Diaspora, the West and the Law. The Birth of Christian Literature Through the Letters of Paul and the End of Diaspora.

Abstract

My approach, in this work, is to reappraise the birth of Christianity in diasporic terms: that’s to say that we need to use modern outcomes of diasporic studies to reinterpret even the Jewish Diaspora, and to settle her problems properly within the legal and political setting of the Greek cities of the time, through the emergence of new literary genres, as the gospels, and the active use of letterwriting, as a kind of stereotyped but evolving genre.

My claim is that the rise of a distinct christian literature emerged because of the impact of the Greek Polis on the Western Diaspora.

My conclusion is that if we keep the strong 'geopolitical' meaning of diaspora, in relation to concrete spaces and displacements, we may see at work in the literary production of Paul an antinomic effort to supersede the condition of diasporic life.

From this point of view the Greek city is to be thought as a "democratic but totalitarian device" dislocating all aspects of life, with such a strong impact on the Western Diaspora as to produce an onto-theological attempt to dismantle any distinction between Israel and the nations, reshaping the same "Geography of the Nomos" of the ancient world.

Keywords: Western Legal Tradition, Diapora Studies, Legal Theory, Theology, Legal History, Christianity, Judaism,