It is now a truism that the publication in 1977 of E. P. Sanders's, Paul and Palestinian Judaism marked a watershed in Pauline interpretation.E. P. Sanders, Paul and Palestinian Judaism: A Comparison of Patterns of Religion (Philadelphia: Fortress; London: SCM, 1977). For the critique of the traditional interpretation, see esp. 33–59. Sanders outlawed once and forever from Christian scholarship the old legalistic caricature of Judaism that generations of Christians had derived from Paul.See also Sanders's more specific study, Paul, the Law and the Jewish People (Philadelphia: Fortress, 1983). For subsequent critiques along the same lines see F. Watson, Paul, Judaism and the Gentiles (SNTSMS 56; Cambridge: Cambridge University, 1986)1–22. Note, however, that Watson has modified his view more recently. See also S. K. Stowers, A Rereading of Romans: Justice, Jews and Gentiles (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1994) 1–5, 13–16, 258–60. That caricature stemmed largely from Martin Luther's identification of the battle in which he saw himself engaged in the sixteenth century with what he believed to be Paul's struggle in the mid-first century: namely, that both were confronting a religion of works-righteousness, exemplified in the one case by certain tendencies of late-medieval Catholicism and in the other by Judaism.

Most Christian and Jewish scholars have been heavily invested in asserting the radical difference and total separation of Christianity from Judaism at a very early period. Thus we find the following view expressed by one of the leading historians of dogma in our time, Basil Studer: From the socio-political point of view Christianity fairly soon broke away from Judaism. Already by about 130 the final break had been effected. This certainly contributed to an even greater openness towards religious and cultural influences from the Greco-Roman environment. Not without reason, then, it is exactly at that time that the rise of antijudaistic and hellenophile gnostic trends is alleged. Christian theology began gradually to draw away from Judaic tendencies. … In the course of separation from the Synagogue and of rapprochement with the pagan world, theology itself became more open towards the thinking of antiquity with its scientific methods. This is particularly evident in the exegesis of Holy Scripture in which the chasm separating it from rabbinic methods broadened and deepened, whereas the ancient art of interpretation as it was exercised especially in Alexandria gained the upper hand.Basil Studer, Trinity and Incarnation: The Faith of the Early Church (ed. Andrew Louth; trans. Matthias Westerhoff; Collegeville, Minn.: Liturgical Press, 1993) 14.

The Dominican friar Bernard Gui (or Bernardus Guidonis, ca. 1261–1331) was papal inquisitor in Toulouse from 1307 to 1323. At the close of his inquisitorial career he wrote Practica inquisitionis heretice pravitatis, “A Handbook for the Inquisition of Heretical Depravity.”I cite Bernard's Practica from the edition by C. Douais (Paris: Alphonse Picard, 1886) and from the edition of part 5 by G. Mollat with the assistance of G. Drioux, Bernard Gui, Manuel de l'inquisiteur (2 vols.; Paris: Honoré Champion, 1927). The following works, which are cited frequently, are cited by author's name and brief title: Antoine Dondaine, “Le manuel de l'inquisiteur (1230–1330),” Archivum Fratrum Praedicatorum 17 (1947) 85–194; Solomon Grayzel, The Church and the Jews in the XIIIth Century, Vol. 2: 1254–1314 (ed. Kenneth Stow; New York: Jewish Theological Seminary, 1988); Shlomo Simonsohn, The Apostolic See and the Jews: Documents 492–1404 (Studies and Texts 94; Toronto: Pontifical Institute of Mediaeval Studies, 1988) and The Apostolic See and the Jews: History (Studies and Texts 109; Toronto: Pontifical Institute of Mediaeval Studies, 1991); Walter Wakefield and Austin Evans, Heresies of the High Middle Ages (New York: Columbia University Press, 1969; repr., 1991); Yosef H. Yerushalmi, “The Inquisition and the Jews of France in the Time of Bernard Gui,” HTR 63 (1970) 317–76. On Bernard Gui, see Wakefield and Evans, Heresies 373–75; Yerushalmi, “Inquisition”; A. Vernet, “Guidonis, Bernardo,” Lexikon des Mittelalters 1 (1980) 1976–78; Bernard Gui et son monde (Cahiers de Fanjeaux 16; Toulouse: Edouard Privat, 1981); Jeremy Cohen, The Friars and the Jews (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1982) 89–96. In this work Bernard sets out in great detail everything one needs to know in order to be an effective inquisitor: the proper legal forms for drawing up accusations, summoning witnesses, and remanding suspects into custody; the proper questions to use in cross-examining suspects; the assessment of evidence for guilt versus innocence; the hallmarks of true confession, contrition, and repentance; the appropriate punishments for the condemned; the legal authority for the Inquisition; and, in part 5, the concluding and perhaps most interesting part of the entire work, a detailed description of the errors and sects that threaten the church and require the vigilance of the Inquisition: the Manichees (Cathari), Waldensians (Poor of Lyon), Pseudo-Apostles (Apostles of Christ), Beguins (Poor Brethren), Jews, and sorcerers. The four chapters on the Jews focus on two themes: first, Jews draw Christians away from Christianity; second, Jews in their prayers and in their books blaspheme Christ and the Church. The first theme is introduced in the first chapter and developed in the second, which describes the rite by which the Jews “rejudaize” Jews who had become Christians. The second theme is the subject of the fourth and concluding chapter, which is entitled “On the Intolerable Blasphemy of the Jews against Christ, Christianity, and Christians,” and describes in some detail how the Jews curse Christ in their prayers and pray for the downfall of the Catholic Church. Both themes appear in the third chapter, which contains an interrogation script entitled “A List of Questions Specifically for Jews and Those Who Have Been Rejudaized.”De perfidia Judeorum, Practica 5.5.1–4 (Douais 288–92; Mollat-Drioux 2.6–19). For a translation of part 5, see Wakefield and Evans, Heresies, 375–445. All translations in this essay are mine except as noted.

The writings of Ludwig Wittgenstein have inspired countless philosophical reflections in the brief half-century since they first began circulating in English and German. In the past several decades theologians have added their own contributions, applying Wittgenstein's observations about language and human behavior to talking about God and other religious concepts. Recent writers such as Fergus Kerr and D. Z. Phillips have drawn on Wittgenstein's cryptic statements to emphasize the intrinsic role of language in religious life.See especially Fergus Kerr, Theology after Wittgenstein (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1986), and D. Z. Phillips, Wittgenstein and Religion (London: St. Martin's Press, 1993). My brief summary however, in giving only a general sense of their priorities, hardly does justice to the complexity of their thought. These writers critique, though with different aims, the notion that religious language refers primarily to some metaphysical realm which is either difficult or impossible to access, whether this is the private inner self, barred from investigation, or the distant God dwelling in heaven far above us. The above-mentioned theologians take their cue from Wittgenstein's emphasis on seeing clearly the multitude of different, embodied forms of life in which language arises and takes on meaning. In the context of religious language, they stress that words about God and other religious concepts, even when they seem to refer to invisible entities, deal primarily with our current embodied reality. They insist that religious language cannot be dismissed as unverifiable metaphysics, and they critique those who use it as a means of fantasizing about hidden realms.

The “hermeneutics of suspicion,” which has emerged in recent times as a lens for examining historical texts, is a hermeneutic which involves a fundamental philosophical reorientation.See Richard E. Palmer, Hermeneutics: Interpretation Theory in Schleiermacher, Dilthey, Heidegger, and Gadamer (Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 1969); Paul Ricœur, The Conflict of Interpretations: Essays in Hermeneutics (ed. Don Ihde; Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 1974); Hans-Georg Gadamer, Truth and Method (translation edited by Garrett Barden and John Cumming; New York: Seabury Press, 1975). Consciousness, which was once considered to be perceptually transparent in a Cartesian manner and linguistically transparent in a Wittgensteinian way, is now considered to consist primarily of the relationship between the hidden and the shown, between what is concealed and what is revealed.Rowan Williams, “The Suspicion of Suspicion: Wittgenstein and Bonhoeffer,” The Grammar of the Heart (ed. Richard H. Bell; San Francisco: Harper & Row Publishers, 1988) 36–53. Consciousness therefore needs decoding, and so also the texts which embody it. This understanding of consciousness is the fundamental assumption underlying the “hermeneutics of suspicion” as it was espoused by Paul Ricoeur, who referred repeatedly to the three “masters of suspicion”: Karl Marx, Friedrich Nietzsche, and Sigmund Freud.Paul Ricœur, Freud and Philosophy: An Essay in Interpretation (trans. Denis Savage; New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 1970) 32. While these three might appear “seemingly mutually exclusive,”Ibid. for all three “the fundamental category of consciousness is the relation of hidden-shown or, if you prefer, simulated-manifested.”Ibid., 33–34. I leave it to the reader to decide whether Michel Foucault and Edward Said should now be incuded in this list. The case for René Descartes is less clear. See Geneviève Rodis-Lewis, Descartes: His Life and Thought (trans. Jane Marie Todd; Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 1998) 79–81. The basic hermeneutical implication of their thought points in the same direction—a text may not be taken at its face value, indeed the face of a text may be no more than a mask which conceals underlying socio-economic, political, and psychological realities in such a way as to obscure them, or render them more palatable, if not more acceptable.

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This is a witty, passionate, remarkably written book, with a pedagogical intent.John Dominic Crossan, The Birth of Christianity: Discovering What Happened in the Years Immediately after the Execution of Jesus (New York: HarperSanFrancisco, 1998). I would like to thank here two friends, Ann Graham Brock and Christopher R. Matthews, who both read this paper and revised its English carefully. These pages were written before I found N. T. Wright's review and John Dominic Crossan's response. See N. T. Wright, “A New Birth? An Article Review of John Dominic Crossan's The Birth of Christianity…,” SJT 53 (2000) 72–91; John Dominic Crossan, “Blessed Plot: A Reply to N.T. Wright's Review of The Birth of Christianity,” ibid., 92–112. In this learned book Crossan displays an extraordinary range of knowledge, from Irish literature to modern Greek folklore, in his reconstruction of the birth of Christianity. He discusses everything from four types of crucifixion to death certificates in eighteenth-century London, from medical to anthropological opinions concerning dreams and visions. This expansive approach impacts our knowledge of antiquity through his insights concerning the sociology of the ancient world, specifically the relationship between rural and urban life. Although he does not mention Papias's opinion on oral communication,Papias's opinion is preserved by Eusebius of Caesarea, Hist. Eccl. 3.39.3–4. he provides valuable pages on memory and oral tradition. Using quotations in a style reminiscent of Montaigne, who in the 16th century decorated his study with emblematic quotations of classical authors not as a source of authority, but as a source of inspiration, Crossan provides an unusual, scholarly work. Much like Montaigne, Crossan often speaks as a moralist, focused on justice as the main characteristic of Jesus and the Jesus movement. It is thus clear that Crossan's own creed maintains that Christianity was in the beginning and still should be a movement of revolt against economic oppression and a struggle for the God of justice.