If the only compelling feature of this book were its bibliography, it would be easy to recommend. That it also contains concise and up-to-date descriptions of the basic contours of the scholarly debates surrounding topics including the “parting of the ways,” “Jewish identity” in the first century, the demographic parameters of Paul's mission, Matthew's “Jewishness,” and how to mine taanaitic literature for history, warrants its place on the bookshelf of anyone who teaches rabbinics, New Testament, or early Christianity. Yet Joshua Burns, while returning to the well-studied parallel development of rabbinic Judaism and apostolic Christianity and their eventual antipathy towards one another, manages to make a compelling new argument for the relative paucity of information about Christianity and Christians in the earliest sources of rabbinic Judaism. In so doing, Burns maps out an intermediate space between those, like Lawrence Schiffman and Jacob Neusner, who argue that Christianity was already largely a non-Jewish phenomenon by roughly the time of destruction of Herod's temple in 70 CE, and those, like Daniel Boyarin and Annette Yoshiko Reed, who wish to see Judaism and Christianity as poles on a messy spectrum until the heresiology of both camps succeeded in defining the other by the fourth century CE. According to Burns, taanaitic literature contains few references to Christianity, because though they knew enough about “Jewish-Christianity” in the second and third centuries to dislike it, the early rabbis saw their Jewish-Christian neighbors as one of many misguided yet thoroughly Jewish sects encompassed by the term minim. What they did not know was Paul's thoroughly gentile Christianity, which slowly came to dominate late antiquity; that is what, conversely, the Amoraim talk about when they talk about Jesus.
In order to make this subtle and convincing argument, Burns lays out a comprehensive yet clear project. He begins in chapter 1 by summarizing the history and providing a good critique of the “parting of the ways” model, arguing not only for the continued existence of Jewish Christians into the third century, but for classifying (at least some of) them as Jews. In chapter 2, Burns returns to the discussion of identity, eschewing narrow ethnic or religious definitions, preferring to sketch a history of Jews and Judaism from biblical times to argue for David Goodblatt's notion, which he terms “Continuity over Change” (77). As someone who has long attempted to teach his students that the terms יהודי, Ἰουδαῖος, and Iudaeus are all best translated as “Judean,” I found this chapter as challenging as it is compelling. The final section, concerning 2 Maccabees, is especially convincing. Chapter 3 delves into New Testament and early Christian sources, setting up a dichotomy between Paul's letters to a thoroughly gentile church in contrast to Matthew's gospel, the Didache, and the Pseudo-Clementine texts as directed towards Jewish-Christians. In this schema these camps are not antagonists but simply separate streams; one camp included the heirs to Jesus's initial Jewish followers and the other was the product of Paul's novel notions about faith and works. This is all well and good, though I take issue with Burns's tendency to see Matthew as a single coherent (if conflicted) work, ignoring the position, based on higher textual criticism (especially the two-source hypothesis), that the First Gospel is multivocal and layered. Chapter 4 turns to Mishnah and Tosefta, to show that the Christianity with which the Taanaim were familiar was that of Matthew's Jewish gospel, the Didache, and the Pseudo-Clementine texts, and not that which stems from Paul. He writes, “As a function of the broader Tannaitic discourse on heresy, the targeted indictment of Christians preserved in the Tosefta and subsequent rabbinic texts contribute to a distinct impression of just who the early rabbinic sages thought those people were. The Christians with whom they were acquainted were, in the first place, Jews. In other words, they were active players in the lives of the same Galilean Jewish communities frequented by the sages and their disciples” (207). Here too, Burns demonstrates impressive mastery of the contemporary modes of interpreting Mishnah, Tosefta, and the textual witnesses of both. Finally, in chapter 5, Burns makes his biggest contribution, arguing that the reign of Marcus Aurelius Severus Antoninus Augustus from 198–217 CE brought economic benefits to the province of Syria and thus to the Jews of Palestine, the office of the nasi’, and in turn to the rabbis. He performs clever readings of Origen to show that it was in the beginning of the third century that a schism between Jewish and gentile Christianities led to the gradual disappearance of the former, and with it a concomitant reevaluation of Christians and Christianity as gentile Other in the literature of the Amoraim.
In tackling not only history as such, but also “Jewish Memory,” Burns enters a burgeoning mode of discourse, not unlike the stance of Sarit Kattan Gribetz's analysis of rabbinic engagement with the Roman calendar in AJS Review 40, no. 1 (April 2016), in which she posits and describes a Jewish collective unconscious process of negotiating complex identities. Fascinatingly, Burns does not pretend to complete scholarly detachment, but rather, “write[s] as a Jew committed to [his] religion and the collective welfare of [his] people” (17). Given that the study of earliest Jewish/Christian encounters began within the domain of a particular strain of Protestant supersessionism, this book is a welcome corrective.
