u/This_Conversation493

They hate George over there, lmao

I'm sitting in the UK, currently in the midst of yet another record-breaking heatwave, just pining for that brief window of time c. 2019, when the protests made it seem like we were finally on the way to taking some kind of action on climate change.

Where's the comparable action now? Every day, we need it more than ever, but it seems like even in progressive circles, people are only becoming less willing to talk about climate change.

As depicted in Tommy Wiseau's new biopic.

Tried asking on AcademicBiblical and had no joy, so here's take two. I'd like to preface this by noting that I'm a layperson, so please excuse me if I get anything terribly wrong here.

I have a question on a claim from Daniel Boyarin, which he made in a lecture series at Yale Divinity School (see lecture 1 here).

If you haven't seen the series already, it addresses the connection between the Jewish "Two Powers in Heaven" heresy (2PHH) and early Christology. Boyarin wants to take a "middle ground" position that avoids attributing any direct line of influence from one religious tradition to the other. Instead, he proposes a "bricolage" model, in which early Christians and rabbinic Jews were both drawing on shared apocalyptic traditions independently. As he says at the very end of the third lecture, we shouldn't see Jesus as the father of Metatron or vice-versa, but both of them as separate scions of the same family tree.

In order to argue for the existence of shared/overlapping apocalyptic traditions, Boyarin argues that we need to change our understanding of the "apocalyptic". This is the focus of the first lecture from 19:27 onwards and is where I'm getting a bit lost.

He pushes back against what he claims is the mainstream view, i.e. that apocalyptic Judaism was confined to marginal, fringe sects/conventicles. At 22:54, he cites Philip Davies’ alternative view that “apocalyptic” Jewish thought is part of Babylonian scribal wisdom literature. At 35:21, he goes as far as to say:

>It is also important to note that [JZ] Smith, as some other scholars following in his wake, do not so much posit a connection between wisdom and apocalyptic as a breaking down of the borders between these abstract categories and attention to the ways that so-called “apocalyptic” literature is also just a form of wisdom.

Could someone explain a bit more concretely for me what makes these genres what they are, and what scholars like Smith see as being the commonalities between them? Boyarin doesn't really give any details.

I'd also be interested to know any alternative points of view, criticisms of Smith's argument, etc.