If

(DB) That was plausibly the very prayer to which Jerome was referring in his letter, since his alleged condemnation by the Pharisees comprises precisely these two names ('minim/Notzrim' for this group. The word minim seems just to mean sectarians in a general sense, including such as these who follow the Jewish law but confess the Nicene Creed.

The word Notzrim (Nazarenes) would be a specific reference to the Christian character of these Jews. But according to Jerome's report, even this is not a Jewish condemnation of Christians in general but rather applies to those poor folks who couldn't tell the difference properly & thought that they were both.

The total deligit-imation that Jerome seeks to accomplish of the both-Jews-and-Christians in his letter to Augustine by declaring them "nothing," the s.c. Rabbis (whom he calls anachronistically "Pharisees" seek to accomplish through the medium of a curse against those same Jews-and-at-the-same-time-Christians when they come to the synagogue.

While both would undoubtedly have denied it angrily, Jerome & the Rabbis are engaged in a kind of conspiracy to deligitimate these folks who defined themselves as both Jewish & Christians, in order that the checklist remain absolutely clear and unambiguous. As we can see, these seemingly innocuous checklists are really tools of power, not simply description.

IF, thunders Jerome, you believe IN THE NICENE CREED, GET OUT OF THE SYNAGOGUE & YOU WILL BE A CHRISTIAN. & if you stay in the synagogue & drop your belief in Christian doctrines, then the Pharisees will agree to cal you a Jew! Fill in the boxes correctly on the checklist, or you are neither a Christian nor a Jew.

The very fact that Jerome & the Rabbis needed to fight against these minim, these Nazarenes who thought they were both Jews & Christians, suggests that they did, in fact, exist & in sufficient numbers to arouse concern?!

We need a way of thinking about the varieties of Jewish religious experience ~ especially in the crucial early period ~ that successfully accounts for the eddying & swirling of different currents of thought in a larger, more complex field of differences & simi-larities, one that enables us to speak of both the Rabbis & the Notzrim as historically ~ not normatively ~ expressions of Judaism .......

Instead of a checklist for who is a Jew, which inevitably, as we have seen, leads to arbitrary exclusions, we could use the idea of family resemblances in order to recapture the period of religious fluidity that followed Jesus' crual death. As one literary scholar has noted,
'MEMBERS OF ONE FAMILY SHARE A VARIETY OF SIMILAR FEATURES: eyes, gait, hair color, temperament. But ~ and this is the crucial point ~ there need be no one set of features shared by all family members!'

Sleep well, dream sweet & please do tell us all about it if you really want to?
DO SO!