Monotheism and Tolerance: Recovering a Religion of Reason Book

More a textbook than a monograph'which does not stop it from advancing an argument. The major change in the current edition is a new, concluding chapter on the "parting of the ways" between Jews and Christians. I cannot imagine how the prior editions would read, as the book builds thematically toward that chapter. Cohen's take, in brief, is that the ways did not part, because they never ran together in the first place. As soon as we can identify a Christian church from documentary or material evidence, it did not mix with Jewish communities in "the land of Israel"* or in the diaspora. This telos, in retrospect, governs his prior account of Jewish practice, social organization, and belief.

Likewise, this telos is a function of the book's audience. The primary constituency for a course in "Second Temple Judaism" (let alone "The Jewish Background to the New Testament") is, if not Christian, then at least conditioned by prior interest in the New Testament or Christian origins. I should add, in this connection, that my training is in Christian systematic theology, so I am very much a part of this same audience.

Any American Jew writing for Christians knows what questions are likely to interest them. Such is the balance of power. In my judgment, Cohen assesses the New Testament, and Christian evidence on the period more generally, scrupulously and even generously: He treats Jesus as a healer, speaks of "post-resurrection" communities, and considers Paul a very strange Jew, but also a significant Jewish writer of the period and a source of evidence for Jewish language and internal politics. There is refreshingly little polemic here, at least on the surface where a non-specialist would notice it. A prior reviewer contrasts Cohen's account to that of N. T. Wright, which is frankly apologetic: Quite so.

Much of this material was familiar to me in other ways, but there was still plenty to learn from Cohen's presentation, and not only from his argument. Some takeaways'perhaps not new to you, but new to me:

'The only Jewish writer who ever self-identified as a Pharisee was Paul, and then of course as an ex-Pharisee. That name (which seems to come from a word for "separation") functioned to name a party, clearly, but that party's members never identified with it, either at the time or in retrospect. The word does not even appear in the Mishnah!
'Likewise with Sadducee, a group that leaves no written testimony at all. One clue: The root of the word seems to be Zadok, a priestly lineage also claimed at Qumran! Now I want to read a 19th-c. historical novel, à la Ben-Hur, about a falling-out of aristocratic priestly brothers in the late Hasmonean period.
'The word politeuma, cf. Phil 3:20 ("our politeuma is in heaven"), referred to autonomous ethnic communities within Greek cities, such as those of diaspora Jews. The exegetical implications are not yet clear to me, and it can simply mean "citizenship" in a broader sense, but now I'm curious whether NT commentators have picked up on the diasporic specificity here, as Paul certainly would have done.

*Cohen consistently uses this language as the counterpoint to the diaspora. He likewise includes, in his preface, a protest against the Presbyterian Church (USA)'s position on the Israel-Palestine conflict, which he believes to reflect an "obsess[ion] with the sins of Israel" on the part of Christians. (In case any reader doesn't know: The book's publisher is affiliated with the PCUSA.) I appreciated his forthrightness, while still finding the apologetic undercurrent a bit distracting. YMMV.