1. Birkat Ha-Minim and Early Christianity: Introduction

In 1898, Solomon Schechter and Israel Abrahams published a version of the statutory daily prayer of Judaism, the Eighteen Benedictions or ‘Amidah (‘standing prayer’), which they had discovered in the Cairo Genizah.Footnote ¹ Scholars of early Judaism and Christianity were immediately intrigued by the rendition here of the Twelfth Benediction, which is commonly dubbed Birkat Ha-Minim, a phrase that literally means ‘the benediction of the heretics’ but is actually a euphemism for an imprecation against them.Footnote ² The arresting thing about Schechter's Genizah version is that it refers not only to minim = heretics in general but also to Nazarenes = Christians in particular:Footnote ³

Scholars frequently refer to this version of Birkat Ha-Minim as ‘the Genizah version’ or ‘the Palestinian recension’,Footnote ⁵ although both terms are somewhat misleading. The Genizah collection contains not just one manuscript attesting Birkat Ha-Minim but eighty-six, which Uri Ehrlich and Ruth Langer have recently sorted into six different versions.Footnote ⁶ Many of the Genizah fragments, moreover, display ‘Babylonian’ characteristics, and many ‘Babylonian’ liturgical traditions are probably rooted in Palestine, so that a simplistic equation of ‘the Genizah version’ with ‘the Palestinian recension’ is misleading.Footnote ⁷ It is nonetheless significant that the vast majority of the Genizah manuscripts of this imprecation contain a reference not only to minim but also to Nazarenes, and that those that lack נצרים also lack מינים.Footnote ⁸

Despite the fact that Schechter's Genizah fragment dates to the late ninth or early tenth century, several scholars have used it to support their view that a reference to Christians ‘was regularly incorporated in the Eighteen Benedictions from the end of the first century, [and] played an important part in the separation of church and synagogue…’Footnote ⁹ In recent years, this view has been especially associated with the name of J. Louis Martyn, who in a famous 1968 study linked Schechter's Genizah version of Birkat Ha-Minim with the references in John 9.22; 12.42; and 16.2 to Christians becoming ἀποσυνάγωγοι, i.e. outcasts from the synagogue or the Jewish community.Footnote ¹⁰ According to Martyn, these Johannine ἀποσυνάγωγος passages reflect not their ostensible setting in Jesus' time but the Gospel writer's own historical location near the end of the first century CE, after the rabbis at Jamnia or Yavneh, in the wake of the disaster of the First Revolt, had decreed that Jewish Christians could no longer be part of the religious community of Israel.Footnote ¹¹

In constructing his case, Martyn, following the lead of much previous scholarship, linked Schechter's Genizah manuscript with a passage from the Babylonian Talmud, Berakot 28b–29a:Footnote ¹²

Here, according to Martyn, we see Birkat Ha-Minim functioning as a loyalty oath to ‘smoke out’ Christians and thus hasten their departure from the synagogue. Martyn interpreted b. Ber. 29a and other rabbinic traditions such as y. Ber. 5.3 (9c) to mean that, if a reader faltered in reciting this benediction, he was suspected of being a min himself and therefore stood in danger of expulsion.

2. Responses to Martyn

In general Martyn's book was well received, and it has continued to shape Johannine scholarship to the present day. Several scholars, however, have criticized its intertwined assumptions that Birkat Ha-Minim was promulgated at Yavneh and directed at Christians.Footnote ¹³ Although the motivation usually does not become explicit, part of the passion of this denial seems to stem from the fear that a reconstruction of Johannine history that sees the back story of the Gospel in a situation in which Jews were cursing and even killing ChristiansFootnote ¹⁴ will also lend credence to the belief that the fierce Johannine language about ‘the Jews’ is justified and that subsequent Christian persecution of Jews has simply been payback for what Jews previously did to Christians.Footnote ¹⁵ This fear is not entirely paranoid. As William Horbury shows in his erudite study of Birkat Ha-Minim, since the benediction was first translated into Latin by a Jewish convert to Catholicism in 1239, its relevance to early Christian history has been routinely upheld by anti-Semites and denied by Jews and their defenders.Footnote ¹⁶

But it would be a mistake to think the objections to Martyn's thesis were motivated entirely by concern about anti-Semitism. Many of them, rather, have to do with substantive issues of scholarly method. Reuven Kimelman and Steven Katz, for example, have stressed that the benediction is known as ברכת המינים (‘the benediction of the heretics’). If it were really directed against the Christians, Kimelman and Katz argue, it would instead be called ברכת הנצרים (‘the benediction of the Nazarenes’).Footnote ¹⁷ Moreover, the explicit reference to the Christians (=Nazarenes) in the phrase הנצרים והמינים (‘the Nazarenes and the heretics’) appears to these scholars to be a secondary addition, since they consider unnatural a phrase in which the subgroup is mentioned before the larger group to which it belongs.Footnote ¹⁸ Katz concludes that the Genizah form, with its reference to the Christians, reflects medieval Jewish polemic rather than the original text of Birkat Ha-Minim. The original, according to Katz, was probably directed at a variety of Jewish sects, including perhaps Jewish Gnostics, Hellenizers, and post-70 remnants of the Sadducees and the Essenes, as well as Jewish Christians.Footnote ¹⁹

Recently, scholarship on early Jewish liturgy has surfaced more radical doubts, which have to do with such matters as the precise relation of the rabbis to the formulation of the ‘Amidah and our ability to reconstruct the original form of that prayer—or even if there was such a thing. These doubts have profound implications for Martyn's analysis, since the latter is based on the presuppositions that Birkat Ha-Minim was a set and influential liturgical text by the end of the first century, and that the rabbis (who according to Martyn correspond to the Pharisees in the Gospel of John) played a decisive role in its promulgation. Two quotations from a contemporary investigator of ancient Jewish liturgy, Ruth Langer, will illustrate the nature of some of these doubts:

Moreover, even if we accept the substantial historicity of the tradition in b. Ber. 28b about Simeon Ha-Paquli arranging the Eighteen Benedictions before Rabban Gamaliel at Yavneh,Footnote ²² there is room for dispute about how this tradition should be interpreted. Does it imply, as Louis Finkelstein maintains, that Gamaliel simply gave a final editing to existing benedictions?Footnote ²³ Does it suggest, as Ezra Fleischer argues, that Simeon virtually created the Eighteen Benedictions ex nihilo and thereby fixed their form?Footnote ²⁴ Or is Joseph Heinemann correct in asserting that the sages' activity at Yavneh was limited to fixing the number, themes, and order of the benedictions, and that it is therefore fruitless to search for their ‘original text’?Footnote ²⁵

Such questions, and the scholarly uncertainty they imply, may make it appear as though the foundations for Martyn's use of Birkat Ha-Minim have collapsed.Footnote ²⁶

3. Response to the Respondents

Other scholars of ancient Judaism, however, have challenged these opinions about the insignificance of the rabbis, the fluidity of the ‘Amidah, and the indeterminacy of our knowledge about early Jewish liturgy. For example, Langer's occasional collaborator Uri Ehrlich acknowledges the lateness of the Genizah and other prayerbook texts, but he still thinks it possible to use them to argue backwards, in some instances even to a first-century form of a particular ‘Amidah blessing.

In an important methodological note, Ehrlich suggests that the point of departure for reconstructing the history of these versions of particular benedictions should be the allusions to them in the Talmudic literature rather than the later full texts, but that the prayerbooks can be useful for filling out the picture reconstructed from the Talmudic references. He adds that in certain cases the prayerbook recensions of particular benedictions seem to be genetically related to each other, and the development of one from another can be inferred. For example, עבודה, the benediction having to do with the Temple service (#16/17), appears in two basic versions, one of which clearly reflects the destruction of the Temple while the other does not. Ehrlich argues that these Ur-versions are not two alternative primitive forms, as Heinemann would have it, but that the one reflecting the Temple's destruction grows out of the earlier one, which does not, and which probably originated in the Second Temple period.

Ehrlich reaches a similar conclusion about Benediction 14, בונה ירושלים, which speaks of God building the holy city. In the earlier version, which can be glimpsed in a trajectory that extends from Sir 31.17–19 to Saadia Gaon and some of the Genizah fragments, the requested divine ‘building’ of Jerusalem is the glorification of its present structures. In the later version, which first appears in the recension of Rav Amram Gaon and other Genizah fragments, it is the return of God's presence to a city from which it has been absent.Footnote ²⁷ Here again, according to Ehrlich, the earlier version probably goes back to Second Temple times. All of this suggests that there is something to the Talmudic tradition that the rudiments of the ‘Amidah were already present in Second Temple times, and that the task of the sages at Yavneh was to edit these preexistent prayers. The existence of such preexistent prayer traditions is also indicated by the parallels between the ‘Amidah, on the one hand, and passages from Sirach (36.1–17; 51.12 [Heb.B]) and the Dead Sea Scrolls (1QS 10.8–11.16), on the other.Footnote ²⁸

Nor does radical skepticism about the existence of synagogues, their use for worship, and the importance of the rabbis seem to be warranted. Pieter Van der Horst, for example, has mounted a vigorous defense of the view that Second Temple synagogues functioned as places of organized worship,Footnote ²⁹ and Stuart Miller has argued that synagogues were probably widespread before the fourth century, although they were not monumental structures but something more akin to Christian house-churches.Footnote ³⁰ And Miller, Adiel Schremer, and others have contended that, while the rabbis in the earliest Christian centuries did not possess the hegemony that they later attained, it is an exaggeration to say that they were peripheral to Palestinian Jewish society, even in the late first century CE.Footnote ³¹

Here the NT itself, if used judiciously, can come to our aid, since it is after all a first-century source that says a lot about Jews and their beliefs and lives. Much of what it says, to be sure, is biased and negative, but one always has to compensate for the prejudices of ancient sources, and the NT is no worse than other sources in this regard. For this reason, Jacob Neusner and his followers have been making liberal use of the NT for the past generation or so in their attempts to reconstruct the social position of the rabbis and their predecessors, the pre–70 Pharisees.Footnote ³²

And indeed, it is legitimate to ask why the Gospels should be so preoccupied with the Pharisees, if the latter were relatively unimportant. Already in the Synoptic Gospels, the Pharisees are described as Jesus' main antagonists, and Matthew in particular, at the beginning of a chapter that turns into a furious denunciation of ‘scribes and Pharisees, hypocrites’, still asserts that these same groups, who embrace the title ‘Rabbi’, need to be obeyed in their halakhic rulings, since they ‘sit in Moses’ seat' (Matt 23.1–10). In several passages in John, similarly, the author virtually equates the Pharisees with ‘the Jews’, i.e. the hostile Jewish leadership (8.13, 22; 9.13, 15–16, 18, 22), and in 12.42 he implies that the Pharisees have the authority to expel people from the synagogue. This is of a piece not only with the possibly biased report of Josephus (who was a Pharisee) that the party was popular with the common people (Ant. 13.288, 298, 400–404; 18.15), but also with the gripe in the Nahum Pesher that the Qumran sect's Pharisaic enemies, the ‘Seekers of Smooth Things’, possess ‘dominion’ (ממשלה), are deceiving the many, and are being supported by ‘the congregation and the simple ones’ (4QpNah 2.4, 8; 3.7–8).Footnote ³³ This sort of grudging acknowledgment of an opponent's superior political power needs to be taken seriously.Footnote ³⁴

The NT and other early Christian writings, moreover, are useful not only for showing that the Pharisees and rabbis did have some power but also for trying to trace the history of Birkat Ha-Minim, which probably emerged from Pharisaic/rabbinic circles. We can use this Christian literature in a similar way to Ehrlich's deployment of Talmudic references to the benedictions of the ‘Amidah: it enables us to see whether or not certain features of the later texts might go back to the early Christian centuries. Most important in this regard is the testimony in patristic literature, beginning with Justin Martyr, about Jews cursing Christians in their synagogues.Footnote ³⁵ When we recall that the word ברכה in the phrase ברכת המינים is a euphemism for ‘curse’, and that the whole phrase means ‘the cursing of the heretics’, the similarity to these patristic references to the cursing of Christians in the synagogue becomes too great to ignore. This pushes back to about 150 CE, the date for Justin's Dialogue with Trypho, the evidence for an anti-Christian version of Birkat Ha-Minim, and possibly for the phrase הנצרים והמינים.Footnote ³⁶ This argument from external attestation is supported by one from textual study of the manuscripts of the Benediction in the Genizah and elsewhere; after an exhaustive investigation, Ehrlich and Langer conclude that attestation for נצרים is as old as that for מינים: ‘If one of them is early, then both are, and if one of them is late, then both are’.Footnote ³⁷

Recognizing the importance of the patristic citations, and especially of the texts from Justin Martyr, for an early dating of Birkat Ha-Minim, Kimelman has questioned their relevance. He points out that Justin does not mention prayer specifically when he speaks of Jews cursing Christians in their synagogues in Dialogue 16.4; 47.4; and 96.2. In Dialogue 137.2, moreover, he talks of the rulers of the synagogues teaching their congregants to scoff at Christ (not Christians) after their prayers (not during them).Footnote ³⁸ These arguments, however, are not convincing. The most probable context for the cursing of Christians in synagogues is a liturgical one, and the line between cursing Christians and cursing their master would have been thin to the vanishing point in a world in which it was commonly believed that a person's messenger was as the person himself (m. Ber. 5.5; b. Qid. 41b; cf. Mark 9.37 pars.; John 13.20). It is not clear, moreover, that μετὰ τὴν προσευχήν in Dial. 137.2 means ‘after the prayer’. It may, on the contrary, mean ‘at the end of the prayer’,Footnote ³⁹ ‘according to the prayer’,Footnote ⁴⁰ or, most likely, ‘by means of the prayer’.Footnote ⁴¹ The latter translation, indeed, corresponds to Justin's usage elsewhere. In Dial. 45.1, for example, he promises to complete his discourse μετὰ τὰς ἐξετάσεις καὶ ἀποκρίσεις, which may mean ‘by means of questions and answers’. In Dial. 113.4, similarly, he says that Jesus will give Christians an eternal inheritance μετὰ τὴν ἁγίαν ἀνάστασιν, which probably means ‘by means of his holy resurrection’. And in Dial. 138.2 he says that Moses, taking the rod, led the children of Israel through the sea μετὰ χεῖρα, which almost certainly means ‘by means of his hand’. Despite Kimelman's objections, then, Justin's Dialogue provides strong evidence for a usage of Birkat Ha-Minim against Christians in the mid-second century CE.

But we can probably trace Birkat Ha-Minim back even further than 150 CE, since as we have seen the patristic citations continue a Christian hostility to Pharisees and rabbis that is already well attested in the NT and that can be plausibly linked to rabbinic enactments such as Birkat Ha-Minim. In the Johannine ἀποσυνάγωγος texts, moreover (John 9.22; 12.42; 16.2), the Fourth Gospel speaks of a decision by ‘the Jews’ (9.22) or ‘the Pharisees’ (12.42) to put out of the synagogue and the Jewish community in general anyone who confesses Jesus as the Messiah,Footnote ⁴² and it is easy to see the self-curse of Birkat Ha-Minim as a weapon for enforcing such an edict. The alternative is, as Katz puts it, to view the Johannine passages as ‘complete fabrications created to make Christians fearful of visiting synagogues’Footnote ⁴³—an unlikely hypothesis given the consonance between these NT passages and the rabbinic traditions considered above.Footnote ⁴⁴

4. Minim in Rabbinic Literature

A consideration of the usage of the word minim in rabbinic literature reinforces this argument from early Christian writings, since from the Tannaitic period on, minim is prominently applied to Christians.

Admittedly, the Christians are not the only group tarred with this epithet. In fact, in y. Sanh. 10.5 (29d), R. Yohanan, a third-century Palestinian sage, ascribes the second exile to the fissuring of Jewish society into twenty-four classes of minim.Footnote ⁴⁵ As this passage suggests, in early traditions minim is usually reserved for heretical Jews. To be sure, there are some Amoraic Babylonian texts that use it for Gentiles (e.g. b. Ḥul. 13b), but Tannaitic texts and Amoraic literature from Palestine nearly always employ it to refer to Jewish sectarians.Footnote ⁴⁶ Alan Segal, moreover, argues that, even when dealing with later texts, ‘[f]rom a methodological point of view…, one has to assume that minim are always Jewish sectarians, …unless they are specifically accused of anti-Israel propaganda’.Footnote ⁴⁷

Of these Jewish sectarians, identifiable Jewish Christians are mentioned comparatively frequently as minim in Tannaitic sources and Amoraic literature from Palestine. In t. Ḥul. 2.24, for example, R. Eliezer is arrested by/for minut because he once heard with pleasure words of heresy spoken in the name of Jesus.Footnote ⁴⁸ Because of its proximity to the tale about R. Eliezer, the story in t. Ḥul. 2.22 about Jacob of Kefar Sama attempting to heal Ben Dama in the name of Jesus also seems, in the opinion of the Tosefta's editors, to be a narrative about minut. And t. Yad. 2.13 and t. Šabb. 13(14).5 mention הגליונים וספרי (ה)מינים, which probably means ‘the Gospels and the other books of the minim’ (see below, p. 539).Footnote ⁴⁹ It is also likely that the stricture in m. Meg. 4.8–10 against reading the second narrative of the Golden Calf because of the danger of minut is directed against Christian interpretations of that story,Footnote ⁵⁰ and that in Palestinian sources most of the proponents of ‘two powers in heaven’ heresy, who are sometimes identified as minim, are Jewish Christians.Footnote ⁵¹ On the basis of such evidence, even Reuven Kimelman, who entitles his article ‘Birkat Ha-Minim and the Lack of Evidence for an Anti-Christian Jewish Prayer in Late Antiquity’, says that it is ‘safe to conclude that the Palestinian prayer against the minim was aimed at Jewish sectarians among whom Jewish Christians figured prominently’.Footnote ⁵²

After the Christians, the groups most frequently mentioned by recent scholars as minim in rabbinic literature are (roughly in order of frequency of reference in secondary literature) Sadducees, Essenes, Gnostics, and Samaritans. Let us consider these groups one at a time, in reverse order. To anticipate our conclusion, none of them has the sort of high profile that Christians do.

With regard to Samaritans, Alan Segal points out that one late midrashic text (Lev. Rab. [Vilna] 13.5) may call a Samaritan מינאי.Footnote ⁵³ It is debatable, however, whether this is actually ancient evidence for a Samaritan being called a min,Footnote ⁵⁴ and even if it is, it is a very rare usage. By the first century CE, a Samaritan was no longer the sort of inside–outsider whom the word מין designated but an outsider pure and simple. It is not surprising, then, that a Tannaitic passage, t. Ḥul. 1.1, distinguishes minim from Samaritans.

As for Jewish Gnostics, some scholars, such as Segal, mention them as possible targets of Birkat Ha-Minim.Footnote ⁵⁵ As Travers Herford already pointed out, however, the few named individuals in rabbinic texts who have been identified as possible Gnostics, such as Ben Zoma, Ben Azzai, and Elisha ben Abuya, are never called minim.Footnote ⁵⁶ Segal's case for minim as Gnostics is based on rabbinic passages in which anonymous interlocutors, some of whom are called minim, are accused of positing two or more powers in heaven. According to Segal, these heretics sometimes seem to be Gnostics. For example, in Mekilta, Baḥodesh 5 (Lauterbach 2.231–32), R. Nathan builds on Exod 20.2 an argument that only one God gave the Law, and that he did not do so deviously. This appears to be an argument against Gnostics who maintain that the God of the Law is not the true God, and that this Demiurge introduced the Law surreptitiously. Segal acknowledges, however, that in many of the ‘two powers’ passages the opponents may be Christians who believe in the divinity both of the Father and of Jesus,Footnote ⁵⁷ and Daniel Boyarin points out that ‘in the most extensive text in which Two Powers arguments are debated with minim (Palestinian Talmud Berakhot 12d–13a), it is obvious that these minim hold a Logos theology and not a “Gnostic” evil-creator sort of doctrine’.Footnote ⁵⁸ In any case, Jewish Gnosticism is a difficult phenomenon to pin down, so much so that some scholars doubt its existence.Footnote ⁵⁹ It is unlikely to be the main target of Birkat Ha-Minim.

Essenes and Sadducees are more promising candidates. Martin Goodman has recently argued that these groups probably continued to play a role in Palestinian Jewish society after 70 CE—they were too important simply to vanish in the wake of the First Jewish Revolt. There are, moreover, some Tannaitic and later passages in which מין is used for a heretic whose ideology resembles that of the Sadducees. In m. Ber. 9.5, for example, the Sages institute a rule requiring that concluding formulas of blessings should include the phrase מן העולם ועד העולם (‘from eternity to eternity’, lit. ‘from the world to the world’) in order to confute minim who say that there is only one world, i.e. no world to come. And y. Ber. 5.3 (9c) stipulates that the person who omits the benediction ‘who makes the dead to live’ must repeat his prayer, since he is suspected of being a min.Footnote ⁶⁰ As we shall see below, moreover, there are tannaitic texts that use min/minim to refer to groups whose practices seem to be similar to those of the Qumran sect or the Essenes. It is hard, however, to think of Essenes and Sadducees as the main targets of Birkat Ha-Minim, especially since evidence for their continued existence is largely circumstantial.Footnote ⁶¹

By process of elimination, then, if nothing else, the Jewish Christians emerge as the most prominent candidates for min status in the earliest strata of rabbinic literature. As we have seen, they are frequently called מינים in Tannaitic traditions and Palestinian Amoraic traditions, and they fit the bill nicely, since they are inside outsiders—people with whom the rabbis share basic presuppositions (e.g. the authority of the Tanach), practices (observance of the Torah), and community (to the point that Jewish Christians and rabbis keep running into each other and debating scripture, and even distinguished rabbis are tempted to be treated by Christian healers). Yet they are also people whom the rabbis consider to be fundamentally mistaken about central matters such as the unity of God. They are, in short, minim.

5. ‘The Nazarenes and the [Other] Heretics’

But if Jewish Christians were the most prominent targets of Birkat Ha-Minim, and this prominence is reflected in the Johannine ἀποσυνάγωγος texts and the passages from Justin about Jews cursing Christians in the synagogues, what does one make of the argument of Kimelman and Katz that the reading in Schechter's Genizah text, הנצרים והמינים (‘the Nazarenes and the heretics’), is awkward and the reference to the Nazarenes = Jewish Christians secondary? My reply is twofold:

1. 1) Even if it were true that the original form of Birkat Ha-Minim mentioned only מינים, not נצרים, it would still be possible, and indeed likely, that the main target of the benediction was Jewish Christians. If, as argued in the previous section, Jewish Christians were the most prominent group among those whom rabbinic Jews designated as minim, a curse against minim would be understood as targeting Jewish Christians above all. Kimelman and Katz object that Jewish Christians could have escaped the threat of self-curse by saying, in effect, ‘I am not a heretic; the benediction must apply to someone else’.Footnote ⁶² But as Phillip Alexander responds, min = ‘heretic’ seems to be a rabbinic coinage for those whom the rabbis considered to be heretics, ‘[s]o anyone opposed to the Rabbis would have felt threatened’.Footnote ⁶³

2. 2) More importantly, the syntactical basis of the argument for the secondariness of ‘Nazarenes’ is faulty. Contrary to the assertion of Kimelman and Katz, a phrase of the form ‘the Christians and the heretics’ is not at all unnatural in the context of ancient Jewish and Christian literature. Indeed, there are many ancient examples in which the specific precedes the general in this way.

Perhaps the best-known instances are the allusions in the Synoptic Gospels to τελῶναι καὶ ἁμαρτωλοί = ‘toll collectors and sinners’, some of which are put into the mouths of Jewish opponents (Matt 9.10–11; 11.19; Mark 2.15–16; Luke 5.30; 7.34; 15.1). The καί here is generalizing, a usage known from classical Greek,Footnote ⁶⁴ and the phrase means ‘toll collectors and [other] sinners’.Footnote ⁶⁵ Other possible NT examples include the common Matthean/Lukan locution, γραμματεῖς καὶ Φαρισαῖοι (‘scribes and [other] Pharisees’),Footnote ⁶⁶ προφῆται καὶ δίκαιοι (‘prophets and [other] righteous people’) in Matt 13.17, ἱερεῖς καὶ Λευίτας (‘priests and [other] Levites’) in John 1.19,Footnote ⁶⁷ πάντων τῶν ὁλοκαυτωμάτων καὶ θυσιῶν (‘than all whole burnt offerings and [other] sacrifices’) in Mark 12.33, and several locutions in which the word βασιλεῖς (‘kings’) is followed by a generalizing term.Footnote ⁶⁸ This NT usage continues one that is already attested in Second Temple Jewish literature. In 1 Macc 14.28, for example, ἐπὶ συναγωγῆς μεγάλης ἱερέων καὶ λαοῦ (‘at the great assembly of the priests and the people’) is apparently meant to be synonymous with τοῖς ἱερεῦσιν καὶ τῷ λοιπῷ δήμῳ (‘to the priests and the rest of the populace’) in 14.20.

Nor did speakers of ancient Greek have a monopoly on use of the generalizing ‘and’. The NT phrase ‘whole burnt offerings and [other] sacrifices’, which is cited above, is an OT locution (Exod 10.25; 2 Chron 7.1; Ezek 44.11), as is ‘priests and [other] Levites’ (1 Kgs 8.4; 1 Chron 13.2; 15.14 etc.), and there are several other OT phrases that pair priests with a larger, more inclusive group, by means of waw (‘and’): הכהנים והעם (‘the priests and the [rest of the] people’) in Exod 19.24, הכהנים הלוים וכל ישראל (‘the Levitical priests and all [the rest of] Israel’) in Ezra 10.5, הכהנים והשופטים (‘the priests and the [other] magistrates’) in Deut 19.17, לכהנים ולקסמים (‘to the priests and to the [other] diviners’) in 1 Sam 6.2, הכהנים וכל העם (‘the priests and all the [rest of the] people’) in Jer 26.7–8; 28.1, 5; 29.1, etc. Nor are the priests the only group that can be included in such a generalizing expression; see, for example, אל השרים ואל כל העם (‘to the officials and to all [the rest of] the people’) in Jer 26.11, מלכינו ושרינו (‘our kings and our [other] officials’) in Jer 44.17, 21, and מלכיה וכל נשיאיה (‘her kings and all [the rest of] her chieftains’) in Ezek 32.29.

Post-biblical Jewish literature written in Hebrew is also familiar with the idiom of the generalizing ‘and’. In the Dead Sea Scrolls, for example, the phrase משיח[י] אהרון וישראל (‘the anointed one[s] of Aaron and of Israel’) in 1QS 9.11; CD 14.19 provides an example, since the tribe of Aaron is a subset of the people of Israel. In rabbinic literature, similarly, the formula ‘Rabbi X and the [other] sages’ is very common from the Mishnah on (see m. Ber. 1.1; 6.8; 7.5, etc.), and similar phrases such as הסופרים והחכמים (‘the scribes and the [other] sages’, Exod. Rab. 30.5) also occur. Significantly, moreover, as we have briefly noted above, there is in the Tosefta a phrase that uses a generalizing ‘and’ with reference to minim: הגליונים וספרי (ה)מינים = ‘the Gospels and the [other] books of the minim’ (t. Yad. 2.13; t. Šabb. 13[14].5).Footnote ⁶⁹ And there is even a possible example elsewhere within the ‘Amidah itself, שופטינו…ויועצינו (‘our judges and our [other] counselors’) in Benediction 11.

Given the frequency of the generalizing ‘and’, it seems very plausible that the phrase in the next benediction of the ‘Amidah, הנצרים והמינים, should be interpreted as ‘the Christians and the other heretics’.Footnote ⁷⁰ If so, the benediction containing this phrase could justly be called Birkat Ha-Minim, since minim is the more inclusive term. This interpretation also comports with our survey of min passages in the previous section, since it showed that, in early rabbinic sources, the Christians were the most prominent but not the only group that could be denoted by the term. An interpretation of הנצרים והמינים as ‘the Christians and the other heretics’ fits this combination perfectly.Footnote ⁷¹

6. The Genealogy of Birkat Ha-Minim

It is, moreover, likely that Birkat Ha-Minim can be traced back even earlier than the Tannaitic and Amoraic periods. Indeed, the very Talmudic passage that speaks of its composition at Yavneh, b. Ber. 28b–29a (see above, pp. 525–26), hints at this backdating when it says that at Rabban Gamaliel's request Simeon ha-Paquli organized the Eighteen Benedictions in order (הסדיר שמונה עשרה ברכות…על הסדר). This seems to refer to the reorganization of an existent prayer. A similar nuance may be present when the same passage says that Gamaliel sought someone לתקן ברכת המינים. The Soncino translation of Maurice Simon renders this as ‘[to] frame a benediction relating to the Minim’.Footnote ⁷² But לתקן, which Simon renders here as ‘to frame’ and in the next sentence as ‘to compose’,Footnote ⁷³ is actually ambiguous, since it can mean either ‘to ordain’ or ‘to repair’Footnote ⁷⁴—in the present case, either to invent or to revise a benediction. The English verb ‘to fix’ provides a perfect analogy, since it can mean either to fix something up or to ‘fix’ it for all time, i.e. to set it in stone.Footnote ⁷⁵

In this particular case, most translations join the Soncino in opting for the nuance of ordaining or promulgating, but the implication of repairing or revising may be preferable, as is suggested by the important early passage t. Ber. 3.25. This text identifies Birkat Ha-Minim as one of several benedictions that were created by melding earlier prayer traditions:

This implies that Birkat Ha-Minim resulted from editorial activity that incorporated the cursing of the מינים into another imprecation. Lieberman, citing b. Ber. 28b, identifies the point of transition as the meeting at Yavneh.Footnote ⁷⁶

The general point asserted by t. Ber. 3.25, that Birkat Ha-Minim is a composite benediction, is supported by internal evidence. As Philip Alexander puts it:

An earlier form of the benediction, then, was probably directed against the pagan empire; indeed, even as late as the Amoraic period, the benediction could be called מכניע זדים (‘he who subdues the arrogant’) from its concluding eulogy.Footnote ⁷⁸ Various later versions of the saying quoted above from t. Ber. 3.25, moreover, speak of intercalating Birkat Ha-Minim not into the ‘benediction of the separatists’ but into ‘he who subdues the arrogant’.Footnote ⁷⁹ The original form of what we now call Birkat Ha-Minim, therefore, probably cursed neither the פרושין (‘separatists’) nor the מינים (‘heretics’), but rather the זדים (‘arrogant’), and was directed against the Romans. At a later stage (under Rabban Gamaliel, according to b. Ber. 28b), it was reformulated to include other targets, resulting in its present hybrid form.

Our confidence in the reliability of the Tosefta passage is increased by a look at the two other benedictions identified by t. Ber. 3.25 as having been intercalated, since these likewise reveal internal evidence of intercalation. The benediction that speaks about the building of Jerusalem is, in the recension that predominates in Jewish prayer books today, separate from the benediction that speaks about the Davidic Messiah (## 14 and 15). In Schechter's Genizah version, however, these two benedictions are melded into one, which ends with a conflated eulogy. The Thirteenth Benediction also seems to be conflated, since it concerns two different groups, pious Jews and converts to Judaism.Footnote ⁸⁰

Our reconstruction of the tradition history of Birkat Ha-Minim is supported by the observation of Ehrlich and Langer that what they call Branch 6, the largest of the six families of Birkat Ha-Minim texts in the Genizah (24 out of 86 mss), omits entirely the segment against the minim. Ehrlich and Langer acknowledge that this shorter version of the benediction, which owes its popularity to the authority of Saadia Gaon, could be the result of Saadia's abbreviation of a longer form, but they also raise the possibility ‘that this version was itself a received early text that Rav Saadia Gaon chose to adopt for his prayer book. If so, this could be an extremely ancient text, perhaps the earliest preserved. It would then be a witness to the period before the addition of the explicit curse against the noṣerim and minim’.Footnote ⁸¹

7. Qumran Connections

But there is a problem with the argument I have been advancing that the present form of Birkat Ha-Minim resulted from the insertion of a curse against the minim into one against the arrogant: it does not seem to correspond exactly to the text of our oldest witness to intercalation, t. Ber. 3.25. The latter, as we have seen, speaks of the insertion of Birkat Ha-Minim not into מכניע זדים (‘he who subdues the arrogant’) but into ברכת הפרושין (‘the benediction of the separatists’).Footnote ⁸² This seems awkward: why should anyone insert a reference to the heretics (מינים) into an imprecation against the separatists (פרושין), when the two terms are nearly synonymous? These two difficulties are related, and some light can be gained on both by asking a further question about the genealogy of the benediction: in what circles might an anti-pagan imprecation have arisen?

If we are right that the prototype for our benediction antedated Yavneh, the most probable answer would be that its curse against the ‘arrogant kingdom’ reflects the events leading up to the Great Revolt against the Romans in 66–73 CE. As is well known, Josephus blames this revolt on a group he calls the ‘Fourth Philosophy’, which he distinguishes from the other leading Jewish sects, the Sadducees, Essenes, and Pharisees (Ant. 18.11–25). From Josephus's own testimony, however, the revolutionary group seems actually to have included both Essenes and Pharisees.Footnote ⁸³ Moreover, the scrolls of the Qumran sectarians, who were probably a subset or offshoot of the Essenes, manifest in many places a militantly anti-Roman ideology, and the Qumran settlement itself appears to have been decimated by the war. The Dead Sea sectarians, then, were in some ways ‘zealotic’, and it is unsurprising that language similar to the militant denunciation of the ‘dominion of arrogance’ in Birkat Ha-Minim appears throughout the Qumran scrolls, as the following excerpts illustrate:Footnote ⁸⁴

The similarities include a vision of eschatological destruction in which the dominion of evil, as embodied in the arrogant pagan empire, will be eradicated, and the proud pagans will be subdued and left without hope. It is particularly noticeable that להכניע (‘to subdue’), which appears in the eulogy of Birkat Ha-Minim, also turns up frequently in these passages, where it seems to be virtually a technical term for the eschatological subjugation of the evil Kittim (= Romans), who are referred to in one passage as זדים (‘arrogant’). Another key word in Birkat Ha-Minim, תקוה (‘hope’), also seems in the Qumran literature to be a technical term for what the evil enemy cannot expect at the eschaton. There are, moreover, frequent construct chains such as ‘dominion of perversity’ and ‘dominion of wickedness’, which are parallel in form and meaning to ‘dominion of arrogance’, a term that is used in Birkat Ha-Minim, as in its Qumran parallels, to designate the pagan enemy. The verb שמד, which means ‘to destroy’, also features in both Birkat Ha-Minim and the Qumran texts listed.Footnote ⁸⁵

Birkat Ha-Minim is not the only benediction in the ‘Amidah to contain such zealotic language. Another militant benediction is #10, which like 1QH-a 14.34 uses an imperatival form of the verb נשא (‘to lift’) plus the object נס (‘a banner’) in a vision of the eschatological battle. A similar note is struck in Schechter's Genizah version of Benediction 11: ומלוך עלינו אתה לבדך (‘and rule over us, you alone’). This is a noteworthy parallel to Josephus's description of the ‘Fourth Philosophy’ in Ant. 18.23.

In many ways, then, the language of Birkat Ha-Minim and the [other] militant benedictions of the ‘Amidah strikingly resembles the language of Qumran.

8. Minim as a Subjective Genitive?

In light of these similarities, I would tentatively recommend modifying a suggestion by David Flusser, who noticed that t. Ber. 3.25 refers to the earlier form of the benediction as ברכת הפרושין and hypothesized that פרושין designated not the Pharisees but the Qumran sect, which was self-consciously separatist in its ideology. As the author of an early Qumran document puts it: פרשנו מרוב העם (‘We have segregated ourselves from the majority of the people’, 4QMMT 4.7). Other passages praise Qumranian separatism but do not use the verb פרש, employing instead the synonym להבדל (1QS 5.1–2, 10–11; 8.12–14; 9.20–21) and paraphrases such as לסור מדרך העם (‘to turn away from the path of the people’, CD 8.16; 19.29; 11QMelchizedek 2.24; 4QFlorilegium 2.14). The phrase בית פלג (‘house of division’) in CD 20.22 also may be a self-designation of the Qumran community (cf. also 1QSa 1.1–3). According to Flusser, then, what we now know as ברכת המינים was previously ברכת הפרושין, an imprecation against the Qumran separatists.Footnote ⁸⁶ Flusser's hypothesis has been strengthened by a recent article of Joshua Burns, who shows that criticism in tannaitic passages of minim who use an alternate festal calendar, dress in white, practice aberrant sacrificial rites, and are fastidious about water rituals related to purity corresponds to descriptions of the Essenes from Philo and Josephus and to practices of the Qumran sect in its own literature.Footnote ⁸⁷

I differ from Flusser and Burns, however, in their assumption that the phrase ברכת הפרושין in t. Ber. 3.25 unambiguously means ‘the benediction against the separatists’. My counter-suggestion is that perhaps it also contains the nuance of ‘the benediction that comes from the separatists’. And the same ambiguity, I would suggest, may apply to the report in b. Ber. 28b that Rabban Gamaliel asked for someone ‘to fix the Benediction of the Minim’. This may imply that Gamaliel was looking for someone not only to formulate a malediction against heretics, but also to reformulate a malediction that came from a group of them. This hypothesis of the Qumranian origin of the ‘Amidah's only curse is especially compelling because there is ample evidence that the Qumran sect engaged in rituals of cursing.Footnote ⁸⁸

According to the understanding I am proposing, one nuance of the genitives פרושין in t. Ber. 3.25 and מינים in b. Ber. 28b may be subjective; the second member of the construct chain, in other words, may denote the group from which the benediction originates.Footnote ⁸⁹ This understanding comports with what we see in several other rabbinic examples of phrases of the form birkat X. For example, ברכת כהנים (‘the blessing of priests’), which appears frequently in tannaitic traditions (see, for example, m. R. HaŠ 4.5; m. Meg. 4.10; t. Men. 6.12), is the benediction with which priests bless the people, as t. Sot. 7.7 makes clear (see also m. Tam. 7.2).Footnote ⁹⁰ Similarly, ברכת פועלים (‘the blessing of workers’) in b. Ber. 46a is the benediction that workers pronounce, and ברכת הדיוט (‘the benediction of a layperson’) in b. Meg. 15a; b. Ber. 7a, etc. is the benediction that a layperson pronounces (cf. the context in b. Meg. 15a).Footnote ⁹¹ There also may be some ambiguity about the frequent locution ברכת האבלים (‘the benediction of the mourners’)Footnote ⁹² and about ברכת הלוים (‘the benediction of the Levites’) in b. Sof. 19.7 etc. and ברכת החתונים (‘the benediction of the bridegrooms’) in b. Ket. 7b etc., though these are usually taken as objective genitives.

Correspondingly, I am suggesting, there may be ambiguity about ברכת המינים and ברכת הפרושין in some contexts; they may mean both a curse against sectarians and separatists and a curse that comes from a group of the same. Specifically, it may be that what the rabbis came to call Birkat Ha-Minim, ‘the curse of the heretics’, was originally an anti-Roman curse that came from a group that in their eyes consisted of ‘heretics’, the Qumran sect, but was eventually turned against this group and other sectarians by the rabbis. This process of turning against a group one of its own traditions has a long history within the OT, ancient Judaism, and the early church.Footnote ⁹³

9. Conclusion

As we have seen, however, the primary target, at the time of this curse's rabbinic reformulation, was no longer the Qumranians, who existed in a denuded form by the end of the first century, but the Jewish Christians, the minim par excellence, who were a far more powerful force. This amalgamation of a curse against Jewish Christians with one against the ‘arrogant kingdom’ makes sense because, as Philip Alexander emphasizes, the Jewish Christianity of the first few centuries ran afoul of Jewish nationalism:

Thus it was logical for the rabbis to associate their assault on Christian ‘sectarians’ with an excoriation of the pagan kingdom; they were not the first party, and they would not be the last, to undermine internal enemies and rivals by implicating them with external foes and thus tarnishing their patriotism.

What are the implications of our reconstruction of the tradition history of Birkat Ha-Minim for the scholarly debates we discussed at the beginning of this article about the fluidity or fixity of Jewish liturgy and the influence of the Pharisees and later the rabbis in the early Christian era? While we have found compelling Ehrlich's suggestion that the rudiments of at least some of the benedictions go back to the Second Temple period, the subsequent analysis has also recognized that the form of at least one of them, Birkat Ha-Minim, was still being hammered out at the end of the first century. It may be that, overall, the truth lies somewhere between the contrasting positions of Heinemann and Ehrlich. At Yavneh the sages prescribed an order and general outline for the ‘Amidah benedictions, most or all of which probably existed already as an inheritance from the Temple liturgy and other venues.Footnote ⁹⁶ They were thus not creating a liturgy ex nihilo but ratifying and revising one that was already in use. They did not impose this liturgy on synagogues by fiat, but by putting their stamp of approval on a particular version of the developing tradition they simultaneously accepted the common consensus, moved toward fixing its form, and solidified their claim to be the people's leaders.

This view of things comports with Lee Levine's observation about the eclecticism of the rabbis:

Another example of the same eclecticism may be the way in which the second-century rabbis, according to Martin Goodman, adopted and rabbinized the common law of Galilee with regard to the Sabbath. Goodman thinks that this populism is one of the reasons that the rabbis became more and more influential over time.Footnote ⁹⁸

There are two ways of viewing such rabbinic eclecticism. One is to understand it against the background of the theory proposed by Shaye Cohen in his well-known article ‘The Significance of Yavneh: Pharisees, Rabbis, and the End of Jewish Sectarianism’.Footnote ⁹⁹ As this title implies, Cohen suggests that the rabbis at Yavneh erected a ‘big tent’ for the Jewish community, thus effectively ending Jewish sectarianism, and that the only people who were left out of this tent were those who refused to enter it. Cohen argues that these post-70 rabbis, the heirs of the former Pharisees, were operating from a position of substantial strength vis-à-vis their vanquished foes from other sects.Footnote ¹⁰⁰

But eclecticism and the search for consensus can also be a strategy adopted by a group that is making a bid for power and not yet secure in it, and in such cases it may be combined with strong exclusionary tendencies designed to eliminate potential rivals. This picture fits better with the results of the present investigation. If my argument here has been correct, the post-70 rabbis were not simply putting up a large tent, trying to create one big happy family out of diverse traditions. They were also using diverse traditions from various groups to exclude people whom they wanted to render beyond the pale. Perhaps the most important thing for them was not so much the question of ‘who loses and who wins, who's in, who's out’,Footnote ¹⁰¹ but that they should be the ones to define who belonged where.

In attempting to don the mantle of authority to decide such questions, the rabbis were probably more successful in some localities than in others. As we have seen, the Gospels of Matthew and John, and Justin's reports about Jews cursing Christians in synagogues, probably emerged from places in which the rabbis were able to establish substantial control over the synagogue and Jewish religious life in general. Because they had the upper hand in these areas, they could enforce an anti-Christian policy through measures such as Birkat Ha-Minim. In other localities, however, the rabbis probably did not exercise comparable control for several centuries,Footnote ¹⁰² as is attested by the frequent tension between rabbinic law and piety, on the one hand, and synagogal art and architecture, on the other.Footnote ¹⁰³ Moreover, as I will argue in a subsequent article, y. Ber. 4.3 (8a) shows that in late third-century Palestine there were still groups of Jewish Christians who employed a seventeen-benediction form of the ‘Amidah, one that lacked Birkat Ha-Minim and competed with the eighteen-benediction version of the rabbis.Footnote ¹⁰⁴

What all this reveals is that the post-70 rabbis were involved in a religious battle that would continue for several centuries. In this war they were happy to use any weapon at their disposal, including some that had fallen from the hands of their vanquished foes and could be reforged for their own purposes. One of these weapons was Birkat Ha-Minim.