A shared history.

In his review of Daniel Boyarin's Border Lines ("What If ...," October 21), Jack Miles suggests that both Christians and Jews have shied away from considering this scholar's work. Miles, who believes that his is the first review of Border Lines to appear, finds this "silence" to be "regrettable" and suggests that it is due to the difficulty Christians have with appreciating rabbinic argumentation and the ideological challenge that Boyarin's work poses for Jews.

Miles will be happy to learn that Boyarin's oeuvre continues to receive the scholarly hearing it deserves. Indeed, several academic reviews of Border Lines have already appeared, including in Shofar and in the Review of Biblical Literature. My review of the book appeared in the Jerusalem Report ("The First True Religion," October 3), two weeks prior to Miles's insightful, but very different remarks in Commonweal.

Since Miles ponders how scholars who are versed in rabbinic history and literature might react to Boyarin's provocative theories, Commonweal readers might want to compare his remarks to my own. Boyarin's theories do not amount to a major reconstruction of the emergence of Rabbinic Judaism, not unless one dismisses much else that we know about Rabbinic Judaism and its roots, which can be traced to developments that long preceded and were independent of the church's preoccupation with heresy. The indeterminate nature of rabbinic argument, for example, does not owe its origins to the rabbis' eventual rejection of the notion of a "second divine power" and their determination to oust those who believed in it from an emerging fold.

Theories of mutual and parallel dynamics in the development of Christianity and Rabbinic Judaism certainly help us appreciate their commonalities but they do not in and of themselves explain the origins of either religion, as Boyarin would have us believe.

STUART S. MILLER

Storrs, Conn.