Summary Drawing in my own way on all the lessons of Daniel Boyarin’s Judaism , I take a critical look back at my own personal, scientific and institutional career, analyzing a number of key moments along the way: my conversion to Judaism at the age of 20, my entry into the world of research at 30, my appointment at the Section des sciences religieuses of the École pratique des hautes Études at 40. I explain how I became convinced of the need to “get rid” of Judaism as a concept, as the designation of a field or object of study, and how intellectually fruitful it could be to break free from the straitjacket the word represents. Of course, the fact that it seems necessary to get rid of it does not mean that it is easy, or even completely possible, to do so, given the history of the discipline itself and that of the academic institutions in which it has developed and continues to develop.
Summary An appreciation of Daniel Boyarin’s critique of the category “religion” in his most recent work.
Summary As part of a collective project to produce multilingual editions of the Acts of Pilate for the Series apocryphorum of the Corpus christianorum (Brepols), this contribution comments on the first attested mention of the title of this apocryphon in the work of Justin, in the middle of the second century. It shows that Justin is not referring to the minutes of the trial of Jesus in the Praetorium of the Roman governor Pilate, but to a theatrical script of Jewish origin, which discusses the traditions reported in the canonical Gospels. The testimony of Tertullian’s treatise Des spectacles , from the end of the same century, confirms the circulation of this literary work.
Résumé Un lithopédion (« enfant de pierre ») est un embryon calcifié. Il s’agit d’un phénomène rare. Abulcasis ( x e siècle) est fréquemment cité, y compris dans les publications médicales, comme étant le premier à avoir rapporté un cas de ce genre. Selon l’auteur de cet article, cette affirmation, largement relayée (Meerson, 2013), est erronée à double titre. Premièrement, le cas observé par Abulcasis ne peut pas être assimilé à un lithopédion. Deuxièmement, le phénomène était déjà connu des médecins, chirurgiens et naturalistes de l’Antiquité. Un épisode singulier, consigné dans les Toledot Yeshu du « groupe Pilate », est désormais adjoint au dossier (Di Segni, 1985 ; Meerson, 2013). Yeshu (Jésus) prétend pouvoir permettre à la fille de Tibère de concevoir sans le concours d’un homme. Celle-ci, vierge, se retrouve effectivement enceinte mais le fœtus est changé en pierre. L’auteur de cet article montre que derrière ce récit, qui peut sembler « simpliste », se cache en réalité une attaque extrêmement subtile et parfaitement calibrée contre les doctrines chrétiennes. Il établit que son auteur ne peut être qu’un érudit dont les connaissances médicales outrepassent celles que l’on peut trouver dans la littérature talmudique.
Summary The term “Judaism” is the subject of intense debate in current scholarship on Christians and Jews in Antiquity. What does this term mean? What was the nature of Judaism before the modern era? Boyarin has been pondering these important questions for several years, and offers a detailed treatment in his book, Judaism: The Genealogy of a Modern Notion . While Boyarin completely discourages using the term Judaism because it is particularly susceptible to distortion, an increasing number of scholars use the phrase “within Judaism” to signal the Jewishness of the authors and writings of the New Testament. This article traces the origins of this phraseology, in vogue in New Testament studies, and critically discusses its utility in light of Boyarin’s reflections. Without calling for its decommissioning, this article suggests using the term Judaism as well as other related words, such as “Jew” and “Judean,” in ways that take Boyarin’s warnings against anachronism and essentialization into consideration.
