male & female genital puzzles: only for lovers ...

That
Caesarean
preaching tradition
is one early site in which
the gender of the martyr shifts
from masculine to feminine, a shift that [as in from virago to virgo]
comes to the fore in Christian texts in the fourth century, as we have seen several times before.

That shift seems, once again, first attested in our Mekhilta text, attributed pseudepigraphically to Rabbi Akiva. The mystical interpretation of the Song itself was also attributed to Rabbi Akiva. It thus becomes almost absurd to speak of origins and influences, let alone of exclusively
Jewish and Christian elements

The story of Rabbi Eli'ezer
with which we entered this enquiry itself
enacts the terms we have suggested for a history
of cultural interactions that produced the full-
fledged martyrological literature
of both late antique
Judaism and
Christianity.

The story admits
that Christian martyrdoms
began earlier than those of the Jews,
since Judaism was at first religio licita,
while Christianity was [still] superstitio. The persecutions of the Jewish religion
under Hadrian were explained in the following
convincing manner.

First,
the Jews were forbidden to circumcise,
not as an attack on Judaism, but as part of the general Roman law against genital mutilation,
the lex Cornelia de Sicariis. This led to Jewish revolt, which led, in turn, to a harsh Roman response, but according to this version, there was never a concerted attack on the Jewish religion
by the Roman government.

It demonstrates
that the notion of persecution
of the Jewish religion in the third & fourth centuries
in Palestine is nothing other than pure scholarly myth.
Indeed, there is evidence that Jews invited Gentile
Christians to become Jews in order
to avoid persecution.

It is argued
compellingly that the Romans never
forbade the practice of Judaism per se,
but always only interdicted particular practices that otherwise
interfered with Roman legal institutions. There was, therefore, never a crime involved
in simply being a Jew, as there was
in being a Christian.

In both of the cases
of Jewish martyrdom that we have read here,
it was provocative teaching of Torah in public, understood
as a potentially seditious activity [the production of the
site for a "hidden transcript"] that brought
on the wrath of the Romans, & this even
according to our halflegendary
sources.

This
interpretation is echoed
in a clear definition that "Roman religion was therefore
less a matter of personal devotion than a national cult. Rome judged the religion of others
from the same standpoint. 'Every people has its religion, and we have ours!'
A religio was licita for a particular group on the basis
of tribe or nationality & traditional practices, coupled
with the proviso that its rites were not offensive
to the Roman people
or its gods!".

That last proviso is,
of course, vitally significant, and it is
the particular offensiveness of individual practices
that explains the Hadrianic persecution, which was not,
as was clearly demonstrated, an attempt at extirpation of the Jewish religion.
This, then, does not imply the theory that Christians
were persecuted for belonging
to collegia illicita.

So why
were the early Christians persecuted?
It rather constitutes another version of the positive claim,
that "the Jews were a people which followed, the Christians a sect which deserted,
the religion of their fathers!?

So Rabbi Eli'ezer
escapes from being martyred by establishing,
however trickily, that he is
not a Christian.

But if our reading
of this stories is not pure fantasy,
the text also suggests that, with reference to the third-century context
of the telling of this story, Rabbi Eli'ezer, one of the central, if problematic,
heroes of the Pharisees and later of the Rabbis, could indeed legitimately have suffered martyrdom
as a Christian. And this text even fits the technical definition
of a martyr act in that "the kernel is the
authentic documentation
of the legal
hearing."

I
don't want
to be misunderstood,
however, as proposing simply
something that we might be tempted
to call "syncretism," as if some "ingredients"
of a religion can be assigned to one "source of influence"
and others to another, even a bidirectional sycretism. Such a model
would still assume discrete and separated sects of Rabbis and Christians.
Rather, if we are talking about one complex sociocultural group with sub-
groups, then in addition to competition and polemic or dialogue,
even the partial identification of rabbinic
Jews with their Christian brothers
and sisters being
martyred is
plausible.

En
zo zie
je maar weer
eens hoe het spanningsveld
van bijna 2000 jaar geleden nog steeds springlevend
'verborgen' zit onder deze hedendaagse hersenspinsels van
bepaalde politici & religieuze stromingen die elkaar extreem fanatiek
naar het leven schijnen te staan als het gaat om de definities van legale &
illegale 'dogma's der grote [& kleine] groepen gelovigen', stemmingsgerechtigden &
de massa's die elkaar om de oren slaan & 't licht in de ogen niet gunnen t.a.v. besnijdenissen, synagogen, kerktorens, minaretten, kosjer, halal, officieel '
goedgekeurde' {on}heiligheden, verplichtingen,
overtredingen & allerlei
andere vormen van
angst &
beven.

Er zijn
al met al
nog steeds zeer diverse
groepen {on}gelovige joden,
christenen, moslims, hindoes, buddhisten,
liberalen, socialisten, communisten, kapitalisten, opportunisten & andere "-isten" die krampachtig
lijken te willen vasthouden aan hun eigen gelijk
en de levensgevaarlijke
'krankzinnigheden' der
'anderen'?!

Als we niet
in staat blijken te zijn
om een en ander als redelijke mensen
te bespreken & te regelen door kennis te nemen
van wat mensen werkelijk bezielde [& bezielt], dan kan
de [nabije] toekomst alleen nog maar veel meer ellende voor ons allen
in petto hebben a la achterdochtige samenzweringscomplotten van deze & gene en/of Jan & Alleman?!

Wie niet horen wil moet voelen: gaat onze eigen gevoeligheid al zo ver dat we in staat zijn om naar anderen te luisteren & te trachten om hen te begrijpen zonder elkaar bij voorbaat
al de hersens in te slaan met opgeblazen vooroordeel
& bureaucratische wetsuitleg
t.a.v. deze
"puzzles"?