The Middle of the Bridge (1)

But even if we, or an angel from heaven, should preach to you a gospel contrary to what we have preached to you, he is to be accursed!  As we have said before, even now I say again: if anyone is preaching to you a gospel contrary to what you received, he is to be accursed!  Galatians 1:8-9  NASB

Contrary – Where do you belong?  By what name should you be called?  As I’ve pointed out many times, those of us who follow the Jewish Messiah, but are not Jews, and who don’t find a home in the Christian Church, not rejecting Torah, often feel as if we are in the middle of the bridge.  We can’t retreat to the Christian side and we’re not exactly welcomed on the Jewish side.  Stuck in the middle, as the song goes.  We don’t even know what to call ourselves.  We’re not really Messianics because most Messianic assemblies are still Christian in their theology, especially when it comes to Trinitarian ideas.  All we really know is what we’re not.

But this isn’t so unusual.  First century believers faced the same problem.

Most Christian exegetes read these verses from Galatians as if Paul is warning about heresy, that is, about anyone who teaches that “Jesus” is not the Messiah (or, from a Christian perspective, that he is not God in the flesh).  But it’s very unlikely that this is what Paul meant.  Why?  Because in the first century all kinds of variant sects populated the religious plain, none of which claimed absolute divine authority.  It took nearly two more centuries (and a lot of political maneuvering) to come up with the idea of heresy, that is, the ability of one group to exclude and anathematize all other spiritually-oriented groups.  Both Christians and Jewish Rabbis eventually established borders by claiming that anyone who didn’t accept their doctrines was, by definition, outside the Kingdom and rejected by God.  But in Paul’s time, no such authority existed.  Each group followed its own teachings without claiming that every other group was dead wrong. So, when Paul warns about those who preach a different version of  the good news of the Kingdom, that is, something other than what he has taught, he’s not saying that those other versions are perversions or heresy.  He’s saying that they don’t fit his group’s view.  If you want to belong to the sect of “the Way,” then you won’t buy into these other views.  But you are still likely to find people who follow these other views in your assembly or at the Temple.

Now you’ll say, “But look at Paul’s language.  It’s strong!  How can the religious world of the first century be so tolerant and yet Paul speak about cursing those who don’t agree?”  And now we have a translation problem.  You see, the Greek word translated “contrary” is pará.  It has a wide range of meaning depending on the case of the word it modifies.   As adversarial, it means “without regard to,” “in spite of,” or “against.”  All of these can, of course, be captured by the English “contrary,” but they don’t necessarily mean “with direct opposition.”  What if Paul is really saying that these others views don’t take his account seriously, or that they disregard what he proclaims?  It’s not that they’re heresy.  It’s that they don’t share the same perspective.  And, of course, insofar as they don’t share his perspective, they are a threat to the community.  From Paul’s point of view, they are anathema, something to be handed over to God for punishment.

How can we make such a claim about Paul’s intention?  We turn to Daniel Boyarin’s book, Border Lines.  He writes:

“ . . . the borders between Christianity and Judaism are as constructed and imposed, as artificial and political, as any borders on earth.”[1]

“Authorities on both sides tried to establish a border, a line that, when crossed, meant that someone had definitely left one group for another.  They named such folk ‘Judaizers’ or minim, respectively, and attempted to declare their beliefs and practices, their very identities, as out of bounds.”[2]

“Judeo-Christianity, not now Jewish Christianity, but the entire multiform cultural system, should be seen as the original cauldron of contentious, dissonant, sometimes friendly, more frequently hostile, fecund religious productivity out of which ultimately precipitated two institutions at the end of late antiquity: orthodox Christianity and rabbinic Judaism.”[3]

“It is not so much that one group has won, as that something in their own discourse and perhaps in the circumstances allows then to shift from representing themselves as the embattled group that has the truth (sect) to the always/already there possessors of the truth that others are attempting to suborn (orthodoxy/’church’).  One way to think of this is that a sect describes itself as having left the larger group, owing to the corruption of that larger group, which a church, as it were, describes the others as having left (or been pushed out of) the larger group owing to their defalcation from the true way and concomitant corruption, or even representing a contaminating force that comes from the outside.”[4]

“The Temple itself (or, rather, its destruction) is one of the crucial factors that explains the epistemic shift.  While the Temple stood, it served as a focus of sectarian controversy but at the same time formed a unifying roof under which all the competing groups stood together, including the earliest Christians, and excluding, perhaps, only Qumran, who had seemingly rejected it completely.  Once, however, this unifying center was gone, new modes of religious identity formation became necessary.”[5]

“This, together with the challenges of ‘Jewish’ identity provided by the growing development and importance of Gentile Christianity (that is, the Christianity of those who were neither genealogically Israel nor observers of the commandments but claimed, nevertheless, the name Israel), formed the background for the invention of Jewish orthodoxy by the Rabbis.  A similar necessity for identifying center and borders drove, I would suggest, the parallel and virtually contemporaneous Christian invention . . .”[6]

“In short, the issue is authority.”[7]

We can conclude that prior to the need for power by religious authorities on both sides of the aisle, people were never actually in the middle of the bridge.  They were simply crossing the river without the necessity of a defined bridge.  Christian elites and their rabbinic contemporaries constructed the bridge and forced everyone onto it.

“The invention of heresy and the invention of a Christian religion that is clearly distinct from a Jewish religion are thus shown to go intimately together, part and parcel of the very production of the discursive institution of orthodoxy itself.”[8]

Instead of trying to figure out where you are on the bridge, remember the Israelites at the edge of the Sea of Reeds.  Just wade into the water.

Topical Index: bridge, heresy, curse, contrary, pará, anathema, Rabbis, Galatians 1:8

[1] Daniel Boyarin, Border Lines: the Partition of Judeo-Christianity (University of Pennsylvania Press, 2004), p. 1.

[2] Ibid., p. 2.

[3] Ibid., p. 44.

[4] Ibid., p. 50.

[5] Ibid., p. 62.

[6] Ibid.

[7] Ibid., p. 63.

[8] Ibid., p. 29.