Border Lines: Introduction (1)
First of all, I will insist that the borders between Christianity and Judaism are as constructed and imposed, as artificial and political as any of the borders of the earth ... Rather than a natural-sounding "parting of the ways," such as we usually hear about with respect to these two "religions," I will suggest an imposed partitioning of what was once a territory without border lines ... (1)
My proposal here is that the discourse we know of orthodoxy and heresy provides at least one crucial site for the excavation of of a genealogy of Judaism and Christianity. (2)
I agree completely with Yuval's claim that there is something fundamentally upside down in looking within Rabbinic sources for "background" to the New Testament. Judaism is not the "mother" of Christianity; they are twins, joined at the hip. (5)
Shwartz is claiming that the production of Christianity is, itself, the invention of religion as such--a discrete category of human experience. The production of this category does not imply that many elements of what would form religions did not exist before this time, but rather that the particular aggregation of verbal and other practices that would now be named as constituting a religion only came into being as a discrete category as Christianization itself. In this sense, one cannot speak of Judaism as existing before Christianity but only as part of the process of the invention of Christianity. "Religion" Denis Guenoun has recently pointed out, "is constituted as the differences between religions." Christianity, in its constitution as a religion, therefore needed religious difference, needed Judaism to be its other--the religion that is false. (11)
My proposal here is that the discourse we know of orthodoxy and heresy provides at least one crucial site for the excavation of of a genealogy of Judaism and Christianity. (2)
I agree completely with Yuval's claim that there is something fundamentally upside down in looking within Rabbinic sources for "background" to the New Testament. Judaism is not the "mother" of Christianity; they are twins, joined at the hip. (5)
Shwartz is claiming that the production of Christianity is, itself, the invention of religion as such--a discrete category of human experience. The production of this category does not imply that many elements of what would form religions did not exist before this time, but rather that the particular aggregation of verbal and other practices that would now be named as constituting a religion only came into being as a discrete category as Christianization itself. In this sense, one cannot speak of Judaism as existing before Christianity but only as part of the process of the invention of Christianity. "Religion" Denis Guenoun has recently pointed out, "is constituted as the differences between religions." Christianity, in its constitution as a religion, therefore needed religious difference, needed Judaism to be its other--the religion that is false. (11)