Heresy and Identity in Late Antiquity

Eduard Iricinschi and Holger Zellentin, editors Heresy and Identity in Late Antiquity Texts and Studies in Ancient Judaism, 119 Tübingen: Mohr Siebeck, 2008 Pp. viii + 407, [euro]79.

These days no one talks about heresy as heresy anymore. Instead we talk about "heresy" and usually pair it with some other qualifier like "rhetoric," "representation," or "construction." Additionally, recent approaches to "heresy" and "orthodoxy" in antiquity have turned to theorists in other discipline-including sociology, anthropology, and literary criticism-for fresh interpretive insights. For this volume, the result of a 2005 Princeton University colloquium entitled "Making Selves and Marking Others: Heresy and Self-Definition in Late Antiquity," the ongoing discussion/debate about "heresy" is explored through the lens of identity-formation. To that end, the editors assembled a fine group of contributors who explored "the varied ways in which different late antique groups and communities defined their own socio-political borders and secured in-group identities by means of discourses about 'heresy' and 'heretics'" (2). In the helpful introductory chapter, the editors frame the essays that follow by providing a broad survey of the modern study of "heresy" and "heresiology," as well as religious "identity" and its formation, and they also discuss important examples of how scholars have connected heretical discourse with Jewish and Christian...