Playing a Jewish Game: Gentile Christian Judaizing in the First and Second Centuries CE (review)

Abstract

Playing a Jewish Game: Gentile Christian Judaizing in the First and Second Centuries CE, by Michele Murray. Studies in Christianity and Judaism/Etudes sur le christianisme et le judaisme 13. Waterloo, Ontario: Wilfrid Laurier University Press, 2004. 240 pp. $44.95. The present study represents a revised version of Michele Murray's doctoral dissertation completed at the University of Toronto. The book is a contribution to the ongoing field of research that no longer treats early Christianity as a movement distinct from Judaism. Rather, as Murray emphasizes, recent scholarship has highlighted the ongoing interaction between Judaism and Christianity in the first two centuries CE (p. 1). Much of the impetus for this rethinking of Jewish-Christian relations in antiquity emerges from contemporary post-Holocaust Jewish-Christian dialogue, both in a scholarly and non-scholarly environment. Murray treats one of the most contentious issues in Jewish-Christian relations both in antiquity and up to the modern period-the abundance of anti-Jewish rhetoric (Murray's terminology) in the New Testament and early Christian literature. Previous scholarship has understood this phenomenon as a by-product of the parting of the ways between Judaism and Christianity. Namely, as Christianity pulled further away from it felt compelled to distance itself theologically and ideologically from Judaism. Likewise, as Jewish Christians continued to advocate observance of Jewish law, Christian leaders needed to further dissociate nascent Christianity from Judaism. Murray's study argues for nothing less than a paradigm shift in the understanding of this phenomenon. She re-contextualizes a large amount of this anti-Jewish rhetoric, arguing that it should not be understood as directed toward Jews (or even Jewish Christians), but rather against Gentile Christian judaizers. This term refers to Gentile Christians who adhered to some Jewish practices while maintaining a commitment to Christianity (p. 2). Murray argues that Gentile Christians' practicing Jewish customs and rites was especially disturbing to early Christian leaders. In particular, they found these Gentiles playing a Jewish game to be dangerously blurring the boundaries between Christianity and Judaism, and therefore attempted to suppress it (p. 2). Thus, the intense anti-Jewish rhetoric found in the New Testament and early Christian literature merely represents the efforts of Christian leaders to discourage Gentile Christians from observing Jewish law and to condemn those Gentile Christians actively promoting this lifestyle among fellow Gentile Christians. In unpacking this thesis, Murray explores three different but closely related issues. First, she identifies the historical reality of Gentile Christians adhering to various aspects of Jewish law. Second, she seeks to demonstrate that the motivation for this behavior came from fellow Gentile Christians, not from Jewish Christians. Finally, she attempts to frame the anti-Jewish rhetoric throughout the New Testament and early Christian literature as a direct response to this behavior on the part of the ecclesiastical authorities. In order to fulfill this task, Murray marshals evidence of anti-Jewish rhetoric that comes from texts presumably addressed to a Gentile Christian audience, attempting to reconstruct their socio-historical context. She isolates three distinct geographic areas for this sort of investigation: Galatia (based solely on Paul's letter to the Galations), Syria (based on the Epistle of Barnabas, the Didache, and the Pseudo-Clementine literature), and Asia Minor (based on Revelation, Ignatius, Justin Martyr, Marcion, and Melito). …