Playing a Jewish Game: Gentile Christian Judaizing in the First and Second Centuries CE

By Michele Murray

Is it possible that early Christian anti-Judaism was directed toward people other than Jews?

Michele Murray proposes that significant strands of early Christian anti-Judaism were directed against Gentile Christians. More specifically, it was directed toward Gentile Christian judaizers. These were Christians who combined a commitment to Christianity with adherence in varying degrees to Jewish practices, without viewing such behaviour as contradictory. Several Christian leaders thought that these community members dangerously blurred the boundaries between Christianity and Judaism. As such, Gentile Christian judaizers became the target of much anti-Jewish rhetoric in various early Christian writings.

Evidence of Gentile Christian judaizers can be found in canonical sources, such as Pauls Letter to the Galatians and the Book of Revelation, as well as non-canonical sources, such as the Epistle of Barnabas, the Didache, and Justin Martyr’s Dialogue with Trypho. In order to compare the phenomenon of judaizing and the reaction to it of ecclesiastical authorities, Murray organizes the evidence by probable geographical location, using Asia Minor and Syria as the two main loci.

The phenomenon of Gentile Christian judaizing is examined within the broader context of Jewish-Christian relations in the early centuries, and is the first attempt to draw all possible references to Gentile Christian judaizers together into one study to consider them as a whole. This discussion invites readers to reflect on the existence of Gentile Christian judaizers as another point on the continuum of Jewish-Christian relations in the Greco-Roman world — an area, Murray concludes, that needs to be more carefully defined.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Wilfrid Laurier University Press
• Release date: Jan 1, 2006
• ISBN: 9781554581177

Michele Murray

Michele Murray lives in South Park in Central Colorado. She is a professional geologist (sometimes reflected in her stories) and freelance writer. Her articles on outdoor living have been published in Mountain Gazette (she has been a contributing editor for 12 years), as well as in Discover the Outdoors, EQUUS, Fly Fishing World, Native People's Magazine, New Tribal Dawn, The Aquarian, International Double Reed Society, and other literary journals. She also writes fly fishing stories for http://www.coloradofishing.net/ and www.wyomingfishing.net. Michele's stories are included three anthologies: "Colorado Mountain Dogs," published by WestWinds Press - The Pruett Series, an imprint of Graphic Arts Books, 2014. "Comeback Wolves: Western Writers Speak for Wolves in the Southern Rockies," published by Johnson Books, 2005. "Hell's Half Mile: River Runners' Tales of Hilarity and Misadventure," published by Breakaway Books, 2004. Michele is an enrolled member in the Pembina Clan of Ojibwe of the Turtle Mountain Agency in North Dakota -- home of her father. She is also part Scottish. She draws on both sides of her ancestral heritage to write compassionate, technically correct stories that relate to these two ancient histories.

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Reviews for Playing a Jewish Game

[Luis Alexandre Ribeiro Branco · Rating: 3 out of 5 stars]

Quite good!