, clear or evident, and those that are σκοτεινά, obscure (cf. 8.7), and his epistle can be understood as an act of semiotic allegoresis, interpretation of allegory. Though twice avowing that he does not speak as a teacher (1.8; 4.9), Barnabas does instruct his readers in the interpretative leverage he attains by reading texts from the prophets – usually understood hyperbolically – as literal statements about God’s lack of interest in sacrifices, calendrical observances and fasts. For example, he writes, “For he has made it clear to us through all the prophets that he needs neither sacrifices nor whole burnt offerings nor general offerings” (2.4, citing Isa 1:11–13). So it would be a mistake simply to suggest that Barnabas has an allegorical hermeneutic, when he rather has a variegated hermeneutic that operates in service of his holistic construal of the history of Israel – a history of massive misunderstanding and hopeless failure.45 At some points in his Epistle, Barnabas seems to fit the third category of law criticism, material critique of the Torah. So for example, he writes of sacrifices that “he has nullified these things” (ταῦτα οὖν κατήργησεν; 2.6), and goes on to speak of a “new law” (καινὸς νόμος) of our Lord Jesus Christ, without the yoke 43  Esp. ch. 26, on which see W. C. van Unnik, “The Significance of Moses’ Law for the Church of Christ according to the Syriac Didascalia,” in Sparsa Collecta III (Leiden: Brill, 1983), 7–39. 44  Supersessionism is a slippery term that often means different things to different readers; for some indication of its range of possibilities, see B. Longenecker, “On Israel’s God and God’s Israel: Assessing Supersessionism in Paul,” JTS 58.1 (2007): 26–44. But under almost all definitions of supersessionism, Barnabas would qualify. 45 Cf. Knut Backhaus, “Das Bundesmotiv in der frühkirchlichen Schwellenzeit: Hebräerbrief, Barnabasbrief, Dialogus cum Tryphone,” in Der sprechende Gott: Gesammelte Studien zum Hebräerbrief, WUNT 240 (Tübingen: Mohr Siebeck, 2009), 153–73, who suggests that “Nicht in der semantischen Substitution oder Konzentration, sondern in der radikalen Finalisierung der konventionellen Felder liegt das Spezifikum des Barn. Insofern die Schrift eindeitig auf die Christen zu beziehen ist, ist jede Kontinuität, jede Heilsgeschichte auszuschließen” (166). Similarly, S. Lowy speaks of Barn’s “unique radicalism” with “almost no counterpart in all patristic literature”; see “The Confutation of Judaism in the Epistle of Barnabas,” JJS 11 (1960): 1–33, here, 1.

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of necessity – cf. τὸν λαὸν τὸν καινὸν in 5.7. Likewise, he criticizes literal understandings of sacrifices (ch. 2), fasting (ch. 3), circumcision (9.6), dietary laws (ch. 10), the Sabbath (ch. 15), and the Temple (ch. 16). But on the other hand, Barnabas wants to avoid “lawlessness” (ἀνομία; 4.1, 10), and urges close attention to the “righteous requirements of the Lord” (τὰ δικαιώματα κυρίου; 2.1; 4.11). There will be a judgment according to works (4.12; cf. 21.1), the result of which – rather than the basis – will be justification for the righteous (4.10). Moreover, he upholds the goodness of the Torah: “Observe how well Moses legislated!” (βλέπετε πῶς ἐνομοθέτησεν Μωϋσῆς καλῶς; 10.11). The way in which Barnabas holds this together is a recognition that the timeless validity of the law – in contrast to salvation-historical approaches – is achieved ironically by an unheilsgeschichtliche judgment, with the decisive moment being Sinai rather than the Christ-event, and the hermeneutical consequences only seen retrospectively from Barnabas’s present. And in fact, according to Barnabas, circumcision of the ears and hearts is precisely the hermeneutical precondition to understanding the law rightly, along the lines the Lord intended (10.12). This vision in place, the Bible becomes a vast field of signifiers pointing ahead to the common signified in Jesus: the land becomes a typological sign of both the incarnate body of Jesus, and the believing Christian (ch. 6); the Day of Atonement also offers a picture of Jesus’s suffering (ch. 7), the red heifer signifies the purifying death of Jesus (ch. 8), circumcision is an internal spiritual reality rather than a mark in the flesh (ch. 9). Jesus and his cross are indicated by a symbolic understanding of the number of Abraham’s 318 servants – a piece of nomina sacra-like symbolism46 of which Barnabas is rather proud – and likewise both baptism (ch. 11) and the cross (ch. 12) are foreshadowed in Scripture. Despite what one might charitably call the productiveness of Barnabas’s vision, it is not difficult to identify inconsistencies: if the covenant was destroyed at Sinai in deferment until “the beloved” Jesus should come, then why did God give the post-Sinai Torah to a people who could only misunderstand it? Moreover, Barnabas “systematically ignores the incident that according to the biblical text itself is the complement to the destruction of the tablets. It ignores the making of the new tablets, according to the Lord’s own command, on which by the Lord’s own hand were written the terms of the renewed covenant.”47 There is surely a question of theodicy lurking not far beneath the surface of Barnabas’s theological vision, but the fury of his polemical vision keeps the question from surfacing. One might say that in any case Barnabas’s position enables the laws to have an ongoing validity, if understood correctly, in contrast to the salvation-historical approaches.48 46  Not, as is sometimes imprecisely said, gematria; see R. Hvalvik, “Barnabas 9:7–9 and the Author’s Supposed Use of Gematria,” NTS 33 (1987): 276–282. 47  Simon, Verus Israel, 88. 48  Cf. Carleton Paget, Barnabas, 242; See also W. Horbury, “Jewish-Christian Relations in Barnabas and Justin Martyr,” in Jews and Christians, 127–61, here 142: “certainly allows to

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Conclusion Early Christians were resourceful in the argumentative strategies they employed in justifying the non-observance of Torah commandments, particularly those concerning purity and cultic laws. Faced with a particular hermeneutical dilemma – an authoritative Scripture that demanded a way of life they no longer followed – they responded with a broad array of justifications that placed interpretative priorities in different places. The typology developed here is heuristic rather than exhaustive, and intends chiefly to include the main argumentative strategies employed by early Christians. The study of earliest Christian stances toward the Torah has been plagued by an anachronism that has only begun to recede in the past few decades, as scholarship has learned once more what it means to see Jesus and Paul as genuinely Jewish representatives of Second Temple Judaism. Much of what had previously gone under the label of “law criticism”, or sometimes more aptly, Gesetzeskritik, is better seen as intra-Jewish halakhic dispute and clarification. But the process of Gentilization (which is not to say Hellenization) of the early Christian movement ensured that a three-pronged fork in the road appeared: pursue the Matthean solution of requiring full proselytism for community membership, maintain the Pauline balance of alternative strategies for Jewish and Gentile background Christ-believers, or universalize the Pauline solution for Gentiles into a rule for the church as a whole. The last of these options prevailed, whether through self-conscious reflection or simply the passage of time and the erasing of distinctions once clear. Regardless, the process of self-definition and the rationalization of religious belief, particularly in conversation with alternative views, provoked an array of justifications for a variety of stances toward Torah obedience. In the end, Barnabas’s stance toward the law is distinctive, although naturally not entirely unique, among other early Christian approaches, in that he achieves his rhetorical purpose of dissuading would-be adopters of Jewish law observance not by arguing for an alternative halakhic vision (unless all this somehow amounts to a radical halakhah), nor by heralding a change of ages with the coming of the Messiah and an attendant change of law, nor even by criticizing particular elements of the Torah itself, but by leveraging the Golden Calf event as a hermeneutical turning point, by reifying prophetic anti-cultic hyperbole, and so by accusing the entire Jewish tradition of an overly literal misreading of the Torah. Needless to say, the vision is in many ways an unattractive one, but in simultaneously holding to both the eternal validity and the practical irrelevance of the the ritual laws an abiding value – but only as encoded moral commandments and prophecies, the meaning of which was declared in vain to the Jews in the law and the prophets, but is now understood by the Christians.”

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Mosaic law, Barnabas achieved an innovation that would have lasting effects, through the Alexandrian tradition, on the history of Christian and Jewish encounters for centuries to come.

The Ancient Church Orders: Early ecclesiastical law? Paul F. Bradshaw “Ancient church orders” is the collective designation given to several early Christian works spanning the period from the late first to the early fifth century that share a number of features in common. All purport to be apostolic in one way or another and give authoritative directions as to the manner of Christian living and/or the ordering of a community’s ecclesiastical and liturgical practices. In other words, at least on the surface, they appear to be at least in part some kind of legal material, if it can be called such even when no penalties are attached to failure to obey it. They comprise, in what has generally come to be thought of as the chronological order of their final redaction: the Didache, the Apostolic Church Order, the Didascalia Apostolorum, the so-called Apostolic Tradition of Hippolytus, together with two derivatives of this last work, the Canons of Hippolytus and the Testamentum Domini, and a composite reworking of material from three of them, the Apostolic Constitutions. All were originally written in Greek, although in some cases all that has survived are translations into other ancient languages.1 The appellation “church orders” was made by scholars of the modern period on the analogy of the Kirchenordnungen of the sixteenth–century German Reformation because of the similarity of content between the two.2 However, as Joseph Mueller has observed, this is potentially misleading because, although both groups of documents attempted to ground the legitimacy of their prescriptions in supposed apostolic tradition, the Reformation texts derived their ultimate authority from the particular ecclesiastical community that produced them and so could be subsequently changed by that same community, whereas the ancient church orders were either anonymous or pseudepigraphic and thus claimed instead to derive their authority solely from being in some way “apostolic.”3 Mueller himself challenged the idea that they constituted a single literary genre of their own because the forms and topics that have been identified as charac1 For further details of the date, provenance and character of all these, together with details of editions and translations, see Paul F. Bradshaw, Ancient Church Orders, Alcuin/GROW Joint Liturgical Study 80 (Norwich: Hymns Ancient & Modern, 2015), 10–26. 2  On the history of the designation of the ancient works as “church orders,” see Nancy Pardee, The Genre and Development of the Didache, WUNT 2.339 (Tübingen: Mohr Siebeck, 2012), 31–46. 3  See Joseph G. Mueller, “The Ancient Church Order Literature: Genre or Tradition?” JECS 15 (2007): 337–80, here at 340–43.

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teristic of them can also be found in what are clearly other genres. Instead, he claimed that they formed part of a wider exegetical tradition that extracted doctrine on church life from the Old Testament. Building on the work of C. E. Fonrobert, who saw the Didascalia as a sort of Christian Mishnah, and of Eva Synek, who viewed the Apostolic Constitutions as a Christian Talmud,4 he argued that the compilers of the various church orders intended their works to function as teaching on community order founded on interpretations of the Old Testament that adopted hermeneutical techniques used by Jews in the first centuries of the Common Era, a mix of halakhah and haggadah. But this, he asserted, was also true of a much broader tradition within early Christian writings, among them I Clement, Ambrose of Milan’s De sacramentis, and the Epistula apostolorum. However, although individual points of congruity may be seen between that tradition and some parts of some of the church orders, it will hardly suffice as a category for them all. For example, to describe them as being “exegesis of Scripture” misrepresents them. When the Old Testament is cited, it is in support of the teaching that is given: the teaching is not derived from it. And unlike the Mishnah, alternative opinions of authorities are not offered.5 Nevertheless, in spite of the difficulties associated with assigning a common classification to the church orders and the application of that term itself to them, they can be said to belong together partly because a literary relationship exists between many of them and also because in antiquity they were seen to have some affinity with one another and were assembled together in collective works.

Comprehensive or selective? For most of the twentieth century they were treated by scholars as having been the authoritative manuals of rules and regulations of particular Christian communities and it was therefore assumed that what they prescribed had actually been put into effect. So, for example, Alexandre Faivre could describe them as “canonico-liturgical literature.”6 Gradually, however, doubts began to be raised by some about these presuppositions. In particular, Georg Schöllgen argued that their content was not comprehensive but selective: they were polemical texts 4  Charlotte Elisheva Fonrobert, “The Didascalia Apostolorum: A Mishnah for the Disciples of Jesus,” JECS 9 (2001): 483–509; Eva M. Synek, “Die Apostolischen Konstitutionen – ein ‘christlicher Talmud’ aus dem 4. Jh.,” Bib 79 (1998): 27–56. 5 For a more detailed critique, see Pardee, Genre and Development, 18–31; also the comments by Alistair Stewart-Sykes, The Didascalia Apostolorum: An English Version with Introduction and Annotation (Turnhout: Brepols, 2009), 4, n. 3. 6  Alexandre Faivre, “La documentation canonico-liturgique de l’Église ancienne,” RevSR 54 (1980): 204–19, 273–97; repr. in La documentation patristique. Bilan et prospective, ed. JeanClaude Fredouille and René-Michel Roberge (Quebec: Presses de l’Université de Laval, 1995), 3–41.

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addressing only specific controverted issues and new situations that had arisen within their communities.7 Thus, the fact that some institution or practice was not mentioned did not mean that it might not have existed. Not all were won over to his point of view. Although the author of the most recent comprehensive commentary on the Didache, Kurt Niederwimmer, gave cautious support as far as that document was concerned,8 Bruno Steimer directly challenged Schöllgen, insisting that the church orders represented actual practice and so could be taken as constituting comprehensive mirrors of church life of their times. The absence of explicit pseudepigraphy in the Didache meant for him that the practices were already generally accepted and had been put into writing by someone recognised as authoritative in the community, while the claims to apostolicity in other works were simply intended to gain them more universal validity.9 Steimer’s view was in turn subjected to severe criticism by Schöllgen in a review of his book. He argued that the very use of apostolic pseudonymity in the church orders to bolster the authority of what they prescribed counted decisively against the supposition of unanimous acceptance on the part of the intended recipients and against the idea that their authors were authorised representatives of the community. Such a subterfuge would not have been necessary if the authority of what was being prescribed in them had been readily recognised by all concerned.10 They therefore could not be taken as descriptions of what was already being practised but only as aspirations by their compilers and editors as to what should be practised. Schöllgen’s line of reasoning has been strongly endorsed in a recent major work by Bart Ehrman, who avers that “when considering the church orders, we are dealing with inherently polemical literature, even when the polemics are below the surface.”11 Yet, when discussing the Didascalia, he is forced to admit that  7 Georg Schöllgen, “Die Didache als Kirchenordnung. Zur Frage des Abfassungszweckes und seinen Konsequenzen für die Interpretation,” JAC 29 (1986): 5–26; trans. as “The Didache as a Church Order,” in The Didache in Modern Research, ed. Jonathan Draper (Leiden: Brill, 1996), 43–71; Schöllgen, “Die literarische Gattung der syrischen Didaskalie,” in IV Symposium Syriacum, 1984: Literary genres in Syriac literature, ed. H. J. W. Drijvers et al.; Orientalia Christiana Analecta 229 (Rome: Pontificale Institutum Orientalium Studiorum, 1987), 149–59.  8  Kurt Niederwimmer, The Didache: A Commentary, Hermeneia (Minneapolis: Fortress, 1998), 3, n. 15.  9  Bruno Steimer, Vertex Traditionis: Die Gattung der altchristlichen Kirchenordnungen (New York: De Gruyter, 1992), 268–80. 10 Georg Schöllgen, “Der Abfassungszweck der frühchristlichen Kirchenordnungen: Anmerkungen zu den Thesen Bruno Steimers,” JAC 40 (1997): 55–77. See also Georg Schöllgen, “Pseudapolizität und Schriftgebrauch in den ersten Kirchenordnungen. Anmerkungen zur Begründung des frühen Kirchenrechts,” in Stimuli. Exegese und ihre Hermeneutik in Antike und Christentum, ed. Georg Schöllgen and Clemens Schöllgen, JACE 23 (Münster: Aschendorff, 1996), 96–121. 11 Bart D. Ehrman, Forgery and Counterforgery: The Use of Literary Deceit in Early Christian Polemics (Oxford/New York: Oxford University Press, 2013), 387.

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most of it “is not polemical in nature” and that the polemic only begins to appear in it when the status of the Jewish Law is raised,12 although he later rightly adds the discussions of the roles of the bishop and of women as also being controverted issues in the work, following the arguments of Carolyn Osiek and Charlotte Methuen, as well as the form of the observance of Easter.13 Rather than viewing the character of the church orders as being strictly polemical, Alistair Stewart-Sykes preferred the more moderate term “propagandist” to identify their purpose. The principal aim of the redactors of the Didascalia he thought was “to deal with the challenges posed by Jewish Christians”;14 and that of the Apostolic Church Order was “fundamentally to legislate against a liturgical role for women.”15 The aim of the first of what he believed were the two successive redactors of the Apostolic Tradition was “to boost his particular agendum of exalting the bishop, as a teacher who might be without social standing, above the presbyters, who might act as patrons within the school” while the second, “as a result of the reconciliation of this school with the wider Roman church,… made it useable in the united community.”16 For the Apostolic Constitutions he referred to another work of Joseph Mueller, who had proposed that it reflected an ­anti-­imperial and anti-Nicene stance and that it had adapted traditional techniques of Old Testament exegesis to fit fourth-century ecclesiological contexts.17 Like Ehrman, however, Stewart-Sykes acknowledged that not every element in the text of these works is propagandist in intent. Thus, its two sources “account for the greater part” of the Didascalia18 and similarly the greater part of the Apostolic Church Order “is simply the repetition of traditional material largely derived from earlier documents”;19 while at the core of the Apostolic Tradition was “an ancient document of a recognised genre.”20

12 Ehrman,

348. 387–90; Carolyn Osiek, “The Widow as Altar: The Rise and Fall of a Symbol,” Second Century 3 (1983): 159–69; Charlotte Methuen, “Widows, Bishops and the Struggle for Authority in the Didascalia Apostolorum,” JEH 46 (1995): 197–213. 14  Stewart-Sykes, The Didascalia Apostolorum, 3. 15 Alistair Stewart-Sykes, The Apostolic Church Order: The Greek Text with Introduction, Translation and Annotation, Early Christian Studies 10 (Strathfield, Australia: St Pauls Publications, 2006), 75. 16  Alistair Stewart-Sykes, Hippolytus: On the Apostolic Tradition (Crestwood, NY: St Vladimir’s Seminary Press, 2001), 49. 17  Joseph G. Mueller, L’Ancien Testament dans l’ecclésiologie des Pères. Une lecture des Constitutions Apostoliques, Instrumenta Patristica et Mediaevalia 41 (Turnhout: Brepols, 2004), 120–26. 18  Stewart-Sykes, The Didascalia Apostolorum, 22. 19  Stewart-Sykes, The Apostolic Church Order, 80. 20  Stewart-Sykes, On the Apostolic Tradition, 49. 13 Ehrman,

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A single purpose? In recent years, however, a new perspective on the question of purpose has begun to open up among a number of scholars with the recognition that all of the church orders fall into the category of what has been described as “living literature.” This is material that circulates within a community and forms a part of its heritage and tradition but is constantly subject to revision and rewriting to reflect changing historical and cultural circumstances. Examples would include folk tales and even some scriptural material, all characterised by the existence of multiple recensions, sometimes exhibiting quantitive differences (i. e., longer and shorter versions) and sometimes qualitive differences (i. e., various ways of saying the same thing, often with no clear reflection of a single Urtext), and sometimes both.21 Although it had always been understood that at least some of the individual church orders had suffered emendations and interpolations by later hands, the general consensus had been that the substance of each of the texts belonged to a specific community in a particular place at a particular time period, and so could be read as reflecting what had been practised there, or at least what it was desired should be practised there. But once it is recognised that every one of the church orders was the product of a process of redaction, the work can no longer be regarded as belonging to a single point in time, nor even to one location, as elements characteristic of different parts of the ancient Christian world can be seen in some of them, to say nothing of variations introduced by translators, especially when a text in the original language against which these could be tested is not extant. In the light of this, it is difficult to regard a church order as having a single unified purpose, as different redactors might well have had quite disparate intentions in modifying the text that had come into their hands. Instead, the documents need to be treated as embodying several different layers of tradition and each of these strata examined for clues as to its specific character. To such an examination we now turn.

Didache and Apostolic Church Order The first thing to be noted is that some of the church orders are amalgams of two different types of literature. The Didache and the Apostolic Church Order each prefix a version of the Jewish “Two Ways” material, urging the adoption of the way of life over the way of death, to directions concerning church institutions. 21  See further Paul F. Bradshaw, “Liturgy and ‘Living Literature’,” in Liturgy in Dialogue: Essays in Memory of Ronald Jasper, ed. Paul Bradshaw and Bryan Spinks (Collegeville, MN: Liturgical Press, 1995), 139–54.

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In the case of the Didache, these directions cover baptism, fasting, daily prayer and prayer at meals, the treatment of “apostles and prophets,” the celebration of the Eucharist on the Lord’s Day, and the appointment of bishops and deacons, concluding with an admonition to eschatological vigilance. In the case of the Apostolic Church Order, the content is restricted to the appointment of bishops, presbyters, readers, deacons, and widows, and the duties of deacons, laymen, and lay women. Because the “Two Ways” material also turns up in a number of other works,22 it clearly had an existence independent of its inclusion in these church orders, and is generally agreed by scholars to stand in the tradition of paraenesis, however difficult that term may be to define, rather than that of law. But what of the other directives? Here, as Niederwimmer has rightly insisted,23 we need to distinguish between tradition and redaction. The material appears to include what may well originally have been genuine community rules (though not necessarily all of them from the same community or from the same time period), but they have been assembled and edited into their present form by a later hand, probably around the end of the first century. In the case of the Didache, according to Niederwimmer, this redactor had drawn on: a (written or oral) archaic liturgical tradition concerning baptism and Eucharist; a (probably written) also archaic tradition concerning the reception of itinerant charismatics; and a brief apocalyptic description of the events of the end time. This material the redactor expanded and modified, reinterpreting the “Two Ways” tractate as pre-baptismal catechesis in the process (see Didache 7.1).24 His aim appears to have been “to harmonize ancient and revered traditions of the church with new ecclesial necessities.”25 In its present form, therefore, it cannot be assumed always to reflect authentically those ancient regulations, nor can we know whether its final redaction did actually form the accepted ordering of the redactor’s own community or merely an individual’s desire for such an outcome. Apart from its title, “The teaching of the twelve apostles” (which may or may not belong to the oldest form of the text26), it makes no other claim as to its authority. 22  For further details see Niederwimmer, The Didache, 14, 30–35; Huub van de Sandt and David Flusser, The Didache: Its Jewish Sources and its Place in Early Judaism and Christianity (Minneapolis: Fortress, 2002), 59–70; Alistair Stewart-Sykes, On the Two Ways (Yonkers, NY: St Vladimir’s Seminary Press, 2011). 23  Niederwimmer, The Didache, 52. 24  Niederwimmer, 42–46. For the possibility that the redaction of the meal prayers had been even more radical than Niederwimmer judged, see Paul F. Bradshaw, “Yet Another Explanation of Didache 9–10,” Studia Liturgica 36 (2006): 124–28. The most recent collection of studies on the Didache is Jonathan A. Draper and Clayton N. Jefford, eds., The Didache: A Missing Piece of the Puzzle in Early Christianity (Atlanta: SBL Press, 2015). 25 Niederwimmer, The Didache, 3. 26  Niederwimmer, 56–57.

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The situation with regard to the Apostolic Church Order is somewhat clearer. Once again, the directives appended to the “Two Ways” material appear to stem from a genuine ancient ecclesiastical source, but have gone through a process of interpolation in order to address later issues, and especially to challenge the liturgical activity of women, probably completed by the early third century. That these later developments were not part of settled community law but formed a controversial point of view is strongly suggested by the attachment of the names of individual apostles to the various sections of the whole work in order to give it greater authority.

Didascalia Apostolorum The Didascalia also made use of material from the “Two Ways” tradition, but with a different outcome. Alistair Stewart-Sykes has identified two main sources in this church order – a version of the “Two Ways” tradition and a version of the source behind the Apostolic Church Order containing directions for the appointment of church officers and their duties – together with signs of the existence of other briefer sources. All of these have been worked over and greatly expanded by an apparent succession of redactors down to the fourth century so that they no longer resemble the rather terse instructions found in the earlier church orders. The result is a lengthy pastoral and disciplinary manual that has the air of extended paraenesis rather than law, and that is more concerned to offer theological justification for what it promotes than to present an easily useable book of instructions. Indeed, it lacks specific directions altogether as to how ministers are to be appointed, and makes only passing references to the celebration of the Eucharist and the administration of baptism when addressing other matters. A prime example of the character of the work is in Chapter 21, where what apparently had been a set of directions for the keeping of a Quartodeciman Pascha have been adapted to refer instead to a Sunday observance of the feast.27 But the actual instructions form only a relatively small part of the whole chapter, as they are submerged in a wealth of argument and explanation as to why the season should be kept in that particular manner. It has, in fact, become a treatise rather than a practical handbook. Moreover, whereas the earlier church orders had made only very occasional explicit reference to scripture passages (as distinct from unacknowledged allusions) to support their instructions concerning ecclesiastical institutions and practice,28 biblical citations and paraphrases in the 27 For the Quartodeciman Pascha, see Paul F. Bradshaw and Maxwell E. Johnson, The Origins of Feasts, Fasts and Seasons in Early Christianity, Alcuin Club Collections 86 (Collegeville, MN: Liturgical Press, 2011), 39–47. 28  Didache 8.2 to Matt 6:9–13 for the Lord’s Prayer; 9.5 to Matt 7:6 on not giving what is holy to dogs; and 14.3 to Mal 1:11 & 14 on sacrifice; Apostolic Church Order 20.1 to what may be Deut

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Didascalia are much more plentiful in relation to its instructions. To give but one example, the direction to observe a pre-paschal fast begins: “fast on the Friday, because it was then that the people killed themselves in crucifying our Saviour, and again on the sabbath since it is the Lord’s sleep. For this day especially should be observed with fasting; so the blessed Moses, who is the prophet of all such matters, commanded. Indeed, he knew through the Holy Spirit, and it was commanded of him by Almighty God, since he knew beforehand what the people would do to his son, the beloved, Jesus Christ ….”29 And it continues in this vein for the equivalent of about two pages, thus submerging the brief directions in an abundance of supporting argumentation. The need for such extensive bolstering of its teaching by appeal to biblical precedent strongly intimates that, whatever the original status of its source material, in its present form it did not command immediate acceptance in the community to which it was addressed. This conclusion is further reinforced by the fact that the Didascalia carries apostolic pseudonymity further than the Apostolic Church Order did. Rather than simply attaching the names of apostles to different sections, it refers to the apostles collectively as the authors (“we”) in several places in the latter part of the work, and in one place to Matthew individually (2.39), but also records an imagined expansion of the Council of Jerusalem (Acts 15), at the end of which the apostles claim that they had remained there “many days” to compose the Didascalia (6.13). The final chapter of the church order, which may be from a different editorial hand than that responsible for the apostolic fiction,30 addresses the issue of the observance of the Jewish law by Christians. It argues that, apart from the Decalogue, the law had been imposed as a punishment for idolatry; and this burden having been lifted by the new dispensation, Christians must not submit to it. That it was thought necessary to persuade readers to this position at some length indicates that it was still a contentious matter at the relatively late date at which this chapter appears to have been appended to the work.

The so-called Apostolic Tradition of Hippolytus With this church order we return, at least outwardly, to an extended version of the sort of instructions about ecclesiastical life that underlay part of the Didache and the Apostolic Church Order. It provides directions for the ordination of a variety of ministers, for the lengthy process of the initiation of new converts, and for the practice of daily prayer and for other occasions, as well as a Eucharistic prayer 17:6, 19:15, Matt 18:16, or 2 Cor 13:1 concerning three witnesses; 22.2 to Matt 25:35 on feeding the hungry; and 26.1 to the dominical words at the Last Supper 29  Stewart-Sykes, The Didascalia Apostolorum, 221. 30  See Stewart-Sykes, 25–29.

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and other prayers. Gone is the moral exhortation of those documents and mostly absent is any lengthy justification for what is directed of the kind dominating the Didascalia. In addition, any claim to an apostolic origin is limited to statements in the prologue about preserving the “tradition which has remained until now” and also an apparent reference to “apostolic tradition” in the conclusion of the work. Although previously regarded as an authentic third-century composition by a certain Hippolytus of Rome, it is increasingly viewed as a piece of living literature that was expanded and modified by a series of editorial hands over a period of some two hundred years from the mid-second century onwards, and though its core appears to stem from North Africa or possibly Rome, its later redaction seems to have taken place in Eastern Mediterranean regions.31 The appearance of a manual for practical use is deceptive, however. Emendations that were obviously made to bring its prescriptions up to date and to harmonize with current practices known to a particular redactor have not been carried through consistently, but were seemingly constrained by a desire to retain as much of the older material as possible, no doubt out of respect for its supposed apostolic origin. As a result, two distinct patterns for the ordination of a bishop seem to have been juxtaposed, two later layers of material concerning Christian initiation have been superimposed on an original core rite, and a Eucharistic prayer with its own redactional history has been inserted into the ordination section. Even the doxological conclusions to prayer texts have had Trinitarian formulae inserted into them, but without the deletion of the earlier forms, so that they are rendered ungrammatical. In this later form the church order can hardly have been intended for actual use. It is rather a combination of old – and in some cases at least, obsolete – directions with more recent practices intended to bestow on the latter the status of antiquity. Thus, some of what is included is doubtless the remains of ancient community rules, though not necessarily always preserved in their original state, especially if a redactor could not make sense of them, and some may well reflect what were genuine later practices in one place or another, even if these cannot always be distinguished from what a redactor would have liked to have been the practice, but the work as a whole cannot be taken as what was ever done anywhere.

Canons of Hippolytus and Testamentum Domini These two derivatives of the Apostolic Tradition develop their primary source in different ways. The former attempts a radical revision in order to conform the material more closely to what was either the practice of its own day, seemingly 31 See Paul F. Bradshaw, Maxwell E. Johnson, and L. Edward Phillips, The Apostolic Tradition: A Commentary, Hermeneia (Minneapolis: Fortress, 2002), 1–6, 13–15.

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in Egypt, or at least what the compiler wished to be that practice.32 The latter maintains a perverse fidelity that preserves many of the words and phrases of the original but so heavily interpolated with new material that the sense is often greatly changed. It also carries the apostolic fiction to its ultimate conclusion by ascribing the contents to Jesus himself.33 In both works there are signs that some material was retained solely because of its presumed antiquity and not because it continued to be current practice.

Apostolic Constitutions This late-fourth-century work is an early attempt to gather older church orders into a collection. It comprises the Didascalia, the Didache, and the Apostolic Tradition, all heavily revised and interpolated. While the primary object of its compiler clearly was to preserve this traditional material without attempting to reconcile divergent passages or eliminate repetitions, at the same time he introduced alongside it other material that reflected contemporary practice known to him in Syria. But once again, the result is not a work intended for practical use. For example, the Eucharistic prayer based on the Didache and that based on the one in the Apostolic Tradition are so widely divergent from one another that it seems impossible to imagine a church that used both, and the latter is so prolix that it cannot have formed the regular weekly diet of any congregation. This is not a book of rules to be followed but a repository of presumed ancient tradition derived from both written texts and current liturgy, which the compiler no doubt thought was just as old as the former.34

Other collections Apostolic Constitutions was not the only attempt to bring together some of these alleged apostolic sources, but the others did on the whole try to preserve them in the form that they found them, even though the process of translation from the original Greek into other ancient languages often resulted in some marked divergences. Their choice of which to include and which to leave out of their collections is revealing as to the purpose of their work. It was not purely to preserve the past as a whole, but to assemble from the past such documents as might 32  See Paul F. Bradshaw, The Canons of Hippolytus, Alcuin/GROW Joint Liturgical Study 2 (Nottingham: Grove Books, 1987). 33  See Grant Sperry‑White, The Testamentum Domini: A Text for Students, Alcuin/GROW Joint Liturgical Study 19 (Nottingham: Grove Books, 1991). 34  See W. Jardine Grisbrooke, The Liturgical Portions of the Apostolic Constitutions: A Text for Students, Alcuin/GROW Joint Liturgical Study 13–14 (Nottingham: Grove Books, 1990).

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constitute a body of ecclesiastical law. Thus, we do not again find the Didache included in any of the collections: no doubt its content was simply too archaic to relate to later practice. And the Didascalia appears only once, in an early Latin collection: not only did its content not have the appearance of law as such but its discursive style did not easily permit it to be broken up into the form of separate canons in the way that was now happening to the other church orders.35 Hence, of the other extant collections, the Apostolic Church Order, the Apostolic Tradition, and a version of the final book 8 of the Apostolic Constitutions form one, and the Testamentum Domini, the Apostolic Church Order, the Apostolic Tradition, and book 8 of the Apostolic Constitutions form another.36 Although it is thought that these were originally assembled from the Greek originals, all that is extant are translated versions, in the case of the first into the two dialects of Coptic, Arabic, and Ethiopic, and in the case of the second into Syriac and Arabic. The disappearance of the presumed originals does not seem to be a pure historical accident. By the fifth and sixth centuries the Chalcedonian churches were losing interest in grounding their practices in ancient Christian texts and instead authority rested upon the contemporary or recent decrees of ecumenical councils and edicts of patriarchal sees. It was almost only in the churches of Egypt and Ethiopia that apparent apostolic works continued to be valued as the basis for canon law, even if their prescriptions were used selectively rather than being adopted in their entirety.

Conclusion In the course of its history, therefore, the material in the church orders seems to have gone full circle. Their oldest strata having in part apparently begun life as the genuine rules and regulations of particular Christian communities, before being absorbed later into more controversial works that were more often intended to promote and defend particular theological and liturgical views by a selective preservation of the imagined past rather than to function as practical manuals, they are in the end reappropriated as the basis of collections of canon law in certain churches.

35  Although Arabic and Ethiopic versions of books 1–6 of the Apostolic Constitutions, which was itself a revision of the Didascalia, do exist. 36  For further details, see Bradshaw, Ancient Church Orders, 23–26.

Rabbis on Gentile Lawlessness Three Midrashic Moments Steven D. Fraade Introduction In Hebrew scriptural theology, what most distinguishes Israel from the other peoples or nations is the former’s having had God’s Torah, both as text and teaching, and especially its covenantal laws, revealed to it alone. God may be ‫מלך העולם‬ (“king of the universe”), as rabbinic prayers express it, and the source of all life, but with Israel alone, according to this understanding, has God entrusted his law, wisdom, and sacred history, whether in written or oral forms, for study and enactment. Other peoples might have their particular laws (‫)נימוסין‬, but theirs are not the revealed laws of God, which are Israel’s alone.1 As the Psalmist (see appendix: text #1.1) strongly puts it, He issued his commands to Jacob, his statutes and rules to Israel. He did not do so for any other nation; of such rules they know nothing. Hallelujah. (Ps 147:19–20 NJPS)

But would not the God of all creation want all of his creatures to benefit from lives led in accordance with the very law that is understood to be the blueprint of creation? From Israel’s perspective at least, such a universal nomian world would represent an erasure of Israel’s very raison d’être as God’s unique covenantal partners. For example, when God introduces the Decalogue (Exod 20:2), he does so not based on his credentials as creator or sovereign of the universe writ large, but as the one-time redeemer of the people of Israel, in particular, from the land of Egypt: “I the Lord am your God who brought you out of the land of Egypt, the house of bondage,” even though the precepts that follow are largely universal in their demands (with the possible exception of Sabbath observance).2 1 See the “vocation” of Lev 18:2–4, as traced by Beth A. Berkowitz, Defining Jewish Difference: From Antiquity to the Present (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2012). 2 However, the rationale for the Sabbath commandment is framed in terms of God’s having created the world in six days and having rested on and thereby sanctified the seventh (Exod 20:11), a justification that would apply equally to all of creation. Note, however, that in the Deuteronomic version of the Decalogue, the justification for observing the Sabbath is the re-

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Rabbinic midrashim differ as to whether the reason the Torah does not begin with laws but with narratives is God’s need to establish his universal authority as the source of all life (and land and property), or his specific historical role as the guardian of Israel.3 This tension is given its earliest clear expression in the writings of Ben Sira (ca. 180 BCE), where the female personification of wisdom, speaking in the first person, is first created by and resides with God in primordial times, then spans creation, and only after having sought a dwelling place among the nations is commanded by God to dwell among Israel in the Jerusalem temple. His words are worth reading and pondering in full (text #1.2; not extant in Hebrew): I came forth from the mouth of the Most High, and covered the earth like a mist. I dwelt in the highest heaven, and my throne was in a pillar of cloud. Alone I compassed the vault of heaven and traversed the depths of the abyss. Over waves of the sea, over all the earth, and over every people and nation I have held sway. Among all these I sought a resting place; in whose territory should I abide? Then the Creator of all things gave me a command, and my Creator chose the place for my tent. He said, “Make your dwelling in Jacob, and in Israel receive your inheritance.” Before the ages, in the beginning, he created me, and for all the ages I shall not cease to be. In the holy tent I ministered before him, and so I was established in Zion. Thus in the beloved city he gave me a resting place, and in Jerusalem was my domain. I took root in an honored people, in the portion of the Lord, his heritage. (23) All this is the book of the covenant of the Most High God, the law that Moses commanded us as an inheritance for the congregation of Jacob (Sir 24:3–12, 23 NRSV).4

Wisdom/Torah retains its primordial, transcendent, universal aspects while finding its permanent residence (mishkan?) in a material scroll in the structure of Israel’s Jerusalem temple.5 For a similar progression, see Sir 16:24–17:23, as treated by Seth Schwartz.6 As v. 23 makes explicit, Wisdom comes to be identified spe-

demption of Israel in particular from Egypt (Deut 5:15). Note also Amos 9:7, where God tells Israel not to think that they are the only people to have been divinely redeemed from captivity. 3  Compare Mekhilta of Rabbi Ishmael, Baḥodesh 5 with Tanḥ. Bereshit 11 (ed. Buber), the latter made famous by Rashi’s opening comment to Gen 1:1. 4  The second half of the final verse is an exact quote of LXX Deut 33:4. 5  For discussion of this passage in light of the broader tension between universalistic and particularistic aspects of Torah, see Marc Hirshman, Torah for the Entire World (Tel Aviv: Hakibbutz Hameuchad, 1999), 131–33 (Hebrew). For second temple Jewish sources which similarly imagine Wisdom/Torah residing with God in heaven, see 1 En 42:1–3; Bar. 3:36–37. In the former, Wisdom seeks a place to reside among the “sons of man,” but without success, returning to dwell among the angels, until she finally succeeds in finding an earthly dwelling. In the latter, she is first given by God to Jacob/Israel, and only subsequently comes to earth to live among humankind. For other expressions of Wisdom having come to dwell on earth, see Prov 8:1–4, 31; Wis 9:10. 6 Seth Schwartz, Were the Jews a Mediterranean Society? Reciprocity and Solidarity in Ancient Judaism (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2009), 49–54.

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cifically with the Torah and its laws.7 However, the question remains: how could God be the creator and ruler of all creatures, and yet prefer for his law to “reside” among one people alone, especially if, we might presume, others would similarly benefit from its guidance and redemptive power? Nor are we told here why God chooses Israel/Zion to be the residence of Wisdom/Torah. In order to explore these questions we will look at three clusters of rabbinic narratives regarding the availability of the Torah, especially its laws, to non-Jews. The fact that rabbinic literature preserves multiple versions of these stories, with significant variations between them, is itself a sign of the ambivalent attitudes that they encompass.

Rabbinic Texts: The Torah Was Offered First to the Nations8 There are many versions of the midrashic story of God’s having offered the Torah to the nations before revealing it to Israel alone. In Sifre Deuteronomy’s version (text #2.1), one of the earliest,9 the four stiches of Deut 33:2 are interpreted to mean that prior to coming to Sinai to reveal the Torah to Israel, God had first gone to all of the other nations to offer it to them (and not just to the four neighboring nations mentioned), but to no avail. In each case, the approached nations inquire as to what it contained, that is, to what they would be obligating themselves, only to learn that (at least) one of the laws included in the Torah would be impossible for them to follow. Note that the specific prohibitions mentioned are of universal moral nature: murder, adultery, and stealing (which are among the rabbinic list of universal, Noahide laws10), and in each case biblical ‘proof texts’ are provided to prove the unsuitability of the prohibitions to the essential law See also Sir 4:1.  For fuller, more detailed treatments, see S. D. Fraade, From Tradition to Commentary: Torah and its Interpretation in the Midrash Sifre to Deuteronomy (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1991), 32–37 with notes. Bilingual readers will notice some slight differences between the Hebrew texts provided and my English translations. This is because I have chosen to translate what I consider to be superior Hebrew variants, according to the best manuscript evidence, rather than always rendering the printed editions cited. Justifications for favoring these variants are provided in the notes to my treatment of these texts in From Tradition to Commentary.  9  See From Tradition to Commentary, 197 n. 38. 10  On these laws, rabbinically understood to have been the legal and moral foundation of God’s covenant with Noah and his descendants (that is, all of humanity), according to rabbinic interpretation of Gen 9:1–17, see Fraade, From Tradition to Commentary, 34, 52, 197, 198, 216, 219, 221; Schwartz, Were the Jews a Mediterranean Society?, 51–52. One function of the Noahide laws (most of which rabbinic traditions trace back already to the time of Adam and Eve in Eden) is to establish a skeletal legal/moral code prior to the full revelation at Sinai. Otherwise, it could be argued, that, for example, Cain could not have been held accountable for his murder of Cain in the absence of a law prohibiting murder. Our present text seems to assume that whatever its earlier status, the Noahide laws had ceased to be operative (or at least followed) by the time Israel received the Torah at Sinai.  7

 8

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lessness of the respective nations. The midrash represents God as having spared no effort to reveal the Torah to each and every one of the nations (knocking, as it were, on each and every door). But as the midrash goes on to argue, by way of a parable, not only did the nations decline God’s offer of the minimalist, universal (Noahide) moral commandments, but they actively spurned them, heaping them onto Israel instead, which now had to carry both its own legal load and that intended for the other nations. The implied a fortiori argument is that being unable to bear the minimal moral commandments (previously accepted, it may be presumed, by the descendants of Noah), the nations certainly did not deserve, nor would they have been receptive of, the Torah as a whole. It is only when God approached Israel at Sinai, where they accepted the Torah without hesitation, or even needing to know what it contained, in all of its fine points (that is, future [rabbinic] interpretations already incorporated into revelation), that God found suitable recipients of the Torah and its laws, both written and oral. No one could say that the nations, both individually and collectively, were not given the full opportunity to receive the Torah. Having been offered the Torah, they proved themselves unworthy of it. However much the nations are given ample opportunity to receive the Torah, their reasons for not doing so are conveyed in a mocking tone. While the version of the story found in Mekhilta de R. Ishmael (text #2.2) contains many of the same details, it is framed quite differently. Here, it would appear, God never intended to give the Torah to the nations, but feigns an effort to do so only so as to preclude their arguing (‫פתחון פה‬, literally, an “opening of the mouth”) that they were never were given the opportunity. Having been given the chance, in anticipation that they would decline to accept the Torah, they have no further excuse (e. g., “ignorance of the law”) to make in their self-defense. While it might be assumed that a similar, cynical strategy underlies the version in Sifre Deuteronomy, there is no direct hint of it. Although the parable in the Mekhilta is different from that in the Sifre, its meaning is much the same, with the a fortiori argument now being made explicit. Furthermore, the use of Hab 3:6 is important, for it suggests that not only did the nations not accept the Torah when it was offered to them, but that they suffered severe consequences for their refusal. As we shall see, the verse is elsewhere cited to release the nations from both the obligations and protections (e. g., of their property) accorded to Israel alone as parties to the covenantal nomos.11 As if to mitigate this more cynical view of the offering of the Torah to all of the nations, 11  See S. D. Fraade, “Navigating the Anomalous: Non-Jews at the Intersection of Early Rabbinic Law and Narrative,” in The Other in Jewish Thought and History: Constructions of Jewish Culture and Identity, ed. Laurence J. Silberstein and Robert L. Cohn (New York: New York University Press, 1994), 145–65; repr. in Legal Fictions: Studies of Law and Narrative in the Discursive Worlds of Ancient Jewish Sectarians and Sages, JSJSup 147 (Leiden: Brill, 2011), 345–63.

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this section concludes with a tack in a more universalistic direction (but still not fully altruistically, since the aim is to preempt the nations’ “opening of the mouth” in their defense): the Torah was revealed in, as it were, the no man’s land of the Sinai desert so that Israel would not assert territorial claims to it, thereby rendering it, in principle at least, like fire and water,12 “free to all who come into the world,” that is, to all of humanity.13 The last text for this section, regarding the role of the nations in the giving of the Torah at Sinai, is again from Sifre Deuteronomy (§ 343) as it interprets Deut 33:2 (text #2.3).14 Here the nations are not offered the Torah but are bystanders to its being given to Israel. As the whole world shakes as a consequence of God’s revealing the Torah to Israel, the nations, led by the non-Israelite prophet Balaam, are gripped by fear for their own well-being, thinking that God is about to bring another flood, if not of water then of fire, to destroy them. When Balaam midrashically reassures them that they are not at risk and that the earth’s shaking is a consequence of God’s giving of the Torah to Israel, they show no interest in the content of such revelation, or any desire to be included, but in relief bless Israel with peace, needing not to be involved any further.

Rabbinic Texts: The Torah Inscribed/ Transcribed in Seventy Languages15 While the preceding texts that we examined entertained the possibility of the Torah having been offered to the non-Israelite nations, it was not stated, but may be presumed, that the Torah would have been revealed to them (as God spoke to them) not in Hebrew, but in their own national languages in order for them to have understood its contents. This multilingual possibility is entertained, with some interesting exegetical and ideological twists, in the next set of texts that we shall examine. The core text is Deut 27:1–8 (text #3.1), in which Moses instructs the Israelites, upon crossing the Jordan (without Moses), to inscribe the words of the Torah on 12  The analogy is not tight. Fire and water are used as metaphors for Torah, but the wilderness is where it was given. This is a case of midrashic slippage or license. 13  The part of the text indicated by an ellipsis provides another reason for the Torah having been offered outside of the Land of Israel: so that no tribe of Israel has a greater claim to the Torah than any other by virtue of the Torah having been revealed in its territory. This interpretation presumes that the Torah was intended to be given to Israel all along. For more on this passage, see Hirshman, Torah for the Entire World, 95–96 (Hebrew). 14  For greater detail, see Fraade, From Tradition to Commentary, 37; Hirshman, Torah for the Entire World, 95 (Hebrew). 15  For fuller, more detailed treatment, see S. D. Fraade,“The Torah Inscribed/Transcribed in Seventy Languages,” in Hebrew between Jews and Christians, ed. Daniel Stein Kokin, Studia Judaica (Berlin: de Gruyter, forthcoming).

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stones “most distinctly” (‫)באר היטב‬. However, there are several exegetical challenges with this passage. First it speaks of two sets of stones, one being large, plastered stelai (vv. 2–4), the other being the unhewn stones from which a sacrificial altar is to be constructed. (vv. 5–7). To which set of stones does v. 8 (“those stones”) refer, to its immediate antecedent (unhewn altar stones) or to the stones more suitable for inscribing with the words of the Torah (the plastered stelai, presumably with flat surfaces? Already inner-biblically and in late Second Temple times different resolutions to this question are well attested.16 Nor is it stated what is originally meant by “this Teaching/Torah”: what becomes the book of Deuteronomy, some part of it (e. g., the blessings and curses that follow), or the whole of the Pentateuch, considering that the greater the length of the inscription the less practical its fulfillment. Furthermore, it is not clear what the purpose of or audience for such an inscription was to be. Josh 4:24, in speaking of the erection of stelai at Gilgal, after crossing the Jordan, says that by their recording of God’s mighty deeds, they are to make a continuing impression not only the on the children of future generations, but on “all the peoples of the earth” (‫כל־עמי‬ ‫)הארץ‬, clearly a universal nod. Our earliest rabbinic text to respond, albeit very succinctly, to these exegetical questions is the Mishnah (m. Soṭah 7:5; text #3.2). In the immediate context of determining which ritual recitations could be recited only “in the Holy tongue” (Hebrew; e. g., the blessings and curses of Deut 27–28) and which could be recited “in any tongue” (e. g., the Shem’a), a brief aside narrates the ceremony of the inscribing of the Torah on stones after crossing the Jordan. The Mishnah clearly understands the Torah to have been inscribed on the altar stones of Deut 27:5–7, albeit plastered as were the stelai of Deut 27:2–4. Furthermore, it understands ‫“( באר היטב‬very clearly”) of Deut 27:8 to refer not to the physical clarity of the Torah’s inscription, but to its achieving maximal clarity of understanding through being translated into all seventy languages of the seventy nations of the world (as rabbinically understood from the “table of nations” of Gen 10). But no sooner than the sacrifices were completed, the altar stones upon which the Torah in seventy languages had been inscribed had to be disassembled and removed. For according to the book of Deuteronomy (e. g., 12:8–12), as rabbinically understood, prior to the building of the temple in Jerusalem, one-time local altars were permitted, but needed to be removed after being used. The stage is now set for the interpretation of the Mishnah itself (or some antecedent) concerning the nature and purpose of the multilingual inscription of the Torah on stones after crossing the Jordan. The Tosefta, or appendix to the Mishnah (although it often incorporates traditions prior to the redacted Mishnah), juxtaposes the views of two contemporary, mid-second century CE sages. According to R. Judah (bar Ila’i), the Torah was inscribed on the altar  Cf. Josh 4:1–8, 19–24; 8:30–32; Pseudo-Philo, LAB 21:7–8; Josephus, Ant. 4.307–308.

16

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stones in Hebrew, and the nations each sent its notaries (bilingual scribes) to transcribe the Hebrew Torah from the stones into its own language.17 Thus, not only was the Torah available to them, but it was made available to each nation in its respective language. However, once again (see the Mekhilta passage treated above), this is done with a cynical goal of denying the nations the excuse of not knowing the Torah laws that they violated, thereby consigning them to doom. By contrast, R. Simeon (bar Yoḥai) is of the view that the words of the Torah were inscribed in seventy languages on the plastered stelai (although this is not stated explicitly), and that the non-Jews, by having the Torah available to them in their own languages, were given a real opportunity to repent for their violations of the Torah’s laws and be accepted by Israel. In typical fashion, the two views, the one cynical and the other irenic, of the Torah’s being inscribed or transcribed in seventy languages are juxtaposed to one another with no indication of which is “correct” or editorially favored. We turn next to a once lost, then found, and lost again midrashic fragment from the Cairo Geniza, first published by Solomon Schechter in 1911, and subsequently republished with slight variations. Although fragmentary and substantially restored, its outlines are clear, with similar traditions as those found in the Tosefta, with somewhat different attributions and details. Was the Torah inscribed in Hebrew alone (anonymous opening), or in all seventy languages, interpreting ‫“( באר היטב‬very clearly”; Deut 27:8), as in the Mishnah, to denote multilingual plenitude (R. Ishmael)? Was it the whole Torah that was so inscribed, whether just in Hebrew or in seventy languages, or just the book of Deuteronomy (R. Shimʿon bar Yoḥai, following Josh 8:32)? But now a totally new view is incorporated, that of R. Yose ben Yose (otherwise unattested) in the name of R. Eleazar b. Shimʿon: only those verses were inscribed which relate kindly to the foreign nations in time of war. Since these verses were presumably for the benefit of the nations, they would have been written in all seventy languages, with the availability of sufficient space not having posed a problem. Most interesting (according to the reconstructed text), Rabbi (Judah the Patriarch, reputed editor of the Mishnah) favors the view of R. Shimʿon (contrary to the view expressed in the Mishnah) that the Torah was inscribed (presumably in seventy languages) on the stelai, since they would have been permanent, unlike the altar stones which would have stood only briefly before being removed. In other words, Rabbi recognizes that inscribing the Torah in seventy languages on the altar stones (as in the Mishnah) would not have afforded the nations a true opportunity to 17  For the role of such notaries in the ancient world, see Marja Vierros, Bilingual Notaries in Hellenistic Egypt: A Study of Greek As a Second Language, Collectanea hellenistica 5 (Brussels: Koninklijke Vlaamse Academie van België voor Wetenschappen en Kunsten, 2012), which informs my understanding of their function in these rabbinic passages, and as I spell out in greater length in “The Torah Inscribed/Transcribed in Seventy Languages.”

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repent, since the Torah in seventy languages would have been removed from multilingual “circulation” no sooner than it was made available. Finally (for this section), we find the Palestinian Talmud trying to rectify the wrong of making the Torah available in seventy languages only for it to be immediately removed. In the view that the Torah was inscribed in seventy languages on the stelai, there would have been plenty of time (‫“[ בכל יום ויום‬each and every day”]) for each nation to send its notaries to transcribe the Torah into its respective language. In the view that the Torah was inscribed in seventy languages on the altar stones, God miraculously inspired the nations’ scribes to copy the Torah in seventy languages, or at least the translation relevant to their nation, requiring hardly any time at all. In either case, the purpose of broadcasting the Torah to the nations in their seventy languages would have been credibly fulfilled. In these various attempts to understand both Scripture and the Mishnah a variety of attitudes toward revealing the Torah in seventy languages for the benefit of the nations are on display: cynical (just enough to deny them the argument that they did not have access to the Torah), irenic (to facilitate their repentance and acceptance, especially with some divine assistance), and apologetic (to reveal to them only so much as would cause them to view Israel and its Torah favorably). It is only with the Palestinian Talmud that the irenic view seems to gain the upper hand. Nevertheless, the Hebrew Torah as the source of its seventy translations retains its central place and permanence (unlike in the story of the translation of the Hebrew into Greek in third-century BCE Ptolemaic Egypt according to the Letter of Aristeas and other ancient writings).18

Rabbinic Texts: Roman Officials Study Torah Laws with Rabban Gamaliel19 The midrashic story to be considered next (text #4.1) is different from the preceding two clusters in that it “takes place” in post-biblical, rabbinic times (ca. 100–200 CE), the non-Israelites now being Roman imperial officials, who, in this version, feign being converts to Judaism so as to justify their wishing to study (rabbinic) Torah, specifically law. Their true purpose, we may surmise, was to report to their Roman superiors the nature of Israel’s laws, possibly with negative intentions. In other words, they were, in effect, spies.20 Unlike the previous clus18  This is a clever inversion that I discuss in greater detail in my forthcoming article (see above, n. 15). 19  For a fuller, more detailed treatment, see S. D. Fraade, From Tradition to Commentary, 51–54; and Fraade, “Navigating the Anomalous” (= S. D. Fraade, Legal Fictions, 345–63). 20  On the reading “converts” and alternative readings, see Fraade, From Tradition to Commentary, 214 n. 129. It should be stressed that, unlike previous scholars, I do not presume this episode to have actually happened, and prefer to view it in rhetorical rather than historical terms.

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ter of texts that we considered, there is no hint of any language barrier between the Roman officials and their rabbinic interlocutors (or their written and oral Torah). The verse being exposited (Deut 33:3) could mean either that Israel, in particular, is God’s beloved people (the Hebrew word ‫ אף‬being emphatic [“indeed”]), or that God loves the (other) peoples too (‫ אף‬meaning “also”), but not as much as he loves Israel.21 This divine favoritism toward Israel is exemplified by (rabbinic) Torah laws that afford fewer protections to non-Jewish property than to Jewish property, since non-Jews, as non-parties to the covenant, are not afforded its protections. This is especially apparent in the rule that permits a stolen object of a non-Jew to a Jew, but not vice-versa.22 After engaging in the full “curriculum” of rabbinic studies, of both written and oral Torah,23 the Roman officials are duly impressed with everything they have learned, with the sole exception of one seemingly discriminatory law (which may stand for others) regarding the stolen items of non-Jews. However, whatever their original intent, or that of the Roman authorities that sent them, it is subverted as they volunteer not to report the negative law(s) but only those which they deemed praiseworthy. In the end, whatever the original intent of the Roman authorities the outcome of the teaching of Torah law to the Romans is wholly positive, due to the Roman’s having been so impressed with the rabbinic Torah. Compare this to the statement of R. Yose b. Yose in the name of R. Eleazar b. Shimʿon, in the Cairo Geniza fragment discussed above (text #3.4), according to which the only verses of the Torah inscribed and translated for the benefit of the non-Jewish nations were those (few) that require sympathetic treatment of them during war. In either case the intent (or hope) of sharing the Torah’s laws with The purpose of the story in its present context is to illustrate God’s favoritism for Israel, and its possible, but averted risks. Thus, the fact that Rabban Gamaliel (presumably the second) would have been at Yavneh and not Usha is of little significance to me. For previous scholars who have gone to great lengths to reconcile the details of the story with one another and with a particular historical setting on the assumption that the story is a simple historical representation rather than a rhetorical construction, see Fraade, From Tradition to Commentary, 214–15 n. 137; Bernard S. Jackson, “On the Problem of Roman Influence on the Halakha and Normative Self-Definition in Judaism,” in Jewish and Christian Self-Definition. Volume Two: Aspects of Judaism in the Graeco-Roman Period, ed. E. P. Sanders et al. (Philadelphia: Fortress, 1981), 163, 358 nn. 54, 55; Catherine Hezser, Form, Function, and Historical Significance of the Rabbinic Story in Yerushalmi Neziqin, TSAJ 37 (Tübingen: Mohr Siebeck, 1993), 15–24. 21  For a more “universalistic” interpretation of Deut 33:3, as well as other variants, compare the fragmentary text of Mekhilta Devarim published and discussed by Menahem Kahana, “‫דפים‬ ‫מן המכילתא לדברים פרשות האזינו וזאת הברכה‬,” Tarbiz 57 (1988): 165–201, esp. 180–85, 200–201. On the broader question of contrasting attitudes toward non-Jews in the tannaitic midrashim, see idem, “The Halakhic Midrashim,” in The Literature of the Sages: Second Part: Midrash and Targum, Liturgy, Poetry, Mysticism, Contracts, Inscriptions, Ancient Science and the Languages of Rabbinic Literature, ed. S. Safrai, Z. Safrai, J. Schwartz and P. J. Tomson, CRINT 2.3.2 (Assen: Royal Van Gorcum, 2006), 51–52. 22  For details, see Fraade, From Tradition to Commentary, 53, 217–218 n. 148. 23 See Fraade, From Tradition to Commentary, 214 n. 131; 244 n. 111.

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non-Jews is to make a favorable impression upon them, but perhaps somewhat mockingly. Another version of the same story appears in the Palestinian Talmud (y. B. Qam. 4.3, 4b; text #4.2), in the context of commenting on the mishnaic rule (m. B. Qam. 4:3) that an Israelite is not culpable if his ox gores the ox of a non-Israelite, whereas in the opposite case the non-Israelite must pay full damages regardless of whether the non-Israelite’s ox is a habitual gorer (a distinction made in Jewish law, but presumed not to apply in non-Jewish law).24 To explain this discrepancy between the treatment of the property of a non-Israelite and that of an Israelite, several justifications are offered, the first two based on scriptural verses (Hab 3:6; Deut 33:2), with which we are by now familiar, understood to refer to the non-Israelite nations’ rejection of the Torah, and especially the seven Noahide laws, at the time of revelation. A somewhat expanded version of the story of the Roman officials who come to study the written and oral Torah with Rabban Gamaliel follows. Once again, they find most of it to be praiseworthy, except now there is no mention of their pretending to be converts, and there are two rules (or three) to which they object, that would appear to discriminate against non-Jews, including now rules restricting the role of non-Jewish women in the birth and nursing of Jewish infants.25 Rabban Gamaliel, in an effort to prevent “profanation of the divine name,” that is, the Romans’ defaming God as the source of the Jewish laws, changes the law so as to prohibit the stolen property of non-Jews, while leaving the other discriminatory rules (goring ox and non-Israelite midwifes and wet-nurses) in place. Now the Roman officials are intent on reporting back to their superiors both what is praiseworthy and what to them is objectionable. However, soon after they leave Palestine for Syria (if not beyond), they forget (presumably by divine intervention) all of the Torah, written and oral, that they have learned from Rabban Gamaliel. It would appear preferable that they have nothing to report than for them to report something negative, even if the bulk of their report is positive. This is a very different outcome from that of the earlier version that we discussed from Sifre Deuteronomy, in which all but the discriminatory laws are reported, due to the self-censorship, as it were, of the Roman officials. The later version of the story (or at least the one appearing in the later source) may reflect a fear that once the Torah and its laws in their entirety is in Roman imperial hands, there is no guarantee how it might be used against the Jews, at the least to cast aspersions on them (and their God) for the discriminatory laws. Interestingly, just as in the Tosefta and the Palestinian Talmud, God inspires the non-Jewish nations and their notaries to translate the Torah, thereby ensuring its multilingual dissemination, here, by contrast, God (I presume) causes the Romans to  See b. B. Qam. 14a.  See m. ʿAbod. Zar. 2:1; b. ʿAbod. Zar. 26a.

24 25

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forget all of the Torah laws they have learned, thereby precluding their sharing them with their Roman superiors. In the previous version of the story it is the Romans themselves who subvert the original purpose of their mission (by their withholding a few of the rabbinic laws they have learned), whereas in this version of the story it is God (presumably) who subverts their mission by afflicting them with legal amnesia, an occupational hazard of studying, especially laws, in an oral medium. Presumably the Romans left without written texts or notes to assist them in recalling what they had learned. In both sets of stories (non-Jewish notaries and Roman officials), the sharing of the Torah laws (Israel’s privileged inheritance, thinking back to Ben Sira) with non-Jews is to some extent, but not in all versions, subverted.

Conclusions The best way to sum up the variety of texts that we have examined for their attitudes to the Torah and its laws having been given, or potentially given, to the non-Israelite nations is that they express ambivalence. While this could simply be the editorial result of the anthological nature of rabbinic literature, which often includes and juxtaposes seemingly contradictory teachings from different times, places, and authorities (and which could be said to characterize my own juxtaposition of textual snippets from a variety of sources), the ambivalence pervades several of the individual traditions as well, and seems to extend back to much earlier times in the history of biblical tradition. As so clearly expressed already by Ben Sira in the early second century BCE, the Torah and its laws are both universal in their divine, primordial origins, and the particular possession of Israel alone as God’s covenantal partners in sacred history. While, in principle at least, the Torah and its oral accompaniments should have been revealed to all of humankind, the nations, with the exception of Israel, are shown to have been both disinterested in and unworthy of them, especially their laws. But still, how can pre‑ and non-Israelites have been divinely judged and punished for their corrupt and depraved behavior if they were not given the opportunity, at least, of knowing the laws and following them before being condemned? Conversely, how could the nations hope for their eventual redemption, as imagined by some scriptural prophets, if the means thereto were not available to them? Stated differently, while all humans were equally created in the divine image, those who had entered into and maintained a covenantal relationship with God were entitled to legal rights and protections, commensurate with their acceptance of legal responsibilities, while those who had not were not. We also saw the desire of Israel to be judged and treated positively by the non-Israelite nations (and especially the empires that ruled over Israel) for those laws of the Torah and rab-

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binic tradition that they would view favorably, and, conversely, not to be reviled by them for those laws that they would view unfavorably as being discriminatory against non-Israelites. As we have seen, Israel’s possession of the laws of the Torah set it apart from the other nations, in part since it was in their national (and holy) language of Hebrew that the Torah was originally revealed, recorded, and transmitted, even if it could be derivatively translated into all seventy of the human languages. What differentiated Israel from the lawless nations, who had proven themselves incapable of abiding by even the minimal, universal, moral laws of the Noahides, was not only their possession of the written laws of the Torah, but also, and even more so, the oral laws of rabbinic tradition (for which see text #5.1, where the “nations” would seem to represent Christianity).26 Were the oral Torah to be committed to writing, it would be claimed by the nations (presumably once translated into their languages, especially Greek), to blur the line between them and Israel as the “children of the God.” Once the Torah, written and oral, were to become universally available and accessible, Israel’s distinctive identity and covenantal status would evaporate. Stated differently, if the “judge of all the world” (‫( )השפט כל־הארץ‬Gen 18:25; cf. Ps 94:2) were to apply one set of laws to all of its inhabitants, what would remain of Israel’s unique, identity-conferring raison d’être?

Appendix: Primary Texts 1.1 Psalms 147:19–20 :‫וּמ ְשׁ ָפּ ָטיו ְליִ ְשׂ ָר ֵאל‬ ִ ‫ מגִּ יד ְדּ ָב ָריו ְליַ ֲעקֹב ֻח ָקּיו‬19 ַ :‫וּמ ְשׁ ָפּ ִטים ַבּל־יְ ָדעוּם ַה ְללוּ־יָ הּ‬ ִ ‫ לֹא ָע ָשׂה ֵכן | ְל ָכל־גּוֹי‬20 19  He issued his commands to Jacob, his statutes and rules to Israel. 20  He did not do so for any other nation; of such rules they know nothing. Hallelujah. (NJPS)

26  On this passage, see S. D. Fraade, “Concepts of Scripture in Rabbinic Judaism: Oral Torah and Written Torah,” in Jewish Concepts of Scripture: A Comparative Introduction, ed. Benjamin D. Sommer (New York: New York University Press, 2012), 39–40; Marc Bregman, “Mishnah and LXX as Mystery: An Example of Jewish-Christian Polemic in the Byzantine Period, in Continuity and Renewal: Jews and Judaism in Byzantine-Christian Palestine, ed. Lee I. Levine (Jerusalem: Merkaz Dinur and the Jewish Theological Seminary, 2004), 333–42; Bregman, “‫”משנה כמסטירין‬ [Mishnah as Mystery], in Meḥqerei Talmud III: Talmudic Studies Dedicated to the Memory of Professor Ephraim E. Urbach, ed. Yaakov Sussmann and David Rosenthal (Jerusalem: Magnes, 2005), 101–109 (Hebrew).

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1.2 Ben Sira 24:3–12, 23 3  Ἐγὼ ἀπὸ στόματος ὑψίστου ἐξῆλθον καὶ ὡς ὁμίχλη κατεκάλυψα γῆν: 4  ἐγὼ ἐν ὑψηλοῖς κατεσκήνωσα, καὶ ὁ θρόνος μου ἐν στύλῳ νεφέλης: 5  γῦρον οὐρανοῦ ἐκύκλωσα μόνη καὶ ἐν βάθει ἀβύσσων περιεπάτησα: 6  ἐν κύμασιν θαλάσσης καὶ ἐν πάσῃ τῇ γῇ καὶ ἐν παντὶ λαῷ καὶ ἔθνει ἐκτησάμην. 7  μετὰ τούτων πάντων ἀνάπαυσιν ἐζήτησα καὶ ἐν κληρονομίᾳ τίνος αὐλισθήσομαι. 8  τότε ἐνετείλατό μοι ὁ κτίστης ἁπάντων, καὶ ὁ κτίσας με κατέπαυσεν τὴν σκηνήν μου καὶ εἶπεν  Ἐν Ιακωβ κατασκήνωσον καὶ ἐν Ισραηλ κατακληρονομήθητι. 9  πρὸ τοῦ αἰῶνος ἀπ’ ἀρχῆς ἔκτισέν με, καὶ ἕως αἰῶνος οὐ μὴ ἐκλίπω. 10  ἐν σκηνῇ ἁγίᾳ ἐνώπιον αὐτοῦ ἐλειτούργησα καὶ οὕτως ἐν Σιων ἐστηρίχθην: 11  ἐν πόλει ἠγαπημένῃ ὁμοίως με κατέπαυσεν, καὶ ἐν Ιερουσαλημ ἡ ἐξουσία μου: 12  καὶ ἐρρίζωσα ἐν λαῷ δεδοξασμένῳ, ἐν μερίδι κληρονομίας αὐτοῦ. … 23  Ταῦτα πάντα βίβλος διαθήκης θεοῦ ὑψίστου, νόμον ὃν ἐνετείλατο ἡμῖν Μωυσῆς κληρονομίαν συναγωγαῖς Ιακωβ. 3  I came forth from the mouth of the Most High, and covered the earth like a mist. 4  I dwelt in the highest heaven, and my throne was in a pillar of cloud. 5  Alone I compassed the vault of heaven and traversed the depths of the abyss. 6  Over waves of the sea, over all the earth, and over every people and nation I have held sway. 7  Among all these I sought a resting place; in whose territory should I abide? 8  Then the Creator of all things gave me a command, and my Creator chose the place for my tent. He said, “Make your dwelling in Jacob, and in Israel receive your inheritance.” 9  Before the ages, in the beginning, he created me, and for all the ages I shall not cease to be. 10  In the holy tent I ministered before him, and so I was established in Zion. 11  Thus in the beloved city he gave me a resting place, and in Jerusalem was my domain. 12  I took root in an honored people, in the portion of the Lord, his heritage. … 23  All this is the book of the covenant of the Most High God, the law that Moses commanded us as an inheritance for the congregation of Jacob. (NRSV)

2.1 Sifre Deuteronomy § 43 (ed. Finkelstein, 395–397): ‫ כשנגלה הקדוש ברוך הוא ליתן תורה לישראל לא על ישראל בלבד‬,‫דבר אחר ויאמר ה׳ מסיני בא‬ ‫ תחילה הלך אצל בני עשו אמר להם מקבלים אתם את התורה אמרו‬,‫הוא נגלה אלא על כל האומות‬ ‫לו מה כתוב בה אמר להם (שמות כ יג) לא תרצח אמרו כל עצמם של אותם האנשים ואביהם רוצח‬ .‫הוא שנאמר (בראשית כז כב) והידים ידי עשו (בראשית כז מ) ועל חרבך תחיה‬ ‫הלך אצל בני עמון ומואב אמר להם מקבלים אתם את התורה אמרו לו מה כתוב בה אמר להם‬ ‫(שמות כ יג) לא תנאף אמרו לו כל עצמה של ערוה להם היא שנאמר (בראשית יט לו) ותהרין שתי‬ .‫בנות לוט מאביהן‬ ‫הלך אצל בני ישמעאל אמר להם מקבלים אתם את התורה אמרו לו מה כתוב בה אמר להם (שמות‬ ‫שם כ יג) לא תגנוב אמרו לו כל עצמם אביהם ליסטים היה שנאמר (בראשית טז יב) והוא יהיה פרא‬ .‫אדם‬

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‫וכן לכל אומה ואומה שאל להם אם מקבלים את התורה שנאמר (תהלים קלח ד) יודוך ה׳ כל מלכי‬ ‫ארץ כי שמעו אמרי פיך יכול שמעו וקבלו תלמוד לומר (מיכה ה יד) ועשיתי באף ובחימה נקם את‬ ‫הגוים אשר לא שמעו לא דיים שלא שמעו אלא אפילו שבע מצות שקבלו עליהם בני נח לא יכלו‬ .‫לעמוד בהם עד שפרקום כיון שראה הקדוש ברוך הוא כך נתנם לישראל‬ ‫משל לאחד ששילח את חמורו וכלבו לגרן והטעינו לחמור לתך ולכלב שלש סאים היה החמור‬ ‫מהלך והכלב מלחית פרק ממנו סאה ונתנו על החמור וכן שיני וכן שלישי כך ישראל קבלו את‬ ‫התורה בפירושיה ובדקדוקיה אף אותם שבע מצות שלא יכלו בני נח לעמוד בהם ופרקום באו‬ .‫ישראל וקבלום לכך נאמר ויאמר ה׳ מסיני בא וזרח משעיר למו‬ Another interpretation: “He said: The Lord came from Sinai” (Deut 33:2): When the Holy One, blessed be he, revealed himself to give the Torah to Israel, he revealed himself not to Israel alone but to all the nations. He went first to the descendants of Esau and said to them, “Will you accept the Torah?” They said to him, “What is written in it?” He said to them, “You shall not murder” (Exod 20: 13). They said, “This is the very essence of this people, and their [= our] forefather was a murderer, as it is said, ‘Yet the hands are the hands of Esau’ (Gen 27:22), and his [= Esau’s] father assured that he would be so, as it is said, ‘By the sword you shall live’ (Gen 27:40).” He then went to the descendants of Ammon and Moab and asked them, “Will you accept the Torah?” They replied, “What is written in it?” He said, “You shall not commit adultery” (Exod 20: 13). They replied, “Unchastity is their [= our] very essence, as it is said, ‘Thus the two daughters of Lot came to be with child by their father’ (Gen 19:36). He went next to the descendants of Ishmael and asked them, “Will you accept the Torah?” They replied, “What is written in it?” He said, “You shall not steal” (Exod 20: 13). They replied,“[Theft is ] their [= our] very essence [and] their [= our] forefather was a thief, as it is said, ‘He shall be a wild ass of a man’ (Gen 16:12).” And there was not a single nation among the nations with whom he did not speak, knocking on each one’s door to ask if they wanted to receive the Torah, as it says, “All the kings of the earth shall praise You, O Lord, for they heard (shameʿu) the words you spoke” (Ps 138:4). Could it be that they heard and accepted [his offer]? Scripture teaches, “In anger and wrath will I wreak retribution on the nations that have not obeyed (shameʿu)” (Mic 5: 14). Rather, they were not even able to observe [lit.: withstand] the seven commandments that the children of Noah had accepted as incumbent upon themselves, and finally cast them off and gave them to Israel. A parable: [This can be compared to] a man who took his donkey and his dog to the threshing floor and loaded the donkey with a letek [= 15 seʾahs] [of grain] and the dog with three seʾahs. The donkey went along [easily], but the dog began to pant. He [= the man] removed a seʾah from him [= the dog] and put it on the donkey, and so too the second and the third [seʾah]. Similarly, Israel accepted the Torah according to all of its explications and fine points, as well at those very seven commandments that the descendants of Noah [at first] accepted but were unable to observe [lit.: withstand] until finally they cast them off and gave them to Israel. Therefore, it is said, “He said: The Lord came from Sinai, and shone upon them from Seir.”

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‫‪Rabbis on Gentile Lawlessness‬‬

‫‪2.2 Mekhilta de R. Ishmael Baḥodesh 5 (ed. Lauterbach, 2:234–37):‬‬ ‫לפיכך נתבעו אומות העולם בתורה‪ ,‬כדי שלא ליתן פתחון פה להם כלפי שכינה לומר‪ ,‬אלו נתבענו‬ ‫כבר קיבלנו עלינו‪ ,‬הרי שנתבעו ולא קבלו עליהם‪ ,‬שנ׳ ויאמר ה׳ מסיני בא וגו׳ (דברים לג ב)‪.‬‬ ‫נגלה על בני עשו הרשע ואמר להם‪ ,‬מקבלים אתם עליכ׳ את התורה‪ ,‬אמרו לו‪ ,‬מה כתיב בה‪ ,‬אמר‬ ‫להם‪ :‬לא תרצח‪ .‬אמרו לו‪ ,‬זו היא ירושה שהורישנו אבינו‪ ,‬שנאמר ועל חרבך תחיה (בראשית כז מ)‪.‬‬ ‫נגלה על בני עמון ומואב‪ ,‬אמר להם‪ ,‬מקבלים אתם את התורה‪ .‬אמרו לו‪ ,‬מה כתוב בה‪ ,‬אמר להם‪,‬‬ ‫לא תנאף‪ .‬אמרו לו‪ ,‬כלנו מניאוף דכתיב ותהרין שתי בנות לוט מאביהם (בראשית יט לו)‪ ,‬והיאך‬ ‫נקבלה‪.‬‬ ‫נגלה על בני ישמעאל‪ ,‬אמר להם‪ ,‬מקבלים אתם עליכם את התורה‪ .‬אמרו לו‪ ,‬מה כתוב בה‪ ,‬אמר‬ ‫להם‪ ,‬אל תגנוב‪ .‬אמרו לו‪ ,‬בזו הברכה נתברך אבינו‪ ,‬דכתיב והוא יהיה פרא אדם (בראשית טז יב)‪,‬‬ ‫וכתיב כי גנב גנבתי (בראשית מ טו)‪.‬‬ ‫וכשבא אצל ישראל‪ ,‬מימינו אש דת למו (דברים לג ב)‪ ,‬פתחו כלם פיהם ואמרו‪ :‬כל אשר דבר ה׳‬ ‫נעשה ונשמע (שמות כד ז)‪ ,‬וכן הוא אומר עמד וימודד ארץ ראה ויתר גוים (חבקוק ג ו)‪.‬‬ ‫אמר רבי שמעון בן אלעזר‪ :‬אם בשבע מצות שנצטוו בני נח‪ ,‬שקבלו עליהן אינן יכולין לעמוד בהן‪,‬‬ ‫קל וחומר למצות שבתורה‪.‬‬ ‫משל למלך שמנה לו שני אפטרופסין אחד ממונה על אוצר של תבן‪ ,‬ואחד ממונה על אוצר של כסף‬ ‫ושל זהב‪ .‬זה שהיה ממונה על התבן נחשד‪ – ‬והיה מתרעם על שלא מנו אותו על אוצר של כסף ושל‬ ‫זהב‪ ,‬וזה שהיה ממונה על הכסף ועל הזהב אמר לו‪ ,‬ריקה‪ ,‬בתבן כפרת‪ ,‬בכסף וזהב על אחת כמה‬ ‫וכמה‪.‬‬ ‫והלא דברים קל וחומר‪ ,‬ומה אם בשבע מצות שנצטוו בני נח לא יכלו לעמוד בהם‪ ,‬על אחת כמה‬ ‫וכמה בכל המצות שבתורה‪.‬‬ ‫ומפני מה לא ניתנה תורה בארץ ישראל‪ ,‬שלא ליתן פתחון פה לאומות העולם לומר‪ ,‬לפי שנתנה‬ ‫תורה בארצו לפיכך לא קבלנו עלינו… בשלשה דברים ניתנה תורה‪ ,‬במדבר ובאש ובמים‪ ,‬לומר לך‪,‬‬ ‫מה אלו חנם לכל באי העולם‪ ,‬כך דברי תורה חנם לכל באי העולם‪.‬‬ ‫‪It was for this reason that the nations of the world were asked [to receive the Torah], so‬‬ ‫‪that they would not have an opportunity to say, “Had we been asked we would surely have‬‬ ‫‪accepted it.” Behold, they were asked and they did not accept it, as it is said, “He said: The‬‬ ‫‪Lord came from Sinai,” etc.‬‬ ‫‪He revealed himself to the descendants of the wicked Esau, saying to them, “Will you‬‬ ‫‪accept the Torah?” They said to him, “What is written in it?” He said to them, “You shall‬‬ ‫‪not murder” (Exod 20:13). They said to him, “This is the inheritance that our forefather‬‬ ‫”‪passed on to us: ‘By the sword you shall live’ (Gen 27:40).‬‬ ‫‪He revealed himself to the descendants of Ammon and Moab, saying to them, “Will you‬‬ ‫‪accept the Torah?” They said to him, “What is written in it?” He said to them, “You shall not‬‬ ‫‪commit adultery” (Exod 20:13). They said to him that they were all the children of adulter‬‬‫‪ers, as it is said, “Both of the daughters of Lot were with child by their father” (Gen 19:36).‬‬ ‫‪He revealed himself to the descendants of Ishmael, saying to them, “Do you accept the‬‬ ‫”‪Torah?” They said to him, “What is written in it?” He said to them, “You shall not steal‬‬ ‫‪(Exod 20:13). They said to him, “This was the very blessing which was pronounced on‬‬ ‫‪our forefather, ‘And he shall be a wild ass of a man, with his hand upon everything’ (Gen‬‬ ‫‪16:12). And it is written, ‘For surely I [Joseph] was stolen away [by the Ishmaelites] out of‬‬ ‫‪the land of the Hebrews’ (Gen 40: 15).‬‬

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And when he came to Israel, “From his right hand was a fiery law to them” (Deut 33:2), they all opened their mouths and said, “All that the Lord has spoken we will do and obey” (Exod 24:7). And thus it says, “He stood and measured the earth. He beheld and released the nations” (Hab 3:6). R. Simon b. Eleazar (ca. 200) says: If the descendants of Noah were unable to withstand [= obey] the seven commandments which were enjoined upon them, how much less would they have been able to endure all the commandments in the Torah. A parable: [This can be compared] to a king who appointed two administrators. One was appointed over a store of straw and one was appointed over a store of silver and gold. The one who was appointed over the store of straw was suspected [of mishandling it], but [nevertheless] complained that he had not been appointed over the store of silver and gold. They said to him, “You good for nothing! If you were suspected in connection with the store of straw, how could anyone trust you with the store of silver and gold?” Behold, one can reason a fortiori: If the descendants of Noah were unable to withstand the seven commandments enjoined upon them, how much more so [would they have been unable to withstand all the commandments in the Torah!] Why was the Torah not given in the land of Israel? In order that the nations of the world should not have the excuse for saying: Because it was given in Israel’s land, therefore we have not accepted it… To three things the Torah is likened: to the desert, to fire, and to water. This is to tell you that just as these three things are free to all who come into the world, so also are the words of Torah free to all who come into the world.

2.3 Sifre Deuteronomy § 343 (ed. Finkelstein, 397–398): ‫דבר אחר מסיני בא כשנגלה הקדוש ברוך הוא ליתן את התורה הרעיש כל העולם על יושביו שנאמר‬ ‫(תהלים כט ג) קול ה׳ על המים ואומר קול ה׳ בכח באותה שעה נתקבצו כל האומות אצל בלעם אמרו‬ ‫לו כמדומים אנו הקדוש ברוך הוא מחריב את העולם במים אמר להם (בראשית ט טו) לא יהיה עוד‬ ‫המים למבול אמרו לו מה הקול הזה אמר להם (תהלים כט יא) ה׳ עוז לעמו יתן ואין עוז אלא תורה‬ .‫שנאמר (איוב יב טז) עמו עוז ותושיה אמרו לו אם כן (תהלים כט יא) ה׳ יברך את עמו בשלום‬ When the Holy One, blessed be he, revealed himself to give the Torah to Israel, he shook the entire world, together with its inhabitants, as it is said, “The voice of the Lord is over the waters, the God of glory thunders” (Ps 29:3). When they heard the thunderous voices [of revelation], all the nations gathered together and came to Balaam, saying to him, “It seems to us that the Holy One, blessed be he, is about to destroy the world with water.” He said to them, “It has already been said, ‘The waters shall never again become a flood’ (Gen 9:15).” They said to him, “What then is this thunderous voice?” He replied, “The Lord will grant strength to his people” (Ps 29: 11), and “strength” must refer to Torah, as it is said, “With him are strength and sound wisdom” (Job 12:16). They said to him, “If that is so, ‘May the Lord bless his people with peace’ (Ps 29: 11).”

3.1 Deuteronomy 27:1–8: :‫ל־ה ִמּ ְצוָ ה ֲא ֶשׁר ָאנ ִֹכי ְמ ַצוֶּ ה ֶא ְת ֶכם ַהיּוֹם‬ ַ ‫ת־כּ‬ ָ ‫ת־ה ָעם ֵלאמֹר ָשׁמֹר ֶא‬ ָ ‫] וַ יְ ַצו מ ֶֹשׁה וְ זִ ְקנֵ י יִ ְשׂ ָר ֵאל ֶא‬1[ ‫ֹלהיָך נ ֵֹתן ָלְך וַ ֲה ֵקמ ָֹת ְלָך ֲא ָבנִ ים גְּ ד ֹלוֹת‬ ֶ ‫ל־ה ָא ֶרץ ֲא ֶשׁר־יְ הוָ ה ֱא‬ ָ ‫ת־היַּ ְר ֵדּן ֶא‬ ַ ‫] וְ ָהיָ ה ַבּיּוֹם ֲא ֶשׁר ַתּ ַע ְברוּ ֶא‬2[ :‫וְ ַשׂ ְד ָתּ א ָֹתם ַבּ ִשּׂיד‬

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‫ֹלהיָך‬ ֶ ‫ל־ה ָא ֶרץ ֲא ֶשׁר־יְ הוָ ה ֱא‬ ָ ‫תּוֹרה ַהזֹּאת ְבּ ָע ְב ֶרָך ְל ַמ ַען ֲא ֶשׁר ָתּבֹא ֶא‬ ָ ‫ל־דּ ְב ֵרי ַה‬ ִ ‫ת־כּ‬ ָ ‫יהן ֶא‬ ֶ ‫] וְ ָכ ַת ְב ָתּ ֲע ֵל‬3[ :‫י־אב ֶֹתיָך ָלְך‬ ֲ ‫ֹלה‬ ֵ ‫נ ֵֹתן ְלָך ֶא ֶרץ זָ ַבת ָח ָלב ְוּד ַבשׁ ַכּ ֲא ֶשׁר ִדּ ֶבּר יְ הוָ ה ֱא‬ ‫ת־ה ֲא ָבנִ ים ָה ֵא ֶלּה ֲא ֶשׁר ָאנ ִֹכי ְמ ַצוֶּ ה ֶא ְת ֶכם ַהיּוֹם ְבּ ַהר ֵע ָיבל‬ ָ ‫ת־היַּ ְר ֵדּן ָתּ ִקימוּ ֶא‬ ַ ‫] וְ ָהיָ ה ְבּ ָע ְב ְר ֶכם ֶא‬4[ :‫אוֹתם ַבּ ִשּׂיד‬ ָ ‫וְ ַשׂ ְד ָתּ‬ :‫יהם ַבּ ְרזֶ ל‬ ֶ ‫א־תנִ יף ֲע ֵל‬ ָ ֹ ‫ֹלהיָך ִמזְ ַבּח ֲא ָבנִ ים ל‬ ֶ ‫ית ָשּׁם ִמזְ ֵבּ ַח ַליהוָ ה ֱא‬ ָ ִ‫] וּבנ‬5[ ָ :‫ֹלהיָך‬ ֶ ‫ית ָע ָליו עוֹֹלת ַליהוָ ה ֱא‬ ָ ‫ֹלהיָך וְ ַה ֲע ִל‬ ֶ ‫ת־מזְ ַבּח יְ הוָ ה ֱא‬ ִ ‫] א ָבנִ ים ְשׁ ֵלמוֹת ִתּ ְבנֶ ה ֶא‬6[ ֲ :‫ֹלהיָך‬ ֶ ‫] וְ זָ ַב ְח ָתּ ְשׁ ָל ִמים וְ ָא ַכ ְל ָתּ ָשּׁם וְ ָשׂ ַמ ְח ָתּ ִל ְפנֵ י יְ הוָ ה ֱא‬7[ :‫יטב‬ ֵ ‫תּוֹרה ַהזֹּאת ַבּ ֵאר ֵה‬ ָ ‫ל־דּ ְב ֵרי ַה‬ ִ ‫ת־כּ‬ ָ ‫ל־ה ֲא ָבנִ ים ֶא‬ ָ ‫] וְ ָכ ַת ְב ָתּ ַע‬8[ [1]  Moses and the elders of Israel charged the people, saying: Observe all the Instruction that I enjoin upon you this day. [2]  As soon as you have crossed the Jordan into the land that the Lord your God is giving you, you shall set up large stones. Coat them with plaster [3]  and inscribe upon them all the words of this Teaching. When you cross over to enter the land that the Lord your God is giving you, a land flowing with milk and honey, as the Lord, the God of your fathers, promised you – [4]  upon crossing the Jordan, you shall set up these stones, about which I charge you this day, on Mount Ebal, and coat them with plaster. [5]  There, too, you shall build an altar to the Lord your God, an altar of stones. Do not wield an iron tool over them; [6]  you must build the altar of the Lord your God of unhewn stones. You shall offer on it burnt offerings to the Lord your God, [7]  and you shall sacrifice there offerings of well-being and eat them, rejoicing before the Lord your God. [8]  And on those stones you shall inscribe every word of this Teaching most distinctly.

3.2 Mishnah Soṭah 7:5 (MS Kaufmann): ‫ואחר כך הביאו את האבנים ובנו את המזבח וסדוהו בסיד וכתבו עליהן את כל דברי התורה‬ ‫הזאת בשבעים לשון שנאמר ״באר היטב״ (דברים כז ח) ונטלו את האבנים ובאו ולנו‬ .‫במקומן‬ And afterward they brought the stones and built the altar and plastered it with plaster. And they wrote on them all the words of this Torah in seventy languages, as it is written, “very clearly” (Deut 27:8). And they took the stones and came and spent the night in their own place (cf. Josh 4:3, 8).

3.3 Tosefta Soṭah 8:6–7(ed. Lieberman, 205): ‫] ר׳ יהודה אומ׳ על אבני מזבח כתבוה אמרו לו היאך למדו אותן אומות העולם את התורה אמ׳‬6[ ‫להן מלמד שנתן המקום בלב כל אומה ומלכות ושלחו נטורים שלהם והשיאו את הכתב מגבי אבנים‬ .‫בשבעים לשון באותה שעה נתחתם גזר דינם של אומות העולם לבאר שחת‬ ‫] ר׳ שמעון או׳ על הסיד כתבו כיצד כירוהו וסדוהו בסיד וכתבו עליו את כל דברי התורה‬7[ ‫ ״אם אתם חוזרין‬:)‫בשבעים לשון וכתבו מלמטה ״למען אשר לא ילמדו אתכם״ וגו׳ (דברים כ יח‬ .‫ אנו מקבלין אתכם״‬,‫בכם‬

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[6]  R. Judah says: They inscribed it [= the Torah] on the stones of the altar. They said to him: How did the nations of the world learn the Torah? He said to them: This teaches that the Omnipresent moved every nation and kingdom to send their scribes and they transcribed the writing from the stones in seventy languages. At that moment the verdict against the nations of the world was sealed for destruction. [7]  R. Simeon says: They wrote it on plaster. How so? They laid it out and plastered it with plaster, and they wrote on it all the words of the Torah in seventy languages, and they wrote below, “That they teach you not [to do after all their abominations]” (Deut 20:18): “If you [non-Jews] repent, we shall receive you.”

3.4 Mekhilta Deuteronomy Geniza frag. (ed. Kahana, 345, after Lieberman and Schechter): ‫בו ביום עברו ישראל את הירדן ונטלו את האבנים והעבירום והעמידום וכתבו על [האבנים] ̊א ̊ת כל‬ ‫ ר׳ ישמעאל אומ׳ בשבעים לשון כתבו [שנ׳ ״באר היטב״(דברים‬.]‫דברי התורה [בלשון הקודש‬ ‫ רבי שמעון בן יוחאי א׳ לא כתבו עליה[ן א]ל[א את משנה] תורת משה שנ׳ ״ויכתב שם על‬.])‫כז ח‬ ‫ (יהושע ח לב) ר׳ יוסה בן יוסי אומ׳ משום ר׳ אלעזר בן שמעון‬.‫האבנים את משנה תורת משה״ וג׳‬ ‫לא כתבו עליהן אלא מה שאומות העולם רוצין כגון ״כי תקרב אל עיר להלחם עליה וקראת עליה‬ ]‫ על [אבני‬.)‫ ״כי תצור אל עיר ימים רבים״ וג׳ (שם כ יט‬.)‫לשלום אם שלום תענך״ וג׳ (דברים כ י־יא‬ ‫ [אמ׳] [ר׳ נרא]ין דברי ר׳ שמעון‬.‫ ר׳ שמעון א׳ על האבנים כתבום‬.‫[המזב]ח כתבום דברי ר׳ יודה‬ ‫שאמר על האבנים [כתבום] [שנ׳ ״על] האבנים״ (שם כז ח) מדברי ר׳ יודה שאמר על המזבח‬ ‫ [ולמטה כת׳] עליהם‬.‫ שאלו [על] המזבח כתבום האיך היו אומות העולם רוצין לקרות דין‬.‫כתבום‬ .‫״כל הרוצה לקבל ימין יבוא ויקבל״ וגנזום בו ביום‬ On the same day that Israel crossed the Jordan, they took the stones, brought them across, and erected them and wrote on [the stones] all the words of the Torah [in the holy language]. R. Ishmael says, They wrote in seventy languages, [as it is said, “most distinctly” (Deut 27:8)]. R. Shimʿon b. Yoḥai says, They did not write on the[m bu]t [a copy] of the Torah of Moses (or: the book of Deuteronomy), as it is said, “And there, on the stones, he inscribed a copy of the Torah of Moses” (Josh 8:32). R. Yose b. Yose says in the name of R. Eleazar b. Shimʿon, They did not write on them but that which the nations of the world desired, such as, “When you approach a town to attack it, you shall offer it terms of peace. If it responds peaceably,” etc. (Deut 20:10–11); “When you besiege a city for a long time,” etc. (Deut 20:19). They wrote them on [the stones] [of the alta]r. These are the words of R. Judah. R. Shimʿon says, They wrote them on the stones (cf. Deut 27:2–4). [Said] [Rabbi I prefer] the words of R. Shimʿon, who said, They wrote them on the stones, to the words of R. Judah, who said, They wrote them on the altar. For if they had written them [on] the altar, how could the nations of the world who desired to read the law [been able to do so]? [At the bottom was written] on them: “Whoever wishes to receive right (forgiveness) shall come and receive!” But the very same day they hid them [= the stones of the altar] away.

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3.5 Palestinian Talmud Soṭah 7:5, 21d (ed. Academy of the Hebrew Language, 935–36): ‫ מאן דמר על‬.‫ על אבני המזבח נכתבו‬.‫ רבי יוסי אומר‬.‫ דברי רבי יודה‬.‫ על אבני המלון נכתבו‬.‫תני‬ ‫אבני המלון נכתבו בכל יום ויום אומ׳ העולם משלחין נוטריהן ומשיאין את התורה שהיתה כתובה‬ ‫ נתן‬.‫ עוד הוא מעשה ניסים‬.‫ לא לשעה היו ונגנזו‬.‫ מאן דמר על אבני המזבח נכתבו‬.‫בשבעים לשון‬ .‫הקב»ה בינה בלב כל אומה ואומה והשיאו את התורה שהיתה כתובה בשבעים לשון‬ It was taught: [The words of the Torah] were written on the stones of the lodging place (Josh 4:3, 8). These are the words of R. Judah. R. Yose says: They were written on the stones of the altar. [With respect to] the one who says that they were [permanently] written on the stones of the lodging: Every day the nations of the world would send their scribes, who would transcribe the Torah which was written in seventy languages. [With respect to] the one who says that they were written on the altar, [how can this be?] Were they not [there] for only a short time before they were hidden away? [Rather,] this was another miracle. The Holy One, blessed be he, gave insight into the heart of each and every nation so that they transcribed the Torah that was written in seventy languages.

3.6 Fragmentary Targum (MS Paris) Deut 27:8: ‫ותכתבון על אבניא ית כל מילי שבח אוריתא הדא כתב חקק ומפרש טבא מתקרי בחד לישן‬ .‫ומתורגם בשבעין לישן‬ And you shall inscribe upon the stones all of the words of praise of this Torah, in engraved writing and very distinct; to be read in one language and translated into seventy languages.

4.1 Sifre Deuteronomy § 344 (ed. Finkelstein, 400–401): ‫דבר אחר אף חובב עמים מלמד שלא חלק להם הקדוש ברוך הוא חיבה לאומות העולם כדרך‬ ‫שחלק לישראל תדע לך שכן שהרי אמרו גזילו של נכרי מותר ושל ישראל אסור וכבר שלחה‬ ‫מלכות שני סרדיטיאות ואמרה להם לכו ועשו עצמכם יהודים וראו תורתם מה טיבה הלכו אצל רבן‬ ‫גמליאל לאושא וקראו את המקרא ושנו את המשנה מדרש הלכות והגדות בשעת פטירתם אמרו‬ ‫להם כל התורה נאה ומשובחת חוץ מדבר אחד זה שאתם אומרים גזילו של גוי מותר ושל ישראל‬ .‫אסור ודבר זה אין אנו מודיעים למלכות‬ Another interpretation: “Lover, indeed, of the people(s)” (Deut 33:3): This teaches that the Holy One, blessed be he, did not dispense love to the nations of the world as he did to Israel. Know that this is so since they [= the sages] have said: “The robbed property of a Gentile is permitted, while the robbed property of an Israelite is forbidden.” It once happened that the government [of Rome] sent two officers, instructing them as follows: “Go and disguise yourselves as converts, and find out what is the nature of Israel’s Torah.” They went to Rabban Gamaliel at Usha, where they recited Scripture and studied Mishnah: Midrash, Halakhot, and Aggadot. As they were taking their leave, they said, “All of the Torah is pleasing and praiseworthy, except for one thing, and that is your saying, ‘The robbed

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property of a Gentile is permitted, while the robbed property of an Israelite is forbidden,’ but we will not report this to the government.”

4.2 Palestinian Talmud Bava Qamma 4.3, 4b (ed. Academy of the Hebrew Language, 1197): ‫ חזקיה‬.‫ התיר ממונה שלגוים‬."‫ "ראה ויתר גוים‬.‫ רב אמר‬.‫"שור שלישראל שנגח לשור שלנכרי" כול׳‬ .‫ הורידן מנכסיהן‬.‫ רבי יוסי בן חנינה אמר‬.‫ והופיע פנים כנגד אומות העולם‬."‫ "הופיע מהר פארן‬.‫אמר‬ ‫ לא על הדא איתאמרת אלא בהדא דתני רבי‬.‫ אמר רבי ָלא‬.‫ כדיניהן‬.‫רבי אבהו בשם רבי יוחנן אמר‬ ‫ אף על פי שקיבל עליו לדון כדיני ישראל בין תם בין‬.‫ שור שלגוי שנגח שור שלגוי אחר חבירו‬.‫חייה‬ ‫ מעשה ששילח‬.‫ כדיניהן‬.‫ רבי אבהו בשם רבי יוחנן‬.‫ על הדא אתאמרת‬.‫מועד משלם נזק שלם‬ ‫ ולמדו ממנו מקרא משנה תלמוד הלכות‬.‫המלכות שני {איסרטיוטות} ללמוד תורה מרבן גמליאל‬ ‫ "בת‬.‫ כל תורתכם נאה ומשובחת חוץ משני דברים הללו שאתם אומרי׳‬.‫ ובסוף אמרו לו‬.‫ואגדות‬ .‫ בת ישראל לא תניק בנה שלנכרית‬.‫ "אבל נכרית מיילדת לבת ישראל‬."‫ישראל לא תיילד לנכרית‬ ‫ באותה שעה גזר‬.‫ גזילו שלישראל אסור ושלנכרי מותר‬."‫אבל נכרית מניקה לבת ישראל ברשותה‬ ‫ "שור שלישראל שנגח לשור שלנכרי‬.‫רבן גמליאל על גזילות נכרי שיהא אסו׳ מפני חילול השם‬ .‫ אפילו כן לא מטון לסולמיה דצור עד דשכחון כולן‬.‫ בדבר הזה אין אנו מודיעין למלכות‬.‫פטור" כול׳‬ “An ox of an Israelite that gores an ox of a gentile,” etc. (m. B. Qam. 4:3). Rab said: “[God] looked and loosened the nations” (Hab 3:6): He loosened [= permitted] the property of the nations of the world. Hezekiah said: “and [God] showed himself from Mount Paran” (Deut 33:2): He showed his face against the nations of the world. R. Yose b. Ḥanina said: He lowered them from their property. R. Abbahu said in the name of R. Yoḥanan: [The Mishnah] is in accord with [the Gentiles’] laws [according to which it matters not whether the ox was an attested danger]. R. La said: [The previous statement] was not said with regard to this [Mishnah] but with regard to what R. Ḥiyya taught: If the ox of one Gentile gored the ox of another Gentile, his fellow, even if he elected to be judged according to the laws of Israel, whether [the ox was] harmless or an attested danger he pays full damage. It is with regard to this [baraita] that R. Abbahu said in the name of R. Yoḥanan: It is in accord with their laws. It once happened that the wicked government [of Rome] sent two officers to learn Torah from Rabban Gamaliel. They learned from him Scripture [and] Mishnah: Talmud and Aggadah. At the end they said to him: “All of your Torah is pleasing and praiseworthy, except for these two things that you say: ‘An Israelite woman cannot serve as a midwife to an Gentile woman but a Gentile woman can serve as a midwife to an Israelite woman, and an Israelite woman cannot nurse the child of a Gentile woman but a Gentile woman can nurse [the child of] an Israelite woman.’ [Secondly,] ‘the robbed property of an Israelite is prohibited while the robbed property of a Gentile is permitted.’ ” At that moment, Rabban Gamaliel decreed that the robbed property of a Gentile be forbidden because of profanation of the divine name. “ ‘If an ox of an Israelite gored an ox of a Gentile, [the Israelite owner] is not culpable.’ Concerning these matters we will not inform the government.” Even so, they did not get so far as the Ladder of Tyre when they forgot all of it.

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5.1 Pesiqta Rabbati 5 (ed Meir Friedmann, 4b; cf. trans. William Braude, 93) ‫אמר רבי יהודה ברבי שלום ביקש משה שתהא המשנה בכתב וצפה הקדוש ברוך הוא שהאומות‬ ‫עתידין לתרגם את התורה ולהיות קוראים בה יוונית ואומרים אין הם ישראל אמר לו הקדוש ברוך‬ ‫הוא הא משה עתידין האומות להיות אומרים אנו הם ישראל אנו הם בניו של מקום וישראל אומרים‬ ‫ אמר הקדוש ברוך הוא לאומות מה אתם אומרים‬,‫ ועכשיו המאזניים מעויין‬,‫אנו הם בניו של מקום‬ ‫שאתם בניי איני יודע אלא מי שמסטירין שלי בידו הוא בני אמרו לו ומה הם מסטירין שלך אמר‬ ‫להם זו המשנה … אמר הקדוש ברוך הוא למשה מה אתה מבקש שתהא המשנה בכתב ומה בין‬ ‫ישראל לאומות מניין (כך) [שכך] הוא אומר אכתוב לך רובי תורתי (הושע ח יב) ואם כן כמו זר‬ .)‫נחשבו (שם‬ R. Judah b. R. Shalom (ca. 375) said: Moses requested [of God] that the oral teaching (mishnah) be written. The Holy One, blessed be he, foresaw that in the future the nations would translate the Torah and read from it in Greek and say, “They are not Israel.” The Holy One, blessed be he, said to him, “O Moses! In the future the nations will say, ‘We are Israel; we are the children of the Lord.’ And Israel will say, ‘We are the children of the Lord.’ Now, the scales would appear to be balanced [between the two claims].” The Holy One, blessed be he, would say to the nations, “What are you saying that you are my children? I only recognize as my son one in whose hand are my ‘mysteries.’” They would say to him, “And what are your “mysteries?” He would say to them, the oral teaching (mishnah).”… Said the Holy One, blessed be he, to Moses, “What are you requesting, that the oral teaching be written? What then would be the difference between Israel and the nations?” Thus, it says, “Were I to write for him [= Israel] the fullness of my teaching (torah)”; if so, “they [= Israel] would have been considered as strangers” (Hos 8:12).

Law Corpora Compared: Early Collections of Monastic Rules and Rabbinic Literature Michal Bar-Asher Siegal Introduction The Babylonian Talmud in tractate Berachot 62a, recounts the testimonials of a few famed rabbis. These rabbis, R Akiva, Ben Azzai and R. Kahana, spied after their masters, to better learn a few halachic details. The cases in point: how to behave in the toilet and in the bedroom: It has been taught: R. Akiba said: Once I went in after R. Joshua to a privy, and I learnt from him three things. I learnt that one evacuates not standing but sitting; I learnt that one does not turn east and west but north and south; and I learnt that it is proper to wipe with the left hand and not with the right. Ben Azzai said to him: Did you dare to take such liberties with your master? He replied: It was a matter of Torah, and I required to learn. Ben ‘Azzai also went in after R. Akiba to a privy. He said I learnt from him three things. I learnt that one evacuates sitting and not standing. I learnt that one does not turn east and west but north and south. I also learnt it is proper to wipe with the left hand and not with the right. Said R. Judah to him: Did you dare to take such liberties with your master? He replied: It was a matter of Torah, and I required to learn. R. Kahana once went in after Rav while he was engaged in another matter [= sexual intercourse], and he sat under his bed. He heard him chatting [with his wife] and joking and doing what he required. He said, ‘One would think that Abba’s mouth had never sipped the dish before!’ He said to him: Kahana, is that you? Go out, because it is not the way of the world [= it is rude]. He replied: It is a matter of Torah, and I require to learn.1

The Talmudic passage is brought in the context of the laws concerning the correct use of the toilet. A few rabbis remark on the way they learnt the correct way to relieve themselves, and to wipe thereafter – they followed their master to the toilet and saw what he did. The stories evoke a sense of shock in their listener. It is disrespectful to do such a thing. The answer to this rebuke, in the different stories, is given in the same response: “It was a matter of Torah, and I required to learn.” Notice, that in one case, the same listener, Ben Azzai, is said to have acted in the exact same way he is reportedly rebuking, towards R. Akiva himself. In the last story in this passage, the voyeurism is extended to the bedroom: R. Kahana is hiding under the bed of Rav and is amazed to find his master enjoying himself, 1 According

to MS Oxford 366

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and engaging in more than the simple sexual act. Here, as opposed to the previous stories, he is discovered under the bed, by the master himself (presumably due to the surprised exclamation pronounced from under the bed, regarding the unexpected foreplay in Rav’s bed.) And yet again, the same justification is given: “It was a matter of Torah, and I required to learn.” This story is emblematic of the nature of rabbinic literature. On the one hand, like many other rabbinic passages it engages with the most minute details of one’s life, and gives directives for these situations. On the other hand, it exposes the absurdity of the discussion of the most intimate aspects of one’s life: in the bedroom and in the toilet. How would one even learn of the correct way to act in these places and these situations? In a culture that promotes and builds on master-student relationships; where many halachic details are learned through observation of the actions of previous generations; the natural extension is that these laws as well should be learned by way of imitation. But the stories, as Talmudic stories often are, are satirical, while informative. The spying rabbis did learn a few things about bedding and going to the toilet, but they encountered criticism for their disrespectful actions. The stories in fact, push the point to the limit of acceptability: if rabbinic literature discusses every aspect of one’s life, these aspects as well, should be included. And if one learns by way of imitation, then it should apply here as well. Or should it? By pushing the story to portray these extreme situations, the rabbinic text asks: Is there a limit to the minutia of rabbinic occupation with Jewish law? In this paper, I wish to discuss rabbinic law, but not through an examination of specific sets of rules in the various layers of rabbinic literature. I will also bow out from the fruitful uses of legal theories. Instead I shall focus on quotidian regulations and rules as an aspect of law. What I wish to stress here is the possible benefits of comparing rabbinic law with other contemporaneous, legal collections. While such comparisons have been made using Roman legal sources,2 I wish to offer preliminary observations on monastic rules in comparison to rabbinic legal traditions. In religious societies the legal aspects present a kind of completing, but also competing, mode of thought. As expressed by Perry Dane: At one level, the resemblance between law and religion, as modes of thought, is striking. They are both hermeneutic activities. Both find efficacy in ritual. They each live a dialectic between a commitment to authority and tradition and a commitment to objective truth. They are both obsessed with questions of right and wrong, sin and crime. And both set that inquiry into a larger, structural, often hierarchical, frame.3 2 See for example bibliography cited in C. Hezser, “Roman Law and Rabbinic Legal Composition,” in The Cambridge Companion to the Talmud and Rabbinic Literature, ed. Charlotte E. Fonrobert and Martin S. Jaffee (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007), 144–164. 3  P. Dane, “Constitutional Law and Religion,” in A Companion to Philosophy of Law and Legal Theory, ed. D. Patterson, 2nd ed. (Oxford: Wiley-Blackwell, 2010), 120.

Law Corpora Compared: Early Collections of Monastic Rules and Rabbinic Literature 159

However, in cases where religious traditions “define the spiritual sensibility against law and its mode of thought,” the place of the legal system needs to be addressed. Is it a mere accessory to the preservation of a spiritual system, or can it be part of the system itself, part of the spiritual goals? As seen from the story above, Jewish law does not include only ritual law. It aims, fully consciously, to address all matters of law, large or small. It addresses matters of ritual but also tort and property; marriage laws and laws that apply to the king. Stereotypically, this is set up against antinomian Christianity, starting from Paul. This supposed dichotomy, between a rabbinic legal religious system where law is “a central religious category” and Christianity as antinomian in nature, has been addressed in other essays in the current volume, and can be challenged or at least more carefully defined. One exception to this division4 is the one I wish to discuss here: the early monastic rules. This article will look at two corpora which developed in Late Antiquity. I will focus broadly on rabbinic literature but will draw mainly on Talmudic passages from the Babylonian Talmud. In comparison, I will use early monastic collections of rules, but will draw mostly from the Asketikon of St. Basil and the Rule of Pachomius. I choose these texts, not due to a claim for historical connection between the two, but rather as representatives of the legal genre: the rabbinic and the monastic. I believe many of my observations can be made using other texts as well, but these corpora offered easy access to the genre as a whole. I will attempt to discuss questions of genre as well as point to a few similarities in content. This analysis constitutes, not the study of literary influence or polemical relationship, but preliminary attempt at a comparative discussion of contemporary sets of rules. The comparison will offer a chance to discuss the literary genre of legal writings: what they might tell us about how religious societies regulate and create laws, what can we learn from these laws about the religious communities for which they were written, and in which they functioned.

The rules and rabbinic writings Let us begin with the literary nature of the corpora. The Rule of Pachomius was written in the middle of the fourth century. It is considered one of the oldest monastic rules, if not the earliest.5 This specific set of rules, as opposed to later 4 Another interesting exception can be early collections of laws such as the Didache. For a survey of the literature see K. Pennington, “The Growth of Church Law,” in The Cambridge History of Christianity, ed. A. Casiday and F. W. Norris (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007), 386–402. 5  Armand Veilleux, Pachomian Koinonia II: Pachomian Chronicles and Rules, CS 46 (Kalamazoo, MI: Cistercian Publications, 1981), 139–195; Heinrich Bacht, Das Vermächtnis des Ursprungs: Studien zum frühen Mönchtum. 2: Pachomius. Der Mann und sein Werk (Würzburg: Echter, 1983); In quotation here I use the online version translated by Esmeralda Ramirez de

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ones, does not start with an uplifting theological statement, but dives right into the rules themselves. While early monastic rules can appear in different literary genres, such as Basil’s Asketikon – which is a collection of questions and answers concerning the monastic life6 – the Rule of Pachomius is simply a list of rules. As described by William Harmless: “Like most rulebooks, they are rather dry reading, long lists of dos and don’ts. But if one can get beneath this surface, they offer fascinating clues into the life of the Koinonia, its everyday rhythms and its all-too-human problems.”7 Similarly to rabbinic halacha, when one reads through the monastic rules, one is immediately struck with a sense of being plunged into the most mundane and daily aspects of a life of a community. Even more so than rabbinic literature, where scholars argue to what extent the rules were actually implemented and by whom, in the case of the rules, it reads very clearly as a guide to the life of a living community. As Harmless notes, the rules seem “more ad hoc, framed to counter specific abuses. They take for granted a daily routine, so one has to reconstruct some things from passing remarks.”8 In similar fashion, Rabbinic literature, often depicts halachic debates as if stemming from an ad hoc question, sometimes presented as someone walking into the study house with an issue, or as a story prompting a debate for its halachic consequences. As can be expected in collections of laws, the rules in both rabbinic and monastic literature reflect consideration and adaptation to time and place. While for example, the Rule of Augustine reflects a city based monastery (Hippo), the Pachomian rules reflect life near a river – so one finds specific rules involving the use of boats.9 The various layers of rabbinic literature similarly reflect differences due to place and circumstances. For example an earlier Palestinian Mishnah discussing the renting of a field, and then the drying of a stream within, was later revised, in the Babylonian Talmud, to discuss the big rivers of Babylon and its segments.10 Jennings, in the Patristics in English project http://www.seanmultimedia.com/Pie_Pachomius_ Rule_1.html .  6  “… it is mostly a long record of rather free-form dialogues on various monastic questions. Although the Rule of Basil contains extremely precious insights into the mentality of the first cenobites, it is a somewhat disorderly jumble of material that tends to digression and also obscurity.” Terrence Kardong, Pillars Of Community: Four Rules of Pre-Benedictine Monastic Life (Collegeville: Liturgical Press, 2010). Kindle Locations 133–134.  7 William Harmless, Desert Christians: An Introduction to the Literature of Early Monasticism (Oxford/New York: Oxford University Press, 2004), 124.  8  Harmless, Desert Christians, 124. On this see Philip Rousseau, Pachomius: The Making of a Community in Fourth-Century Egypt, rev. ed., Transformation of the Classical Heritage 6 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1999).  9  Kardong, Pillars Of Community, Kindle Locations 123–124. 10  See m. B. Mes. 9:2 and b. B. Mes. 103b. On this and other examples see David Rosenthal, “The Transformation of Eretz Israel Traditions in Babylonia,” Cathedra 92 (1999): 7–48 [Hebrew].

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The interesting thing about Pachomius’s rules is the preoccupation, side by side, with significant issues and the smallest of details. This tendency was viewed by Harmless as a tool in the creation of social change: “At the heart of Pachomius’s legislation was the desire to create, down to the most nitty-gritty details of everyday life, a community of equals.”11 The equality before the law, is indeed a factor in regulating a society created by various voluntary incoming members, from all social and economic strata. But there is no denying that this description does not stress enough the factor of control the rules clearly display. The level of regulation and policing that these texts suggest is highlighted by the preoccupation of the rules with the nitty-gritty details: Each of the chairmen will teach the members of their house how to eat, with discipline and modesty. If anyone talks or laughs during the meals he will make penance and will be rebuked instantly in his place. He will stand and will stay standing until some of the other brothers that are sitting stand. (Reg. Pachom. 31)

Pachomius’s rules often talk about punishment, especially public punishment, for what might seem minor offenses, such as falling asleep during prayer services. In the monastic texts, the policing is clearly done by supervisors at different levels. For example: The chief of the house who finishes the week and the one who relieves him, as well as the father of the monastery, will take care checking what has been omitted or neglected from the work. He will also make the door mats shake that are extended ordinarily on the floor of the church and will count the strings of each week that are to be weaved. They will write the result on the wooden tablets that they will keep until the time of the annual reunion, in the course of which they settle accounts and give absolution of the faults. (Reg. Pachom. 32)

Policing and regulating these religious communities is a major factor in the creations of these systems of laws, and as presented in the Rules the preoccupation with every single aspect of the life of the members of such a society is part of this system of overseeing. We thus have yet another comparative angle to the rabbinic literature. While the stories presented at the start of this article underlined the absurdity of such preoccupation with details, it should also be examined as part of a system of policing and regulating members of a religious group. Monastic communities were small and contained, while scholars argue about the actual followers of rabbinic dicta.12 We don’t know to what extent the policing and regulating of rabbinic circles were affecting large numbers of community members. But the driving force of such a regulatory system, dealing with the minutest detail of one’s life, has to take into account the need of such a system to police and regulate its members.  Harmless, Desert Christians, 132.  See most famously Seth Schwartz, Imperialism and Jewish Society, 200 B. C. E. to 640 C. E. (Princeton and Oxford: Princeton University Press, 2002). 11 12

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The different supervisors were part of a hierarchical social structure. One Pachomian rule states that these social ranks should be the basis for ceremonies such as entrance to a gathering: “When coming back to the monastery (from their job) they will do it in the order that is correspondent to each of them by their rank” (Reg. Pachom. 83). We find similar manifestations of hierarchical structures in the Tosefta Sanhedrin chapters 7 and 8, where the order of the entrance of the sages into the study hall, as well as the order of their sitting, depends upon their ranks.13 The gap between the somewhat lofty spiritual quest for a connection between a man and his God, on the one hand, and the need to regulate and control a religious society to make it conform and unite under one goal, on the other, is embodied in the texts of the rules and in the many rabbinic laws that govern the daily life of the members of their communities. Such policing often goes hand in hand with other tendencies, such as the wish to keep its members cut off from the non-members. Monastic communities are famous for their call for defamilialization,14 and desert fathers are told to have ignored visits and requests from close family members.15 Rabbinic literature does not contain explicit calls to its members to cut off ties with their families, but nonetheless rabbinic texts contain several stories about rabbis leaving their wives for extended periods of times in order to concentrate on their studies. Most famously R. Akiva is told to have stayed away for years from his wife,16 and R. Yochanan ignores his sister’s pleading when her husband (Resh Lakish) is dying.17 Scholars have stressed that “representations of the ascetic life as a complete rejection of traditional family, however, are somewhat exaggerated.”18 We see evidence for that in Pachomius’s rules as well, where visits with members of one’s family are at least tolerated. See for example, the rule about visiting the nearby women’s monastery:

13  See Shimon Fogel, The Orders of Discourse in the House of Study (beit midrash) in Palestinian Rabbinic Literature: Organizing Space, Ritual and Discipline (PhD diss., Ben Gurion University, 2014), ch.1. 14  E. A. Clark, Reading Renunciation: Asceticism and Scripture in Early Christianity (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1999); C. T. Schroeder, “Child Sacrifice in Egyptian Monastic Culture: From Familial Renunciation to Jephatah’s Lost Daughter ,” JECS 20 (2012): 269–302. 15  See for example Apophthegmata Patrum, Poemen 5 (PG 65.320, ET in Sayings of the Desert Fathers, trans. Benedicta Ward, Cisctercian Studies 59 [Kalamazoo: Cistercian Publications, 1984], 165.) 16  Cf. b. Ketub. 62b–63a; b. Ned.50a. 17 b. B. Mes. 84a. On this story and parallel literary motifs in monastic texts see Michal Bar-Asher Siegal, “Ethics and Identity Formation: Resh Lakish and the Monastic Repentant Robber,” in L’identité à travers l’éthique: Nouvelles perspectives sur la formation des identités collectives dans le monde greco-romain, ed. K. Berthelot, R. Naiweld and D. Stökl Ben Ezra (Turnhout: Brepols, 2015), 53–72. 18  Schroeder, “Child Sacrifice,” 280, based on based on evidence from Shenoute’s monastery

Law Corpora Compared: Early Collections of Monastic Rules and Rabbinic Literature 163

Let us speak also about the monastery of virgins: No one shall go to visit them unless he has there a mother, sister, or daughter, some relatives or cousins, or the mother of his own children.19

The call for the reclusive way of life to members of these religious communities, in its various forms, and its complex relationship to the family ties, is yet another similar aspect in both these religious texts.

Scripture Another point of comparison is the central role Scripture plays in the early monastic rules and rabbinic literature. Rabbinic literature relies heavily on biblical verses, and the promotion of the study of the Torah is a central topos, sometimes over actual performance of the commandments.20 The lives of the desert fathers were “saturated by scripture”21 not only in the liturgy but also in the recitation of the psalms during their manual labor. Many abbas used biblical verses in their sayings.22 In the early monastic rules, the centrality of Scripture is clearly present. Taking for example, the questions and answers of the Basil’s Asketikon, one cannot ignore the central role Scripture plays in these texts.23 The shorter rules  – Basil’s Small Asketikon  – were probably composed from a series of collected questions around the years 365–6 CE, (and were later translated by Rufinus) and a later edition, much longer (more than twice the size of the short one), was left at Basil’s death in 370.24 In these rules there are many biblical references, and several of the questions are of an exegetical nature – asking about the meaning of the verses. Basil goes as far as to say that when there is a conflict between an order given by monastic seniors and Scripture, only scriptural-based

19  Veilleux, Pachomian 2, 166–67. See discussion in Rebecca Krawiec, Shenoute and the women of the White Monastery: Egyptian monasticism in late antiquity (Oxford; New York : Oxford University Press, 2002), 120–132 20  See for example Martin S. Jaffee, Torah in the Mouth: Writing and Oral Tradition in Palestinian Judaism, 200 BCE–400 CE (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2001). 21  Harmless, Desert Christians, 244. 22 On the use of scripture in the early monastic writings and the Sayings of the Desert Fathers, see Douglas Burton-Christie, The Word in the Desert: Scripture and the Quest for Holiness in Early Christian Monasticism (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1993); Elizabeth A. Clark, Reading Renunciation: Asceticism and Scripture in Early Christianity (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1999); Per Rönnegård, Threads and Images: The Use of Scripture in Apophthegmata Patrum (Winona Lake, IN: Eisenbrauns, 2010). 23 Enzo Bianchi, Introduction to Saint Basile, évangile et église by Jean Gribomont (Bégrollesen-Mauges: Abbaye de Bellefontaine, 1984), lix– lxi. 24  The Asketikon of Saint Basil the Great [Long and Short Rules] trans. Anna M. Silvas (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2005), 2. See also, Philip Rousseau, Basil of Caesarea (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1994).

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orders should be followed.25 The higher members of the monastery are expected to know their scripture: The superior of the monastery should be well versed in bible, and transmit his knowledge to the monks.26 In Pachomius we find the emphasis on memorization of Scripture, central when addressing the capabilities of the new members, as well as existing community members. For example, new members are given two psalms to memorize,27 and the monks are asked to learn by heart the whole Psalter and the New Testament.28 The study of bible passages is mentioned a few times, in the form of catechetical instructions given by the superiors: The Abbot and the housemaster.29 But notice the emphasis on not only memorizing biblical passages but the study and discussion of the teaching among the members of the monastic community.30 In two passages in the rules we read: By the morning, in each house, after finishing the prayer, the brothers will not go back immediately to their cells.They will first have a colloquy about what was exposed by the chairman in the conferences and then they will return to their rooms … (Reg. Pachom. 19) May the brothers be seriously compelled to review among them all of the teachings that they have listened to in the common meeting, do this mainly on the days of fasting in which their chairmen teach the catechesis. (Reg. Pachom. 138)

There is a strong emphasis in these passages to review among the members of the community the biblical passages they heard that day. Two aspects are important to note: first, this goes beyond the simple memorization mentioned elsewhere, but seems to imply an engagement with the sources. Second, the passages dictate a communal discussion, done in the company of others. This brings the Scriptural occupation in the monastery closer to a rabbinic bet midrash. Obviously, in places such as the famous School of Nisibis we find a development of the exegetical and scholastic practices,31 but it is interesting to find such preoccupation with biblical passages in the context of local monastic rules. More explicitly put, is Basil’s comment in his prologue: So then, in whatever way each of you thinks he is lacking (in knowledge), let him bring it forward for common examination, for if something appears difficult or obscure, it is more easily uncovered by the labor of several looking into the matter together.32

Basil seems to offer a glimpse into the making of his Asketikon, through discussion among fellow monks. Terrence Kardong concludes that “the Asketikon of  Basil, Short Rules 98.  Short Rules 235 and Long Rules 25. 27  Reg. Pachom. 49. 28  Reg. Pachom. 140. 29  Reg. Pachom. 138. 30 Kardong, Pillars Of Community. (Kindle Location 2008) 31  Adam Becker, Fear of God and the Beginning of Wisdom: The School of Nisibis and the Development of Scholastic Culture in Late Antique Mesopotamia (Philadelphia : University of Pennsylvania Press, 2006). 32  Silvas, Asketikon, 159, and quoted in Kardong, Pillars Of Community, Kindle Location 539. 25 26

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St. Basil is more the product of communal thinking in the early church than it is the legislation of a single leader.”33 But it also gives us an explicit description of the benefits of a joint learning session: the combined effort of several learners leads to better results. The importance of joint study sessions is clearly a main aspect of rabbinic learning. Here is one explicit formulation of this principle: The Palestinian Talmud tells the story of Yehudah of Hutsa, who went and hid in a cave for three days considering a certain legal matter. However, he comes out of the cave after he could find no solution. When he asks other rabbis for help, they supply him with an answer to his question, but then they add: He (R. Yose) said to him (Yehudah): “what brought it about (that you could find no solution)? That you did not study with your colleagues.” (y. Ned. 11:1, 42c)

The Talmud articulates that finding answers is depended on a process involving a collegial studying session. Part of the occupation with study and prayer is the balance between them and manual work. As can be expected from a society immersed in the attainment of spiritual goals, the monastic writings, as well as rabbinic writings, retain views that promote the wish to avoid all physical work. For example, Philippe Escolan shows that manual labor was “the exception to the norm in the Syrian milieu.”34 However, some monastic rules come out against this tendency such as Basil’s Long rule 37. In answer to a question: “Should we neglect work on a pretext of the prayers and the psalmody?” Basil answers a resounding no. He thinks that: this way of life is good for us not only because of the rigorous treatment of the body, but also because of love for our neighbor, so that through us God may provide sufficiently for the weak among the brothers.35

Other monastic sayings portray this tension as well, such as It was said of Abba John the Dwarf, that one day he said to his elder brother, “I should like to be free of all care, like the angels who do not work, but ceaselessly offer worship to God.” So he took off his cloak and went away into the desert. After a week he came back to his brother. When he knocked on the door, he heard his brother say, before he opened it, “Who are you?” He said, “I am John, your brother.” But he replied, “John has become an angel, and henceforth he is no longer among men.” Then the other begged him saying, “It is I.” However, his brother did not let him in, but left him there in distress until morning. Then, opening the door, he said to him, “You are a man and you must once again work in order to eat.” Then John made a prostration before him, saying, “Forgive me.”36  Kardong, Pillars Of Community, Kindle Locations 544–545.  Philippe Escolan, Monachisme et Église: Le monachisme syrien du IVe au VIIe siècle: un ministère charismatique (Paris: Beauchesne, 1999), 183– 201. And see also Daniel Caner, Wandering, Begging Monks: Spiritual Authority and the Promotion of Monasticism in Late Antiquity (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2002), 13–22. 35  Kardong, Pillars Of Community, Kindle Location 1298. 36  Apophthegmata Patrum, John the Dwarf 2 (PG 65: 204–5, Ward, Sayings, 86). Cf. Abba Silvanus 4 (PG 65: 409, Ward, Sayings, 223) 33 34

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Rabbinic literature similarly retains passages discussing this tension between ora et labora most famously in passages in Sifre Deuteronomy where R. Shimon b. Yochai says: This is an endless business: [If a person] reaps in the time of reaping, ploughs in the time of ploughing, threshes in the time of heat, winnows in the time of wind, when will a person study the Torah? But when Israel acts according to God’s will, their work is done by others, as it is said: “the sons of the alien shall be your plowmen and your vinedressers” (Isa. 61: 5), and when Israel does not act according to God’s will, they do their own work, and not only that, but the work of others is done by them, as it is said: “Therefore shalt thou serve thine enemies” (Deut. 28: 48). (Sifre Deuteronomy 42).

And in a story in the Babylonian Talmud in which R. Shimon b. Yochai criticizes others for choosing to abandon the life eternal for life temporal (Shabbat 33b). But the Talmudic story ultimately rejects this view, at least for the vast majority of working men.37 Until now, in this paper, I tried to offer a very general and broad comparison between the corpora of law. But in the next part of this article, I wish to offer a few examples for similarities in content of rules. The comparison, again, does not suggest actual connections between the composers of the rules, but rather a shared interest in topics emerging from the life of a religious community, and interestingly, a shared way to address these interests.

A brother went to see Abba Silvanus on the mountain of Sinai. When he saw the brothers working hard, he said to the old man, “Do not labor for the food which perishes [but for that meat which endures unto everlasting life] (John 6: 27). Mary has chosen the good portion (Luke 10: 42).” The old man said to his disciple, “Zacharias, give the brother a book and put him in a cell without anything else.” So, when the ninth hour came the visitor watched the door expecting someone would be sent to call him to the meal. When no one called him he got up, went to find the old man and said to him, “Have the brothers not eaten today?” The old man replied that they had. Then he said, “Why did you not call me?” The old man said to him, “Because you are a spiritual man and do not need that kind of food. We, being carnal, want to eat, and that is why we work. But you have chosen the good portion and read the whole day long and you do not want to eat carnal food.” When he heard these words the brother made a prostration saying, “Forgive me, Abba.” The old man said to him, “Mary needs Martha. It is really thanks to Martha that Mary is praised. On this topic see also Antoine Guillaumont “Le travail manuel dans la monachisme ancien: contestation et valorization,” in Aux origines du monachisme chretien (Begrolles-en-Mauges: Abbaye de Bellefontaine, 1979), 117–26; Guillaumont, “Le probleme de la priere continuelle dans le monachisme ancien,” in L’expérience de la prière dans les grandes religions: actes du colloque de Louvain-la-Neuve et Liège (22– 23 novembre 1978), ed. Henri Limetet and Julien Ries (Louvainla-Neuve: Centre d’histoire des religions, 1980), 285–93; Birgit van den Hoven, Work in Ancient and Medieval Thought: Ancient Philosophers, Medieval Monks, and Theologians and the Concept of Work, Occupations, and Technology (Amsterdam: J. C. Gieben Publisher, 1996), 117– 52. 37 More on this story see the fifth chapter of Michal Bar-Asher Segal, Early Christian Monastic Literature and the Babylonian Talmud (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2013).

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Wearing of Belt One such example is that of the monks’ attire. In a few interesting passages the monastic rules list the items of clothing for monks. The monks’ habits looked a lot like the clothes of Egyptian farmers, with a “sleeveless linen tunic worn with the linen cloth or leather belt or girdle,” alongside a hide for the shoulders and a head veil.38 This belt or girdle, mentioned in a few of the monastic rules, “in the form of a leather belt, sash of cloth, or a cord, was worn around the usually loose tunic.” In the sixth century, in the well-known rule of St. Benedict, the belt is listed among the items provided to the monk: In order to cut this vice of private ownership out at the root, the Abbot should provide everything necessary, that is cowl, tunic, leggings, boots, belt, knife, stylus, needle, handkerchief and tablets; in order to forestall any excuse about necessity. (Rule of Benedict 55)39

The rules also specify that the belts should be worn during the night, to be easily ready the next morning: They shall sleep in their habits, and girt with their girdles or cords: not with knives at their side, or they might hurt themselves in their sleep. Thus they will be ready to rise the instant the bell rings and hurry to be first at the divine office, yet with all gravity and composure. (Rule of Benedict 22)40

In the rules of Pachomius we encounter the belt in specific rules: If it happens that during the psalmody or the prayer or in the midst of reading anyone speaks or laughs, he shall unfasten his belt immediately and with neck bowed down and hands hanging down he shall stand before the altar and be rebuked by the superior of the monastery. He shall do the same also in the assembly of the brothers when they assemble to eat. (Reg. Pachom. 8)

The rule states that one should not speak or laugh during prayer or reading of the psalmody. If one transgresses, he is rebuked. The rule also states the way in which one behaves in such a scenario: “neck bowed down and hands hanging down.” But before the humble posture is performed, the monk needs to unfasten his belt. This appears again in rule 135: “any punishment will be fulfilled like this: the ones who suffer any correction will be without a belt and will stay standing during the great sinaxis and in the refectory.” Scholars have wondered about this specific act regarding the belt: it is obviously part of the humiliation involved in the rebuke ceremony, but can it also refer 38  Marek Derwich, “Clothing: Christian Perspectives,” in Encyclopedia of Monasticism: A–L, ed. William M. Johnston (London: Taylor & Francis, 2000), 309–310. 39  The Rule of Saint Benedict, trans. Bruce L Venarde (Cambridge: Harvard University Press 2011), 181. 40  Owen Chadwick, ed., Western Asceticism, Library of Christian Classics 12 (Philadelphia: Westminster John Knox Press, 1958), 310.

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to something more specific? One scholar suggested it is an act borrowed from military mannerism, a relic of Pachomius’s time in the military.41 But Bacht in his edition, rejects this claim.42 Kardong, in his comments notes that: “In this regard, though, it is curious that the same monks loosened their belts when receiving Holy Communion.”43 I found this rule especially intriguing since we find a similar function for a belt in the Babylonian Talmud, used for prayer services, and loosened for eating. For example, in Babylonian Talmud tractate Shabbat we find: And when is the [definition of the] beginning of eating? Rab said: When one washes his hands; R. Hanina said: When he loosens his belt. But they do not differ: the one refers to ourselves [Babylonians], the other to them [Palestinians]44… let him stand thus [unbelted] and pray? [no!] Because it is said, “prepare to meet thy God, O Israel” (Amos 4:12). (b. Sabb. 9b–10a)45

In this Talmudic passage it stated that one wears a belt for prayer (at least in Babylonia), and it is a sign of honor to do so, and disrespectful to stand in prayer unbelted. However, when one eats, one needs to loosen his belt. Scholars of rabbinics have tried to decode the meaning of the belt in the Talmud, in light of Persian writings, where a belt is also featured.46 The belt in the Persian world marks the privileged class, and the Zoroastrians “attributed a deep religious meaning to the activity of wearing the kustīg [= the belt]. Zoroastrian ritual mandates a rite of untying and retying the kustīg at set points in the day.” Geoffrey Herman also notes that: It is noteworthy, then, that Babylonian Jewish culture (but not Palestinian!) also formulated a benediction for putting on the belt in the morning (and for putting on shoes); it is

41 Konstantin Lehmann, “Die Entstehung der Freiheitsstrafe in den Klöstern des hl. Pachomius,” Zeitschrift der Savigny-Stiftung für Rechtsgeschichte: Kanonistische Abteilung 37 (1951): 1– 94. 42  Bacht, Das Vermächtnis des Ursprungs, 131 n. 48. I thank Fr. Terrence Kardong for his help in securing me access to Bacht’s edition here. 43  Kardong, Pillars Of Community, Kindle Locations 2211–2212, n. 22. 44  The text literally only has: “this is for us and this is for them,” which theoretically can mean both options: either they wear a belt in Palestine (R. Hannanel) or in Babylonia (Rashi). Since the belt appears prominently only in Babylonian Talmudic passages, and as can be seen from the rest of the passage here, I tend to think the Rashi reading is the correct one. And so does Geoffrey Herman, “Like a Slave before his Master: A Persian Gesture of Deference in Sasanian Jewish and Christian Sources,” ARAM 26 (2014): 93–100 (here, 95). 45 For the different version of this passage see Geoffrey Herman, “Like a Slave.” 46 Shaul Shaked, “’No Talking During a Meal:’ Zoroastrian Themes in the Babylonian Talmud” in The Talmud in its Iranian Context, ed. Carol Bakhos and M. Rahim Shayegan (Tübingen: Mohr Siebeck, 2010), 161–177; Geoffrey Herman, A Prince Without a Kingdom: The Exilarch in the Sasanian Era (Tübingen: Mohr Siebeck, 2012), 217, 273; Herman, “Like a Slave,” 93–96; and see his footnotes (15, 17) there for more bibliographical references. I am grateful for Geoffrey Herman’s help with these references.

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concerned with the belt in the context of prayer; and it discusses the belt as a sign for the commencement of the meal.47

Interestingly, Herman writes about the belt in an article that compares other gestures of prayer to Zoroastrianism, and in one case, hand gestures, also to Eastern Christian customs. Herman concludes his article by saying: In the Sasanian empire religions as different as Judaism, Christianity and Zoroastrianism shared certain modes of deeply religious behavior. People shared a fashion of deference. They prayed with their belts fastened, their shoes on, arms crossed, and they regarded such behaviour as divinely mandated. We might envision a process of influence, but for the contemporaries there was no such awareness. This was just the way things were done – like a slave before his master.48

In addition to the Persian context offered by Herman, I am offering yet another dimension to his conclusion. Through a look at the monastic rules, one can see that Christian monks were wearing belts for similar purposes: for prayer. And the belt was loosened for purposes such as eating, in this case the Holy Communion. Moreover, if one looks more closely at monastic writings, Herman’s comment about a special benediction dedicated for the wearing of the belt, found only in the Babylonian Talmud, also finds an interesting parallel in monastic sayings. In the Verba Seniorum we find: An old man said: “The cowl we use is the symbol of innocence. The amice which covers neck and shoulders is the symbol of a cross: the girdle, the symbol of courage. Let us live our lives in the virtues symbolized by our habit. If we do everything with earnestness, we shall not fail.” (Verba Seniorum 10.115)49

As with other items of clothing, the belt is viewed as a symbol. If the cowl is a symbol of innocence, as it covers one’s face and eyes; and if the amice, due to its shape, is a symbol of the cross; then the belt is viewed as a symbol of courage. This obviously needs to be viewed in regards to the use of the belts as a holder for weapons and knives. But one cannot escape the similarity between this symbolism and the phrasing of the rabbinic benediction for wearing a belt. And so we read in tractate Berachot 60b: “When he fastens his girdle, he should say: ‘Blessed is He who girds Israel with might.’” Scholars have pointed out the formulation of this benediction is based on Psalms 65:7, describing God as “having armed yourself with strength (‫)נאזר בגבורה‬,” and based on the etymology of the root ‫אזר‬ to refer to belts in biblical Hebrew.50 Regardless of the source of the monastic saying (can it be related to the same biblical verse?), or the rabbinic formulation  Herman, “Like a Slave,” 96.  Herman, 100. 49  Trans. Chadwick, Western Asceticism, 131. 50  Moshe Bar-Asher, Leshonenu Rinna: Liturgical Studies: Language, Style, Content, Versions and Customs (Jerusalem: Rubin Mass and Yad ha-Rav Nissim, 2016), 21–22. 47 48

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of the benediction, the end result is similar and worth noting: The wearing of the belt is viewed as symbolizing might, bravery and courage in both communities. Due to lack of space, I will briefly mention that other functions of the belt such as its use to control sexual urges or at least signal the wish to separate the lower and higher part of one’s body, is also shared in monastic and rabbinic writings (and possibly Persian writings).51 What this short survey suggests, I think, is that a careful consideration of specific theme within monastic rules, can be of use in refining our understanding of the shared religious and cultural world in which Monastic and rabbinic communities functioned. Regardless of the actual connection between the two communities, they share aspects of the religious life, such as a garment used for prayer, and define its use in similar terms. In this case, a comparative look at both traditions, can even shed light on both and give extra depth to the understanding of the tradition in each of its individual setting.

Bare-backed riding on donkeys In this last case, I wish to give another short example to the benefits of a comparative reading of the monastic and rabbinic corpora of law: the prohibition to ride bare-backed on donkeys. Monastic rules are famously occupied with the fear of homosexual relationships.52 Such rules include several different legislations involving sleeping arrangements; keeping the candle burning all night; sleeping with clothes on; and separating young monks from sleeping side by side (cf. Rule of Benedict 22). But one rule in particular is worth a comparative examination. In one of the Pachomian rules (109) we find, “two men shall not sit together on a bare-backed donkey or on a wagon-shaft.”53 Scholars have suggested this law might be the result of a consideration of cruelty to animals. When the homosexual aspect was the preferred interpretation, cruelty to animals was still considered part of the motivation for the rule.54 However, the Babylonian Talmud, tractate Nidah contains a similar reference to a prohibition of riding bare-backed on donkeys:

 I intend to look more fully on this topic in a forthcoming article.  John Boswell, Christianity, Social Tolerance, and Homosexuality: Gay People in Western Europe from the Beginning of the Christian Era to the Fourteenth Century (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2009), 187–188. 53  This last word is difficult to translate as it appears only once in Coptic literature. See Bacht there (131) 54  See Bacht, Das Vermächtnis des Ursprungs; Veilleux, Pachomian Koinonia II; and the discussion in Kardong, Pillars Of Community, Kindle Location 2785. 51 52

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So it was also taught: All camel-drivers are wicked, all sailors are righteous, but among the donkey-drivers some are wicked and others righteous. Some say: The latter are those who use a saddle [when riding] and the former are those who use no saddle; while others say: The former are those who ride astraddle and the latter are those who do not ride astraddle [riding with both legs on the same side]. (b. Nid. 14a)

The assumption in this passage is that friction brought on by riding either barebacked on the donkey, or astraddle, is apt to engender heat resulting in an emission of semen. I find it interesting that the bare-backed donkey riders are singled out here, similar to the monastic rules. In the monastic text, however, the emphasis is on a pair of riders, and the possible outcome of a sexual arousal, of two monks side by side. The rabbinic text by contrast is interested in the sexual arousal of even a single rider. This example demonstrates that even without an attempt to claim historical connection between texts, the parallel study of such corpora is worthwhile. In this case, the comparison between the two texts supplies us with additional information to comprehend the meaning of the monastic rule and give extra support to its reading as an anti-homosexual law. And it highlights the joint religious atmosphere that created both these rules. Similar concerns with sexual stimulations lead here to the creation of similar rules.

Conclusion This article offered first thoughts on a comparative look at two collections of rules: rabbinic and monastic. Its focus was on regulations and rules, in both religious communities, as an aspect of law, as part of a larger discussion of this volume on law in Late Antiquity. The comparison did not focus specifically on certain sets of texts, or engaged with the historical connections between the two, but emphasized general issues regarding genre, style and biblical sources, in a few of the earlier monastic rules and the rabbinic, and more specifically the Babylonian Talmud. In a handful of examples, I tried to show the potential in comparing specific rules, and their content. I am well aware of the magnitude of the project I am suggesting, but hope to have contributed to the consideration of such an endeavor as worthwhile.

“By an immediate revelation … by the voice of his own spirit to my soul” A perspective from Reception History on the New Testament and Antinomianism Christopher Rowland There was a debate forty years ago, which is now largely forgotten, and I think probably merits more than a footnote in the history of modern New Testament scholarship. In writings which had much popularity at the time I was first studying theology, the North American-based New Testament scholar John Knox juxtaposed the ethic of Jesus and that of Paul, and found the latter wanting because of the lack of the dynamic of repentance and forgiveness, and what he considered was the inadequate theoretical structure of the theology underpinning Paul’s doctrine of justification by faith which failed to offer a convincing theological response to antinomianism. Knox’s discussion of the dynamics of inter-personal relationships, based on his interpretation of the Parable of the Prodigal Son, in The Ethic of Jesus and the Teaching of the Church (1961)1 repays careful consideration, not because Knox got the diagnosis right but because he did see there was a problem in the Pauline corpus. Knox’s challenge received a response in the Festschrift which was presented to him, including essays by Paul Schubert and Charlie Moule.2 The latter analyzed Paul’s understanding of identification with Christ and showed convincingly that, even if Paul did not use the language of repentance and forgiveness, the Pauline language of submission to another lordship, say, in Romans 6, had an implicit notion of the dynamic of repentance and forgiveness, which paralleled that which Knox had identified in the Jesus tradition, which was the major concern of the Knox essay. What Moule failed to answer adequately, however, was the subsidiary point that in the Pauline letters there are contradictory themes, which sit uneasily together. This contribution is about lawlessness, in the sense that there is less of law and more of “immediate revelation” as a mode of understanding and engaging  John Knox, The Ethic of Jesus and the Teaching of the Church (New York: Abingdon 1961). F. D. Moule, “Obligation in the Ethic of Paul,” and Paul Schubert, “Paul and the New Testament Ethic in the Thought of John Knox” in Christian History and Interpretation: Studies Presented to John Knox, ed. W. R. Farmer, C. F. D. Moule, and R. R. Niebuhr (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1967). 1

2 Charles

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with the divine which relativizes the position of law. It may occasionally involve disregard of, or disobedience to, law, but need not do so – and indeed arguably even in the most extreme cases, it includes some of the main ethical themes of the law. As such, while its primary concern is with strands of theology from the early modern and modern period, it concerns an issue which goes all the way back to the New Testament and indeed is a feature one may find much more widely in the study of religion. It is an attempt to move beyond the usual brief rejection of antinomianism by probing aspects of reception history of the Bible. I agree with the view that “none of the [NT] authors would have considered himself as defending an antinomian position.”3 I do not think that the New Testament is “antinomian” in the sense of being against appropriate forms of conduct with basic outlines echoing key themes from the Mosaic law, even if there are at times statements which suggest an end of the Mosaic dispensation. I would say the same with regard to those who were reputedly antinomian, for there is often a profoundly ethical stance, as with Abiezer Coppe (1619–72) and Laurence Clarkson (1615–1667), however unconventional their behavior and subversive of contemporary values they were. I shall question the adequacy of “antinomianism” as being primarily “anti-law” or indeed about the promotion of “immoral” behavior. Not prioritizing rules and regulations, sitting loose to law and custom, even appearing to be sexually immoral, blasphemous or offending against convention are often symptomatic of prioritizing another source of authority, which is experiential and indeed apocalyptic. It could be termed prioritizing autonomy over heteronomy, but autonomy fails adequately to capture the widespread and deep-seated conviction that it is not principally about the right of the individual to determine how they should live, for most pre-modern and early modern people (possibly Blake apart of those considered in this essay); it is an individual’s claim to knowledge based on divine inspiration. The conviction that God has spoken by dream or revelation, and indeed revealed God independently of established patterns of discerning the divine will, is evident in different parts of the New Testament itself, as in the passages from the later Christian tradition which I will consider. As a result, inspiration then is given priority over obedience to convention. As we shall see, that should not lead us to conclude that Blake naïvely supposed that appeal to “Memory” wasn’t crucial to him. No one used his intellectual ancestors’ work to better effect, in reaction and as an inspiration, than Blake.4 Indeed, he mentions as much. (e. g. Marriage of Heaven and Hell 5 [E35]; 21–2 [E42]).5 Milton, Swedenborg, not to mention the Bible, all influenced  Moises Mayordomo, “Antinomianism: New Testament,” EBR 2.234.  Harold Bloom, The Anxiety of Influence: a Theory of Poetry (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1975) 5. 5  All citations of Blake are followed by a reference (prefixed “E”) to the page number in the standard critical edition, The Complete Poetry and Prose of William Blake, ed. D. V. Erdman (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1982). 3 4

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Blake, stimulated his imagination and concentrated his mind to articulate his resistance to them. Key to my thesis is, that one aspect of the broad phenomenon of antinomianism is the primacy of what was believed to be immediate access to understanding the divine, through dreams, visions, insight – what Anne Hutchinson calls an immediate revelation “by the voice of God’s own spirit to my soul” and what a young William Blake wrote about Jesus that he “acted from impulse not from rules.” It is “anti-nomian” in the sense of relegating the authority of Scripture and received wisdom to a secondary position, another medium and source of authority. This may be considered a weak sense of “antinomian”, but I believe it is part and parcel of the intellectual history of Christianity. Even Blake, the most coherent advocate of the subordinate place of law in religion, indicated a place for boundaries and constraints as a necessary complement to the imaginative flights of fancy of the prophetic spirit and a necessary means of communicating them. After a brief survey of the article on antinomianism in the de Gruyter Encyclopedia of the Bible and its Reception, I shall consider some examples of antinomianism in the sense I am considering it from the early modern period with particular reference to the trial of Anne Hutchinson and the writings of William Blake. I shall then outline a typology, which I worked out for my book on Blake and the Bible, based on the book on 17th century antinomianism by David Como. I shall suggest that subjection to an external law has mutated so that the external code is internalized, “written on the heart” or “the spirit within,” influenced by passages from Ezekiel 36:25–27 and Jeremiah 31:33–34, so that the individual has no need any longer of resort to law as an external authority. Finally I shall return to the New Testament itself, ending with some hermeneutical reflections.

Antinomianism in the de Gruyter Encyclopedia of the Bible and its Reception There is a multi-authored article on Antinomianism in the new de Gruyter Encyclopedia of the Bible and its Reception. It is divided into three major sections: New Testament; Judaism; and Christianity. In the New Testament section (by Moises Mayordomo) there is recognition that antinomianism is used loosely to refer to ideas which consider “obligation to fixed religious or social laws somehow irrelevant for salvation or moral behavior.”6 The place of the term in discussions about gospel and Law, and the emergence of a new perspective on Paul in the last thirty years, in which “covenantal nomism” looms large, is taken as an indication that care is needed to not read back the controversies of later times into the New Testament. There is then coverage of those passages in the New Testament (es Mayordomo, “Antinomianism: New Testament,” EBR 2.233.

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pecially the Pauline corpus) which might be taken in an antinomian way, but the conclusion is that “on any account it is difficult to consider Paul an antinomian.”7 The Gospel of Matthew and Revelation are then considered, but the same general conclusion emerges. Section II on Judaism8 has an interesting discussion of redemption through sin with particular attention to the Sabbatian movement of the 17th century, and Maimonides’ view of the conventional, rather than normative, nature of Torah law. Spinoza, Moses Mendelssohn, and Buber are mentioned in an article which explores the effects of deep-seated antinomian traditions in Judaism. What is missing is a mention of the rather elusive figure found in the rabbinic tradition, Elishah ben Abuyah. The traditions preserved about him suggest a rather similar mix that we find in the Pauline corpus, of profound knowledge of the law and its traditional understanding, along with stories about his corrupting young scholars, as well as accounts of his “immediate revelation,” including in one version an apocalyptic heavenly ascent, which convinced him that there was no possibility of repentance for him (b. Hag. 15a; 3 Enoch 16). Part III examines the rest of Christian intellectual history. This is divided into four sections each by different authors. The first on the Greek and Latin Patristics9 covers gnostic texts, especially the patristic references to the Carpocratians. The section on Medieval Times10 focuses on “the Heresy of the Free Spirit” among Beguines and Beghards, with some attention given to Marguerite Porete’s Mirror of the Simple Annihilated Soul, which McGinn points out does not deserve the description “antinomian.” The third part is on the Reformation Era.11 The major concern here is with the first and second antinomian conflicts, the first involving Johann Agricola, the second George Major. The fourth section on Modern Europe and America12 starts with Wesley’s antinomian tendencies, and mentions Anabaptist and Quakers in passing. Then there is reference to the Civil War period in seventeenth century England. Laurence Clarkson’s views are briefly quoted. The New England antinomian controversy in 1636–7 gets a longer treatment, especially a crucial point in Anne Hutchinson’s trial when she made a claim to “immediate revelation,” which was crucial to her conviction. There is a final reference to the Oneida community and John Humphrey Oneida’s advocacy of freedom from the constraints of the law, which is typical of many such millenarian movements in both Europe and North America.  7 Mayordomo,

2.234.  Joseph Davis, “Antinomianism: Judaism,” EBR 2.235–238.  9  Peter Gemeinhardt, “Antinomianism: Christianity  – Greek and Latin Patristics,” EBR 2.238–239. 10  Bernard McGinn, “Antinomianism: Christianity – Medieval Times,” EBR 2.239–241. 11  Friedrich C. Ilgner, “Antinomianism: Christianity – Reformation Era,” EBR 2.241–244. 12  Kate Bowler, “Antinomianism: Christianity – Modern Europe and America,” EBR 2.244– 246.  8

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The point of the Anne Hutchinson condemnation is that she claimed “immediate revelation” as the basis of a superior theological appeal and the subordination of the Bible to it. This is something which is implicit in the writings of some of the radical Reformation writers like Hans Denck and Sebastian Franck. Abiezer Coppe gets a passing reference.13 He epitomizes the problem of the discussion of antinomianism. His reputation as immoral and a libertine needs to be matched by a strong theme throughout, that the result of his being indwelt by the divine is a demonstration of the motor of his ethical outlook. Then there is lack of any mention of the consummate example of antinomianism, the writings of the English poet, artist and visionary, William Blake (1757–1827), which exemplify the way in which the biblical material informed this current of thought. In light of the fact that we find throughout the survey of history recourse to a superior source of theological insight, whether through the Spirit or vision, that puts in an inferior place the written words of the Bible, including the biblical injunctions, the selection of the New Testament material should have been organized, and expanded, to include the way in which the potential for such appeals are deeply rooted in the New Testament. 1 Corinthians 2:10–16 is an obvious passage. This has often been appealed to by those of an antinomian bent.14 Debates about antinomianism have a long history but became an explicit part of theological vocabulary with the dispute between Luther and Johannes Agricola in the 1530’s.15 It became part and parcel of the way in which non-conformist groups were branded in the early modern period. John Milton dismissively lumps together the “sort of men who follow Anabaptism, Familism, Antinomianism, and other fanatic dreams” without acknowledging the moral seriousness evident in the lives of Familists and Anabaptists alike, though he does go on to make the perceptive point that this kind of approach to ethics “proceed not partly, if not chiefly, from the restraint of some lawful liberty which ought to be given Men, and is deny’d them” (On Divorce, 14). Milton’s Samson Agonistes, published in 1671 at the same time as Paradise Regain’d, has a more nuanced view of “antinomianism” than that which we find in the writing on divorce. Samson’s words offer an apologia for neglect of the law of God in furtherance of some higher aim on the basis that God cannot be tied “to his own prescript, Who made our Laws to bind us, not himself, And who hath full right to exempt Whom so it pleases him” (309–10). There is a dramatic moment in the trial of Anne Hutchinson in New England in 1637 when she explains to her interrogator the priority she gives to “speaking what in my conscience I know to be truth”: 13  On the links between Coppe and Blake, cf. S. Makdisi, Blake and the Impossible History of the 1790s (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2003). 14  Cf. A. C. Thiselton, The First Epistle to the Corinthians (Carlisle: Paternoster, 2000). 15  Ilgner, “Antinomianism: Christianity – Reformation Era,” EBR 2.241; cf. T. Wengert, Law and Gospel (Grand Rapids: Baker, 1997).

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Mr. Nowell. How do you know that that was the spirit? Mrs. H. How did Abraham know that it was God that bid him offer his son, being a breach of the sixth commandment? Dep. Gov. By an immediate voice. Mrs. H. So to me by an immediate revelation. Dep. Gov. How! an immediate revelation. Mrs. H. By the voice of his own spirit to my soul.16

Here she appeals to Genesis 22 and the priority of “an immediate voice,” which was the basis of him sacrificing Isaac. The example of Abraham offered a precedent for appealing to “an immediate revelation,” “… the voice of [God’s] own spirit to my soul,” which settled a matter as far as she was concerned. In the opinion of those judging her, this clear enunciation of her convictions, at the climax of what had hitherto been a very measured response, was the basis for her condemnation. So, John Winthrop in his summing up thanked divine providence for making Hutchinson “lay open herself and the ground of all these disturbances to be by revelation.”17 There was a crucial turning point in Anne Hutchinson’s trial when she intervened and was allowed to do so by the governor of Massachusetts. The original charge leveled against Anne Hutchinson was as a woman promoting the “covenant by grace” preaching of John Cotton and John Wheelwright, the latter of whom was related to Hutchinson by marriage and was also banished for his views. As suggested Hutchinson’s reported admission at her trial put the matter on another level of theological significance, however closely related to it it might have been. It was not just about a “covenant of grace” as compared to a “covenant of works,” but the relative weight given to “immediate revelation” as compared with Scripture of any kind. To use Blake’s terminology, it has become about the priority given, to “Inspiration” over “Memory” (Milton A Poem, Preface [E95]). The decisive moment came when she, seemingly spontaneously, shared with the court her fondness for what governor Winthrop, writing to friends in England, termed “bottomlesse, revelations, as came without any word [of scripture] or without the sense of the word.”18 What is more, though she justified such rev16 “The Examination of Mrs. Anne Hutchison at the Court at Newtown,” in David Hall, The Antinomian Controversy, 1636–1638: a Documentary History (Middletown, CT: Wesleyan University Press, 1968), 337. 17  Hall, “The Examination of Mrs. Anne Hutchison,” 341. Cf. Bowler, “Antinomianism: Christianity  – Modern Europe and America,” EBR 2.245; M. G. Ditmore, “A Prophetess in Her Own Country: An Exegesis of Anne Hutchinson’s ‘Immediate Revelation,’” The William and Mary Quarterly 57 (2000): 349–392; and on the general background in English Calvinism, D. Wallace, Shapers of English Calvinism, 1660–1714: Variety, Persistence, and Transformation (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2011). 18  M. Winship, The Times and Trials of Anne Hutchinson: Puritans Divided (Lawrence: University of Kansas Press, 2005), 111–112.

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elations, she used the word “immediate” of the revelations, which suggested the subordination of the words of scripture to revelation and conjured up what her opponents considered antinomian, Familist and smacked of all the worst excesses of Anabaptism. According to Winship, Hutchinson became the cause of the colony’s troubles and her supporters became, at worst, followers of this dangerous ringleader. Though Hutchinson’s testimony is laced with scriptural support, the basic conviction is there, that it is immediate revelation which not only inspires her use of the Bible but also the typological identification with biblical figures.19 The 1630’s Antinomian Controversy in New England is the tip of the iceberg of a network of beliefs, which reverberated around Old England in the following decades, in which the primary place was given to the apocalyptic, viewed in its epistemological, rather than eschatological, sense. For example, the importance of “immediate revelations” is confirmed and justified by Anne Hutchinson’s English contemporary Gerrard Winstanley who wrote “if you say that visions and revelations are ceased … then you erre mightily” (“Truth Lifting his Head,” [CHL1.410]).20 He himself repeatedly set great store by his trance experience with the command to dig the common land: Not a full year since, being quiet at my work, my heart was filled with sweet thoughts, and many things were revealed to me which I never read in books, nor heard from the mouth of any flesh, and when I began to speak of them, some people could not bear my words, and amongst those revelations this was one, That the earth shall be made a common Treasury of livelihood to whole mankind, without respect of persons; and I had a voice within me bad me declare it all abroad, which I did obey …. yet my mind was not at rest, because nothing was acted, and thoughts run in me, that words and writings were all nothing, and must die, for action is the life of all, and if thou dost not act, thou dost nothing. Within a little time I was made obedient to the word in that particular likewise; for I took my spade and went and broke the ground upon George-hill in Surrey (“A Watch-Word to the City of London,” [CHL 2.80]).21

Winstanley begins his treatise The Saints Paradice (CHL 1.313–16) with a quotation from Jeremiah 31:34 (“And they shall teach no more every man his neighbor, and every man his brother, saying, Know the Lord: for they shall know me, from the least of them unto the greatest of them, saith the Lord.”) It is not the verse which mentions the law written on the heart (the previous verse). The quotation is put to use as part of Winstanley’s challenge to acceptance of “the tradition from the mouths & pen of others.” Indeed, the whole treatise is a challenge to those “professors” who may know the Bible well and its history, but “who worshipped a God, but neither knew who he was, nor where he was.” What is required is “a  Ditmore, “A Prophetess in Her Own Country,” 386–388.  Citations from the works of Winstanley are given with page numbers from the critical edition, T. Corns, A. Hughes and D. Loewenstein, eds., The Complete Works of Gerrard Winstanley, 2 vols. (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2009). 21  Noted by Ditmore, “A Prophetess in Her Own Country,” 352 n. 5, from the earlier “New Law of Righteousnesse” (CHL 1.513). 19 20

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teacher within yourselves (which is Spirit)” who “will teach you all things, and bring all things to your remembrance (echoes here of John 14:26, 1 Cor 2:14–15, in addition to Jeremiah), so that you shall not need to run after men for instruction.” Winstanley denies the authenticity of even “the most glorious Preacher, or professor of literal gospel” who may end up as “the subtilest hypocrites,” if they do not know the “power of God.” It is not the words of the letter of the Bible, for example adherence to what is “called the ten Commandments,” for “it is the manifestations of God in all, or any one of his attributes, shining forth upon, and in his creature.” Among Winstanley’s more radical contemporaries were Laurence Clarkson and Abiezer Coppe. Coppe was one of the most colorful and controversial figures of his day, and his A Fiery Flying Roll, which provoked parliament’s censure and later the Blasphemy Act of 1650, suggests that he was more interested in challenging the conventional hierarchy of values as a result of his overwhelming experience of being indwelt by God. Coppe in “A Fiery Flying Roll” 2.18 writes “Why should I turn away mine eyes from mine own flesh? Why should I not break bread to the hungry, whoever they be?”22 Particularly evident in mid-17th century radical English non-conformist theology is the assumption that God is present in all, so there is no need to attend to another source of authority. David Lincicum has suggested to me that the neologism “panentheonomy” might be an apt description of this. For example, Richard Coppin, a writer who may have influenced Abiezer Coppe, wrote: “God is all in one; and so in everyone; the same all which is in me, is in thee; the same God which dwels in me dwels in another; and in the same fullness as he is in me, he is in everyone.”23 This is echoed in a reminiscence of Blake by Henry Crabb Robinson. When asked about the divinity of Christ, Blake responded “he is the only God” – but then he added – “And so am I and so are you.”24 It parallels “The worship of God is. Honouring his gifts in other men each according to his genius (Marriage of Heaven and Hell 22 [E43], repeated in Jerusalem 91: 7 [E25]). Such reflect the conviction of the innate rights of the individual as being indwelt by God and is an important component of any comprehensive discussion of the theological basis of antinomianism.

22 Cf. Coppe’s words quoted in Bowler, “Antinomianism: Christianity – Modern Europe and America,” EBR 2.246: “We as lief be dead drunk every day of the weeke, and lye with whores i’the market place, account these as good actions as taking the poore abused, enslaved ploughmans money from him.” 23  Divine Teachings, quoted in A. L. Morton, The Everlasting Gospel: A Study in the Sources of William Blake (London: Lawrence & Wishart, 1958), 58. 24  G. E. Bentley, ed., Blake Records: Documents (1714–1841) Concerning the Life of William Blake (1757–1827) and his Family, 2nd ed. (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2004), 696.

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“Jesus was all virtue, acted from impulse, not from rules” (William Blake) Reference to Blake’s views is a reminder that several commentators have regarded him as the quintessential antinomian. In his amusing, satirical, work, The Marriage of Heaven and Hell, we find a challenge to dualism, intriguing echoes of the views of Carpocrates according to Irenaeus.25 In it Blake offers his most explicit and succinct statement about what he considers to be Jesus’ antinomianism: Jesus is the pioneer of radical religion who acted “from impulse not from rules”: The Devil answer’d:… did he not mock at the sabbath, and so mock the sabbath’s God? murder those who were murder’d because of him? turn away the law from the woman taken in adultery? steal the labour of others to support him? bear false witness when he omitted making a defence before Pilate? covet when he pray’d for his disciples, and when he bid them shake off the dust off their feet against such as refused to lodge them? I tell you, no virtue can exist without breaking these ten commandments. Jesus was all virtue, acted from impulse, not from rules. (Marriage of Heaven and Hell 24 [E43])

It is the critical moment in a debate which persuades the angel to come over to the side of the devils given that the Jesus whom the angel thought was on his side, as a supporter of the religion of commandments, was in fact an exponent of all that he had been opposing. It is easy to be put off by William Blake’s hyperbole here and as a result fail to see that he has put his finger on something very important in the Jesus tradition, even if one cannot go along with the details of his exegesis. William Blake’s view of Jesus as one who “acted from impulse not from rules” exhibits the same kind of prioritization of the subjective experience as compared with the subservience to authoritative texts or tradition. Though Blake does not use the word “impulse” very frequently, he probably meant “divine impulse.” The priority of “intimate impulses” from God is an issue wrestled with by Milton in Samson Agonistes: “That what I motion’d was of God; I knew From intimate impulse” (222–3).26 It was part of the language of the activity of the Spirit by the prominent seventeenth century puritan divine, John Owen who in fact brings together the words used by both Hutchinson and Blake in his phrase “an immediate revelation or divine impulse and impression” (Pneumatologia 184; cf. “if by 25  Adversus Haereses 1.25.4: “they maintain that things are evil or good, simply in virtue of human opinion.” cf. Marriage of Heaven and Hell 3 (E34): “From these contraries spring what the religious call Good & Evil. Good is the passive that obeys Reason. Evil is the active springing from Energy. Good is Heaven. Evil is Hell.” 26 Cf. “didst plead / Divine impulsion prompting how [he] might’st / Find some occasion to infest [Israel’s] foes,” (421–23); cf. also 300–320; R. Grey, The Complicity of Imagination: The American Renaissance, Contests of Authority, and Seventeenth-Century English Culture (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997), 217; D. Urban, “’Rousing Motions’ and the Silence of God: Scripture and Immediate Revelation in Samson Agonistes and Clarel,” Leviathan 4 (2002): 91–111.

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some revelation or impulse of the Spirit,” John Owen Sermon 14: “The Testimony of the Church is not the Only nor the Chief Reason of our Believing the Scripture to be the Word of God.”) Elsewhere in the Blake corpus the incomplete verses of the Everlasting Gospel (c. 1820) show Blake contrasting “Inspiration” with “Memory,” a regular feature of his writing (e. g. in The Preface found in some versions of Milton, A Poem, [E95]). Jesus lived by the inspiration of the Spirit and exhibited the kind of religious enthusiasm which was despised by the wise of the world: Like dr. Priestly & [Sir Isaac del.] Bacon & Newton – Poor Spiritual Knowledge is not worth a button! … For thus the Gospel Sir Isaac confutes: God can only be known by his Attributes; And as for the Indwelling of the Holy Ghost Or of Christ & his Father, it’s all a boast And Pride & Vanity of the imagination, That disdains to follow this World’s Fashion. (Everlasting Gospel [E519])27

Elsewhere in “The Everlasting Gospel” the story of the Woman taken in Adultery (John 8:2–11)28 evokes an explicit antinomian challenge from Blake. The woman in the story is identified with Mary Magdalene and the setting of the biblical passage in the Temple (John 8:2) makes the climactic focus of the story even clearer – the presence of God is not in the Temple, the Holy Place, but in the act of forgiveness and reconciliation taking place in the environs of Jesus (cf. Matt 18:20): Was Jesus chaste or did he Give any Lessons of Chastity The morning blushd fiery red Mary was found in Adulterous bed 5 Earth groand beneath & Heaven above Trembled at discovery of Love Jesus was sitting in Moses Chair (Matt 23:2) They brought the trembling Woman There Moses commands she be stond to Death. 10 What was the sound of Jesus breath He laid his hand on Moses Law The Ancient Heavens in Silent Awe (Deut 29:20) Writ with Curses from Pole to Pole All away began to roll 15 The Earth trembling & Naked lay (Ps 18:7; Ps 68:8) In secret bed of Mortal Clay On Sinai felt the hand Divine Putting back the bloody shrine (Exod 20:24)  Cf. C. Rowland, Blake and the Bible (London: Yale University Press, 2010), 192.  Cf. Rowland, Blake and the Bible, 181–194.

27 28

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The Woman Taken in Adultery (1805), Photograph © 2018 Museum of Fine Arts, Boston

And she heard the breath of God

20 As she heard by Eden’s flood

Go[o]d & Evil are no more Sinais trumpets cease to roar Cease finger of God, to Write (Exod 31:18; John 8:6) The Heavens are not clean in thy Sight 25 Thou art Good & thou Alone Nor may the sinner cast one stone To be good only is to be A God [Devil] or else a Pharisee (Everlasting Gospel [E521])29

This event Blake interprets as an “earth shattering” event (lines 5 and 12, 15), in which Jesus’ actions not only challenge, but also revolutionize, the hegemony of the religion of law. What Blake sees in this passage means a shaking of the theological foundations of a culture and religion dominated by the law. In this  Cf. Rowland, Blake and the Bible, 182–190.

29

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poem, Blake has the Pharisees forcing Jesus to occupy Moses’ seat (Matt 23:2 in line 7), thereby being asked to make a judgment on the case. The consequence is cataclysmic: “What was the sound of Jesus’ breath? He laid His hand on Moses’ law, The ancient Heavens, in silent awe, Writ with curses from pole to pole, All away began to roll.” In the words “Cease finger of God to Write,” Jesus pronounces the end of the era of law (cf. Rom 10:4), written on Sinai with the finger of God (Exod 31:18) and condemns the law and its policing by the clerics of every generation. The apocalyptic character of the event (in the strict sense of the word), however, is not reserved solely for the Law, for Mary’s experience of release prompts a revelation to her of the nature of her shortcomings. Mary comes to see the way she has conformed to culture, habit, and circumstances. The sin is not the fact that she committed adultery, for Mary’s sin was the pretense to chastity in conformity with a moral law, whose origins and originator Jesus exposed and condemned. Where Blake takes this is crucial for understanding his theology. It is emphatically not the case that he is against mutually enabling, respectful and merciful, even just, ways of behaving between people but that this is not in subservience to an external moral law. The charge often made against antinomians is that “they placed exclusive emphasis on the infusion of grace as an emotional experience, so that once they possessed that emotional conviction, no other principle of ethics could be consulted to question it, as they discarded the notions of reason and of ecclesiastic tradition.”30 This is probably an appropriate assessment of the position taken by Anne Hutchinson. On the other hand, Blake argued that there was a balance between reason and Spirit. Thus Blake writes of the inspiration of the “comforter or Desire that Reason may have Ideas to build on” (Marriage of Heaven and Hell 6 [E35]). In writing of the Bible he advocates an immediate appeal to the imagination but secondarily reason has its part to play: “Why is the Bible more Entertaining & Instructive than any other book. Is it not because they are addressed to the Imagination which is Spiritual Sensation & but mediately to the Understanding or Reason” (Letter to Trusler 1799 [E703]). Notwithstanding the rhetoric of the simple contrast between “Inspiration” and “Memory” we should not neglect the complexity of Blake’s work. It should not surprise us, given that for him “Contraries” are the very stuff of existence (“Without Contraries is no progression” Marriage of Heaven and Hell 3 [E34]). As already mentioned engagement with his intellectual ancestors’ work by way of critical response and as a stimulus to his own creativity, is central to Blake’s genius. That is how the dialectic of “Contraries” works for him.31 The dialectic 30  Gertrude Huehns, quoted in J. Moskal, Blake, Ethics and Forgiveness (Tuscaloosa: University of Alabama, 1994), 14. 31  Cf. Bloom, The Anxiety of Influence.

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between constraint and freedom, Memory as well as Inspiration is crucial. In the practice of his art, the kind of constraint offered by Law alongside the flights of imaginative fancy together make up Blake’s exercise of the “Poetic Genius.” Constraint is for Blake “the great and golden rule of art, as well of life: That the more distinct, sharp, and wirey [sic] the bounding line, the more perfect the work of art … Leave out this line and you leave out life itself; all is chaos again” (E550). The unbounded and the bounded, the free and the constrained are both necessary, therefore, for creativity to take place. It is essential for the “Poetic Genius which is every where call’d the Spirit of Prophecy” (All Religions are One Principle 5 [E1]) to be channeled and directed aright, not in the sense of doing what befits conventional propriety so much as that sense of boundedness and encapsulation in which imaginative energy can communicate. For Blake “constraint is the necessary condition of freedom … The point of the protected or even closed circle is to make it possible for people to transcend it.”32

Antinomianism: a typology In his widely praised book, Blown by the Spirit: Puritanism and the Emergence of an Antinomian Underground in Pre-Civil-War England, David Como explored the origins of antinomianism in the seventeenth century on both sides of the English-speaking Atlantic.33 He showed the variegated character of early Puritanism and how that was the seedbed of the surge in antinomian sentiment in mid-century. As the title of the book implies, Como comes to the unsurprising conclusion (to the biblical scholar at least) that the more his sources trusted the power of the Spirit the more likely they were to allow the Spirit to convey them from accepted standards of orthodox belief and practice. At the heart of his thesis is that antinomian “believers would obey the will of God not out of the external compulsion of the Law but freely and voluntarily by virtue of the internal guidance of the Spirit.”34 He characterizes early seventeenth century antinomianism as a spectrum of beliefs, showing how the early modern debates were inspired by New Testament passages.35 Como suggests that, while Paul inherited an unstructured anti-legal spirit from those who were Christians before him, his own sweeping comments on the law were improvisations of his own making. Como finds pervasive anti-legal elements in the Pauline corpus and alleges that, despite his strenuous efforts to clarify the subject, Paul left an ambiguous textual legacy.  J. Bowker, Why Religions Matter (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2015), 162.  David Como, Blown by the Spirit: Puritanism and the Emergence of an Antinomian Underground in Pre-Civil-War England (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2004); cf. E. P. Thompson, Witness against the Beast (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993). 34  Como, Blown by the Spirit, 260. 35  Como, Blown by the Spirit, 38–40. 32 33

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On the one hand, at some points, Paul suggests that followers of Christ were utterly free from the Law. On the other hand, he made statements that, even if believers were free from the Law, they were not free from moral duty to God. There are passages in the Pauline corpus (e. g. Romans 8, Galatians and 1 Corinthians 1–4), which suggest that the period of the Law was over, and recourse to it was to slip back into the obsolete religion of a bygone age (this is something like the sentiments we find in Galatians 4:5, 9 and the Letter to the Hebrews). Those who have turned to Christ are no longer subject to an external code, but, echoing Jer 31:31 (alluded to in 2 Cor 3:3 but only quoted explicitly in Heb 8:8–12), God’s demands were written on the heart, and believers no longer had need for an external code. Milton believed that “on the introduction of the gospel, or new covenant through faith in Christ, the whole of the preceding covenant, in other words the entire Mosaic law, was abolished. Jer. xxxi.31–33” (De Doctrina Christiana), and that “we ought to believe what in our conscience we apprehend the Scripture to say, though the visible church with all her doctors gainsay” (Treatise Of Civil Power).36 In the table which follows I have produced an expanded typology of antinomianism.37 Type

Character

1

Antinomianism is lawlessness, anarchism and immorality. (There is little discussion of that in this paper.)

2

Absolute confidence in the individual’s ultimate salvation so that no works can alter that destiny (the tradition from which Anne Hutchinson came).

3

Law is regarded as the creation of a lesser divine being.

4

(Eschatological or Dispensational) Law is a feature of an earlier era / old age, and is now obsolete with the coming of the new age. The last three types are distinct in their focus on the human person:

5

Law written on the heart. So Milton, dependent on Jer 31:33 and Ezek 26:26–27; and found in the NT in Heb 8:8–13, probably 2 Cor 3:3 and just possibly Rom 8:4.

6

Emphasis on inspiration by the divine (akin to 1 Cor 2:10–16)

7

Emphasis on the conviction of divine indwelling/possession which enables and completely justifies the action taken (so e. g. Coppe).

 Cf. C. Hill, Milton and the English Revolution (London: Faber 1977), 314.  Cf. an earlier attempt in Rowland, Blake and the Bible, 201–207.

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A survey of antinomian themes in the New Testament As I have indicated, at first sight anomia seems to be frowned on in the New Testament (e. g. Matt 24:12; 2 Cor 6:14; Rom 6:19).38 Yet there are strongly antipathetic passages especially in the Pauline corpus (e. g. Gal 3–4; Rom 7:1–7, 10:4). The Gospel of Matthew suggests strong support for Law observance. While it is difficult to consider a writer like Paul to be an antinomian, when his writings are taken as a whole, strong moral concerns are evident. There is evidence of tolerance, for example with regard to the food laws (1 Cor 8, cf. Acts 15:20, 29 and 21:25). But, as I have suggested, to confine discussion of antinomianism solely to those passages which concern licentiousness is to miss a key ingredient evident in the early modern examples which we have considered: the inward conviction of divine light or inspiration by the divine spirit being given priority over a heteronomous code. This is an important dimension of early Christian experience. Paul’s favorite self-designation is as the agent, or apostle of Jesus Christ. As the peculiarly called agent of the Christ he subordinates all human tradition to that. But he is not only an agent, for he is the one who imitated Christ (1 Cor 11:1). Rarely he uses language about Christ indwelling the believer (e. g. Gal 2:20), and can occasionally include fellow Christians also (cf. Rom 8:3–9; 8:20, and Col 1:27). Galatians 1 is also important. It is a chapter which is not mentioned in Ditmore’s otherwise comprehensive treatment of biblical references in Anne Hutchinson’s similar confession.39 Hutchinson’s words “after he was pleased to reveal himself to me” echo Gal 1:15 (cf. Isa 49:1). Elsewhere, Ditmore risks polarizing what he terms “ecstatic mysticism” and engagement with the Bible when he writes “In her closing citations Hutchinson’s personal voice becomes entirely swallowed up not in ecstatic or oracular utterance but in what might be called ecstatic but exact scriptural quotation.”40 One of the most striking passages of all, and the one which relates most closely to the theme of this paper, is 1 Cor 2, not surprisingly a favorite of later writers often labeled as “antinomian.” It is one of the most remarkable passages in the Pauline corpus. It is a chapter chock full of apocalyptic terminology. Thus, the language in v. 2 about “mystery” echoes apocalyptic elements such as we find in Dan 2:28 (and elsewhere in the New Testament, e. g. Mark 4:11; Rom 16:25; Eph 1:9; 3:3; Col 1:26; 1 Tim 3:16). In 1 Cor 2:7 we have the sharing of secrets, reminiscent of the kind of apocalyptic brokerage claimed by the Teacher of Righteousness in 1QpHab 7, “to whom God made known all the mysteries of the words of his servants the prophets” (cf. Matt 11:25–27; 13:35; 1 Cor 14:2; 15:51; Col 1:26; Rom 8:30; 16:25; Eph 1:4; 3:1–13; 1 Pet 1:20; Rev 13:8). Paul too is a  Mayordomo, “Antinomianism: New Testament,” EBR 2.234–35.  Ditmore, “A Prophetess in Her Own Country.” 40  Ditmore, “A Prophetess in Her Own Country,” 383. 38 39

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broker of divine mysteries (cf. 1 Cor 4:1). It is not clear whether the exploration of the “deep things of God” (1 Cor 2:10 cf. Dan 2:22 “deep mysteries” and Rev 2:24 “depths of Satan”) is just the preserve of the apostolic elite who speaks wisdom among the perfect (1 Cor 2:6) or includes the Corinthians. They may well be excluded from this privilege in 2:6, but in 2:10 the first person plural may include the Corinthians, which is even more likely in 2:12. Receipt of the Spirit probably applies to them too, whatever reservations Paul may have about them and however much he may contrast his own ability to know the mind of Christ (2:16) as compared with his addressees. What follows about life in the Spirit in vv. 10–16 is an extraordinary testimony to the centrality of “immediate revelation.” Paul expected that those who resorted to “immediate revelation” complemented this with a way of life appropriate for those who are the “temple of the Holy Spirit” (3:16; 6:19). This is not made clear in 1 Cor 2, from the surrounding context it is clear that Paul required that the holiness of the Temple space be maintained (Lev 18:8, 25 cf. Lev. 10:10; 20:26; 21:23). To digress briefly: a glance at one example of the early reception history of 1 Cor 2 reveals its importance. The following example manifests the need to leave open additional channels of interpretative insight as compared with the Bible. Look at the way in which a writer like Origen appeals to 1 Corinthians 2 to make his point: If we say that someone knows that which is beyond that which stands written (1 Cor 4:6), we are not saying that these things can be known by many …. but the things which Paul learned, the unspeakable words (2 Cor 12:4) beyond what stands written, if indeed human beings have spoken the things that stand written. And what the eye has not seen (1 Cor 2:9) is beyond what is written and what the ear has not heard (1 Cor 2:9) cannot be written. And things that have not arisen in the heart of a human being (1 Cor 2:9) are greater than the well of Jacob (John 4:11), because from the well of water springing up to eternal life (John 4:13) they are manifested to those who no longer have a human heart, but who are able to say, We possess the mind of Christ (1 Cor 2:16), so that we may know the things that have been given to us by God (1 Cor 2:12) which also speak not in teachings of human wisdom but in teachings of the spirit (1 Cor 2:13) (Origen, Comm. John 13:5–6.).41

Origen did not allow himself to be confined to what the words of the Bible said to understand the ways of God’s Spirit and points to a divine wisdom, which lies outside scripture and argues for a devaluation of the written text as containing only the introduction to divine knowledge. Margaret Mitchell comments on this remarkable passage that “Origen offers none other than Paul himself – in both 1 and 2 Corinthians – to exemplify a spiritual hermeneutics which offer a promise of deeper insight” to get at “that which is beyond what stands written” (cf. 1 Cor 4:6.)42 41  Translation taken from M. Mitchell, Paul, the Corinthians and the Birth of Christian Hermeneutics (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2010), 36–37. 42  Mitchell, Paul, the Corinthians and the Birth of Christian Hermeneutics, 36–37.

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It is the Gospel of John which prioritizes “immediate revelation.” The Johannine Jesus is one who seems willing to flout the law impelled by some higher call. This appeal to a higher authority becomes the criterion for his action, not the Law of Moses. There is a justification of Sabbath contravention by scripture in John 7:23 and by reference to God’s ongoing action, Sabbath included, in John 5:17. Thus, Jesus claims to offer revelation of God (in his person) and also revelation about God in his words from what he has seen and heard in heaven. There is an authority independent of previous tradition, as John 1:17 hints, “grace and truth came through Jesus Christ.” The law, which came through Moses, becomes part of the testimony, along with the words of John the Baptist and the deeds or signs of Jesus. The narrative of Jesus portrays him as one who breaks the Sabbath law to heal, most especially in John 9, where the issue gets focused on the comparative claims of who is the true interpreter of the divine will (John 9:28–29), with Jesus as the one who asserts his mission from God to act and speak as he does. The Gospel of John is a text which has a lot to say about commandments, but its focus is just one, the new commandment, that you “love one another as I have loved you” (John 13:34). The editorial addition in John 5:18 indicates that the problem was not only Sabbath-breaking but also that Jesus made himself equal with God (John 5:18 cf. 10:33). Although the blasphemy charge is not part of the Jewish hearing in the Gospel of John, transgression against the law does come up in the hearing before Pilate (19:7). Jesus claimed to be the son of God and before that Jesus was accused of being a criminal (18:30). Jesus claims not to have spoken on his own authority, for “the father who sent me has himself given me a commandment about what to say and what to speak. And I know that his commandment is eternal life. What I speak, therefore I speak just as the father has told me.” (12:49–50, cf. 8:38: “I speak of what I have seen with my Father,” and 3:11). The Johannine Jesus is impelled by a divine impulse, a higher authority than the Torah, which is the basis of his actions (John 5 and 9). Jesus claims to offer revelation of God (in his person) and also revelation about God in his words from what he has seen and heard in heaven (12:49–50).43 John presents Jesus as the giver of a new commandment, one that related to friendship (“that you love each other”). Whatever explanation we offer of the presentation of Jesus in John in relation to the Sabbath, whether Jesus fulfills the Sabbath or transcends the Sabbath of this age by enabling people to enter the eschatological Sabbath of the new age (cf. Hebrews 4), there is an issue of a higher authority in John. The Gospel of John is as much about the source of authority as it is about Christology, or, put another way, the

43  Cf. E. Käsemann, On Being a Disciple of the Crucified Nazarene: Unpublished Lectures and Sermons, ed. Rudolf Landau in cooperation with Wolfgang Kraus; trans. Roy A. Harrisville (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 2010), 138–39.

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Christology is communicated in a narrative of the power struggle over the source of the apocalypse of the divine in word and person. More widely, in connection with the theme of antinomianism, elsewhere in the New Testament and in early Christian literature, the early Christians told a story of Jesus as an offender against the law.44 Thus, according to Mark, Jesus declared “all foods clean” (Mark 7:19) and died as a transgressor against the law, being found guilty of blasphemy (Mark 14:64). Mark doesn’t ever quite portray Jesus as transgressing the law. Even 7:19 is never applied to Jesus in action. Elsewhere in the Synoptic Gospels, the end of the era of the Law and the advent of a new dispensation that has begun is suggested by Luke 16:16/Matt 11:13. The sayings in Luke 16:16–18 come in different points in Matthew (Matt 11:12–13, Matt 5:32 and 5:17).  The saying in Luke 16:17 qualifies what precedes it. A new era may be here but the Law is still in some sense in force. It is possible that the development history of the Q source offers evidence of an attempt to tone down what appears to be a strong subordination of the place of the Law.45 In Acts, whatever the role of Stephen’s speech, preparing a way for the departure from Jerusalem, a transition to Paul, or whatever, it is not too difficult to sympathize with Luke’s report of Stephen’s opponents that he “never stops saying things against this holy place and the law” (Acts 6:13; 7:46).46 He points to Solomon as the one who built a house for God rather than establish a “habitation” for the house of Jacob, which is part of the promise to David, who found favor with God and asked God to find a dwelling for the house of Jacob. Possibly in the description of Solomon’s act of building a house for the God of Jacob (Acts 7:47 cf. 2 Sam 7:10–13; 1 Kings 8:19) there may be suggested that Solomon had misunderstood the promise of the dwelling for Jacob in the land. He challenges divine approbation of the Temple, finally suggesting that the Temple was little better than the idolatrous places of the nations, “a house made with hands” (Acts 7:48 cf. Lev. 26: 1, 30; Isa 2:18).47 The extent of the apostasy appears not to have been lost on Stephen’s “hearers” (Acts 7:54). Elsewhere in Stephen’s speech, there is little by way of explicit criticism of the Law. But Stephen is presented as endorsing the view that angelic mediation was involved in the giving of the Law (Acts 7:53; cf. Gal 3:19 and Heb 2:2; Jub. 1:27; 3:7).48 It is not clear whether the doctrine is being used with a tinge of polemic 44  J. Crossley, “Halakah and Mark 7.3: ‘with the hand in the shape of a fist,’” NTS 58 (2012): 57–68. 45  C. M. Tuckett, Q and the History of Early Christianity: Studies on Q (Edinburgh: T&T Clark, 1996), 407. 46  Cf. C. Rowland, “The Temple in the New Testament,” in Temple and Worship in Biblical Israel, ed, J. Day (London: Continuum, 2005), 469–483. 47  See C. K. Barrett, Acts 1–14, International Critical Commentary (London: T&T Clark, 2004), 373. 48 Cf. H. Strack and P. Billerbeck, Kommentar zum Neuen Testament aus Talmud und Midrasch (Munich: Beck, 1922–61), 3.554–56.

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in Stephen’s speech (as in Gal 3:19). After all, what Moses received were logia zonta. In the understated way, which is typical of the speech as a whole, Stephen states that the tent of testimony was the result of the instruction from the one who spoke with Moses. Despite the suggestion of the NRSV’s translation, (RSV is to be preferred) which indicates that the ordinance for the tent of testimony in the wilderness was the result of a direct divine command, (“our ancestors had the tent of testimony in the wilderness, as God directed when he spoke to Moses,” Acts 7:44) the Greek is ambiguous. The last time reference is made to converse with the divine world, is where the angel speaks with Moses on Mount Sinai (Acts 7:38). The themes of Stephen’s speech have their parallels in other early Christian texts. The obsolete character of the Temple is taken up in the Epistle of Barnabas (16:7). Sacrifices are abolished and replaced by the law of Christ (Barn. 2:6). Inspired by 1 Enoch 89:55, 66–7 Barnabas implies that God the eschatological temple is found in lives in which God dwells (Barn. 16:8), not a building of stone (cf. 1 Cor 3:16; 6:19). The true covenant came with Christ, and the Mosaic Law is to be read allegorically (Barn. 8–9).49

Hermeneutical reflections In sum, antinomian tendencies were a part of the particular form of the interpretation of the Jewish traditions, which came to be known as Christianity. What we find in the New Testament displays a balance between novelty and continuity. As I have indicated, I agree with the view that antinomianism is a very blunt analytical instrument for understanding a very complex phenomenon in Christian intellectual history. What we have are different types of ethical responses, characterized by a common initial move, stimulus from the internal rather than the external and consequent relativizing of the position and role of law. For some, including some of those written off as antinomians, if one is convinced of one’s relationship with God, or has a sense of the divine dwelling within, the impetus for appropriate behavior is what Blake simply called “impulse not from rules.” Of course, that will not bypass the hermeneutical, and so engagement with influence of, past texts and beliefs, including law.50 What we find in the early Christian sources is evidence of the internalization of the law in accordance with, e. g., Jer 31/Ezek 36, anticipating the kind of debate which Como points to in the late sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries. I am not sure that this is what Blake had in mind, but then I think that he had more 49 Cf. J. Carleton Paget, The Epistle of Barnabas: Outlook and Background (Tübingen: Mohr Siebeck, 1994); cf. also Philo, Migration 89–93 and Ptolemy’s Letter to Flora in Epiphanius Pan. 33.3.1–7,10. 50  C. H. Dodd, Gospel and Law: the Relation of Faith and Ethics in Early Christianity (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1953), 77.

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sympathy with 1 Cor 2:10–16 than Jeremiah 31:31–33 and Ezekiel 36:26–27 (it was noted that it is only Jer 31:34 which is quoted by Winstanley extensively in The Saints Paradice [CHL 1.313] and identified as the anointing mentioned in 1 John 2:27). The supporter of the supremacy of the letter of the Bible and those of a more antinomian bent, negotiate a course between two extremes, one giving greater explicit weight to external authorities and the other to the divinely inspired self, as a source of wisdom as applied to a particular time and place. Blake differed from much Christian mainstream hermeneutics in his conviction that the Spirit is not some privileged property of Christians but that which all humans possess by virtue of their humanity. What one finds in his interpretation is a realistically positive view of humanity. The pouring out of the Spirit on all flesh is the normative experience of humanity; the problem is raising awareness about the perspective which the Spirit gives, which Blake saw it as his vocation to fulfill. One might summarize the heart of his position in the light of Corinthians as one form of the exploration of the discernment of the mind of Christ, which is not already known in advance by resort to any external authority, the Law written on the heart included. Already in 1 Corinthians we find him asserting the need to follow his example since he had the mind of Christ (1 Cor 2:16; 11:1). There may well have been be a development in Paul’s understanding of this from simply being “taught by God” (1 Thess 4: 9) and the potentially anarchic 1 Cor 2:10–16 on the one hand, to the more considered and law-friendly Rom 8, where pre-existing rules, albeit written on the heart are nevertheless acknowledged.

Law and Liberty: Circumcision Discourse from Galatia to Germany Michael Peppard “Neither circumcision nor uncircumcision wields any power.” – Paul, to Galatia, ca. 50 CE “Circumcision therefore is, and, in a material sense, remains, unlawful even if performed as a religious rite.” – R. Merkel and H. Putzke, Germany 2013

Circumcision in Gentile Lands: Insignificant or Illegal? During Greco-Roman antiquity, the Gentile view of Jewish difference most frequently focused on Sabbath observance, dietary restrictions (kashrut), and the ritual of circumcision. The broad contours of this history are well-known, and many details are found in the works of Greek ethnographers and Roman historians, the writings about the Maccabean era, and – not least – the New Testament.1 Among the three ritual behaviors, circumcision captured the imagination of Gentile observers most strongly, going back to travelers to Judea and its environs who were curious or, in some cases, horrified by the ritual removal of the male foreskin.2 Ancient ethnographers associated the practice with Ethiopians, Phoenicians, Egyptian priests, and Hebrews. The Greeks, who were well-known for idealization of the nude male form, considered the custom barbaric.3 According to medical historian Frederick Hodges, “in the Greek cultural constellation of symbols, the image of the exposed glans was remarkable for the intensity and sheer abundance of negative imagery associated with it.”4 The Jews’ own etiological narratives for circumcision are ancient enough to be almost prehistoric. Undoubtedly it marks 1  On Jewish distinctiveness in Greco-Roman antiquity, see Shaye Cohen, The Beginnings of Jewishness: Boundaries, Varieties, Uncertainties (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1999). The summary material in this introduction bears some resemblance to my essay, “Paul Would be Proud: The New Testament and Jewish-Gentile Respect,” Theological Studies 76 (2015): 273–75. 2  E. g., Strabo, Geogr. 16.2.37. 3  Cf. Menachem Stern, Greek and Latin Authors on Jews and Judaism, 2 vols. (Israel Academy of Sciences and Humanities, 1974), nos. 1, 115, 118, 124, 176, 301, 375, etc. 4  Frederick M. Hodges, “The Ideal Prepuce in Ancient Greece and Rome,” The Bulletin of the History of Medicine 75 (2001): 375–405, at 394.

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God’s covenant with Abraham by the time of the authoring of Genesis (Gen 17:9– 4), but other narratives from the Torah hardly supply a clear etiology or function. For instance, the brief episode in which God “tried to kill” Moses, and Zipporah saved him by circumcising their son and rubbing it on Moses, remains enigmatic (Ex 4:24–26). Centuries later, when the message about the God of the Judeans was spread to Gentile lands by the followers of Jesus, the question of proselyte circumcision for Gentiles was prominent. Several New Testament texts deal with it, and Christians – at least Pauline Christians – ultimately championed the view that circumcision was among the adiaphora for Gentiles: it was “insignificant” or made “no difference.”5 “Circumcision is nothing, and uncircumcision is nothing,” wrote Paul to a community in Greece, although he was himself circumcised. “Let each of you [converts] remain in the condition in which you were called” (1 Cor 7:19–20). To his followers in Galatia, who were embroiled in (and likely confused by) a detailed intra-Jewish argument between Paul and other Jewish followers of Jesus about the necessity of circumcision, Paul emphasized that righteousness “in Christ” came through faith like Abraham’s and not the rite of circumcision. In the new era proclaimed by Paul, the Messiah had acted like a mohel, but through his own flesh and blood had granted access for Gentiles to God’s covenant with Israel (Rom 15:8).6 Regarding mortal flesh, therefore, “neither circumcision nor uncircumcision is anything” (Gal 6:15), and neither “wields any power” or “is capable of anything” (Gal 5:6). Instead, Paul argued that the Messiah had granted “freedom” or “liberty” in such matters of law (Gal 5:1–15). Gentile indifference toward the practice of circumcision has been the norm in many times and places in Western history. In contemporary North America, for example, the decision of Gentile parents about whether or not to circumcise is usually considered to be an aesthetic decision and not especially fraught with moral gravity – it is important, but not more so than many other decisions expectant parents make for a child. Many parents unfamiliar with religious history have no idea of its signification for Jews or its controversial status in other cultures. From the Jewish perspective, the adiaphora attitude of the Pauline heritage in certain Gentile lands has enabled a crucial religious liberty for a minority population. Despite occasional legal challenges to Jewish circumcision rituals – as with New York’s negotiations about the rare practice of metzitzah b’peh (oral suction of blood from circumcision) – the robust religious liberty tradition of the United States has enabled Jewish law and communal liberty to have almost free rein over circumcision practices.7 To this tradition of religious liberty, American 5  For discussion of the category of adiaphora in Stoic ethics and its applicability to Paul, see Will Deming, “Paul and Indifferent Things,” in Paul in the Greco-Roman World: A Handbook, ed. J. Paul Sampley (London: A & C Black, 2003), 384–403. 6  See Joshua D. Garroway, “The Circumcision of Christ: Romans 15.7–13,” JSNT 34 (2012): 303–22.  7  The most recent result of negotiations is summarized in Michael M. Grynbaum, “De Bla-

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case law adds a strong defense of parental rights: “the fundamental interest of parents, as contrasted with that of the State, to guide the religious future and education of their children … is now established beyond debate as an enduring American tradition” (Wisconsin v. Yoder, 1972).8 The situation in Europe looks different. Recently Jews and Muslims (who also circumcise boys at a high rate) have feared popular support for outlawing the prescribed ritual. Instead of viewing the issue as a matter of Jewish or Muslim law and religious liberty of minority communities, opponents of circumcision view it as an affront to European national law and the prominence of individual liberty therein. This controversy received international attention in 2012, when a regional court in Cologne ruled that infant circumcision should not be permitted under German law. By the end of that year, the German legislature (the Bundestag) had passed a new law to the contrary, but even the possibility of banning the ritual had awakened barely dormant fears of anti-Semitism. Jewish leader Charlotte Knobloch wrote an incisive op-ed in the Süddeutsche Zeitung: “Wollt ihr uns Juden noch?” (“Do you still want us Jews?”). For six decades I have had to justify myself because I stayed in Germany – as a remnant of a destroyed world, as a sheep among wolves. I was always happy to carry this burden because I was firmly convinced that this country and these people deserved it. For the first time my foundations are starting to shake. For the first time I feel resignation. I earnestly ask whether this country still wants us.9

Other northern European countries, such as the Netherlands, Norway, Sweden, and Denmark, also have significant political parties and medical organizations pushing for the ban on circumcision.10 The notion of making illegal a prescribed ritual for 50 % of a well-established religious group seems, at first glance, unlikely to gain support in a modern Western democracy. Yet when couched in the language of “genital mutilation,” which associates the practice with female genital mutilation, and when positioned as an issue about the human right to bodily integrity, the secular stance of human rights for children has gained ground against the competing stance of religious rights for a minority group. During the process of the debate in Europe, a still predominantly Christian continent, one might expect Christian engagement with the New Testament to play a role, since it involves a tangible contemporary sio Set to Waive Rule Requiring Consent Form for Circumcision Ritual,” The New York Times, February 25, 2015.  8  Wisconsin v. Yoder, 406 U. S. 205 (1972).  9 Unless otherwise noted, all translations of German in this article are my own. Charlotte Knobloch, “Wollt ihr uns Juden noch?,” Süddeutsche Zeitung, September 25, 2012, http://www. sueddeutsche.de/politik/beschneidungen-in-deutschland-wollt-ihr-uns-juden-noch-1.1459038 [last accessed 22 January 2018]. 10  For summary of recent efforts, see William A. Galston, “Mark of Belonging: Why Circumcision Is No Crime,” Commonweal, May 16, 2014, 15–18.

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issue of Gentile-Jewish respect about which Christian scriptures speak definitively. Not only does Paul argue for its “indifference,” but promoting a ban on circumcision also puts a Christian in the awkward position of outlawing Mary’s informed consent for her infant son, Jesus (Luke 2:21). The arguments made by Paul regarding circumcision – its role in the founding narratives of Israel, its signification for his Jewish contemporaries, and its status among the adiaphora for mixed communities of Jews and Gentiles in Christ – are some of the most frequently studied in the New Testament. But the recent arguments about law and liberty in Europe’s circumcision controversy have not yet received much attention among historians of religion. The present essay thus offers a rhetorical analysis of influential discourse about religiously motivated circumcision in contemporary Europe, focusing on the flashpoint of the 2012 court ruling in Cologne, and showing occasions when the discourse does or does not echo past situations. The second part of the paper isolates and evaluates some unsettling strands in the German discourse – dark reminders of the legacy of anti-Semitism that runs through the “law vs. liberty” debate.

Landgericht Köln, 2012 The story begins on November 4, 2010, when a medical doctor in Cologne performed a circumcision on a four-year-old boy at the request of his parents.11 Two days later, the boy’s wound had “secondary bleeding,” and the mother was concerned. According to the report of Jan F. Orth, the official spokesperson for the case, “a passer-by in the city centre of Cologne” encountered the mother, who “seemed disorientated and confused,” and called an ambulance. At the University Children’s Hospital, there was “a terrible misunderstanding” in the emergency room because the mother spoke only Arabic and French. The doctors mistakenly thought the circumcision had been performed at home without standard procedures or anesthesia, and that the child had been “kept from medical assistance” since the procedure. Suspecting that someone might be liable for “aggravated offences of causing bodily harm,” the doctor reported the situation to the police, which led to the criminal investigation. The doctor was put on trial in the local court, Amtsgericht Köln. On September 21, 2011, this court found him not guilty, since he had done the circumcision “lege artis (according to the rules of medicine)” and it was “justified by the consent of the boy’s parents.” The prosecution appealed the case to Landgericht Köln, the regional court. Landgericht Köln covers a jurisdiction of over 2 million residents. Though it is one of the largest regional courts in Germany, it is an intermediate court 11  The case is summarized in many places. This version and quotations are from Jan F. Orth, “Explaining the Cologne Circumcision Decision,” The Journal of Criminal Law 77 (2013): 497–511.

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functioning as a state court, not a federal court. Its precedents are influential, but not binding on other regions.12 On May 7, 2012, this court rejected the prosecutor’s appeal and acquitted the doctor, as the lower court had done. However, the details of the ruling were quite different. The court ruled that the causing of bodily harm by the doctor, in the act of a religiously motivated circumcision, satisfied the conditions of criminal assault under German Criminal Code s. 223. The assault was not justified by consent, since the child was too young to consent and the consent of the parents “could not justify the infliction of bodily harm.”13 Though the “care and upbringing of children is the natural right of parents” under German law, the court ruled that the child’s right to “bodily integrity” (körperliche Unversehrtheit) outweighs the parents’ rights to have him circumcised for purposes of “religious upbringing” (zur religiösen Erziehung). In addition, since “the circumcision changes the body of the child permanently and irreparably,” it “runs contrary to the interest of the child to be able later to decide his religious affiliation for himself.”14 How then was the defendant found innocent? Because his “error about the illegality of his act” (Verbotsirrtum) was “unavoidable” (unvermeidbar).15 The judge admits that “the question of the legality of circumcision with the consent of parents is answered variously in case law and literature.”16 The doctor thus “had a firm presumption” that he was allowed to perform the circumcision of boys “for religious reasons at the request of the parents” (auf Wunsch der Eltern aus religiösen Gründen). According to Landgericht Köln, his reasonable assumption was nonetheless wrong. The circumcising doctor had committed a criminal assault, though he was found not guilty by reason of ignorance  – a double conviction disguised as an acquittal. Not surprisingly, the ruling of this court was the one that made headlines.17 12 Decisions of this court “do not count as precedent, especially not in the sense of stare decisis,” but “do have a signal effect and give good guidance.” So “what led to a temporary moratorium on religiously motivated circumcisions” was not the binding decision of the judge, but “legal uncertainty amongst the medical profession.” Orth, “Explaining,” 506. 13  “Die Handlung des Angeklagten war auch nicht durch Einwilligung gerechtfertigt. Eine Einwilligung des seinerzeit vierjährigen Kindes lag nicht vor und kam mangels hinreichender Verstandesreife auch nicht in Betracht. Eine Einwilligung der Eltern lag vor, vermochte indes die tatbestandsmäßige Körperverletzung nicht zu rechtfertigen.” Landgericht Köln 151 Ns 169/11. 14 “Zudem wird der Körper des Kindes durch die Beschneidung dauerhaft und irreparabel verändert. Diese Veränderung läuft dem Interesse des Kindes später selbst über seine Religionszugehörigkeit entscheiden zu können zuwider.” Landgericht Köln 151 Ns 169/11. 15 German Criminal Code s. 17 provides for such an unusual defense of criminality, but Orth admits that “students in German law schools” are taught this provision “is ‘never’ applicable in the field of practice.” Orth, “Explaining,” 505. 16 “Die Frage der Rechtmäßigkeit von Knabenbeschneidungen aufgrund Einwilligung der Eltern wird in Rechtsprechung und Literatur unterschiedlich beantwortet.” Landgericht Köln 151 Ns 169/11. 17  The aftermath of the court ruling and subsequent new law continues in Germany. Unfortunately a recent, major compendium of anti-circumcision perspectives (anthropological, med-

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Bodily Integrity The court ruled that circumcision violates the bodily integrity of a child unnecessarily and irreversibly. But because parents make many irreversible decisions for children that may seem (to other adults) to be unnecessary violations, much of the discourse around this ruling has focused on comparisons and analogies to circumcision. Among those comparisons perceived as harmful, female genital cutting is frequently emphasized by opponents of male circumcision. But even law professor Holm Putzke, one of Germany’s most influential opponents of circumcision, acknowledges a difference in degree between traditions of genital cutting for men and women. The male version is “not as severe,” and not “a drastic and sustained impairment of health.”18 Furthermore, as contrasted with female genital cutting, Ben Cohen notes that male circumcision “lacks the basic condition conventionally associated with human-rights violations: namely, the victims’ own acknowledgment of having been systematically maltreated. Millions of male children are circumcised every year, and the vast majority reach adulthood never claiming that their bodies have been damaged without their consent.”19 The current discourse also compares circumcision to forms of corporal punishment, which is odd, considering the lack of explicit evidence for such motives among present-day Jews or Muslims in Germany. A few years before the Cologne decision, Putzke proposed that “if there was a faith community which had a centuries-old tradition that the leader of the community strike a boy with thirty forceful cane-lashes on his buttocks (highly painful, but not dangerous) on the occasion of his fifth birthday, in order to teach him reverence for God, then no one would hesitate to recognize this as a violation” of criminal law.20 Outside of the context of certain northern European sensibilities, it is difficult to see the explanatory power of such an analogy. The parents are substituted for a community leader; the child is much older and cognizant of the ritual’s public aspect; the action has a different intention; and one might add, it is entirely fictional. (See below for more analogies to punishment from Prof. Putzke and others.)

ical, ethical, legal) came to my attention too late to be incorporated in this essay. See Matthias Franz, ed., Die Beschneidung von Jungen: Ein trauriges Vermächtnis (Göttingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, 2014). 18  Holm Putzke, “Die strafrechtliche Relevanz der Beschneidung von Knaben: Zugleich ein Beitrag über die Grenzen der Einwilligung in Fällen der Personensorge,” in Strafrecht zwischen System und Telos. Festschrift für Rolf Dietrich Herzberg zum siebzigsten Geburtstag am 14. Februar 2008, ed. Holm Putzke et al. (Tübingen: Mohr Siebeck, 2008), 695. 19  Ben Cohen, “Europe’s Assault on Jewish Ritual,” Commentary, November 2012, 19. 20  Putzke, “Strafrechtliche Relevanz,” 702.

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Other comparisons to bodily violations with perceived harmful effects have included scarification, tattooing, ear piercing, and drug abuse.21 A key factor in this line of inquiry is the irreversibility of circumcision. Though the procedure is not technically irreversible  – as demonstrated by ancient evidence of both professional and home remedies for epispasm for men with circumcised or congenitally short foreskins  – the reversal procedure is certainly onerous and extremely rare.22 Paul specifically recommended that his Jewish converts not seek out epispasm to hide their circumcisions (1 Cor 7:18). Modern defenders of circumcision have also responded that, “for better or worse, much of what parents do is irreversible.”23 Parents make an incalculable number of decisions with indelible influences on a child’s language, nutrition, psychological development, culture, exposure to disease, and more. In terms of permanent bodily change, one might also ask about the neurological effects on young children enrolled by their parents in high-impact sports, such as ice hockey or American football. Does a five-year-old have informed consent about the lasting effects of repeated head trauma? In the realm of psychology, would a child’s abandonment by a father or mother, or sustained manipulation through fear and belittling, constitute less harmful or irreversible effects on a child? The full appointment calendars of psychotherapists in the modern West would suggest not. All of these comparisons concern perceived harms to a child, and so Paul might respond: “What benefit has circumcision? Much in every way!” (Rom 3:1–2) Indeed, from the Jewish perspective, circumcision is viewed as irreversible and beneficial. Therefore, some commentators compare it to the remediation of a cosmetic feature, such as a cleft lip.24 Or perhaps it resembles orthodonture – another invasive decision usually made by one’s parents. These treatments are often years-long, quite painful, and the implements can cause social ostracization. (In the case of the present author, the palatal expander installed in the roof of my mouth required a daily, self-administered crank of a wrench that painfully pushed my teeth apart. My parents chose the orthodonture, but I had to inflict the pain myself.) If one seeks an analogy that removes part of the body, Putzke has discussed a preventive appendectomy.25 And Josef Joffe, editor of Die Zeit, joked that “he would love to sue” his parents for the “unwanted tonsillectomy when he was age 5, for we now know that these tissues, a lot more voluminous than a tiny foreskin, are the body’s first defense against pathogens.”26 From all 21  Putzke, “Strafrechtliche Relevanz,” 696–97; Matthew Thomas Johnson, “Religious Circumcision, Invasive Rites, Neutrality and Equality: Bearing the Burdens and Consequences of Belief,” Journal of Medical Ethics 39 (2013): 452. 22  E. g., Celsus, De medicina 7.25; Soranus, Gynecology 2.34; etc. 23 Galston, “Mark of Belonging,” 18. 24  Joseph Mazor, “The Child’s Interests and the Case for the Permissibility of Male Infant Circumcision,” Journal of Medical Ethics 39 (2013): 422. 25  Putzke, “Strafrechtliche Relevanz,” 691. 26  Josef Joffe, “A German Judge Bans Judaism, Islam,” The Wall Street Journal, July 27, 2012.

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these examples, one can see that the choice about to what circumcision should be compared starkly influences the calculus of its legality. And in the tradition of Judaism, the rite of circumcision is viewed as an incalculable benefit, nothing less than “an opportunity to participate in the perfecting of one part of creation. God, in a sense, created something imperfect that human beings are then covenantally bound to make perfect.”27 In this sense of cooperation, circumcision symbolizes and enacts covenantal partnership.

Self-determination and Informed Consent The second pillar of the Cologne decision was “self-determination,” or in medical terms, the “informed consent” of the child to any procedure. “The parental right of upbringing is not unacceptably impaired,” decreed the judge, “if they are required to wait until later, when the son is able to decide for himself in favor of circumcision as a visible sign of belonging.”28 When explaining the decision to the public, the court noted how Germany is “a society that understands itself as secular in nature” and thus desires that all people have individual liberty to choose their religious affiliation, a “profoundly liberal approach.”29 The court does not believe that the “religious interests and rights” of the parents have been disregarded; rather, “the court’s weighing up of them simply ended in favour of the individual rights of the child.”30 Philosopher Joseph Mazor offers a different take on the rights of self-determination for Jewish men, noting that in the case of Orthodox Jews, “the chances that the child would himself choose to become circumcised once reaching majority are much, much higher than in the secular case [of circumcision for aesthetic reasons].”31 Infant circumcision under parental consent thus “enables the child to avoid the significant extra costs that he would most likely have to bear if he were forced to wait to have his circumcision as an adult.”32 Mazor concludes that the weighing of rights in religiously motivated, community-binding circumcisions leans toward permission, while it is “admittedly quite murky and perhaps even tilted against circumcision in the secular case.”33 27 See Gen. Rab. 11:6; 46:4, and m. Ned. 3:11. Quote from Michael Peppard, “Reclaiming the Postmodern Jew,” Judaism 51 (2002): 401. 28  “Umgekehrt wird das Erziehungsrecht der Eltern nicht unzumutbar beeinträchtigt, wenn sie gehalten sind abzuwarten, ob sich der Knabe später, wenn er mündig ist, selbst für die Beschneidung als sichtbares Zeichen der Zugehörigkeit zum Islam entscheidet.” Landgericht Köln 151 Ns 169/11. 29 Orth, “Explaining,” 504. 30 Orth, “Explaining,” 504. 31  Mazor, “Child’s interests,” 426. Italics original. 32  Mazor, “Child’s interests,” 427. 33  Mazor, “Child’s interests,” 427.

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Most Germans, outside of the Bundestag, do not agree. On the whole, Germany is trending toward an extremely libertarian conception of religious freedom and self-determination, perhaps overcompensating for past abuses in the other direction. Just last year, the German Ethikrat, an appointed Ethics Council that advises the federal government, recommended the legalization of incest – sexual relationships and child-rearing between siblings – in a formal report.34 This too is based on the principle of self-determination, despite the near-universal disdain for the practice and the high degree of birth defects in children of incestuous unions. “The majority of the German Ethics Council is of the opinion,” states their press release, “that criminal law is not the appropriate means to maintain a societal taboo” (ein gesellschaftliches Tabu zu bewahren).35 Such a principle of “live and let live” seems not to apply to the German taboo about circumcision. The critics of circumcision further fail to see that they impose, perhaps unwittingly, a framework of religion that is not objective or universal, but rather exists almost exclusively in individualistic, European, Protestant traditions. By using individual self-determination and freedom from bodily obligations to community as the metrics for legality, they attempt to press (much more ancient) religions into a peculiarly modernist mold. William A. Galston wonders “whether the human rights community’s insistence on adult consent as a necessary source of authorization represents a secularized version of the Protestant rejection of infant baptism – and whether it is an accident that the epicenter of antipathy to infant circumcision is located in heavily Protestant northern Europe.”36 The ideas that religious self-determination is primarily intellectual (informed consent) and that actions spring only later from prior assent to believed propositions are, in the words of Michael Brendan Dougherty, “the inheritance of a certain type of creedal Protestantism.”37 These hunches seem to be confirmed by the recent discourse. Diana Aurenque and Urban Wiesing, for instance, defend the Cologne decision with a phrase that reveals just how thickly Protestant culture pervades Germany: “To call the decision of the District Court an ‘unprecedented attack on the identity of religious families’ is misplaced, for the ethical and legal problem was not a matter of religious upbringing but was actually concerned with lawfulness of irreversible and permanent changes to a child’s body that provide no benefit whatsoever to the child.”38 That these professors can call circumcision “not a matter of religious upbringing” reveals a view of religion so anti-ritualistic 34  Deutscher Ethikrat, “Inzestverbot,” September 24, 2014, http://www.ethikrat.org/dateien/ pdf/stellungnahme-inzestverbot.pdf [last accessed 22 January 2018]. 35  Deutscher Ethikrat, “Pressemitteilung 08/2014,” September 24, 2014, http://www.ethikrat. org/dateien/pdf/pressemitteilung-08-2014.pdf [last accessed 22 January 2018]. 36 Galston, “Mark of Belonging,” 18. 37  Michael Brendan Dougherty, “Faith in the Flesh,” The American Conservative, August 2012, 6. 38 Diana Aurenque and Urban Wiesing, “German Law on Circumcision and Its Debate: How an Ethical and Legal Issue Turned Political,” Bioethics 29 (2015): 209. Italics added.

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as to be disembodied. The Cologne regional court had merely ruled that a child’s rights to self-determination outweighed the parents’ rights to determine his religious upbringing. But the view represented by Aurenque and Wiesing fundamentally assumes that religious identity is passed on not through flesh at all, but through spirit: from one self-determining, rational, Enlightenment soul to another. When rationalized in this way, the attempt to ban circumcision reveals its unstated reliance on a spiritualized, Enlightenment-Protestant conception of what counts as religious, regardless of whether the person making the argument is a confessing Protestant or not. Some official German church statements have nonetheless spoken in defense of parental rights for infant circumcision. Hans Ulrich Anke, president of the church office of the Evangelical Church in Germany (EKD), argued that “the parental right of custody should be protected, precisely in religious matters, as it also contributes to the idea of protecting the family and the good of the child. The good of children also includes integration into their context and the family’s religious life.”39 Anke’s emphasis on the importance of integration into one’s family as the primary community of belonging raises a final aspect of the court’s reasoning to consider: to whom should a child feel he belongs?

Social Adequacy and Communal Belonging The court ruling raised a third principle, “social adequacy” (Sozialadäquanz), but only to reject its relevance to the issue. Social adequacy refers to the amorphous sensibilities of a particular society that implicitly govern the nature, extent, and enforceability of legal prohibitions. Laws about “disturbing the peace” and “public order,” for instance, usually rely on cultural norms of social adequacy. Definitions of socially adequate behavior are thus more challenging to discern and enforce in societies that are multicultural and transient. The court ruled that social adequacy does not apply to circumcision, rejecting the arguments made by a German dissertation on this matter.40 In doing so, the court followed the reasoning of Putzke, who argues correctly on the point that socially adequate behaviors do not, by definition, require special justification (besondere Rechtfertigung). On the contrary, he concludes, “criminal risk exists in the case of both [medical] doctors and [religious community] circumcisers to the same degree: 39 Official translation from EKD press release: “EKD sieht Kölner Beschneidungsurteil kritisch.” http://www.ekd.de/presse/pm130_2012_beschneidungsurteil_koeln.html [last acces­sed 22 January 2018]. German: “Das elterliche Recht der Personensorge, gerade auch in religiösen Dingen, ist ein hohes Rechtsgut, denn es trägt auch dem Gedanken des Schutzes der Familie Rechnung und dient gerade dem Wohl des Kindes. Dazu gehört auch, ein Kind in sein Umfeld und in das religiöse Leben seiner Familie hinein zu nehmen.” 40  Thomas Exner, Sozialadäquanz im Strafrecht: zur Knabenbeschneidung (Berlin: Duncker & Humblot, 2011).

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without a legal justification, no one is allowed to interfere with the bodily integrity of another.”41 Putzke later discusses bodily interventions for which social adequacy may apply, such as the correction of certain facial features in children that might lead to disproportionate amounts of teasing (more on this later). But the arguments about teasing and community acceptance cut both ways. For a child whose primary community is a well-bounded religious one, with circumcised men, the social acceptance into that community probably outweighs acceptance by the broader culture – judging solely on the metric of what most benefits the child. Even more foundationally, the child’s father and other family members of such a community are likely circumcised. In the United States, where the adiaphora approach to circumcision is more common, new parents are often not prepared for the decision to circumcise or not. What to do in these cases? I recently asked this question to a well-respected obstetrician with 45 years of experience in a multicultural city. “If the parents are uncertain or indifferent about circumcision,” he said, “we recommend that they have the boy look like his dad.” Before all else, the family is the primary community in which a child needs to feel a sense of belonging. Many anti-circumcision advocates acknowledge the importance of “social adequacy” and community acceptance, but they downplay its power in the weighing of pros and cons. Aurenque and Wiesing, for example, effectively tell the Jewish and Muslim communities not to take the ritual so seriously, and not to ostracize uncircumcised members. “An uncircumcised boy may risk being ostracized from his community. However, this is only the case if a religious community responds to his foregoing the ritual by no longer regarding the child as a fullfledged member. This reaction is not necessary, since not all men are circumcised in Jewish or Muslim communities.”42 In an impressive display of chutzpah, these two scholars offer commentary on which rituals are or are “not necessary” for Jews and Muslims. Later in their article, they continue with supposedly constructive criticism, by suggesting replacement rituals. “It might be reasonable to call upon religious communities to adjust these customs and to rethink the symbolic character of religious rituals, within reason. A religious community could replace invasive circumcisions with an alternative symbolic ritual … after the birth of a child that does not compromise the child’s wellbeing.”43 While they do not mention what kind of ritual they have in mind, perhaps a sprinkling of water would 41 Putzke,

“Strafrechtliche Relevanz,” 680. and Wiesing, “German Law,” 207. Italics added. Cf. R. Merkel in Die Zeit interview: Till Schwarze, “Ein kläglicher Gesetzentwurf: Keine Pflicht zur Anästhesie, kein Vetorecht des Kindes: Reinhard Merkel, Jurist und Ethikrat-Mitglied, übt im Interview scharfe Kritik am Gesetz zur Beschneidung.” Zeit Online, October 1, 2012, http://www.zeit.de/gesellschaft/ zeitgeschehen/2012-10/beschneidung-ethikrat-reinhard-merkel/seite-2 [last accessed 22 January 2018]. 43  Aurenque and Wiesing, “German Law,” 210. Italics added. 42 Aurenque

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suffice, to be followed up years later by consent to full immersion? Indeed, it is hard not to think of Christian baptism in the Anabaptist tradition, here looking like an attempt – even if subconscious – “to redefine Judaism along low-church Protestant lines.”44

Anti-Semitic Echoes and Post-Holocaust Hermeneutics “In essence – except for a few exceptions – a rather ­objective and sophisticated public debate on the matter has been ­observed in Germany.” – Jan F. Orth, judge and spokesperson Landgericht Köln “Nowhere else in the world was this issue debated with such sharpness, coldness, and sometimes brutal intolerance.” – Dieter Graumann, President Central Council of Jews in Germany

The most alarming aspect of the past few years’ debate in northern Europe has been the echo of anti-Semitic tropes, faint but clearly audible in the theater of self-described “objective” discourse. One theme regards sexual deviance. As Peter Schäfer summarizes in Judeophobia, “most authors of Greek and Roman antiquity take circumcision to be a distinctively Jewish custom which unmistakably identifies the Jews … the Jewish custom par excellence.”45 Not surprisingly, several ancient authors couch their criticism of the custom in sexual terms. For Tacitus, it relates to how the Jewish “race” is “prone to lust” (proiectissima ad libidinem gens), and the satirist Martial offers multiple epigrams mocking Jews as well-endowed, lustful, and even aggressively homosexual.46 The connection between circumcision and purported sexual deviance was also well-documented in modern German anti-Semitism, as catalogued through the archival research of historian Robin Judd. In Contested Rituals: Circumcision, Kosher Butchering, and Jewish Political Life in Germany, 1843–1933, she shows how both popular press and “established medical literature” during the German Empire portrayed the Jewish body as fearsome and foreign. Some physicians “asserted that circumcision dulled the sensory organ, thus robbing Jewish boys of their manliness,” while others  Dougherty, “Faith in the Flesh,” 6.  Peter Schäfer, Judeophobia: Attitudes toward the Jews in the Ancient World (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1997), 96, 98. 46  Tacitus, Hist. 5.5. Martial, Ep. 7.30, 7.35, 7.82, 11.75, 11.94. See Schäfer, Judeophobia, 96–105, for discussion. 44 45

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evoked images of castration in their claims that the removal of the foreskin caused Jewish men to experience severe sexual frustration. Such frustration allegedly would result either in abstention from any type of sexual contact or, on the contrary, excessively passionate behavior and sexual deviance. Others charged that circumcision led to masturbation, a powerful charge since nineteenth‑ and twentieth-century medicine and science considered masturbation anti-social – the cause of homosexuality, deviant sexual behavior, insanity, even death. Impossibly categorizing the Jewish man as both undersexed and supersexual and his penis as both unresponsive and hyperactive, these medical writings suggested that there was indeed something abnormal about the Jewish man.47

Writing in support of the Cologne decision and against the Bundestag’s new statute, legal scholars Reinhard Merkel and Holm Putzke echo nineteenth-century anti-Semitism by suggesting that circumcision “may, at least in some cases, cause deficiencies in the boy’s later sexual life” and “may even lead to persistent traumatic consequences.”48 They go on to criticize how the corrective statute does not restrict circumcisions to those done only for religious reasons and suggest that parents might elect circumcision for “purely aesthetic reasons” or with “the intent to hamper masturbation” – what they call “a sexual-educational fad of the parents.”49 Since they offer no examples of contemporary German parents seeking infant circumcision for “sexual-educational” reasons, the comment seems more at home in one of Judd’s nineteenth-century anti-Semitic tracts. Several German authors also describe circumcision as a form of punishment, despite providing no evidence of Jews or Muslims in Europe conceiving of the practice in this way. Aurenque and Wiesing attempt to point out a legal contradiction, when stating that “circumcising a child as a form of punishment is unacceptable, but that very same circumcision performed as part of a religious ritual is acceptable.”50 This is already a thought experiment completely cut off from reality, to imagine a hypothetical Europe in which circumcision were not a millennia-old religious ritual, but the authors go further, following their line of thinking down a slippery slope: “Furthermore, it remains unclear as to whether circumcisions are legitimate when called for by a religious community as a form of punishment.”51 Though first distinguishing the hypothetical ‘circumcision as punishment’ from the real ‘circumcision as religious ritual,’ the authors quickly move to conflate the two. They assume the worst about their Jewish and Muslim neighbors, proposing that future court cases will need to address the legality of religious communities’ using circumcisions specifically as punishment. This 47  Robin Judd, Contested Rituals: Circumcision, Kosher Butchering, and Jewish Political Life in Germany, 1843–1933 (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2007), 116. Cf. citations of primary sources there. 48 Reinhard Merkel and Holm Putzke, “After Cologne: Male Circumcision and the Law. Parental Right, Religious Liberty or Criminal Assault?,” Journal of Medical Ethics 39 (2013): 445. 49  Merkel and Putzke, “After Cologne,” 449. 50 Aurenque and Wiesing, “German Law,” 210. 51  Aurenque and Wiesing, “German Law,” 210.

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harkens back to well-known anti-Semitic propaganda from Europe’s past, when circumcision and kosher butchering were portrayed as monstrous signifiers of supposed Jewish blood-thirst. The famous Hilsner trials culminated a series of Jewish “ritual murder” trials around 1900.52 Judd summarizes the period thus: “as social fears concerning overpopulation, degeneracy, and criminality became fused with and articulated through sexual anxieties, the Schächt‑ and Ritualfragen conflated concerns of Jewish brutality with Jewish sexual difference.”53 R. Merkel and Putzke, for their part, conclude their essay with a truly unusual example that harkens back to the anti-Jewish/anti-Catholic affinities of fin-desiècle imperial Germany.54 In the macabre dystopia of their hypotheticals, “The fundamentalist Catholic father who catches his 8-year-old masturbating, and, in order to prevent the habit from taking hold, hits him hard in the face, acts unlawfully and is punishable by the criminal law. If he, for the very same purpose, decides to have the boy circumcised, the new law paves the way for him.”55 The new Bundestag law does nothing of the sort, of course, since circumcision is limited to infants under six months and performed by those trained to do so. In other words, R. Merkel and Putzke (along with Aurenque and Wiesing) produce no evidence of circumcision used by German parents as violent punishment or sexual hindrance – at least no evidence besides the echoes of old stereotypes or their own sinister thought experiments.56 Like the portrayal of Jews in medieval European art, this is “not a portrait of actual neighbors or even imagined others, but a cloudy glass into which Christendom gazed to find a distorted, phantasmagoric rendering of itself.”57 Other anti-Semitic resonances seem to flow subconsciously from Putzke’s pen. Since 2008 he has written many articles and granted numerous interviews with the intent of opening up debate about the legal status of non-therapeutic (religiously motivated) circumcision. His work is of the utmost relevance, because the legal reasoning offered by Landgericht Köln relied heavily on arguments advanced by him. In his first and longest treatment of the subject, “Die strafrechtliche Relevanz der Beschneidung von Knaben,” Putzke acknowledges

52 See Judd, Contested Rituals, ch. 3, “The Radicalization of the Ritual Questions, 1880–1916.”

 Judd, Contested Rituals, 114.  On the connection of anti-Jewish and anti-Catholic bigotry (under the umbrella of antiritual), see Michael B. Gross, The War Against Catholicism: Liberalism and the Anti-Catholic Imagination in Nineteenth-Century Germany (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2004). 55  Merkel and Putzke, “After Cologne,” 449. 56 Other hypothetical examples they offer also focus on sexual deviance and violence: a mother who takes her child to piano lessons “to gain some undisturbed hours for her adulterous affair” and a father who takes his “hated stepson” to the dentist only to take “malicious joy in witnessing the fear and pain of the child” (449). 57  Sara Lipton, Dark Mirror: The Medieval Origins of Anti-Jewish Iconography (New York: Macmillan, 2014). 53 54

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the sensitive nature of the topic.58 He compares it to the “fierce debate” about criticism of religion that sprung up around cartoons of the prophet Mohammed in Denmark. That is to say, he knows his argument will have the consequence of upsetting both Muslims and Jews in Germany, yet “the search for truth does not need to please everyone,” he writes. Or “as Georg Christoph Lichtenberg has expressed it, ‘It is near impossible to carry the torch of truth through a crowd without singeing someone’s beard.’” The metaphor speaks clearly enough as a one-line aphorism, borrowed from the Enlightenment-era German satirist (who penned, among other works, “Fragment von Schwänzen,” a physiognomic satire that compares Jewish penises to pig’s tails – with illustrations). But Putzke carries the torch metaphor further: the situation turns rotten, he says, “when the beard-wearers try to prevent the grasping and carrying of the torch. And it becomes all the more alarming when fear of the beard-wearers causes no one to be willing to grasp the torch; that is, because of fear of repression, self-censorship takes the place of sound argumentation.” Prof. Putzke is not afraid. But who comprises this bearded mob trying to prevent his march of truth? In contemporary Germany and other parts of Europe, the predominant bearded population is Muslim; indeed, caricatures of Mohammed were already mentioned by Putzke himself. And in previous eras of German history, a beard was a necessary part of a Jewish caricature. Recall that this is how Putzke begins his scholarly article that argues for the criminalization of circumcision. Nonetheless, he protests immediately that his topic is “by no means critical of religion.” Rather, the singeing of a few beards is just the price paid (by others) for an objective march of truth. Early in the essay, Putzke addresses the question of whether “social adequacy” is a sufficient defense for circumcision, citing a definition of such acts as those “which happen completely within the framework of the historically developed social-ethical order of a community and, as such, are permitted.”59 But then he makes an analogy not to, say, permitting young children to drink wine at the Eucharist, but rather to the spread of disease – as when “someone who has got a common cold (grippaler Infekt) rides the bus and knowingly infects those fellow passengers who are crowded around. This may lead to some unpleasant colds, but this action is accepted, because it would be disproportionate to constrain the general liberty of action of people infected with a cold, bearing in mind the normal risk of contagion.”60 Did Putzke intend to compare the symbol of the Jewish covenant with God to a contagion (Ansteckung), and thus the Jewish people to

58  The quotations in the following two paragraphs are from Putzke, “Strafrechtliche Relevanz,” 670. 59  Putzke, “Strafrechtliche Relevanz,” 679. 60  Putzke, 679–80.

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the carriers of disease – one of the oldest anti-Semitic metaphors?61 That would seem unlikely, but the metaphors chosen in his work do not stop there. Putzke later addresses the issue of whether circumcision can be justified as a “cosmetic procedure,” one which can be permitted for minors for an “aesthetic purpose” to serve the “wellbeing of a child” or, again, for “social adequacy” in the child’s community. Ear piercing is allowed for minors by parental request, for example, because it is “minimal, low-risk, and hardly painful,” while leading to benefits of “social acceptance,” “aesthetics,” and an “expression of individuality.”62 So when cutting skin signifies membership in a minority religious community, it is verboten, but if it expresses Individualität within the majority community, Putzke approves. The question of tattoos depends on the specifics of size and location, and requires a “weighing of pros and cons.” Next he presents comparisons with closer resemblance to circumcision, namely those that more significantly alter skin or cartilage.63 Among his approved examples of cosmetic changes, Putzke notes “ear correction” (Ohrkorrektur, surgically minimizing protruding ears), with the justification that such ears can be “the reason for taunting” (Grund für Hänseleien) from other children. Other approved “remediative” or “curative” treatments (Heilbehandlung) may include the fixing of such features as a “hooked nose, a so-called ‘Ladybeard,’ or a large mole on the face.” In other words, Putzke would permit parents to elect to have doctors surgically alter their children’s faces, including hair and mole removal for (undeniably subjective) aesthetic purposes, the binding of ears to the head, and even so far as to do rhinoplasty (a ‘nose job’). But it’s not just any nose he picks as the example of one obviously worthy of remediation. It’s a “hooked nose” (Höckernase), which was, in the context of anti-Semitic propaganda, a stereotypical signifier of a Jew. While not quite as old as anti-Judaism in Christian Europe, the hooked nose has artistically signified Jews since at least the thirteenth century: [At that time,] a move toward realism in art and an increased interest in physiognomy spurred artists to devise visual signs of ethnicity. The range of features assigned to Jews consolidated into one fairly narrowly construed, simultaneously grotesque and naturalistic face, and the hook-nosed, pointy-bearded Jewish caricature was born. … This image served many purposes. In being so fleshily vivid and realistic, the Jew’s face seemed to embody for Christian viewers the physical, secular, material world, a realm with which Jews had long been associated in Christian polemic. … In other cases, the caricature conveyed error and infidelity.64

61  E. g., Claudius’s Letter to the Alexandrians (about strife with the Jews), P.Lond. VI 1912, line 100. 62  Putzke, “Strafrechtliche Relevanz,” 696. 63  Putzke, “Strafrechtliche Relevanz,” 697. 64  Sara Lipton, “The Invention of the Jewish Nose,” New York Review of Books, November 14, 2014, http://www.nybooks.com/blogs/gallery/2014/nov/14/invention-jewish-nose/ [last accessed 22 January 2018]; cf. Lipton, Dark Mirror, ch. 5, esp. 171–86 for more details.

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The stock image of the hook-nosed and bearded Jew was made most disturbingly prominent in Germany itself, in the most notorious Nazi propaganda film, Der ewige Jude (1940) and the posters advertising it. It is true that the more common German word today for the “Jewish nose” is Hakennase, not Höckernase, and so Putzke could plausibly claim that he did not intend to single out a “Jewish nose” as an example of a surgical remediation acceptable to social order. Yet the term “ jüdische Höckernase” certainly exists, and not only on the fringe: it was the term for the “racial” (rassige) Jewish nose in a description of “unschöne Nasenformen” by Erich Lexer, the pioneer of cosmetic surgery in Germany and author of widely-used surgical textbooks.65 (The cosmetic and plastic surgery center in Freiburg is named in his honor.) But more importantly, scholars such as Putzke would not dare to consciously make a pejorative claim about Jewish noses in post-Holocaust Germany; rather, the old anti-Semitic tropes seem to operate subconsciously, just as notions about what counts as appropriate religion seem to operate subconsciously among other legal scholars cited above. At the conscious level, Putzke assures his German readers that the push to criminalize circumcision is not about religious discrimination or even “criticism of religion” (Religionskritik), and he considers historical analogies his opponents might make to Antiochus Epiphanes, Hadrian, Stalin, or Hitler to be “extraneous” (sachfremd) to the discussion.66 His argument is objectively not about Jews or Muslims, he says. It’s just about outlawing circumcisions, correcting the appearance of noses, and rhetorically burning a few beards along the way.

Is Germany’s History Adiaphora? This tour through Putzke’s torch-bearing rhetoric raises a final question: to what degree is post-Holocaust hermeneutics appropriate within the contemporary legal debate about circumcision in northern Europe? By post-Holocaust hermeneutics, I refer to a mode of interpretation that views the Holocaust as more than just a temporal marker, but a rupture in Western history that necessarily affects all subsequent discourse about monotheistic religions in general and Judaism in particular.67 It recognizes the uniqueness of this attempted genocide, since no other has been so closely linked to the mythic and religious imagination of 65  Erich Lexer, “Kosmetische Operationen der Nase,” in Die Krankheiten der Luftwege und der Mundhöhle, Fünfter Teil, ed. K. Amersbach et al. (Berlin: Springer, 1929), pp. 999–1000. 66  Putzke, “Strafrechtliche Relevanz,” 703. 67  My summary of post-Holocaust hermeneutics in this paragraph is condensed from a teaching handout I generated and frequently use, one which was made over ten years ago based on my research and fieldwork in this area. If any exact phrases were drawn from others and are not here cited, I apologize for my negligence.

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the modern West. This mode of interpretation is postmodern in a number of ways. First, the epistemological: it rejects the idea of an interpreter’s objective neutrality, the myth of the detached observer. Thus, there are no ethically neutral stances; it is less concerned with meanings inherent ‘in’ texts or the purported intentions of their authors ‘behind’ the texts than with the actual consequences of particular interpretations in particular social locations. Related to this is a socio-political dimension of postmodernity: words, names, labels, and stereotypes of people and groups have profound influence in the political realm. This mode of interpretation does not believe form and content, style and substance, tone and topic, can be easily separated in the theater of discourse. Finally, like other forms of postmodern hermeneutics, it resists description as a general method; rather, it promotes a context of responsiveness to texts and events that can only be demonstrated through actual interpreters engaged with the world ‘in front of’ the text. One group of interpreters clearly permits and privileges post-Holocaust hermeneutics: the majority of German politicians. Not only did the Bundestag move with extraordinary swiftness to enact a statute legalizing infant circumcision, it catered the second part of the new law specifically to Jewish practice by specifying the time within which the circumcision can occur (up to six months) and the persons authorized to carry it out (“persons appointed for such purpose by religious communities” who are “comparably qualified” to “medical doctors,” i. e. mohalim). I hasten to add that the parliamentary representatives did this despite a German populace that shows little support for infant circumcision. While the statute’s phrasing can be viewed as a law of general applicability and is obviously welcomed by Muslims, the details were undoubtedly crafted with Jews – and the Holocaust – in mind. In the forthright words of Chancellor Angela Merkel, “I do not want Germany to be the only country in the world in which Jews cannot practice their rites.”68 Many legal scholars attempting to influence the debate, however, are not as keen to view this issue in light of the Holocaust. In a special issue of the Journal of Medical Ethics devoted to the controversy, Matthew Johnson of the University of York rejects the “exceptionalist treatment demanded by certain circumcising groups,” and advocates “a consistent approach to invasive practices which overcomes ethnocentric preferences for certain groups and treats forms of belief equally and neutrally, whether they be atheist, antitheist, monotheist, or polytheist.”69 The specific history of Jews in Germany is, on this line of reasoning, not relevant. Rather, he draws explicitly on Rawlsian liberalism (and implicitly on the universalist reception of Paul) to attempt to respect the variety of religiously motivated alterations of children’s bodies in human societies. Specifically, he rec68  “Umstrittene Rechtslage: Kanzlerin warnt vor Beschneidungsverbot,” Spiegel Online, July 16, 2012, http://www.spiegel.de/politik/deutschland/bundeskanzlerin-merkel-warnt-vorbeschneidungsverbot-a-844671.html [last accessed 22 January 2018]. 69  Johnson, “Religious circumcision,” 454.

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ommends moving such practices under the auspices of the state and regulating their provision. Elsewhere in the same issue, Putzke co-authored an essay with Reinhard Merkel about the aftermath of the Cologne decision (already discussed above). Prof. R. Merkel, also a professor of criminal law, is even more influential than Putzke in German society: he is a former Olympian, former writer for the opinion-making national weekly Die Zeit, and member of both the German Academy of Sciences (Leopoldina) and the German Ethics Council (Ethikrat) that advises the government. (This is the same Ethics Council that advocates for the legalization of incest, based on the principle of self-determination.) As for post-Holocaust hermeneutics, these two jurists acknowledge the inevitability of such reasoning in contemporary Germany, while at the same time rejecting its validity. The statute “relates almost exclusively to Jewish ritual circumcisions” in their assessment, and is thus “a legislative concession that clandestinely subordinates the law to a tacit, but powerful pressure by a religious community.”70 They believe that “politically speaking,” the outcome of the controversy was “well assured from the very beginning” due to “its link with the darkest part of German history: the genocidal mass murder of Jews in the Nazi era.” Next they almost define post-Holocaust hermeneutics, just before lamenting its use. On one hand, they “respect and indeed emphasise the singular political obligation of all German political authorities that originates from this historical fact”; on the other hand, they are “convinced that the sheer act of circumcising an infant would not be tolerable, and would hardly be tolerated, under German law, were it not for this peculiar religious background that refers to grave historical guilt.” R. Merkel expressed a similar stance in a prior interview with Die Zeit, imagining that “if circumcision were not a rite of both great religions [Judaism and Islam], but rather the new idea of a small Christian sect that now wanted to claim its respective rights, one would prohibit circumcision on the spot – and no Constitutional court would come to its aid.”71 Both R. Merkel and Putzke begrudgingly admit that there is a “singular obligation” to Jews in German politics, while asserting that – if it were possible to abstract circumcision from its history – German law would never tolerate it. There are a number of shocking turns of phrase in these jurists’ analysis, especially in the sentence italicized above. First, how was any of this very public debate “clandestine” or “tacit”? While it is technically true that Jews are not named in the new statute, everyone in the country knew what was being discussed and legislated. Second, under what bizarre, stomach-turning view of German society is the Jewish religious community “powerful”? The notion of a secretive, powerful group of Jews infiltrating German society to have dispropor Merkel and Putzke, “After Cologne,” 447–48. Italics added.  R. Merkel in Schwarze, “Ein kläglicher Gesetzentwurf.”

70 71

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tionate and harmful influence bears more resemblance to the plot of Der ewige Jude than the demographic facts of contemporary Germany. Finally, the framing of the new statute as a “concession” to supposedly less-enlightened, reprobate behavior mimics a primary line of anti-Jewish polemic from Christians in late antiquity. One of the main rhetorical charges then was that God did not intend the materially-concerned and ritual-centered aspects of Torah to be eternal commandments, but only temporary concessions to the base instincts of the Jewish people. In his 2008 article, Putzke had implied a similar line of thinking when he labeled the chief characteristic of the debate about circumcision as “emotional” – as opposed to his own pure “rational verification” (rationale Überprüfbarkeit).72 He even concludes the essay by referring to his quest as fearlessly “breaking taboos” (Tabubrüche), an ‘othering’ concept akin to superstition and barbarism.73 With all of these echoes of historical anti-Semitism, perhaps Putzke should leave it up to his readers to decide whether comparisons to past events are sachfremd. To conclude, I turn back from these legal advocates surrounding the controversy to the Cologne case itself. In the German judicial system, every court case has an assigned spokesperson – a judge who is not the one that decided the case in question – to explain decisions to the public. In this instance, because of the worldwide attention to the case, Jan F. Orth took the unusual step of publishing an English translation of his explanation of the decision in the Journal of Criminal Law (UK), aimed at an international readership. What about here, in the official explanation of the decision – does he mention or imply a role for post-Holocaust hermeneutics? Neither the Holocaust nor Germany’s “grave historical guilt” is mentioned, but it is darkly, if unwittingly, implied. After explaining the case and the subsequent statute, Orth attempts to quell fears that religious circumcisions remain under threat in Germany. This is “very unlikely,” he argues, because there was no interest or even zeal among German prosecutors to investigate hundreds of religiously motivated circumcisions in Germany. German prosecutors are bound to investigate a case (Legalitätsprinzip, principle of mandatory prosecution) when they become aware of a potential crime, but there is still an extremely miniscule likelihood that the police or prosecutors would be notified of religious motivated circumcisions – those directly involved (parents, doctor, child, celebrating family members and friends in the Muslim or Jewish community) simply have no interest in doing so. Only a few other people outside their circle would even know about a performed circumcision, and those people would not usually bother to take any action.74

In other words, German prosecutors do not currently have the “zeal” to round up circumcisers, and the members of the circumcised’s communities have well-bounded (ghettoized?) “circles” anyway. It’s not as if Muslims and Jews  Putzke, “Strafrechtliche Relevanz,” 698, 709.  Putzke, “Strafrechtliche Relevanz,” 709. 74  Orth, “Explaining,” 507. 72 73

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need to worry about some kind of raid on their neighborhoods to look for the circumcised. Orth goes on to assure the world that “German police are currently much more occupied combatting far worse criminality and simply have no personnel and financial resources available to raid paediatricians’ clinics in order to find operation reports on circumcisions.”75 Ach so! Why on earth would Jewish leaders such as Charlotte Knobloch have been worried? Circumcision is only small-time criminality, occurring in insular communities. Even though public scholars such as R. Merkel and Putzke have suggested criminal prosecutions for circumcision, Orth explains that there just wouldn’t be the resources to “raid” Jewish and Muslim doctors’ offices in these times of austerity. How comforting that must be. Besides, Orth reminds the world, the German population is mostly not interested in having children circumcised. He reports that for months after the ruling, the court received “countless submissions … on a daily basis,” and “the majority of these submissions were endorsements of the decision.”76 Even so, the public’s rejection of circumcision “should by no means be interpreted as a sign of intolerance or discrimination.” Rather, it is just a “fact that circumcision has no tradition in Germany beyond the religious communities or for medical reasons.”77 For Orth and others, this is a fact apparently divorced from history. Circumcision has “no tradition in Germany” only if the (Jewish and Muslim) “religious communities” simply are not a part of “Germany.” He writes as if contemporary German society’s relative lack of interest in circumcision bears no historical relation to the stigmatization and attempted genocide of a group frequently characterized by it.

Whose Law? Whose Liberty? The tension between law and liberty bequeathed to the Christian tradition by Paul’s letter to Galatia has found renewed resonance in contemporary circumcision debates. During the first-century controversies about circumcision in Gentile lands, Paul framed the debate as one between a divine law significant for Jews (but not significant for Gentiles in the Messianic age) and the new-found liberty of Jews and Gentiles to form monotheistic communities together. In the current controversies, the same Jewish law is pitted against a different law of modern nation-states, one which enshrines individual liberty as more powerful than communal norms – in terms of religion, individual self-determination is approaching a law unto itself.  Orth, “Explaining,” 507.  Orth, “Explaining,” 508. 77  Orth, “Explaining,” 510. 75 76

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Behind this, occupying the “epistemological unconscious” of the European discourse, is the presumption of religion as an individualized, self-determined quest for spiritual development that carries few specific obligations to community and even fewer duties of embodied ritual.78 When critics of circumcision continually muse, “had there never been any ritual justification for the procedure in history …,” the lack of regard for embodied particularity and historical accountability comes to the fore.79 Perhaps Clemens Heni, the director of the Berlin International Center for the Study of Anti-Semitism, captured this best. In September 2012, after the court ruling, he described the paradox of a certain pro-circumcision gathering in Berlin: a group of German pro-Israel activists had urged their supporters not to attend the event.80 Heni remarked that these supporters of the state of Israel but not the rite of circumcision want “a fantasy Israel with no Judaism.”81 But Jaron Engelmayer, the rabbi of the Jewish community in Köln, summarized the situation in the traditional way: “The mohels are inquiring, and we tell them: without circumcision, there is no Judaism.”82 In other words, Jews and Gentiles are not done adjudicating the debate from Galatia.

78  I borrow the phrase from Pierre Bourdieu and Lois. J. D. Wacquant, An Invitation to Reflexive Sociology (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1992), 41. 79  Quotation from Merkel and Putzke, “After Cologne,” 445. 80  Summarized in Cohen, “Europe’s Assault,” 18. 81 Clemens Heni, “Pro-Circumcision Rally Held in Berlin,” The Algemeiner, September 12, 2012, http://www.algemeiner.com/2012/09/12/pro-circumcision-rally-held-in-berlin-germanactivists-seek-a-fantasy-israel-with-no-judaism/# [last accessed 22 January 2018]. 82  Raphael Ahren, “Interview: Cologne’s Circumcision Ban Could Hit You Too,” Times of Israel, July 23, 2012, http://www.timesofisrael.com/cologne-rabbi-we-will-continue-to-performcircumcision-despite-horrific-ban/?fb_comment_id=10150975067432406_23315183#f​3​d​1​e​b​c​ 7​5​1​3​5​d​8​6​ [last accessed 22 January 2018].

List of Contributors Michal Bar-Asher Segal is Senior Lecturer in the Goldstein-Goren Department of Jewish Thought, Ben Gurion University Paul F. Bradshaw is Emeritus Professor of Liturgy at the University of Notre Dame Lutz Doering is Professor for New Testament and Ancient Judaism at the University of Münster Steven D. Fraade is the Mark Taper Professor of the History of Judaism at Yale University Paula Fredriksen is the Aurelio Professor of Scripture Emerita at Boston University and Distinguished Visiting Professor of Comparative Religion at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem Joshua D. Garroway is Associate Professor of Early Christianity and the Second Commonwealth at the Hebrew Union College, Jewish Institute of Religion David Lincicum is the Rev. John A. O’Brien Associate Professor of Theology at the University of Notre Dame Grant Macaskill holds the Kirby Laing Chair of New Testament Exegesis at the University of Aberdeen David M. Moffitt is Senior Lecturer of New Testament Studies at the University of St. Andrews Michael Peppard is Associate Professor of Theology at Fordham University Christopher Rowland is the Emeritus Dean Ireland’s Professor of the Exegesis of Holy Scripture at the University of Oxford Ruth Sheridan is senior research fellow at Western Sydney University affiliated with the Religion and Society Research cluster and working within the Translational Health Research Institute Charles M. Stang is Professor of Early Christian Thought and Director of the Center for the Study of World Religions at Harvard Divinity School

Ancient Sources Index Hebrew Bible / ​Old Testament Genesis 1 32 1:1 136 1:27 25 2:16–17 112 7:9 25 9:1–17 137 9:15 150 10 140 16:12 148–49 17:9–4 194 19:36 148–49 22 178 27:22 148 27:40 148–49 40:15 149 Exodus 32 4:24–26 194 20 110 20:2 135 20:11 135 20:13 148–49 20:24 182 24:7 150 31:18 183–84 Leviticus 59 3:17 34 4:27–35 95 7:26–27 34 10:10 188 12–15 92 12:1–5 92 12:4 93 12:6–8 92, 95 12:7 96 12:8 92 15:1–11 92 16:15–20 96 16:16 96 16:30 98 17–26 36

17:10–14 34 18:2–4 135 18:8 188 18:19 24 18:22–23 24 18:24–25 94 18:25 188 18:26–30 95 19 22 19:18 63 20:3 94 20:6 24 20:26 188 21:1–3 93 21:10–11 93 21:23 188 23:11 26 24:20 70 26:1 190 26:30 190 Numbers 15:27–31 22 16–17 22 18:12, 21 96 23:7 37 23:21 37 23:23 37 24:5 37 24:17 37 24:18 37 Deuteronomy 36 4:14 111 5:15 136 12:8–12 140 17:3–5 24 17:6 129–30 17:17 25 18:11 24 19:15 130 20:10–11 152 20:18 152

218

Ancient Sources Index

20:19 152 23 22 27–28 140 27:1–8 139 27:1–8 150–51 27:2–4 140, 152 27:5–7 140 27:8 140–41, 151–53 27:15–26 24 28:15–68 27 28:48 166 29:20 182 33:2 137, 139, 144, 148, 150, 154 33:3 143, 153 33:4 136 Joshua 4:1–8 140 4:19–24 140 4:24 140 4:3 151, 153 4:8 151, 153 8:30–32 140 8:32 141, 152 2 Samuel 7:10–13 190 1 Kings 8:19 190 Job 12:16 150 30:12 9 Psalms 164 18:7 182 29:3 150 29:11 150 40 89–90 44:8 89 65:7 169 68:8 182 110:4 99 138:4 148 147:19–20 135, 146 Proverbs 8:1–4 136 8:31 136

Isaiah 40 1:11–13 118 2:18 190 24:17 25 49:1 187 61:3 37 61:5 166 65:20 37 Jeremiah 180 31 191 31:31 186 31:31–33 186, 192 31:33 186 31:33–34 7, 175 31:34 179, 192 Ezekiel 17 5:11 96 20:5 111 20:25 70 26:26–27 186 36 191 36:25–27 7, 175 36:26–27 192 44 15 Daniel 2:22 188 2:28 187 Hosea 8:12 155 Amos 9:7 136 Micah 5:14 148 Habakkuk 3:6

138, 144, 150, 154

Zechariah 17 Malachi 1:11 129 1:14 129

Ancient Sources Index

New Testament Matthew 108, 187 5:17 190 5:21–48 108 5:32 190 6:9–13 129 7:6 129 7:23 2 11:12–13 190 11:13 190 11:25–27 187 12:1–8 79 13:35 187 15:4–9 113 18:15 73 18:16 130 18:20 182 19:8 112 23:2 182, 184 23:23 106 23:28 2 24:12 2, 187 25:35 130 Mark 108 4:11 187 7:19 108, 190 14:64 190 Luke 108–9 2:21 196 10:42 166 16 109 16:16 109, 190 16:16–18 190 16:17 190 John 1:17 189 3:11 189 4:11 188 4:13 188 5 189 5:17 189 5:18 189 6:27 166 7:23 189 8:2 182 8:2–11 182 8:38 189 8:6 183 9 189

9:28–29 189 10:33 189 12:49–50 189 13:34 189 14:26 180 16:12–13 75 18:30 189 19:7 189 Acts 5, 109 6:13 190 7 114 7:38 191 7:44 191 7:46 190 7:47 190 7:48 190 7:53 114, 190 7:54 190 10 75 10:9–15 76 15 130 15:20 187 15:29 83, 187 16:1–30 80 21:25 187 21:26 73, 76 Romans 64 1:18–3:20 55 2:13–14 63 2:25 63 2:25–26 63 2:26 62–63 2:28–29 62 3:1–2 199 3:1–20 55 3:21 55, 64 3:25 62 3:27 63–64 3:27–31 63 3:29 69 3:31 64 4:1–12 62 5:20 50 6 173 6:14 54 6:19 187 7 63, 73 7:1–7 187 7:6 55

219

220 7:12 70 7:14 79 7:17 55 8 186, 192 8:1 55 8:3–9 187 8:20 187 8:30 187 8:4 63, 186 9–11 69 9:4 73 9:6 62 9:7 62 10:4 184, 187 10:5–6 63 11:6 54 11:25–35 69 11:26 62, 73, 77, 85 12:2 65 13:8 55, 63 14 58–59 14:14 59 15:4–12 69 15:8 194 15:23 55 15:25 55 16:25 187 1 Corinthians 1–4 186 2 187–88 2:2 187 2:6 188 2:7 187 2:9 188 2:10 188 2:10–16 177, 186, 188, 192 2:12 188 2:13 188 2:14–15 180 2:16 188, 192 3:16 188, 191 4:1 188 4:6 188 5:7 70 6:12 65 6:19 188, 191 7:18 199 7:19 80 7:19–20 194 8 187 8–10 58 9:19–22 56

Ancient Sources Index 9:20 73, 76, 80 9:20–21 64 9:21 2, 55, 64 10:23 59 11:1 187, 192 12:18 55 13:13 55 14:2 187 15:20 55 15:51 187 2 Corinthians 3 58 3:3 186 3:6 50, 55, 57 3:7 58 3:12–15 58 3:16–17 59 5:2 55 5:17 55 6:14 2, 187 8:22 55 12:4 188 13:1 130 Galatians 5, 64, 186 1 187 1:14 49 1:15 187 2 73, 79–80, 84 2:11–14 73 2:12 75–76 2:14 56, 81 2:18 56 2:19 56 2:20 187 3 102, 109–10 3–4 187 3:1–29 57 3:10 63 3:11–12 63 3:12 63 3:19 52, 57, 190–91 3:19–20 114 3:23–25 57 3:24 55, 57 3:24–25 56 3:25 57 3:28 86 3:6–29 50, 65 4:10 62 4:12 56 4:21–4:31 57

Ancient Sources Index 4:21–5:1 57 4:24 58 4:5 186 4:9 57, 186 5:1 59 5:1–15 194 5:14 63 5:6 194 6:15 55, 194 6:2 63, 64 Ephesians 1:4 187 1:9 187 2:11–22 109 3:1–13 187 3:3 187 Philippians 1:10 65 3:8 75, 81 Colossians 1:26 187 1:27 187 1 Thessalonians 4:9 192 2 Thessalonians 2 2 1 Timothy 1:8–11 109 2:4 77 3:16 187 Philemon 9 55 11 55 Hebrews 109, 112, 186 1:3 98, 100 1:9 89 1:13–14 102

2:2 190 2:10 100 2:14 99 4 189 4:15 100 5:9 100 7 98–99 7:3 99 7:8 99 7:11–12 102 7:16 99 7:18 5, 89 7:18–19 102 7:19 5, 89, 100 7:23 99 7:24–25 99 7:27 100 7:28 99–100 8:4 101–2 8:8–12 186 8:8–13 186 8:13 102 9:9 100 9:9–10 89 9:14 100 9:22 89 10 89–90 11:35 101 12:24 102 12:27 102 James 1:22–25 106 2:8–13 106 1 Peter 1:20 187 1 John 2:27 192 Revelation 2:24 188 13:8 187

Deuterocanonical Works Wisdom of Solomon 9:10 136

Sirach 4:1 137 16:24–17:23 136

221

222

Ancient Sources Index Baruch 3:36–37 136

17:23 136 24:3–12 136, 147 24:23 136, 144

Old Testament Pseudepigrapha 1 Enoch

4, 29, 31, 36, 38, 40–41, 43–45, 47 1–5 35 1:1 37 1:8 37, 40 5:4 34 5:6 40 5:8 37 5:8–9 34 5:9 37 7:1 14 7:3 34 7:6 14, 33 8:1–4 14 9:1 14 9:6 34 9:7–9 34 9:8 34 9:10 34 9:9 34 42:1–3 136 10:3 34, 37 10:8 34 10:9 34 10:11 34 10:16 10, 34, 37 10:17 34 10:18 34 10:20 34 10:20–21 33 10:21 34 10:22 34 12:5 40 13:4 40 13:6 40 22:13 33 38:5 41 39:5 42 42:1–3 41 42:3 41 45:3 41 45:5–6 41 51:2 41 51:2–3 42 51:3 42

51:4–5 42 53:5 41 53:6 41 58:1–4 41 58:5 41 61:8 41 62:2 41 62:9 41 82:9 34 84:6 37 89:28 35 89:41 38 89:55 191 89:66–67 191 90:6 38 90:7 38 92:3 40 93:10 37 94:1 39 94:1–5 37 94:2 39 94:6 39 94:7 39 94:8 39 95:6 39 95:7 39 96:4 39 96:4–8 39 96:5–6 39 97:6 33 2 Enoch 4, 29, 42–47 30:8 46 43:1 45 44:1–4 46 51:4 45 59 44–45 60:1–4 46 64:5 44 65:1–5 46 68:3 45 3 Enoch 29 16 176

Ancient Sources Index 4 Ezra 8:20–36 107

223

22:16–20 27 23 10 23:9–15 10 23:14 10 23:16 10 23:16–25 10 23:26 10 23:27–31 10

Jubilees 4, 9, 21, 29, 43 1:7–17 10 1:27 190 2:24–33 9 3:7 190 6:22 9

Texts from the Judean Desert 1QpHab 187 1QS 11, 16–17, 20–22, 27–28 4Q162 19 4Q201 14 4Q266 16 4Q271 16 4Q390 10 4Q513 26 4QDa 13, 15, 17, 23, 22, 23 4QDb 15, 22 4QDd 13–15, 23

11, 13, 22–23, 24 4QDe 4QDf 11, 21 4QJuba 10 4QOrdinancesb 26 4QSb 27 20, 27 4QSd 4QSe 20 6QD 15, 24 CD 21 CD-A 11–19, 21, 24–25, 28 CD-B 17–19, 22, 24–25, 28

Rabbinic Literature Mishnah m. ʿAbodah Zarah 144 m. Baba Meṣiʿa 160 m. Baba Qamma 144, 154 m. Menaḥot 26 m. Nedarim 200 m. Soṭah 140, 151 Tosefta t. Sanhedrin 162 t. Soṭah 151–52 Jerusalem Talmud y. Baba Qamma 144, 154 y. Berakot 113 y. Nedarim 165 y. Soṭah 153 Babylonian Talmud b. ʿAbodah Zarah

144

b. Baba Meṣiʿa 160, 162 b. Baba Qamma 144 b. Berakot 113, 158, 169 b. Ḥagigah 176 b. Ketubbot 162 b. Nedarim 162 b. Niddah 170–71 b. Šabbat 166, 168 Midrashim and Minor Tractates Genesis Rabbah 200 Mekilta 141, 152 Mekhilta de 136, 138, 149   Rabbi Ishmael Pesiqta Rabbati 155 Sifre 137–39, 144, 147, 150, 153, 166 Tanḥuma Bereshit 136

224

Ancient Sources Index

Other Ancient Jewish Authors Josephus Antiquitates judaicae Contra Apionem

107, 140 114

Philo De Iosepho 107

De migratione Abrahami 107, 191 Pseudo-Philo Liber antiquitatum biblicarum 140

Ancient Christian Writers Abba Silvanus

165

Ambrose De sacramentis 124 De paradiso 116 Apelles Phaneroseis 116 Apology of Aristides

113, 114

Apophthegmata Patrum 162, 165

Canons of Hippolytus

123, 131–32

Cyprian Ad Quirinum 110 Didache

106, 123, 125, 127–28, 130–33, 159

Didascalia

118, 123–26, 129–33

Apostolic Constitutions 123–24, 126, 132–33

Epiphanius Panarion (Adversus  haereses)

Apostolic Church Order 123, 126–30, 133

Epistula ad Diognetum 114

Augustine Contra Faustum 79, 81–83, 85  Manichaeum De civitate Dei 85–86 De doctrina christiana 78–79 De Genesi ad litteram 86 Epistulae 28 80 40 80–81 82 84 149 85 263 114 Expositio in epistulam 79, 80–81, 84   ad Galatas

Epistula apostolorum 124

Basil Asketikon 7, 159, 160, 163, 164 Long Rules 164–65 Short Rules 164

Epistle of Barnabas Hippolytus Traditio apostolica

69–70, 110, 112–13, 191

5–6, 105, 116, 118–19, 191 123, 126, 130–33

Ignatius To the Philadelphians 110 Irenaeus Adversus haereses 110, 113  (Elenchos) Syllogismes 116 Jerome Commentariorum in Epistulam   ad Galatas libri III 73 Epistulae 75 73, 83–84

225

Ancient Sources Index Justin Apologia i 69–70 Dialogus cum Tryphone 69, 70–72, 110–13 Martial Epistulae 7 204 11 204 Melito of Sardis Peri Pascha 110

Recognitiones 114 Ps-Gregory of Nyssa Testimonia 110 Ptolemy Epistula ad Floram 191 Regula S. Augustini 160 Regula S. Benedicti

167, 170

Origen Commentarii in 188   evangelium Joannis Commentarii 74, 76–77   in Romanos Contra Celsum 74–77 De principiis 86 Homilae in Genesim 116

Regula S. Pachomii

7, 159, 160–62, 164, 167, 170

Ps-Clementine Homilia 113

Verba Seniorum 169

Tertullian Adversus Judaeos 112 Adversus Marcionem 71–72, 74, 115 Testamentum Domini

123, 131–32, 133

Classical Authors Apuleius Florida 115

Quintilian Institutio oratoria 114

Celsus De medicina 199

Soranus Gynaeceia 199

Cicero Pro Flacco 114

Strabo Geographica

Horace Satirae 114

Suetonius Tiberias 115

Plutarch De Superstitione 114–15

Tacitus Annales 115 Historiae 115, 204

114, 193

Author Index Adler, F. ​52, 60, 65 Adler, S. ​60 Agnon, S.  Y. ​61 Ahren, R. ​214 Alexander, P. S. ​20, 29 Allison, D. ​108 Andersen, F.  I. ​43–46 Anke, H.  U. ​202 Atkinson, K. ​2 Aurenque, D. ​201–3, 205–6 Bacht, H. ​159, 168, 170 Backhaus, K. ​118 Bar-Asher Siegal, M. ​6–7, 162, 166 Bar-Asher, M. ​169 Barclay, J. M. G. ​50, 67 Barrett, C.  K. ​190 Barton, J. ​115 Bauckham, R.  J. ​33–34 Baumgarten, J. M. ​9, 13, 24, 26 Becker, A. H. ​107, 164 BeDuhn, J. ​78 Ben Ezra, D. S. ​43 Bentley, G.  E. ​180 Berkowitz, B.  A. ​135 Betz, H. D. ​56, 63 Bianchi, E. ​163 Billerbeck, P. ​190 Bisschops, R. ​61 Bloom, H. ​174, 184 Bobertz, C.  A. ​110–11 Boccaccini, G. ​14, 30, 32, 35, 51 Bock, D. ​31 Borchardt, F. ​1 Boswell, J. ​170 Böttrich, C. ​43, 46 Bourdieu, P. ​214 Bowker, J. ​185 Bowler, K. ​176, 178, 180 Bradshaw, P. F. ​6, 123, 127–29, 131–33 Bregman, M. ​146 Brent, F.  E. ​69 Brown, P. ​78 Brown, W.  P. ​32 Bultmann, R. ​51 Burton-Christie, D. ​163

Caner, D. ​165 Chadwick, O. ​167, 169 Charlesworth, J. ​31 Chernick, M. ​113 Clark, E.  A. ​162–63 Clarkson, L. ​174, 176, 180 Cohen, B. ​198, 214 Cohen, J. ​86 Cohen, S. ​36, 193 Collins, J. J. ​1, 10, 14, 18, 27, 30, 35 Colpe, C. ​106 Como, D. R. ​3, 175, 185, 191 Corns, T. ​179 Cross, F.  M. ​20 Crossley, J. ​108, 190 Dane, P. ​158 Davidson, J.  E. ​2 Davies, P. R. ​12–19, 24 Davis, J. ​176 de Jonge, M. ​111 Decret, F. ​78 Deming, W. ​194 Derwich, M. ​167 DeSilva, D.  A. ​100 Dillon, J. ​69 Ditmore, M. G. ​178–79, 187 Dodd, C.  H. ​191 Dodds, E.  R. ​69 Doering, L. ​4, 9–10, 21, 25–26 Dougherty, M. B. ​201, 204 Draper, J.  A. ​128 Du Plessis, P. J. ​100 Duff, P.  B. ​58 Dunn, G. ​112 Dunn, James D. G. ​51, 55 Efroymson, D. P. ​68, 72 Ehrman, B.  D. ​125–26 Eisele, W. ​89 Eisenbaum, P. ​51–52, 57 Ellis, N. ​113 Escolan, P. ​165 Exner, T. ​202

Author Index Faivre, A. ​124 Fallon, F.  T. ​113 Flusser, D. ​128 Fogel, S. ​162 Fonrobert, C.  E. ​124 Fraade, S. D. ​6, 16, 137–39, 142–43, 146 Franz, M. ​198 Fredriksen, P. ​4, 51–52, 56–58, 67–69, 78–79, 83, 85–86 Frend, W. H. C. ​78 Funk, F.  X. ​117 Furstenberg, Y. ​108 Galston, W. A. ​195, 199, 201 Gane, R. ​96 García Martínez, F. ​25 Garroway, J. D. ​4, 62, 194 Gemeinhardt, P. ​176 Goodman, M. ​46, 117 Graetz, H. ​50, 54 Greschat, K. ​116 Grey, R. ​181 Grisbrooke, W.  J. ​132 Gross, M.  B. ​206 Grynbaum, M.  M. ​194 Guillaumont, A. ​166 Haacker, K. ​2 Haber, S. ​90–91, 98 Haga, J. ​2 Hagen, J. ​43 Hall, D. D. ​3, 178 Hampton, S. ​3 Hanson, P.  D. ​30 Harmless, W. ​160–61, 163 Harnack, A. von ​74, 106, 116 Hartman, L. ​35, 37 Hawthorne, G.  F. ​110 Hayes, C. ​36 Heemstra, M. ​117 Heni, C. ​214 Hempel, C. ​12, 23 Herman, G. ​168–69 Hezser, C. ​143, 158 Hill, C. ​186 Himmelfarb, M. ​32 Hirshman, M. ​136, 139 Hodges, F.  M. ​193 Holdheim, S. ​53–54, 59, 61 Horbury, W. ​111, 119 Huehns, G. ​184 Hughes, A. ​179 Hultgren, S. ​15, 18

Hurtado, L. ​117 Hvalvik, R. ​110, 119 Ilgner, F.  C. ​176–77 Inowlocki, S. ​112 Jackson-McCabe, M. ​106 Jackson, B.  S. ​143 Jaffee, M.  S. ​163 Jassen, A.  P. ​15 Jefford, C.  N. ​128 Jennings, E. R. de ​159–60 Jeremias, G. ​24 Joffe, J. ​199 Johnson, L.  T. ​105 Johnson, M. T. ​199, 210 Johnson, M. E. ​129, 131 Johnsson, W.  G. ​101 Judd, R. ​204–6 Junod, E. ​116 Kahana, M. ​143 Kaplan, M. ​60–61 Kardong, T. ​160, 164–65, 168 Käsemann, E. ​189 Kinzig, W. ​105 Kister, M. ​18, 23 Klawans, J. ​91, 94–95, 97 Knobloch, C. ​195, 213 Knox, J. ​115, 173 Kovacs, J.  L. ​2 Krauss, S. ​111 Krawiec, R. ​163 Lapide, P. ​108 Lehmann, K. ​168 Lexer, E. ​209 Lichtenberg, G.  C. ​207 Lieu, J. M. ​71–72, 74, 115 Lincicum, D. ​5, 113, 117, 180 Lipton, S. ​206, 208 Löhr, W. ​113 Lona, H.  E. ​114–15 Longenecker, B. ​118 Longenecker, R. N. ​56, 57 Loewenstein, D. ​179 Lowy, S. ​118 Macaskill, G. ​4, 31, 34, 36, 44, 46 Maccoby, H. ​93–95 Maggi, A. ​2 Magid, S. ​3 Makdisi, S. ​177

227

228 Martyn, J.  L. ​56 Maunder, A. S. D. ​42 May, G. ​115 Mayordomo, M. ​174–76, 187 Mazor, J. ​199–200 McCruden, K.  B. ​100 McGinn, B. ​176 Meier, J.  P. ​107–8 Merkel, R. ​193, 203, 205–6, 211, 213–14 Methuen, C. ​126 Metso, S. ​20 Meyer, M. A. ​50, 53–54, 60 Milgrom, J. ​36, 93, 95–96 Milik, J. T. ​14, 42 Mitchell, M. M. ​73, 188 Moffitt, D. M. ​5, 90, 98, 101, 109 Moll, S. ​115 Montefiore, H. ​89 Morray-Jones, C. ​39 Morton, A.  L. ​180 Moskal, J. ​184 Moule, C. F. D. ​173 Mueller, J. G. ​123, 126 Murison, C.  L. ​117 Murphy-O’Connor, J. ​12, 62 Murphy, E. ​110 Nanos, M. D. ​51–52, 56, 87, 108 Nickelsburg, G. W. E. ​14, 31, 33–35, 38 Niederwimmer, K. ​125, 128 Nirenberg, D. ​68 Novak, D. ​3 Opsomer, J. ​69 Orlov, A. ​45–46 Orth, J. F. ​196–97, 200, 204, 212–13 Osiek, C. ​126 Paget, J. C. ​106, 110, 117, 119, 191 Pardee, N. ​123–24 Pennington, K. ​159 Peppard, M. ​7, 193, 200 Peterson, D. ​100 Petuchowski, J. ​53, 61, 65 Philipson, D. ​49–50 Phillips, L.  E. ​131 Pines, S. ​44 Plaut, G.  W. ​60 Plöger, O. ​30 Poirier, P.-H. ​114 Pollmann, I. ​2, 107 Porete, M. ​176

Author Index Prostmeier, F.  R. ​116 Putzke, H. ​197–99, 202–3, 205–9, 211–14 Qimron, E. ​13–14, 21–24 Quispel, G. ​113 Räisänen, H. ​56–57, 63, 65, 115 Reed, A.  Y. ​107 Rhodes, J.  N. ​117 Richardson, P. ​117 Ritter, I.  H. ​49 Robinson, H.  C. ​180 Rönnegård, P. ​163 Rosenthal, D. ​160 Rousseau, P. ​160, 163 Rowland, C. ​7, 39, 182–83, 186, 190 Rudolph, D.  J. ​56 Sacchi, P. ​30 Sand, A. ​2 Sanders, E. P. ​1, 51, 92–94 Schäfer, P. ​204 Scheck, T.  P. ​74 Scherbenske, E.  W. ​115 Schiffman, L. H. ​21, 43, 45 Schneider, D.  L. ​3 Schofield, A. ​20 Schöllgen, G. ​124–25 Schremer, A. ​26, 113 Schroeder, C.  T. ​162 Schubert, P. ​173 Schwartz, S. ​136–37, 161 Schwarze, T. ​203, 211 Schweitzer, A. ​87 Segovia, C.  A. ​52 Shaked, S. ​168 Shemesh, A. ​19, 21–22, 27 Shukster, M.  B. ​117 Shuve, K. ​113 Sim, D.  C. ​2 Simon, M. ​68, 112, 114, 119 Sklar, J. ​97 Smith, M.  F. ​115 Sperry-White, G. ​132 Stebnicka, K. ​115 Stegemann, H. ​12, 16 Steimer, B. ​125 Stendahl, K. ​1 Stern, M. ​114, 193 Stewart-Sykes, A. ​110, 124, 126, 128–29 Stone, Michael E. ​32 Strack, H. ​190 Stroumsa, G.  G. ​106

Author Index Stylianopoulos, T. ​111 Synek, E.  M. ​124

Vierros, M. ​141 Viviano, B. ​108

Tardieu, M. ​77 Taylor, M.  S. ​106 Thiessen, M. ​51–52, 57–58, 87 Thiselton, A.  C. ​177 Thompson, E.  P. ​185 Tiller, P. ​10, 37 Tränkle, H. ​112 Tuckett, C.  M. ​190 Tugwell, S. ​116

Wacquant, L. J. D. ​214 Wallace, D. ​178 Wallis, R.  T. ​69 Wedderburn, A. J. M. ​89–91 Wengert, T. ​177 Wenham, D. ​2 Westerholm, S. ​63, 105 Wiese, C. ​49, 59 Wiesing, U. ​201–3, 205–6 Williams, A.  L. ​117 Winship, M. ​178–79 Wright, N.  T. ​51

Urban, D. ​181 Vaillant, A. ​42 Sandt, H. van de ​128 Hoven, B. van den ​166 Horst, P. W. van der ​111, 115 Unnik, W. C. van ​118 VanderKam, J. ​31, 33 Veilleux, A. ​159, 163, 170

Yeago, D.  S. ​3 Yinger, K. L. ​2, 51 Young, F.  M. ​71 Zetterholm, M. ​51–52, 56, 87, 108

229

Subject Index Abraham ​14, 43, 49, 57–58, 62–63, 65, 69, 74, 119, 178, 194 adultery ​95, 137, 148–49, 181–84, 206 allegory ​50, 57, 70–72, 74, 77, 79, 113, 116–18, 191 anarchism ​186, 192 anti-Semitism ​8, 195–96, 204–6, 208–9, 212, 214 antinomianism ​1–4, 7, 49–52, 54–55, 62, 64, 90, 159, 173–77, 179–82, 184–87, 190–92 apostasy ​21, 28, 34, 50, 190 appointment of religious officials ​99, 128–29, 150, 210 atonement ​15, 24, 27, 44, 62, 95–98, 119 backsliding ​17–19, 28 baptism ​53, 76, 89, 119, 128–29, 201, 204 beit midrash ​7, 164 birth ​9, 81, 92–96, 144, 203 blasphemy ​12, 174, 180, 189–90 blood ​10, 14, 26, 34, 70, 76, 79, 82, 90, 92–97, 102, 182, 194, 206 boats, use of ​160 body, human ​82–83, 86, 89–90, 92–93, 98, 101, 119, 165, 170, 197, 199, 201 Cairo Geniza ​141, 143 calendar ​4, 12, 26, 33–34, 42–43, 47 canon law ​133 capital punishment ​See punishment, capital catechesis ​128, 164 ceremonial law ​49, 53–54, 65, 111 chastity ​148, 182, 184. See also fornication, licentiousness, lust, sex children ​7, 10–11, 13, 55, 140, 163, 194–203, 205–8, 210, 212–13. See also birth, sacrifice circumcision ​7–8, 49–50, 55–58, 62–63, 67, 70–72, 76–77, 79–80, 82, 108, 110, 112–15, 119, 193–214 civil law ​53–54 clean ​20, 33, 76, 95–96, 108, 183, 190. See also purity, unclean codes ​7, 10, 20–23, 28–29, 36, 40, 44, 46–47, 65, 99–100, 102, 137, 175, 186–87, 197

commandments ​10–11, 13–15, 17–18, 20, 23, 25, 28, 34, 49–50, 53, 58, 61, 63, 64, 70, 79, 82–84, 94, 97, 105, 111, 113, 116, 119–20, 130, 135–36, 138, 146–48, 150, 163, 178, 180–81, 189, 191, 212 communal norms ​6–7, 11–13, 15–28, 30, 34, 41, 47, 51, 65, 76, 108, 120, 123–31, 133, 159–66, 170–71, 194–96, 198, 200–203, 205, 207–8, 210–14 conversion ​2, 16, 28, 43, 55, 77, 83, 85, 130, 142, 144, 153, 194, 199 corporal punishment ​198 corpse contamination ​92, 93, 95 courts ​7, 40, 178, 195–98, 200–202, 205, 211–12 covenant ​1, 6, 10–12, 14–20, 27, 35, 37, 43, 46–47, 51–52, 55, 57–58, 65, 96, 117–19, 135–38, 143, 145–47, 175, 178, 186, 191, 194, 200, 207 criminal law ​10, 189, 196–98, 201–2, 206–7, 209, 211, 213 custody ​21, 202 Day of Atonement ​98, 119. See also Yom Kippur death ​11, 15, 18, 21, 39, 49, 55, 58, 62, 65, 67, 83, 89–90, 91, 93–95, 97, 99–102, 110, 116, 119, 127, 163, 182, 205 defamilialization ​162 defilement ​14, 25, 34, 94–98, 102. See also clean, holiness, purity, unclean diaspora ​5, 49, 67 disputes ​6, 12, 81, 107–9, 120, 177 divorce ​108, 112, 177 donkeys, prohibition on riding bareback ​7, 170–171 dualism ​5, 68, 77, 82, 90, 99, 181 ejaculation ​92, 93, 171 elders (Jewish) ​70, 112, 151 emancipation ​50, 54 eschatology ​17, 34, 36–40, 44–45, 55, 85, 128, 179, 186, 189, 191 Essenes ​30

Subject Index ethics ​43–44, 46–47, 52, 60, 70, 79, 105, 111, 173–74, 177, 184, 191, 194, 198, 201, 207, 210 Eucharist ​128–32, 207 faith ​1, 12, 38, 57–58, 63–64, 81, 110, 173, 186, 194 Familism ​177, 179 farming ​26, 166–67, 180 fasting ​61, 70, 113–14, 118–19, 128, 130, 164 festivals ​10–11, 14, 21, 33, 36, 44–45. See also holidays food ​20–22, 28, 34, 49, 58–59, 71–72, 82–83, 89, 108, 114, 119, 166, 168–69, 187, 190, 193 forgiveness ​15–16, 29, 40, 42, 44, 46–47, 90, 102–3, 152, 165–66, 173, 182 fornication ​10, 65. See also chastity, licentiousness, lust, sex Gnosticism ​114, 176 Golden Calf ​6, 71, 110, 118, 120 goring ox ​144 grace ​3, 40, 54, 59, 67, 85, 178, 184, 189 grave, stepping on a ​92 haggadah ​124, 153–54 halakhah ​2–3, 6, 9–10, 21, 26, 28, 35–36, 43–45, 79, 107–9, 120, 124, 153, 157–58, 160 Hasidism ​3 heresy ​44–45, 71, 74, 76, 84, 176 holidays ​26, 49, 72, 114. See also festivals holiness ​19–20, 22–23, 28, 36, 42, 70–71, 93, 96, 98, 129, 136, 140, 146–47, 152, 188, 190. See also clean, purity, unclean Holocaust ​1, 204, 209–12 homosexuality ​170–71, 204–5 human rights ​7, 195, 198, 201 idolatry ​10, 12, 19, 24, 46–47, 59, 70–72, 82–83, 130, 190 incest ​24, 201, 211 initiation ​4, 12, 16–17, 19, 28, 130–31 judgment ​3, 22–23, 27, 33, 37, 39, 44, 50, 109, 111, 119, 184 justice ​3, 10, 29, 38–40, 41–42, 71, 86, 113 labor ​19, 163–66 law vs. gospel dialectic ​2, 5, 67, 71, 72, 80, 81, 82, 108, 110, 115, 175, 186 laws that apply to the king

231

legalism ​1, 40, 44, 46, 47 lex talionis ​70, 113 licentiousness ​12, 65, 187. See also licentiousness liturgy ​6, 62, 123–24, 126, 128–29, 132–33, 163 love ​24–25, 39, 49, 53–55, 63–64, 71, 79, 81, 84–86, 89, 108, 143, 153, 189 lust ​24, 204. See also chastity, fornication, licentiousness, sex Manichaeanism ​5, 68, 77–78, 80–82, 84, 114 Marcionism ​5, 53, 62, 68, 71–72, 74, 76–77, 81–82, 85, 87, 113–16 marriage ​26, 32, 35–36, 38, 47, 113, 159, 178 menstruation ​24, 26, 92–95 mercy ​16, 40, 42, 44, 47, 58, 81, 84–86, 100, 184 messianism ​2–3, 17–18, 41, 49–50, 52, 54–55, 59, 61–62, 64–66, 70, 107, 109, 117, 120, 194, 213 midwife ​144, 154 minorities ​7, 18, 37, 106, 194, 195, 208 mixing ​82 monotheism ​43, 46–47, 52, 60, 61, 116, 209, 210, 213 morality ​3, 5–7, 37–38, 43–47, 53–55, 60–61, 64–65, 70–71, 82–83, 91–98, 100–102, 116, 120, 131, 137–38, 146, 174–75, 177, 184, 186–87, 194 Moses ​4–5, 11, 12, 14–16, 20, 21, 23, 26–30, 32–36, 43–45, 47, 49, 57–58, 60–61, 63–66, 70, 74–75, 89–91, 102–3, 107, 109–10, 112, 114, 118–19, 121, 130, 136, 139, 147, 151–52, 155, 174, 182, 184, 186, 189, 191, 194 murder ​137, 148–49, 181, 206, 211 mysticism ​3, 75–77, 79, 187 New Moon ​114 Noahide laws ​6, 137–38, 144, 146, 148, 150 oaths ​11, 16, 27, 99, 108 omer ​26 ordination ​130–31 orthodoxy ​5, 54, 60, 68, 72, 77, 83–84, 185, 200 Passover ​26, 70, 82, 113–14 Paul ​1–2, 4–5, 7–8, 49–59, 61–73, 76–87, 99, 102, 108–10, 114, 120, 159, 173, 175–76, 185–88, 190, 192–94, 196, 199, 210 Penal Code ​20–23, 28

232

Subject Index

Pentateuch ​9, 14, 24, 32, 113, 140 Pharisees ​26, 83, 183–84 pietism ​3 piety ​14, 79, 85, 111 polygyny ​25 prayer ​34, 61–62, 128–32, 135, 161, 164–65, 167–70, 181 predestination ​12–13, 15–17, 19, 28, 85, 86 preventive law ​112. See also punitive law, remedial law priesthood ​5, 16–17, 22–23, 26, 32, 35–36, 90–91, 93, 95, 98–103, 193 property ​138, 143–44, 153–54, 159 proselytes ​120, 194 punishment ​18–19, 24, 28, 79, 85, 130, 161, 167, 198, 205–6. Capital punishment 9, 22, 24 punitive law ​70, 97, 110, 112. See also preventive law, remedial law purity ​5, 9–10, 15, 17, 20–21, 25, 32–34, 36, 51, 90–103, 108, 111, 113, 119–20. See also clean, holiness, unclean ransom ​97–98 reconciliation ​49, 126, 182 red heifer ​119 remedial law ​110. See also preventive law, punitive law repentance ​17, 25, 28, 42, 44, 86, 94, 96, 141–42, 152, 173, 176 retribution ​17, 85, 148 revealed, revelation ​7, 11, 14, 27, 35–39, 42, 46, 58, 72, 81, 86, 110, 115, 137–39, 144, 150, 173–79, 181–82, 184, 188–89 righteousness ​10–11, 14, 17, 23–24, 33–34, 36–42, 44, 55, 62–64, 89, 111, 119, 171, 187, 194 ritual ​5, 7, 62, 65, 76, 83, 89–103, 111–12, 120, 140, 158–59, 168, 193–95, 198, 201, 203, 205, 211–12, 214 Sabbath ​9–12, 14, 21, 24, 26, 70–72, 74, 79, 82–83, 108, 110, 112–14, 119, 130, 135, 181, 189, 193

sacrifice ​5, 12, 43–46, 49, 59, 71, 73, 75–76, 81–82, 89–92, 94–98, 100, 102, 110, 112, 118–19, 129, 140, 151, 178, 191 sectarianism ​4, 10, 11, 78 sex ​25, 35, 82, 92, 94, 157–58, 170–71, 174, 201, 204–6. See also chastity, fornication, licentiousness, lust Sinai ​14, 35, 57–58, 60, 119, 137–39, 148–49, 166, 182–84, 191 skin disease ​92–93 status, legal ​17, 46, 93, 99, 206 Sukkot ​82 supersessionism ​3, 5, 89–90, 101–2, 118 tablets ​Heavenly Tablets 9; Decalogue tablets 118–19 temple ​10, 18, 23, 25, 30, 32, 45, 53, 62, 73, 79, 83, 93, 94–95, 114, 117, 119, 136, 140, 182, 188, 190–91 theft ​137, 143–44, 148–49, 181 tithing ​106 toilet behavior ​157–58 Torah ​1–6, 8–12, 14, 16, 19, 21, 23, 25–28, 32, 35–36, 46–47, 49–54, 56, 61, 64–65, 67, 105–14, 116, 118–20, 135–46, 148–55, 157–58, 163, 166, 176, 189, 194, 212 torts ​159 unclean ​59, 76, 96. See also clean, holiness, purity Unleavened Bread (Maṣṣot) ​26, 113–14 vengeance ​25, 27, 83, 85 wages ​40 wealth ​19, 24–25, 38–39, 40–41 Yom Kippur ​61–62. See also Day of Atonement