Overview
Daniel Boyarin turns to the Epistles of Paul as the spiritual autobiography of a first-century Jewish cultural critic. What led Paul-in his dramatic conversion to Christianity-to such a radical critique of Jewish culture? Paul's famous formulation, ""There is neither Jew nor Greek, no male and female in Christ,"" demonstrates the genius of Christianity: its concern for all people. The genius of Judaism is its validation of genealogy and cultural, ethnic difference. But the evils of these two thought systems are the obverse of their geniuses: Christianity has threatened to coerce universality, while ethnic difference is one of the most troubled issues in modern history. Boyarin posits a ""diaspora identity"" as a way to negotiate the pitfalls inherent in either position. Jewishness disrupts categories of identity because it is not national, genealogical, or even religious, but all of these, in dialectical tension with one another. It is analogous with gender: gender identity makes us different in some ways but not in others. An exploration of these tensions in the Pauline corpus, argues Boyarin, will lead us to a richer appreciation of our own cultural quandaries as male and female, gay and straight, Jew and Palestinian-and as human beings.
Full Product Details
Author: Daniel Boyarin
Publisher: University of California Press
Imprint: University of California Press
Volume: 1
Dimensions:
Width: 15.20cm
, Height: 2.80cm
, Length: 22.90cm
Weight: 0.590kg
ISBN: 9780520212145
ISBN 10: 0520212142
Pages: 400
Publication Date: 11 November 1997
Audience:
Professional and scholarly
,
Professional & Vocational
Format: Paperback
Publisher's Status: Active
Availability: Out of stock
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Reviews
A markedly contemporary study that navigates the New Testament scholar past the perils of Pauline theology. Boyarin (Talmudic Culture/Univ. of Calif., Berkeley; Carnal Israel, not reviewed) attempts to reclaim Paul as an important Jewish thinker. He goes on to establish this primary apostle as a Hellenized Jew whose Platonic sensibility calls for a universal sameness that negates the divisions separating Jew from Gentile and man from woman. The disembodied spirituality of Platonic dualism allows females (especially virgins) to be equal to men under Christ, and allows an uncircumcised Christian of any gender to circumcise the foreskin of her [sic] heart with Hebrew Bible commandments universalized and allegorized. Boyarin does not glibly valorize Paul as a champion of feminism and an opponent of Jewish exclusivist chauvinism. After crediting Paul for being a radical social critic, the author makes clear how the apostle's pre-Marxist universalism too easily slid into violent coercion in the later, blood-soaked chapters of Christian history. Boyarin analyzes the work of many Christian scholars in concluding that Lutheran misinterpretations of Paul allow us to consider the apostle to be far more antagonistic to Jews and Judaism than he really was. The benefit of Boyarin's Jewish defense against hermeneutical Christian anti-Semitism is tempered by his disdain for a Judaic tendency towards contemptuous neglect for human solidarity and his anti-Zionism ( modern Jewish statist nationalism has been...very violent and exclusionary ). Sometimes he confuses Christian salvation theology with Jewish belief, and he fails to find any similarity between Pauline Platonism and the allegorical and universal levels of Torah laws. The final chapter digresses to a personal view of the essentialist/social constructionist dichotomy, but the book does end with ample notes and bibliography. A rewarding read for students of Christian theology willing to be challenged by today's multicultural, poststructuralist, postfeminist scholarship. (Kirkus Reviews)
Author Information
Daniel Boyarin is Taubman Professor of Talmudic Culture at the University of California, Berkeley. He is the author of Carnal Israel: Reading Sex in Talmudic Culture (California, 1993).
