Language:
English
Year of publication:
2022
Titel der Quelle:
Harvard Theological Review
Angaben zur Quelle:
115,3 (2022) 309-330
Keywords:
Paul, Criticism and interpretation
;
Epiphanius,
;
Christianity and other religions Judaism Early church, ca. 30-600
;
History
;
Identification (Religion)
Abstract:
Paul’s Jewishness has often acted as a pivot in scholarship about the relationship between Christianity and Judaism, especially in recent conversation about the date and duration of the so-called “Parting of the Ways.” Too little attention has been paid, however, to who represented Paul as Jewish (or not) and why. I examine the late antique reception of Paul’s ethnic identity in Epiphanius of Cyprus, heresiologist, bishop, and someone for whom representation of Jewishness often served as a foil for the manufacture of orthodoxy. I argue that for Epiphanius, when Paul’s ethnic identity is relevant at all, the focus falls on an Israelite, Benjaminite Paul. Paul’s Jewishness becomes peripheral. Building on this observation, I suggest that we must understand even the reification of Jewishness familiar to current scholarship as only one of the late antique Christian behaviors that governed identification as Israelite.
DOI:
10.1017/S0017816022000219
URL:
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