through which the Christian movement became widely characterized by its connection with middle and neo-platonism. In fact, this connection (between philonic Judaism and Christianity) was recognized in antiquity as well, for popular Christian legend had Philo convert to Christianity. Even some fairly recent scholarship attributed some of his works to Christians (Bruns 1973; and see Winston 1981, xixii and 31314).
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The central thesis of this book is that rabbinic Judaismthe cultural formation of most of the Hebrew- and Aramaic-speaking Jews of Palestine and Babyloniawas substantially differentiated in its representations and discourses of the body and sexuality from Greek-speaking Jewish formations, including much of Christianity. My fundamental notion, which will be explored and defended throughout the book, is that rabbinic Judaism invested significance in the body which in the other formations was invested in the soul. That is, for rabbinic Jews, the human being was defined as a bodyanimated, to be sure, by a soulwhile for Hellenistic Jews (such as Philo) and (at least many Greek-speaking) Christians (such as Paul), the essence of a human being is a soul housed in a body.
8
For most of the Greco-Roman world an ontological dualism became as natural
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 | | 8. See Boyarin 1992 for evidence and qualification of this statement. To prevent misunderstanding at this point, let me state here that such dualism does not
necessarily
imply contempt for the body. It would be a mistake to characterize Paul (and many early Christians, even among the dualists) simply as misomatists. Where some dualists represent the body as a grave for the soul, Paul represents it as a garment and affords it a positive role even in the eschaton. It seems, nevertheless, that the essence of humanbeing is for him the soul, whereas I am arguing that for the Rabbis it was the body.
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| | For an analogous case in which a platonistic view is identified as common in Hellenistic culture and absent in rabbinic Judaism compare the following statement of E. P. Sanders:
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| | I must now reaffirm, against Robinson, that I think there is some validity to discussing the general character of religion which obtained in a given geographical/cultural milieu. I think that there is some sense in speaking of "Platonism," for example, when referring to the widespread view in the Hellenistic world that the true is to be identified with the immutable. Robinson might object to this as too essentialist a category and as insufficiently dynamic, and it may be that one can give a history of the conception, but the category of Platonism as just defined does, in my view, point to something real in the ancient world. (It is, by the way, a view which is notable by its absence in most of Palestinian Judaism.)
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| | (Sanders 1977, 24)
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| | I will be arguing in this book that an analogous patterning obtains with regard to the platonic (or rather platonistic) idea that the soul is the essence of the human being, and it is housed in a body.
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