Negotiating Identities: Conflict, Conversion, and Consolidation in Early Judaism and Christianity (200 BCE–600 CE)

by Karin Hedner Zetterholm (Contributor), Anders Runesson (Editor), Cecilia Wassén (Editor)

Covering the period from 200 BCE to 600 CE, this book describes important aspects of identity formation processes within early Judaism and Christianity, and shows how negotiations involving issues of ethnicity, stereotyping, purity, commensality, and institution building contributed to the forming of group identities. Over time, some of these Jewish group identities evolved into non-Jewish Christian identities, others into a rabbinic Jewish identity, while yet others remained somewhere in between. The contributors to this volume trace these developments in archaeological remains as well as in texts from the Qumran movement, the New Testament and the reception of Paul's writings, rabbinic literature, and apocryphal and pseudepigraphical writings, such as the Book of Dreams and the Pseudo-Clementine Homilies. The long timespan covered in the volume together with the combined expertise of scholars from various fields make this book a unique contribution to research on group identity, Jewish and Christian identity formation, the Partings-of-the-ways between Judaism and Christianity, and interactions between Jews and Christians.

626 pages, Hardcover

First published September 15, 2022

Reviews

[Ans Schapendonk · Rating 1 out of 5]

Not "The long timespan covered in the volume together with the combined expertise of scholars from various fields make this book a unique contribution to research on group identity", but the knowledge about the 'universal soundhelix', rediscovered in 2013 (De universele klankhelix van Goropius Becanus) makes this kind of research possible.
As long as the Zetterholms do not refer to this amazing discovery they cannot call their work 'unique' since it is a kind of piracy. Colleagues like Jean Maurais do at least admit this by mentioning the new linguistic methods: "Research in contact linguistics and cognition provides a framework to describe the various phenomena observed, ranging from borrowing of linguistic material to the more widespread structural transfer. Processes such as pivot-matching and the cognitive aspects of word-choice transfer shed light on the mechanics of translation and issues such as the nature of cross-linguistic influence and a translator’s apparent inconsistencies".