myDiin~ & ~exclusive: g d(s), angel(s) & devil(s).

(DB) For Jerome (and for us as well), these were mutually exclusive possibilities. However, for these Jews who confessed the Nicene Creed, there was no contradiction. Just as today there are Jews who are Hassidic ~ some of whom believe that the Messiah has come, died, and will be resurrected ~ and Jews who reject the Hassidic movement entirely but all are considered Jews, so in antiquity there were Jews who were believers in Christ and Jews who weren't, but all were Jews! To use another comparison that is evocative if not entirely exact, it is as if non-Christian Jews and Christian Jews were more like Catholics and Protestants today than like Jews and Christians today ~ parts of one religious grouping, not always living in harmony or recognizing each other's legitimacy but still in a very important sense apprehensible as one entity. In order to protect the orthodox notion that there is an absolute distinction between Jews and Christians, Jerome had to "invent" a third category, neither Christians nor Jews. Jerome, backed up by the fiats of Emperor Costan-tine's Council of Nicaea and the law of the Roman Empire, the code of the Emperor Theodosius, rather imperiously declared that some folks were simply not Christians; even more surprisingly, he claimed he could decide that they were not Jews either, because they didn't fit his definition of Jews. No one before Constantine had had that power to declare some folks not Christians or not Jews. Jerome tells us something about the synagogue leadership here as well: they also condemned these people as not Jews, thus applying a similar type of checklist to read people out of a group. But there's more yet. Jerome gives fascinating names to this sect of not-Jews, not Christians. He calls them, as we've seen, minei/minim & Nazarenes (Notsrim). These names, mysterious as they seem at first, are really not mysteries at all.

They refer to two terms used in the rabbinic prayer against the sectarians, which is, in fact, first firmly attested in Jerome's fifth century (although earlier forms of it are known from the third century). In this prayer, repeated in the synagogues, Jews used to say: "And to the minim & to the Notzrim, let there be no hope!" The term MINIM means, literally, "kinds."

Jews who don't belong to the group that the Rabbis wish to define as kosher are named by them as "kinds" of Jews, not entirely main-stream! This included Jews who are not quite halakhically correct, such as followers of "Yoshua" (Jesus), but still Jews! The second term, NOTZRIM (Latinized as NAZARENES), is much more specific, referring as it does to Nazaret & thus explicitly to Christians. I'm curious ...