The Christian Invention of “Judaism”
Daniel Boyarin University of California at Berkeley
In this lecture, I argue that “Judaism” was invented by Christians to serve the formation of the Church (with a capital C) as a new form of human collective. Jewry, however, I suggest, remained forever the old form of human collective, in which a People (locatively defined) worshipped its god and practiced its historical practices.
A Palinode In a much earlier adumbration of the argument that I am making here, I proposed that the invention of “Judaism” by Christian writers was part and parcel of the invention of “religion” in the fourth and fifth centuries. As demonstrated at length by Brent Nongbri in his Yale dissertation, some of my key evidence was simply misconstrued by me, in large part because I committed what I take to be now a cardinal sin, depending on translations for scholarly work. Consequently I now am convinced that the idea expressed there that “religion” in something close to the modern sense discussed above in the first chapter was fabricated in the fourth century is generally invalid.1 Nongbri himself, writes, however that “in spite of these points of disagreement, I think that Boyarin’s recognition that this time period marks a certain epistemic shift is an acute observation.”2 Nongbri’s own account of that epistemic shift is of great interest and has much to teach us. I would focus here, however, on the transformations of “Ioudaismos” that I see taking place then. If, in its earlier and very rare usage, as I have argued in chapter 2 above, Ioudaismos in the pens of Palestinian Judeans means only loyalty to Judean doings, now it comes to mean, but only in Christian parlance, something quite distinct from that. Abandoning the (now clearly perceived as) anachronistic term, “religion,” in my analysis, I am going to term the new turn—not claiming, of course, any originality here—as the invention of “orthodoxy,” as well as its concomitant body, the Church, for which here, however, I will use the Greek term Ekklesia. Put in other terms, it involves the shift from locative to non-locative accounts of group boundaries and definitions. According to Rowan Williams, “Orthodoxy” is a way that a “religion,” separated from the locativity of ethnic or geocultural self-definition as Christianity was, asks itself: “[H]ow, if at all, is one to identify the ‘centre’ of [our]
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religious tradition? At what point and why do we start speaking about ‘a’ religion? . . .”3 I will modify this only by suggesting that in place of “religion” here and to keep things clear, let us substitute Ekklesia, not as the building or as the local community but as the corporate body of Orthodox Christianity as well as its supernal homologue. The Ekklesia, we might say, invents “Judaism” as an alternate, as the dark double of the true Ekklesia, transforming Jews from a People to an Ekklesia via the medium of orthodoxy, an Ekklesia that it names Ioudaismos in Greek. The crux of the matter seems to me to be that in order for there to be a true Ekklesia, there had to be a false one too. Let us go back, then, and look at the beginnings of the Christian naming of Ioudaismos, and work our way up to the period in question at the end of the fourth century. What I hope to show is that the development of Christian orthodoxy involved not only the production of Christian heresies but also the interpellation (hailing into existence) of another “orthodoxy,” another Ekklesia, as it were, with an orthodoxy of its own, that of the Jews. This dark double of the true Ekklesia was frequently, at least later on, named, in fact, Synagoga. Needless to say, this word never has such a meaning in Jewish sources, as it refers in them only to a building and a community that worships in it and not a corporate body [corporeal or mystical] at all.4 This latter orthodoxy, the orthodoxy of the phantasmal Synagoga, was named by Christians, Ioudaismos. As we shall observe, this term, originally used by its earliest Christian writers as an internal flaw or tendency in Christianismos, through the fourth century becomes the name for that other (false) orthodoxy, “Judaism.”
Ignatius; or, Ioudaismos Becomes “Judaism” Ignatius of Antioch is apparently the first Christian writer (I am not including Paul as a Christian, who may, nonetheless, have been his source for the word). The bishop and future martyred saint inveighed mightily against those who blurred the boundaries between Jew and Christian. His very inveighings, however, are indicative of the ideological work that he is performing. In Ignatius’s time (and, I will hypothesize, for many generations after), “Ioudaismos” and “Christianismos” constituted a very fuzzy category, or better, set of categories.5 The “fuzzy category” is referred to by Ignatius as the “monster”: “It is monstrous to talk of Jesus Christ and to practice Ioudaismos” [Magnesians 10:3],6 he proclaims, thus making both points at once, the drive of the nascent orthodoxy—understood as a particular social location and as a particular form of self fashioning and identity making7—, to normative separation and the lack of clear separations “on the ground.” What is most important for my purposes here, however, is to see that for Ignatius, Ioudaismos is clearly a matter of praxis, not yet an institution, not yet a Synagoga.
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The question of names and naming is central to the Ignatian enterprise. Near the very beginning of his letter to the Ephesians, in a passage the significance of which has been only partly realized in my view, Ignatius writes, “Having received in God your much loved name, which you possess by a just nature according to faith and love in Christ Jesus, our Savior--being imitators of God, enkindled by the blood of God, you accomplished perfectly the task suited to you” [1:1]. 8 Although this interpretation has been spurned by most commentators and scholars of Ignatius,9 I would make a cornerstone of my construction the to read this as a reference to the name “Christians.”10 It was, after all, in Ignatius’s Antioch that the people were first called by that name (Acts 11:26). Ignatius is complimenting the church in Ephesus as being worthy, indeed, to be called by the name of Christ owing to their merits.11 Indeed, as Schoedel does not fail to point out, in Magnesians 10:1, Ignatius writes, “Therefore let us become his disciples and learn to live according to Christianity [Christianismos]. For one who is called by any name other than this, is not of God.”12 Even more to the point, however, is Magnesians 4:1: “It is right, then, not only to be called Christians but to be Christians.”13 Ignatius tells the Ephesians, then, that they are not just called Christians but are Christians, by nature [φύσει], as it were.14 Ignatius goes on in verse 2 to write, “For hearing that I was put in bonds from Syria for the common name and hope, hoping by your prayer to attain to fighting with beasts in Rome, that by attaining I may be able to be a disciple, you hastened to see me.”15 Once again, the interpretative tradition seems to have missed an attractively specific interpretation of “name” here that links it to the “name” in the previous verse. It is not so much, I opine, the name of Christ that is referred to here16 as the name of “Christian,” which equals “disciple” (cf. again Acts 11:26: “And the disciples were called Christians first in Antioch.”). The “common hope” is Jesus Christ (cf. Eph. 21:1; Trallians 2:2),17 but the common “name” is “Christian.” I would suggest that Ignatius represents here the martyrological theme of the centrality of martyrdom in establishing the name “Christian” as the legitimate and true name of the disciple; this, in accord with the practice whereby “Christianos eimi” were the last words of the martyr, the name for which she died.18 Similarly in the next passage, Ignatius explicitly connects martyrdom with “the name”: “I do not command you as being someone; for even though I have been bound in the name, I have not yet been perfected in Jesus Christ” [3:1]. The “name” in which Ignatius has been bound (i.e., imprisoned and sent to Rome for martyrdom) is the name “Christianos.”19 The nexus between having the right to that name and martyrdom or between martyrdom and identity, and the nexus between them and heresiology, separation from Ioudaismos is also clear.20 In opening his letters with this declaration, I think, Ignatius is declaring one of his major themes for the corpus entire: the establishment of a new Christian identity,
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distinguished and distinguishable from Ioudaismos. If this is seen as a highly marked moment in his texts, then one can follow this as a dominant theme throughout his letters, and the protoheresiology21 of Ignatius is profoundly related to this themes, as well. This issue is most directly thematized, however, in Ignatius’s letter to the Magnesians. He exhorts: “Be not deceived by erroneous opinions nor by old fables, which are useless. For if we continue to live until now according to Judaism, we confess that we have not received grace” [Magnesians 8:1].22 Ioudaismos is defined here by Ignatius, a erroneous opinions and old fables, but what precisely does he mean? Let us go back to the beginning of the letter. Once more, Ignatius makes a reference to the “name”: “For having been deemed worthy of a most godly name, in the bonds which I bear I sing the churches” [1:1].23 Here, as Schoedel recognizes, it is almost certain that only the name “Christian” will fit the context. This thought about the name is continued explicitly in Ignatius’s famous, “It is right, then, not only to be called Christians but to be Christians” [4:1].24 On my reading, it is the establishment of that name, giving it definition, “defining, . . . policing, the boundaries that separate the name of one entity [Christianismos] from the name of another [Ioudaismos]” that provides one of the two thematic foci for the letter (and the letters) as a whole, the other—and related—one, being, of course, the establishment of the bishop as sole authority in a given church. Near the end of the letter to the Magnesians, Ignatius writes, “(I write) these things, my beloved, not because I know that some of you are so disposed, but as one less than you I wish to forewarn you” [11].25 Although Schoedel and others treat this as mere rhetoric—i.e., that some of them were so disposed and Ignatius is either being ingratiating or purposefully idealizing—, I would suggest that we might take it literally, as an indication that Ignatius knows that what he is doing is constructing borders, delimiting what will be understood as legitimate Christianity, the proper name, and what will be excluded as Judaism, rather than confronting a real danger. As a sort of thought experiment, at any rate, I would like to take seriously the possibility that the “heterodox” ideas anathematized by Ignatius were, indeed, in some important sense Ioudaismos, i.e., that the folks who held them might well have thought of themselves as, in some important sense, Ioudaioi, at the same time, of course, that they were “Christians” (perhaps, for them, avant la lettre). The issue joined by Ignatius then is the making of the Christian name as something distinct and different, an opposed place to Judaism, “defining and policing the boundaries that separate the name of one entity from the name of another,” preventing the smuggling of stolen goods.
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Ioudaismos, so far for Ignatius does not seem to be what it means in other writers of and before his time, namely the “false views and misguided practice,” or “insisting especially on the ritual requirements of that system.”26 Ignatius troubles to let us know that this is not the case, as we learn from a famous and powerful rhetorical paradox in his Letter to the Philadelphians: “But if anyone expounds Judaism to you, do not listen to him; for it is better to hear Christianity from a man who is circumcised than Judaism from a man uncircumcised; both of them, if they do not speak of Jesus Christ, are to me tombstones and graves of the dead on which nothing but the names of men is written” (Philadelphians 6:1).27 After considering various options that have been offered for the interpretation of this surprising passage,28 Schoedel arrives at what seems to me the most compelling interpretation, “perhaps it was the ‘expounding’ (exegetical expertise) that was the problem and not the ‘Judaism’ (observance).”29 I would go further than Schoedel by making one more seemingly logical exegetical step, namely to assume that for Ignatius, “Ioudaismos” is a matter of expounding, just as “Christianismos” is. In Ignatius, I suggest, Ioudaismos no longer means observance per se (except insofar as expounding itself is an observance). In other words, for him Judaism and Christianity are two doxas, two theological positions, a wrong one [ἑτεροδοξία 8:1]30 and a right one, a wrong interpretation of the legacy of the Prophets and a right one. The right one is that which is taught by the prophets “inspired by his grace,” and called “Christianity” as it is that “revealed through Jesus Christ his Son, who is his Word” [8:1]. The point may in fact be even more radical, namely that Ioudaismos is comprised by even the study of the Prophets, or any Scripture at all. The words quoted certainly seem to mean that Christianismos consists of “speaking of Jesus Christ,” Gospel—still oral of course—,31 while Ioudaismos is devoting oneself to the study of Scripture. Although, to be sure in chapter 9 of Magnesians Ignatius mentions one aspect of practice, namely the abandonment of the Sabbath for “the Lord’s Day,” assuming that the plausible translation “Lord’s Day” for κυριακή is correct,32 nevertheless Schoedel seems correct in asserting that it was too much attention to the meaning of biblical texts and not practicing of “the Law” that was at issue, that is a Scripturally based Christianity versus an exclusively apostolic faith, “disciples of Jesus Christ, our only teacher.”33 Ignatius explicitly links those who have not abandoned the Sabbath for the Lord’s Day as those who deny Christ’s death, as well [9:1], a point that will take on greater significance below. For Ignatius, seemingly, “Ioudaismos” and “Christianismos” are both versions of what we would call “Christianity,” since his opponents are those who say, “If I do not find it in the archives, I do not believe (it to be) in the gospel” (Philadelphians 8:2).34 Ignatius’s antagonists, real or imagined, are not actually what we today would call
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“Jews,” since Gospel seems to be a relevant concept for them, but Christians, even uncircumcised ones, who preach some “heterodox” attachment to Christ, or even merely an insistence that everything in Christianity be anchored in Scriptural (the only Scripture they had, the “Old Testament”) exegesis.35 They do not put Christ first, and therefore, they are preaching “Ioudaismos,” and they are “tombstones.” What is this Ioudaismos, and how does it define Christianismos? A closer reading of the passage will help answer this question:
I exhort you to do nothing from partisanship but in accordance with Christ’s teaching. For I heard some say, “If I do not find (it) in the archives, I do not believe (it to be) in the gospel.” and when I said, “It is written,” they answered me, “That is just the question.” But for me the archives are Jesus Christ, the inviolable archives are his cross and death and his resurrection and faith through him--in which, through your prayers, I want to be justified. [8:2]36
The Greek of this passage allows for two translations at a crux. ἐν τῷ εὐαγγελίῳ οὐ πιστεύω can either be taken, as Schoedel does, as “I do not believe (it to be) in the gospel,” or, as Bauer would have it, “[When I do not find it [also] in the Archives], I do not believe it, [when I find] it in the gospel.”37 Schoedel gives his reasons for taking the first option: “Ignatius could not have accomplished anything by twisting his opponents’ words that badly (I take it for granted that they regarded themselves as believers in the gospel.)” And then comments:
Conceivably a group of Christians could have declared rhetorically their unwillingness to believe the gopsel unless it was backed up by Scripture simply to make clear the importance of Scripture to them. But then why would Ignatius have replied by saying, “It is written”? And why would they have challenged him on that as if to suggest that the truth of the gospel itself was in doubt? The answer may be that the group was actually made up of Jews closely associated with Christianity but doubtful of its central tenets. But surely Ignatius has in mind Christians in danger of being attracted to Judaism (cf. Phd. 6.1)—people close enough to other members of the congregation that they almost “deceived” Ignatius (Phd. 11.1). When Ignatius indicates that “repentance” and a turning to the unity of the church is in order for this group (Phd. 8.1), it is likely that they were recognizably Christian.38
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The possibility that Schoedel refuses to consider is that Jews who insist that the true gospel must only contain ideas, histories that can be backed up from Scripture, might have been precisely “people close to other members of the congregation,” and even, quel horreur, “recognizably Christian.” The group in Philadelphia to which the future martyr is objecting so strongly would be, on this reading, Christian Jews who insist that the gospel can only contain scriptural truth, and this was acceptable to the Philadelphian congregation with whom they were in communion. Schoedel’s incredulity is generated by his assumption that Jew and Christian are separate identities by the time of Ignatius, an assumption that I would seriously put into question. If we do not make this assumption and recognize that the very content of the probably oral gospel is under question at this time, then whence those “central tenets of Christianity”—whose Christianity, indeed?—that these Jews close to Christianity might be said to doubt? That is exactly the question that they put to Ignatius: “they answered me, ‘That is just the question,’” to wit: Who are you, Ignatius to determine what is or is not gospel? For Ignatius, however, for whom some non-scriptural kerygma is central and, sees, as he insists over and over, such reliance on Scripture as itself, Ioudaismos, the following of Jewish Scriptures, and not Christianismos, the following of Christ’s teaching alone. This opposition between Ignatius and these other Christian Jews has been symbolized by him already as an opposition between those who keep the Sabbath and those who only observe the Lord’s Day. Here Ignatius draws it out further via an epistemological contrast between that which is known from Scripture (=Ioudaismos) and that which is known from the very facts of the Lord’s death and resurrection (=χριστομαθία). As we have seen above, for Ignatius those who observe the Sabbath are implicated as ones who deny the Lord’s death as well (Magnesians 9:1). Schoedel believes that: “the link between Judaizing and docetism was invented by Ignatius,”39 and, moreover, “it may well be that the form of the polemic compelled Ignatius to look for a serious theological disagreement where none existed.”40 I have argued elsewhere, however, that Jews who held a version of Logos theology, and perhaps might even have seen in Christ the manifestation of the Logos, might yet have balked at an incarnational christology,41 i.e., rather than the “low” christology of which so-called Jewish-Christians are usually accused, their christology might have been, indeed, too “high” for Ignatius’s taste. That which is not found in the Archives, then, is precisely the notion that the Logos could die! That is, exactly that which Ignatius himself claims as the something which the gospel has that is distinctive over-against the Old Testament [9:2]: “the coming of the Savior, our Lord Jesus Christ, his passion and resurrection.” This suggests strongly that, if not precisely the same people—if, indeed, there were such people altogether—, it is the same complex
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of Christian Jewish ideas, accepting Jesus, accepting the Logos, denying actual physical death and resurrection, which Ignatius names as Ioudaismos, the product of over-valuing of Scripture against the claims of the gospel, which alone must be first and foremost for those would have the name Christian, that name for which Ignatius would die.42 In any case—that is whether or not my suggestion for a new variant on the idea of essentially one “heresy” for Ignatius is acceptable—, Schoedel has surely advanced our understanding by showing that “it was Ignatius and not they [the “heretics”] who polarized the situation.”43 Ignatius produced his Ioudaismos (and perhaps his docetic heresy as well) in order to more fully define and articulate the new identity for the disciples as true bearers of the new name, Christianoi. In my view, Ioudaismos, the Ekklesia, was not invented primarily as a pejorative term but rather adopted and shifted in meaning precisely so that Christianismos could have an other (in its semantic paradigm of what sort of thing it is).44 Ignatius has, in some important sense, taken the first step in the invention of Judaism as an Ekklesia as part and parcel of his invention of Christianity. Oddly enough, the “Judaism” that he creates has very little to do, it seems, with Jews.
Jerome and Epiphanius By the fourth century, Eusebius of Caesarea, the first church historian and an important theologian in his own right,45 could write “I have already said before in the Preparation46 how Christianity is something that is neither Hellenism nor Judaism, but which has its own particular characteristic piety [ὁ Χριστιανισμὸς οὔτε Ἑλληνισμός τις ἐστιν οὔτε Ἰιουδαισμὸς, οἰκεῖον δέ τίνα φέρων χαρακτῆρα θεοσεβείας],”47 the implication being that both Hellenism and Judaism have, as well, their own characteristic forms of piety (however, to be sure, wrong-headed ones). He also writes:
This compels us to conceive some other ideal of piety [eusebia], by which they [the ancient Patriarchs] must have guided their lives. Would not this be exactly that third form of eusebia midway between Judaism and Hellenism, which I have already deduced as the most ancient and venerable of all religions, and which has been preached of late to all nations through our Saviour. . . . The convert from Hellenism to Christianity does not land in Judaism, nor does one who rejects the Jewish worship become ipso facto a Greek.48
Here we find in Eusebius a clear articulation of Judaism, Hellenism, and Christianity as “forms of piety.” There is something called “eusebia” which takes different “forms.”
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The fullest expression of this conceptual shift may be located in the heresiology of Epiphanius (fl. early 5th c.). For him, not only “Hellenism” and “Judaism” but also “Scythianism” and even “Barbarianism” are no longer the names of ethnic entities49 but of “heresies,” that is, institutions other than orthodox Christianity.50 “
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at this particular time,59 we need to discover other ways of understanding this striking literary flowering. The Ebionites and Nazoreans, in my reading, function much as the mythical “trickster” figures of many cultures, in that precisely by transgressing borders that the culture establishes, they reify those boundaries.60 The discourse of the “Judaizing heretics” thus performs this very function of reinforcing the binaries. The purpose of Epiphanius’s discourse on the Ebionites and Nazarenes is to participate in the imperial project of control of (in this case) Palestine by “identifying and reifying the . . . religions.” Epiphanius explicitly indicates that this is his purpose by writing of Ebion, the heresiarch-founder of the sect: “But since he is practically midway between all the sects, he is nothing. The words of scripture, ‘I was almost in all evil, in the midst of the church and synagogue’ [Proverbs 5:14], are fulfilled in him. For he is Samaritan, but rejects the name with disgust. And while professing to be a Jew, he is the opposite of Jews—though he does agree with them in part.”61 In a rare moment of midrashic wit (one hesitates to attribute it to Epiphanius himself), the verse of Proverbs is read to mean that I was in all evil, because I was in the midst [between] the church and the synagogue. Epiphanius’s declaration that the Ebionites “are nothing,” especially when put next to Jerome’s famous declaration that the Nazarenes think that they are Christians and Jews, but in reality are neither, strongly recalls for me the insistence in the modern period that the people of southern Africa have no religion, not because they are not Christians, but because they are not pagans.62 Suddenly it seems important to these two writers to assert a difference between Judaizing heretics and Jews. The ascription of existence to the “hybrids” assumes (and thus assures) the existence of non-hybrid, “pure” Ekklesiai. Heresiology is not only, as it is usually figured, the insistence on some (or another) right doctrine but on a discourse of the pure as opposed to the hybrid, a discourse that then requires the hybrid as its opposite term. The discourse of race as analyzed by Homi Bhabha proves helpful: “The exertions of the ‘official knowledges’ of colonialism—pseudo-scientific, typological, legal-administrative, eugenicist—are imbricated at the point of their production of meaning and power with the fantasy that dramatizes the impossible desire for a pure, undifferentiated origin.”63 We need only substitute “heresiological” for “eugenicist” in this sentence to arrive at a major thesis of this article. Jerome, Epiphanius’s younger contemporary, is the other most prolific writer about “Jewish-Christians” in antiquity.64 Jacobs reads Jerome’s Hebrew knowledge as an important part of the “colonialist” project of the Theodosian age.65 I want to focus here on only one aspect of Jerome’s discourse about Jews, his discussions of the “Jewish-Christians.” Hillel Newman has recently argued that Jerome’s discourse about the Judaizers and Nazarenes is more or less constructed out of whole cloth.66 It thus
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sharply raises the question of motivation, for, as historian Marc Bloch notes, “[T]o establish the fact of forgery is not enough. It is further necessary to discover its motivations. . . . Above all, a fraud is, in its way, a piece of evidence.”67 I would suggest that Jerome, in general a much clearer thinker than Epiphanius, moves in the same direction but with greater lucidity. For him, it is absolutely unambiguous that rabbinic Judaism is not a Christian heresy but a separate Ekklesia. The Mischlinge thus explicitly mark out the space of illegitimacy, of no religion:
usque hodie per totas orientis synagogas inter Iudaeos heresis est, quae dicitur Minaeorum, et a pharisaeis huc usque damnatur, quos uulgo Nazaraeos nuncupant, qui credunt in Christum, filium dei natum de Maria uirgine, et eum dicunt esse, qui sub Pontio Pilato et passus est et resurrexit, in quem et nos credimus, sed, dum uolunt et Iudaei esse et Christiani, nec Iudaei sunt nec Christiani.68 In our own day there exists a sect among the Jews throughout all the synagogues of the East, which is called the sect of the Minei, and is even now condemned by the Pharisees. The adherents to this sect are known commonly as Nazarenes; they believe in Christ the Son of God, born of the Virgin Mary; and they say that He who suffered under Pontius Pilate and rose again, is the same as the one in whom we believe. But while they desire to be both Jews and Christians, they are neither the one nor the other.
This proclamation of Jerome’s comes in the context of his discussion with Augustine about Galatians 2, in which Augustine, disallowing the notion that the apostles dissimulated when they kept Jewish practices, suggests that their “Jewish-Christianity” was legitimate. Jerome responds vigorously, understanding the “danger” of such notions to totalizing Imperial orthodoxy.69 What is new here is not, obviously, the condemnation of the “Jewish followers of Jesus” heretics but that the Christian author condemns them, in addition, for not being Jews, thus at least implicitly marking the existence and legitimacy of a “true” Jewish Ekklesia alongside Christianity, as opposed to the falsities of the Mischlinge. This move parallels, then, Epiphanius’s insistence that the Ebionites are “nothing.” Pushing Jacobs’s interpretation a bit further, I would suggest that Jerome’s insistence on translating from the Hebrew is both an instance of control of the Jew (Jacobs’s point) and also the very marking out of the Jews as “absolute other” to Christianity. I think that it is not going too far to see here a reflection of a social and political process like that David Chidester remarks in an entirely different historical moment, “The discovery of an indigenous religious system
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on southern African frontiers depended upon colonial conquest and domination. Once contained under colonial control, an indigenous population was found to have its own religious system.”70 Following out the logic of this statement suggests that there may have been a similar nexus between the containment of the Jews under the colonial eye of the Christian Empire that enabled the discovery/invention of Judaism as an Ekklesia named Synagoga. Looked at from the other direction, the assertion of the existence of a fully separate-from-Christianity “orthodox” Judaism functioned for Christian orthodoxy as a guarantee of the Christian’s own bounded and coherent identity and thus furthered the project of imperial control, as marked out by Jacobs. The discursive processes in the situation of Christian Empire are very different from the projects of mutual self-definition that I have elsewhere explored.71 Hegemonic Christian discourse also produced Judaism (and Paganism, e.g., that of Julian) as other Ekklesiai or alternative orthodoxies precisely in order to cordon off Christianity, in a purification and crystallization of its essence as a bounded entity. Julian cleverly reverses this procedure and turns it against Christianity. In at least one reading of Julian’s “Against the Galileans,” the point of that work is to reinstate a binary opposition between Greek and Jew, Hellenism and Judaism, by inscribing Christianity as a hybrid. Eusebius’s claim that the one who leaves Hellenism does not land in Judaism and the reverse now constitutes an argument that Christianity is a monstrous hybrid, a mooncalf: “For if any man should wish to examine into the truth concerning you, he will find that your impiety is compounded of the rashness of the Jews and the indifference and vulgarity of the Gentiles. for from both sides you have drawn what is by no means their best but their inferior teaching, and so have made for yourselves a border of wickedness.”72 Julian further writes: “It is worth while . . . to compare what is said about the divine among the Hellenes and Hebrews; and finally to enquire of those who are neither Hellenes nor Jews, but belong to the sect of the Galileans.”73 Julian, as dedicated as any Christian orthodox writer to policing borderlines, bitterly reproaches the “Galileans” for contending that they are Israelites and argues that they are no such thing, neither Jews nor Greeks but impure hybrids.74 Here Julian sounds very much like Jerome when the latter declares that those who think they are both Jews and Christians are neither, or Epiphanius when he refers to the Ebionites as “nothing.” This would make Julian’s project structurally identical to the projects of the Christian heresiologists who, at about the same time, were rendering Christianity and Judaism in their “orthodox” forms the pure terms of a binary opposition with the “Judaizing” Christians, the hybrids who must be excluded from the semiotic system, being “monsters.”75 I suggest, then, a deeper explanation of Julian’s insistence that you cannot mix Hellenism with Christianity. It is not only that Hellenism and Christianity are separate “orthodoxies”
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that, by definition, cannot be mixed with each other, but even more that Christianity is always already (if you will) an admixture, a syncretism. Julian wants to reinstate the binary of Jew and Greek. He provides, therefore, another instance of the discursive form that I am arguing for in the Christian texts of his time, a horror of supposed hybrids. To recapitulate, in Julian’s very formation of Hellenism (or should I say Hellenicity?76), as a difference not of ethnicity but of systems of belief and worship, he mirrors the efforts of the orthodox churchmen.77 While he was protecting the borders between Hellenism and Judaism by excluding Christianity as a hybrid, Julian, it seems, was, unbeknownst to himself, smuggling some Christian ideas in his very attempt to outlaw Christianity.78 This interpretation adds something to that of Jacobs, who writes that “among the deviant figures of Christian discourse we often find the Jew, the ‘proximate other’ used to produce the hierarchical space between the Christian and the non-Christian.”79 I am suggesting that the heretic can also be read as a proximate other, producing a hierarchical space between the Christian and the Jew. This point is at least partially anticipated by Jacobs himself when he writes that “Jews exist as the paradigmatic ‘to-be-known’ in the overwhelming project of conceptualizing the ‘all in all’ of orthodoxy. This comes out most clearly in the [Epiphanian] accounts of ‘Jewish-Christian’ heresies.”80 One way of spinning this would be to see heresiology as central to the production of Judaism as the “pure other” of Christian orthodoxy, while the other way of interpreting it would be to see Judaism as essential to the production of orthodoxy over-against heresy. My point is that both of these moments in an oscillating analysis are equally important and valid. Seen in this light, orthodoxy itself, orthodoxy as an idea, as a regime (as opposed to any particular orthodox position) is crucial in the formation of Christianity as the universal and imperial religion of the late Roman Empire and, later on, of European Christendom as well.
Notes 1. Brent Nongbri, “Paul Without Religion: The Creation of a Category and the Search for an Apostle Beyond the New Perspective” (Ph.D. diss., Yale, 2008), 50–62. Nongbri goes sometimes too far, imho, in dismissing some of my interpretations there and somewhat mischaracterizes others but no matter, in essence he is right. In what follows, I simply delete the previous interpretations that I consider now partly or largely invalid and rephrase what remains in new terms that I think, today, make more sense. 2. Nongbri, “Paul Without Religion,” 62. 3. Rowan Williams, “Does It Make Sense to Speak of Pre-Nicene Orthodoxy?” in The Making of Orthodoxy: Essays in Honour of Henry Chadwick, ed. Rowan Williams (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1989), 3.
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4. This is true, I warrant, as well of the term aposynagogos in the Fourth Gospel as well which only means kicked out of the synagogue, not excommunicated or rendered a non-Israelite! 5. Daniel Boyarin, “Semantic Differences: Linguistics and ‘the Parting of the Ways’,” in The Ways That Never Parted: Jews and Christians in Late Antiquity and the Early Middle Ages, ed. Adam H. Becker and Annette Yoshiko Reed, Texte und Studien Zum Antiken Judentum 95 (Tübingen: Mohr Siebeck, 2003), 65–85. 6. William R. Schoedel, Ignatius of Antioch: A Commentary on the Letters of Ignatius of Antioch, ed. Helmut Koester, trans. and ed. William R. Schoedel, Hermeneia--a Critical and Historical Commentary on the Bible (Philadelphia: Fortress Press, 1985), 126. See Judith Lieu, Image & Reality: The Jews in the World of the Christians in the Second Century (Edinburgh: T & T Clark, 1996), 28 ff and passim for an exploration of the anxieties that this fuzzy border gave rise to. This position is partially pace Keith Hopkins, “Christian Number and Its Implications,” Journal of Early Christian Studies 6, no. 2 (1998): 187 who seems to regard such fuzziness (or “porosity” in his language) as particularly characteristic of Christianity. Hopkins’s paper is very important and will have to be reckoned with seriously in any future accounts of Judaeo-Christian origins and genealogies. 7. Rebecca Lyman, “The Politics of Passing: Justin Martyr, Mimicry, and the Origins of Christian ‘Orthodoxy’” (2000). 8. Schoedel, Ignatius, 40. 9. Schoedel, Ignatius, 41. 10. Henning Paulsen and Walter Bauer, Die Briefe Des Ignatius von Antiochia und der Brief Des Polykarp von Smyrna, Handbuch Zum Neuen Testament (Tübingen: Mohr/ Siebeck, 1985), 25. 11. Other interpretations, seeing this as a reference to the name Ephesus, seem to me quite far-fetched. 12. Schoedel, Ignatius, 126. I shall have more to say about this passage anon. 13. See also Ignatius to the Romans 3:2. 14. For φύσει in this sense, cp. Trallians 1:1 and discussion in Schoedel, Ignatius, 138. 15. Schoedel, Ignatius, 40. 16. pace Schoedel, Ignatius, 43. 17. Schoedel, Ignatius, 95; Schoedel, Ignatius, 140. 18. Judith Lieu, “‘I Am a Christian’: Martyrdom and the Beginning of ‘Christian’ Identity,” in Neither Jew Nor Greek? Constructing Christian Identity (Edinburgh: T & T Clark, 2003) Carlin A. Barton, “The ‘Moment of Truth’ in Ancient Rome: Honor and Embodiment in a Contest Culture,” Stanford Humanities Review (1998): 16–30. 19. Similarly, it seems to me that 7:1 of that letter in which Ignatius writes, “For some are accustomed with evil deceit to carry about the name, at the same time doing things unworthy of God” ( Schoedel, Ignatius, 59), it is not the name “Christ” that these folks are carrying about (pace Schoedel: “that is, they move from place to place looking for converts to their version of Christianity”), but the name Christian. Cf. Justin’s remark that, “For I made it clear to you that those who are Christians in name, but in reality are godless and impious heretics, teach in all respects what is blasphemous and godless and foolish” (Dialogue 80.3-4), A. Lukyn Williams, ed. and trans., Justin Martyr: The Dialogue with Trypho, Translations of Christian Literature (London: SPCK, 1930), 169–71; Justin, Dialogus Cum Tryphone, ed. Miroslav Marcovich, Patristische Texte und Studien Bd. 47. (Berlin: Walter de Gruyter, 1997), 208–9.
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20. As Lieu remarks, “The claiming of this identity involves the denial of other alternatives,” Lieu, “I Am.” hence the importance of the name, martyrdom, and Ioudaismos in Ignatius. If one can be a Jew and a Christian, then Ignatius’s martyrdom would, indeed, be in vain. 21. Schoedel, Ignatius, 12 who sees ‘heresy’ and ‘heterodox’ as quasi-technical terms in Ignatius. But cf. Schoedel, Ignatius, 147: “But we should note first that in referring to the ‘strange plant’ as ‘heresy’ Ignatius is mainly concerned about the false teachers themselves rather than their teaching. ‘Heresy,’ then, is still basically a matter of people who disrupt unity and create ‘faction.’” 22. Schoedel, Ignatius, 28. See also C.K. Barrett, “Jews and Judaizers in the Epistles of Ignatius,” in Jews, Greeks and Christians: Essays in Honor of William David Davies, ed. Robin Scroggs, SJLA 21 (Leiden: E. J. Brill, 1976), 220–44. 23. Schoedel, Ignatius, 104. 24. Schoedel, Ignatius, 108. 25. Schoedel, Ignatius, 128. 26. pace Schoedel, Ignatius, 118 who considers Ignatius’s usage the same as that of II Maccabees, Paul, and the Pastoral Epistles. 27. Schoedel, Ignatius, 200 [emphasis added]. 28. Schoedel, Ignatius, 202–3. 29. Schoedel, Ignatius, 203. 30. Contra Schoedel, Ignatius, 118, I do not see here a near-technical term for heresy, preferring the view of Martin Elze, “Irrtum und Häresie,” Kairos 71 (1974): 393–94. 31. Schoedel, Ignatius, 201. 32. Schoedel, Ignatius, 123, n. 3. 33. “But Ignatius makes a characteristic move when he links the resurrection with the mystery of Christ’s death and emphasizes the latter as that through which faith comes. For it is Christ’s death that stands out as a ‘mystery’ in Ignatius’ mind (Eph. 19.1). One purpose of Ignatius here is to present the passion and resurrection (not Scripture as misinterpreted by the Jews and Judaizers) as that which determines the shape of Christian existence (and makes sense of Scripture),” Schoedel, Ignatius, 123–24. 34. Schoedel, Ignatius, 207. 35. For further discussion of this difficult passage, see Schoedel, Ignatius, 207–9 and especially William R. Schoedel, “Ignatius and the Archives,” Harvard Theological Review 71 (1978). Oddly enough these Jewish-Christians sound like Saducees: “the Sadducean group reject [the oral traditions], saying that one should consider as rules [only] those which have been written down, and that it is not necessary to keep the regulations handed down from the ancestors,” (Josephus, Antiquities 13.297).For another recent discussion of these passages, see Birger Pearson, “The Emergence of the Christian Religion,” in The Emergence of the Christian Religion: Essays on Early Christianity (Harrisburg, Pa.: Trinity Press International, 1997), 11–14. For the interpretation that I have suggested here, see also Einar Molland, “The Heretics Combatted by Ignatius of Antioch,” Journal of Ecclesiastical History V (1954): 1–6. See also the important argument of C. K. Barrett. Arguing that Ignatius indicates that he has heard this preaching, he writes: “Presumably in some kind of church meeting (like that in which Ignatius prophesied [7.1]—an important point, for it must mean that the persons in question were Christian, even if (in Ignatius’ eyes) unsatisfactory Christians. Ignatius is unlikely to have made his way into the synagogue,” C. K. Barrett, “Jews and Judaizers in the Epistles of
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Ignatius,” in Jews, Greeks and Christians: Religious Cultures in Late Antiquity. Essays in Honor of W. D. Davies (Leiden: E. J. Brill, 1976), 233. Finally, cf. Paulsen and Bauer, Die Briefe, 85–86. 36. Schoedel, Ignatius, 207. 37. Paulsen and Bauer, Die Briefe, 85. 38. Schoedel, Ignatius, 207. 39. Schoedel, Ignatius, 118. 40. Schoedel, Ignatius, 119. I disagree with Schoedel’s remark there that “We may observe in this connection that Ignatius speaks of Judaism where Paul would more naturally have spoken of the law. Thus Ignatius’ contrast is between grace and Judaism and not, as in Paul, between grace and law.” I think that Ignatius simply does not operate with an opposition between grace and law at all, as we can see from Mag. 2: “because he is subject to the bishop as to the grace of God and to the presbytery as to the law of Jesus Christ.” Indeed, Schoedel’s remark is somewhat puzzling, since he himself argues that “Ignatius uses ‘grace’ and ‘law’ as parallel expressions,” Schoedel, Ignatius, 239. Ignatius’s Judaizers are apparently uncircumcised, making them very very different from Paul’s opponents indeed (cf. Phil. 6:1; see discussion in Ignatius, “The Four Authentic Letters of Ignatius, the Martyr a Critical Study Based on the Anomalies Contained in the Textus Receptus” (1979), 41, who nonetheless insists that the “Judaizers” and the “Gnostic-docetics” must be two “irreducibly” different groups. This flows from Rius-Camps’s misapprehension that Ignatius’s “Judaizers” are the representatives of “Judaizing tendencies similar to those that sprang up in the Pauline communities,” notwithstanding the fact that virtually the entire content of the Pauline opposition was their insistence on Jewish law especially circumcision, while Ignatius’s Judaizing opponents’ “error” is christological and not connected with any insistence on Jewish practice, notwithstanding their maintenance of the Sabbath). Lightfoot’s arguments all stand up to Rius-Camps’s attempt at withering critique of them, Josep Rius-Camps, The Four Authentic Letters of Ignatius, the Martyr: A Critical Study Based on the Anomalies Contained in the Textus Receptus, Xpictianicmoc (Roma: Pontificium Institutum Orientalium Studiorum, 1979), 40–51. Rius-Camps seems to believe that by defining “Judaizing” as a form of Christianity which “inculcates Jewish observances and practices” (Rius-Camps, Ignatius, 42), he has then proven that if Ignatius refers to those who expound Ioudaismos, they must too be inculcating such observances and practices, in spite of the fact that Ignatius himself refers to them as “uncircumcised”! 41. Daniel Boyarin, “The Gospel of the Memra: Jewish Binitarianism and the Crucifixion of the Logos,” Harvard Theological Review 94, no. 3 (2001): 243–84. 42. This interpretation was generated in conversation with my colleague Rebecca Lyman for whose koinonia I am grateful. It must be conceded, however, that in the letters (Trallians and Smyrneans) where Ignatius is most explicit in his attacks on “docetics,” he does not mention Ioudaismos. I find it, nevertheless, quite plausible to see the same tendencies at work in these instances, with perhaps a somewhat varying emphasis. In all instances, it does seem to be denial of Christ’s passion that is at work. Similarly in Ephesians, where it is generally conceded that Ignatius combats “docetic” teachers (Schoedel, Ignatius, 59, 231), Ignatius does not name the “heresy” either but merely refers to those “who are accustomed with evil deceit to carry about the name” (7:1), but there, too, he emphasizes positively the reality of the Incarnation, death, and resurrection, “first passible and then impassible [of] Jesus Christ our Lord,” who is, moreover, “God in death.” According to this interpretation we must understand those mentioned in Smyrneans 5:1, “whom the prophecies did not persuade nor
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the law of Moses, nor indeed until now the gospel” (Schoedel, Ignatius, 230), as meaning that they were not persuaded to interpret those documents and traditions (for the gospel is almost surely oral for Ignatius) as proof of the gospel of Incarnational christology. As Schoedel, himself an adherent of the view that two groups of “heretics” are comprehended in Ignatius, writes: “As we have seen, Ignatius thinks of the appeal to the Scriptures as making sense only if it is recognized that they point forward to Christ and find their fulfillment there. The prophets and Moses gain their significance from the events of the Lord’s ministry (cf. Phd. 5.2;8.2;9.2) and the commitment of the martyr (cf. Phd. 5.1;8.2). Thus arguments that Ignatius had used against Judaizers to subordinate the Scriptures to Christ are used here (in a modified form) against docetists to confirm the reality of the humanity of Christ,” Schoedel, Ignatius, 234. Given, however, that it seems most plausible (in my view) to see the issue between Ignatius and those who “expound Ioudaismos” in Magnesians and Philadelphians as also about the death of the Logos, it seems most elegant to assume as well that the same arguments are used with the same goals in mind in both groups of texts, thus supporting the view of Theodor Zahn, “Ignatius von Antiochien.” (1873), 356–99, esp. 370 and J. B. Lightfoot and J. R. Harmer, trans., The Apostolic Fathers, second ed., rev. Michael W. Holmes, reprint, 1891 (Grand Rapids, Michigan: Baker Book House, 1989), 359–75. This interpretation is supported by the fact that Ignatius uses precisely the same terms, “heterodoxy” and “grace” as the terms of opposition in Mag. 8:1 and Smyrneans 6:2. Cf. the awkwardness to which Schoedel is forced: “In any event, his arguments rely most heavily . . . on the nature of the gospel, and he finds it possible to adapt his views on the subject either to those who overemphasize the Scriptures (as in Philadelphia) or to those who teach docetism (as in Smyrna),” Schoedel, Ignatius, 242. A further possible objection to this interpretation is the fact that Ignatius accuses his opponents at Smyrna of having no concern for “the widow. none for the orphan, none for one distressed, none for one imprisoned etc.” [Smyr. 6:2] (Schoedel, Ignatius, 238), a set of objections that would seem hardly to have been directed at Judaizing. However, against this objection we can put Schoedel’s own obviously correct assertion that, “It would be naive, however, to think that the bishop was describing the behavior of his opponents accurately. What is true, perhaps, is that they valued their theology highly enough to be unwilling to sacrifice it simply to avoid the threat of disruption to the community,” Ignatius, 240. This would be just as true of alleged Judaizers who deny the physical death and resurrection as of so-called Gnostics. In my view, the interpretation that Ignatius deals with two groups of “heretics,” Jewish Christians who keep the Law and have too low a christology and “gnostics” who have too high a christology, owing to their over-allegiance to pagan philosophies is a product of the (later) heresiological schema itself, argued for compellingly by Karen King, wherein all heresy is either a matter of being too Jewish or not Jewish enough, as it were, Karen L. King, Making Heresy: Gnosticism in Twentieth Century Historiography (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2003). The very assertion of the existence of a real entity called “Gnosticism” is, following Michael Allen Williams, Rethinking “Gnosticism”: An Argument for Dismantling a Dubious Category (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1996) and the even more far-reaching King, is to buy into the (Justinian, Irenaean) heresiological ideology itself. 43. Schoedel, Ignatius, 234. To be sure, Schoedel in accord with his view would see this as only applicable in the case of the “Gnostic docetics,” while I would extend the point, either by seeing all the opponents as essentially one, particularly so if they are being polarized by Ignatius himself, or as applicable to both of the cases if the “two heresy” view holds.
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44. Mason, in contrast, had argued that Ioudaismos was catachretically produced as a pejorative term, and Schwartz wondered, quite reasonably, how then it fit with Christianismos formed in the same way. I trust that this account of Ignatius answers the objections raised by Schwartz against Mason on this text, Seth Schwartz, “How Many Judaisms Were There? : A Critique of Neusner and Smith on Definition and Mason and Boyarin on Categorization,” Journal of Ancient Judaism 2, no. 2 (2011): 226, n. 46. 45. J. Rebecca Lyman, Christology and Cosmology: Models of Divine Activity in Origen, Eusebius, and Athanasius, Oxford Theological Monographs (Oxford: Oxford University Press, Clarendon, 1993). 46. Eusebius, Preparation for the Gospel, trans. Edwin Hamilton Gifford (Grand Rapids: Baker Book House, 1981). 47. Eusebius, The Proof of the Gospel, ed. and trans. W. J. Ferrar, Translations of Christian Literature (London: S.P.C.K., 1920), I. 7. The translation here follows Andrew S. Jacobs, “The Imperial Construction of the Jew in the Early Christian Holy Land” (Ph.D. diss., Durham, N.C.: Duke, 2001), 33. 48. Eusebius, Proof, I. 9. I am grateful to my student Ron Reissberg for this reference. 49. Which is not, of course, to claim that the notion of ethnic identity is a stable and fixed one either. See Jonathan M. Hall, Ethnic Identity in Greek Antiquity (Cambridge, England, 1997). 50. The Panarion of Epiphanius of Salamis, Book I, Sections 1–46, trans. Frank Williams (Leiden, 1987), 16–50. Cf., however, Eusebius’s Demonstratio evangelica 1.2.1 (Eusebius, Proof, 9). 51. Panarion, 17–18. In another part of the Christian world, Frankfurter points out, for the fifth-century Coptic abbot Shenoute “Hēllēne did not carry the sense of ethnically ‘Greek’ and therefore different from ‘Egyptian,’ but simply ‘pagan’—‘not Christian’” (David Frankfurter, Religion in Roman Egypt: Assimilation and Resistance [Princeton, N. J., 1998], 79.) 52. Panarion, 9. 53. Cf. Jacobs, “Construction,” 55–56. 54. For a highly salient and crystal clear delineation of these terms, ethnic and cultural, see Jonathan M. Hall, Hellenicity Between Ethnicity and Culture (Chicago, 2002), esp. 9–19. 55. As has been noted by previous scholars, for Epiphanius “heresy” is a much more capacious and even baggy-monster category than for most writers (Aline Pourkier, L’Hérésiologie chez Épiphane de Salamine, Christianisme Antique 4 [Paris, 1992], 85–87; Young, “Epiphanius.”). See the discussion in Jacobs, “Construction,” 56. 56. Panarion, 24. 57. Justin’s discussion of Jewish heresies is a different move from this, as analyzed above. 58. Johann Karl Ludwig Geiseler, “Über di Nazaräer und Ebioniten” (1819), 279, as cited in Glenn Alan Koch, “A Critical Investigation of Epiphanius’ Knowledge of the Ebionites: A Translation and Critical Discussion of Panarion 30” (Ph.D. diss., Pennsylvania, Philadelphia, 1976), 10. 59. Günter Stemberger, Jews and Christians in the Holy Land: Palestine in the Fourth Century (Edinburgh: T & T Clark, 1999), 80, writes: “It seems that there were no significant Jewish-Christian communities left in Palestine itself, and the primary problem for the wider church was the attraction of Judaism for the members of Gentile Christianity.” 60. Nathaniel Deutsch, Guardians of the Gate: Angelic Vice Regency in Late Antiquity, Brill’s Series in Jewish Studies, vol. 22 (Leiden ; Boston: Brill, 1999), 19. 61. Panarion, 120.
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62. David Chidester, Savage Systems: Colonialism and Comparative Religion in Southern Africa (Charlottesville: University Press of Virginia, 1996), 11–16. 63. Homi K. Bhabha, The Location of Culture (London: Routledge, 1994), 71. 64. For a useful (if methodologically uncritical) summary of the material, see Ray A. Pritz, Nazarene Jewish Christianity: From the End of the New Testament Period Until Its Disappearance in the Fourth-Century (Jerusalem: The Magnes Press, 1992), 48–70. 65. Jacobs, “Imperial Construction,” 76–77. 66. Hillel Newman, “Jerome’s Judaizers,” Journal of Early Christian Studies 9, no. 4 (December 2001): 421–52. 67. Marc Bloch, The Historian’s Craft: Reflections on the Nature and Uses of History and the Techniques and Methods of Those Who Write It, Peter Putnam (New York: Vintage Books, 1953), 93. 68. Jerome, Correspondence, ed. Isidorus Hilberg, Corpus Scriptorum Ecclesiasticorum Latinorum (Vienna: Verlag der Osterreichischen Akademie der Wissenschaften, 1996), vol. 55, 381–2. 69. See the discussion in Jacobs, “Imperial Construction,” 114. 70. Chidester, Savage, 19. 71. Boyarin, “Justin Invents Judaism.” 72. Julian and Wilmer Cave France Wright, “Against the Galileans,” in The Works of the Emperor Julian, trans. Wilmer Cave France Wright, Loeb Classical Library (London New York: Heinemann Macmillan, 1913), 389. 73. Julian and Wright, “Against the Galileans,” 319–21. 74. Julian and Wright, “Against the Galileans,” 393–95. Fascinatingly, this perspective gives us another way of understanding Julian’s intention to allow the Temple in Jerusalem to be rebuilt. A large part of his polemic consists, as we have seen, of charges that Christians are nothing, since they have abandoned Hellenism but not become Jews, given that they do not follow the Torah. He imagines a Christian answering him that the Jews, too, do not sacrifice as they are enjoined (Julian and Wright, “Against the Galileans,” 405–7). What better way to refute this Christian counter-claim and demonstrate that the only reason that Jews do not sacrifice is that they have no Temple, than to help them rebuild their Temple and reinstitute the sacrifices? 75. For a somewhat different, but I think largely compatible, interpretation of Julian’s program, see Nongbri, “Paul Without Religion,” 63–66. 76. Hall, Hellenicity, xix. 77. Vasiliki Limberis, “‘Religion’ as the Cipher for Identity: The Cases of Emperor Julian, Libanius, and Gregory Nazianzus,” Harvard Theological Review 93, no. 4 (2000): 373–400. 78. Wright points out that Julian has Christ-like figures in his own theology (Julian and Wright, “Against the Galileans,” 315). 79. Jacobs, “Imperial Construction,” 30. 80. Jacobs, “Imperial Construction,” 57.