Augustine as Revolutionary?: Reflections on Continuity and Rupture in Jewish–Christian Relations in Paula Fredriksen's Augustine and the Jews

Abstract

Augustine as Revolutionary? Reflections on Continuity and Rupture in Jewish-Christian Relations in Paula Fredriksen's Augustine and the Jews PAULA FREDRIKSEN. Augustine and the Jews: A Christian Defence of Jem and Judabm. New York: Doubleday, 2008. Pp. 488.THIRTY OR FORTY YEARS AGO, the most divisive issue in the study of ancient society and culture was the degree to which in the Second Temple and talmudic periods (circa 450 B.C.E. to 650 CE.) operated within the bounds of a single unified authoritative framework. Some scholars explained the conspicuous variation in belief and practice attested in the sources as relatively minor deviations from a more or less cohesive system of religious norms (as reflected perhaps in the writings of the rabbis). Others, however, viewed this diversity and even pluralism as the original and enduring condition of religious practice in antiquity, despite the strident insistence of a handful of ancient sectarians to the contrary. At this point, all but a very few have abandoned the proposition that ancient Jews functioned within or even had the notion of a normative Judaism governed by a systematic set of theological beliefs - though many now would also wisely refrain from speaking of multiple Judaisms as wholly discrete cultural or sociological systems.1The current generation of scholars, by contrast, is far more riven by a different, though equally perennial, historiographical conundrum, namely, the problem of historical continuity, change, and rupture. The past ten years have seen increasingly heated debates concerning the degree to which institutions, practices, and discursive categories were repeatedly and fundamentally transformed in antiquity at key moments of historical disjuncture. Can we indeed still speak usefully of as an essentially continuous, if always evolving, phenomenon? Thus, we find in recent - especially North American - scholarship the conspicuous recurrence of such terms as beginnings, rupture, making, and invention. Novel forms of identity are called - or interpellated - into existence. Rather than forming the fabric of a continuous religious and cultural system known as Judaism, Jewish tradition is unmasked as a discursive strategy, the name under which historical change masquerades.2To take two prominent recent examples: in a series of books and articles, Daniel Boyarin has argued that the gradual consolidation of a Christian orthodox establishment and the concomitant production of the specifically Christian discourses of orthodoxy, heresy, and religion did not merely provide the background for the emergence of as formulated by the rabbis of Late Antiquity but were the prime engines in this process.3 According to Boyarin, at least from a certain analytical vantage point, we can productively say that rabbinic was invented by Christianity as elites, over the course of Late Antiquity, engaged with - and, ultimately, refused - the hegemonic logic of imperial, orthodox Christianity. Complementarily, though in a rather different academic idiom, Seth Schwartz has advanced the equally provocative thesis that, from the second to fourth centuries, Jewishness formed at best a vestigial element in the social identities of the now highly Romanized and provincialized ethnic Jews of the Mediterranean basin, but under the often heavy-handed auspices of imperial Christianity its fragments were - somewhat paradoxically - reconstituted into a new and newly robust form of communal identity.4 In Schwartz's analysis, the disembedding of the Jews from the increasingly Christianized Roman imperial system of the late fourth to sixth centuries was critical to the emergence of as a radically new type of religious, social, and cultural formation.Of course, not all historians of ancient would endorse such sweeping, even extravagant narratives of social and cultural rupture. …