In this stimulating collection, which consists of nine previously published essays and three which appear for the first time, together with a number of substantial appendices, Annette Yoshiko Reed adds her distinctive voice to a proliferating body of literature on the much controverted subject of Jewish Christianity. In her brief introduction, ‘Historicizing Jewish Christianity’, she lays out the three aims of her collection. First, to draw further attention to a cluster of significant and what she understands to be understudied texts and traditions which do not fit neatly into present-day notions of Christianity and Judaism. Secondly, to lay out ways in which these texts can be fitted into future study of late antiquity, on the one hand, and Jewish studies, on the other. And thirdly, to use Jewish Christianity as a lens through which to probe the power and limits, as she understands them, of our present-day scholarly practices of sorting and studying religions. In all of this, Reed is as sensitive as any scholar to the limitations of the term ‘Jewish Christianity’ (it occurs throughout the book with double inverted commas around it), but rather than joining the likes of Daniel Boyarin, and abandoning the term altogether, she wishes to retain it precisely because it shows up the limitations of current study of Jewish-Christian relations, acting as a kind of heuristic irritant, in which texts and traditions which do not fit a particular vision of that subject, necessarily attract to themselves a problematic descriptor. ‘Perhaps precisely because “Jewish-Christianity” is an anachronistic, clumsy, fraught, and contested category, I propose that it proves useful as a site for reassessing some of the interpretative habits we take for granted.’ And ‘labeling sources as “Jewish-Christian” often permits scholars to marginalize those very sources that most expose the anachronism of our current notions of “Christian” identities as always and inevitably mutually exclusive’ (p. xx).

The volume consists of two parts. In the first part, entitled, ‘“Jewish Christians” and the historiography of early Jewish/Christian relations’, Reed attempts to show how ‘Jewish-Christian’ sources can help ‘to expose the predominantly Christian frameworks through which Jewish/Christian relations and post-Christian Judaism have been commonly studied’. In an opening essay, which first appeared in the significant volume which Reed co-edited with Adam Becker, The ways that never parted (Tübingen 2003), she seeks to investigate the variant ways in which the authors of a selection of Christian works, including the Pseudo-Clementines, conceived of Christianity within Judaism, laying special emphasis upon the Homilist's presentation of followers of Christ and followers of Moses as essentially presenting the same ethically-oriented ideas. Against the tendency, prevalent since Baur, to read this collection of writings exclusively as containing sources which illuminate earliest Christianity, which was Jewish Christianity, Reed makes a good case for situating them in the fourth century, whatever one's views on the age of the sources that they might contain. If this is the case, Reed argues, the Pseudo-Clementines provide a vision of Judaism (a word they significantly never use, as they never use Christianity) which strongly contrasts with that promulgated by Eusebius, Epiphanius and others, who at this time sought to attack Jewish aspects of Christianity. The Jewish component of the Pseudo-Clementines and other early Christian texts, including the Didascalia Apostolorum, is explored further in an essay entitled ‘Beyond “Judaism” and “Christianity” in the Roman Near East’. Here the shared discourse of these Christian texts and some Rabbinic sources on issues to do with purity is examined to question traditional distinctions between Judaism and Christianity. Some of the same themes emerge in the following essay on Christian apocrypha, where emphasis is once again placed upon the contested nature of applying straightforward binaries between supposed Christian and Jewish sources. For instance, in a fascinating discussion of the Apocalypse of Peter, and taking up some conclusions of David Frankfurter, Reed suggests that this text may provide an example of a combination of Christ-devotion and Jewish identity shaped by the experience of martyrdom, by beliefs in the Eschaton and by assumptions about the centrality of Israel in eschatological events. In an essay devoted to the discussion of Pseudo-Clementine Hom. 4-6, a text often held to hail from a Jewish source, Reed seeks to show that regardless of whether that view is true or not, the positive contrast drawn by Clement between Greek paideia and Judaism, to which Clement is presented as converting, should be read within the context of the whole of the Homilies, where the category of Judaism is not contrasted with Christianity, ‘but rather expanded to include it’, with the two ‘being a prophetic pair presented as parallel lineages of the same divine truth’ arraigned against a wicked Gentile world. In an essay entitled ‘Heresy, Minut, and the Jewish-Christian novel’, Reed shows up intriguing parallels between the heresiology of the Pseudo-Clementines and the same phenomenon in the Rabbis, here concentrating on their shared narrative qualities. Again she contrasts this form of heresiology with what we find in more conventional Christian heresiology, where Judaism often appears as a heresy, and where the character of the presentation is very different. Here the Pseudo-Clementines can be read against better-known Christian discourses. This broad theme, of Jewish Christianity as a counterpoint to ‘common’ Christian understandings of Judaism, emerges in the next essay where Reed, in a brilliantly original pairing, compares and contrasts the accounts of earliest Christian history found in Eusebius and the Pseudo-Clementines. Provocatively, Reed proposes that the contrasts between the two accounts, in the very different ways in which they approach Christianity's Jewish heritage, can be seen in terms of active competition.

In the second part of the volume, Reed attempts to show what it might look like to bring Jewish-Christian sources to bear on Jewish studies. In the process she examines what she terms more integrative approaches, as these manifested themselves in the work of some significant nineteenth- century scholars such as August Neander, Heinrich Graetz and Kaufmann Kohler. There are important chapters on messianism (are we right to see this as the differentiating issue between Jews and Christians, or rather would we do better to contextualise these discussions within Judasim?), and on the Pseudo-Clementine Epistle of Peter to James and its reception in John Toland, Baur, Graetz and Kohler. In an essay entitled ‘When did Rabbis become Pharisees?’, Reed criticises those principally Christian scholars who have read Pharisees as rabbis in the New Testament and on this basis constructed around this bold theories of Christian history, which assume the early appropriation of power by Rabbis. Instead she wants to show how the Pseudo-Clementines, written in the fourth century, give evidence of rabbinic power in the fourth century, and do so by implication in a positive way. Chapter x examines the debate about the role of Christian texts in the reconstruction of histories of Jewish mysticism; and a final essay looks at what Reed terms the modern rediscovery of Jewish Christianity. Here particular attention is paid to the work of Neander and Graetz:

In a lengthy epilogue Reed expatiates on a number of points, which are either drawn straightforwardly from the preceding essays or are implied by them. She attacks the tendency in studies of ancient Jewish-Christian relations to look for a temporal point at which a ‘split’ emerged, as, for instance, one finds in the enduring, if much criticised, model of the parting of the ways. Such a framing of the subject in temporal terms is predicated upon a notion of ‘religions’ as separate and identifiable entities, an assumption which constitutes what she holds to be a ‘presentist’ concern often alien to the late antique period which is her concern. ‘What’, she asks, ‘is ignored and elided when we frame our analysis of ancient identity formation primarily in terms of the search for precedents for the terms and taxonomies most familiar to us today?’ A return to the ancient texts themselves will show that the categories which are often used nowadays to describe the ancient evidence under discussion are not universally used, or in the case of rabbinic literature, not used at all. More radically she proposes a move from our current obsession with identity to a concern with identification, or the identificatory process. It is precisely this intellectual commitment which will show up what she terms ‘the stark incommensurability that has rarely been taken into full account in studies of Christian and Jewish identity formation, precisely because Christian perspectives have been tacitly treated as central if not descriptively neutral’. Rather than classifying identities we should move to analysing practices of identification with more fine-grained attention to specific agents, settings, power relations and social ramifications. Looking at the way a range of texts theorise identity or category differences may surprise or puzzle us. A series of appendices follow, including an annotated bibliography of ‘Jewish Christianity’.

There is much that is fresh and new in this collection. Especially illuminating is Reed's detailed engagement with the Pseudo-Clementine literature as a heuristic irritant to traditional views of the history of Jewish Christian relations and the arresting alternative narrative of such a history that it can give, especially if the fourth-century context of its final redaction is taken seriously. Also important is the way in which she shows how a knowledge of the historiography of the subject can help to release us from various assumptions and adopt new ones, which better fit the messy evidence as we have it, or enable us to examine it from new perspectives. Also engaging is the radicalism of some of the suggestions made, not least about the problematic nature of using our own views of religion in engaging with ancient texts. It is perhaps an irony of this book that, while retaining for reasons already outlined the term ‘Jewish Christianity’, it ends up precisely questioning the categories ‘Jew’ and ‘Christian’. But that is precisely the point which Reed wants to make in her retention of the term, irony or no irony. The very existence of the term ‘Jewish Christianity’ stands as a reminder of the limits of our present notions of ‘Judaism’ and ‘Christianity’ to describe the ancient evidence. The book is also a treasure trove of erudition manifested over a wide range of materials and themes, mixing hard-nosed scholarly exegesis of a variety of texts with sophisticated discussion of heremeneutics. Indeed, amidst the many original observations, the book provides the attentive reader with a distinctive presentation of the status quaestionis of current debate about Jewish-Christianity and by extension Jewish-Christian relations. This is not just a thesis-driven book, though it is that, but a reliable guide to a proliferating and multifarious literature on a much changed subject.

There will inevitably be criticisms. Some might wonder about the significance which Reed has accorded to the Pseudo-Clementine literature, a point to which she in fact responds by noting evidence for its popularity in the ancient period and beyond. Others might ask why she has not spent some time considering epigraphic evidence, which, while not directly relevant to ‘Jewish Christianity’ is significant for the related discussions of Jewish and Christian identity. Others, while sympathising with her critique of the ‘partings’ model, might show some frustration at Reed's emphasis on the limits of any definition of Judaism and Christianity in late antiquity and her apparent contentedness to place at the foreground of her study what she has termed the identificatory process. That process, they might claim, led to a bifurcation, at least among a growing majority of Jews and Christians, and her book provides no answers to the nature of that process of separation. Reed would reply, I suspect, that what she is attempting to do is to draw attention to the ways in which an obsession with that type of problem has drawn us to overlook certain questions, and to allow particular types of assumptions to blind us to the individual workings of texts.

Like all important books, this one bids us return to what was once familiar with new eyes, and an awareness of the questionable assumptions which have dominated much study of a highly contested issue. For that and much more, we should be very grateful.