Reimagining Boundaries: Jewish and Christian Identity in Late Antiquity

In this week's show our guest is Rabbi Dr. Juan Marcos Bejarano Gutierrez  author of Reimagining Boundaries: Jewish and Christian Identity in Late Antiquity.

In the eighth century, a debate between Sergius the Stylite and a Jew occurred. The discussion was conveniently titled, Debate against a Jew. It records arguments about the relevance of biblical texts to Christians and the Jewish people. The anti-Jewish perspectives of Sergius are not surprising. The response given by his Jewish interlocutor is, however. The Jew noted that he was surprised by the number of Christians who attended his synagogue, contributed to it, and celebrated various Jewish holidays alongside Jews.

What does this tell us? It shows us that the boundaries between Jews and Christians even as late as the 8th century were permeable at the very least and ill-defined at the most extreme. The anti-Jewish polemics of Melito of Sardis in the second century or John Chrysostom in the fourth century are heartfelt. Regardless of how vile they are, they reflect something very significant.

The Church’s consistent attack on Jewish practices and theology was reflective of a simple fact. The Jewish tradition was sufficiently strong to interest curious Christians who were most certainly familiar with the anti-Jewish sentiments of medieval Christianity but saw in the living presence of Jews among them a very different portrait of the people of the Bible and their continued appeal.

Judaism and Christianity as we know them today, and this is the crucial point, i.e., today did not exist in the first centuries of the Common Era in the same form. This is not to say that people did not recognize near-universal Jewish observances, i.e., the Sabbath, the lighting of candles, beliefs, i.e., the election of Israel, etc., or even nascent Christian rituals. But the fully developed theological systems and the boundaries of these entities did not exist in the same way they did in later periods of history.

With that being said, this work seeks to address the problem of Jewish and Christian identity from various perspectives. What follows are a series of what I call semi-independent essays discussing the nexus between these two evolving religious systems. These essays seek to challenge the reader to consider alternative approaches to identity and consider that beliefs and the impositions of later views partly formulate our assumptions about groups on either side of the supposed divide. That is not to say that Jews and Christians were nebulous entities characterized by “open borders” to use a contentious modern-day term. Instead, there were groups whose responses to each other were partly formed by theological, regional, cultural, and perhaps even economic considerations.

A major focus of this work is the Clementine Literature as a reflective of a community that found itself in between the communities we now recognize as Judaism and Christianity.