Perceiving the Other in Ancient Judaism and Early Christianity

The present volume reexamines both ancient Christian and Jewish portrayals of outsiders. In what ways, both positive and negative, do ancient writers interact with and relate to those outside of their ethnicity or religious tradition? This volume devotes itself to the methodological questions surrounding the use of diverse ancient sources for the construction of the other. The goal is to shed new light on ancient interactions between different religious groups in order to describe more accurately these relationships.Albert I. Baumgarten: An Ancient Debate of Disciples - Matthew Thiessen: Gentiles as Impure Animals in the Writings of Early Christ Followers - Nathan Eubank: Damned Disciples: The Permeability of the Boundary between Insiders and Outsiders in Matthew and Paul - Tobias Nicklas: Creating the Other: The »Jews« in the Gospel of John: Past and Future Lines of Scholarship - Wolfgang Grünstäudl: Instant Polemics: Use and Reuse of Charges against Others in Early Christianity - Patricia A. Duncan: The Case for Tolerance in the Early Christian (Pseudo-Clementine) Novel - Katell Berthelot: The Paradoxical Similarities between the Jews and the Roman Other - Isaiah M. Gafni: Various »Others« in Rabbinic Literature: Between Babylonia and the Land of Israel - Haim Weiss: The Bodily Images of Shimon Bar Kosibah in Rabbinic Literature - Michal Bar-Asher Siegal: »The Best of Them Is like a Brier«: On b. 'Eruvin 101a and the Jewish-Christian Dialogue in the Babylonian Talmud - Christine Hayes: The Complicated Goy in Classical Rabbinic Sources