What Would Say to Daniel Boyarin?

Simon Goldhill

“I have sometimes thought of writing a dialogue of the dead in which Lucian, Erasmus, and should mutually acknowledge the danger of exposing an old to the contempt of the blind and fantastic multitude.” So mused Edward Gibbon in his autobiography.1 It is extremely hard to know whether—or how—the historian is being ironic here. There is no indication that he is being other than straightforwardly serious in this reminiscence, but if there was any critic who had been accused of slippery cynicism with regard to the ancient authorities of religious tradition it was Gibbon himself. His Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire was vitriolically criticized by com- mitted Christians and then bowdlerized—literally and drastically edited by Dr. Bowdler—to make it acceptable to his projected nineteenth-century audi- ence, not just to remove the reliably salacious details of decline and fall, but also, more importantly, piously to silence Gibbon’s critical concerns about the veracity of the miraculous stories of the early church.2 According to the Gospels, darkness covered the earth for three hours at the time of the Crucifixion; such a frightening and symbolic moment was not recorded anywhere in classical sources. So Gibbon sniffed, with a sarcasm precisely calibrated to outrage the orthodox, “Even this miraculous event, which ought to have excited the won- der, the curiosity, and the devotion of mankind, passed without notice in an age of science and history.”3 Voltaire was, of course, the icon of the Enlightenment whose skeptical treat- ment of scriptural narrative was seen as foundational for . Erasmus—a staunchly religious man—was much hated by orthodox church- men for the challenge his Greek learning offered to the status of the received text of the Bible. And Lucian? Lucian was translated by Erasmus and Thomas More and became one of the best-sellers of the Renaissance. He was a hero of for his wit and irreverent, debunking satires—his critiques of

1 Edward Gibbon, Memoirs of My Life and Writing (ed. A.O.J. Cockshut and Stephen Constantine; Keele: Rybum Publishing, 1994), 214. 2 See Frank M. Turner, The Greek Heritage in Victorian Britain. New Haven: Yale University Press, 1981. 3 Edward Gibbon, The History of the Decline and fall of the Roman Empire. (ed. David Womersley; London: Penguin, 1995), 512.

© koninklijke brill nv, leiden, ���7 | doi ��.��63/9789004345331_019 476 Goldhill received wisdom and of religion in particular.4 This trio, Lucian, Erasmus, and Voltaire, could easily be seen as a self-serving genealogy for Gibbon, a person- al history of historical acumen—a short catalogue of the saints of a proudly threatening religious criticism. Yet, imagines Gibbon, his dialogue would have them each acknowledge the danger of such enlightened learning being pre- sented to the ignorant masses. Although Erasmus, like Friedrich David Strauss three centuries later, publicly declared that his most stringent work was suit- able only for scholars, it is hard to imagine any of Gibbon’s three heroes—let alone Gibbon himself—actually agreeing that revealing truth to the people was a danger to be avoided. Hence my anxiety about how ironic, how self- aware Gibbon should be thought to be. Reading Daniel Boyarin’s wonderful and provocative book, Socrates and the Fat Rabbis, as I have done more than once at various stages of its gestation and publication, leads me to imagine a different sort of conversation between the living and the dead: a dialogue between Martin Luther, the Pope and Daniel Boyarin. Now this might sound like the beginning of a bad joke—the reasons for such a form and such an echo will eventually become patent—and indeed it might turn out to be a very short or very bad-tempered dialogue: Martin Luther was not renowned for his easy charm in conversation with Jews. But I do think such an encounter might open an important vista onto a significant dynamic of both Boyarin’s thinking and the strategies of the rabbinical writings, espe- cially in the Babylonian . For if Lucian is important to Gibbon’s genea- logical self-positioning as an Enlightenment historian, so too Lucian is central to Daniel Boyarin’s own genealogies, because on the one hand he leads him back to his mentor, Lieberman, who told him “Read Lucian! Lucian holds the keys to the Talmud,”5 and, on the other, because he acts as a portal to a re- positioning of the Talmud within a late antique social and literary world. Yet Lucian was also a burning image in the mind both of Martin Luther, Protestant reformer, and of Sixtus V, the Pope in the late 1580s and one of the great admin- istrative reformers of the Catholic Church. The subject I want Luther, Sixtus and Boyarin to debate through their shared fascination with Lucian is the role of laughter and religious thinking—but we will need some scene setting first. Let me begin, as is only right in this volume, with Daniel Boyarin. (Martin Luther and the Pope can wait where they are.) One of the most important tra- jectories of Boyarin’s work, from Carnal Israel through to Socrates and the Fat Rabbis is the increasing insistence that rabbinical thinking is not a closed or

4 See for discussion and further bibliography Simon Goldhill, Who Needs Greek? Contests in the Cultural History of Hellenism (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002), 14–59. 5 Daniel Boyarin, Socrates and the Fat Rabbis (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2009), viii.