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Border Lines: The Partition of Judaeo-Christianity (2004) is a book by Daniel Boyarin.

Abstract

<The historical separation between Judaism and Christianity is often figured as a clearly defined break of a single entity into two separate religions. Following this model, there would have been one religion known as Judaism before the birth of Christ, which then took on a hybrid identity. Even before its subsequent division, certain beliefs and practices of this composite would have been identifiable as Christian or Jewish.In Border Lines, however, Daniel Boyarin makes a striking case for a very different way of thinking about the historical development that is the partition of Judaeo-Christianity. There were no characteristics or features that could be described as uniquely Jewish or Christian in late antiquity, Boyarin argues. Rather, Jesus-following Jews and Jews who did not follow Jesus lived on a cultural map in which beliefs, such as that in a second divine being, and practices, such as keeping kosher or maintaining the Sabbath, were widely and variably distributed. The ultimate distinctions between Judaism and Christianity were imposed from above by "border-makers," heresiologists anxious to construct a discrete identity for Christianity. By defining some beliefs and practices as Christian and others as Jewish or heretical, they moved ideas, behaviors, and people to one side or another of an artificial border--and, Boyarin significantly contends, invented the very notion of religion.>--Publisher description.

Editions

Published in Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2004. Reprinted in Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2007.

Translations

Translated into German in Berlin: Institut Kirche und Judentum, 2009.

• Espacios fronterizos: Judaísmo y cristianismo en la Antigüedad tardía = Border Lines: The Partition of Judaeo-Christianity (2013 Boyarin / Segovia), book (Spanish ed.)

Table of contents

• Preface: Interrogate, My Love
• 1. Introduction

Part I: Making a Difference: The Heresiological Beginnings of Christianity and Judaism

• 2. Justin's Dialogue with the Jews: The Beginnings of Orthodoxy
• 3. Naturalizing the Border: Apostolic Succession in the Mishnah

Part II: The Crucifixion of the Logos: How Logos Theology Became Christian

• 4. The Intertextual Birth of the Logos: The Prologue to John as a Jewish Midrash
• 5. The Jewish Life of the Logos: Logos Theology in Pre- and Pararabbinic Judaism
• 6. The Crucifixion of the Memra: How the Logos Became Christian

Part III: Sparks of the Logos: Historicizing Rabbinic Religion

• 7. The Yavneh Legend of the Stammaim: On the Invention of the Rabbis in the Sixth Century
• 8. "When the Kingdom Turned to Minut ": The Christian Empire and the Rabbinic Refusal of Religion
• Concluding Political Postscript: A Fragment

Online reviews

• RBL (Jed Wyrick)