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This chapter surveys the various hypotheses suggested by scholars for establishing Victorinus’ motivations for commenting on the Pauline corpus. Reader-response criticism is employed to elucidate Victorinus’ intentions toward his audience. The dating of the commentaries, in relation to that of his Trinitarian treatises, is closely examined. Two major thematic complexes emerge from a reading of the extant commentaries on Galatians, Ephesians, and Philippians: the Trinitarian Controversy; and justification by faith, often accompanied by polemics against Judaizing Christians. Victorinus’ concern to articulate an understanding of God and Christ consonant with the creed of Nicea is patent, but the attempt to identify that concern as the major motivation for his authorship of the commentaries is unconvincing. Victorinus’ frequent polemics against Jewish practices derives his own concern about Christians engaged in Judaizing — such Judaizing being well-documented by a variety of fourth-century sources. Victorinus’ pioneering employment of the formulation ‘faith alone’ (sola fides) and his understanding of justification by faith does not reach the point of Augustine’s anti-Pelagian exegesis but is not itself reducible to an incipient Pelagianism.

“Judaism” was not only a religion practiced by living adherents but also a basic epistemological and ontological category in the thought of non-Jews. This chapter focuses on the interaction between “Jewish” figures of thought and figures of flesh to understand the tensely productive relationship between the two. What kinds of cognitive work did “Judaism” and “Judaizing” do in Christian thought? How did this work depend upon or relate to “real” Judaism or living Jews? And how did the disappearance of so many Jews in the flesh affect the kinds of work that “Jewish” concepts of thought could do? We pose these questions in order to appreciate the immense power that concepts like “Judaism” and “Judaizing” had in the production of Christian communities and identities. By focusing on how these concepts were deployed by the many (mostly Christian) poets writing in Castilian and Catalan in the years after the mass conversions, this chapter explores how those poets used ideas about Judaism in order to create a critical discourse about poetry, and how that discourse transformed and was transformed by the possibilities of existence for living Jews and Christians.

This chapter examines Paul's praise of the Law, its mandates, and its privilege, and how he urges its standards of behavior not only toward both God but also toward fellow Christ-followers on his gentile communities. It first considers how the gospel's mission to Israel in the diaspora had absorbed sympathetic pagans without demanding that they receive circumcision. It then discusses the inconsistencies of the Law's rhetorical valence in Paul's epistles, along with the identification of “Christianity” with “Law-freeness” and what Paul has to say anything about Jews circumcising their own sons. It also analyzes Paul's negative statements about the Law to his communities mid-century, suggesting that they were intended to dissuade Christ-following pagans from Judaizing in any way other than in Paul's way.

This chapter examines Paul's conviction that Jesus Christ was about to return in the way that a warrior-messiah—a messiah son of David—should return: conquering, triumphant, establishing the Kingdom of God, in power. It was Christ's resurrection, communicated to Paul by his own vision, that convinced him of the nearness of the End. The chapter considers Paul's argument against apostolic competitors who want male believers to be circumcised, in which he insists that huiothesia, or sonship, comes through spirit and not flesh. It also discusses Paul's language of hagiasmos, “sanctification,” with respect to his gentiles-in-Christ, and the way that his thought integrates gentiles with Jerusalem's temple. Finally, it analyzes Paul's letter to the Romans, in which he addresses the issue of gentile Judaizing as well as the “fullness of the nations” and “all Israel.”

This chapter looks at Paul of Tarsus and how he played a major role in the coming together of biblical tradition and Greek philosophy. While he may not be so dramatic a figure as either Socrates or Jesus, Paul did play a major role in what can be called the birth of the Western mind, shaping events and being shaped by them. There was a predominated question in the mind of those Jews in and around Jerusalem at that time, and this involved the question of meaning. A Judaizing account of Jesus would place him in the tradition of the major Prophets, while for Hellenizing Jews, Jesus became intelligible through the lens of Greek philosophy. In a sense, both the Judaizing and Hellenizing Jews sought out a context of meaning in order to grasp and understand what had happened to Jesus. As a result, Paul attempted to effect in his own mind a synthesis between Athens and Jerusalem.

The chapter introduces the history of the Bene Ephraim in the context of other Lost Tribes communities all over the world, the history of Dalit movements in India, and broader academic discussion about definitions of Jewishness, particularist and universalist tendencies in Judaism, opportunities for social mobility in India, and issues in conversion and the rhetoric of identity. The chapter also describes the methodology used in the study that this book is based on and discusses ethical considerations of our research.

This chapter goes beyond the ethnographic context of the Bene Ephraim and presents a discussion of their relationship with international Jewish organizations that support ‘emerging’ Jewish communities. The chapter explores what role this support and wider responses to the Bene Ephraim movement on the part of other Jewish communities may have played in the development of Bene Ephraim narratives, practices, and notions of relatedness. We show that though those who rendered economic and religious support to the community strived to avoid affecting what they saw as the ‘natural’ development of the Bene Ephraim Jewishness, they could not help but contribute to the community’s engagement with mainstream Judaism. Nevertheless, we argue that their relationship with the Bene Ephraim and other Judaizing groups demonstrates that in contemporary Judaism the ‘mainstream’ and the ‘marginal’ are mutually implicated, and that this relationship problematizes the perceived divide between ‘recognized’ and ‘emerging’ Jewish communities.

This chapter evaluates various moments when detailed historical narratives survive for particular Rogation celebrations—such as for the Rogationtide of Paris in 580, a Rogationtide near Rheims in 743, and the Rogationtide of the Milanese Patarenes in 1066. These events have much in common. In all, popular holy men split off their followers from the rest of the congregation, church hierarchies condemned these holy men as heretics, Judaizers, or magicians, and competing processions emphasized factionalism, rather than solidarity. Because the march embodied the local community, the Rogation Days were a period of danger. The procession’s formal unity clashed with actual divisions on the ground. This incongruity guaranteed that the ritual could upset the local order if performed improperly just as easily as the rite could reinforce order.