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Introduction: Judaeo-Christianity Redivivus
Daniel Boyarin
Journal of Early Christian Studies, Volume 9, Number 4,
Winter
2001, pp. 417-419 (Article)
Published by The Johns Hopkins University Press
DOI: 10.1353/earl.2001.0054
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BOYARIN/INTRODUCTION 417
Journal of Early Christian Studies 9:4, 417420 2001 The Johns
Hopkins University Press
Introduction:Judaeo-Christianity Redivivus
DANIEL BOYARIN
In June of 1999, a group of approximately fifteen scholars met
at TrinityCollege in Hartford, under the aegis of Professor Mark
Silk. The confer-
ence had been conceived by Guy Stroumsa and Daniel Boyarin and
was
framed as a meeting between Israeli patristic scholars and
historians of
early Christianity and American counterparts. The common theme
of the
enterprise was new evaluations of the relations of between
Judaism and
Christianity (as well as between Jews and Christians) in late
antiquity.
There was a sensibility shared by the two organizers, as well as
by many,
if not most, of the participants at the meeting that a new
generation of
scholars, both those trained in traditional early Christian
studies and
those trained in traditional rabbinics were poised and ready to
enter into
conversation with each other and to conceive, in some way or in
part at
least, of the two enterprises as one complex field of study, in
which we
ignore each others work at our peril. John Gager provided the
keynote
address and Elizabeth A. Clark a critical summation at the
end.
Following here are three representative papers from that
conference
that incarnate some of the different logoi that this mode of
research has
generated and, we hope, will be a seed for future work as
well.The three papers that are included here each represent one
possible
tendency within this emerging and burgeoning field of study.
Hillel
Newmans paper, Jeromes Judaizers, critically investigates
Jeromes
uses of the term Judaizers (iudaizantes) as well as his alleged
implicitreferences to such Christians. The paper consists of a
meticulous revisit-
ing of the arguments made by Samuel Krauss a century ago and
repeated
in scholarship since then without critical reinvestigation.
Newman con-
cludes that the term is being most often deployed by Jerome as a
rhetori-
cal trope, either in his controversies with Augustine, as an
oblique way ofattacking his opponent, or as a means of defense
against fears that he
himself might be held up as a Judaizer (Judaizing panic).
Finally the term
