Texts and Studies in Ancient Judaism Texte und Studien zum Antiken Judentum

Edited by Peter Schäfer (Princeton, NJ) Annette Y. Reed (Philadelphia, PA) Seth Schwartz (New York, NY) Azzan Yadin (New Brunswick, NJ)

119

Heresy and Identity in Late Antiquity

Edited by Eduard Iricinschi and Holger M. Zellentin Studien zu einer narrativen Anthropologie im frühen Judentum

Mohr Siebeck Eduard Iricinschi, born 1968; MA in Philosophy from Bucharest University, and MA in Religious Studies from ; is finishing a doctorate in the Depart- ment of Religion at . Holger M. Zellentin, born 1976, is an Assistant Professor of Rabbinics at the Richard S. Dinner Center for at the Graduate Theological Union in Berkeley, California.

e-ISBN PDF 978-3-16-151452-4 ISBN 978-3-16-149122-1 ISSN 0721-8753 (Texts and Studies in Ancient Judaism) Die Deutsche Nationalbibliothek lists this publication in the Deutsche Nationalbiblio- graphie; detailed bibliographic data is available in the Internet at http://dnb.d-nb.de.

© 2008 Mohr Siebeck, Tübingen, Germany. This book may not be reproduced, in whole or in part, in any form (beyond that permitted by copyright law) without the publisher’s written permission. This applies particularly to reproductions, translations, microfilms and storage and processing in electronic systems. The book was printed by Gulde-Druck in Tübingen on non-aging paper and bound by Buchbinderei Spinner in Ottersweier. Printed in Germany. Preface

The colloquium held on January 16–18 2005, “Making Selves and Marking Others: Heresy and Self-Definition in Late Antiquity,” follows in the steps of two earlier Princeton colloquia and volumes, which have gained wide academic attention. The series of colloquia was initiated by Peter Schäfer in 2000, with generous funding from the Princeton University Graduate School, and continued in the following years under his tutelage.* Each year, two graduate students in the Department of Religion at Princeton University choose a topic of interdisciplinary interest and organize a semester-long workshop on the selected theme, followed by a colloquium. During the workshop, graduate students present their papers to colleagues and faculty from a variety of fields, and rework them into a formal presentation. At the concluding colloquium, the participants discuss their revised work with recognized scholars from Princeton University and other institutions, invited by the organizers to present their views on the same topic. We take this opportunity to express our sincere gratitude to our contributors, and to all who so generously supported the colloquium and this publication. As representative of all those who ensured our success, we have space to name only the most prominent ones. It is hardly possible to exaggerate Peter Schäfer’s initiative and support for this project. Annette Yoshiko Reed has considerably facilitated our task by providing us with invaluable academic and editorial advice. Baru Saul and Lorraine Fuhrmann have ensured a pleasant stay at Princeton for all participants of the colloquium. At Princeton University, the Center for the Study of Religion, the Department of Religion, and the Program in Judaic Studies generously provided office space and funding for the colloquium and the publication. Finally, Henning Ziebritzki and Tanja Mix from Mohr Siebeck guided the project to its present form.

Holger Zellentin and Eduard Iricinschi

————— * Adam H. Becker and Annette Y. Reed, eds. The Ways that Never Parted: Jews and Christians in Late Antiquity and the Early Middle Ages, TSAJ 95 (Tübingen: Mohr Siebeck, 2003); and Ra‘anan Boustan and Annette Y. Reed, eds., Heavenly Realms and Earthly Realities in Late Antique Religions (Cambridge, U.K; New York: Cambridge University Press, 2004). See now also Gregg Gardner and Kevin L. Osterloh, eds., Antiquity in Antiquity: Jewish and Christian Pasts in the Greco-Roman World (Tübingen: Mohr Siebeck, forthcoming); and the colloquium organized in January 2007 by Philippa Townsend and Moulie Vidas, “Revelation, Literature, and Community in Antiquity.”

Table of Contents

Preface ...... V

EDUARD IRICINSCHI & HOLGER M. ZELLENTIN Making Selves and Marking Others: Identity and Late Antique Heresiologies ...... 1

KAREN L. KING Social and Theological Effects of Heresiological Discourse...... 28

WILLIAM E. ARNAL Doxa, Heresy, and Self-Construction: The Pauline Ekklsiai and the Boundaries of Urban Identities...... 50

AVERIL CAMERON

The Violence of Orthodoxy ...... 102

YANNIS PAPADOYANNAKIS Defining Orthodoxy in Pseudo-Justin’s “Quaestiones et responsiones ad orthodoxos”...... 115

CAROLINE HUMFRESS Citizens and Heretics: Late Roman Lawyers on Christian Heresy ...... 128

RICHARD LIM The Nomen Manichaeorum and Its Uses in Late Antiquity...... 143

KEVIN LEE OSTERLOH Judea, Rome and the Hellenistic Oikoumenê: Emulation and the Reinvention of Communal Identity ...... 168

JOHN G. GAGER Where Does Luke’s Anti-Judaism Come from?...... 207

PHILIPPA TOWNSEND

Who Were the First Christians? Jews, Gentiles and the Christianoi ...... 212

VIII Table of Contents

ELAINE PAGELS The Social History of Satan, Part III: John of Patmos and Ignatius of Antioch – Contrasting Visions of “God’s People”...... 231

EDUARD IRICINSCHI If You Got It, Flaunt It: Religious Advertising in the Gospel of Philip ...... 253

ANNETTE YOSHIKO REED Heresiology and the (Jewish-)Christian Novel: Narrativized Polemics in the Pseudo-Clementine Homilies ...... 273

BURTON L. VISOTZKY Goys ‘’n’t Us: Rabbinic Anti-Gentile Polemic in Yerushalmi Berachot 9:1 ...... 299

GREGG GARDNER Astrology in the Talmud: An Analysis of Bavli Shabbat 156 ...... 314

HOLGER M. ZELLENTIN Margin of Error: Women, Law, and Christianity in Bavli Shabbat 116a–b...... 339

ISRAEL JACOB YUVAL The Other in Us: Liturgica, Poetica, Polemica...... 364

List of Contributors...... 387

Modern Author Index ...... 389 Subject Index ...... 397 Making Selves and Marking Others: Identity and Late Antique Heresiologies

EDUARD IRICINSCHI & HOLGER M. ZELLENTIN

“The Other may not be very other at all.” Kwame Anthony Appiah1

As influential catchwords, “heresy” and “identity” have recently acquired the sense of entitlement and hazard that only a dominant academic paradigm would impart. In a famous manifesto of the 1970s, for instance, sociologist Peter Berger associates modernity with the “universalization of heresy.” According to Berger, the freedom to choose among different versions of plausibility characterizes the post-Enlightenment person. Under these new circumstances, heresy surrenders itself to the imperative of multiple worldviews and becomes the very label of modern religious life: “For premodern man, heresy is a possibility – usually a rather remote one; for modern man, heresy typically becomes a necessity.”2 Academic success has not been easy on “identity” either. In the last three decades of shifting cultural geographies, identity has become an ever- present theoretical tool in the Humanities and Social Sciences to the point where Siniša Maleševi has invoked the utopia of an identity-less world.3 A number of social scientists and historians concur that the birth of

————— * We would like to thank Adam Becker, Ra‘anan Boustan, Gregg Gardner, Martha Himmelfarb, Annette Yoshiko Reed, Jeffrey Stout, Philippa Townsend, and Moulie Vidas for their careful reading, insightful critiques, and helpful suggestions for improving this text. 1 Kwame Anthony Appiah, The Ethics of Identity (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2005). 2 Peter L. Berger, The Heretical Imperative: Contemporary Possibilities of Religious Affirmation (Garden City, NY: Anchor Press, 1979), 28. Closer to our disenchanted twenty-first century, Arthur Versluis identifies the origins of totalitarianism in “the emergence of historical Christianity,” more precisely, in its incipient heresiology and the unabated history of witch-hunting in Christianity; The New Inquisitions: Heretic-Hunting and the Intellectual Origins of Modern Totalitarianism (Oxford: OUP, 2006), ix. 3 Siniša Maleševi, Identity as Ideology: Understanding Ethnicity and Nationalism (Basingstoke U.K.; New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2006), 13–14. 2 Eduard Iricinschi & Holger M. Zellentin

“identity” must be located at the advent of modernity.4 Anthony Giddens, for instance, argues that it was only “late” or “high modernity” that brought with it “transformations in self-identity.”5 This raises the question: How legitimate is the search for identity formations in pre-modern texts?6 What are the benefits of projecting modern theoretical concepts of “identity” back into the Mediterranean and Near Eastern worlds of Late Antiquity? And, if modernity is indeed an age of heresy, then how might this skew our images of those deemed “heretics” in our pre-modern sources? What is the work that the categories of “heresy” and “identity” do, when applied to times so distant from our own? To these questions, the essays in the present volume offer a broad array of answers, drawing on sources ranging from Second-Temple Jewish and New Testament literature to late antique Christian and Rabbinic writings. They explore, in particular, how discourses of “heresy” relate to the formation of religious identities by Jews, Christians, and others. Taken together, they map the multiple functions of the discourse of “heresy” in late antique religions and their shifting relationships to “identity.” Some essays focus on the ways in which (re)imagined dissenters are perceived, described, grouped, categorized, and/or disqualified in our late antique sources. Others consider the power of labels such as “heretic,” “min,” “Jew,” “Christian,” “gnostic,” and “Manichean.” The volume thus seeks to open a vista onto the varied ways in which late antique groups and communities defined their own socio-political borders and secured in-group identities by means of discourses about “heresy” and “heretics.” The papers collected here put to work the methodological tools provided both by the recent scholarly emphases on textuality and by the social study of heresiology in order to reach a more ————— 4 Roy F. Baumeister begins his research on basic conceptual issues with Descartes’ dubitative formula and expands it to the development of the “hidden self” in the sixteenth century; see his Identity: Cultural Change and the Struggle for Self (Oxford: OUP, 1986), 11–50. 5 Anthony Giddens, Modernity and Self-Identity: Self and Society in the Late Modern Age (Cambridge: Polity Press, 1991), 33. Critics of the now-popular notion of “identity” have drawn attention to its lack of analytical value. Maleševi holds that the malleability and vagueness of this “conceptually, operationally and politically seriously troubled idiom” causes identity to be just an “operational phantom” (Identity as Ideology, 56). In the most thorough critique to date, Rogers Brubaker and Frederick Cooper advocate a complete dismissal of the project that attempts to strike the right chord between a “hard,” essentialist conception of identity and a “soft,” constructivist version of it (“Beyond ‘Identity’,” TS 29.1 [2000]: 1–47). See also Mervyn F. Bendle, “The Crisis of ‘Identity’ in High Modernity,” BJS 53.1 (2002): 1–18; and Richard Jenkins, Social Identity (2d ed. London: Routledge, 2004). 6 On pre-modern attempts at self-understanding and identification, see e.g. Judith M. Lieu, Christian Identity in the Jewish and Graeco-Roman World (Oxford: OUP, 2004); and discussion below. Making Selves and Marking Others 3 integrative understanding of late antique religious movements. They shift the focus away from “heretics” and “heresy” to heresiological discourse, by adopting literary approaches and by contextualizing the late antique Jewish and Christian groups that produced our extant literature. In the following section, we review recent developments on ancient heresiology and orthodoxy, connecting them to current discussions on the concept of “identity” in the study of religion. Finally, we introduce the papers in this volume with a focus on their novel approaches.

Hairesis in Modern Scholarship

Early Christian hairesis emerged in part from the broader context of Greek Hellenistic culture. John Glucker describes the word’s development, beginning with the classical Greek verb haireomai, “to choose.” Its root underwent a series of different modifications. For instance, in the third century BCE, hairesis could mean a person’s “attitude” or “disposition,” and often had political connotations, while later Polybius applied the term to individuals as well as groups.7 Heinrich von Staden traces the transition from individual to group applications first in the medical schools, then in philosophical schools of Hellenistic Alexandria. According to von Staden, in the Ptolemaic Alexandrian medical hairesis literature: [A] group with a fairly coherent and distinctive theories, with an acknowledged founder […], and with publicly identifiable leaders who articulate (a) their rejection of rival theories through theoretically founded polemics, as well as (b) their own systematic alternatives, would qualify as a hairesis. […] It is worth noting that, no later than the second century BCE, hairesis begins to occur in non-medical literature, too, as a designation for a group that is thought to be doctrinally distinctive, especially for a philosophical school…. In some of these non-medical texts “doctrine,” “school,” and “sect” all might be defensible translations of hairesis, but in each case it refers to a group phenomenon, not to individual choice.8 The Alexandrian classification left a lingering imprint on the term hairesis. From the second century BCE onwards, hairesis had mostly referred in Greek literature to a group, usually associated with its founder. The term hairesis appeared in the titles of books concerning the opinions of philosophers or their respective doctrines, yet it did not initially signify the institutionalized schools.9 The meaning of the term “heresy” as ————— 7 John Glucker, Antiochus and the Late Academy (Göttingen: Vandenhoeck und Ruprecht, 1978), 168, 172–3. 8 Heinrich von Staden, “Hairesis and Heresy: The Case of the haireseis iatrikai,” in Jewish and Christian Self-definition, v. 3, Self-definition in the Greco-Roman World (ed. Ben F. Meyer and E.P. Sanders; Philadelphia: Fortress Press, 1982), 76–100, esp. 80. 9 Glucker, Antiochus and the Late Academy, 174–5. 4 Eduard Iricinschi & Holger M. Zellentin

“philosophical school” became more common in the subsequent decades, and by the first century BCE it came to characterize precisely these philosophical institutions.10 As early as 1979, Marcel Simon registered the similar use of orthodoxy and hairesis in Judaism and incipient Christianity. He pointed to the trajectory between the New Testament book of Acts (24:14 and 26:5) and Justin Martyr’s Dialogue with Trypho, and most notably to a passage in the latter that describes Justin’s branch of Christianity as a Jewish hairesis (Dial. 62.3; ca. 140–150 CE).11 Semantically, hairesis remained an open term all through third century CE, according to Simon. Yet the consequences of such “choice” varied from case to case. For Origen, hairesis designated the necessary tools of paideia in the most relevant areas of human life, such as medicine, philosophy and Judaism; in the writings of Clement and Hippolytus, pagan philosophical schools receive a clearly better assessment than Christian heresies; finally, in Hellenistic philosophical writings, hairesis designates a highly qualitative choice.12 Von Staden suggests that the relational character of haireseis in early Christian contexts divorced it from its more independent uses in Alexandrian medicine or in philosophical schools, such as “doctrine,” “school,” or “sect.” Whereas these neutral descriptions underlined the discrete character of each philosophical or medical group and its leader, hairesis received new meanings in Patristic writings that described degrees of separation from the true church, such as “falling away,” “breaking away,” “separation,” “estrangement,” “alienation.”13 Even after hairesis developed into “heresy” in early Christianity, one of the term’s most important denotations remained Hellenistic philosophy and its numerous schools. Consequently, ancient Greek thought provides modern scholars with one of the main contexts for most of the research on heresy. Understanding “heresies,” however, in connection to philosophical schools has led scholars to describe them as real and concrete social movements, rather than as perceptions of a specific religious group or individual. In this sense, the history of the term “heresy” has long directed most scholars’ analysis towards the study of genuine, discrete groups. ————— 10 Glucker, Antiochus and the Late Academy, 182–184, cf. Alain Le Boulluec, La notion d’hérésie dans la littérature grecque, IIe–IIIe siècles (Paris: Études Augustiniennes, 1985), 47. 11 Marcel Simon, “From Greek Hairesis to Christian Heresy,” in Early Christian Literature and the Classical Intellectual Tradition: In Honorem Robert M. Grant, Théologie historique 54 (ed. William R. Schoedel and Robert L. Wilken; Paris: Éditions Beauchesne, 1979), 101–116, esp. 105–6. 12 Origen Contra Celsum 3.12–3; cf. 2.27; 5.61, Diogenes Laertius used it as a praise in Vit. Philos. Introd; see Simon, “From Greek Hairesis to Christian Heresy,” 108–111. 13 Von Staden, “Hairesis and Heresy,” esp. 81, 97–98. Making Selves and Marking Others 5

This approach to heresy changed a few decades ago, as Averil Cameron notes in the present volume. Currently, students of late antique Mediterranean religions question the existence of heresies as deviant from orthodoxy. The category of heresy, however, continues to fascinate scholars.

Heresiology and Difference

Two works stand as milestones of scholarship on heresiology in the last century: Walter Bauer’s Rechtgläubigkeit und Ketzerei im ältesten Chris- tentum14 and Alain Le Boulluec’s La notion d’hérésie dans la littérature grecque.15 Bauer’s book challenged the ecclesiastical understanding of heresy as a late offshoot of orthodoxy, and made room for reevaluating chronological priority in the study of local churches. Bauer’s major thesis was that heresy mainly characterized Christian communities in the Roman provincial peripheries – that is Syria, Egypt, and Asia Minor, while orthodoxy grew out of a particular form of the Church of Rome.16 Contesting early heresiological truth-claims put forward by ecclesiastical writers as well as later theological approaches to the study of ancient religions, Walter Bauer made the “contingent character of heresy” the cornerstone of historical reconstructions of Christian origins.17 Bauer’s Rechtgläubigkeit und Ketzerei broadened the spectrum of possibilities for re-imagining early Christian groups, allowing later scholars to de- emphasize the “history-of-ideas” mode of historical reconstruction and focus instead on social history. Positive German reviews of the first edition (1934) commended the ingenious approach and boldness of Bauer’ vision; they joined, however, the more critical ones in underlining Bauer’s use of the “argument from silence” and excesses of interpretation.18 ————— 14 Walter Bauer, Rechtgläubigkeit und Ketzerei im ältesten Christentum (Tübingen, Mohr Siebeck, 1934 [1964]); Orthodoxy and Heresy in Earliest Christianity (trans. by a team from the Philadelphia Seminar on Christian Origins, ed. by Robert A. Kraft and Gerhard Krodel; Philadelphia: Fortress Press, 1971). 15 Le Boulluec, La notion d’hérésie. 16 Bauer, Orthodoxy and Heresy, “Introduction” and ch. 5. 17 See Alain Le Boulluec, “Orthodoxie et hérésie aux premiers siècles dans l’historiographie récente,” in Orthodoxie, Christianisme, histoire (ed. Susanna Elm, Éric Rebillard, and Antonella Romano; Rome: École Française de Rome, 2000), 303–319, esp. 307–8. 18 See Georg Strecker, “The Reception of the Book” (rev. and augmented by Robert A. Kraft), in Bauer, Orthodoxy and Heresy, 286–316, esp. 290–295. Frederick W. Norris contests the validity of Bauer’s historical reconstruction, yet concedes to his critique of former theories of heresy (“Ignatius, Polycarp, and I Clement: Walter Bauer Reconsidered,” VC 30.1 (1976): 23–44, esp. 41–44). See also D. J. Harrington, “The 6 Eduard Iricinschi & Holger M. Zellentin

The discovery in 1945 of the Coptic documents at Nag Hammadi and their subsequent publication provided support for Bauer’s earlier views, and did away with some of the accusations leveled against his use of the argument from silence. Scholars applied the methods of form and redaction criticism to some of the Coptic texts,19 looked carefully for their “social and political implications” by reading them together with the heresiological writings,20 and stressed new and innovative use of gender images in these ancient Christian texts.21 Bauer’s book and the discovery of the Nag Hammadi texts provided the major principles for a reevaluation of early Christian heresiologies.22 The translation of the Nag Hammadi texts into modern languages, mostly during the 1970s, prompted scholars to inquire about ways to understand their mythological content and theological debates, and, in a parallel move, to reconstruct their social and political contexts. Attempts at locating more than theological dogmas and philosophical ideas in the heresiological treatises and the Nag Hammadi texts allowed , for instance, to describe heresiological writings and Valentinian mytho- logical texts as performing different argumentative tasks in strengthening

————— Reception of Walter Bauer’s Orthodoxy and Heresy in Earliest Christianity during the Last Decade,” HTR 70 (1980): 289–298. More recently, see Lewis Ayres, “The Question of Orthodoxy,” JECS 14.4 (2006): 395–398, as well as Walther Völker’s 1935 review of Bauer’s book in JECS 14.4 (2006): 399–405, trans. T. P. Scheck. 19 Helmut Koester, Ancient Christian Gospels: Their History and Development (Philadelphia: Trinity Press International, 1990). 20 Elaine Pagels, The Gnostic Gospels (New York: Vintage Books, 1979). 21 Karen King, ed., Images of the Feminine in Gnosticism (Philadelphia: Fortress Press, 1988), eadem, The Gospel of Mary of Magdala: Jesus and the First Woman Apostle (Santa Rosa, Calif.: Polebridge Press, 2003). 22 The publication of the texts discovered at Nag Hammadi led gradually to the consolidation of “Gnosticism” as an established academic category, a trend that described it as a religion in its own right, with two branches, Valentinianism and Sethianism. For “gnosticism” as a historical category, see Ugo Bianchi, ed., Le origini dello gnosticismo: Colloquio di Messina 13–18 Aprile 1966 (Leiden: Brill, 1967); Proceedings of the International Colloquium on Gnosticism, Stockholm August 20–25 1973 (Stockholm, Leiden: Almquist & Wiksell, E.J. Brill, 1977); Bentley Layton, ed., The Rediscovery of Gnosticism; I: Valentinian Gnosticism; II: Sethian Gnosticism (Leiden: Brill, 1981); and Alan F. Segal, Two Powers in Heaven: Early Rabbinic Reports about Christianity and Gnosticism (Leiden: Brill, 1977). Recently, careful reconsiderations by Michael A. Williams, Karen King, and Elaine Pagels have led scholars to question the usefulness of such a category as “gnosticism.” See Michael A. Williams, Rethinking “Gnosticism”: An Argument for Dismantling a Dubious Category (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1996); Karen L. King, What Is Gnosticism? (Cambridge, Mass: Press, 2003); and Elaine Pagels, “Irenaeus, the ‘Canon of Truth,’ and the Gospel of John: ‘Making a Difference’ through Hermeneutics and Ritual,” VC 56 (2002): 339–371. Making Selves and Marking Others 7 or contesting ecclesiastical and spiritual authority.23 Furthermore, Pagels stressed that theological and political issues were not only connected but had remarkable relevance in early Christian communities.24 Much of the recent research in this area looks for inspiration outside of the field of Religious Studies and the literature of Late Antiquity. Pierre Bourdieu and Michel Foucault number among those theorists to whom scholars of late antique religions have turned for new perspectives on the historical categories of heresy and orthodoxy. As a result, the theological perspective on Christian Origins and the rise of orthodoxy, heavily influential until the 1970s, is being gradually displaced by sociological, textual, and historical approaches, marked by a strong emphasis on local diversity. If past studies typically assumed a clear-cut distinction between the winning orthodox party and losing heretical factions, more recent studies seem to signal a shift of interest from heresy toward heresiology. Moreover, they understand competition between diverse Christian groups as contentions between the competing orthodoxies and heresiologies within each of the respective groups. This shift is perhaps clear from the newly- developed vocabulary found in recent works, which includes terms such as “heresiological representations,” “discourse,” “insider/outsider,” “identity formation,” “ethnicity,” “gender,” “sexuality,” “dissension,” “exclusion,” and “territoriality.” The most prominent representative of this trend, Alain Le Boulluec, took into account some of the critiques aimed at Bauer and shifted the focus toward “the presuppositions of the heresiological discourses.”25 Le Boulluec also took Bauer’s efforts to de-legitimize the ecclesiastical position on the origins of heresy one step further and confined his analysis to the sole study of “heresiological representations.” This approach reduces the risks of value judgments and, at the same time, makes clear the constructed character of “heresy.” When seen from this new perspective, “heresy” becomes a discursive structure rather than an historical object.26

————— 23 Elaine Pagels, “The Valentinian Claim to Esoteric Exegesis of Romans as Basis for Anthropological Theory,” VC 26 (1972): 241–258, eadem, “‘The Demiurge and His Archons’: A Gnostic View of the Bishop and Presbyters?” HTR 69.3/4 (1976): 301–324; eadem, The Johannine Gospel in Gnostic Exegesis: Heracleon’s Commentary on John (Nashville & New York: Abingdon Press, 1973), esp. 56–7. 24 Pagels, “Demiurge and His Archons,” 301–324; eadem, “Visions, Appearances, and Apostolic Authority: Gnostic and Orthodox Traditions” in Gnosis: Festschrift für Hans Jonas (ed. B. Aland; Gottingen: Vandenhoeck and Ruprecht, 1978), 415–430; eadem. “Gnostic and Orthodox Views of Christ’s Passion: Paradigms for the Christian's Response to Persecution?” in The Rediscovery of Gnosticism (ed. Bentley Layton; Leiden: E. J. Brill, 1980), vol. 1, 262–283, and conference discussions at 283–288. 25 Le Boulluec, La notion d’hérésie, vol. 1. 26 Ibid.,1.19. 8 Eduard Iricinschi & Holger M. Zellentin

The influence of Foucault, in particular, becomes clear in Le Boulluec’s examination of early Christian “institutional structures,” “norms of belonging,” and “sacramental disciplines” as well as in his purpose of detecting the reasons behind the “invention of a regulative and reductive scheme to master dissensions.”27 Le Boulluec proposes that Justin Martyr “invented” heresy around the mid-second century, by positing common traits between Christian “heresies” and “philosophical schools.” This innovation was based in two models: the depiction of “schools of thought” in Greek historiography and the identification of the demonic origins of dissensions, the latter of which was applied to the biblical trope of the “false prophet.” In addition, Le Boulluec presented Justin as the inventor of a new literary genre: his Against Heresies was the first example of what would become the Christian genre of heresiology.28 Critics of Le Boulluec’s work have noted that he focuses on the “idea of heresy,” leaving aside the question of ritual practice.29 They have also objected to Le Boulluec’s identification of the beginnings of heresiology in Justin’s writings. Rebecca Lyman, for instance, has placed Justin’s heresiology in the context of middle-Platonic universalism. She points out that the claim to a single true hairesis might not be original to Christian heresiology; rather, it may have flowed out of Greek philosophical and Roman political constraints on religious debate.30 To this, we might add that Le Boulluec mentions “Jewish precedents” to Justin’s literary use of hairesis only in passing.31 Since Justin explicitly describes Christianity as heresy from a Jewish point of view and compares Christian heresies to the Jewish ones that he claims to know, one might argue that Justin’s budding ————— 27 Ibid.,1.11–15, translated by the authors. 28 Ibid.,1.110–112, see also 42. 29 For instance, Elaine Pagels remarks that, despite the utter absence of the word “gnostic” in Justin’s writings, Le Boulluec portrays Justin’s heretics as “gnostics,” thus importing the problematic tacit assumptions of this notion; see Elaine Pagels, “Irenaeus, the ‘Canon of Truth,’ and the Gospel of John,” esp. 340–3. Extending Pagels’ objection, one could question Le Boulluec’s detection of ancient origins of heresy in Justin’s work based solely on the occurrence of new meanings for hairesis. Le Boulluec identified nascent aspects of ancient Christian “heresy” in Justin Martyr’s use of haireseis for false Christians as comparable to Greek philosophical schools. Yet, based on the single reference and the ambiguous context, one could hardly be sure that Justin’s lost treatise against haireseis made reference to Christian heresies rather than simply to contemporary philosophical schools, to which Justin devoted a considerable amount of his educational efforts; cf. Le Boulluec, La notion d’hérésie, 1.37; see Justin, 1 Apol. 26, where Justin speaks about “Christian” heretics and explicitly draws the comparison to philosophical haireseis. See also Eusebius’ discussion of Justin’s treatise against all heresies (Hist. eccl. 4.11.10). 30 Rebecca Lyman, “2002 NAPS Presidential Address: Hellenism and Heresy,” JECS 11.2 (2003): 209–222. 31 Le Boulluec, La notion d’hérésie, 1.37. Making Selves and Marking Others 9 heresiology may have been formed in interaction with Jewish models, as Daniel Boyarin has recently emphasized.32 Acknowledging the culturally-constructed character of heresy and orthodoxy, scholars of late antique religions have now applied Le Boulluec’s insights to later periods and extended his approach to such categories as rhetoric, body, and gender. In Christianity and the Rhetoric of Empire, for instance, Averil Cameron examines the making of Christian totalizing discourse through her analysis of ancient rhetoric, a focus on symbols of virginity, and on ideas about representation.33 Similarly, scholars such as Susanna Elm and Virgina Burrus have investigated the social and discursive connections between orthodoxy and heresy, as well as their reciprocal construction through “practices of bodily markings.”34 The methodological shift from “heresy” to “heresiology” also raised the question of the ideological stakes of writing and reading heresiological literature. Cameron, for instance, proposes that Byzantine Christian heresiological writings were informed by earlier defensive rhetorical strategies against the Christians’ Jewish and Gentile neighbors. In the

————— 32 Daniel Boyarin, Border Lines: The Partition of Judaeo-Christianity (Philadelphia: U. of Pennsylvania Press, 2004), 41. Justin used the term hairesis only seven times in his extant work, almost exclusively in the Dialogue with Trypho, apart from the reference to his Refutation in the First Apology. Most of his uses of hairesis seem to describe heresies from a Jewish perspective. According to this hypothesis, the search for the origin of heresiology points beyond Justin Martyr, toward the Jewish heresiology of or before Justin’s time. 33 Averil Cameron, Christianity and the Rhetoric of Empire: The Development of Christian Discourse (Berkeley: U. of California Press, 1991), and review by G. Woolf in JRS 83 (1993): 257–258. See also Averil Cameron’s earlier review article, “Redrawing the Map: Early Christianity Territory after Foucault,” JRS 76 (1986): 266–271, for the restructuring of the late antique studies. Also Peter Brown, Power and Persuasion in Late Antiquity: Towards a Christian Empire (Madison: U. of Wisconsin Press, 1992), and, more recently, Fergus Millar, A Greek Roman Empire: Power and Belief under Theodosius II (408-450) (Berkeley: U. of California Press, 2006). 34 Susanna Elm, “Pierced by Bronze Needles: Anti-Montanist Charges of Ritual Stigmatization in Their Fourth-Century Context,” JECS 4:4 (1996): 409–439. Harry O. Maier’s inquiry into Leo’s anti-Manichaean polemics employed other Foucauldian topoi, such as power, discipline and punishment; see Harry O. Maier, “‘Manichee!’: Leo the Great and the Orthodox Panopticon,” JECS 4.4 (1996): 441–460. Likewise, Virginia Burrus has explored the function of gender metaphors in “the construction of an orthodox subjectivity” in the early works of Ambrose; see Virginia Burrus, The Making of a Heretic: Gender, Authority, and the Priscillianist Controversy (Berkeley: U. of California, 1995); eadem, “Equipped for Victory: Ambrose and the Gendering of Orthodoxy,” JECS 4.4 (1996): 461–475; and “The Heretical Woman as Symbol in Alexander, Athanasius, Epiphanius, and Jerome,” HTR 84 (1991): 229–248. See also, for a nuanced correlation of heresy, gender, and magic, Todd Breyfogle, “Magic, Women, and Heresy in the Late Empire: the Case of the Priscillianists,” in Ancient Magic and Ritual Power (ed. Marvin Meyer and Paul Mirecki; Leiden: Brill 1995), 435–454. 10 Eduard Iricinschi & Holger M. Zellentin process of constructing their own and others’ identities, the authors of heresiological literature adopted verbal vituperation as a way to label the “heretics,” and to prepare a cognitive niche for theological otherness in the “mutations” of the Christian system of knowledge.35 Similarly, Hervé Inglebert regards the history of heresies as a “way to write Christian history,” similar to the ancient genres of biography and doxography. He thus situates the classical origins of heresiological genealogies within the larger process of integrating Greek paideia into doctrina Christiana. According to Inglebert, Greek paideia deeply informed the organizing system of the heresiological discourse through the genealogical model of Greek philosophical doxography.36 More recently, Denise Kimber Buell has called attention to early Christian identity-building through discursive practices and ethnoracial reasoning. According to Buell, early Christians employed ethnicity, race, and religion as social conventions with both a fixed and a fluid character, reflecting real or claimed kinship and descent.37 Buell argues that the authors of the heresiological texts allowed fluidity for their own definition of race and ethnicity, to keep their doors open for converts, while assuming that their Christian rivals have a “fixed” race/ethnicity.38 The present volume calls into question the value of a distinct notion of “heresy” for the study of Late Antiquity and aims at repositioning heresio- logical discourse within the broader context of religious identities. As such, the papers proceed from the assumption that late antique “heresy” reflects the limits of its discursive construction by authors and groups who ————— 35 Averil Cameron, “Apologetics in the Roman Empire – A Genre of Intolerance?” in “Humana sapit”: études d’antiquité tardive offertes à Lellia Cracco Ruggini (ed. Jean- Michel Carrié and Rita Lizzi Testa; Turnhout: Brepols, 2002), 219–229; see also Averil Cameron, “Jews and Heretics – A Category Error?” 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; TSAJ 95; Tübingen: Mohr Siebeck, 2003; reprint by Minneapolis: Fortress Press, 2007); and Averil Cameron, “How to Read Heresiology?” in The Cultural Turn in Late Ancient Studies: Gender, Asceticism, and Historiography (ed. Dale Martin and Patricia Cox Miller; Durham: Duke University Press, 2005), 193–212. 36 Hervé Inglebert, Interpretatio christiana: Les mutations des savoirs, cosmographie, géographie, ethnographie, histoire, dans l’antiquité chrétienne, 30–630 après J.-C, Collection des études augustiniennes (Paris: Institut d’études augustiniennes, 2001), chapter 5, “L’histoire des heresies,” 393–461, esp. 395–399, 409, 458. 37 Denise Kimber Buell, Why This New Race: Ethnic Reasoning in Early Christianity (New York: Columbia University Press, 2005); eadem, Making Christians: Clement of Alexandria and the Rhetoric of Legitimacy (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1999), esp. 18, 81. Similarly, Susan Wessel’s detailed analysis of the Nestorian controversy focuses on the rhetorical means through which its actors carried theological debates and reached their polemical purposes; see Susan Wessel, Cyril of Alexandria and the Nestorian Controversy: The Making of a Saint and of a Heretic (Oxford: OUP, 2004). 38 Buell, Why This New Race, 118, 145. Making Selves and Marking Others 11 made claims to orthodoxy and power and are shaped by social and cultural tensions. Hence, the heresy-making discourses under analysis in this volume will be best understood as representing specific late antique worldviews. Although we cannot posit a direct or self-conscious notion of religious identity in the late antique world, heresiological discourses provide us a lens for understanding Jewish or Christian identities as discursive and enduring processes of cultural negotiation with the “other.”

Ancient Jewish and Christian Identity in Modern Scholarship

Whereas the work of Bauer and Le Boulluec helped to open many new directions in research on early Christianity, scholars of Second Temple and Rabbinic Judaism did not initially engage with their views nor accept the applicability of the Christian categories of “heresy” and “heresiology” for the study of Judaism. Nevertheless, similar questions about difference, exclusion, and self-definition, have been richly explored in the context of the lively discussion of identity in the study of early Jewish self-definition as well as in the study of Jewish–Christian relations. This too is part of a broader trend: recent studies of Jewish–Christian relations have increasingly investigated the formation of religious identity as an ongoing negotiation and internalization of the “other.” Blurring boundaries of the ancient “never-parting” ways between Judaism and Christianity, articulating a working definition of the religious “other,” and taking advantage of postcolonial theories of difference and hybridity – these strategies have led to the rise of a fertile field of research where ancient answers received completely new questions.39 This approach to studying Jewish, Christian, and “pagan” traditions in concert draws on broader theoretical discussions of identity as well as critiques of older models for comparative research in the field of Religious Studies. In this, one of the most influential voices has been that of Jonathan Z. Smith.40 Smith sketches three main models of the “other” common in

————— 39 See, for instance, E.P. Sanders, ed., Jewish and Christian Self-definition, vol. 1, The Shaping of Christianity in the Second and Third Centuries (Philadelphia: Fortress Press, 1980); Jacob Neusner and Ernest S. Frerichs, eds., “To See Ourselves as Others See Us”: Christians, Jews, “Others” in Late Antiquity (Chico, Calif.: Scholars Press, 1985); Becker and Reed, eds., The Ways That Never Parted; Judith Lieu, Christian Identity. 40 See his latest collection of essays, Jonathan Z. Smith, Relating Religion: Essays in the Study of Religion (Chicago: U. of Chicago Press, 2004). See also Maleševi, Identity as Ideology, which sketches the trajectory of “identity” in the last century from logic and analytical philosophy, through neo-Freudian psychoanalysis and cultural studies, to contemporary social sciences and humanities. Maleševi argues that identity arrived on 12 Eduard Iricinschi & Holger M. Zellentin the fields of Religious Studies and Anthropology: [1] “the ‘other’ represented metonymically in terms of the presence or absence of one or more cultural traits”; [2] “the ‘other’ represented topographically in terms of center and periphery”; and, finally, [3] “the ‘other’ represented linguistically and/or intellectually in terms of intelligibility.”41 According to Smith, these metonymical, topographical, and linguistic models of the “other” render it incomprehensible. By placing difference in specific political and economic terms, articulated by social interaction and reciprocity, Smith suggests reforming otherness as a relational and situational category – “a political and linguistic project, a matter of rhetoric and judgment.”42 The reconceptualization of identity and difference – as dynamic processes rather than static or self-evident categories – has proved fruitful when applied to early Jewish and Christian texts and authors. Research has progressed along two main lines: the examination of parallel developments in Jewish and Christian cultures and the investigation of the place of exclusion in the construction of Jewish and Christian identity. This doubled interest is already clear in the three volumes on Jewish and Christian Self-Definition, the result of E.P. Sander’s 1978 project at

————— the stage of social sciences as a replacement of three other key notions that had fallen in disrepute: “race,” “national character,” and “social consciousness.” Whereas race or class consciousness compromised their theoretical legitimacy through their ideological associations with Nazism and, respectively, Communism, national character has been successfully replaced in its American context by Erik Erikson’s notion of “identity.” Maleševi concludes that it was the elusiveness of identity, its omnipresence and high rate of adaptability to social change that propelled it to the forefront of social sciences and humanities: “‘Identity’ is a fuzzy term for fuzzy times” (p. 16). 41 Jonathan Z. Smith, “Differential Equations: On Constructing the Other,” in idem, Relating Religion, 230–250, esp. 231. 42 Jonathan Z. Smith, “What a Difference a Difference Makes,” in idem, Relating Religion, 251–302, esp. 275. Conceptual haziness has not always been the main attribute of identity. Martin Heidegger’s philosophy heralds a strong concept of “identity,” charged with requirements such as unity, continuity, and authenticity. See Martin Heidegger, Identity and Difference (trans. and Introduction by Joan Stambaugh; New York: Harper & Row, 1969 [originally published in 1957]); as well as Andre Gingrich’s critique of Heidegger’s use of identity and difference in “Conceptualizing Identities: Anthropological Alternatives to Essentializing Difference and Moralizing about Othering,” in Grammars of Identity/Alterity: A Structural Approach (ed. Gerd Baumann and Andre Gingrich; New York: Berghahn Books, 2004), 3–17. Kenneth Burke’s entry on “Identity, Identification,” in his 1937 “Dictionary of Pivotal Terms,” marks an important strand of the American discussion of identity; see Kenneth Burke, Attitudes toward History (3d ed.; Berkeley: U. of California Press, 1984), 267–269 and idem, A Rhetoric of Motives (Berkeley: U. of California Press, 1969), 19). See also Beth Eddy, The Rites of Identity: The Religious Naturalism and Cultural Criticism of Kenneth Burke and Ralph Ellison (Princeton: Princeton University Press), 2003, esp. 27, 55. We are indebted to Jeffrey Stout for calling our attention to this reference. Making Selves and Marking Others 13

McMaster University that brought together scholars of Judaism, Christ- ianity, and Greco-Roman traditions to discuss ancient identity-formation. Sanders called attention to comparable tendencies toward regulative self-definition in both early Judaism and Christianity.43 Accordingly, participants analyzed these trends through a close look at the theological, social and political mechanisms of exclusion in the making of heresy and orthodoxy, Second Temple Judaism, and early Christianity. In spite of keeping their inquiries on Judaism, Christianity, and “paganism” distinct, the authors stressed that normative self-definition operates through separation, exclusion, and a heightened sense of religious identity, and regarding religious conflict and polemical attitudes as conducive to religious self-definition.44 In the three decades since the McMaster project, subsequent scholarship further applied the categories of identity and heresy to early Jewish texts and early Christian representations of Jews as well as charting the analogous historical formative processes in Judaism and Christianity. Following Smith, recent studies have tended to consider identity as a relational and situational category and focused, accordingly, on the rhetoric of difference and the process of differentiation. One notable example is Judith Lieu’s recent analysis of the formation of Christian identity in the first three centuries. Lieu reads the representation of “the Jews” and “heretics” not as a direct reflection of social reality, but as rhetorical construction.45 Lieu processes “otherness” in early Christian discourse by taking into consideration the convenient construction of a domesticated Jewish or heretic “other,” stripped of threatening character- istics. Through “mystification of alternative voices within an actual divers- ity,” the invention of these “others” amounts to effacing the similarities

————— 43 E.g. E. P. Sanders, “Introduction” to Jewish and Christian Self-definition, 1.ix–x. See also E.P. Sanders, A.I. Baumgarten, and Alan Mendelson, eds., Jewish and Christian Self-definition, vol. 2, Aspects of Judaism in the Graeco-Roman Period (Philadelphia: Fortress Press, 1981); Ben F. Meyer and E.P. Sanders, eds., Jewish and Christian Self- definition, vol. 3, Self-definition in the Greco-Roman World (Philadelphia: Fortress Press, 1982). 44 R.A. Markus, “The Problem of Self-definition: From Sect to Church,” in Jewish and Christian Self-definition, 1.1–15; Alan F. Segal, “Ruler of This World: Attitudes about Mediator Figures and the Importance of Sociology for Self-definition,” in Jewish and Christian Self-definition, 2.245–268; John M. Dillon, “Self-definition in Later Platonism,” in Jewish and Christian Self-definition, 3.60–75. 45 Lieu, Christian Identity. On the discursive construction of the “other” in Late Antiquity, see also Elizabeth A. Castelli, Martyrdom and Memory: Early Christian Culture Making (New York: Columbia University Press, 2004); Aaron P. Johnson, Ethnicity and Argument in Eusebius’ Preparatio Evangelica (Oxford: OUP, 2006); and David Frankfurter, Evil Incarnate: Rumors of Demonic Conspiracy and Ritual Abuse in History (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2006). 14 Eduard Iricinschi & Holger M. Zellentin between Jews and Christians as well as the similarities among various Christian groups. In Lieu’s study, propaganda and textuality receive a critical role in early Christianity: “The creation of otherness is a literary enterprise, reproduced no doubt in worship and homily.”46 Similarly, Lieu argues, early Christian authors waged hermeneutical battles for the right to read the Hebrew Bible and to remember Jewish textual pasts in ways suitable for various social and political settings.47 Significantly for our purposes, the “other” has also received a number of important treatments in recent scholarly reconstructions of Second Temple and Rabbinic Jewish identities. In her work on Philo’s construction of Jewish Diaspora identity in the Hellenistic setting of Egypt, for instance, Maren Niehoff argues that the Roman Empire provided Philo the blueprint upon which he envisioned first-century C.E. Egyptian-Jewish identity.48 According to Niehoff, Philo elevates Jewish values by aligning them to the contemporary Roman appropriation of the Greek past while harboring a sense of superiority toward the Greek present.49 Similarly, in a survey of the use of the term Ioudaismos in Hellenistic and Rabbinic Jewish litera- ture, Shaye J.D. Cohen suggests that a considerable degree of fluidity and elusiveness characterize the “uncertainty of Jewishness.”50 The main cultural, ethnic and religious elements of Jewish identity (birth, marriage, the Hebrew Bible, and ritual) came together and reached canonical authority, according to Cohen, only in Rabbinic Judaism.51 Even though questions of identity have been richly explored in research on Judaism, it is only recently that the themes of identity and heresiology have been brought together in scholarship on Rabbinic Judaism. In a 1980 article by Cohen we find an initial attempt to connect heresy and self- definition. Cohen’s analysis set the ground for comparing Rabbinic Jewish and early Christian ideas of “heresy” in relation to each other; it also approached the study of heresiology with the purpose of illustrating the negotiation of ancient religious identities.52 According to Cohen, Christian and Rabbinic heresiologies took shape in a similar manner, under the ————— 46 Lieu, Christian Identity, 297. 47 Ibid., 33–35, 255. 48 Maren R. Niehoff, Philo on Jewish Identity and Culture, TSAJ 86 (Tübingen: Mohr Siebeck, 2001). 49 Niehoff, Philo, 48, 54–58, 62. 50 Shaye J.D. Cohen, The Beginnings of Jewishness: Boundaries, Varieties, Uncertainties (Berkeley: U. of California Press, 1999). 51 Cohen, Beginnings, 343. See also John J. Collins, Between Athens and Jerusalem: Jewish Identity in the Hellenistic Diaspora (2d ed.; Grand Rapids, MI: William B. Eerdmans, 2000). 52 Shaye J. D. Cohen, “A Virgin Defiled: Some Rabbinic and Christian Views on the Origin of Heresy,” USQR 36.1 (1980): 1–11. Making Selves and Marking Others 15 influence of Hellenistic models of disputation among philosophical schools: “The fathers of the early Catholic church and of Rabbinic Judaism proposed nearly identical theories of self-definition and authentication.”53 Invoking the difficulties of dating Rabbinic texts, however, Cohen did not further explore the question of the primary location of this discourse or its subsequent adaptation in either Christianity or Rabbinic Judaism.54 The 1990s saw a renewed interest in the question of Rabbinic heresiology, partly inspired by Cohen’s suggestions. In a 1994 article, for instance, Richard Kalmin challenged the historicity of Rabbinic tales about minim, confirming for the study of ancient Judaism the pertinence of the findings of Le Boulluec and others for early Christian heresiology.55 In a 1996 article, Martin Goodman similarly highlights the parallels between Rabbinic representations of minim and their treatment of other “ambiguous” groups such as androgynous males and women.56 Goodman proposed that the indeterminate character of minut stems from the Rabbinic intellectual impulse towards classification. Although Goodman did not go so far as to analyze the relevance of this indeterminacy for the making of Rabbinic identity, this question was picked up and explored by Naomi Janowitz, in a 1998 article. Janowitz proposed that “Constructing the ‘min’ constructs in turn a shield which deflects notice away from the fact that other rabbis hold the same opinion [as the heretic].”57 The question of Rabbinic and Christian heresiologies has been explored, most comprehensively, by Daniel Boyarin in his 2004 book Border Lines. This book examines ancient religious borders, limits, and labels in both Jewish and Christian literature.58 For Boyarin, heresiology defines Christian identity not merely as the illustration of a third genos, but rather as a completely new ideological, political, and social formation, a religion. He further contends that the very process of creating in-group Christian borders through heresiological segregation and alienation led to the simultaneous and interdependent creation of the Christian religion as a ————— 53 Cohen, “Virgin Defiled,” 8. 54 In a similar analysis, Reuven Kimelman showed that early Rabbinic heresiology seems to have explicitly targeted only Jewish Christians as “heretics,” overlooking the possibility of any relationship between Rabbinic and orthodox Christianity heresiology; “Birkat ha-Minim and the Lack of Evidence for an Anti-Christian Jewish Prayer in Late Antiquity,” in Jewish and Christian Self-definition 2.226–44, 391–403. 55 Richard Kalmin, “Christians and Heretics in Rabbinic Literature of Late Antiquity,” HTR 87 (1994): 155–169. 56 Martin Goodman, “The Function of Minim in Early Rabbinic Judaism,” in Geschichte–Tradition–Reflexion: Festschrift für Martin Hengel zum 70. Geburstag (ed. H. Cancik, H. Lichtenberger and P. Schäfer; Tübingen: Mohr Siebeck, 1996), 1.501–510. 57 Naomi Janowitz, “Rabbis and Their Opponents: The Construction of the ‘Min’ in Rabbinic Anecdotes,” JECS 6 (1998): 449–462, esp. 460. 58 Boyarin, Border Lines. 16 Eduard Iricinschi & Holger M. Zellentin category, and of “Judaism,” as the “other” of the newly created religious formation.59 Boyarin reads the incipient Jewish-Christian relations as “dialogical relations between texts and traditions,” between Jewish and Christian authors who claim the right to appropriate the Hebrew Bible. In a parallel movement, he argues, Rabbinic writers adopted similar heresiological strategies in their own attempts to define – and exclude from their midst – a Christian “other.” Yet, Boyarin states, Rabbinic authors “only occasionally, ambivalently, and strategically” defined Judaism as religion.60 Along with Cohen and Boyarin, the present volume extends the discussion begun in the McMaster project on “pagan,” Jewish, and Christian self-definition. In doing so, the papers collected here reflect the effort to situate the developments they document in increasingly detailed and specific historical and intellectual settings. In recognizing the specificity of the discourses they discuss, however, the authors also suggest that the pairing of heresy and identity makes visible the integration, though not equivalence, of late antique Jewish and Christian discourses.

Ancient Heresy and Society

Recent scholarship on heresiology and identity has also opened the way for new perspectives on the social history of Late Antiquity. Already in the late 1960s and early 1970s, for instance, Peter Brown’s essays on the Pelagian controversy move beyond texts and discourses to place Pelagian theological debates in the social context of the fourth- and fifth-century Roman aristocracy.61 ————— 59 Ibid., 11. 60 Ibid., 224, cf. 13. See also Ra‘anan Boustan’s review in JQR 96.3 (2006): 441–446. A noteworthy ancient descriptive use of the “Other” occurs within the Rabbinic practice of referring to Elisha ben Avuya as Aher [Hb. “the Other”]. According to Boyarin, the heresy of which R. Elisha was guilty – tantamount to apostasy – was a type of binitarian theology which the rabbis yielded to Christianity and used as benchmark of Rabbinic orthodoxy (ibid., 142f). 61 Peter Brown, “Pelagius and His Supporters: Aims and Environment,” JTS (1968): 93–114; idem, “The Patrons of Pelagius: The Roman Aristocracy between East and West,” JTS (1970): 56–72. Both articles have been reprinted in Peter Brown, Religion and Society in the Age of Saint Augustine (London: Faber and Faber, 1972), 183–226. The importance of social dynamics to the formation of heresiology was further highlighted by sociological research in the early 1980s. George Zito, for instance, argued for the usefulness of the concept of heresy as a discursive procedure in a contemporary secular society; see his “Towards a Sociology of Heresy,” Sociological Analysis 44.2 (1983): 123–130. Similarly, sociologist Lester R. Kurtz described heresy as having social Making Selves and Marking Others 17

That “heresy” consists of more than theological polemics is also shown by Elizabeth A. Clark in her 1992 book on the Origenist controversy. Clark employs network-theory to unravel the highly dense relations of “kinship, friendship, hospitality given and received, literary and financial patronage, religious mentorship, traveling companionship” which blended in the fourth- and fifth-century clash between Jerome and Rufinus.62 The social implications of heresy dramatically changed as a result of the Christianization of the Roman Empire. In a 1999 article, Richard Lim presents the picture of an eclectic “religious landscape” in which the very isolation of marginal, “heretical” groups assured their survival.63 In Constantine’s time, orthodoxy had mostly a nominal character, as becomes clear from the spatial diversity of beliefs and practices across the Roman Empire. After Theodosius I, however, orthodoxy came to be defined in terms of “bishops,” “creeds,” and “councils.” According to Lim, “heresy” did not vanish; it became intensely localized, and took advantage of theological rivalries between important urban centers.64 Similarly, Caroline Humfress illustrates legal aspects of the procedural formation of orthodoxies in a 2000 article. Humfress here illuminates the links between theological positions on heresy and Roman juridical adaptations and innovations.65 These legal categories enhance the “orthodox” cognitive capacity to name, define, classify, and legally ————— origins and providing control over social arrangements; cf. Lester R. Kurtz, “The Politics of Heresy,” AJS 88/6 (1983): 1085–1115. See also idem, The Politics of Heresy: The Modernist Crisis in Roman Catholicism (Berkeley: U. of California Press, 1986). Such a sociological approach attributes to the “orthodox” party the creation of heresies, with the direct result of strengthening early Christian and Rabbinic in-group identities. 62 Elizabeth A. Clark, The Origenist Controversy: The Cultural Construction of an Early Christian Debate (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1992). In an analogous study of the early Rabbinic movement, Catherine Heszer uses network-theory to situate the rise of the Rabbinic movement with reference to the concrete circumstances of travel, discipleship, economy, and power, as seen against the background of various intra-Jewish competitors for social and religious prestige; see Catherine Hezser, The Social Structure of the Rabbinic Movement in Roman Palestine, TSAJ 66 (Tübingen: Mohr Siebeck, 1997), and also Seth Schwartz, Imperialism and Jewish Society, 200 BCE to 640 CE (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2001), 103–28. 63 Richard Lim, “Christian Triumph and Controversy,” in Late Antiquity: A Guide to the Postclassical World (ed. G. W. Bowersock, Peter Brown, and Oleg Grabar; Cambridge, Mass: Harvard University Press, 1999), 196–218, esp. 197–198. Earlier in the twentieth-century, A.H.M Jones had raised the question of the connection between heresies and national identities: “Were ancient heresies disguised social movements?” Jones’ negative answer conveys skepticism concerning the difficult task of translating theological arguments into social causes. See A. H. M. Jones, “Were Ancient Heresies National or Social Movements in Disguise?” JTS 10.2 (1959): 280–297. 64 Lim, “Christian Triumph and Controversy,” 200–208. 65 Caroline Humfress, “Roman Law, Forensic Argument and the Formation of Christian Orthodoxy (III–VI Centuries)” in Orthodoxie, Christianisme, histoire, 124–147. 18 Eduard Iricinschi & Holger M. Zellentin categorize religious beliefs. The result was legal categorization of religious belief.66 The concept of a “weak” orthodoxy led an international team of scholars, including Susanna Elm, Éric Rebillard, and Antonella Romano, to explore the composite and constructed character of “orthodoxy” in 2001.67 According to these scholars, negotiation, process, and ecclesiastical geography are precisely those conjectural features of “orthodoxy” that enable it to become a criterion of differentiation for insiders and a boundary-setting device vis-à-vis outsiders. They argue that social and political crises, expressed through theological arguments, made room for a constant redefinition and negotiation of boundaries and limits of orthodoxy in early Christianity.68 In a 2005 article by Harry O. Maier, a focus on heresy similarly allows for the exposure of elements of continuity amidst these many changes of Christianity’s first five centuries. Maier delineates the “territorial” character of Church and State after Theodosius, which forced dissenters to retreat into the privacy of their households. He contends that, in the fourth- and fifth-century, the official ecclesiastical topography and confinement of public worship to private households thus led to a “topography of heresy […] that has its origins in the domestic patterns of meeting and organization of earliest Christianity.”69 In Karen King’s What is Gnosticism?, the connections between heresy, identity, and social history are brought to bear on both ancient “gnostic” texts and modern scholarship about them.70 For King, “the ancient construction of heresy and the modern construction of Gnosticism” can be read as two similar processes whose theological intersections give birth and strength to contemporary persistence of mislabeling ancient Christian groups as gnostic.71 The puzzle that confronted early Christian authors was how to be different from other late antique religious groups, yet without being perceived as newcomers. According to King, these writers employed

————— 66 Humfress, “Roman Law,” 131. 67 See the papers of project carried at the École Française de Rome between 1996 and 1998 in Elm, Rebillard, and Romano, eds., Orthodoxie, Christianisme, histoire. 68 Susanna Elm, Pierre-Antoine Fabre, Antonella Romano, and Claire Sotinel, “Introduction” to Orthodoxie, Christianisme, histoire, viii–xxv. 69 Harry O. Maier, “Heresy, Households, and the Disciplining of Diversity,” in A People’s , vol. 2, Late Ancient Christianity (ed. Virginia Burrus; Minneapolis: Fortress Press, 2005), 213–233, esp. 222. See also Harry O. Maier, “Religious Dissent, Heresy, and Household in Late Antiquity” VC 49.1 (1995): 49–63, esp. 49–50. 70 Karen L. King, What is Gnosticism? (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2003). 71 Ibid., 21, 53. Making Selves and Marking Others 19 several distinct “theological, political and rhetorical tools” to fashion early Christian self-definition. As new categories of outsiders, “Jew” and “pagan,” received their conceptual double in the “heretic,” the antagonist Christian insider who errs by adopting outside traditions from either side of this heresiological construct. More than an intellectual category, King argues, heresy itself fulfils the role of an assessment tool that distorts religious proximity and sameness into textual difference and social exclusion.72 Most recently, Daniel Boyarin and Virginia Burrus portray Christian and Rabbinic heretics as the product of orthodox attempts to create clear insider/outsider categories. By engaging with Homi Bhabha’s “Of Mimicry and Man,” they further suggest that the idea of the heretic opens the possibility of a hybrid space, a third possibility between the self and the other, ancient Judaism and Christianity – or, in Bhabha’s words, “a differ- ence that is almost the same, but not quite.”73 In line with Boyarin and Burrus’ insight, we might notice that Irenaeus and Tertullian’s heresiological accounts of Marcion and Valentinus proceed by what James Boon designates as a “cultural exaggeration” in anthropological research, an intensification of perceived cultural differ- ences within a shared discursive space.74 Complementary to this, Rabbinic heresiology acknowledges the proximity of the heretic arguably to secure its community boundaries through narrative and legal exclusion of the interpellated min. To paraphrase Franz Fanon: The heretic is comparison.75 As the ultimate other, the concept of the “heretic” allows for the comparison, distortion, and dissimulation of “real” Jews and Christians, turning their caricature into an ideological tool whose main role is to evaluate and craft orthodox identities. Asking “cui bono?” reminds us that theological categories are never devoid of social context; that ancient heresiologies and vivid Nag Hammadi mythologies put their performative features of creating heretics

————— 72 Ibid., 22–25, esp. 24. 73 Daniel Boyarin and Virginia Burrus, “Hybridity as Subversion of Orthodoxy? Jews and Christians in Late Antiquity,” Social Compass 52.4 (2005): 431–441. Homi Bhabha, “Of Mimicry and Man: The Ambivalence of Colonial Discourse” October, Discipleship: A Special Issue on Psychoanalysis 28 (1984): 125–133. 74 James A. Boon, Other Tribes, Other Scribes: Symbolic Anthropology in the Comparative Study of Cultures, Histories, Religions, and Texts (Cambridge: CUP, 1982), esp. 26. 75 “The Negro is comparison. There is the first truth. He is comparison: that is, he is constantly preoccupied with self-evaluation and with the ego ideal”; Frantz Fanon, Black Skin, White Masks (New York: Grove Press 1967), 211. See also Diana Fuss, Identification Papers (London: Routledge, 1995), 144. Our thanks to Anthony Pietro who called our attention to this title. 20 Eduard Iricinschi & Holger M. Zellentin at work in very detailed social and political contexts of late antique societies. Thus, the ancient act of naming “heretics” provides scholars with an open window onto the formation of recently Christianized and, respectively, rabbanized state apparatuses (in Althusser’s description of ideological functions) in the post-Constantinian period.76 From the very same perspective, the act of “interpellating” late antique individuals with comparable religious practices and ideas within a heresiological context transforms them into the “other” and, at the same time, identifies them as “heretics.”77 The lines of research sketched above point to the power of naming to shape the perception and organization of social space, political status, and group boundaries. The present volume builds on the premise that one profitable way to approach heresiological writings is as “performative discourses” that strive to bring “the heretic” into being by the “social magical” act of naming – whether performed from within ecclesiastical structures of power or as expressions of fantasies of such power.78 In our view, the main tasks of ancient heresiologies included comparing and assessing similar ideological/religious formations. In the process, ancient heresiological discourses re-read similarity as difference; they turned religious formations akin to their own into utterly different configurations through appellation, the construction of hybrid genealogies, and/or the exaggeration of existing differences. To study such processes thus requires critical self-reflection on the part of the scholar, as Boyarin, Buell, King, and others have shown. Particularly in its incipient stages, the modern study of pre-modern religions was arguably shaped by the very modes of heresiological thinking and writing that we find in our late antique sources. Just as heresiology is a tool that generates comparisons and thrives on them, so ancient heresiological discourses readily served as a blueprint for modern attempts to understand a whole range of patterns in the history of religion. In some cases, modern scholars thus preserved and reproduced the image of the “heretical other”

————— 76 Louis Althusser, “Ideology and Ideological State Apparatuses (Notes towards an Investigation),” in idem, Lenin and Philosophy and Other Essays (New York: Monthly Review Press, 1971), 127–186. 77 “I shall then suggest that ideology ‘acts’ or ‘functions’ in such a way that it ‘recruits’ subjects among the individuals (it recruits them all), or ‘transforms’ the individuals into subjects (it transforms them all) by that very precise operation which I have called interpellation or hailing.” (Althusser, “Ideology,” 174). 78 Pierre Bourdieu, “Identity and Representation: Elements for a Critical Reflection on the Idea of Region,” in idem, Language and Symbolic Power (Cambridge: Polity and Basil Blackwell, 1991), 220–228, esp. 223–4. Making Selves and Marking Others 21 in colonial projects in non-Western regions.79 As a result, however, the question of the relationship of heresy and identity in our late antique sources is arguably an important and timely question, with the potential to touch upon theoretical issues beyond the confines of specialist scholarship.

Making Selves and Marking Others

This volume originated in a conference convened at Princeton University on January 16–18, 2005, on the topic of “Making Selves and Marking Others: Heresy and Self-Definition in Late Antiquity.” In organizing this conference, we sought to explore the ways in which different late antique groups and communities defined their own socio-political borders and secured in-group identities by means of discourses about “heresy” and “heretics.” Moreover, we sought to explore the value and challenges of bringing Jewish and other Greco-Roman materials to bear on the scholarly study of heresiology, which has previously been dominated by questions and considerations related specifically to Christianity. In this, our project extends the conversation of the earlier conferences in a series of books, as organized within the Department of Religion at Princeton University under the guidance of Peter Schäfer. The previous two conferences explored the shared discursive contexts of Jews, Christians, and “pagans” in Late Antiquity.80 For the conference on which this volume is based, we sought to continue these inquiries with a sustained consideration of the ancient construction of the “other” as “heretic” in various religious formations.

————— 79 Karen King has already established that modern students and defenders of the category “Gnosticism” follow in the steps of the ancient heresiologists; see What is Gnosticism? 18–19. Jonathan Z. Smith announced the end of comparison in the study of religion, not without connecting the dots between ancient and medieval heresiological discourses and early modern comparative explorations of the non-European religious landscapes; “Epilogue: The ‘End’ of Comparison: Redescription and Rectification,” in A Magic Still Dwells: Comparative Religion in the Postmodern Age (ed. Kimberley C. Patton and Benjamin C. Ray; Berkeley: U. of California Press, 2000), 237–241; idem, “Classification,” in Guide to the Study of Religion (ed. Willi Braun and Russell T. McCutcheon; London; New York: Cassell, 2000), 35–43, esp. 39–40; see also idem, “Religion, Religions, Religious,” in Critical Terms for Religious Studies (ed. Mark C. Taylor; Chicago: U. of Chicago Press, 1998), 269–284. 80 Adam H. Becker and Annette Yoshiko Reed, “Introduction: Traditional Models and New Directions,” in Ways that Never Parted, 2. See also Ra‘anan Boustan and Annette Yoshiko Reed, eds., Heavenly Realms and Earthly Realities in Late Antique Religions (Cambridge: CUP, 2004); and Gregg Gardner and Kevin Osterloh, eds., Antiquity in Antiquity: Jewish and Christian Pasts in the Greco-Roman World, TSAJ (Tübingen: Mohr Siebeck, forthcoming).