Border Lines

"I can’t! The whole thing? What I tried to do was to choose some books that change the story in some fundamental way, or at least call it into question. But to give a précis of the whole metanarrative of Jewish history? That’s too much to ask! Yes, Daniel Boyarin’s Border Lines. The standard story is that Christianity is the daughter religion of Judaism. I don’t know why they use feminine metaphors, but in any case … what’s happening in that field is a rethinking of the whole story of the evolution of Judaism and Christianity. Two thousand years ago various groups of people who accepted the Hebrew Bible and the God that’s represented there and believed that He resided in the Temple, saw that Temple destroyed. And once the Temple was destroyed they had to figure out a way to maintain their beliefs. And there were many, many people who tried to figure out how to do that in various ways. Daniel Boyarin is the most outspoken and the most interesting historian of all this—not always dead on—but he provides a picture of all of the questions that are now open. People would say, once the Temple was destroyed, that the Rabbis created Judaism and St Paul broke away from the Rabbinic Jews and Pharisees and created this new religion. But in fact it took a very long time for these two groups to be teased out of each other."