Daniel Boyarin

In this book, Boyarin repeatedly asserts the brilliance of Paul, and in turn, writes about him brilliantly. The author comes to the main letters of Paul from the standpoint of a post-modern Jewish Talmudic scholar. For him, the passage that provides the key to understanding the complex thought-world of the apostle to the nations is Galatians 3:28, where Paul asserts that “there is neither Jew nor Greek, there is neither slave nor free, there is neither male and female, for ye are all one show more in Christ Jesus” (this verse is printed on the cover of the book). Boyarin reads this as Paul’s attempt to resolve the tension he had experienced between the conflicting pulls of Jewish particularism and Hellenistic universalism. The solution involves a thoroughgoing allegorization, through which the emblems of particularity, especially circumcision, become signifiers of a higher, spiritual reality. In this way, “true Israel” becomes configured as those Jews and non-Jews who become followers of Jesus. The result is a moderate dualism, one “that makes room for the body, however much the spirit is more highly valued” (p. 185). At the same time, it leaves no room for Jews who choose neither to renounce their particularity nor become Christian. In subsequent centuries, this led in predominantly Christian lands to the so-called “Jewish problem” and the hideously barbaric attempts to “solve” it. Without making Paul personally responsible for this, Boyarin shows how these developments were one way Paul’s writings could be used.
Boyarin’s reading of Paul is sensible. In the course of his research, he found that at many points his understanding was a return to positions taken in the 19th century by F. C. Baur. While I found much to agree with, there are a couple of points I’m not so sure about. Toward the end of his Letter to the Galatians, Paul claims that the competing missionaries don’t themselves keep the law. Boyarin relates this charge to Paul’s lengthy account of his conflict with Peter in Gal. 2. While not maintaining that Peter is the opponent Paul has in mind throughout the letter, Boyarin asserts that the problem is the same. Rather than believing that adherence to the Torah is necessary to belong to the community of Christ-believers and thus attain salvation, theirs is a position of expediency. I will have to live with this suggestion for a while, since a more mainstream understanding makes adequate sense of chapters 3 and 4 of Galatians as well.
In another departure from current mainstream thinking on Paul, Boyarin understands him to be a proto-encratite, proclaiming the superiority of celibacy over marriage not only because of the “present distress,” but generally. In this way, Boyarin returns to the understanding of earlier centuries. His argument, based on readings of Romans 5–8, I Corinthians 6–7 and Galatians 5, is persuasive, but again, I will have to live with this for a while.
In his final chapter, Boyarin shifts from engaging with Paul’s writings and the history of their interpretation to his personal response to Paul’s claim. Boyarin rejects Paul’s program of divesting himself of particularity to become assimilated into a universal (non-Jewish) man (Paul’s call for an end to the distinction male/female has a similar effect; initially liberating for women, treated as second-class, ends by assimilating them to a male ideal). Instead, he proposes a continued dialectic of Pauline common humanity and its opposite, Rabbinic particularism: “A dialectic that would utilize each of these as antithesis to the other, correcting in the ‘Christian’ system its tendencies toward a coercive universalism and in the ‘Jewish’ system its tendencies toward contemptuous neglect for human solidarity might lead beyond both toward a better social system” (p. 235) This would have the effect of what Boyarin calls “deterritorializing Jewishness.” As he sees it, it is not possible to uphold both particularity and territoriality. Boyarin thus rejects not only Paul but also Zionism, since the particularism of a minority cannot help but become oppressive when it is combined with political hegemony. In its place, Boyarin envisions what he calls a “diasporized (multicultural) Israel.” Sounds interesting, but it’s hard for me to see how to get there from the current situation.
I found this book stimulating and thought-provoking. Boyarin’s frequent references to points he had previously made or would subsequently suggest that the book could have been better organized. Also, there are 78 pages of endnotes, more than a quarter of the book. In many of these, Boyarin engages with a wide variety of scholarship, not just Biblical. I tried flipping back and forth for the first couple of chapters, but often had difficulty finding my way into the main text again. So I stayed with the main text, sometimes turning to the back at the end of each chapter to scan the notes. I’m sure I missed some interesting material this way. There seems to be no hard and fast rule for when footnotes would be better than endnotes. I envisioned an edition of this book in which the pages were laid out like pages of the Talmud, with the body of text in the middle, surrounded by discussion in all the margins.
Most books about Paul are written with the assumption that his writings are scripture, and therefore need to be defended or debunked. For Boyarin, they are valuable documents of first-century Jewish thought. The resulting book is a worthwhile read. show less

Unheroic Conduct: The Rise of Heterosexuality and the Invention of the Jewish Man by Daniel Boyarin is uneven at best. The best parts are very, very good, but there are a number of places where it is almost unreadable. It is pretentious and limited. Also, although the title doesn't say, it is limited to the Orthodox Ashkenazic Jewish people of Eastern Europe.

The initial premise of the book is that after the Jews were expelled from Judah and Jerusalem in the 6th century BCE and then later, in show more 135 CE,* they needed a center for their unification. Responding to pressure both within and outside the community, the Rabbis moved to form a people using Talmudic studies as the basis of Jewish identification and heritage. The Talmudic scholars deliberately turned away from the oppressors abstract Phallic ideal and all that entails; thrusting, violence, rape, masculinity, fighting and aggression. The Rabbis needed to come to terms with the non-Jewish ideals of the Phallus without losing the reality of the penis which they were NOT trying to eliminate from their culture. They needed to come to terms with the idea without the ideals. The male-bonding, femminizing (Boyarin's word), and the quiet (passive?) ideal of studying tended to form men who looked female-like to the Phallus-driven surrounding cultures. Jewish women were culturally attuned to desire a gentle, studious mate. The author deals with this Jewish ideal in depth (about 200 pages). Then we move abruptly into the late 19th century into the early 20th century. The second half of the book is based on psychoanalysis, Zionism, and then back to psychoanalysis.

One central core of the book (some 100 pages, two of the chapters) on the rise of heterosexuality, are reinterpretations of Freud's life and work. It appears that Freud's theories are based on his fear of his homoerotic if not homosexual attachments and fear of his Jewishness at a time when homophobia and antisemitism were on the rise in Europe. I find his arguments interesting, desire to check some of his references, and find so much emphasis on one man's psychology out of place in an exploration of 2000+ years of a people's gender exploration and theology. I accept Boyarin's statement that heterosexuality was first named in the late 1800s** and used to counterbalance with homosexuality, but even he recognizes that manliness and feminized were concepts used for thousands of years. The concept that castration complex merged with the Jewish tradition of circumcision to create antisemitism is way out there. I cannot decide from the text if it was Freud who made the connection or if it is Boyarin. Whoever made it was cracked.

The Zionist movement was described, by this avowed anti-Zionist, as a move to assimilate Jews into Aryan culture and “make real men” (fighters) of them. In order to become like “all men”, Jewish traditions must be eliminated, and an ersatz Christian civilization put in its place. The Talmud must be forgotten in a move to become invisible. This would, supposedly, put a stop to antisemitism. Jews must become like their oppressors. We can easily see the self-hate in the Zionist and psychoanalytic writings of the period though Boyarin's examples.

The chapter “Retelling the Story of O.” tells the psychiatric story of Anna O. and her subsequent life and activism as Bertha Pappenheim. The chapter has some good points, but it is unclear in the main. I learned more of Anna O's psychoanalysis in a Wiki article than I did in his chapter about her psychoanalysis. The cultural background, as the Jewish “modernizers” and Zionists attempted to take away women's traditional Jewish role in the marketplace and running businesses was more clearly stated in the book. This gave a clearer reason for the endemic problem of “hysteria in” (revolt by) Jewish women at the turn of the 19th/20th century. While most documentation of Bertha Pappenheim's life do not explain what caused the cure, Boyarin places it directly on the shift from modernist Vienna to Orthodox Frankfort. In Frankfort she was able to go out into the world and make a difference. In this Boyarin blames the condition directly on the Zionists and other modernizers who would limit women's roles to the “angel in the house” who still have no access to Hebraic learning, thus giving intelligent women no outlet.

The one sentence that, I think, expresses Boyarin's thesis is on p. 354.
“Rather than a one-sided perception of Jewish men as feminized or of Jewish women as viriagoized, can we not begin to conceive the structure of Jewish gender as being differently configured, as being resistant to ... [rigid] patterns of gender ...?”

The book has the useful footnotes, section on works cited, and index necessary in a scholarly book.

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* Yes, Peter, the period between the first and second leaving Judah were based on this ideal, and the Talmud includes ways that buying into the oppressors ways (being manly men) were considered collaboration with the enemy.

**The term "heterosexual" was first published in 1892 in C.G. Chaddock's translation of Krafft-Ebing's "Psychopathia Sexualis". en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Heterosexuality show less

Daniel Boyarin is one of the most original and provocative rabbinic scholars, the author of many valuable books exploring the matrix in which both orthodox Judaism and Christianity arose. He is one of the many scholars who have challenged the assumption that there was, at an early point, a “parting of the ways” between these two movements. In The Jewish Gospels, he sets out to show that the New Testament is “more deeply embedded within Second Temple Jewish life and thought than many show more have imagined” (pp. 157–8).
This is even true, he contends, in the beliefs about Jesus often termed Christology. In other words, it is not just that Jesus lived and died a Jew, but even the concept of “Christ” was not a foreign element, cobbled together from non-Jewish sources. Boyarin explicitly offers his reconstruction as an alternative narrative of how Christology arose. These motifs—the notion of a dual godhead with father and son, the notion of a Redeemer who himself will be both God and man, and the notion that this Redeemer would suffer and die as part of the process of salvation—are often seen as Christian as opposed to Jewish.
These topics are explored in chapters 1, 2 and 4, using a close reading of Dan 7, the Enoch literature, 4 Ezra, and Isa 53. The results are not controversial in today’s scholarly world. More controversial is the imagined dichotomy behind his thesis: that the group of ideas we think of as Christology were either developed by his followers after his crucifixion, or were present in Jewish thought prior to Jesus. Since, as Boyarin demonstrates, these ideas were there, he concludes that Jesus saw himself in these terms and openly shared his self-understanding with his followers.
Here, I believe, he does not display the same differentiated reading of the gospels and other New Testament texts that he shows with Old Testament, intertestamental, and rabbinic literature. There is ample evidence in the New Testament, to me, of an intermediate possibility, namely, the view that the raw materials for later Christology were indeed available in the first century Jewish world, but coalesced around Jesus after his crucifixion. On this view, as well, it is not necessary to posit the adoption of concepts from the wider, pagan world to explain Christian beliefs about Jesus. On this point, I agree with Boyarin.
Falling outside of this discussion of the sources of Christology is chapter 3, entitled “Jesus Kept Kosher.” Although a separate topic, there are continuities with the other three chapters of the book, and it shares their strengths and weaknesses. In this chapter, he focuses on a conflict between some Pharisees from Jerusalem and Jesus in Mark 7. The traditional reading of this account is that it shows “the total rejection by Mark’s Jesus of Jewish dietary practices, the kosher rules” (p. 103). Boyarin makes the contrary assertion: according to the Gospel of Mark, Jesus kept kosher, which is to say (this is a crucial step in his argument) that he saw himself not as abrogating the Torah but as defending it. He defended it against what he perceived to be threats to it from the Pharisees: “Jesus’ Judaism was a conservative reaction against some radical innovations in the Law stemming from the Pharisees and Scribes of Jerusalem” (p. 105).
Accepting Markan priority, Boyarin views this Gospel as representative of the “earliest” Christians. If Mark were Jewish, “then the beginnings of the Jewish movement can be considered in a very different light” (106). In this view, Jesus was fighting not against Judaism, but within it.
To support his contention, Boyarin points out that the distinction made in Jewish thought between clean/unclean and permitted/not-permitted, with the first pair dealing with the body and other matters, is ignored in scholarly discussion of the passage Only the second category is applied in the question of whether foods are kosher or not. He concedes, though, that animals not kosher are called impure in the Torah (112). When one consults the author’s end notes, one finds the interesting remark that this is a “terminological glitch.” I would submit that, while knowledge of this distinction in rabbinic thought is helpful in interpreting this passage, scholars who fail to can be excused.
Nevertheless, Boyarin succeeds, in my view, in showing that the passage carefully records a debate that is, ironically, the earliest witness to the innovative practice of hand-washing to avoid ritual impurity. To him, this is evidence that the evangelist Mark was Jewish. It may however prove nothing more than that he carefully transmitted traditional material in his possession. Whether this is enough to place the entire passage in the world of the “earliest” Christians, therefore in direct continuity with Jesus and his practices, is another matter. For one thing, the fact that the Pharisees complain to Jesus about what the disciples do, not about what Jesus does (Mark 7:5) suggests a possible diachronic dimension. For another, the evangelist’s detailed explanation of the custom of hand-washing is a certain indication that his implied reader is not Jewish and has no certain knowledge of Jewish customs.
Another way in which Boyarin makes sense of the passage is in pointing out that the nature of Jesus’ explanation to the disciples (verses 18–23) treats the matter of impurity as a parable. What comes out of a person defiles, which Jesus then interprets not as bodily emissions, but as characteristics that come out of the heart.
Boyarin concludes that the editorial comment “he purified all foods” (verse 19) means that Jesus rejected the stringent laws of defiled foods (p. 121). I’m not sure this follows. Following Boyarin’s logic, these foods never were impure, meaning there was nothing for Jesus to do except uphold this. There was no “purifying” for him to do.
Boyarin goes further: “It is highly unlikely that in its original context [just what does he imagine this to be?], Mark was read as meaning that Jesus had abrogated the rules of forbidden and permitted animals” (ibid.). Yet to me, the revisions that the Gospel of Matthew makes to this passage shows that its author was, at the very least, concerned that it could very well be read this way. Even more likely: that he understood the Gospel of Mark to mean this.
For Boyarin, the entire passage makes sense, and Jesus’ saying can be seen within a Jewish spiritual world (p. 124). May well be, but Matthew clearly thought otherwise. He deals with this in endnote 24 (p. 184): “The Matthean text makes explicit that which might be ambiguous in Mark as we’ve read it.” This leads him to question whether Matthew is a “Judaizing" revision of Mark, a “temporizing voice that actually serves to neutralize the authentic Christian message on the Law as represented by Mark and Paul, namely, that Christianity is a whole new religion, an entirely different way of serving God from the way that the Israelites and Jews have understood it?” Once again, he reduces the argument to either/or terms that miss the point. The question is not Law yes or no, but which law (or, which aspects of the law) for whom? Either way, I would agree with his conclusion: “Torah-abiding Jesus folks are not aberrant; they simply are the earliest Church,” but not with the way he reaches it.
Regrettably, this book is not up to the high standard of some of Boyarin’s other books, such as Border Lines or A Radical Jew. In addition to the problems I have mentioned, the text feels padded and repetitive, surprising in such a slim volume. Nevertheless, I feel it is a good read, as reflected in my rating. For those who are still laboring under the impression that Judaism and Christianity early diverged into two discrete religions, or that mainstream views of the nature of God and Christ were the result of Hellenistic syncretism, I would recommend this as a good starting point. But not as the last word. show less

Just when you think you’ve got it all figured out, along comes Daniel Boyarin, a professor of Talmudic Culture and Rhetoric at the University of California.

You think Christianity’s unique contribution to Judaism was the introduction of a god-man? Wrong. Could it be the idea of a suffering savior? Wrong again. Maybe that Jesus rejected Jewish dietary laws and Sabbath restrictions, freeing us from the Law? Hardly; Boyarin paints a very Jewish Jesus in his reading of the Gospels, certainly show more a Jesus who keeps kosher.

Christianity’s one claim to fame may be the insistence that the Messiah had already arrived, but that’s about the extent of its uniqueness. Otherwise, Christianity is a very Jewish offshoot of a Jewish religion. Boyarin draws from texts like the Book of Daniel and 1st Enoch to explain the title Son of Man (which, it turns out, is a much more exalted title than Son of God) and in turn to expose the expectation of many first-century Jews of just such a divine savior.

This is a fascinating, controversial book presenting a very different look at Jesus as one who defended Torah from wayward Judaic sects (the Pharisees), rather than vice versa. I don’t think the arguments are fully developed yet, but certainly Boyarin introduces “reasonable doubt” against traditional scholarship. Let the arguing begin. show less