JJMJS 2 2015

Issue 2 (2015)

The Concept of Religion and the Study of the Apostle Paul BRENT NONGBRI Paul, Synagogues, and Associations: Reframing the Question of Models for Pauline Christ Groups RICHARD S. ASCOUGH Ekklesia as a Jewish Synagogue Term: Some Implications for Paul’s Socio-Religious Location RALPH J. KORNER ‘A Remnant of Them Will Be Saved’ (Rom 9:27): Understanding Paul’s Conception of the Faithfulness of God to Israel WILLIAM S. CAMPBELL Jesus Followers in Pompeii: The Christianos Graffito and “Hotel of the Christians” Reconsidered THOMAS A. WAYMENT AND MATTHEW J. GREY Issue 2 (2015)

ISSN 2374-7862

Between Polemic and Propaganda: Evoking the Jews of Fourth-Century Antioch CHRISTINE SHEPARDSON The Jewish Gospels: The Story of the Jewish Christ. A Review Article MIRIAM DECOCK

JOURNAL OF THE JESUS MOVEMENT IN ITS JEWISH SETTING: FROM THE FIRST TO THE SEVENTH CENTURY Editor-in-Chief Anders Runesson (University of Oslo, Norway) Editorial Committee Torleif Elgvin (NLA University College, Norway) Paula Fredriksen (The Hebrew University of Jerusalem, Israel) Alexei Sivertsev (DePaul University, USA) Managing Editor: Knut H. Høyland (managingeditor@jjmjs.org) Editorial Secretary: Andreas Johansson (edsecr@jjmjs.org) Forum Director: Ralph J. Korner (Taylor Seminary, Canada) Linguistic editing and layout: C. Osborne Cover design: Heidi Tohmola The Journal of the Jesus Movement in Its Jewish Setting (JJMJS) is an independent open-access peer-reviewed journal. It is published online and in print in cooperation with Eisenbrauns, P.O.Box 275, Winona Lake, IN 46590, USA. All content in JJMJS is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution License. Papers for submission should be directed to the Editor-in-Chief, Anders Runesson at anders.runesson@teologi.uio.no. For further information regarding the journal please visit our website or contact our managing editor, Knut H. Høyland at managingeditor@jjmjs.org.

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JOURNAL OF THE JESUS MOVEMENT IN ITS JEWISH SETTING: FROM THE FIRST TO THE SEVENTH CENTURY Issue 2 (2015)

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The Concept of Religion and the Study of the Apostle Paul Brent Nongbri Macquarie University│brent.nongbri@mq.edu.au JJMJS No. 2 (2015): 1---26

Introduction In the early 2000s, when I first started looking into questions of how the concept of religion may have shaped the study of the apostle Paul and his letters, the bibliography on the topic was not especially large. 1 Burton Mack’s statement, published in 1996, still seemed to ring true: “New Testament studies are generally pursued without feeling the need for discussing theories of religion, much less articulating the assumptions about religion that are taken for granted

by New Testament scholars.” 2 This is not to say that no one was interested in the question of Paul and religion (as I will outline in a moment), but it is to emphasize that now, twenty years after Mack’s statement, there is a much more visible concern for thinking critically about the concept of religion among at least some scholars of the Pauline corpus. Part of the reason for this situation has to do with trends in the field of religious studies more generally. 3 But even in the narrower area of Pauline scholarship, a desire to avoid “distortion” and to achieve greater descriptive precision has brought religion and several associated concepts under the microscope. 4 1

The results of that investigation can be found in Brent Nongbri, Paul Without Religion: The Creation of a Category and the Search for an Apostle Beyond the New Perspective (PhD diss., Yale University, 2008).

2 Burton L. Mack, “On Redescribing Christian Origins,” MTSR 8 (1996): 247–69, at 251– 52. See, however, the response by John S. Kloppenborg, “Critical Histories and Theories of Religion: A Response to Burton Mack and Ron Cameron,” MTSR 8 (1996): 279–89.

3 For a sense of the changes in the last twenty years, see the two status quaestionis essays

by Russell T. McCutcheon, “The Category ‘Religion’ in Recent Publications: A Critical Survey,” Numen 42 (1995): 284–309; and “The Category ‘Religion’ in Recent Publications: Twenty Years Later,” Numen 62 (2015): 119–41.

4 On the concepts of “conversion,” “nationalism,” and “monotheism,” see Paula Fredriksen, “Mandatory retirement: Ideas in the study of Christian origins whose time has come to go,” SR 35 (2006): 231–46. On “Christianity” and “church,” see Anders Runesson, “The Question of Terminology: The Architecture of Contemporary

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In what follows, I will trace out a brief history of the question of the concept of religion in the study of Paul’s letters, focusing primarily on two exchanges, one involving the work of Edwin Judge and Wayne Meeks, the other involving the work of E. P. Sanders and Jonathan Z. Smith. Framing the history of scholarship in this way will serve as a springboard for reflecting on the current state of the question among Pauline interpreters. While the arguments of E. P. Sanders have had tremendous influence on North American and British Pauline scholarship, I find that scholars working in Sanders’s wake, including many socalled “radical” interpreters of Paul, have not sufficiently accounted for J. Z. Smith’s critique and remain locked into reading Paul’s letters in ways that have been decisively shaped by Sanders’s notion of religion as soteriology. Even Pauline scholars who have explicitly criticized Sanders’s use of religion tend to replicate the structure of Sanders’s argumentation, continuing to compare Paul on the one hand and “Judaism” on the other, with a focus on questions of belief.

To illustrate this phenomenon in contemporary Pauline scholarship, I place N. T. Wright’s recent criticism of Sanders in conversation with the work of Russell McCutcheon and William Arnal, who have especially highlighted the problematic status of religion and belief in New Testament studies. My conclusion from surveying all these debates is that, despite the wide influence of Sanders, the exchange between Judge and Meeks offers approaches to the concept of religion that provide more fruitful paths for the study of Paul’s letters.

I therefore close with a look at how either setting aside the concept of religion in Pauline studies (as Judge suggested) or using the concept in a more selfconscious and sophisticated way (as Meeks modeled) might open new avenues of exploration. Throughout, I try to demonstrate the contact points of the study of Paul’s letters and the wider field of the academic study of religion. 5

Discussions on Paul,” in Paul Within Judaism: Restoring the First-Century Context to the Apostle, ed. Mark D. Nanos and Magnus Zetterholm (Minneapolis: Fortress Press, 2015), 53–77. On “missionary journeys,” see John Townsend, “Missionary Journeys in Acts and European Missionary Societies,” in SBL 1985 Seminar Papers, SBLSPS 24 (Atlanta: Scholars Press, 1985), 433–37.

5 I share the concerns of a number of scholars who have voiced the opinion that biblical studies often operates in isolation from religious studies and the humanities. I am largely (though not wholly) in agreement with the diagnosis and proposals of William Arnal, “What branches grow out of this stony rubbish? Christian Origins and the Study of Religion,” SR 39 (2010): 549–72. My own interest in the present essay centers on contact points in the histories of scholarship of Pauline studies and religious studies in the twentieth century.

Nongbri, The Concept of Religion 3

Paul and Religion: A Brief History of the Question There are numerous studies of Paul and his letters that seek to situate Paul among “ancient religions.” For the project at hand, these studies are of less interest because they generally presume the universality of religion and attempt to show how Paul’s letters manifest a particular instance of this supposedly universal phenomenon. 6 Yet, among the effects of the broader questioning of the concept of religion is the recognition that the idea of “ancient religion” is, somewhat paradoxically, a modern invention. 7 To compress and simplify the conclusions of a large and unwieldy body of scholarship, we might say that one of the features (along with the invention and spread of the printing press and Europe’s colonial exploits) that marks off what we typically call “modernity” from what came before is the notion that religion is an identifiable and basically autonomous part of the social world, ideally distinct from politics, science, law, and other spheres of life. This relatively recent development in Western thought has been projected outward in space and backward in time to yield the impression that religion is a natural and necessary part of the way humans understand the world, and always has been. 8 But it is only in the last three hundred years that religion has come to be seen as a universal genus of which the “World Religions” are species. 9 Thus, studies of Paul that seek to locate “his religion” among other discrete “ancient religions,” while numerous, are not the topic at hand. I am interested in more self-conscious assessments of the

6 For exercises of this sort, see, for example, Hans Dieter Betz, “Christianity as Religion: Paul’s Attempt at Definition in Romans,” JR 71 (1991): 315–44; and idem, “The Birth of Christianity as a Hellenistic Religion: Three Theories of Origin,” JR 74 (1994), 1–25. I would also place under this rubric studies that focus on Paul as an exemplar of a universal “religious experience,” such as John Ashton, The Religion of Paul the Apostle (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2000).

7 There is a growing bibliography on this point. See Brent Nongbri, Before Religion: A History of a Modern Concept (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2013), especially chapter 7, “The Modern Origins of Ancient Religions.”

8 See the literature reviewed in McCutcheon, “The Category ‘Religion’ in Recent Publications: Twenty Years Later.”

9 On the development of the “World Religions” paradigm in the nineteenth century, see Tomoko Masuzawa, The Invention of World Religions: Or, How European Universalism Was Preserved in the Language of Pluralism (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 2005). For further developments in the twentieth century, see Katherine K. Young, “World Religions: A Category in the Making?” in Religion in History: The Word, the Idea, the Reality, ed. Michel Despland and Girard Vallée (Waterloo: Wilfred Laurier University Press, 1992), 111–30.

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usefulness of religion to talk about various historical phenomena. It is these approaches to Paul’s letters that I mean to discuss.

A second conversation relating to “Paul and religion” that I will not explore in depth but should mention here is the critique of religion associated with the work of Karl Barth. 10 For Barth, all religion was human striving, which stood in direct opposition to what Paul allegedly advocated, a point captured nicely in a subheading in the Church Dogmatics, “Gottes Offenbarung als Aufhebung der Religion” (“God’s Revelation as the Abolition of Religion”). 11 Barth’s outlook finds expression in contemporary Pauline scholarship in the works of J. Louis Martyn. The theme of Paul’s supposed critique of religion is recurrent throughout Martyn’s works. To take but one clear example: “Religion . . . is the various communal, cultic means—always involving the distinction of sacred from profane—by which human beings seek to know and to be happily related to the gods. . . . Religion is a human enterprise. Thus in Paul’s view, religion is the polar opposite of God’s act in Christ.” 12 Paul’s extant writings, however, do not contain Greek words generally rendered as “religion” (hardly a surprising observation, given the history of the concept). What Paul does frequently mention is the concept of nomos, and his addressees’ inability to adhere to the particular nomos of the Judaean god. Thus, “religion” for Martyn operates as a cipher for “Judaism,” and is the very opposite of what Paul advocates in his letters. 13 Martyn’s work proceeds without reference to the wider field of religious studies or the historicization of the concept of religion, so it also lies outside the area of my present investigation.

Barth’s specifically Protestant theological critique of religion did, however, play an important role in the landmark study that in some ways marks the beginning of the historicization of religion, Wilfred Cantwell Smith’s The

10

The standard point of reference for Barth’s take on Paul is his commentary on Romans, The Epistle to the Romans, trans. Edwyn C. Hoskyns (London: Oxford University Press, 1933), a translation of the sixth German edition.

11 See section III.17 of Die kirchliche Dogmatik (Zollikon: Verlag der evangelischen Buchhandlung, 1938), vol. 1, part 2, p. 304; Church Dogmatics, vol. 1.2, trans. G. T. Thomson et al. (Edinburgh: T&T Clark, 1956), 280.

12 J. Louis Martyn, Theological Issues in the Letters of Paul (Nashville: Abingdon, 1997), 79.

13 For a related critical take on “religion” and “Judaism” in Martyn’s work, see Mark Nanos, “How Inter-Christian Approaches to Paul’s Rhetoric Can Perpetuate Negative Valuations of Jewishness—Although Proposing to Avoid that Outcome,” www.marknanos.com/SBL-03-Inter-Christian-Prob.pdf.

Nongbri, The Concept of Religion 5

Meaning and End of Religion. 14 Smith claimed that, just as Barth protested that religion was inimical to being a true Christian, “representatives of other traditions” similarly rejected the concept of religion. 15 For Smith, religion was essentially an “outsider’s” (inadequate) way of depicting inner faith. The first portion of his book thus traced the development of the Latin term religio and the concept of “religion” in the history of the West. He concluded that the notion of “religion” as a system of belief that can be compared to other “religions” or systems of belief is a relatively recent invention particular to the Christian tradition and thus not useful for thinking about other cultures, such as those of India or China (or ancient cultures). Smith then proposed that scholars dispense with the category “religion” and instead open two separate lines of inquiry, one that would examine the historical, contingent “cumulative tradition” of religious groups and one that would examine the ahistorical, unchanging “faith” of the groups that have come to be designated “religions.” 16 The immediately obvious drawback of such a proposal is that Smith essentializes the noun “faith” and the adjective “religious” to such a degree that these terms becomes plagued with all of the same problems as the traditional notion of “religion” that he seeks to replace. 17 Smith’s work has nevertheless proven highly influential in the

14

Wilfred Cantwell Smith, The Meaning and End of Religion: A New Approach to the Religious Traditions of Mankind (New York: Macmillan, 1963). For the book’s impact, see Talal Asad, “Reading a Modern Classic: W. C. Smith’s The Meaning and End of Religion,” HR 40 (2001): 205–22.

15 Smith, The Meaning and End of Religion, 114–18. Elsewhere Smith asserts, “Throughout human history no man has been religiously great who was not dissatisfied with those aspects of his age that the modern observer would call its religion” (117).

16 Smith was not alone in advocating this kind of method. His formulation resembles the division of labor in Mircea Eliade’s summary statement in the final paragraph of The Sacred and the Profane. After a rather triumphalist description of the “history of religions” field, Eliade concluded, “At present, historians of religions are divided between two divergent but complementary methodological orientations. One group concentrate[s] primarily on the characteristic structures of religious phenomena, the other choose[s] to investigate their historical context. The former seek to understand the essence of religion, the latter to discover and communicate its history” (Eliade, The Sacred and the Profane: The Nature of Religion, trans. W. R. Trask [San Diego: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1959], 232).

17 In the formulation of Tomoko Masuzawa, “Smith was proposing to abandon the use of the term ‘religion’ in order to forefront what it really is, which is by nature, as he would have it, off limits to naturalistic analysis or explanation” (“The Production of Religion and the Task of the Scholar,” Culture and Religion 1 [2000]: 123–30, quotation at 125).

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academic field of religious studies, even if more critical voices have emerged in recent years. 18 At roughly the same time as the publication of Smith’s The Meaning and End of Religion, Edwin A. Judge published an essay arguing, among other things, that Pauline groups more closely resembled ancient “scholastic communities” than they did so-called ancient religious groups. 19 In a retrospective essay published twenty years later, Judge sharpened that point, posing the question, “In what terms is the social identity of early Christianity to be defined?” and answering, “The first model to be discarded is that of ‘religion’ itself.” 20 Judge went on to cite the work of Wilfred Cantwell Smith as demonstrating the “crippling ambiguities” of the term “religion,” but the emphasis of Judge’s study is the search for understanding how people of the first century might have interpreted groups of the followers of Jesus. By “testing models” that can be discerned in the historical record of the first century (polis, household, school, etc.), we might gain greater clarity on how early followers of

18

See, for instance, Russell T. McCutcheon, “Religion Before ‘Religion’?” in Chasing Down Religion: In the Sights of History and the Cognitive Sciences. Essays in Honor of Luther H. Martin, ed. Panayotis Pachis and Donald Wiebe (Thessaloniki: Barbounakis, 2010), 285–301.

19 By “scholastic communities,” Judge meant sophists as well as a range of philosophers.

See Edwin A. Judge, “The Early Christians as a Scholastic Community,” JRH 1 (1960): 5– 15; (1961): 125–37, now reprinted in The First Christians in the Roman World: Augustan and New Testament Essays, ed. James R. Harrison (Tübingen: Mohr Siebeck, 2008), 526– 52, esp. 539–40. For reservations about Judge’s partial erasure of the distinction between sophists and philosophers, see Stanley K. Stowers, “Social Status, Public Speaking and Private Teaching: The Circumstances of Paul’s Preaching Activity,” NovT 26 (1984): 59–82.

20 Edwin A. Judge, “The Social Identity of the First Christians: A Question of Method in Religious History,” JRH 11 (1980): 201–17, reprinted in Social Distinctives of the Christians in the First Century: Pivotal Essays by E. A. Judge, ed. David M. Scholer (Peabody, MA: Hendrickson, 2008), 117–35, quotations drawn from the latter at 130.

Judge has returned to these questions in greater detail repeatedly over the years in a series of essays: “The Beginning of Religious History,” JRH 15 (1989): 394–412, now reprinted in Jerusalem and Athens: Cultural Transformation in Late Antiquity, ed. Alanna Nobbs (Tübingen: Mohr Siebeck, 2010), 11–31; “Did the Churches Compete with Cult Groups?” in Early Christianity and Classical Culture: Comparative Studies in Honor of Abraham J. Malherbe, ed. John T. Fitzgerald et al. (Leiden: Brill, 2003), 501–24, now reprinted in Harrison, The First Christians in the Roman World, 597–618; and “Was Christianity a Religion?” Society for the Study of Early Christianity Newsletter 56 (2006): 4–7, now reprinted in Harrison, The First Christians in the Roman World, 404–409.

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Jesus may have been perceived. Judge was emphatic that “religion” was not a helpful concept in this exercise.

In 1983, Wayne Meeks offered two responses to Judge’s thesis. First, he countered that the earliest Latin writers to take notice of the followers of Jesus identified them as taking part in superstitio, which, according to a number of ancient authors stood on a continuum with religio. 21 Meeks thus implied that a study of the followers of Jesus as a Roman religio might be fruitful, but his chief interest was somewhat different. While Judge sought to identify the social formations into which contemporary Romans might have placed groups of Jesus’ followers, Meeks set his own discussion in a different register by invoking “the rubric of religion as described by some modern social scientists,” in particular the anthropologist, Melford E. Spiro, who defined religion as “an institution consisting of culturally patterned interaction with culturally postulated superhuman beings.” 22 Beginning from Spiro’s definition and invoking Émile Durkheim, Clifford Geertz, and Mary Douglas among others, Meeks offered an analysis of “rituals” alluded to in the Pauline letters (such as meetings, baptism, and communal eating). Thus, to use terms derived from anthropological discussions, whereas Judge was engaging in an emic, or descriptive, exercise, Meeks was carrying out an etic, or redescriptive, analysis. 23 While Judge found “religion” unhelpful as an emic concept, Meeks found it useful as an etic concept.

A second exchange about Paul and religion took place simultaneously in the late 1970s and the early 1980s in the writings of E. P. Sanders and Jonathan Z. Smith. 24 This dialogue was prompted by the landmark study of E. P.

21

Pliny, Ep. 10.96.8; Tacitus, Ann. 15.44.3; and Suetonius, Nero 16.3. On these passages, see Robert Louis Wilken, The Christians as the Romans Saw Them (2nd ed.; New Haven: Yale University Press, 2003), 1–67; and Dale B. Martin, Inventing Superstition: From the Hippocratics to the Christians (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2004), 1–20.

22 Wayne A. Meeks, The First Urban Christians: The Social World of the Apostle Paul (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1983), 140–42, quotation at 140–41. Further reflections from Meeks on the place of “religion” in the study of Paul can be found in Wayne A. Meeks, “Taking Stock and Moving On,” in After the First Urban Christians: The Social-Scientific Study of Pauline Christianity Twenty-Five Years Later, ed. Todd D. Still and David G. Horrell (London: T&T Clark, 2009), 134–46, esp. 145.

23 On the history of these terms, their usefulness, and their drawbacks, see Russell T. McCutcheon, The Insider/Outsider Problem in the Study of Religion: A Reader (London: Continuum, 1999), 15–17.

24 Their discussion was largely independent of the work of Judge and Meeks. I say “largely” because Meeks, Judge, and Smith all seem to have been well aware of each

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Sanders, Paul and Palestinian Judaism, which carried the subtitle, A Comparison of Patterns of Religion. It was a work in which Sanders was determined to pay attention to religion instead of theology and to carry out a truly comparative study. Although Sanders’s interaction in this book with the broader academic field of religious studies is minimal, much of his work seems to have been shaped by what I would call the ethos of that developing field. In a retrospective essay surveying his career, Sanders has characterized his early impulses in the study of religion as follows: In September 1963, when I started graduate school at Union Theological Seminary in New York, where the New Testament faculty members were John Knox, W. D. Davies, and Louis Martyn, I had three views about the field that I was entering and what I would like to do: (1) Religion is not just theology, and in fact is often not very theological at all. New Testament scholarship then (as now) paid too much attention to theology and not enough attention to religion. . . . (2) To know one religion is to know none. The human brain comprehends by comparing and contrasting, and consequently comparison in the study of religion is essential, not optional. (3) New Testament scholars ought to study Judaism. I now cannot say what had convinced me of numbers 1 and 2 (too much theology, comparison necessary). Bill Farmer had told me item number 3 (study Judaism), and I simply believed him. 25 Sanders’s statement seems to fit comfortably in the context of the academic study of religion in the United States in the 1960s. He identifies two key boundary lines of the developing academic field of religious studies. Tomoko Masuzawa’s account of the modern discourse of “World Religions” is in fact bracketed by these concerns: other’s ideas, even if these two discussions do not cross-reference one another. See Jonathan Z. Smith, “The Social Description of Early Christianity,” RelSRev 1 (1975): 19–25.

25 E. P. Sanders, “Comparing Judaism and Christianity: An Academic Autobiography,” in Redefining First-Century Jewish and Christian Identities: Essays in Honor of Ed Parish Sanders, ed. Fabian E. Udoh et al. (Notre Dame, IN: University of Notre Dame Press, 2008), 11–41, quotation at 14–15. In the same piece, Sanders refers to the impulse toward comparison in reference to the genesis of Paul and Palestinian Judaism: He writes of his “main conviction: I had to compare, just as Gene Kelly had to dance” (21, emphasis in original).

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To this day, the disciplinary history of the science of religion has been intent on distinguishing comparative religion from comparative theology. . . . On the whole, the disciplinary establishment of so-called religious studies, for whatever reason and with whatever justification, seems to hold fast to this bottom line: Religion is found everywhere; it is an essential and irreducible aspect of human life; it should be studied. And if we take into consideration the constitution, for instance, of the American Academy of Religion as a whole, it also seems to imply something else in addition: Religions should be studied concertedly, comparatively. 26 Thus, Sanders’s view number 1 (religion, not theology) is a chief identity marker of the field of religious studies; comparative religion was supposed to be a separate enterprise from comparative theology. 27 Sanders’s view number 2 (comparison necessary) follows logically from number 1 within the framework of the “World Religions” paradigm. Because there exist multiple different religions, they must be studied comparatively. Sanders seems to confirm his affinity to this model with his unattributed reference to the famous quotation of the putative pater of the field of comparative religion, Friedrich Max Müller (“To know one is to know none”). 28 Sanders’s argument in Paul and Palestinian Judaism is well known, but I will very briefly summarize it here. The starting point for Sanders’s project was

26

Masuzawa, The Invention of World Religions, 22 and 317.

Yet, as the work of Masuzawa and others has shown, that separation is porous at best.

Nevertheless, the desire for a pristine, theology-free study of religion seems to be a compelling one for many scholars. This argument is ongoing. The most vocal advocate for a science of religion that is entirely distinct from theological interests is Donald Wiebe. See his essays collected in The Politics of Religious Studies: The Continuing Conflict with Theology in the Academy (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1998); and, more recently, “An Eternal Return All Over Again: The Religious Conversation Endures,” JAAR 74 (2006): 674–96. Overtones of this desire are discernable in some strands of Pauline scholarship. See, for example, Magnus Zetterholm, Approaches to Paul: A Student’s Guide to Recent Scholarship (Minneapolis: Fortress, 2009), 225–40.

28 See Friedrich Max Müller, Introduction to the Science of Religion: Four Lectures Delivered at the Royal Institution with Two Essays on False Analogies, and the Philosophy of Mythology (London: Longmans and Green, 1873), 16: “He who knows one, knows none.” Müller was building upon Johann Wolfgang von Goethe’s contribution to linguistics, paraphrased apophthegmatically as: “He who knows one language, knows none.”

27

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a deep dissatisfaction with an influential strand of German Pauline scholarship that stressed Paul’s uniqueness by denigrating the Jews and Judaism of Paul’s day: Paul’s religion was about grace while the Jewish religion was occupied with legalism and fulfilling commandments. Sanders offered a stinging rebuke of this scholarship. 29 He showed that such an understanding of Jewish literature relied largely on inadequate handbooks and insufficient attention to actual ancient Jewish sources. 30 The picture of a legalistic and dead religion was simply incorrect. Sanders claimed instead that Palestinian Jewish literature showed that Jews thought of themselves as having been elected as a chosen people by divine grace, and the performance of good deeds was what kept them in this covenantal relationship. Sanders called this religious system “covenantal nomism” and summarized it as “the view that one’s place in God’s plan is established on the basis of the covenant and that the covenant requires as the proper response of man his obedience to the commandments, while providing means of atonement for transgression.” 31 In Sanders’s view, Judaism was thus not fundamentally about earning salvation through works; instead, Judaism (like Paul himself) emphasized grace. 32 29

Sanders acknowledged that he had important predecessors in this effort to produce a more sympathetic account of ancient Judaism, namely two scholars of the early twentieth century, George Foot Moore and Claude G. Montefiore.

30 The main target of Sanders’s ire is reliance upon Strack-Billerbeck, a collection of talmudic and midrashic texts arranged as commentary to the New Testament books (Hermann L. Strack and Paul Billerbeck, Kommentar zum Neuen Testament aus Talmud und Midrasch [4 vols.; Munich: C. H. Beck’sche Verlagsbuchhandlung, 1922–1928]).

31 Paul and Palestinian Judaism, 75.

32 It is this charitable understanding of ancient Judaism that has made Sanders’s reading so appealing to many scholars of early Christianity, but as Philip S. Alexander has noted, this presentation of Judaism is not as innocent as it might appear: Sanders’s “answer to the charge of ‘legalism’ seems, in effect, to be that Rabbinic Judaism, despite appearances, is really a religion of ‘grace’. But does this not involve a tacit acceptance of a major element in his opponents’ position—the assumption that ‘grace’ is superior to ‘law’? The correct response to the charge must surely be: And what is wrong with ‘legalism’? . . . It is neither religiously nor philosophically self-evident that a ‘legalistic’ view of the world is inferior to one based on ‘grace.’ If we fail to take a firm stand on this point, we run the risk of seriously misdescribing Pharisaic and Rabbinic Judaism, and of trying to make it over into a pale reflection of Protestant Christianity”; see Alexander’s review of Sanders, Jesus and Judaism, in JJS 37 (1986): 103–106; quotation from 105. See also the review of Paul and Palestinian Judaism by Nils Dahl, who, in an assessment roughly equal parts praise and critique, summarized: “At the end, my objections boil down to a question about the appropriateness of Sanders’s methodological approach. . . . Paul obviously did

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Paul, then, did not find fault with Judaism because of its inherent deficiencies as a religion. In Sanders’s reading, what Paul found “wrong with Judaism” was simply that it was not Christianity. As he put it, Paul did not think “from plight to solution” but rather “from solution to plight”; if Christ is the only means to salvation for all people, then the Jewish law must be somehow deficient when it comes to producing salvation. 33 Thus, while Sanders portrayed Judaism in a way more palatable to Christian scholars by maintaining that it was focused on grace, he still claimed that the religion Paul advocates is very different from Judaism. In Sanders’s model, the “religion of Judaism” presented a valid means of salvation, but it was a means of salvation of that Paul rejected in favor of Christ.

I wish to focus now on Sanders’s methodology, as this is the target of Jonathan Z. Smith’s critique. Sanders’s project proposed to carry out a “holistic” comparison of the religion of Paul and Judaism. He sought “to compare an entire religion, parts and all, with an entire religion, parts and all”; he wanted “to discover two wholes, both of which are considered and defined on their own merits and in their own terms, to be compared with one another.” 34 Sanders’s solution for comparing “Judaism” with “Paulinism” was to study their respective “patterns of religion,” by which he meant the “function” of the “religions”—how one gets from “the logical starting point” to the “logical conclusion” of a religion.

Jonathan Z. Smith pointed out a number of difficulties in this formulation: 35 Allowing, for the moment, the language of “entire” and “wholes” to stand unquestioned, and setting aside the difficulty, indeed the impossibility, of comparing two different

not think of himself as having converted to another religion than Judaism. . . . That might indicate that the category ‘religion’ is not quite appropriate for understanding either Paul or Judaism. . . . [Sanders’s] definition of a ‘pattern of religion’ is drawn from Western, especially Protestant, theology, much more than from Judaism understood on its own terms. As it turns out, the definition is even too narrow to give the full picture of Paul, the Jew who became the apostle to the Gentiles” (RelSRev 4 [1978]: 153–57, quotations drawn from 157).

33 Paul and Palestinian Judaism, 443.

34 Ibid., 16. See also Sanders, Paul, the Law, and the Jewish People (Minneapolis: Fortress, 1983).

35 Imagining Religion: From Babylon to Jonestown (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1982), 33–35. See also Anthony Saldarini’s review of Paul and Palestinian Judaism in JBL 98 (1979): 299–303; and Jacob Neusner, “Mr. Sanders’ Pharisees and Mine: A Response to E. P. Sanders, Jewish Law from Jesus to the Mishnah,” SJT 44 (1991): 73–95.

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objects, each “considered” and “defined in their own terms”— a statement which he cannot mean literally, but which he gives no indication as to how he would modify—Sanders compounds the confusion by further defining the notion of a pattern. It is not a total historical entity (e.g. Judaism, Christianity, Islam), but “only a given more or less homogeneous entity.” How much “more,” how much “less” is needed to posit homogeneity and, hence, a pattern is left unclear. It is a matter of seeing “how one moves from the logical starting point to the logical conclusion of the religion.”

But the notion of “logic” is nowhere clarified. Indeed, it seems thrown aside by Sanders’s exclusion of what he terms “speculative matters” of methodology and by his strange insistence that the logic is one of “function.” Given these restrictions, I am baffled by what “entire religion, parts and all” could possibly mean for Sanders. I find no methodological hints on how such entities are to be discovered, let alone compared. His results give me no ground for confidence. 36 Smith’s critique is on target, but I cannot help but wonder if he was being coy in mentioning the lack of “methodological hints” in Sanders’s account. For Sanders is quite clear that his “pattern of religion” is closely related to what theologians have traditionally called “soteriology.” 37 One can thus isolate a “pattern of religion” by arranging one’s data to mirror the very traditional Christian notion of a system of beliefs (and, to a lesser degree, practices) leading individuals to salvation. 38 This type of comparison of differing “ways to salvation” was timely and fully comprehensible in the pluralistic atmosphere of the study of religion in the late twentieth century. 39 Sanders’s conclusion, however, that Paul 36

Imagining Religion, 33–34.

Sanders wrote, “A pattern of religion thus has largely to do with the items which a systematic theology classifies under ‘soteriology’ [but] . . . ‘[p]attern of religion’ is a more satisfactory term for what we are going to describe” (Paul and Palestinian Judaism, 17).

38 Other early reviewers did note this point. Saldarini writes, “Though he does not call it soteriology, to avoid the many connotations of that word, Sanders’s concern is nevertheless soteriology” (review of Paul and Palestinian Judaism, 300). Sanders was also criticized on this point by Ashton, The Religion of Paul the Apostle, 27.

39 John M. G. Barclay has written concerning scholarship following in Sanders’s path that “this interpretation, like all its predecessors, is influenced by current social and ideological currents, although such influences have rarely been noted and few of its 37

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disapproved of the law as a valid means of salvation leaves the apostle falling short of being an ideal religious pluralist, a point to which I shall return.

Paul and Religion in Contemporary Scholarship Looking broadly at Pauline scholarship since the early 1980s, I think it fair to say that Sanders’s work has been considerably more influential, although this situation has changed somewhat in the last decade, with the approaches closer to those of Judge and Meeks becoming more and more prominent. 40 Jonathan Z. Smith’s remarkable dissection of Sanders’s key theses seems to have left almost no trace in the landscape of Pauline scholarship (especially among writers in the so-called New Perspective). As a result, a number of works that have built upon Sanders’s conclusions are liable to similar criticisms.

For example, while I have learned an immense amount from the writers whose approaches have come to be called collectively the “radical New Perspective,” I find that a number of authors working in this paradigm implicitly employ a concept of religion much like that of Sanders, which is highly concerned with soteriology. 41 As I read them, the authors collected under this heading take issue especially with Sanders’s assertion that for Paul, the Jewish law is not a valid means of salvation for Jews. According to at least some of the radicals, Paul instead suggests two different “paths to salvation,” nomos, or Torah, for Jews and Christ for non-Jews. 42 In a synthetic work summarizing arguments from a variety of authors who could be classed in this “radical” group, John Gager is openly critical of the idea that “Paul underwent a typical conversion from one religion to another, in this case from Judaism to practitioners seem conscious of the fact” (“‘Neither Jew nor Greek’: Multiculturalism and the New Perspective on Paul,” in Ethnicity and the Bible, ed. Mark G. Brett [Leiden: Brill, 1996], 197–214, quotation from 198–99).

40 In particular, Sanders’s work has inspired the so-called New Perspective on Paul, which itself has spawned a variety of reactions (and reactionaries). The bibliography is immense.

For an overview, see Zetterholm, Approaches to Paul, 95–193.

41 For this description, see for example, Zetterholm, Approaches to Paul, 161: “the radical new perspective”; Pamela Eisenbaum, Paul Was Not a Christian: The Original Message of a Misunderstood Apostle (New York: HarperOne, 2009), 216: “radical New Perspective scholars” or “the radicals”; and Caroline Johnson Hodge, If Sons, Then Heirs: A Study of Kinship and Ethnicity in the Letters of Paul (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2007), 153: “the radical wing of the new perspective.”

42 Eisenbaum suggests that “two ways salvation” is a criticism leveled against “the radical New Perspective” (Paul Was Not a Christian, 251), but it seems to me to be a legitimate reading of at least some of these authors.

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Christianity.” 43 He nevertheless seems comfortable with the idea of distinct religions in the ancient world, noting that “the unexpected success of [the postPauline] movement among Gentiles rapidly pushed it toward becoming a new, separate religion.” 44 And when Gager discusses “Paul’s gospel,” he (like Sanders) does so in terms of “salvation”: “If Paul’s gospel is about the acceptance of the Gentiles and if he does not repudiate the law for Israel, does it follow that Gentiles and Jews take different paths to salvation? Put differently, does Paul foresee the redemption of Israel through conversion to Christ?” 45 The ideas of salvation and conversion come together again for Gager in a summary of “revisionist” scholarship on Paul. Gager writes that there is agreement on a number of issues, but “on the question of whether Israel’s salvation lies in Christ, whether Paul regarded Jesus Christ as the Messiah for Israel, there is no such agreement.” Gager’s own view is that Paul “does not envisage an End-time conversion of Israel to Christ.” In Gager’s model, then, Jesus being “the Messiah of Israel” appears to necessitate that Israel would have to “convert to Christ.” 46 Yet, such an inference is only necessary if we insist on working within a framework of religions as multiple paths to salvation. If we set aside that framework, the whole notion of two “paths to salvation” becomes nonsensical. 47

43

John G. Gager, Reinventing Paul (New York: Oxford University Press, 2000), 21.

Ibid., 39.

45 Ibid., 59. Gager is careful to point out that these different “paths to salvation” are not unrelated: “One final observation on the ‘two ways.’ It would be a serious misrepresentation of Paul’s [view] to say that he conceived of separate or divided paths as the final word . . . it is clear that Paul thinks of the two ways as a temporary, provisional stage in the story of salvation” (60).

46 Ibid., 146.

47 Consider the following scenario as a possibility: Paul claims that Jesus is the Messiah.

He further claims that other ioudaioi should acknowledge that Jesus is indeed the Messiah, and thus acknowledge that these are the last days, and that non-ioudaioi, having been made pure by the newly available pneuma of the Messiah, are now to join together with ioudaioi in worshipping their ancestral god, who expressed this desire for joint worship in the book of Isaiah. Ioudaioi would still carry out their ancestral traditions; they would have to change their behavior only in regard to interacting with these newly purified non-ioudaioi. To characterize those kinds of behavioral changes as ioudaioi “converting to Christ” would be baffling. This scenario is condensed and adapted primarily from the work of Paula Fredriksen and Stanley Stowers. See Fredriksen, “Judaism, the Circumcision of Gentiles, and Apocalyptic Hope: Another Look at Galatians 1 and 2,” JTS 42 (1991): 532–64; and Stowers, A Rereading of Romans: Justice, Jews, and Gentiles (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1997).

44

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But there is an undeniable appeal to the framework that Gager provides, in that it presents us with a Paul who is a more ideal religious pluralist.

What we find in Gager (and some, though not all, of the “radicals”) is thus a view that is indeed radical relative to the staid world of Pauline studies but hardly radical all in the context of the North American academic study of religion, in which pluralism reigns as the dominant ethos. 48 And this is perhaps one of the reasons that the “radical” approach to Paul has gained adherents in recent years. I wish to be clear that it is not really a criticism to point out that an interpretation of a text shares the values of the cultural environment in which it was produced. In the present case, however, I think it is a necessary and salutary reminder, because authors of the radical New Perspective sometimes display a tendency to present themselves as describing a value-free or “real” Paul. 49 Yet, the modern idea of religions as providing multiple different equally valid “paths to salvation” is, of course, very much a value-laden ideology.

I am not alone in identifying this phenomenon, although others do seem to think it worthy of rather sharp censure. In fact, N. T. Wright, a more traditional interpreter of Paul, has roundly criticized scholarship emerging from “American ‘departments of religion,’” especially the work of “those who hope to find Paul an ally in the project of postmodern pluralism.” These quotations are derived from Wright’s recent large work, Paul and the Faithfulness of God, in which the concept of religion features prominently. 50 The first volume contains an extended discussion on “‘Religion’ and ‘Culture’ in Paul’s World.” 51 The 48

See Russell T. McCutcheon, “Our ‘Special Promise’ as Teachers: Scholars of Religion and the Politics of Tolerance,” in Critics Not Caretakers: Redescribing the Public Study of Religion (Albany: State University of New York Press, 2001), 155–77.

49 Gager presents his portrait as the “real” Paul and implies a positive answer to his opening question: “Is it possible to break free . . . from the powerful tendency to read our views into Paul rather than working our way from them?” (Reinventing Paul, vii).

Zetterholm speaks of “the truth about Paul” (Approaches to Paul, 235 and 239). I agree that we can adjudicate better and worse historical readings of ancient evidence, but the criteria for making such judgments are the socially constructed “rules” of historiography, which do not produce a singular “truth about Paul.”

50 N. T. Wright, Paul and the Faithfulness of God (2 vols.; Minneapolis: Fortress, 2013).

For general statements of suspicion of “locating the study of early Christianity within university and college ‘Departments of Religion,’” see 1.72 and 2.1321. For the remark on pluralism, see 2.1309, note 108. For what Wright characterizes as the “half-truths” and “untruths” of North American scholars such as Gager, see 2.1129. Full disclosure: While I am presently employed in an Australian department of ancient history, I was trained in an American department of religious studies.

51 Ibid., 1.246–1.278.

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second volume dedicates a chapter to the topic “Paul and Religion,” and contains a critical assessment of E. P. Sanders’s use of the concept of religion in Paul and Palestinian Judaism. 52 In the first volume, Wright cites with approval the more recent work of Edwin Judge but decides, against Judge’s advice, to carry on with using the concept of religion. 53 Wright proceeds to give an overview of “The Religious World of Ancient Greece,” “Mysteries from the East,” and “Religion and Culture in the First-Century Roman World.” He finds that Roman religio encompasses a variety of things: temples, priesthoods, myths, festival calendars, civic magistrates, sacrifice, oracular interpretation, and more—“we are dealing with what today we might call ‘the fabric of society,’ the things which held people together and gave shape and meaning to their personal and corporate life.” 54 This is to be contrasted with the “eighteenth century” or “Enlightenment” notion of religion that Wright characterizes “in most of today’s western world at least, as implying ‘not-ordinary-life,’ ‘not-culture,’ and particularly ‘notpolitics.’” 55 Ultimately, Wright concludes, with much support from recent scholarship in classical studies, that in Paul’s world, “religio penetrated more or less every area of life.” 56 In his second volume, Wright turns to the question of “Paul and Religion,” clarified as “the relationship of Paul to first-century religion, as discussed in that earlier chapter, rather than to ‘religion’ as that term has been understood since at least the eighteenth century.” 57 This relationship is, for Wright, largely negative: Paul has rejected pagan religion in all its works and ways. But “religion” itself—centered upon the celebratory offering of sacrifice, through which humans and the divine presence are bound together in the solidarity of one community and its 52

Interestingly, this critique is made without reference to that of Jonathan Z. Smith, mentioned above.

53 In this context, Wright mentions Judge, “Was Christianity a Religion?” (Wright elsewhere cites some of Judge’s other essays).

54 Wright, Paul and the Faithfulness of God, 1.274. Oddly, Wright seems not to include the Jews under this heading (1.276).

55 Ibid., 1.35.

56 Ibid., 1.274. For a critical view of the treatment of “religion” in much of the classical scholarship on which Wright relies, see Brent Nongbri, “Dislodging ‘Embedded’ Religion: A Brief Note on a Scholarly Trope,” Numen 55 (2008): 440–60.

57 Wright, Paul and the Faithfulness of God, 2.1321.

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consequent fruitfulness—is something Paul sees as fulfilled and transformed in and through Jesus. Jewish “religion” was, for him, a signpost pointing forwards to this new reality.

Pagan “religion” was a parody of it, distorting it in line with the distorted and dehumanizing pseudo-divinities of the pagan pantheon. 58 Wright’s more explicit thoughts on methodology appear most clearly in critiques of other scholars, especially Sanders. After an extended discussion of the problems of Sanders’s use “without any discussion, [of] an implicit definition of ‘religion’ which belongs in the eighteenth rather than in the first century,” Wright cuts to the heart of the matter: By comparing Paul and Judaism in terms of “patterns of religion,” [Sanders] makes it impossible to see that the early Christians, like at least the Qumran sect in one way and the followers of bar-Kochba in another, were claiming that Israel’s God had inaugurated or was inaugurating his long-promised purposes and that they themselves were in the vanguard of this new movement. 59 Apart from the easy gloss from “Paul” to “early Christians,” Wright makes a generally valid point here. The very structure of Sanders’s project determined its results. If we go looking for differences between the writings of Paul on the one hand and all other Jewish writings on the other, we shall surely find them. 60 Yet, despite this recognition, Wright’s own treatment of “Paul and religion” functions in a similarly divisive manner. And despite Wright’s assertion that his own approach to Paul “retains, and indeed emphasizes, Paul’s location within 58

Ibid., 2.1343.

Ibid., 2.1324.

60 If one were to carry out a similar exercise by isolating another Jewish document and comparing it with all other Jewish literature from the Second Temple period, it would not be surprising to find that the isolated Jewish document had “unique” elements. Would we then conclude on this basis that the document was not Jewish? Unlikely. Yet, such a conclusion is exactly what one finds when Paul is compared with “Judaism” in this way.

To his credit, Sanders was at least somewhat consistent in this regard. Sanders noted the ways in which 4 Ezra differs from other contemporary Jewish literature, and in a fascinating formulation, he concluded that “IV Ezra is not a particularly good representative of Judaism” (Paul and Palestinian Judaism, 409–28, quotation from 427).

59

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second-temple Judaism,” Wright, like Sanders, constantly sets “Paul” over against “Judaism.” 61 Judaism is treated (if not described) throughout as a stable, well-defined entity against which Paul can be compared, but mostly contrasted. 62 Wright’s consistent stress upon Paul’s “reinterpretation” or “reworking” or “revising” or “reappropriation” or “renewing” or “radicalization” or “reorientation” or “transformation” or “mutation” or “radical variation” of Jewish traditions implies that these traditions existed in some sort of utterly stable no-man’s-land prior to Paul’s encounter with them. 63 Rather than considering Paul’s voice as one among a cacophony of competing claims about how the Judaean god should properly be worshipped, Wright regularly carries out much the same comparative project as Sanders did, with “Judaism” on one 61

Wright, Paul and the Faithfulness of God, 2.612. Indeed, Wright ends up even further down this path than Sanders himself would venture. On different occasions, Sanders concludes that Paul “unconsciously” created something different from “Judaism,” a third race (not Gentiles, not Jews). Wright goes further. Note the way that Sanders criticizes this statement: “Paul considered Christianity to be a rival religion to Judaism”—“I cannot agree, if the subject is Paul’s conscious intent” (Paul, the Law, and the Jewish People, 201, note 22; his emphasis). Elsewhere in that work, Sanders asserts that “Paul’s view of the church, supported by his practice, against his own conscious intention, was substantially that it was a third entity, not just because it was composed of both Jew and Greek, but also because it was in important ways neither Jewish nor Greek” (178–79). Throughout this section of Sanders’s work, there is a noteworthy dissonance between Paul’s own terminology (“his own conscious intention”) and the “situation” Sanders describes. He writes, “The situation is quite clear, even if the terminology is confusing” (175); Paul thinks of the church as the “true Israel,” “but the terminology is not carried through” (174) and “that term is not used by Paul” (175). Where Sanders is ambivalent, Wright is utterly convinced: “I find Sanders’s argument here so strong that it is not clear to me why he then doubts that Paul would have thought of a ‘third race’” (Paul and the Faithfulness of God, 2.1444).

62 The grammar of Wright’s assertions in Paul and the Faithfulness of God makes the point again and again: “For Paul, as for Judaism . . .” (1.229); “The unity on which Paul insists went explicitly beyond that envisaged within Judaism” (1.387); “ancient Israel and second-temple Judaism” on one hand and “Paul” on the other (2.933); “Love, then, is obviously and uncontroversially central to Paul’s vision of the Christian moral life, in a way which was not true in either Judaism or the greco-roman world” (2.1119).

63 These terms are used throughout Paul and the Faithfulness of God. Wright’s use of the word “radicalization” (1.563) especially invites comparison with contemporary use of that word in academia and the media, most often in association with “radicalized forms of Islam” or the like. Such formulations often serve to segregate so-called “terrorists” from “normal Islam” or “real Islam.” So also, Wright’s use of this term (and all the others) sets up Paul as something other than “real Judaism.”

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side of the equation and Paul (along with “Christianity”) on the other. It does Wright little good to state that he appreciates “the rich, dense, and sometimes mutually contradictory variations within” Second Temple Judaism if, by the structure of Wright’s own argument, Paul is preemptively excluded from those “variations within.” 64 Although Wright repeatedly insists on the “Jewish” grounding of Paul’s “worldview,” he regularly portrays Paul and his “worldview” as something essentially (I use the word advisedly) different. This practice results in claims that are sometimes in high tension with one another. Thus, Wright states at one point that “Paul did not have to stop being a Jew” while elsewhere emphasizing that “Being a Jew was no longer Paul’s basic identity,” which seems to mean that Paul was a Jew, but he was not Jewish (or perhaps Paul was only somewhat “Jewish”). 65 Structurally, this argument is indistinguishable from those that assert that Paul was a Jew, but his “religion” was something other than “Judaism.” 66 What allows Wright to be explicitly critical of Sanders’s use of religion while at the same time by and large reproducing his comparative project is Wright’s heavy (and un-theorized) use of the notion of belief: “It is important to stress . . . that whereas indeed for Christians, starting with Paul, ‘belief,’ and in particular belief about who ‘God’ really was, took centre stage, this had never been the case for the Greeks and the Romans.” 67 Belief is omnipresent in

64 Wright, Paul and the Faithfulness of God, 1.563. Where is the evidence that Paul was being any more or less inventive with ancestral traditions than other contemporary worshippers of the Judaean god? Every text that Wright uses to craft his picture of the “Jewish world” represents a reinterpretation or revision or transformation of an evergrowing and ever-changing “Jewish tradition.” Even claims to “defend the traditions of the ancestors” mask continuous innovation; see Brent Nongbri, “The Motivations of the Maccabees and Judean Rhetoric of Ancestral Traditions,” in Ancient Judaism in its Hellenistic Context, ed. Carol Bakhos (Leiden: Brill, 2005), 85–111.

65 Wright, Paul and the Faithfulness of God, 1.47 and 2.1436, Wright’s italics.

66 Indeed, for all Wright’s repeated stress that Paul’s worldview was “Jewish,” Wright’s uses of “Jewishness” and “Judaism” seem to function chiefly as a means mediating (or of insulating Paul from) the “greco-roman” world or “pagan” thought. Paul “derives” things from “the world of Israel’s scriptures and Jewish traditions,” but he “adapts” things from the non-Jewish world (see, for example, Paul and the Faithfulness of God, 1.200–201). For reflections on how this kind of work crafts a very particular, normative type of “Judaism,” see William Arnal, The Symbolic Jesus: Historical Scholarship, Judaism and the Construction of Identity (London: Equinox, 2005).

67 Wright, Paul and the Faithfulness of God, 1.276. At the outset of his project, Wright speaks of “the heart of Paul’s beliefs and aims, which are the central focus of this book”

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Wright’s work, with major sections of the book dedicated to Paul’s “mindset,” to which Wright seemingly has privileged access. 68 And it is exactly here, in the realm of Paul’s “beliefs,” his “reworking,” “transforming,” etc., that Wright can establish his comparisons with Paul on one side and Judaism on the other.

This brings me to a final study on the concept of religion and the study of Paul (or rather, the early followers of Jesus more generally). It is a chapter by William Arnal and Russell McCutcheon entitled “The Origins of Christianity Within, and Without, ‘Religion’: A Case Study.” 69 In the course of examining the role of the concept of religion in the work of New Testament scholars, they observe that one of the central problems with applying the concept of religion to ancient evidence is that it tends to focus attention on belief as a mental state that precedes actions. 70 The problematic status of “belief” in historical studies has been well established, both in the fields of philosophy and anthropology and of religious studies. 71 Arnal and McCutcheon note that, among other specific problems it causes in the study of early Christianity,

(1.7). He claims to “discern beliefs and motivations . . . underneath the deeds and words which come into the public domain” (1.29).

68 I stopped counting after reaching 50 instances of the phrase “Paul believed.” And these are not all simply quotations from Paul’s letters. In many cases, despite what Paul says (or does not say), Wright is able to identify what Paul actually believed. For example, although Rom 2:26 mentions uncircumcised people who “keep the ordinances of the law” and “fulfill the law,” which appears to mean “uncircumcised people keeping the commandments,” Wright is able to divine that Paul “clearly has in mind a different sort of law-fulfilment” (Paul and the Faithfulness of God, 2.922). And even though Paul never uses the phrase “true Israel,” or “true Jew,” or “true circumcision” with reference to his addressees, Wright can confidently declare that these phrases “express what [Paul] has in mind” (2.1187, note 536).

69 The chapter is part of a collection of essays by Arnal and McCutcheon, The Sacred Is the Profane: The Political Nature of “Religion” (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2013), 134–214.

70 Ibid., 142–49. The authors do note that there are a variety of other problems introduced by the use of the concept of religion: “The issue of belief will have to stand as a synecdoche for the problems involved in treating the New Testament materials as data for ‘religion.’ Space does not permit a thorough recitation of the many other ways in which the notion of ‘religion’ interferes with or inhibits our understanding of Christian origins as explicable, mundane, and the product of behaviors and characteristics common to the human race” (149).

71 See, for example, Rodney Needham, Belief, Language and Experience (Oxford: Blackwell, 1972); and Donald S. Lopez, Jr., “Belief,” in Critical Terms for Religious Studies, ed. Mark C. Taylor (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1998), 21–35.

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the centrality of belief . . . has served to reify the [Christian] tradition, leading us to think in terms of the identity, consistency, and continuity of Christianity over time and in different circumstances. As a result, we often neglect the ways in which the tradition is divided and conflicted . . . we also make the mistake of assuming that the same texts or creeds function in the same ways in different historical periods or social contexts and begin to posit fanciful lines of continuous “tradition” that serve as communicative vectors for these allegedly persistent ideas. 72 For these and other reasons, Arnal and McCutcheon conclude that “the most productive directions in recent New Testament scholarship have been precisely those that wrest the ancient Christian materials away from religious categories.” 73 I cannot pretend to have myself solved all the difficult philosophical and historiographical problems presented by the concept of belief. 74 Nevertheless, the relentless focus on “Paul’s beliefs” that we see in Wright’s work surely obscures other potential loci for generating meaning using Paul’s letters, as I hope to demonstrate in the final section of this article.

Possible Directions for Paul and Religion What, then, are the possible ways ahead for the concept of religion in the study of Paul’s letters? Although Sanders’s work (and his implicit concept of religion) has been highly influential in Pauline studies, I do not think it is an especially promising avenue for further research. Rather, the approaches represented in the exchange between Judge and Meeks seem more potentially fruitful to me. If, following Judge, we momentarily set aside religion when approaching the data of Paul’s letters, we can devote more attention to finding and describing other possible analogues for groups of Jesus’ followers in the ancient textual and material remains. Refining Judge’s observation that some meetings of Jesus’ followers would have appeared to be meetings of “scholastic communities,”

72

Arnal and McCutcheon, The Sacred Is the Profane, 143.

Ibid., 149. Or as they phrase it elsewhere, “our comprehension of the origins of Christianity [is] fostered by moving away from the idea of religion, rather than toward it” (ibid., 151).

74 I do think that understanding belief as part of a field of practices (and not exclusively prior to “practice”) seems to be the only workable way forward. See the discussion of Stowers’s recent work below.

73

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much illuminating work has been carried out specifically on Paul’s letters and the literature of the various philosophical schools. 75 Considerable efforts have also been made in gathering evidence for ancient collegia and guild groups with an eye toward comparison with the group structures and activities outlined in Paul’s letters. 76 It seems to me that various Greek and Roman civic and administrative social formations might also yield interesting models for thinking about Pauline groups. Paul did, after all, address his letters to ekklēsiai, which he characterized as being part of a politeuma. In addition to such vocabulary, one can also consider practices, such as letter writing and the sending of emissaries, which were ubiquitous in the running of Roman civil administration. 77 These sorts of approaches allow us to see that Paul’s groups may well have not been very uniform at all. To put it another way, some of his addressees will have 75

The foremost examples come from the work of Troels Engberg-Pedersen. See his Paul and the Stoics (Louisville: Westminster John Knox, 2000) and Cosmology and Self in the Apostle Paul: The Material Spirit (New York: Oxford University Press, 2010). For the Epicureans, see Clarence E. Glad, Paul and Philodemus: Adaptability in Epicurean and Early Christian Psychagogy (Leiden: Brill, 1995). For Platonists, see Emma Wasserman, The Death of the Soul in Romans 7: Sin, Death, and the Law in Light of Hellenistic Moral Psychology (Tübingen: Mohr Siebeck, 2008). While some of this work is liable to the charge of being overly focused on the beliefs of Paul and the philosophers in isolation from practices, Engberg-Pedersen and Glad do have a good deal to say about community formation. Still more could be said about how groups of philosophers were described by their contemporaries. On this point, see Loveday Alexander, “Paul and the Hellenistic Schools: The Evidence of Galen,” in Paul in His Hellenistic Context, ed. Troels EngbergPedersen (Minneapolis: Fortress, 1995), 60–83; and Stanley K. Stowers, “Does Pauline Christianity Resemble a Hellenistic Philosophy?” in Paul Beyond the Judaism / Hellenism Divide, ed. Troels Engberg-Pedersen (Louisville: Westminster John Knox, 2001), 81–102.

76 For the gathering of primary sources, see John S. Kloppenborg and Richard S. Ascough, Greco-Roman Associations: Texts, Translations, and Commentary (Berlin: de Gruyter, 2011). The first volume covered Attica, Central Greece, Macedonia, and Thrace.

Additional volumes are forthcoming. For select sources in translation, see Richard S. Ascough, Philip A. Harland, and John S. Kloppenborg, Associations in the Greco-Roman World: A Sourcebook (Waco: Baylor University Press, 2012). For an application to the Pauline letters, see Richard S. Ascough, Paul’s Macedonian Associations (Tübingen: Mohr Siebeck, 2003).

77 Such practices have appeared as anomalous or even “unique” to those who understand the followers of Jesus as a self-evidently religious phenomenon. Jan Bremmer has written that the trans-local connections among early followers of Jesus and their letter writing habits “were totally unique in antiquity, as there was nothing comparable in GrecoRoman religion” (Jan N. Bremmer, The Rise of Christianity in the Eyes of Gibbon, Harnack, and Stark [2nd ed.; Groningen: Barkhuis, 2010], 69).

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appeared to outsiders to be acting like philosophical schools, other groups will have more frequently been classed as taking part in rank superstitio; some will have looked like a typical burial society. Such identifications would also depend on what activities of the group were being observed and who was doing the observing.

Another potential benefit of simply bracketing “religion” when analyzing Paul’s letters is that it can make what appear to be “perennial problems” in the study of Paul’s letters seem curious or even unnecessary.

Consider the issue of “Paul and Judaism.” I would hope that, by this point in my discussion, this formulation would seem bizarre. Mark Nanos and others have suggested that we should be talking instead about “Paul’s Judaism” or “Paul within Judaism.” 78 In general terms, I would agree with this suggestion, although my preferred understanding of ioudaismos when discussing Paul follows Steve Mason’s compelling argument that, like other Greek verbal nouns formed from izein verbs, ioudaismos refers primarily to activity (“Judaizing,” to use Mason’s translation). 79 This way of thinking shifts our attention to Paul’s activities, his practices, and his occupation as “apostle to the Gentiles.” Such an orientation is, in different ways and with different emphases, making inroads in some circles of Pauline scholarship. 80 This kind of work allows us to pose a new series of questions to Paul’s letters and think rather differently about the early followers 78

Mark Nanos, “Paul and Judaism: Why Not Paul’s Judaism?” in Paul Unbound: Other Perspectives on the Apostle, ed. Mark D. Given (Peabody: Hendrickson, 2010), 117–60; and the essays collected in Nanos and Zetterholm, Paul within Judaism.

79 Steve Mason, “Jews, Judaeans, Judaizing, Judaism: Problems of Categorization in Ancient History,” JSJ 38 (2007): 457–512. Subsequent scholarship has called for greater nuance regarding Mason’s arguments concerning the translation of ioudaios; see, for example, Michael L. Satlow, “Jew or Judaean?” in “The One Who Sows Bountifully”: Essays in Honor of Stanley K. Stowers, ed. Caroline Johnson Hodge et al. (Providence: Brown Judaic Studies, 2013), 165–75. I would also distance myself from Mason’s overall reading of Paul’s letters, but Mason’s basic argument about the verbal aspect of ioudaismos seems to me to be sound. Seth Schwartz’s reply to Mason concerns post-Pauline usage of the term; see Schwartz, “How Many Judaisms Were There? A Critique of Neusner and Smith on Definition and Mason and Boyarin on Categorization,” Journal of Ancient Judaism 2 (2011), 208–38.

80 See, for example, Paula Fredriksen, “Judaizing the Nations: The Ritual Demands of Paul’s Gospel,” NTS 56 (2010): 232–52; Hodge, If Sons, Then Heirs; Joshua D. Garroway, Paul’s Gentile Jews: Neither Jew nor Gentile, But Both (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2012); and Mark Nanos, “Paul’s Non-Jews Do Not Become ‘Jews,’ But Do They Become ‘Jewish’?: Reading Romans 2:25–29 Within Judaism, Alongside Josephus,” JJMJS 1 (2014): 26–53.

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of Jesus (apart from their later, retrospective incorporation as “founders” of Christianity).

A second trajectory is represented by Meeks’s use of a self-consciously modern anthropological model of religion, an etic approach. This method has been most fruitfully explored in recent years by Stanley Stowers. 81 Based on a robust theory of practice, Stowers’s model of religion is explicitly a second-order formulation. 82 Establishing his interest in religion as taking account of “all activities connected with beliefs about gods, ancestors, and so on—not just those that can be thought of as sanctioned by the kinds of complex social formations that we call religions,” Stowers allows for different modes of religion, such as “the religion of everyday exchange” in which gods and other non-obvious beings are “conceived as interested parties with whom people carry on mundane social exchange.” 83 In contrast to this mode of religion is the “religion of the literate cultural producer,” who deals in the production and interpretation of texts. 84

81

Stowers’s position on social theory, is, however, quite distinct from that which Meeks advocated in 1983. See Stowers’s critical review of The First Urban Christians in “The Social Sciences and the Study of Early Christianity,” in Approaches to Ancient Judaism Volume V: Studies in Judaism and its Greco-Roman Context, ed. William Scott Green (Atlanta: Scholars Press, 1985), 149–81. The positions of both scholars have evolved since that time. Although Stowers’s more recent essays draw on a host of theorists, they are based primarily in the works of Pierre Bourdieu, such as An Outline of a Theory of Practice, trans. Richard Nice (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1977); and the works of Theodore R. Schatzki, especially his book, The Site of the Social: A Philosophical Account of the Constitution of Social Life and Change (University Park: The Pennsylvania State University Press, 2002). Stowers has developed these ideas in a number of discrete studies. For his theoretical grounding, see “The Ontology of Religion,” in Introducing Religion: Essays in Honor of Jonathan Z. Smith, ed. Willi Braun and Russell T. McCutcheon (London: Equinox, 2008), 434–49. For examples of this theory in action, see Stowers, “Theorizing the Religion of Ancient Households and Families,” in Household and Family Religion in Antiquity, ed. John Bodel and Saul M. Olyan (Oxford: Blackwell, 2008), 5–19; and idem, “The Religion of Plant and Animal Offerings Versus the Religion of Meanings, Essences, and Textual Mysteries,” in Ancient Mediterranean Sacrifice, ed.

Jennifer Wright Knust and Zsuzsanna Várhelyi (New York: Oxford, 2011), 35–56.

82 Stowers, “The Ontology of Religion,” 443.

83 Stowers, “The Religion of Plant and Animal Offerings,” 36. The distinction between “religion” and “a religion” is crucial for Stowers. I see a potential for confusion here; see the cautionary comments in Nongbri, “Dislodging ‘Embedded’ Religion,” 449–50 and note 28.

84 Stowers, “The Religion of Plant and Animal Offerings,” 36–42. Stowers adds two caveats: “Two things must be kept in mind in order to understand the effects of literate

Nongbri, The Concept of Religion 25

Because of its basis in practice theory, Stowers’s notion of religion does have a place for belief, but it is less central and autonomous than in the more typical theories of religion criticized by Arnal and McCutcheon: Because mind is bodily activity, and human activity mostly takes the form of socially organized activities, mind is instituted in practices. . . . It is a constant mistake of various forms of individualism to assume that individuals can perform intelligible actions in virtue of beliefs and desires alone. 85 Approaching the Pauline materials with this type of framework allows Stowers to read the letters in an illuminating manner. The content of Paul’s letters places him in the role of the literate specialist, but many of the addressees of Paul’s letters were likely more involved in the religion of household and everyday exchange. Thus, a given event (say, baptism for the dead or the Lord’s Supper) elicited from Paul and his addressees quite different sets of expectations and different ways of making meaning. 86 This observation highlights the multiple possibilities of what it might have meant to participate in these groups: What if a given Corinthian’s sole connection to the Jesus group was a once-a-week meal?

Pauline scholars tend to imagine commitment to Paul’s instructions and beliefs as a twenty-four hour a day, everyday affair, but this seems unlikely for the majority of his addressees. Commitment levels probably varied and led to the kinds of disagreements that Paul’s letters mention. 87 Stowers’s use of the concept of religion directs our attention to such potential fissures and the instability of the groups that the rhetoric of Paul’s letters is attempting to shape into

specialists on religion. First, any literate textual practice, including writing, reading, and interpretive practices, introduces modifications into, or overlaid against, the religion of everyday social exchange and civic religion. Second, the degrees of novelty and difference that separated the religion of the literate specialist from the religion of everyday social exchange and civic religion varied greatly among different kinds of specialists in the field.

This field of literate exchange had many subfields, organized by ethnicity, social rank, educational opportunity, etc.” (41–42).

85 Stowers, “The Ontology of Religion,” 440.

86 Stowers, “Kinds of Myth, Meals, and Power: Paul and the Corinthians,” in Redescribing Paul and the Corinthians, ed. Ron Cameron and Merrill P. Miller (Atlanta: Society of Biblical Literature, 2011), 105–49.

87 See, for instance, 1 Cor 8:1–13.

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communities. 88 This kind of analysis is difficult, if not impossible, when focusing strictly on “Paul’s beliefs.” Thus, the potential of this sort of redescriptive exploration using religion is considerable, but as Arnal and McCutcheon warn, deploying religion in this way requires an “extreme degree of selfconsciousness.” 89 Conclusions Both implicitly and explicitly the concept of religion has played, and continues to play, a large role in the study of Paul’s letters. My main argument is that Pauline scholars should always be conscious of their use of the concept and the ways it might be shaping their projects. 90 I hesitate to join the chorus of voices that call for a complete disavowal of the concept. 91 The two approaches I have just outlined above are not at all incompatible. They can, in fact, be seen as complementary. Once we have moved on from searching for any kind of supposedly universal “religion” in Paul’s letters, we may, with greater clarity, use self-consciously analytic definitions of religion to open up interpretive options that have been obscured by assuming that “religion” naturally inheres in the Pauline texts. Such a move can create space for reading Paul differently. 92

www.jjmjs.org

88

Stowers has elsewhere undermined this notion of stable “Pauline communities” with shared beliefs (Stowers, “The Concept of ‘Community’ and the History of Early Christianity,” MTSR 23 [2011]: 238–56).

89 Arnal and McCutcheon, “The Origins of Christianity,” 208, note 38.

90 Such caution is, of course, not to be limited to the concept of religion, even if this particular concept can be exceptionally mischievous in the field of biblical studies.

91 I noted my differences with Wilfred Cantwell Smith above. More recently, there have been calls for abandoning the concept of religion and attempting to make a useful crosscultural analytic concept out of soteriology in its place (Timothy Fitzgerald, The Ideology of Religious Studies [New York: Oxford, 2000]). Yet, as we have seen, soteriology is itself quite dependent upon traditional Christian notions of religion.

92 I am grateful to Mary Jane Cuyler, Dale Martin, Stanley Stowers, and an anonymous reviewer at JJMJS for helpful feedback on earlier drafts of this essay.

Paul, Synagogues, and Associations: Reframing the Question of Models for Pauline Christ Groups Richard S. Ascough School of Religion, Queen’s University | rsa@queensu.ca JJMJS No. 2 (2015): 27---52

In the continuing and growing discourse on how best to understand the social organization of Pauline Christ groups, some approaches continue to advocate for a separation of categories such as “synagogue” and “association” while attempting to place the Pauline groups into one or the other of these. Yet, in order to progress further in the analysis, the question should not be whether Christ groups are “synagogues” or “associations,” as if these two categories are separate and distinct. In fact, the overlap among Judean groups, Christ groups, and associations breaks down such falsely rigid dichotomies. 1 In my 1998 volume surveying analogous models used for understanding Pauline Christ groups, I used a modified version of the quadruple division on ancient groups outlined by Wayne Meeks in his book The First Urban Christians: 2 households, philosophical schools, synagogues, and voluntary associations. 3 On the assumption that the household was the foundational 1

“Associations” in antiquity are groups of men and/or women that are “normally organized around a common ethnic identity, deity or cult, trade or profession, or neighborhood, and are to be distinguished from civic organizations” (J. S. Kloppenborg, Associations, Voluntary, in Encyclopedia of the Bible and Its Reception, vol. 2, Anim– Atheism, ed. Dale C. Allison and Hans-Joseph Klauck [Berlin: De Gruyter, 2009], 1062).

In antiquity, there was no broad category or even a term “association” that would encompass the variety of groups that are included in this designation by modern scholars.

There was, in fact, a large range of terminology used by the ancients themselves to delineate what moderns call “associations.” The failure to recognize that the etic category of “association” is a modern construct lies at the heart of much of the problematic attempts to locate Judean groups and Christ groups, a issue to which we return in the conclusion of this article.

2 Wayne A. Meeks, The First Urban Christians: The Social World of the Apostle Paul (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 1983).

3 This four-fold model has antecedents in the work of earlier scholars such as E. A. Judge, Robert Wilken, and L. William Countryman, who explored variously the relationship of

28 JJMJS No. 2 (2015)

structure for many manifestations of the other three, 4 I replaced it with “ancient mysteries” as a separate category. My book summarized scholarship up to that time on each of these models, concluding that “no one model is adequate in and of itself for explaining all aspects of Paul’s Christian communities.” 5 Any one model, I suggested, might better explain a Pauline Christ group in a particular location better than the others, but need not be the model that best applies to every group to which Paul writes. Since that time, much work has been done on all the models, although particularly that of the associations. 6 Nevertheless, the sharp distinctive boundary between each has remained firmly in place, as first set out by Meeks and reiterated by my own early work.

According to Meeks’s analysis, “synagogue” is a distinct, separate category from “association,” and to make a comparison with a Christ group one must choose whether the latter is “more like” a synagogue or an association. For Meeks it is the former: “Because Christianity was an offshoot of Judaism, the urban Christian groups obviously had the diaspora synagogue as the nearest and most natural model.” 7 Thus, the synagogue is not “other than” the associations;

Christianity to philosophical schools and collegia (cf. Richard S. Ascough, What Are They Saying About the Formation of Pauline Churches? [New York and Mahwah: Paulist Press, 1998], 38–40, 83–86). Michael White referenced the “four models” in his doctoral dissertation, supervised by Meeks, and later made published mention of it in “Adolf Harnack and the ‘Expansion’ of Early Christianity: A Reappraisal of Social History,” in The Second Century (1985/86), 120 (my thanks to Michael White for pointing me to these references). I start with Meeks, however, since throughout the debate that followed the publication of his book, even until today, he is the most oft-cited source, particularly by those who want to drive a wedge between synagogues and associations (using the same limited dataset of four inscriptions that Meeks cites, alongside the same arguments).

4 Although I still see the household as key to the organizational structure of many types of groups, I would not be quite so insistent that it is foundational for all groups.

5 Ascough, What Are They Saying About the Formation of Pauline Churches?, 95.

6 See Richard S. Ascough, “What Are They Now Saying About Christ Groups and Associations?” Currents in Biblical Research 13/2 (2015): 207–44. The “voluntary” nomenclature has generally been dropped; cf. Richard S. Ascough, “‘Map-maker, Mapmaker, Make me a Map’: Re-describing Greco-Roman ‘Elective Social Formations,’” in Introducing Religion: Festschrift for Jonathan Z. Smith, ed. Willi Braun and Russell T. McCutcheon (London: Equinox, 2008), 69 n. 2.

7 Meeks, The First Urban Christians, 80. Meeks rejected the association model on the basis of a few key differences, all of which have been directly addressed by Richard S. Ascough, “Translocal Relationships Among Voluntary Associations and Early Christianity,” JECS 5 (1997): 223–41; idem, “Voluntary Associations and the Formation of Pauline Churches: Addressing the Objections,” in Vereine, Synagogen und Gemeinden im kaiserzeitlichen

Ascough, Paul, Synagogues, and Associations 29

it is “better than.” He goes on to say, “The synagogue incorporated features of both the two types of groups we have already looked at, the association and the household.” 8 Despite adopting the collegial structure and being legally construed as collegia, these Judean groups “possessed what is most visibly lacking” when the household and association models are compared with Pauline Christianity, namely, “the sense of belonging to a larger entity: Israel, the People of God, concretely represented by the land of Israel and the Temple in Jerusalem.” 9 Thus, for Meeks it is this theological construct—a sense of continuity with the traditions of Israel—that governs the choice of “synagogue” as model for Christ groups. It is by no means clear, however, that Paul’s groups had such a construct, even when Paul himself might have done so. 10 My own conclusions tended towards a different direction, with a greater inclination to viewing the early Christ groups as more like associations than synagogues. In framing the discussion this way, however, both Meeks and I pit synagogues against associations, like two divorced parents vying for the attention of their only child. Such a division is not, however, correct. I attempted to address this somewhat in an essay published in 2008, in which I challenged the tripartite taxonomic configuration of “Jews, Christians, and others/pagans” while proposing a complex, and thus more thickly descriptive, approach under the broad rubric of Greco-Roman “elective social formations” that compared all such groups “with respect to” a particular variable (e.g., meal practices; Kleinasien, ed. Andreas Gutsfeld and Dietrich-Alex Koch (STAC 25; Tübingen: Mohr Siebeck, 2006), 149–83; idem, Paul’s Macedonian Associations: The Social Context of Philippians and 1 Thessalonians (WUNT II 161; Tübingen: Mohr Siebeck, 2003), 47–109; John S. Kloppenborg, “Edwin Hatch, Churches and Collegia,” in Origins and Method: Towards a New Understanding of Judaism and Christianity. Essays in Honour of John C. Hurd, ed. Bradley H. McLean (JSNTSup 86; Sheffield: JSOT Press, 1993). Meeks has since then expressed much more openness to using the associations as a model (“Taking Stock and Moving On,” in After the First Urban Christians: The Social-Scientific Study of Pauline Christianity Twenty-Five Years Later, ed. Todd D. Still and David G. Horrell [London and New York: T&T Clark, 2009], 141).

8 Meeks, The First Urban Christians, 80.

9 Ibid.

10 Cf. Ascough, “What Are They Now Saying,” 207–44. John S. Kloppenborg rightly points out, and calls into question, the scholarly assumption regarding Pauline church order that rests on the premise that Paul laid down the structure and polity of the earliest communities and that one can simply “read-off” their social history from Paul’s letters (“Egalitarianism in the Myth and Rhetoric of Pauline Churches,” in Reimagining Christian Origins: A Colloquium Honoring Burton L. Mack, ed. Elizabeth A. Castelli and Hal Taussig [Valley Forge: Trinity Press International, 1996], 248).

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leadership; nomenclature). 11 Nevertheless, the debate about the best analogous model for early Christ groups persists in employing a sharp dichotomy between “synagogues” and “associations,” viewing them as competitors, albeit sometimes subtly, as the organizing model of early Christ groups. Indeed, at times, even after noting similarities among “synagogues” and “associations,” many scholars insist that ultimately the differences disqualify Christ groups from categorization as associations.

Judean Synagogues as Associations 12 The idea that Judean synagogues can be classified as associations is by no means new. Both Josephus and Philo point to Judean groups using the terminology of associations. For example, in a document attributed to Julius Caesar from ca.

47–46 B.C.E., the emperor is quoted as equating the Judean community on Delos with other associations (thiasoi). Caesar notes that unlike other associations that were banned from meeting, Judean groups were allowed to continue to gather: 13 For even Gaius Caesar, our praetor and consul, passed a decree preventing societies (thiasoi) from gathering together in the city [of Rome], yet he did not prevent these [Judeans] alone from collecting funds or having common meals.

Likewise, when I prevent other societies (thiasoi), I permit these [Judeans] alone to gather together according to their 11

Ascough, “Map-maker,” 68–84.

Abbreviations for Epigraphic and Papyrological Collections follow those used on the AGRW website, http://philipharland.com/greco-roman-associations/welcome/how-to-usethe-inscriptions-database/#abbrev, which is based on G. H. R. Horsley and J. A. L. Lee, A Preliminary Checklist of Abbreviations of Greek Epigraphic Volumes, in Epigraphica 56 (1994): 129–69; and J. F. Oates, R. S. Bagnall, and W. H. Willis, Checklist of Editions of Greek Papyri and Ostraca, 5th ed. (BASP Supplements 9; Oakville, CT: American Society of Papyrologists, 2001).

13 In this article I follow those who translate Ἰουδαῖοι as “Judean” rather than “Jew”: “Adopting this geographic, ethnic, and cultural understanding of the term helps to avoid misunderstandings among modern lay readers and some modern scholars who may tend to separate ‘religion’ from its ethnic or cultural matrix” (Philip A. Harland, Dynamics of Identity in the World of the Early Christians: Associations, Judeans, and Cultural Minorities [New York and London: T&T Clark, 2009], 15). Harland’s entire book “is an argument for approaching Judeans in the diaspora primarily as one among many immigrant and ethnic groups” (15), and convincingly so; see esp. 14–16.

12

Ascough, Paul, Synagogues, and Associations 31

ancestral customs and laws, and to feast. (Josephus, Ant. 14.213–16 = AGRW L33; cf. Ant. 14.235; 259–60) In his composition of instructions and background for a Judean embassy traveling to see the emperor Gaius in 39 or 40 C.E., Philo recalls earlier actions of Augustus, who allowed Judean associations (synodoi) to gather even when other types of associations were forbidden from doing so: [Augustus] sent a letter to all the governors of the provinces in Asia, because he heard that the sacred first fruits were being treated with disrespect. He ordered them to permit only the Judeans to come together in gatherings (synagōgia). For these synods (synodoi) were not based on drunkenness and drunken behavior to cause disturbance. Instead, they were schools of temperance and justice, where people practiced virtue and contributed the annual first fruits every year, sending sacred ambassadors to take them to the temple in Jerusalem. (Philo, Legat. 311–13 = AGRW L37; cf. Legat. 316) In both Josephus and Philo, what sets apart the Judean gatherings is not their inherent difference in categorization from “associations,” but that they are of a particular sort of association by virtue of their socially upstanding collective behavior and having a long history of meeting together. 14 There are some scholars who nevertheless resist the categorization of synagogues as associations, such as Shimon Applebaum, 15 Mary Smallwood, 16 14

Philo seems rather taken with the alcoholic infused excesses of non-Judean associations; see Ebr. 20–21 and 23 = AGRW L8; Contempl. 40, 64, and 83–89 = AGRW L9; Flacc. 4–5 = AGRW L36; Flacc. 135–37 = AGRW L10. See further Torrey Seland, “Philo and the Clubs and Associations of Alexandria,” in Voluntary Associations in the Graeco-Roman World, ed. John S. Kloppenborg and Stephen G. Wilson (London and New York: Routledge, 1996), esp. 110–17; Anne Fitzpatrick-McKinley, “Synagogue Communities in the Graeco-Roman Cities,” in Jews in the Hellenistic and Roman Cities, ed. John R. Bartlett (London and New York: Routledge, 2002), 79–80.

15 Shimon Applebaum cites Caesar’s exemption of Judean communities from the law prohibiting associations, concluding that Judean politeumata were not collegia (“The Organization of the Jewish Communities in the Diaspora,” in The Jewish People in the First Century: Historical Geography, Political History, Social, Cultural and Religious Life and Institutions, ed. S. Safrai and M. Stern [CRINT 1; Assen and Philadelphia: VanGorcum and Fortress, 1974], 502). Their membership was

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and Margaret Williams, 17 among others. In such cases the rejection of the connection between synagogues and associations draws heavily on the 1914 work of Jean Juster, who viewed the synagogues as sui generis and in no way related to associations. 18 Although there are some similarities, “the resemblances are superficial and the differences fundamental.” 19 In 1951,

determined by ethnic status rather than election, and their regulations were predetermined by Torah rather than created upon the formation of the community.

That said, Applebaum does accept that in some cities there existed Judean occupational associations that would have been subject to the Lex Iulia (“Organization,” 476, 481–83; cf. Alan F. Segal, “The Jewish Experience: Temple, Synagogue, Home, and Fraternal Groups,” in Community Formation in the Early Church and in the Church Today, ed. Richard N. Longenecker [Peabody: Hendrickson, 2002], 27–28). Thus, for Applebaum it is only insofar as synagogues held the status of politeuma that they were different from associations; other Judean groups could be thus classified.

16 E. Mary Smallwood views synagogues as having a much broader function than the associations, particularly in the political role local Judean associations took on in their cities in order to negotiate with Roman authorities (The Jews Under Roman Rule: From Pompey to Diocletian [SJLA 20; Leiden: Brill, 1976)], 133–38).

17 Margaret Williams is perhaps one of the clearest opponents of categorizing Judean synagogues as associations, at least in Rome. Her examination of the evidence leads her to conclude that the similarities are superficial and are much outweighed by the differences (“The Structure of the Jewish Community in Rome,” in Jews in a GraecoRoman World, ed. Martin Goodman (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1998), 216; following Jean Juster, Les Juifs dans l’empire romain: Leur condition juridique, économique et sociale [2 vols.; Paris: Paul Geuthner, 1914], 418–24). For example, the texts usually cited in support of the connection from Josephus (Ant. 14.213–16) cannot be authenticated, and the two references in Seutonius (Jul. 42.3 = AGRW L32 and Aug. 32.1 = AGRW L34), in which Judeans are banned from Rome, neither ban all Judeans nor indicate that those who are banned have fallen afoul of laws pertaining to collegia.

Williams then gives four kinds of evidence that Judeans in Rome had a central council to which all the various proseuchē in the city were accountable, but they were collectively conservative and isolationist, more focused on their own “Jewishness” than any appearance of “Romaness” in form.

18 Juster, Les Juifs, 414, 424; see further esp. 413–24.

19 Erich Gruen, Diaspora: Jews Amidst Greeks and Romans (Cambridge, MA and London: Harvard University Press, 2002), 121; cf. Applebaum “Organization,” 464–65; Smallwood, Jews Under Roman Rule, 133; Williams, “Structure of the Jewish Community,” 216. This approach is generally also followed by Lee I. Levine (The Ancient Synagogue: The First Thousand Years [New Haven: Yale University Press, 2000], 130–31), who concludes, “For all the engaging comparisons that have been made between the synagogue and

Ascough, Paul, Synagogues, and Associations 33

however, Simeon Guterman responded point by point to Juster’s argument, demonstrating that the differences are not so great and that synagogues can and should be classified as associations.

To begin with, “the fact that the Jewish community was always referred to collectively as universitas or corpus, or by some similar designation suggest to him [Juster] that the Jewish community or synagogue was not commonly regarded as a collegium.” 20 Yet, as Guterman points out, a diversity of names was used to designate associations, so the lack of evidence among Judean groups “for the use of such familiar terms as collegium or θιασοι is by no means to be construed as a vital defect.” 21 Other claims made

by Juster are addressed in turn. 22 Juster’s assertion that Judean communities are nationally based falters in the West, where they were not considered to comprise part of the Judean nation under Roman law. We might add that other associations are construed similarly in their Diaspora locations based primarily on a specific geographic or ethnic identity. 23 Smallwood makes a similar argument: “membership was automatic for a Jew by right of birth, without question of admission or enrollment; on the other hand, membership was exclusive to Jews and proselytes, while other collegia were corporations with voluntary, open membership.” 24 Yet, it comparable Greco-Roman associations (thiasos, koinon, collegia, etc.), many of them cogent to some degree, no analogy can do justice to the unique role of this institution” (Ancient Synagogue, 173; see also idem, “The First-Century Synagogue: New Perspectives,” Svensk Teologisk Kvartalskrift 77 [2001]: 27–28). Yet, as Peter Richardson points out, after having pointed to multiple similarities himself and earlier rejecting sui generis arguments, “in the end [Levine] seems to make a sui generis argument of synagogues,” thus failing to draw the “obvious conclusion” that early Diaspora synagogues borrowed from the model of associations (Building Jewish in the Roman East [Waco: Baylor University Press, 2004], 219).

20 S. L. Guterman, Religious Toleration and Persecution in Ancient Rome (London: Aiglon Press, 1951), 131.

21 Guterman, Religious Toleration, 131–32 (θιασοι is unaccented in original quote); cf. Ascough, Paul’s Macedonian Associations, 71–78.

22 Guterman, Religious Toleration, 136–48.

23 See Emil Schürer, The History of the Jewish People in the Age of Jesus Christ (175 B.C.— A.D. 135). A New English Version, rev. and ed. Geza Vermes, Fergus Millar, and Martin Goodman (Edinburgh: T&T Clark, 1986), III/1: 107–11 for some detailed comparisons.

On associations that are formed on the basis of ethic identity and/or immigrant status see Philip A. Harland, Associations, Synagogues and Congregations: Claiming a Place in Ancient Mediterranean Society (Minneapolis: Fortress, 2003), 33–36. See further below.

24 Smallwood, Jews Under Roman Rule, 134.

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is simply not the case that all associations had an open admission policy. 25 There are associations whose membership was restricted by one or more factors, such as hereditary succession (e.g., AGRW 322; CIL III 6150; VIII 683) or social status (e.g., citizen associations [orgeōnes] such as GRA I 44; 45). Nor, we might add, was ethnicity an a priori condition for admission to the Judean synagogue, at least if one allows for the early presence of Godfearers and sympathizers in the synagogues. Thus, Juster’s (and following him, Smallwood’s) contrast of the exclusive conditions for membership among Judean groups with the openness of associations cannot be maintained.

Nor can one highlight groups of Judeans (particularly in Alexandria and Rome) and their synagogues as a “special case” of ethnic associations. They were not so different than other immigrant groups at the time that formed associations based on common ethnic identity. For example, on the island of Delos we find Egyptians (AGRW 221, 230), Tyrians (AGRW 223, II–I B.C.E.), Berytians (AGRW 224–28, II–I B.C.E.), Syrians (AGRW 229, II–I B.C.E.), Italians (AGRW 231–32, 237, II–I B.C.E.), Athenians (AGRW 238, II–I B.C.E.), and Bithynians (AGRW 239, undated). We also have evidence for Pisidians (AGRW 273, early II B.C.E.) and Lycians (AGRW 174, early II B.C.E.) in Sidon, Syria, and in a later period we find Tyrians in Puteoli (AGRW 317, 174 C.E.), Asianoi in Macedonia (IG X/2.1 309, 480, both II–III C.E.), Thrace (AGRW 64, 196–98 C.E.), and the Lower Danube area (AGRW 77 [Municipium Montanensium, II C.E.], 78 [Nikopolis ad Istrum, early III C.E.], 71 [Dionysopolis, 222–35 C.E.]), and Alexandrians in Scythia Minor (AGRW 82, 160 C.E.), Neapolis, Italy (AGRW 312, ca. 100 C.E.), and Rome (AGRW 319, 146 C.E.). Understandably, when arriving in a new location, immigrants sought out others who spoke their language, ate the same food, and shared a similar background, and in some cases they formed an association on the basis of such commonalities.

Even in their being granted an exemption from the laws pertaining to collegia, it is clear that Judean groups were assumed to be collegia by the Romans and thus in need of a special exemption. Yet, despite the supposed general ban on associations, there was tacit acceptance that associations would continue to meet, and, except in cases where they became overtly political, they were simply ignored by the imperial authorities. 26 Neither is it 25

Guterman, Religious Toleration, 142–43.

Wendy Cotter, “The Collegia and Roman Law: State Restrictions on Voluntary Associations, 64 BCE–200 CE,” in Voluntary Associations in the Graeco-Roman

26

Ascough, Paul, Synagogues, and Associations 35

fully clear that Judean groups were actually fully exempt from such laws.

Judean groups could be subject to the political heavy-handedness of the rulers when they were deemed to be too disruptive to civic society, just as was the case on occasion with other associations. Whatever might be the details around the potential involvement of Christ adherents, in the view of Suetonius, it is “the Jews” who are the subject of Claudius’s ejection from Rome in the mid-first century C.E., predicated on their political unrest (Claud. 25.4; cf. Cassius Dio 60.6.6–7). Political reasons also may have been the case with the expulsion of the Jews earlier under Tiberius, although here the rationale is less clear (Josephus, Ant. 18.3.5; Tacitus, Ann. 2.85; Suetonius, Tib. 36). 27 Likewise, it is not the case, as Smallwood argues, that associations were either politically neutral or were embroiled in election shenanigans (about which Cicero so vehemently complains; see AGRW L25, L26, L28), since there are cases where associations included civic officials and patrons (e.g., AGRW 7; 74; 108; 109), organized civic events such as festivals (e.g., AGRW 18; τόπος inscriptions from Magnesia ad Maeander 28), and were involved in the work of the polis in a positive manner (e.g., AGRW 162), even holding places of prominence at civic events. 29 Guterman lists a number of association features within synagogues, such as the possession of a treasury for which funds were collected, banquets and common meals, election of officers, and burial of members. 30 The so-called lack of “statutes” in Judean groups is belied by Juster’s own admission that they had the law of Moses, among other binding regulations, in particular Judean groups such as that at Apamea, which possessed a νόμος. 31 Most significantly, “Jewish communities possessed a juridical personality” and as such had, among World, ed. John S. Kloppenborg and Stephen G. Wilson (London and New York: Routledge, 1996), 74–89.

27 See Leonard Victor Rutgers, “Roman Policy Towards the Jews: Expulsions from the City of Rome During the First Century C.E.,” Classical Antiquity 13 (1994), 60–65.

28 See Richard S. Ascough, “Carving Out Public Space: τόπος Inscriptions and Early Christ Groups” in Epigraphik und Neues Testament, ed. Joseph Verheyden, Markus Öhler, and Thomas Corsten (WUNT; Tübingen: Mohr Siebeck, 2015), in press.

29 Among other things, this is suggested by the presence of τόπος markers on seats in which associations are given prominence in theaters; see Ascough, “Carving Out Public Space.” For further evidence and argumentation of associations’ positive participation in civic life see Harland, Associations, Synagogues and Congregations, 101–12.

30 Guterman, Religious Toleration, 132–33.

31 Guterman, Religious Toleration, 136–37.

36 JJMJS No. 2 (2015)

other things, “the right to purchase and maintain land, to sell, and to contract obligations, to receive donations and give donations, and the right to send legations to the emperor.” 32 Guterman concludes that based both on the evidence from Josephus and the overall similarity in organization, Judean communities can be regarded as collegia. 33 Recent scholarly work on Judean groups and associations has affirmed that the former can to be categorized among the latter, especially in the legal setting, 34 but also in their organizational patterns. For example, within his discussion of the similarities among the organizational structures of the Essene community and that of Hellenistic associations, Martin Hengel notes that “the Jewish synagogue communities of the Diaspora had the same legal form” as the associations, and the Jews imitated the associations’ pattern of fostering “patriotic connections and religious interests” among their own ethnos (“nation”) scattered throughout Egypt. 35

32

Guterman, Religious Toleration, 133. He notes that after the reign of Marcus Aurelius synagogues, like associations, also had the right to receive legacies, although this seems only to have been the case for Italy, since Caracalla forbade such a legacy in Antioch (Religious Toleration, 133–35). We avoid here the details, however, since this post-dates the time of our immediate interest.

33 Guterman, Religious Toleration, 150.

34 See Smallwood, Jews Under Roman Rule, 133–43; Schürer, History, III/1: 115–16; H. J. Leon, The Jews of Ancient Rome (updated edition; Peabody: Hendrickson, 1995), 9–11; Cotter, “The Collegia and Roman Law,” 76–78; Carsten Claußen, Versammlung, Gemeinde, Synagoge: Das hellenistisch-jüdische Umfeld der frühchristlichen Gemeinden (StUNT 27; Göttingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, 2002), 224–26, 231; Martin Ebner, Die Stadt als Lebensraum der ersten Christen. Das Urchristentum in seiner Umwelt I. Grundrisse zum Neuen Testament I,I (Göttingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, 2012), 227– 28; and especially Mikael Tellbe, Paul between Synagogue and State, Christians, Jews, and Civic Authorities in 1 Thessalonians, Romans, and Philippians (CBNT 34; Stockholm: Almqvist & Wiksell, 2001), 24–63.

35 Martin Hengel, Judaism and Hellenism: Studies in their Encounter in Palestine During the Early Hellenistic Period, (Philadelphia: Fortress, 1974), 243–45, 311. Albert Baumgarten expands upon the comparisons of commensality of Philo and Josephus to compare Judean sects such as the Essenes, Pharisees, and Sadducees to associations and philosophical schools (“Graeco-Roman Voluntary Associations and Ancient Jewish Sects,” in Jews in a Graeco-Roman World, ed. Martin Goodman [Oxford: Clarendon, 1998], 93–111). The comparison explains why ancient Judean sectarianism flourished at the time it did, since Judean sects and associations were both in similar circumstances, attracting literate urbanites at a time of extreme social disruption. On the similarities between the community associated with the Qumran documents and the Greco-Roman

Ascough, Paul, Synagogues, and Associations 37

Two scholars in particular, however, have laid the groundwork for reframing the discourse by showing that synagogues themselves have characteristics of associations and as such are part of a larger comparative category of “Greco-Roman associations” more generally: Peter Richardson and Anders Runesson. 36 Their systematic treatments may finally put to rest such arguments to the contrary.

associations see Moshe Weinfeld, The Organizational Pattern and the Penal Code of the Qumran Sect: A Comparison With Guilds and Religious Associations of the Hellenistic Period (NovT et orbis antiquus 2; Göttingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, 1986); Matthias Klinghardt, “The Manual of Discipline in the Light of Statutes of Hellenistic Associations,” in Methods of Investigation of the Dead Sea Scrolls and the Khirbet Qumran Site: Present Realities and Future Prospects, ed. John J. Collins, Michael O. Wise, Norman Golb, and Dennis Pardee (Annals of the New York Academy of Sciences 722; New York: New York Academy of Sciences, 1994), 251–70; Richardson, Building Jewish, 165–85; Randolf Herrmann, “Die Gemeindergel von Qumran und das antike Vereinswesen,” in Jewish Identity in the Greco-Roman World, ed. Jörg Frey, Daniel R. Schwartz, and Stephanie Gripentrog (AJEC 71; Leiden: Brill, 2007), 161–203; Harland, Dynamics of Identity, esp. 182–85; Yonder Moynihan Gillihan, Civic Ideology, Organization, and Law in the Rule Scrolls: A Comparative Study of the Covenanters’ Sect and Contemporary Voluntary Associations in Political Context (STDJ 97; Leiden: Brill, 2012).

36 Others who conclude that synagogues were organized as associations include L. Michael White, The Social Origins of Christian Architecture, vol. 1. Building God’s House in the Roman World: Architectural Adaptation Among Pagans, Jews, and Christians (Harvard Theological Press 42; Valley Forge, PA: Trinity Press International, 1990), 82– 83; John M. G. Barclay, “Money and Meetings: Group Formation among Diaspora Jews and Early Christians,” in Vereine, Synagogen und Gemeinden im kaiserzeitlichen Kleinasien, ed. Andreas Gutsfeld and Dietrich-Alex Koch (STAC 25; Tübingen: Mohr Siebeck, 2006), esp. 114–15, 126; Paul R. Trebilco, “Jews, Christians and the Associations in Ephesos: A Comparative Study of Group Structures,” in 100 Jahre Österreichische forschungen in Ephesos. Akten des symposions Wien 1995, ed. Barbara Brandt and Karl R. Krierer (Österreichischen Akademie der Wissenschaften Philosophisch-Historische Klasse Denkschriften 260; Vienna: Österreichischen Akademie der Wissenschaften, 1999), 333; Tessa Rajak, “The Synagogue within the Graeco-Roman City,” in Jews, Christians and Polytheists in the Ancient Synagogue: Cultural Interaction during the Graeco-Roman Period, ed. Steven Fine (London: Routledge, 1999), 161–73; Harland, Dynamics of Identity, 36–42. Hugo Mantel enumerates twelve similarities that lead him to conclude that Judean sects in Palestine, including the Great Synagogue in Jerusalem, “were modeled in their organization on the Hellenistic religious and social associations” (“The Nature of the Great Synagogue,” HTR 60 [1967]: 75); although the similarities are neither “uniform” nor singularly decisive, “taken together” the similarities suggest the influence of the associations (“Nature,” 91).

38 JJMJS No. 2 (2015)

Richardson argues that “synagogues functioned—and were perceived— as collegia in the Diaspora.” 37 Noting the general legislative ban on associations enacted under Julius Caesar and Augustus, Richardson points out that it was only occasionally that collegia were restricted and during such times synagogues were exempted. 38 Although he does not highlight the point, it is important to reiterate, as noted above, the necessity to explicitly exempt Judean groups; presumably they would otherwise have fallen under the laws applying to collegia.

That is, in the view of the Roman imperial legislature, synagogues fell into the category of “collegia” and thus needed special exemption from the laws applying to such.

Turning to epigraphic, literary, and archaeological data for synagogue buildings in the period prior to the destruction of the temple, Richardson demonstrates a consistency among synagogues’ primary focus on multiple communal functions such as meals, education, and civil law.

Synagogues looked and behaved like voluntary associations.

As they developed first in Diaspora, they shared in this architectural complexity (with communal emphasis, benches, meals, worship, courtyards, ancillary spaces, etc.). Within the life of the polis, they adopted patterns of behavior similar to associations, such as reserving seats in the theater (Miletus) or finding a donor to give them a house (Priene, Dura, etc.). 39 While Richardson recognizes that Judean communities might be differentiated from other associations, he rightly notes that the differences “do not subvert the claim that synagogues were associations, for the variety among associations was wide enough that—architecturally, organizationally, and behaviorally— synagogues fell naturally within those limits.” 40

37

Richardson, Building Jewish, 111.

Ibid., 115.

39 Ibid., 204; see further 207–21.

40 Ibid., 218.

38

Ascough, Paul, Synagogues, and Associations 39

Runesson extends this argument both in range and detail. 41 He argues that synagogues developed in different ways, depending upon their location. In Palestine there were two basic types of institution: “public city/town/village assemblies and (semi-public) voluntary associations.” 42 The public assemblies are rooted in the Persian period and included Torah liturgies while also serving as the administrative center of the surrounding population. In contrast, the regulations of the voluntary association type were predominantly inwardly focused, with little concern beyond group boundaries. Similar to their public counterparts, these non-official institutions—both “denominations” (such as the Pharisees, the Essenes, and the Sadducees) and “sects” (such as the Samaritans, the Therapeutae, and the Qumran community)—were engaged in the reading and interpretation of Torah. Yet they came to the fore at a later time, during the Ptolemic period, when conditions were such that there was “a loosened attitude of the Jerusalem authorities to the control of the interpretation of the law” along with the process of canonizing scripture and “increasing Hellenistic influence, including the Greek organizational forms of the thiasoi, or voluntary associations,” which could be adopted and adapted. 43 In the Diaspora, synagogues were regarded as associations and generally treated as such under Roman law, but were granted special privileges based on their “antiquity” that exempted them from the legal ban on collegia.

Thus, “the main difference between the Jewish ‘synagogues’ and other collegia was the extended privileges granted the Jews; we are thus dealing with a difference in degree rather than in nature between the ‘synagogue’ and other associations.” 44 Liturgical developments, including Torah reading, took place variously in place and time in the Diaspora synagogues as Jews from Palestine immigrated westward, although “by the first century torah reading liturgies were firmly established everywhere.” 45 Nevertheless, the social pattern and the

41

Anders Runesson, Origins of the Synagogue: A Socio-Historical Study (CBNT 37; Stockholm: Almquest & Wiksell, 2001). See also his survey of scholarship on the origins of the synagogue in which he demonstrates the breakdown of the consensus view of the exilic origins of the synagogue in favor of seeing the associations as the model, first in Palestine and subsequently in the Diaspora: Anders Runesson, “The Origins of the Synagogue in Past and Present Research—Some Comments on Definitions, Theories, and Sources,” Studia Theologica—Nordic Journal of Theology 58 (2003): 60–76.

42 Runesson, Origins, 395.

43 Ibid., 398–99.

44 Ibid., 468–69.

45 Ibid., 470; 480.

40 JJMJS No. 2 (2015)

temple-like architectural design of Diaspora synagogues resemble the broad organizational form of the collegia. 46 Synagogues as the Intermediary Model for Christ Groups Notwithstanding the misgivings of some scholars as to whether Judean synagogues were associations, as we have seen, other scholars do accept this categorization. This lays the groundwork for scholars to view Christ groups and synagogues under the same broad umbrella—namely, as associations—since there are a number of group characteristics that are manifest in some associations, synagogues, and Christ groups, such as focus on cult liturgies, common banquets and/or meals, provision of burial for members, rules for admission and exclusion, monetary contributions, written regulations, reliance on patronage, a designated leadership structure, ethical expectations, and translocal connections. 47 Despite these mutual similarities, or perhaps because of them, there continues to be resistance to claims that Christ groups were modeled on associations. Indeed, when it comes to understanding Christ groups, the 46 Ibid., 471. It is important to note that Judean synagogues manifest diverse features, often depending upon locale (as demonstrated by Runesson, Origins, and Tessa Rajak, “Synagogue and Community in the Graeco-Roman Diaspora,” in Jews in the Hellenistic and Roman Cities, ed. John R. Bartlett [London and New York: Routledge, 2002], 22–38).

The category “synagogue” itself should not be rarified into a singular model.

47 For evidence from Christ groups see Ascough, “What Are They Now Saying,” in which I summarize the substantive work done in this area since 1998. For the synagogues, along with the material summarized above, see the overview of Fitzpatrick-McKinley, “Synagogue Communities,” 63–70. On the whole, Fitzpatrick-McKinley recognizes a number of similarities among synagogues and associations, but in the end concludes that “there were a number of differences between the Graeco-Roman clubs and the synagogues of the Jews” (69). Curiously, she cites only three substantive differences, much fewer than the number of similarities she names. The first difference is the exclusiveness of the synagogues, which, we noted above, is somewhat overstated, as Fitzpatrick-McKinley at least recognizes by drawing attention to the possible presence of God-fearers and converts. Second, drawing on Meeks, she notes that to outsiders the synagogue restrictions on conviviality “may have seemed a little too intense” (69). But this is a matter of degree, not of kind; Josephus and Philo cluster Judean groups with associations even when making this distinction. Third, she notes the Diaspora sense of belonging was not just to their polis of residence but also to Israel, the “land and its temple city” (70). Yet, as I have pointed out elsewhere, such feeling cannot have been overly intense, for we have scant evidence of the Diaspora Judean communities rallying to the aid of Jerusalem during the siege of 68–70 C.E. (Ascough, “Translocal Relationships,” 236). It seems there were limits to their commitment!

Ascough, Paul, Synagogues, and Associations 41

associations often take a back seat to the synagogues, with the latter playing an intermediary role. For example, in his popular, and thus influential, introductory textbook, Bart Ehrman writes, We are particularly well informed about ancient trade organizations and funeral societies. The church in Thessalonica may have been roughly organized like one of these groups. 48 At this point, he makes reference to a side box on the opposite page that includes the by-laws of the Association of Diana and Antinoüs from Lanuvium (CIL XIV 2112 = AGRW 310; 136 C.E.). Within the boxed text itself, Ehrman reiterates the importance of the associations, albeit again referencing a “burial society,” which belies his claim to be among those “well-informed” about ancient associations, since this category is all but defunct. 49 Yet having made the initial connection of a Christ group with the associations, Ehrman continues, On the other hand, given its central commitment to a religious purpose, it may have had some close organizational affinities with the Jewish synagogue as well, although the Jewish community was probably much larger than the Christian group. It appears that some of the local converts became leaders in the Christian congregation and that they organized their meetings, distributed the funds

48

Bart Ehrman, A Brief Introduction to the New Testament (2nd ed.; New York and Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2009), 208, emphasis in original.

49 See especially Frank M. Ausbüttel, Untersuchungen zu den Vereinen im Westen des römischen Reiches (FAS 11; Kallmünz: Michael Laßleben, 1982), 20, 29; John S. Kloppenborg, “Collegia and Thiasoi: Issues in Function, Taxonomy and Membership,” in Voluntary Associations in the Graeco-Roman World, ed. John S. Kloppenborg and Stephen G. Wilson (London and New York: Routledge, 1996), 20–23; Éric Rebillard, The Care of the Dead in Late Antiquity (Cornell Studies in Classical Philology; Ithaca and London: Cornell University Press, 2009), 38–39. In noting the problems with the special category of “collegia funeraticia,” Jonathan Scott Perry rightly comments, “The better approach to the topic is to catalog all instances of a college—of whatever type—acting in a funerary capacity” (The Roman Collegia: The Modern Evolution of an Ancient Concept [Mnemosyne, Supplementa, History and Archaeology of Classical Antiquity 277; Leiden and Boston: Brill, 2006], 32).

42 JJMJS No. 2 (2015)

they collected, and guided the thinking of the group about religious matters (5:12–13). 50 Ehrman thus quickly shifts from the associations to the synagogue as the model for Christian community at Thessalonike. The source for the “local converts” who became leaders is a bit ambiguous in his text, but following as it does on the claim about the large Judean community in Thessalonike, Ehrman conveys the idea that leadership in the local Christ group was drawn from the synagogue, even while the rank and file were predominantly “pagan,” and thus the Christ group itself would naturally follow the synagogue model. 51 He does not reference again the associations.

Although the primary focus of his study is the organizational leadership of the early Christians, the title of J. T. Burtchaell’s book conveys clearly his fundamental understanding of the lines of influence: From Synagogue to Church. Practices found in the Christian churches of both the earliest period and later developments can be linked, through continuity with Judean antecedents, to the Judean synagogue “from which Christians emerged.” 52 The synagogues, however, had little to do with associations beyond surface resemblances in the naming offices and the electing and honoring of incumbents to these positions. In the synagogues, officers held positions for much longer time periods and focused their attention “on the entire welfare of the people” rather than short term aims of the group. 53 A translocal view created a sense of continuity with Jews elsewhere, 54 while a backward, historic view connected them with the traditions and leaders of Israel, especially Moses. Above all, Jews found the ultimate authority in their God, rather than their elected officials. Thus, despite similarities in titles, the synagogues had little else in common with associations. And, although he does not state it explicitly, this removes any possible influence of the associations on the development of the early Christ groups. For Burtchaell, 50

Ehrman, Brief Introduction, 208.

The same rhetorical move is present almost verbatim in Ehrman’s more comprehensive introductory textbook; see Bart Ehrman, The New Testament: A Historical Introduction to the Early Christian Writings (4th ed.; New York and Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2008), 316–17.

52 J. T. Burtchaell, From Synagogue to Church: Public Services and Offices in the Earliest Christian Communities (Cambridge and New York: Cambridge University Press, 1992), 272.

53 Ibid., 265–66.

54 The argument that associations had no translocal connections in the manner of Judean and Christian groups is addressed in detail in Ascough, “Translocal Relationships,” 223–41.

51

Ascough, Paul, Synagogues, and Associations 43

“the synagogue became the church, not by dint of a new social format, but in view of new convictions within its members.” 55 It seems that for Burtchaell, Christian groups thus inherit all that is embedded in the history and organization of the Jews with little or no (corrupting?) influence from outsiders, and carry these traditions forward in ways the Jews themselves do not.

In Claußen’s comprehensive review of the structure and organization of the ancient synagogues, he considers briefly the influence of associations, although he relies on the work of Meeks and thus ends up discounting their influence on early Christ groups, and arguing that synagogues influenced the structure of early Christian house churches, both in Palestine and in the Diaspora: “Vor allem Privathaushalt, Verein, Synagoge und philosophische Schule bildeten die vielfach herangezogenen Vorbilder der frühchristlichen Gemeindestruktur, wobei zumindest bei Meeks eine gewisse Neigung auszumachen ist, der Diasporasynagoge die führende vorbildrolle zuzubilligen.” 56 Yet, as Runesson points out, Claußen’s assumption that the majority of synagogue gatherings were household based is questionable, since there were a variety of institutional forms associated with terms such as synagogē and proseuchē at that time. 57 In some cases, scholars maintain a distinction within the affirmation of synagogues as associations, bracketing out synagogues as, at best, a special kind of association, and ultimately driving a wedge between the two by emphasizing that Christ groups were synagogues rather than associations. For example, Mark Nanos cites Smallwood and others in affirming that the synagogues had the legal standing of “association” in the ancient world, albeit, with special privileges based on their “ancestral customs.” 58 Two pages later, he quotes La Piana cautiously but affirmingly to the effect that synagogues were in many respects similar to associations, but in other ways were superior: “In a word, the Jewish associations, taken all together, actually possessed all the essential elements of organization and government pertaining to a city, and not merely

55

Burtchaell, From Synagogue to Church, 352.

Claußen, Versammlung, 47, drawing on Meeks, The First Urban Christians.

57 Anders Runesson, Review of Carsten Claußen, Versammlung, Gemeinde, Synagoge (2002), Journal for the Study of Judaism in the Persian, Hellenistic and Roman Period 34 (2003): 314.

58 Mark D. Nanos, The Mystery of Romans: The Jewish Context of Paul’s Letter (Minneapolis: Fortress, 1996), 43–44.

56

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showed the semblance of such institutions, as was the case with the collegia.” 59 Yet La Piana’s work in this particular area needs to be used with caution, since La Piana seems unable to make up his mind whether synagogues can be classified alongside associations. For example, he notes that the Diaspora synagogues adopted the “Greek nomenclature of the associations,” 60 yet claims that they were not collegia, 61 only to contradict this later with the statement that a number of synagogues “were really Jewish collegia domestica,” 62 that is, a particular type of association.

For Nanos, it is the affiliation of the Christian communities with synagogues—as synagogues—rather than associations that protects them from imperial interferences in the mid-part of the first century. Citing Suetonius’s reference to Julius Caesar dissolving all guilds except those with ancient foundations (Jul. 42.3 = AGRW L32), Nanos argues that it is only through their being “subordinate” to the “governing authorities” of the synagogue that the Christ adherents at Rome to whom Paul writes would have been protected: “Paul and the Christian Jews and gentiles of Rome both understood their community(s) as part of the Jewish community(s) when Paul wrote Romans, with Christian gentiles identified as ‘righteous gentiles’ who were now worshipping in the midst of Israel in fulfillment of the eschatological ingathering of the nations (15:5–12).” 63 Had the Christ adherents been designated as a “private club” they would have had insufficient grounds to practice their religion freely within the city. 64 Nanos presumes that Christ groups would need to apply to the Roman authorities for “the right to congregate for fellowship and worship,

59

Georg La Piana, “Foreign Groups in Rome during the First Century of the Empire,” HTR 20 (1927): 349–50; Nanos, Mystery of Romans, 47.

60 La Piana, “Foreign Groups,” 360.

61 Ibid., 349 and n. 17.

62 Ibid., 355 n. 23.

63 Nanos, Mystery of Romans, 75.

64 Ibid., 74–75. He is reacting to suggestions that Christ groups sought protection from the authorities by designating themselves as “funerary associations,” a category of which he is rightly skeptical, as it has been called into question as a taxon, as noted above (see footnote 49). Most recent work on Christ groups as associations no longer relies on this defunct argument. In his 2002 book, Nanos makes a similar argument for the Galatian Christ groups affiliating with local Judean communities in order to gain safeguards from the Roman legal protections offered to Judean groups (The Irony of Galatians: Paul’s Letter in First-Century Context [Minneapolis: Fortress, 2002], 257–67, esp. 264).

Ascough, Paul, Synagogues, and Associations 45

even in their own homes or tenement rooms,” and we have no evidence for such taking place. 65 This, he argues, is because their designation as synagogues provided sufficient protection. This claim, however, does not account for the evidence that, despite the general ban on associations, there was tacit acceptance that associations would continue to meet, and, except in cases where they became overtly political, they were simply ignored by the imperial authorities. 66 That is, many non-Christ groups in first century Rome show no evidence of applying for imperial approval and yet continued to meet in private, despite not having protected themselves by subordinating themselves to the synagogue authorities. Furthermore, although Judean groups did seem to have some privileges, Judeans in particular cities were not immune from periods of opposition from local authorities. 67 Thus, even an alliance with a synagogue would provide Christ groups with no guarantee of freedom from interference.

Other scholars have made the same assumption, even while not so explicitly attempting to distance Christ groups from direct affiliation with associations through the buffer of the synagogues. Thus, for Guterman, it is Christianity’s identification with Judaism, whose associations had the status “religio licita,” that protects it from persecution by Roman authorities; once separation occurred, Christians were prosecuted under Roman law. 68 Even Runesson follows an explicit claim—“In the Diaspora the Jewish communities were most likely organized and understood by the surrounding community as collegia”—by noting, “In the same way, the early Christ-believers were organized as voluntary associations, first within, and later outside the umbrella of Jewish voluntary associations.” 69 But it is the summary of Gehring that perhaps best encapsulates what is at stake when scholars make such claims, whether consciously or sub-consciously: 65

Nanos, Mystery of Romans, 74.

Cotter, “The Collegia and Roman Law,” 74–89.

67 Tellbe, Paul between Synagogue and State, 63.

68 Guterman, Religious Toleration, 157–18. Guterman (like others) is, however, incorrect in asserting the category of “religio licita” as a legally defined category that protected Judeans (or any others) by granting them official status. There is no ancient support for the existence of such a category (see Harland, Associations, Synagogues, Congregations, 222), which originated with Tertullian (Apologeticum 21.1); see further Philip F. Esler, Community and Gospel in Luke-Acts: The Social and Political Motivations of Lucan Theology (SNTSMS 57; Cambridge University Press, 1987), 211–15; Tessa Rajak, “Was There a Roman Charter for the Jews?” JRS 74 (1984): 107–23.

69 Runesson, Review of Claußen, 314.

66

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It is also possible that Hellenistic associations had an indirect influence on the early Christian house churches by way of the Jewish synagogue. If the Diaspora synagogue was organized like an association, this would provide an explanation for the fact that elements of the association can be seen in the organization of the house church. One must distinguish between the theological self-understanding of the early Christian house churches, on the one hand, and the sociological and legal form of organization or outward appearance, on the other. It could be that the house churches were organized like a house synagogue (that is, like an association or household) and yet understood themselves theologically not as an association but as an ecclesia or the family/house of God, which in turn would suggest a theological connection between the house church and the house synagogue. 70 While many scholars, myself included, have been arguing that structurally the Christ groups have the organizational form that would categorize them as “associations,” as did the synagogues, for some scholars there clearly remains an important distinction insofar as they are concerned that the “theology” of the associations (if one can speak of such) should not be seen to be tainting the selfunderstanding of Christ groups. For some scholars, Christ groups are protected from such “pagan” influences through the synagogues.

John Kloppenborg has aptly illustrated the issue of theological or ideological concerns interfering with scholarly pursuit of the connections between associations and the early Christian groups in his analysis of the reaction of scholars to the work of Edwin Hatch (and others) at the end of the 19th century. 71 In the various negative responses that Hatch received to his suggestion that Paul’s communities resembled associations and were thus structurally influenced by them, it is clear that much of the polemic is driven by theological considerations rather than an engagement with the data, and expressed as a fundamental opposition to the suggestion that “paganism” had any influence on early Christianity. Moreover, Jonathan Z. Smith’s Drudgery Divine provides a detailed analysis as to how Judaism was used (mostly by 70

Roger W. Gehring, House Church and Mission: The Importance of Household Structures in Early Christianity (Peabody: Hendrickson, 2004), 21, my emphasis.

71 Kloppenborg, “Edwin Hatch,” 226–28.

Ascough, Paul, Synagogues, and Associations 47

Protestants) to isolate early Christ groups from their “pagan” surroundings (which, for the Protestants, represented Catholicism). 72 It seems to me that framing the question of antecedents for Pauline Christ groups in a manner that pits “synagogues” against “associations” falls prey to the same methodological mistake, even if for different reasons. The question itself must be rethought.

Reframing the Question of Associations as a Model There is a game that my children enjoyed playing, called Apples to Apples, that involves categorization and definition. In the game, the “dealer” turns up a card on which there is a word, and each player must submit, facedown, a card with another word on it that they think the dealer will choose as the best match to the up-turned card. Hence the name of the game; if the face card reads “apple” then a player’s best bet is to submit a card that best encapsulates “apple-ness”—e.g., “round” or “sweet,” or, even better, “Granny Smith.” It strikes me that we are playing a version of this game in the debate about models for early Christ groups, but we are playing it wrong—or at least, are misreading the cards. The “apple” card on the table is “Christ group,” and when one player throws down the “synagogue” card as a matching “apple,” others say, “That’s not an apple, it’s a banana.” In response, they throw down their own match for “apple,” which reads “association,” to which the other side retorts, “That’s not an apple, that’s a grapefruit.” We are left, then, with quite a fruit basket, but little way forward in the debate.

What a summary of scholarship shows, however, is that we are not, in fact, dealing with different fruit at all. Our taxonomy is incorrect, which skews our conclusions. If I may be permitted to persist with the fruit-game analogy, I think the face card on the table is “associations,” a decidedly scholarly (etic) category. When one player puts down the “synagogue” card, they are indicating a particular type of association—perhaps a “Golden Delicious.” When another player puts down the “Christ group” card, they too have a match, but again, it is a particular type of association, a “Granny Smith.” In biological terms, they are different species but of the same genus; different type of apples, but both still of the malus genus.

Returning to Gehring, he asks “whether the synthesis between Judaism and Hellenism can be demonstrated in concentrated form here in the synagogue—in other words, patterned after the organization of a voluntary

72

See Jonathan Z. Smith, Drudgery Divine: On the Comparison of Early Christianities and the Religions of Late Antiquity (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1990), esp. 83.

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association yet Jewish in self-understanding.” 73 On the one hand, it makes sense that the self-understanding of a group of Judeans would be “Jewish.” Yet Gehring’s statement underlines the fundamental methodological problem in the way the question is often framed in the debate between synagogues and associations—a “Jewish self-understanding” in comparison to what? An “association’s self-understanding”? Framed this way, the question is ridiculous, as no ancient group would think like this (nor would they be able to). 74 The taxon “association” as it is used in the scholarly literature is a modern construct—again, an “etic” category; the ancients themselves had numerous words for such groups (the “emic” perspective), which are not entirely synonymous (e.g., thiasos; eranos; koinon; collegium). Nor would it even make sense to the majority of ancients to frame the contrast of Judean selfunderstanding with that of “Gentile self-understanding”; this is a thoroughly Judean framework in and of itself (and when used by modern scholars, often buys into a Pauline theological framework). As religious studies scholars we need to frame the difference appropriately, such as contrasting Judean selfunderstanding with other possible emic ethnic self-understandings such as that of the “Asianoi,” and then for comparative purposes cite examples of associations of Asianoi, which have both ancient traditions and ethnic character traits, and also in some cases include non-Asianoi in their group (see, for example, AGRW 64 = GRA I 87, Perinthos, 196–97 C.E.; IG X/2.1 309, Thessalonike, II–III C.E.).

Kloppenborg has observed that, “our data about associations is sufficiently fragmentary and scattered that it is difficult to tessellate these data into a coherent picture that would permit systematic comparison to the practices

73

Gehring, House Church and Mission, 21 n. 117.

Occasionally Judean groups referred to themselves as “associations”; for example, σύνοδος in IJO II Nysa 26 (see comments in Philip A. Harland, Greco-Roman Associations: Texts, Translations, and Commentary, vol. 2, North Coast of the Black Sea, Asia Minor [BZNW 181; Berlin and New York: Walter de Gruyter, 2014], 355), and Josephus Ant. 14.235 or θίασος in Josephus, Ant. 14.213–16 (quoted above), and perhaps IJO I Ach. 41 (see comments there). There is more evidence for groups that held no special ethnic Judean quality employing the term συναγωγή for their group (e.g., AGRW 63; 95; IPerinthos 59) or ἀρχισυναγωγός for their leader (e.g., AGRW 39; 45; 49; 63; see Kloppenborg and Ascough, Greco-Roman Associations, 311–12); cf. Harland, Dynamics of Identity, 40–41.

74

Ascough, Paul, Synagogues, and Associations 49

of Christ groups.” 75 This is correct, to a degree, but seems to assume that we have enough unfragmentary and unscattered data to permit a coherent picture of the Christ groups themselves. In fact, we do not. Although much of the evidence for the early Christ groups is collected into a single volume—the canonical New Testament—which can give the appearance of coherence, these texts were written by multiple authors spread over at least the second half of the first century (probably later), and geographically spread around the eastern circum-Mediterranean. It is no more a coherent picture than that acquired by association data. One can extend this to the data for ancient synagogues, which again is fragmentary and scattered.

It is the scattered and fragmentary nature of all of this data that makes the comparative process difficult. More to the point, any attempt to tessellate the association data into a coherent picture of “association” would of necessity ignore the various different types of associations. 76 To return to our horticultural metaphor, the genus is “association,” which has various species based on such factors as kinship, neighborhood, ethnicity, occupation, or cultic practice. 77 Breaking the taxonomy down further, we could suggest there are Dionysos associations, Zeus associations, Hero associations—all of them species designations of the larger genus.

There is not a tripartite division of “synagogue, Christ group, and other”—there is only “associations,” with all their various manifestations and permutations. 78 As John Barclay notes with a slightly different emphasis, “To ask, therefore, in what respects the Diaspora synagogues or early churches were like ‘associations’ is akin to asking whether churches today are like clubs: there

75

John S. Kloppenborg, “Associations and Their Meals,” unpublished paper presented at the Greco-Roman Meals Seminar, Annual Meeting of the Society of Biblical Literature (Chicago, IL, Nov. 19, 2012), 48.

76 If there is any justification for using “Greco-Roman associations” in a way that is inclusive of all groupings, including Judeans and Christians, it is that it serves as a quick reference that locates the general topic of scholarly discourse (“association”) within the temporal and locative frame designated “Greco-Roman” by scholarly discourse.

77 John S. Kloppenborg, “Associations in the Ancient World,” in The Historical Jesus In Context, ed. Amy Jill Levine, Dale C. Allison, and John Dominic Crossan (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2006), 323–25; Ascough, Harland, and Kloppenborg, Associations in the Greco-Roman World, 2.

78 Thus, the recently published critical edition volumes and sourcebook on associations assume that Judean groups are to be categorized as associations, not contrasted with them: GRA I 73, 82; GRA II 95, 106, 113, 139, 150; cf. AGRW 46, 59, 86, 89, 105, 127, 145, 149, 196, 270, 307, 329, and perhaps 283 and 286.

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are too many different kinds of church, and too many different kinds of club to make this vague and over-generalized comparison of much heuristic value.” 79 Once we recognize that “synagogue” and “Christ group” are simply two different species of “association,” we can leave behind arguments about whether or not Christ groups are or are not “synagogues” and focus on the more complex, and thus more interesting, comparative investigation across all the “apples” in the basket to see how their similarities, and their differences, help us understand each species in its own right. 80 From the ancients’ perspective, a group of foreigners meeting in the house down the road—those people who arrived a generation ago from Judea and speak Greek in a funny way—are certainly perceived as “different.” But in many respects, they are also similar. Despite their accent, they speak Greek. They shop at some of the same stalls and, like “us” (from the perspective of the neighbor), meet regularly as a form of social experimentation. And thus, how one frames the comparative question will determine the relationship. Do they meet regularly in a house in the name of a particular deity? Yes. Do they pour out libations to their deity and follow this with a drunken discourse over philosophy? Well, not really—but take out the libation and the drunkenness and they do pursue philosophical-like conversations. Thus, they are at the same time both similar and different.

Yet, when one imposes the scholarly taxa such as “synagogue” and “other”/“pagan” group, one privileges the differences of the synagogues and

79

Barclay, “Money and Meetings,” 114–15. Although she does not expand on her comment, Tessa Rajak is quite correct when she observes concerning the similarities between Judean groups, including synagogues, and associations that “it is unwarranted to think in terms of a unitary Graeco-Roman model, as scholars have sometimes been overinclined to do” (“Synagogue and Community,” 37). There was, as she notes, a “broad framework of a spectrum of types of Graeco-Roman associations” within which the various Judean groups could adapt and experiment. As I noted, it would thus be unwise to assume that in using the etic “association” as a comparator we are employing a term that signifies one particular “thing.”

80 Although my argument has focused on how the category “synagogue” is used as a buffer between Christ groups and their wider so-called “pagan” surroundings, the breakdown of the rigid distinctions between the three categories also works the other way, mitigating arguments put forth that would isolate early Christ groups from the synagogues (as does Philip F. Esler, on the basis of architectural distinctions, with Judeans meeting in dedicated buildings termed “proseuchai” and Christ groups meeting in domestic spaces or rented commercial venues (see Conflict and Identity in Romans: The Social Setting of Paul’s Letter [Minneapolis: Fortress, 2003], 77–107, esp. 106).

Ascough, Paul, Synagogues, and Associations 51

demeans the differences among the “others” by making them secondary. In the framing of the comparison we are thus already deciding which is the preferred group; as Smith notes, our language, our choice of categories, creates the world we want to study while reflecting the world that we inhabit. 81 No wonder, then, that when we read Philo’s comparison of synagogues and associations we readily agree with his assessment and see it as self-evidently “historical.” To wit, Philo suggests that in contrast to the sobriety and philosophical nature of particular Judean groups (Therapeutai; synagogues), the associations are raucous drunken feasts, a contrast to which many scholars have given the nod of approval. I hope that my argument has given pause to such assent. Instead, we should see synagogues as a different manifestation of “association,” bearing both similarities to and differences from other manifestations of associations.

Likewise, Christ groups bear both similarities to and differences from other manifestations of associations, including—but not limited to—synagogues.

Nevertheless, my overarching aim is not an attempt to slot “synagogues” (or Christ groups, for that matter) into the particular category “association,” as if doing so will provide some sort of leverage for better understanding. Rather, my aim is to call into question the categories, and the categorization, themselves. We must drop the dichotomous either/or categorization and re-frame the discussion around the comparative exploration of similarities and differences across all types of Greco-Roman associations, including synagogues and Christ groups, in order to move forward in our understanding of the complex interactions reflected in all of our texts, sacred or otherwise. 82

81

Jonathan Z. Smith, Relating Religion: Essays in the Study of Religion (Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press, 2004), 4.

82 Like all metaphors, pushed too far, the fruit metaphor does begin to break down. As Mark Nanos pointed out to me (via email), while one cannot simply take a “Granny Smith” and call it a “Red Delicious,” there is evidence that a Judean group could be identified as both a “synagogue” and an “ekklesia.” That said, I think a focus on the terminology for group meetings is part of the problem. So while we most commonly associate “synagogue” with Judean meetings, there are non-Judean groups that use that term as well. For example, in Perinthos, Thrace, there is a synagogue of barbers dedicated to Zeus, which is clearly not Judean (GRA I 86 = AGRW 63, I–II C.E.). Similarly, the use of ἀρχισυναγωγός as a leadership term appears in non-Judean groups (see footnote 72 above; cf. Ascough, Paul’s Macedonian Associations, 79–80, incl. n. 38). Thus, a focus on nomenclature can only get us so far, which is why I want to push beyond it to formulate comparisons that would be construed something like, “comparing the synagogue of Judeans in Perinthos with the synagogue of barbers with respect to their dedicatory

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www.jjmjs.org

practices.” The use of “synagogue” is not the most interesting aspect, nor does it make them “the same.” It simply invites the deeper comparison of two “associations.” This is something I have advocated more strongly elsewhere; see Ascough, “Map-maker,” 68–84.

We should drop either/or bifurcations and essentializing and focus on deeper analysis of “X compared to Y with respect to Z” and on practices (or so-called “theologies”) reflected in the texts. For example, many groups had meals, so we can identify the similarities in practice (reclining; small numbers; drinking) in order to highlight the differences, not so we can argue that one type of group is better than another (as does Philo) but simply to show the range of practices. In so doing, it may well be that one particular Judean group differs from another Judean group, especially in a different location, yet both claim the designator “synagogue.”

My thanks to many who read and commented on versions of this paper, including Mark Nanos, Anders Runesson, Richard Last, Erich Gruen, Philip Esler, L. Michael White, Cheryl O’Shea, and the anonymous peer-reviewers for JJMJS.

Ekklēsia as a Jewish Synagogue Term: Some Implications for Paul’s Socio-Religious Location Ralph J. Korner Taylor Seminary | ralph.korner@taylor-edu.ca JJMJS No. 2 (2015): 53---78

Introduction In late antiquity, the political mission of Christ-followers reached its zenith when, in 380 C.E., Theodosius I issued an edict that all subjects of the Roman Empire should worship the Christian God. 1 Some, such as Daniel Boyarin, claim that this represents the birth of “religion” as a separate social category, 2 a 1

Throughout this essay I will replace the problematic term “Christian” with “Christfollower.” I use the term “Christ-follower” rather than “Christ-believer” since this term represents not just beliefs, but also practice. See Paul Trebilco, Self-designations and Group Identity in the New Testament (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2012), 3; Steve Mason, “Jews, Judaeans, Judaizing, Judaism: Problems of Categorization in Ancient History,” JSJ 38 (2007): 457–512, esp. 482–88.

2 Bruce Malina, among others, claims that ancient Mediterranean societies knew nothing of “religion” as an autonomous socio-religious entity disconnected from ethno-cultural identities (“Social-Scientific Approaches and the Gospel of Matthew,” in Methods for Matthew [MBI; ed. Mark Allan Powell; Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2009], 154–93, esp. 170). Steve Mason identifies six culturally integrated aspects of “religion” which were expressed in the warp and woof of everyday life in early antiquity: ethnos, cult, philosophy, kinship traditions/domestic worship, astrology/magic, and voluntary association (collegia/thiasoi) (“Jews, Judaeans, Judaizing, Judaism,” 482–88). See also Brent Nongbri who, following on from T. Asad, argues that the absence of the “secular” in pre-modern, non-Western contexts makes “religion” a uniquely modern, Western concept (Before Religion: A History of a Modern Concept [New Haven: Yale University Press, 2013]; see T. Asad, Genealogies of Religion: Disciplines and Reasons for Power in Christianity and Islam [Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1993]). For a critique of Mason’s view of “religion,” see Daniel R. Schwartz, Judeans and Jews: Four Faces of Dichotomy in Ancient Jewish History (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2014).

Schwartz offers 14 examples from Josephus where the Greek word threskia is best translated as “religion” rather than as a religious activity such as “worship,” “cult,” or “ceremony” (ibid., 91–99). For a judicious critique of Nongbri’s conceptual paradigm, see

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“religion” now known as “Christianity.” 3 This “religion” was institutionally represented in “the Catholic Church” 4 (katholikē ekklēsia), 5 whose almost exclusively Gentile congregants gathered in purpose-built structures called “churches.” This fourth century conception of ekklēsia as a religious organization and as religious buildings (“church”), however, was worlds apart from how the concept of ekklēsia (“assembly”) was understood from its inception in the late sixth century B.C.E. up to, and including, the first century C.E. 6

Jack C. Laughlin and Kornel Zathureczky, “An Anatomy of the Canonization of Asadian Genealogy: A Case Study,” SR 44/2 (June 2015): 233–52. Laughlin and Zathureczky contend that “a context-specific historical hermeneutic, with the potential to generate multiple conceptions of religion (as such), not only evades tendencies to reify ‘religion’ through its use as a universally applicable category (religion as a sui generic category) but also resists what Strausberg (2010) calls a ‘reverse-sui-generis-rhetoric’ which treats religion as a uniquely anomalous category” (ibid., 235–36).

3 Daniel Boyarin, “Semantic Differences; or, ‘Judaism’/‘Christianity,’” in The Ways that Never Parted: Jews and Christians in Late Antiquity and the Early Middle Ages, ed. A. Becker and A. Reed (Tübingen: Mohr Siebeck, 2003), 65–85, esp. 77. Boyarin’s argument for the birth of “religion” as a social category is not a social-scientific argument based on the differentiation of proscribed descriptive and prescribed redescriptive discourse (e.g., Asad, Nongbri). Rather, he bases it upon the historically specific context of the fourth century C.E. In not dissimilar fashion, Daniel Schwartz uses historiographical evidence to claim that already in the first century C.E. Josephus, at the very least, conceived of a Jewish religion (Judeans and Jews, 91–99).

4 Inscriptional occurrences of katholikē ekklēsia include references to a building (Pan du désert 27; 340/1 C.E.: ὁ κατασκευάσας ἐνταῦθα καθολικὴν ἐκκλησίαν); to an institutionalized organization (IGLSyr 5 2126; n.d.; ὁ θεοτίμητος Γρηγόρι]ο̣ς ἡμῶν πατριά[ρχης], [κατὰ τοὺς ἱεροὺς κανόνας(?) τῆς καθολικῆς ἐκκ]λησίας·); and in the nonuniversal sense to a regional community of Christ-followers (RIChrM 235; Makedonia [Edonis], Philippoi; fourth cent. C.E.: τῆς καθολικῆς καὶ ἀποστολικῆς ἁγίας ἐκκλησίας Φιλιππησίων).

5 During the earlier patristic era, however, the term katholikē ekklēsia referred simply to the “worldwide church” (“universal/catholic church”) (cf. Polycarp, Introduction: “The ekklēsia of God which dwells in Smyrna to the ekklēsia of God which dwells in Philomelium and to all the sojournings of the holy catholic ekklēsia in every place.” In that same vein, see also Smyrn. 8:1a, 2; 16:2; 19:2.

6 I will avoid using the problematic translation “church” for ekklēsia, not least since ekklēsia never refers to the building or structure in which the ekklēsia gathers.

Korner, Ekklēsia as a Jewish Synagogue Term 55

Beginning with Cleisthenes’s democratic reforms in Athens (508/7–501 B.C.E.), 7 and continuing throughout the Imperial period (27 B.C.E.–284 C.E.), 8 the term ekklēsia was used for the civic assembly of male citizens (dēmos) 9 in a Greek polis (“city-state”) 10 or as a temporary group designation for the dēmos while gathered in assembly (en ekklēsia). 11 Ekklēsia was not used as a permanent group designation in Greco-Roman circles. 12 7 For a detailed discussion of the dating of Cleisthenes’s reforms in light of the discovery of the Athenaion Politeia, see E. Badian, “Back to Kleisthenic Chronology,” in Polis and Politics: Studies in Ancient Greek History, ed. Pernille Flensted-Jensen, Thomas Heine Nielsen, and Lene Rubinstein (Copenhagen: Museum Tusculanum Press, 2000), 447–64.

The earliest inscriptional mention of a civic ekklēsia is found in Tit. Calymnii 70 (late fifth/early fourth cent. B.C.E.; Kalymna—Fanum Apollinis, Cos and Calyma, Aegean Islands). It is fragmentary and consists of seven identifiable words ([ἔ]δο[ξε τᾶι ἐκκλησίαι τᾶι Καλυμνίων, μηνὸς — — — —]).

8 In historiography, the Imperial period is conventionally dated from the start of Caesar Augustus’s reign in 27 B.C.E. and concludes with the beginning of Diocletian’s reign (284–305 C.E.).

9 Civic decision-making in the polis of Athens was enacted through the regular assembly (ekklēsia) of the full citizenry (dēmos) under the leadership of the 500-person council (boulē) (see further, Mogens Herman Hansen, The Athenian Assembly in the Age of Demosthenes [Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1987], 25–28). The principal ekklēsia (ekklēsia kyria) during each prytaneiai had an all-embracing program which included votes of confidence with respect to the magistrates (archontes); discussion of military preparedness and issues related to food security; consideration of accusations of high treason (eisangelia); reports of confiscated property; and determinations made with respect to disputed inheritance claims (Gustave Glotz, The Greek City and Its Institutions [New York: Barnes and Noble, 1929/1969], 85; cf. AP 43.4–6). The Athenian ekklēsia became the governance model for ekklēsiai within poleis across the Greek East.

10 Mogens Hermann Hansen notes that scholarly consensus defines a Greek polis as “a community of citizens rather than a territory ruled by a government” (“City-Ethnics as Evidence for Polis Identity,” in More Studies in the Ancient Greek Polis [HE 108; ed. M. H. Hansen and K. Raaflaub; Stuttgart: Franz Steiner Verlag, 1996], 169–96, esp. 169 and 192).

11 Greek epigraphic sources use the word ekklēsia in reference to a temporary group designation even into the first century C.E. In a letter from Artaban III, king of Parthia, to Seleucia approving the election of a city treasurer, the word ekklēsia is used in lieu of the word dēmos (SEG 7:2; 21 C.E./Parthian year 268, Audnaeus 17). It reads, βασιλευόν[τος Σελευκου, ἔτους] ςλ’ καὶ ρ’, μη[νὸς- - - ], ἐν Σελευκ[είαι δὲ τῆι πρὸς τῶι] Εὐλαίωι Λ[ῴου- -, ἐπὶ] Ἀμμωνί[ου. ἔδοξε τῆι ἐκκλησίαι· [“resolved by the ekklēsia”].

12 My examination of Greek literary (1036 ekklēsia occurrences), papyrological, and inscriptional sources (approx. 2100 occurrences of the ekklēsia related lexemes ἐκκλησία, ἐκλησία, ἐκκλησίη, ἐκκλεσία, and ἐγκλησία) did not find evidence of a non-civic group,

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The New Testament, however, does use the word ekklēsia as a permanent group designation. Not all of the early Christ-follower writings, though, employ ekklēsia terminology (e.g., 1 Peter). If New Testament usage indicates socio-religious reality, then the only Christ-follower communities to self-designate as ekklēsiai are those whose primary allegiance lay either with Paul, the “elder” John, the “prophet” John, or Matthew. Some Christ-followers, such as James’s addressees (Jas 1:2) 13 and the later Nazarenes of Transjordan, 14 appear to have met in (or as) a synagōgē. As the second century dawned, it was ekklēsia which came to predominate as Christ-followers’ group designation of choice. such as a voluntary association, self-designating as an ekklēsia. Inscriptional decrees do indicate, though, that were upwards of three non-civic groups which named their semipublic meeting an ekklēsia: the Tyrian Herakleistai of Delos (IDelos 1519), the aleiphomenoi of Samos (Samos 119), and the syngeneia of Pelekōs (Sinuri 73). See my extensive interaction with previous studies on these three inscriptions as well as on OGIS 488/TAM V,1 222, IGLAM 1381 and 1382 (e.g., John Kloppenborg, Richard Ascough, Philip Harland), in Ralph J. Korner, “Before ‘Church’: Political, Ethno-Religious, and Theological Implications of the Collective Designation of Pauline Christ-Followers as Ekklēsiai” (PhD diss., McMaster University, Jan. 16, 2014), 57–85 (see also Korner, Before ‘Church’: Political, Ethno-Religious, and Theological Implications of the Collective Designation of Pauline Christ-followers as Ekklēsiai, forthcoming). Any statistics I cite relative to the number of ekklēsia occurrences in the inscriptional record reflect the number of times the word ekklēsia occurs in the database of Packard Humanities Institute (PHI) and other sources not incorporated by PHI. Thus, the statement “2100 occurrences of the ekklēsia related lexemes” indicates merely the number of times ekklēsia occurs within the database of PHI. Some of those ekklēsia occurrences are found within different epigraphic titles of the same inscription.

13 Some scholars suggest that the Epistle of James uses the word “synagogue” of a building within which early Christ-followers met en ekklēsia (Jas 2:2; 5:14). If so, James’s halakic observant Christ-followers differentiated their “members only” meeting from other synagogue gatherings by naming their meeting ekklēsia. There are two other possible interpretations of the word synagōgē: (1) a ritual assembly of Jewish Christ-followers (Richard Bauckham, “James and the Jerusalem Community,” in Jewish Believers in Jesus: The Early Centuries, ed. O. Skarsaune and R. Hvalvik [Peabody, MS: Hendrickson, 2007], 55–95, esp. 58); or (2) a building owned by Christ-followers and dedicated for their ritual worship assemblies (Scot McKnight, The Letter of James [NICNT; Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 2011], 183). These two interpretations of the word synagōgē, however, are anomalous with respect to other New Testament writings.

14 The Nazarenes of Transjordan explicitly self-identified collectively as synagōgē (Bastiaan van Elderen, “Early Christianity in Transjordan,” TynBul 45.1 [1994]: 97–117; Wolfram Kinzig, “The Nazoreans,” in Jewish Believers in Jesus, 463–87).

Korner, Ekklēsia as a Jewish Synagogue Term 57

For the purposes of this paper, however, I will focus upon the apostle Paul and his use of ekklēsia as a group designation. I will limit my focus to his undisputed writings. 15 One question in particular informs my study: “Is ekklēsia a term used for Jewish synagogue gatherings, and if so, what are some implications for the socio-religious location of Paul’s ekklēsiai, whether composed of Jews and/or non-Jews?” 16 Along with the synagogue, 17 scholars—following on from Wayne Meeks 18—have assessed the organization of Paul’s ekklēsiai along the lines of three other ancient non-civic models: the household, 19 philosophical schools, 20 15

The seven undisputed or acknowledged letters of Paul, as listed in canonical order, are Romans, 1 and 2 Corinthians, Galatians, Philippians, 1 Thessalonians, and Philemon.

16 I use the term “Jewish” congruent with Mark Nanos, who suggests that “the adjective ‘Jewish’ is used both to refer to those who are Jews ethnically and to the behavior generally associated with the way that Jews live, albeit variously defined, such as by different interpretations of Scripture and related traditions, different views of who represents legitimate authority, and different conclusions about what is appropriate for any specified time and place. The behavior can be referred to by the adverb ‘jewishly,’ and as the expression of ‘jewishness.’ In colloquial terms, one who practices a Jewish way of life according to the ancestral customs of the Jews, which is also referred to as practicing ‘Judaism,’ might be called a ‘good’ Jew” (“Paul’s Non-Jews Do Not Become Jews, But Do They Become ‘Jewish’?: Reading Romans 2:25–29 Within Judaism, Alongside Josephus,” JJMJS 1 [2014]: 26–53, esp. 27–28).

17 Some ways in which Christ-follower ekklēsiai are said to demonstrate affinity with synagogal gatherings include worship gathering functions such as the reading and interpretation of Scripture, communal prayer, and commensality (1 Cor 11:17–34; 14:26), and the settling of legal affairs within the community (1 Cor 6:1–7) (Wayne A. Meeks, The First Urban Christians: The Social World of the Apostle Paul [London/New Haven: Yale University Press, 1983], 80–81; James Tunstead Burtchaell, From Synagogue to Church [Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1992], 284–88). Some of these praxeis within Jewish synagogues, however, are also mirrored in Greek and Egyptian voluntary associations. Hugo Mantel lists twelve similarities between diasporic Jewish synagogue communities and Greek and Egyptian voluntary associations (“The Men of the Great Synagogue,” HTR 60/1 [1967]: 69–91, esp. 82–91). Examples include correlations in titles for association officials (e.g., archisynagōgēs, presbyteros, grammateus), judicial independence, regulatory nomoi, and penalties for disregarding nomoi.

18 Meeks, The First Urban Christians.

19 See Ok-pil Kim, “Paul and Politics: Ekklesia, Household, and Empire in 1 Corinthians 1–7,” (PhD diss., Drew University, April, 2010).

20 Edward Adams provides a concise survey of those scholars who suggest that Greek philosophical schools are a good paradigm for understanding how Paul organized his ekklēsiai (“First-Century Models for Paul’s Churches: Selected Scholarly Developments

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and the voluntary association. 21 Richard Ascough originally supported Meeks’s four-fold sociological model 22 with some modifications. 23 However, he now challenges any heuristic category that creates a sharp dichotomy between “associations” and “synagogues.” Rather, he contends, in line with Harland, 24

since Meeks,” in After the First Urban Christians: The Social-Scientific Study of Pauline Christianity Twenty-five Years Later, ed. T. D. Still and D. G. Horrell [London/New York: T&T Clark International, 2009], 60–78, esp. 73–74).

21 See, for example, John Kloppenborg, “Edwin Hatch, Churches, and Collegia,” in Origins and Method: Towards a New Understanding of Judaism and Christianity, ed. B. H. Maclean (Sheffield: JSOT Press, 1993), 212–38, esp. 231; Richard Ascough, Paul’s Macedonian Associations: The Social Context of Philippians and 1 Thessalonians (WUNT 161; Tübingen: Mohr Siebeck, 2003); Wayne O. McCready, “Ekklēsia and Voluntary Associations,” in Voluntary Associations in the Graeco-Roman World, ed. J. S. Kloppenborg and S. G. Wilson (London and New York: Routledge, 1996), 59–73; Philip Harland, Associations, Synagogues, and Congregations: Claiming a Place in Ancient Mediterranean Society (Minneapolis: Fortress, 2003), esp. 106 and 182; and idem, Dynamics of Identity in the World of the Early Christians: Associations, Judeans, and Cultural Minorities (New York/London: T&T Clark, 2009), esp. 44–45.

22 For updated perspectives on Meeks’s proposals, see Edward Adams, “First-Century Models,” 60–78, and John S. Kloppenborg, “Greco-Roman Thiasoi, the Ekklesia at Corinth, and Conflict Management,” 191–205, both in Redescribing Paul and the Corinthians (ECIL 5; ed. R. Cameron and M. P. Miller; Atlanta: Society of Biblical Literature, 2011). For a judicious critique of four of Meeks’s apparent operating assumptions, see Stanley Kent Stowers, “The Social Sciences and the Study of Early Christianity,” in Approaches to Ancient Judaism, vol. 5, ed. W. Green (Atlanta: Scholars Press, 1985), 149–81, esp. 172. Meeks’s application of modern sociological models (i.e., Bryan Wilson’s “small groups” sect theory) to ancient groups appears to assume that commensurability is valid across vast reaches of time (first vs. twentieth centuries), geography (Mediterranean vs. North America) and culture (dyadic/collectivistic vs. individualistic cultures).

23 Richard Ascough, What Are They Saying About the Formation of Pauline Churches?

(New York and Mahwah: Paulist Press, 1998). While Meeks viewed “synagogue” and “association” as being distinct and separate categories, with “synagogue” best representing Christ-follower groups, Ascough originally argued in the other direction, that “association” was a better category than “synagogue.”

24 Philip Harland identifies at least five types of non-civic associations based upon their principal social networks: (1) household connections; (2) ethnic or geographic connections; (3) neighborhood connections; (4) occupational connections; and (5) cult or temple connections (Associations, 29; see also David Instone-Brewer and Philip A. Harland, “Jewish Associations in Roman Palestine: Evidence from the Mishnah,” JGRJCh 5 [2008]: 200–21, esp. 202, 203).

Korner, Ekklēsia as a Jewish Synagogue Term 59

that “association” is a meta-category within which various taxonomical sub-sets are included based on factors such as kinship, neighborhood, ethnicity, occupation, or cultic expressions. 25 Thus, under the taxon “association” are subsumed particular types of associations such as Jewish groups (e.g., the Covenanters, the Theraputae), 26 Greco-Roman voluntary groups (e.g., thiasoi, collegia, synodos, koina), and Christ-follower groups (e.g., ekklēsiai).

In 2008, Anders Runesson, Donald Binder, and Birger Olsson produced a synagogue sourcebook wherein they include the word ekklēsia as one among upwards of 22 terms used within Jewish sources for synagogue assemblies. 27 Examples of synagogue terms include those which refer to communal 25

Ascough first moved towards comparing early Christ-follower groups in relation to Greco-Roman “elective social formations,” that is, comparing all associational groups with respect to one variable, such as meal practices, leadership dynamics, and so forth (“‘Map-maker, Map-maker, Make me a Map’: Re-describing Greco-Roman ‘Elective Social Formations,’” in Introducing Religion: Festschrift for Jonathan Z. Smith, ed. Willi Braun and Russell T. McCutcheon [London: Equinox, 2008], 68–84). Most recently, however, Ascough has argued that single variable approaches are too reductionistic (“Apples-to-Apples; Reframing the Question of Models for Pauline Christ-Groups” [paper presented at the annual meeting of the Society of Biblical Literature, San Diego, CA, Nov. 25, 2014, p. 17; Ed. note: This paper has been adapted into the article “Paul, Synagogues, and Associations: Reframing the Question of Models for Pauline Christ Groups” in this issue of JJMJS, pp. 27–52]; see also Ascough’s forthcoming article in Currents in Biblical Research [“What Are They Now Saying About Christ Groups and Associations?” 2015]).

26 Some scholars affirm that Jewish groups should be categorized under the umbrella term “association” not least because of their organizational patterns, and particularly because of how they are dealt with in legal contexts. One example is Roman legislation under Julius Caesar and Augustus which explicitly saw the need to exempt Jewish synagogues from restrictive guidelines directed against collegia. For example, see Mikael Tellbe, Paul Between Synagogue and State: Christians, Jews and Civic Authorities in 1 Thessalonians, Romans, and Philippians (Stockholm: Almqvist & Wiksell International, 2001), 24–63; and Martin Ebner, Die Stadt als Lebensraum der ersten Christen. Das Urchristentum in seiner Umwelt I (Grundrisse zum Neuen Testament I,I; Göttingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, 2012), 227–28.

27 Runesson, Binder, and Olsson note that “what in English is translated ‘synagogue’ went under several different names in antiquity,” that is, 17 Greek terms, 5 Hebrew terms, and 3 Latin terms, some of which overlap (The Ancient Synagogue from its Origins to 200 C.E.: A Source Book [AJEC 72; Leiden: Brill, 2008], esp. 159–63, 328, esp. 10, n. 21). For extensive descriptions of each term as used by Jewish communities, see Donald Binder, Into the Temple Courts: The Place of the Synagogues in the Second Temple Period (Atlanta: SBL, 1999), 91–151.

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gatherings, such as syllogos (“meeting”) 28 or synagōgē (“a gathering”), and those which refer to architectural spaces within which Jewish communities met, such as proseuchē (“house of prayer”), 29 bet ha-midrash (“house of study”), 30 and synagōgē (“synagogue”). 31 It becomes readily apparent that the Greek term synagōgē can be used to describe a physical location as well as a public or semi-public gathering of a community within that location. In this paper, however, whenever I use the English term “synagogue,” I intend thereby not simply a specific reference to the Greek term synagōgē but rather a global reference to all terms used by Jews when describing their meetings, their communities, or their meeting places (e.g., syllogos, synagōgē, ekklēsia, proseuchē). Not only are there a number of Greek 28

Syllogos is not specific to, nor identifying of, any particular socio-religious group.

Rather, syllogos is strictly a sociological term that means “a meeting for a specific purpose, whether for deliberations, consultations, etc. There is some kind of mutual activity.”

(Runesson, Binder, and Olsson, The Ancient Synagogue, 201). Regarding the Therapeutae, Philo mentions that they met for a syllogos (“general assembly”) every seventh day (Contemp. 30–33; 30–45 C.E.).

29 Runesson, Binder, and Olsson observe that Philo’s use of proseuchē for the meeting places of Alexandrian Jews appears to be a regional synonym in Egypt for synagōgē (The Ancient Synagogue, 188). A proseuchē is some sort of physical structure in which Jews assemble for prayer (Philo, Legat. 132) and/or for public decision making (Josephus).

Josephus mentions proseuchai both in Alexandria (C. Ap. 2.10) and in Galilee (Vita 276– 81, 294–95). In Vita, Josephus’s proseuchai are purpose built structures for public communal gatherings, and not just for association-specific gatherings. This is clear from his comment that the proseuchē is large enough to contain the entire boulē (“council”) of Tiberias, which numbered approximately 600 persons (ASSB, no. 22). On proseuchai in Egypt, see Martin Hengel, “Proseuche und Synagoge: Jüdische Gemeinde, Gotteshaus und Gottesdienst in der Diaspora und in Palästina,” in The Synagogue: Studies in Origins, Archaeology and Architecture, ed. J. Gutmann (New York: Ktav, 1975), 27–54.

30 In m. Ter. 11:10 the bet hamidrash is a building: “They may kindle oil of priest’s due, that must be burnt, in the synagogues (bate knesiot) and in houses of study (bate midrashot) and in dark alleys and for sick people by permission of a priest” (cf. Runesson, Binder, and Olsson, The Ancient Synagogue, 105; cf. also Anders Runesson, The Origins of the Synagogue: A Socio-Historical Study [ConBNT 37; Stockholm: Almqvist & Wiksell International, 2001], 223–34).

31 E. P. Sanders notes, “Jews assembled in buildings called ‘houses of prayer’ [proseuchē] principally, but also known by such other terms as ‘schools,’ [didaskaleion] ‘temples,’ [hiera] sabbateioi, and synagogues” (“Common Judaism and the Synagogue in the First Century,” in Jews, Christians, and Polytheists in the Ancient Synagogue: Cultural Interaction during the Greco-Roman Period, ed. Stephen Fine [London/New York: Routledge, 1999], 1–17, esp. 6).

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terms to which the English word “synagogue” refers but, as Anders Runesson has highlighted, there are also two types of synagogue institutions: public and semi-public. 32 Jewish public/civic synagogue gatherings addressed a broad range of issues relevant to all members of a regional rural community, 33 while semipublic synagogue gatherings were “members-only” meetings of a voluntary association usually within an urban setting. 34 In his Christian origins work, Runesson examines Christ-follower ekklēsiai through the lens of semi-public association synagogues. 35 Prior to Runesson’s study, Mark Nanos and Donald Binder explored some implications of identifying Paul’s ekklēsiai as synagogue sub-groups. 36 32

Runesson, The Origins of the Synagogue.

In his survey of 1st century C.E. sources, Lee Levine notes that the public synagōgē building was used for “the entire gamut of [public] activities connected with any Jewish community . . . [such] as a courtroom, school, hostel, a place for political meetings, social gatherings, housing charity funds, a setting for manumissions, meals (sacred or otherwise), and, of course, a number of religious-liturgical functions [such as public Torah reading, rituals, festival observance]” (The Ancient Synagogue: The First Thousand Years [2nd ed.; New Haven: Yale University Press, 2005], 29).

34 Semi-public Jewish associations reserved participation for members and sympathizers only. Anders Runesson helpfully clarifies the three social levels on which “religion” “played out” in antiquity: “a. Public level (civic/state/empire concerns); b. Semi-Public level/Association level (voluntary groups/cults and their concerns); c. Private level (domestic, familial concerns)” (“Was there a Christian Mission before the 4th Century?

Problematizing Common Ideas about Early Christianity and the Beginnings of Modern Mission,” in The Making of Christianity: Conflicts, Contacts, and Constructions [ConBNT 47; ed. M. Zetterholm and S. Byrskog; Winona Lake: Eisenbrauns, 2012], 205–47, esp.

213).

35 Runesson, Origins of the Synagogue, 171–72, 356–57; idem, “The Question of Terminology: The Architecture of Contemporary Discussions on Paul,” in Paul Within Judaism: Restoring the First-Century Context to the Apostle (Minneapolis: Fortress, 2015), 53–78, esp. 68–76. Two examples of association synagogues in the land of Israel are Philo’s reference to the Essenes (Prob. 80–83), and the community associated with the 1st century C.E. synagogue in Jerusalem mentioned in the Theodotus inscription (CIJ II 1404; see John S. Kloppenborg, “Dating Theodotus (CIJ II 1404),” JJS [51.2]: 243–80). An example of a semi-public Jewish association from the Diaspora is Acts’ mention of the “synagogue of the Freedmen” (Acts 6:9). See further in Anders Runesson, “Rethinking Early Jewish–Christian Relations: Matthean Community History as Pharisaic Intragroup Conflict,” JBL 127/1 (2008): 95–132, esp. 112.

36 For example, Nanos writes, “Paul appears to use ekklēsia not, as often claimed, to distinguish his groups from synagōgē, but rather to signify their identity as subgroups ‘meeting’ specifically within the larger Jewish communities. The point was not to indicate 33

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Nanos focused in upon the Christ-follower ekklēsiai in Galatia 37 and ostensibly in Rome. 38 Binder looked beyond New Testament writings to Jewish Second Temple texts in situating Christ-follower ekklēsiai within his discussion of “what we might imprecisely label ‘sectarian synagogues,’ those synagogues belonging to the Essenes, the Theraputae, and the Samaritans.” 39 At least two issues arise. First, it is doubtful that the entire Roman community self-designated collectively as an ekklēsia. Paul only identifies one Christ-follower sub-group in Rome as being an ekklēsia—the Christ-followers who met in the home of Aquila and Priscilla (Rom 16:3–5a), his ostensible ministry partners (Acts 18:1–3). 40 Robert Jewett suggests that Paul addresses the rest of the Roman community as hoi hagioi (klētois hagiois, “to the called holy ones”; Rom 1:7). 41 Thus, even if one concurs with Nanos’s claim that Paul’s Roman addressees operated as a synagogue subset, 42 such a categorization need

a rival movement” (“To the Churches Within the Synagogues of Rome,” in Reading Paul’s Letter to the Romans, ed. J. L. Sumney [Atlanta: SBL Press, 2012], 15). For other expansions upon Nanos’s original view, see idem, “The Jewish Context of the Gentile Audience Addressed in Paul’s Letter to the Romans,” CBQ 61 (1999): 283–304; idem, “To the Churches Within the Synagogues of Rome,” 12–16; idem, “Paul’s Non-Jews Do Not Become ‘Jews,’” 26–53, esp. 32, 39, 40.

37 Nanos argues that those in Galatia who opposed Paul were not Christ-followers but emissaries of Jewish communities (“the influencers”) who mandated full proselyte conversion for Gentile Christ-followers who wished to integrate into the broader Jewish community (The Irony of Galatians: Paul’s Letter in First-Century Context [Minneapolis: Augsburg Fortress, 2002], 143).

38 Mark Nanos, The Mystery of Romans: The Jewish Context of Paul’s Letter (Minneapolis: Fortress Press, 1996).

39 Binder, Into the Temple Courts, 24.

40 Although Nanos acknowledges this fact, he nonetheless presumes that “almost certainly there were other [ekklēsia] gatherings in other locations” (“To the Churches Within the Synagogues of Rome,” 11–28, esp. 15).

41 Robert Jewett claims that “when the term ‘saints’ [hagioi; Rom 1:7] is used as a description of specific Christian groups in contrast to all Christians, it refers to Jewish Christians, loyal to or associated with Jerusalem” (Romans: A Commentary [Hermeneia; Minneapolis: Augsburg/Fortress, 2007], 114). Jewett cites other examples in Rom 15:25, 26, 31; 1 Cor 16:1 (ibid., 114; see also Horst Balz, “ἁγίοις κτλ.,” EDNT 1.17).

42 Nanos appears to presume, though, that social interaction between Christ-followers and Jews in Rome is indicated in the social identification of the Christ-followers’ “righteous Gentiles” with Jewish praxeis, such as textual interpretive techniques and worship practices. Nanos identifies examples of social identification as being “archeological evidence, shared literature such as hymnals and prayer books, the

Korner, Ekklēsia as a Jewish Synagogue Term 63

not necessarily apply to the Pauline ekklēsia. Second, Richard Ascough makes clear that when it comes to Pauline ekklēsiai, one cannot simply categorize his communities within the taxonomical sub-set of ethnicity (i.e., Jewish). He notes that Paul’s Thessalonian ekklēsia was an occupational group, and one composed primarily of non-Judeans. 43 The Second Temple context of ekklēsia usage by intra muros groups within pluriform Judaism(s) 44 does, however, help Paul to address an ethnoreligious conundrum—he required a distinctive group identity for his ethnically diverse Christ-followers. 45 He did not require it for the purpose of distinguishing his Christ-followers from pluriform Judaism(s). 46 Rather, Paul needed a group identity with both Greco-Roman and Jewish roots which could place Gentiles qua Gentiles into theological continuity with Torah observant Jews qua Jews. 47 maintenance and even appropriation of nonrabbinic and apocryphal texts in Christian literature, shared language and idioms, Sabbath observance and food regulations, even the same form of meeting and administrative responsibilities” (The Mystery of Romans, 69–71).

43 Ascough, Paul’s Macedonian Associations, 191–212.

44 When I speak of “Judaism,” I follow the definition of “common Judaism” offered by E. P. Sanders. Sanders defines “common Judaism [as being] that of the ordinary priest and the ordinary people. . . . Common is defined as what is agreed among the parties, and agreed among the populace as a whole” (Judaism: Practice and Belief—Early Roman Period (63 BCE to 66 CE) [Philadelphia: TPI, 1992], 11–12). More specifically, “common Judaism” is the convergence of four beliefs among 1st century C.E. Jews: “belief that their God was the only true God, that he had chosen them and had given them his law, and that they were required to obey it” and that “the temple was the visible, functioning symbol of God’s presence with his people and it was also the basic rallying point of Jewish loyalties” (ibid., 241).

45 Regarding the focus of ancient Mediterranean cultures on the collective rather than on individuals, see Bruce Malina, The New Testament World: Insights from Cultural Anthropology (Louisville: Westminster John Knox Press, 2001), 62; and Mikael Tellbe, “The Prototypical Christ-Believer: Early Christian Identity Formation in Ephesus,” in Exploring Early Christian Identity (WUNT 226; ed. B. Holmberg; Tübingen: Mohr Siebeck, 2008), 115–38, esp. 120.

46 Philip Esler is one example of a Pauline scholar who contends that the term ekklēsia was chosen expressly to distinguish Christ-followers from their Jewish roots, that is, from “the Synagogue” (Conflict and Identity in Romans: The Social Setting of Paul’s Letter [Minneapolis: Fortress, 2003]).

47 By “Gentiles qua Gentiles” I mean that Gentiles could become fully constituted followers of the Jewish Christos without being required to become Jewish proselytes and/or or take up any one, or all, of the Jewish covenantal identity markers such as circumcision, dietary restrictions, and festival observances.

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Ekklēsia, with its linguistic roots both in Greek civic politics and in Jewish public and semi-public synagogue assemblies, would have served Paul’s ideological need well.

Jewish Synagogal Entities named Ekklēsia?

At least three ancient Jewish writers bear witness to ekklēsia being used of Jewish synagogue entities: 48 (1) Ben Sira and Josephus each appear to describe public/civic assemblies in Judea which were called ekklēsiai; and (2) Philo twice mentions a non-civic ekklēsia associated with Jews in Egypt. One of Philo’s references speaks of a publicly accessible assembly that was sponsored by a “members-only” association of Jews and the other of a “members-only” association which may have collectively self-designated as an ekklēsia.

Judean Public Assemblies Named Ekklēsia? (Sirach, Josephus) The Judea of Ben Sira’s timeframe appears to have contained public assemblies of Jews which were called ekklēsiai. Sirach uses ekklēsia to translate Ben Sira’s qhl in reference to publicly accessible assemblies of regional communities 49 wherein juridical, political, and religious issues are addressed. 50 This places Sirach’s Judean ekklēsiai in continuity with Lee Levine’s definition of a public synagogue assembly and/or building, 51 a point which synagogue scholars, including Levine, have yet to make. 52 The question, of course, is whether Ben Sira’s qhl was actually known as an ekklēsia by early second century B.C.E. Hellenistic Judeans, or was his grandson, who translates Ben Sira into Greek, viewing the early second century 48 See the extensive discussion in Korner, Before ‘Church,’ (§4.0. Ekklēsia and Non-Civic Jewish Institutions).

49 Sirach writes of public ekklēsiai in Judea nine times (15:5; 21:17; 23:24; 24:2; 34[31]:11; 33:19; 38:33; 39:10; 44:15) (24:2 may only refer to a heavenly ekklēsia).

50 Sirach’s Judean ekklēsiai are functionally similar to 1st century C.E. rural Judean synagogues, that is, public synagogues. For example, politically, Sirach’s ekklēsiai are civic venues where the views of respected community members are voiced (15:15; 21:17; 38:33) and where honor and praise are bestowed upon the blameless (34:11). Judicially, an adulterous woman can be judged εἰς ἐκκλησίαν (23:22–24). Athenians considered adultery as eisangelia (treason), and until 335 B.C.E. publicly tried the offender before the ekklēsia (Hansen, The Athenian Assembly, 212).

51 See n. 33.

52 Even Levine’s opus magnum on ancient synagogues does not appear to include a discussion of ekklēsia as a synagogal entity (The Ancient Synagogue, esp. 763–96 [Subject Index]).

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Judean qhl in light of a contemporaneous institution in his own day (c. 132 B.C.E.). In other words, does Sirach view Ben Sira’s Judean qhl through the second century B.C.E. lens of a civic ekklēsia in the Greek East, a Jewish ekklēsia in Egypt, or a Jewish ekklēsia in Judea? While each option is possible, one seems preferable—ekklēsia as a public synagogue institution in Judea around 132 B.C.E. A reference in 1 Maccabees reinforces that possibility. 53 The ekklēsia which was convened in Jerusalem for the purpose of allowing the Spartans to present condolences to Simon Maccabeus on the passing of his brother Jonathan (c. 141 B.C.E.) is a public/civic assembly. 54 When Ben Sira’s grandson emigrates from Judea to Alexandria only nine years later and there translates qhl with the word ekklēsia he may have done so because the institution of the public ekklēsia still existed in Judea, specifically in Jerusalem.

Josephus uses the word ekklēsia 48 times, 55 9 of which are for a public assembly in the Second Temple period. 56 While Josephus may be using ekklēsia provincially for the sake of his Roman reading audience, his usage does not differ substantially from the public ekklēsiai described in Sirach and 1 Maccabees. 57 This fact is not unsurprising given the increased Hellenization of Judean society associated with Herod’s reign. Josephus’s writings, then, could be 53

1 Maccabees mentions two public ekklēsiai in Judea. One is a more ad hoc gathering (1 Macc 5:16) while the other appears to be a permanent civic institution (1 Macc 14:19).

54 1 Macc 14:19.

55 Josephus uses the word ekklēsia with at least three meanings: first, for the physical assembling of all Hebrews/Jews in a particular region (Ant. 3:84: “He called the multitude into an assembly [ekklēsia]”; also JW 7:412); second, to indicate the assembly of a subgroup of a larger group (Ant. 6:222: “and after coming to Samuel and finding an assembly [ekklēsia] of prophets of God”; also Ant. 8:222; 16:393); third, to imply that once an ekklēsia is dispersed it no longer exists institutionally (Ant. 3:306: “when the assembly [ekklēsia] was dispersed, they [the men], their wives, and children continued the lamentation”; also Ant. 8:122).

56 Josephus speaks nine times of public ekklēsiai, eight times of one in Jerusalem (Ant. 12.164 [Joseph Tobiad]; Ant. 13.216 [Simon Maccabeus]; Ant. 16.62 [Herod]; Ant. 16.135 [Herod]; Ant. 16.393 [Herod]; Ant. 19.332 [Simon]; War 1.550 [Herod]; War 1.654 [Herod]) and once of a public ekklēsia in Jericho (War 1.666 [Salome]).

57 Donald Binder helpfully differentiates between anachronism, provincialism, and bias (Into the Temple Courts, 89). “Anachronism” is the practice of interpreting earlier architectural and literary artifacts from the perspective of later evidence. “Provincialism” involves the attribution to other geographical regions, or social groupings, the sociocultural realities of one’s own geo-political region. “Bias” entails the interpretation or revision of source material for the purpose either of supporting one’s pre-existing suppositions or of creating new ideologically motivated conclusions.

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read as implying that local Jewish communities in Judea met en(eis) ekklēsia(n) within a proseuchē or a synagōgē, 58 that is, within a communal structure that facilitated Jewish public life. Such ekklēsia gatherings would have addressed issues related to local political, administrative, economic, judicial, and religious matters. Philo’s writings, on the other hand, focus our gaze away from Judea and its public/civic ekklēsiai toward Egypt, where it seems that at least one semipublic Jewish ekklēsia community may have pre-existed Christ-follower communities.

Egyptian Semi-Public Assemblies Named Ekklēsia? (Philo) Philo writes between 30 and 45 C.E. He uses the word ekklēsia 23 times. At least 2 of his ekklēsia references imply an Egyptian institution that is contemporaneous with his day. 59 These two ekklēsiai are mentioned in On Virtue (De virtutibus) 108 and The Special Laws (De specialibus legibus) book 1, sections 324–25. 60 De Virtutibus 108, in its entirety, reads: If any of them should wish to pass over into the Jewish community [τὴν Ἰουδαίων πολιτείαν], they must not be spurned with an unconditional refusal as children of enemies, but be so favoured that the third generation is invited to the congregation [εἰς ἐκκλησίαν] and made partakers in the divine revelations [λογῶν θειῶν] to which also the native born, whose lineage is beyond reproach, are rightfully admitted. 61 In Virt. 108 Philo refers to Deut 23:8 on how sojourners are to be treated.

Therein he enjoins his fellow Jews to focus their philanthropia upon one specific subset of Egyptians—new converts (epēlutai)—who are to be invited into the congregation (eis ekklēsian). 62 But does Philo write Virt. 108 as instruction for 58

Josephus mentions a purpose built structure for public communal gatherings located in Judea which is designated as a proseuchē (Vita 276–81, 294–95) (cf. ASSB, no. 22).

59 Runesson, Binder, and Olsson suggest one more instance (Deus 111) of Philo using ekklēsia in reference to a group in Egypt that was contemporaneous with his day (ASSB, no. 203, see esp. the “Comments” section). For an extensive assessment of Philo’s ekklēsia usage in Deus 111, see Korner, Before ‘Church’ (§4.0. Ekklēsia and Non-Civic Jewish Institutions).

60 See ASSB, nos. 201–202 (esp. see each of the “Comments” sections).

61 ASSB, no. 203.

62 For a complete discussion on Philo’s use of οἱ ἐπηλύται for proselytes (Virt. 102) see Peder Borgen, Philo of Alexandria: An Exegete for His Time (NovTSup 86; Leiden: Brill,

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his contemporary Alexandrian readership? Both Peder Borgen and Samuel Sandmel think so. 63 Borgen, for example, states that “it is evident that Philo does not only refer to the Laws of Moses as such, but that he also applies Deut 23:8 to the concrete Jewish community in his own time, since he writes ‘into the community of Jews (πρὸς τὴν Ἰουδαίων πολιτείαν).’” 64 If Sandmel and Borgen are correct, then Philo’s contemporaneous ekklēsia has one key characteristic: it is a forum for religious activity. Runesson, Binder, and Olsson agree. They note that Philo’s mention of the practice of “initiating” sojourners into an ekklēsia (Virt. 108) finds parallels in his description elsewhere of the religious activities in the Egyptian prayer halls (proseuchai). 65 In sum, then, Philo can be said not only to acknowledge the 1997), 256–59. See also Samuel Sandmel, who mentions, without any apparent need for argumentation, that Virt. 102–104 “speaks of proselytes” (Philo of Alexandria: An Introduction [New York/Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1979], 71). Walter T. Wilson states that Philo envisions three components to conversion: “the acceptance of monotheism, moral reform, and a new identity predicated on one’s relationship to God” (Philo of Alexandria: On Virtues [PACS 3; Leiden/Boston: Brill, 2011], 362–63).

63 Sandmel notes “two curious factors of omission” in Philo’s political discussions: (1) the political affairs in Judea (e.g., Maccabeans, Herod the Great); and (2) David as king. From this fact, Sandmel infers that “Philo is concerned more with the situation of the Jewish community in Alexandria as part of a unique politeuma than with the Judean situation and experience” (Sandmel, Philo of Alexandria, 103).

64 Borgen, Philo of Alexandria, 249. Klaus Berger similarly affirms a contemporary referent for the phrase πρὸς τὴν Ἰουδαίων πολιτείαν citing the obvious parallelism between πολιτεία and ἐκκλησία, and the fact that this phraseology is not used in LXX Deuteronomy for the Israelites in the desert (“Volksversammlung und Gemeinde Gottes.

Zu den Anfängen der christlichen Verwendung von ‘ekklesia,’” ZThK 73 [1976]: 167–207, esp. 190). Walter Wilson’s seminal study of De virtutibus translates Virt. 108 as an address to Philo’s Alexandrian contemporaries, rather than as information about Mosaic era praxis (Philo of Alexandria, 65). Trebilco disagrees on this point and contends, instead, that Virt. 108, which reinterprets Deut 23, uses ekklēsia in reference to a localized gathering of Israel in the desert, and not to a contemporary institution (“Why Did the Early Christians Call Themselves ἡ ἐκκλησία?” NTS 57 [2011]: 440–60, esp. 448).

65 Runesson, Binder, and Olsson, The Ancient Synagogue, 263. Within Virt. 80–108 another contemporary reference is made—the giving of tithes to the temple establishment. Aharon Oppenheimer claims that in Virt. 95 Philo is implicitly commenting on Jewish practice current in his day in which the temple tithes were purportedly paid to the priest. Elsewhere, however, Philo identified the Levites as recipients (Spec. 1.156) (The ‘Am Ha-Aretz: A Study in the Social History of the Jewish People in the Hellenistic–Roman Period [trans. I. H. Levine; ALGHJ VIII; Leiden: Brill, 1977], 39–40, nn. 46, 47).

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possibility of individual Egyptians converting to the πολιτεία of the Alexandrian Jews, but that along with their new religio-ethnic identity they are also incorporated into a new association, one that either names itself an ekklēsia or entitles its regularly convened assembly an ekklēsia.

De specialibus legibus 1.324–25 Spec. 1.324–25 is a second place where Runesson, Binder, and Olsson suggest that Philo mentions a potentially contemporaneous local assembly called ekklēsia. Spec. 1.324–25 reads: Thus, knowing that in assemblies (en tai ekklēsiai) there are not a few worthless persons who steal their way in and remain unobserved in the large numbers which surround them, it [the law] guards against this danger by precluding all the unworthy from entering the holy congregation (hierous syllogou). 66 Philo mentions an assembly of Jews (ekklēsia) which is attended by “worthless” persons who, conversely, are prevented from entering the holy congregation (hieros syllogos). Does Philo here refer to ancient or contemporary practice?

Peder Borgen notes that Spec. 1.324 begins Philo’s discussion of who is to be kept out of communal life. Among others, in Spec. 1.325–45 Philo lists sexual deviants (Deut 23:1–2) and polytheists. 67 Borgen points to Philo’s concluding comment in Spec. 1.345 (“we, the pupils and disciples of Moses”) as clearly indicating that “he has his own contemporary situation in mind.” 68 If Spec. 1.324–25 refers to Philo’s contemporary situation then the ekklēsiai are publicly accessible meetings of a group which calls itself “the holy congregation” (hieros syllogos). 69 While George van Kooten agrees that the hieros syllogos is a synagogue entity, he does not also consider the ekklēsia as being one.

Rather, he claims that the ekklēsia is a Greek “counter-example” of a Jewish 66

ASSB, no. 210.

See Runesson, Binder, and Olsson for a specific list of “the five classes of men symbolized in these laws in Deut 23” (The Ancient Synagogue, 260).

68 Borgen, Philo of Alexandria, 256.

69 Runesson, Binder, and Olsson note that “The Greek words hieros syllogos (without definite article) could also be translated as ‘a holy congregation.’ Philo often returns to this allegorical interpretation of Deut 23 frequently using the word ekklēsia and sometimes also syllogos.” By translating hieros syllogos as “a holy congregation,” they remove the impression that hieros syllogos is a sub-category of ekklēsia (The Ancient Synagogue, 260).

67

Korner, Ekklēsia as a Jewish Synagogue Term 69

institution. Such a bifurcation cannot be sustained, however, if Philo’s talk about the sacred nature of the “congregation” (syllogos) which gathers in ekklēsia warrants the conclusion reached by Berger, and affirmed by Runesson, Binder, and Olsson, that “ekklēsia and the synonymous syllogos . . . [probably] refer to some form of synagogue fellowship,” that is, Sabbath assembly. 70 Paul’s Ekklēsiai as Jewish Synagogal Entities?

I have brought three key witnesses to the stand who, to varying degrees, can be said to testify to Jewish synagogal entities called ekklēsia that existed contemporaneously with early Christ-followers: Sirach, Josephus, and Philo.

Their combined witness suggests that the word ekklēsia may very well designate publicly accessible gatherings of Jews during the Hellenistic (Judea) and Imperial periods (Judea and Alexandria), and perhaps even the permanent group identity of at least one semi-public Jewish association in Philo’s Alexandria (Virt. 108). It is to the socio-religious implications of such a fact with respect to Paul’s designation of his communities as ekklēsiai that I now turn.

Before focusing upon Pauline writings specifically, it is perhaps helpful first to review how the word ekklēsia is used throughout the New Testament.

First, not all Christ-follower communities across the Diaspora are explicitly identified as ekklēsiai. The epistles of James and Hebrews use ekklēsia but not necessarily as a permanent group identity. In 1 Peter the word ekklēsia is notable by its absence. This is even more striking given the fact that 1 Peter addresses Christ-followers across Asia Minor, which is where Paul established ekklēsiai (Galatia, Roman Asia), and where, only a few decades later, the author of Revelation writes to seven ekklēsiai (Roman Asia). 71 Second, not all Christ-followers who live in the same diasporic urban context appear to self-designate as an ekklēsia. Paul’s epistle to the Romans is a case in point. 72 Paul requests that the addressees of his epistle, whom he does not call an ekklēsia, extend greetings to an ekklēsia that meets elsewhere, specifically

70

Berger, “Volksversammlung,” 173–74; and Runesson, Binder, and Olsson, The Ancient Synagogue, 260.

71 1 Pet 1:1 reads, “To the exiles of the Dispersion in Pontus, Galatia, Cappadocia, Asia, and Bithynia.”

72 An argument from silence suggests that Paul does not call the entire community of Christ-followers in Rome an ekklēsia. Rather, he only explicitly describes one sub-group of Roman Christ-followers as an ekklēsia—the Roman Christ-followers who meet in the home of Aquila and Priscilla (16:3–5).

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within a house owned by Aquila and Priscilla. 73 Paul’s other four ekklēsia occurrences in the Roman epistle also do not refer to his Roman addressees but rather only to his diasporic communities. 74 Perhaps the fact that Paul is not the founder of the Roman community helps to explain why he does not address them as an ekklēsia. 75 Third, if the author of Acts uses ekklēsia provincially (or anachronistically) when writing about pre-Pauline Christ-follower communities, then Paul’s communities are the only sub-group within the pre-70 C.E. Jesus movement which self-designated collectively as ekklēsiai. 76 Irrespective of one’s stance on this issue, it is abundantly clear that this group designation predominates within writings attributed to or associated with Paul. Of the 114 references to the word ekklēsia within the New Testament, 77 Paul’s undisputed

73

Rom 16:3–5.

Rom 16:1, 4, 16, and 23.

75 I provide here a brief review of scholarship relative to the potential birth and makeup of the Roman community. Acts 2 claims that Jews from a number of regions throughout the Roman Empire (e.g., Cappadocia, Pontus, Asia) came to faith in Jesus as the Christos (2:9, 36–41). These also included Jews and Gentile proselytes from Rome (Acts 2:10; cf. Rom 1:7, klētoi hagioi). Philip Esler suggests that the “Rome-born Judeans” and “non-Judean synagogue-attenders and reverers of the Judean God (called ‘God-fearers’ in the NT) . . . could either have returned to Rome taking the gospel with them or passed it on to Roman visitors to Jerusalem” (Conflict and Identity in Romans, 101). See also Richard Longenecker, who reinforces Esler’s view with evidence from church fathers such as Eusebius (303 C.E.) and Ambrosiaster (4th century C.E.) (Introducing Romans: Critical Issues in Paul’s Most Famous Letter [Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 2011], 69–73).

Longenecker favors the view of Ambrosiaster that it was Jewish Christ-followers, who already lived in Rome, who introduced the gospel there (Introducing Romans, 71–73).

76 Post-70 C.E. writings which seem to use ekklēsia of their communities include Matthew, Acts, Ephesians, Colossians, 2 Thessalonians, 1 Timothy, 3 John, Revelation, 1 Clement, 2 Clement, Barnabas, Didache, The Martyrdom of Polycarp, and the writings of Ignatius and Justin Martyr. As historiography, the book of Acts may have priorities other than presenting historical fact for its own sake. As such, the description in Acts of prePauline communities in Judea self-designating as ekklēsiai need not necessarily be taken as emic terminology. The author of Acts may be using the term ekklēsia provincially—in other words, using a term that was familiar to his non-Judean reading audience (ekklēsia) rather than using the original pluralistic term adopted by the early Jesus movement in Jerusalem, which may have been hoi hagioi instead.

77 The word ekklēsia occurs 114 times in the writings of the New Testament (BDAG).

Occurrences are found in Matthew (3x), Acts (23x), Romans (5x), 1 Corinthians (22x), 2 Corinthians (9x), Galatians (3x), Ephesians (9x), Philippians (2x), Colossians (4x), 1 74

Korner, Ekklēsia as a Jewish Synagogue Term 71

writings predominate with 44. 78 The deutero-Pauline letters account for another 18 79 and the book of Acts for 23 occurrences. 80 Thus, Paul, together with later writers who claim some affiliation with him, account for 85 out of the 114 ekklēsia references.

Paul’s adoption of an ekklēsia group identity makes even more persuasive William Campbell’s argument that Pauline Christ-followers would not have seen themselves as some sort of new, a-cultural, universal association of Jesus worshippers disconnected from their Jewish roots. 81 Rather, in Rom 9–11, which chapters scholarship generally affirm as being central to Paul’s argument, 82 Paul theologically unites his Gentile Christ-followers with historic Israel. Therein, he metaphorically depicts Gentiles as being grafted into the “tree” of historic Israel by virtue of their faith in the Jewish Christos. 83 Yet these Gentiles cannot be named “Israel.” That name is reserved only for the socio-ethnic descendants of Abraham, including full proselytes to

Thessalonians (2x), 2 Thessalonians (2x), 1 Timothy (3x), Philemon (1x), Hebrews (2x), James (1x), 3 John (3x), and Revelation (20x).

78 The 44 Pauline usages of ekklēsia are found in: Romans (5x; 16:1, 4, 5, 16, 23); 1 Corinthians (22x; 1:2; 4:17; 6:4; 7:17; 10:32; 11:16, 18, 22; 12:28; 14:4, 5, 12, 19, 23, 28 [vv.

33b, 34, 35; disputed authorship]; 15:9; 16:1, 19 [2x]); 2 Corinthians (9x; 1:1; 8:1, 18, 19, 23, 24; 11:8, 28; 12:13); Galatians (3x; 1:2, 13, 22); Philippians (2x; 3:6; 4:15); 1 Thessalonians (2x; 1:1; 2:14); Philemon (1x; Phlm 2).

79 Ekklēsia occurs in Ephesians (9x; 1:22; 3:10, 21; 5:23, 24, 25, 27, 29, 32), Colossians (4x; 1:18, 24; 4:15, 16), 2 Thessalonians (2x; 1:1, 4), and 1 Timothy (3x; 3:5, 15; 5:16).

80 Mentions of the word ekklēsia occur in Acts 5:11; 7:38; 8:1, 3; 9:31; 11:22, 26; 12:1; 13:1; 14:23, 27; 15:3, 4, 22, 41; 16:5; 18:22; 19:32, 39, 40, 41; 20:17, 28.

81 William S. Campbell, Paul and the Creation of Christian Identity (London: T&T Clark, 2006).

82 William Campbell comments that “the place of chs. 9–11 as an integral part of the letter has been firmly established” (“The Addressees of Paul’s Letter to the Romans: Assemblies of God in House Churches and Synagogues?” in Between Gospel and Election: Explorations in the Interpretation of Romans 9–11, ed. Florian Wilk, J. Ross Wagner, and Frank Schleritt [Tübingen: Mohr Siebeck, 2010], 171–95, esp.171).

83 Cf. also Rom 4 and Gal 3:6–14. Paul does not appear concerned to locate Gentiles within the Abrahamic covenant, but more so into the faith lineage of Abraham. J. D. G. Dunn suggests that “‘covenant’ [in general] was not a major theological category for Paul’s own theologizing” (“Did Paul Have a Covenant Theology? Reflections on Romans 9:4 and 11:27,” in Celebrating Romans: Template for Pauline Theology, ed. Sheila E. McGinn [Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 2004], 3–19).

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“Judaism(s).” 84 Other ethnicities which identify with the faith of Abraham through their faith in the Jewish Christos require a different name. Granting both Jewish and Gentile followers of Jesus an ekklēsia identity solved well Paul’s conundrum. He reinforced their Abrahamic lineage through a linguistic correlation of his ekklēsia communities with the ekklēsia (Hebrew qāhāl) of Israel whose entrance into the promised land (e.g., LXX Josh 9:2) fulfilled God’s unconditional promise of land for Abraham’s descendants (Gen 15). 85 Contrary to Rost’s supersessionist interpretation, Paul Trebilco sees this socio-religious move as implicitly placing Paul’s communities into theological continuity with the historic Israel of the first testament. 86 What Trebilco does not note, and Runesson, Binder, and Olsson presage, is that pre-existing Jewish synagogue entities in Judea and Egypt which were called ekklēsia would have reinforced Paul’s socio-ethnic reformist agenda.

Such an institutional perspective on Paul’s ekklēsia associations is congruent with scholars who belong to the “Paul within Judaism Perspective,” 87 otherwise variously known as the “Radical New Perspective on Paul” 88 or “Beyond the New Perspective on Paul” (BNP). 89 Scholars of the Paul within

84

See my problematization of N. T. Wright’s ostensibly “middle view” (“incorporative christology”) wherein he posits that, for Paul, Jesus is the continuation of Israel in the latter days, and that all Christ-followers, whether Messianic Jews or Gentiles, together compose latter-day Israel (Paul and the Faithfulness of God [2 vols.; Christian Origins and the Question of God, vol. 4; Minneapolis: Fortress Press, 2013], 2.825–34, 1212) (Korner, Before ‘Church’; cf. 2.3.5. The Ekklēsia of Israel [LXX]). Five passages in particular form the crux of the discussion: Rom 2:17–29; 9:6; 11:26; Gal 6:16; and Phil 3:3.

85 In LXX Josh 9:2f (HB 8:35), God’s covenantal people are still called ἐκκλησία (qāhāl) after having entered the land.

86 Paul Trebilco suggests that through the use of ekklēsia “[early Christ-followers] could express their continuity with the OT people of God” (“Early Christians,” 446).

87 See especially Mark Nanos, “Introduction,” in Paul Within Judaism: Restoring the FirstCentury Context to the Apostle (Minneapolis: Fortress, 2015), 1–29. See also Runesson, “The Question of Terminology,” 53–78.

88 Kathy Ehrensperger, That We May Be Mutually Encouraged: Feminism and the New Perspective in Pauline Studies (London: T&T Clark, 2004), 39; Magnus Zetterholm, Approaches to Paul: A Student’s Guide to Recent Scholarship (Minneapolis: Fortress, 2009), 127–63; Pamela Eisenbaum, Paul Was Not a Christian: The Real Message of a Misunderstood Apostle (New York: HarperOne, 2009), 216.

89 For an extensive discussion of the similarities and differences between scholars of the New Perspective and the Beyond the New Perspective (BNP), along with a carefully nuanced comparative analysis of different views within the BNP “camp,” see J. Brian

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Judaism Perspective do not displace nor replace historical Israel with the “church” in God’s salvation history. 90 Rather, as Bill Campbell succinctly states, “The church and Israel [are] related but separate entities which should not be dissolved or merged in such a way that the sub-group identity of the one is lost or unrecognized.” 91 One could say that by ascribing a permanent ekklēsia identity to his Christ-followers Paul disavowed, not least from an institutional perspective, any perceptions that he was “parting ways” 92 with the Ioudaioi (Jews), 93 that is, with Judaism(s), “Jewishness,” or Jewish organizational forms. 94 Paul’s “ekklēsia identity construction project” did as much to identify his ekklēsiai in some fashion with the ethno-religious “tree” of Israel (Rom 11:17–

Tucker, Remain in Your Calling: Paul and the Continuation of Social Identities in 1 Corinthians (Eugene, OR: Pickwick Publications, 2011), 7–10.

90 For a comprehensive survey of the various scholarly positions taken with respect to the relationship between the church and Israel, see Christopher Zoccali’s dissertation research presented in Whom God Has Called: The Relationship of Church and Israel in Pauline Interpretation, 1920 to the Present (Eugene, OR: Pickwick Publications, 2010), esp. 71–89, 116–44.

91 Campbell, Paul, 101.

92 For suggestions that the ways parted by the end of the 1st century C.E., see the essays in Jews and Christians: The Parting of the Ways A.D. 70 to 135, ed. J. D. G. Dunn (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1999). For evidence that Christ-followers and Jews continued to exhibit social interaction in their dealings with one another even into the Late Antique period, see the collection of essays in The Ways that Never Parted: Jews and Christians in Late Antiquity and the Early Middle Ages, ed. A. Becker and A. Yoshiko Reed (Tübingen/Minneapolis: Mohr Siebeck/Fortress, 2003/2007).

93 Throughout this paper, I have used the term “Jewish,” rather than “Judean,” in contradistinction to Steve Mason’s approach. Mason asserts that Ιουδαϊκός is better translated as “Judean” rather than the traditional “Jewish” (“Jews, Judeans, Judaizing, Judaism,” 457–512). For a judicious critique of Mason’s position, particularly as it relates to (1) Mason’s “terminological distinction between ancient contexts . . . and the late antique and modern situation,” and (2) “the name of the place associated with Jew,” see Runesson, “Inventing Christian Identity: Paul, Ignatius, and Theodotius I,” in Exploring Early Christian Identity (WUNT226; ed. B. Holmberg; Tübingen: Mohr Siebeck, 2008), 59–92, esp. 64–70.

94 Runesson, Binder, and Olsson ask, rhetorically, whether it is “possible to argue that when a group of Christ-believers use ekklēsia to designate their institution . . . they are departing from either ‘the Jewish community,’ from ‘Jewishness,’ or from Jewish organisational forms, as has so often been assumed” (The Ancient Synagogue, 11, n. 21).

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24) as it did to present his communities as active pro-dēmokratia, 95 yet not counter-imperial, 96 participants in the political culture of the Greek East. 97 95

Epigraphic evidence for civic ekklēsiai in the 1st cent. C.E. is limited (15 occurrences; see Korner, Before ‘Church’; cf. Appendix #2: Ekklēsia in First Century C.E. Inscriptions).

This dearth of inscriptional evidence belies the fact that the political influence of the dēmos continued to be substantial given the exponential growth of euergetism (benefaction) during the early Imperial period in Asia Minor. Thus, one must be careful of falling into any word-concept confusion whereby one is tempted to claim that the lack of 1st century C.E. inscriptional evidence for the word ekklēsia indicates general disuse of civic ekklēsiai by dēmoi. Even if the civic decree of a dēmos does not explicitly mention an ekklēsia one can presume nonetheless that such a demotic decree was made within an ekklēsia (see Korner, Before ‘Church’; cf. §2. Ekklēsiai in the Imperial Period: The Politics of Oligarchy, Hierarchy, and Democracy).

96 Paul’s ascription of his non-civic groups with a political identity (ekklēsia) provided them with a political “defense mechanism” that would have countered any outsider perceptions of socio-political subversion among his communities. It would have been difficult for Roman suspicions to have been aroused over a voluntary association in the Greek East, the socio-religious praxeis of which portrays it as a paragon of civic order and dēmokratia, and the very name of which situates it in the center of political culture in Asia Minor (see further in Korner, “The Ekklēsia of Early Christ-Followers in Asia Minor as the Eschatological New Jerusalem: Counter-Imperial Rhetoric?” in Urban Dreams and Realities in Antiquity: Remains and Representations of the Ancient City [Mnemosyne Supplements: History and Archaeology of Classical Antiquity 375; ed. Adam Kemezis; Leiden: Brill, 2015]: 455–99; idem, Before ‘Church’ [§2.2. Ekklēsia as Political Identity: Counter-Imperial Ideology?]; idem, “Paul’s Ekklēsia Associations: Counter-Imperial or Pro-Dēmokratia Communities?” [paper to be presented at the annual meeting of the Society of Biblical Literature, Atlanta, GA, Nov. 24, 2015]).

97 Political culture is the social expression of the underlying mentality and practices that inform political practice. It is particularly evident in Imperial period inscriptions from Asia Minor poleis. Onno van Nijf identifies three non-institutional aspects of vibrant political culture: festivals, monuments of leadership (e.g., honorific inscriptions), and emotive communities. Seminal discussions of vibrant political culture in Imperial period poleis in Asia Minor include: (1) Onno van Nijf, The Civic World of Professional Associations in the Roman East (DMAHA XVII; Amsterdam: J. C. Gieben, 1997); idem, “Public Space and the Political Culture of Roman Termessos,” in Political Culture in the Greek City after the Classical Age, ed. O. van Nijf and R. Alston, with the assistance of C. G. Williamson (Leuven: Peeters, 2011), 215–42; (2) Arjan Zuiderhoek, “On the Political Sociology of the Imperial Greek City,” GRBS 48 (2008): 417–45; idem, The Politics of Munificence in the Roman Empire: Citizens, Elites and Benefactors in Asia Minor (GCRW; Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2009); (3) Stephen Mitchell, “Festivals, Games, and Civic Life in Roman Asia Minor,” JRS 80 (1990): 183–93; and (4) H. W. Pleket, “Political Culture and Political Practice in the Cities of Asia Minor in the Roman

Korner, Ekklēsia as a Jewish Synagogue Term 75

If I might be allowed an aside, I would suggest that it is best to avoid using the anachronistic term “church” in academic discussions, if by that translation scholars intend a reference to a universal ekklēsia comprising all pre70 Christ-followers. As I have suggested, not all pre-70 Christ-followers appear to have self-designated collectively as ekklēsiai. It may be time to find a different English term by which to discuss early Christ-follower communities. Perhaps rendering ekklēsia as “assembly” would suffice, especially since that word is ambiguous enough by itself to indicate either a semi-public meeting of Christfollowers or a semi-public association of Christ-followers.

But I digress. Back now to Paul. While Paul’s designation of his communities as ekklēsiai may have reinforced their Jewish heritage, one of the unintended consequences at the intramural level may have been a resultant socio-religious differentiation of Paul’s communities from their Jewish compatriots in the apostolic community in Jerusalem. This possibility seems likely if, as Paul Trebilco, 98 Robert Jewett 99 and others 100 suggest, the term hoi hagioi is, at times, used in technical fashion as a socio-religious group identity for Christ-followers associated with the apostolic community in Jerusalem. In these instances hoi hagioi is best translated as “the holy ones,” not as “the saints,” since “saints” is a theological construct which includes all Christ-followers across the Roman Empire. If some sort of “denominational divide,” so to speak, did exist between Jerusalem-loyal hoi hagioi and Pauline ekklēsiai, then Paul would have required a theological strategy for bridging this socio-religious divide.

That strategy appears to be evident in Paul’s use of a theology of Jewish sacred space, one to which both Jerusalem and Pauline loyal Christ-followers could adhere. Only in his epistles to the Romans and Corinthians does he Empire,” in Politische Theorie und Praxis im Altertum, ed. W. Schuller (Darmstadt: Wissenschaftliche Buchgesellschaft, 1998), 204–16. Mitchell and Pleket both argue that politics permeated cultural forms and religious life.

98 Trebilco claims that “the use of οἱ ἁγίοι as a self-designation originated with Aramaicspeaking Jewish Christians in Jerusalem at a very early point” (Self-designations and Group Identity in the New Testament [Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2012], 134; see the fuller discussion in 104–37).

99 Jewett, Romans, 114.

100 Commenting on Acts 9:13, Richard I. Pervo implies that the group designation by which (Hebrew) Jewish Christ-followers in Jerusalem self-identify is the term hoi hagioi (Acts: A Commentary [Hermeneia; Minneapolis: Fortress Press, 2009], 248). Richard Bauckham makes that implication explicit: “there is good reason to suppose that it [hoi hagioi] goes back to the early Jerusalem church” (“James and the Jerusalem Community,” in Jewish Believers in Jesus, 55–95, esp. 57).

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metaphorically represent Christ-followers with temple imagery 101 and as the body of the Jewish Christos. 102 This provides an implicit basis from which Paul can rhetorically engender cooperation and harmony between his diasporic communities and Jerusalem, not least in Corinth among the differentiated subgroups of Christ-followers who say “I belong to Paul” or “I belong to Cephas.” 103 The purpose of Paul’s theological arguments, then, goes beyond the crossing and mending of a Jewish–Gentile ethnic divide; they build a unifying bridge between differentially designated Christ-follower sub-groups in the early Jesus movement.

When it comes to the extramural implications of Paul’s collective designation of his Christ-followers as ekklēsiai, there are at least two ways in which diasporic non-Messianic Jews may have viewed Paul’s ekklēsia associations. First, if Philo’s mention of Jewish ekklēsiai in Egypt is indicative of a broader use of the word ekklēsia within the Diaspora for Jewish associations, then Paul’s communities could have been perceived as trans-local extensions of a Jewish synagogal entity, that is, of semi-public Jewish associations named ekklēsia.

If the lack of literary and epigraphic evidence for Jewish ekklēsia associations in the Greek East means that ekklēsia largely was “free” as a 101

Rom 12:1; 1 Cor 3:16, 17; 2 Cor 6:16; cf. 1 Pet 1:4, 5. Paul is not alone among Jewish Second Temple or New Testament writers in his conception of a people as a temple. For example, in 1QS 8.5–6 the “council of the Community” is called “a holy house for Israel [i.e., temple] and the foundation of the holy of holies of Aaron.” Paul is alone, though, in conceiving of a people-group named ekklēsia as a metaphorical naos. For metaphorical conceptions of people as sacred architecture see, for example, Bertil Gärtner, The Temple and the Community in Qumran and the New Testament: A Comparative Study in the Temple Symbolism of the Qumran Texts and the New Testament (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1965), 57; R. J. McKelvey, The New Temple: The Church in the New Testament (OTM; Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1969); Robert A. Briggs, Jewish Temple Imagery in the Book of Revelation (New York: Peter Lang Publishing, 1999); Beate Ego, Armin Lange, and Peter Pilhofer, eds., Gemeinde ohne Tempel: Zur Substituierung und Transformation des Jerusalemer Tempels und seines Kults im Alten Testament, antiken Judentum und frühen Christentum (WUNT 118; Tübingen: Mohr Siebeck, 1999).

102 In 1 Cor 12: 27–28, Paul appears to parallel “the body of Christ” with “the ekklēsia,” and “individual . . . members” with “apostles . . . prophets . . . teachers [etc.].” See also Rom 12:5. For a detailed discussion of Paul’s “body” metaphor, see Robert Jewett, Paul’s Anthropological Terms: a Study of Their Use in Conflict Settings (Leiden: Brill, 1971), 200– 304. See also Michelle V. Lee, Paul, the Stoics, and the Body of Christ (SNTS 137; Cambridge/New York: Cambridge University Press, 2006), 8.

103 1 Cor 1:12.

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diasporic group designation, and if in Judea public ekklēsiai were convened, as Josephus claims, then non-Messianic Jews could have perceived Paul’s ekklēsiai as being extensions of public Jewish society in the Diaspora. This would have presented Paul’s ekklēsiai as diasporic “satellites” in relation to other Judean public ekklēsiai. Paul’s ekklēsiai would then have been viewed as loci for the full expression of all facets of Jewish life, including its ethno-religious, social, political, economic, and judicial dimensions.

Such a self-presentation would have received even greater reinforcement in Paul’s claim that his trans-locally connected ekklēsiai composed a supra-local, or universal, entity known as Ekklēsia (1 Cor 12:28). If such a conception was seen by diasporic Jews to allude to the supra-local ekklēsia of Israel from the desert tradition (e.g., Deut 23:4), then Jewish perceptions that Paul’s Ekklēsia/ekklēsiai of Christos-followers laid claim to being the full expression of the ethno-religious, social, political, economic, and judicial dimensions of Judean life would have gained reinforcement.

If Paul’s ekklēsiai were perceived as public institutions, then Paul’s claim to have been flogged five times by Jews gains more clarity (1 Cor 11:23). If Paul’s ekklēsia associations were seen as being diasporic “satellites” of public Judean ekklēsiai, then Paul would have been received by Jews in the Diaspora as acting in some fashion as an ambassadorial archisynagōgos. This would have made any disputes which arose between Paul and a synagogue association matters of an intra-muros concern, and any religiously oriented issues disputed therein matters of public concern that also involve the realm of Jewish politics and jurisprudence. A judicial response, such as flogging, would not have been outside the realm of due process possibilities. This provides one more factor by which to explain why Jewish communities would have felt justified in flogging Paul, and, on the flip side, why Paul would have acquiesced to such treatment.

Alternatively, Paul’s ekklēsiai may have been viewed, particularly by non-Jews, as being metaphorical cleruchies (colonies) 104 of the “Jerusalem 104

A cleruchy was an ancient Athenian colony in which the cleruchs, or settlers, maintained their political allegiance to Athens and retained their Athenian citizenship.

Two Athenian cleruchies (Delos, Samos) are associated with inscriptional evidence of a Greco-Roman association which names its semi-public assembly an ekklēsia: (1) IDelos 1519 (167/6 B.C.E.) recounts the successful outcome of a decision reached in the ekklēsia (“assembly”) of the Tyrian association of merchants, shippers, and warehousemen to send an embassy to Athens for permission to construct a sanctuary for Herakles. See discussions of IDelos 1519 by Kloppenborg (“Edwin Hatch,” 231) and Harland (Associations, 44–45, 111); (2) Samos 119 (n.d.) is an inscription wherein mention is made of a gymnastic association that gathers (synagō) eis ekklēsian within the palaistra of

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above.” 105 One could say, in not dissimilar fashion to Philo’s use of ekklēsia (Virt.

108), that Paul encouraged individual Jews and non-Jews to submit to the πολιτεία of “Jerusalem above.” In so doing, he envisioned them not only gaining a new religio-ethnic identity, but also being incorporated into a new association, one that both names itself an ekklēsia and also names its regularly convened assembly an ekklēsia.

Conclusion In conclusion, I would suggest that irrespective of whether Paul’s communities were perceived as “satellites” of Judean ekklēsiai or as diasporic Jewish associations, his designation of them as ekklēsiai would have served to minimize Jewish perceptions of his communities as being “other” relative to “Judaisms” within the matrix of pluriform Second Temple Judaism (and vice versa). The widespread use of ekklēsia terminology within the Greco-Roman and Jewish worlds granted Paul’s trans-local associations an increased missional relevance within the Diaspora and in particular would have served, not least at the institutional level, to locate them socially with Jews, Jewishness, and “Judaism.”

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the gerousia in order to enact an honorific decree (psēphisma) for a benefactor (euergētēs).

See earlier publications of Samos 119 by Paul Frédéric Girard (“Inscriptions de Samos,” BCH 5 [1881]: 477–91, esp. 480) and Louis Robert (“Inscriptions de Lesbos et de Samos,” BCH 59 [1935]: 471–88, esp. 476–77).

105 Gal 4:26.

‘A Remnant of Them Will Be Saved’ (Rom 9:27): Understanding Paul’s Conception of the Faithfulness of God to Israel 1 William S. Campbell University of Wales, Trinity Saint David, UK | w.s.campbell@uwtsd.ac.uk JJMJS No. 2 (2015): 79---101

Introduction The thesis of this paper is that, however imperfect at any period of history God’s people actually were, in Paul’s understanding a holy remnant in Israel was the means used by God via the Spirit to transmit the faith to the next generation, thus leading eventually to the consummation of his purpose. Though the term ὑπόλειμμα occurs only in Rom 9:27 in a citation from Isa 10, 2 and λεῖμμα again in 11:5, the theme of the remnant is important in Romans, particularly in chapters 9–11.

Primarily, it denotes God’s continuing purpose for Israel, despite the fact that “the rest”—i.e. those not part of the remnant—are unconvinced by Paul’s gospel. Any future for “all Israel” proceeds via “the remnant” to “the rest,” and any valid interpretation must do justice to both of these themes in Rom 9– 11. This is simply to assert that for Paul, the remnant’s purpose is to serve a saving function toward “the rest” of Israel, and not merely for the ἐκκλησία.

There are two key aspects on which I will focus in this paper, firstly the role of the remnant in relation to the previous continuity of God’s faithful activity in history in relation to Israel, and secondly the relevance of this continuity for the ἐκκλησία of Jews and Gentiles. The issues guiding us here are the remnant as a remnant of Israel, excluding Gentiles; the remnant as a sign of divine providence; the extent of the remnant; the remnant as indicator and 1

An earlier version of this article was presented as a short paper at the SNTS Annual Meeting 2014, in Szeged, Hungary.

2 Paul has possibly conflated Isa 10:22–23 with a similar oracle in Isa 28:22b. For further discussion of the terminology and scriptural contexts, see J. Ross Wagner, Heralds of the Good News: Isaiah and Paul in Concert in the Letter to the Romans (Leiden: Brill, 2003), 95–100.

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evidence for the faithfulness of God to Israel and the relevance of this for understanding God’s faithfulness.

The Remnant Is the Remnant of Israel As noted above, the initial explicit reference to the remnant in Rom 9–11 occurs in 9:27, where we find Paul’s citation stating, in the words of the prophet Isaiah, that “a remnant will be saved.” And this is succeeded by the severe reminder, “If the Lord of hosts had not left us children (σπέρμα), we would have fared like Sodom and been made like Gomorrah.” Thus Paul recognizes in 9:29 that the existence of a remnant of any size is due only to the mercy of the Lord, 3 not to any qualities in Israel herself. As Stanley Stowers states, “The Hebrew Bible tells many stories about times when the leaders and a large number of the people acted unfaithfully under particular conditions. These are always stories of salvation. Some of the faithful remain, and God finds a way to use the remnant to bring the people back to him. There is never a serious question of God abandoning the covenant and revoking his promises to Israel.” 4 In the next verse, 9:30, Paul contrasts the mission to Gentiles with that to his own people: “Gentiles who did not pursue righteousness have attained it.” Yet despite mentioning Gentiles, this reference to them is only incidental here. Paul does not suggest that Gentiles in Christ might form part of the remnant.

An equal focus on both Jews and Gentiles might seem to receive support from the fact that the text we are focusing upon, Rom 9:27, follows shortly after Rom 9:24, where, for the first time in Rom 9, the Gentiles receive mention; the only other reference in this chapter to Gentiles is at 9:30, as we have just noted. If we were to proceed directly from 9:23 to 9:24 without a break, it might seem that Gentiles are equally or primarily the object of the divine purpose in this text, but in my view it is best to designate 9:24–29 as a subsection which may be titled “The Inclusion of Gentiles.” 5 Yet this is a subsection only, 3

Cf. Charles E. B. Cranfield, “[T]he preservation of even a remnant is a miracle of divine grace,” The Epistle to the Romans Vol. 2 (Edinburgh: T&T Clark, 1979), 502.

4 A Rereading of Romans: Justice, Jews and Gentiles (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1974), 296.

5 Joseph Fitzmyer titles the subsection 9:24–29 as “God Does Not Act Arbitrarily.” He is typical of commentators in that he sees Hosea’s words as directed to the Northern Kingdom of Israel but freely adapted by Paul to illustrate God’s election and the divine choice of those who were otherwise unworthy to become privileged ones; see Romans: A New Translation with Introduction and Commentary (Anchor Bible 3; New York: Doubleday, 1993), 573. But see Heikki Räisänen, who titles the new subsection as “The Inclusion of Gentiles” in “Paul, God and Israel: Romans 9–11 in Recent Research,” The

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and it is clear from 9:27–29 that Paul’s primary concern at this point (and in chapters 9–11 as a whole) is not Gentiles; the theme is Israel—“Isaiah cries out concerning Israel” (v. 27). Thus the remnant must be a remnant of Israel, and does not include Gentiles despite the brief earlier reference to them. The reason for my retaining the phrase “remnant of them” as in the RSV is because “of them,” though absent in the Greek text, clearly indicates that the remnant is a remnant of Israel only, thus not including Gentiles.

C. H. Dodd 6 and other commentators have criticized Paul for misusing citations that refer to Israel by arbitrarily applying these to Gentiles. As C. H. Dodd, Karl Barth 7 and others all recognize, the scriptural references apply firstly and primarily to Israel. But does Paul actually recognize this? He certainly does. Paul uses the “not my people” citation 8 of Hos 2:23 in 9:25, to refer not primarily to the inclusion of Gentiles but to the northern kingdom of Israel (as Social World of Formative Christianity and Judaism: Essays in Tribute to Howard Clark Kee, ed. Jacob Neusner et. al, (Philadelphia: Fortress, 1998), 178–226 (183).

6 Dodd comments, “It is rather strange that Paul has not observed that this prophecy referred to Israel, rejected for its sins, but destined to be restored, . . . strange because it would have fitted so admirably the doctrine of the restoration of Israel which he is to expound in chapter 11.” The Epistle to the Romans (London: Hodder and Stoughton, 1932), 160.

7 Cf. Barth’s comment, “To whom did these words originally apply? To the Israel of the kings of Samaria, which had been rejected by God and which had not been granted such a promise. And because these words have now been fulfilled in the calling of the Gentiles to the church of Jesus Christ, they obviously also speak with renewed force in their original sense; they also speak of the rejected disobedient Israel. Now that he has fulfilled it superabundantly among the rejected without, how could God’s promise not apply also to the rejected within, to whom he had once addressed it?” A Shorter Commentary on Romans (London: SCM, 1959), 122–23.

8 As Robert Jewett notes, “Although the material from the book of Hosea is composite, it is introduced here as a single citation.” For a thorough discussion of Paul’s use of Scripture in this pericope see Jewett’s Romans: A Commentary (Hermeneia Series; Minneapolis: Fortress, 2007), 598–605. A summary of Paul’s creative and sometimes apparently loose rendering and combination of scriptural texts suggests a careful and focused use of these rather than a subversive or casual proof-texting. See Richard Hays, Echoes of Scriptures in the Letters of Paul (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1993), and also Kathy Ehrensperger, “Paul and the Authority of Scripture: A Feminist Perspective,” in As It Is Written: Studying Paul’s Use of Scripture, ed. Stanley E. Porter and Christopher D. Stanley (Atlanta: SBL, 2008), 291–319.

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the other two citations that follow it obviously do). “Not my people” did not initially mean Gentiles, but referred to the restoration of these particular tribes.

Thus the three citations in this pericope all have the same theme, i.e.

Israel. Unreceptive Israel, like the northern tribes, will be restored. What is asserted here is a restoration within Israel, rather than a displacement of Israel

by Gentiles. It should come as no surprise that even in an incidental discussion of the mission to the Gentiles, the scriptures of Israel retain their primary reference to Israel. Only thus does the Hosea citation have implications for the inclusion of Gentiles, in that with the restoration of Israel, another “non– people,” the Gentiles, will also be blessed. 9 Paul does use the scriptural citation in a secondary sense, typologically, to apply to Gentiles also, but only after he has first used it to apply to Israel. This understanding of Paul’s use of “not people” terminology, unlike Dodd’s interpretation, does not involve Paul in a confusion of the identity of Jews and Gentiles. 10 But having demonstrated that the remnant is a remnant of Israel, and that this does not include Gentiles, it has still to be recognized that Paul grieves deeply because the majority of Israel, the rest, do not trust in Christ. Paul is not content with the fact that a holy remnant still exists. He resembles Moses in that he identifies with Israel, and contrasts Moses with Elijah, who stands over against Israel. Yet that fact does not diminish the remnant’s significance.

In Paul’s theological thought, the remnant sanctifies the whole of Israel, even though the majority are temporarily hardened—“If the dough offered as first fruits is holy, so is the whole lump” (11:16)—this is precisely the same argument Paul uses about the children of wives with unbelieving husbands in 1 Cor 7:12–14. 11 The importance of the remnant therefore for Paul is that, to a great extent, it preserves the identity of the whole people. There can be no doubt that Paul recognizes and emphasizes the obstinacy of Israel in Rom 10 using the 9

Thus Fitzmyer translates Rom 15:8 as, “For I tell you, Christ became a servant to the circumcised to show God’s fidelity, to confirm the promises made to the patriarchs, and Gentiles have glorified God for his mercy,” Romans, 704 (emphasis mine).

10 I have developed this new understanding of these verses in my essay “Divergent Images of Paul and his Mission,” Reading Israel in Romans: The Legitimacy and Plausibility of Divergent Readings, ed. Cristina Grenholm and Daniel Patte (Harrisburg: Trinity Press International, 2000), 187–211, now included in my Unity and Diversity in Christ: Interpreting Paul in Context (Eugene: Cascade Books, 2013), 67–90. Where relevant, I will draw upon some aspects of this essay.

11 Thus it appears that Paul is aware of two categories of people—those following Christ and those not following Christ—but also of another group sanctified by association with the faithful.

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words from Deut 32:21: “So I will make them jealous with a ‘no people.’” 12 Here God severely disciplines Israel by means of the nations, but nevertheless the Deut 32 passage ends, as Philip F. Esler has noted, with the punishment of the nations and the vindication of Israel. 13 The remnant in fact indicates that God has never completely deserted his people despite their failings, but that in and through this holy remnant he has declared and demonstrated his faithfulness up until now to the whole of Israel, and now in the present, according to Paul’s scenario, Gentiles in Christ will thus also be blessed.

The Remnant Is a Sign of Divine Providence—“Chosen by Grace” Paul describes the remnant as “chosen by grace” (Rom 11:5). This remnant is not a historical accident determined by the erratic events surrounding the first proclamation of the gospel, but exists by the purpose and power of God. Of course, the remnant, i.e. those Jews who followed Christ, were persuaded and empowered by the preaching of the gospel, not in a theological vacuum of absolute divine power but through normal human response in historical contexts. And yet Paul views this theologically as an election of grace, κατ’ ἐκλογὴν χάριτος, indicating, I think, that he views this remnant as a necessary and inalienable link in the process of salvation.

Theoretically, in Paul’s view, God could have raised up children from stones, but he chose not to do so and worked through the people Israel, imperfect as any other people, to achieve his purposes. Thus having chosen to work through human flesh in history, the purpose of God had to be realized through prophets and the faithful who lived the life of faith in historical contexts, and thus this was passed on to succeeding generations, especially by the teaching of the children, so often stressed in Scripture. Working thus within human history and with human vehicles in the transmission of faith across the centuries, continuity was ensured by a faithful remnant, necessary for the social transmission of faith. The remnant was the chosen vehicle for the eventual realization and consummation of God’s promises for Israel and the nations.

12

As Cranfield notes, following F. F. Bruce, Paul’s familiarity with the Hebrew text would suggest a link between “no people” (lo am) here and “not my people” (lo ammi) in Hos 1:9f, a passage he has already cited; Romans, 539.

13 Cf. Conflict and Identity in Romans: The Social Setting of Paul’s Letter (Minneapolis: Fortress, 2003), 293.

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The problem, however, lies not in affirming the existence of a remnant but with its identification and historical description. Scholars are clear about the fact of a remnant, but often skeptical about its extent, or how to identify divine activity in history, as e.g. in Ernst Käsemann’s assertion, “In its earthly course, it is discontinuous and cannot be calculated. . . . Its continuity is the power of God.” 14 I understand why Käsemann in his contemporary German context opposed an earthly continuity that developed into an ideology used as an alternative to the freedom and power of God, and an understanding of an immanent spirit that was not the Spirit of God. I also recognize that despite his opposition to existential interpretations of the gospel, he shared some of its limitations as regards historical claims. 15 But though Käsemann was correct to oppose such ideologies at the time, and though his stance has some theological validity, it is deficient in that it allows no space for the socio-historical transmission of faith. It is a fact of life that the genesis and formation of Christ-followers in the first century as today emerges in a faith context, within the family and the social group, and then in relation to the wider social context. The weakness and imperfection of human beings do not justify a rejection of the normal pattern of faith that teaches “the promise is to you and to your children, and to all that are far off, as many as the Lord our God calls to him” (Acts 2:39). Käsemann himself views God’s 14

Commentary on Romans (ET; London: SCM, 1980), 217. Käsemann argues against “a category of salvation history running its course in chronological continuity” on the grounds that this is “inappropriate as a hermeneutical principle for the illumination of Paul’s picture of Abraham.” He notes that the idea of a holy remnant, so important for Jewish Christianity, in providing a verifiable transition from Israel according to the flesh to Christianity, plays no part in Paul’s writings except for Rom 9:27–29; 11:4–5, 13–16. “The Faith of Abraham in Romans 4,” Perspectives on Paul (London: SCM, 1971), 79–101 (87).

15 But it is worth noting that Käsemann was very critical of G. Klein’s claim that Paul’s theology radically profanes and paganizes the history of Israel (“radikal entheiligt und paganisiert . . . die Geschichte Israels”) in “Römer iv und die Idee der Heilsgeschichte,” Evangelische Theologie, 23:424–47. Käsemann deplores Klein’s individualism in which Abraham becomes merely “the cipher of a contingent historical figure” (Romans, 125– 27). Instead Käsemann emphasises Abraham and Israel as the bearer of the promise, opposing both the concepts of the church as “spiritual Israel” and as “ideal Israel.” “For Paul the church does not simply replace Israel. It is not a new thing with no dimension of depth historically, which then becomes merely a historic entity” (Romans, 261–63).

Käsemann goes as far as to ask, “Is there in fact a continuity of the promise in earthly Israel which, however, is not sustained or guaranteed by the people as such but solely by the acting God? If so, then God is in truth this continuity and Israel is simply the earthly sphere chosen by him” (263).

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righteousness as his “sovereignty over the world revealing itself eschatologically in Jesus.” 16 He notes that even though, according to Paul in Rom 4:11–12, everything depends on faith, not on becoming a proselyte, and thus “Judaism is robbed of both Abraham and circumcision,” Paul in 4:12 “hastens to qualify an exaggerated statement. An on-going relation of the patriarch to Judaism is now acknowledged. In fact the apostle is concerned to be able to call Abraham also the father of the circumcision, since any other course would take the promise away from Israel and contest its salvation history.” 17 For our purposes here, it is sufficient to note that even Käsemann cannot avoid speaking at certain points about Israel’s salvation history.

Of course there can be no objective identification within a historical context of groups/collectives as elect, but that does not mean that one cannot recognize within this pattern of thought faithful obedience wherever it is found.

John Calvin’s pattern was probably wise in that whilst he refused to allow the specific identification of the elect, when he preached to his congregations he preached to them as if they were the elect. Not all Israel was ever faithful at any one time, but so too God never left himself without witnesses, as if there could have been a time when he was not fully present with his world. From a theological perspective, the birth of Christ took place within the divine purpose, but as Luke reminds us, within a people, some of whom at least were waiting and watching in age-long hope of redemption. Luke reminds us of what we might now term the social capital of Israel. 18 But on the other hand, J. Louis Martyn asserts that in the gospel Christ steps onto the scene as if God had been entirely

16

“The Righteousness of God in Paul,” New Testament Questions of Today (London: SCM, 1980), 168–82 (184).

17 Cf. Commentary on Romans, 116. Similarly, when commenting on Rom 9:6–13 in relation to Rom 11:11–24, Käsemann asserts, “Previously the emphasis was on the selection which breaks the earthly continuity again and again. Now, conversely, the faithfulness which makes earthly continuity possible is underscored” (Romans, 308).

18 Adolf Schlatter, by no means uncritical of the Jews and Judaism, nevertheless asserted, “The entire teaching of Jesus, and therefore also the whole thought of the church, is built from materials that had been developed in Israel, which is why there is no New Testament concept without a model (Vorbildung) in the theology of the synagogue.” Cited in Anders Gerdmar, Roots of Theological Anti-Semitism: German Biblical Interpretation from Herder to Semler and from Kittel to Bultmann (Leiden: Brill, 2009), 257.

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absent or never stepped on the scene previously! 19 This is because Martyn’s interest and focus is upon an “Israel of God” understood as the “church of Christ,” and not the Israel of Rom 9–11 or of most recent careful interpretations of Gal 6:16. 20 What needs to be clearly affirmed is that for Paul, even in the 19

Martyn has a preference for the language of invasion in a form I am not familiar with in Käsemann, who is claimed as a forerunner of apocalyptic as Martyn understands this, e.g., “One who has been on the other side rips the curtain apart, steps through to our side, altering irrevocably our time and space”; “From Paul to Flannery O’Connor with the Power of Grace,” Theological Issues in the Letters of Paul (Nashville: Abingdon, 1997), 282. Cf. also Martyn’s “Afterword: The Human Moral Dilemma,” Apocalyptic Paul: Cosmos and Anthropos in Romans 5–8, ed. B. R. Gaventa (Waco: Baylor University, 2013), 156–66. Here Martyn refers to the “tectonic shift presently occurring in Pauline studies” which was “spawned originally and centrally by the work of Ernst Käsemann” (161). Cf. my essay “Ernst Käsemann on Romans: the Way Forward or the End of An Era?,” Modern Interpretations of Romans: Tracking Their Hermeneutical/Theological Trajectory, ed. Daniel Patte and Christina Grenholm (London: T&T Clark, 2013), 161–86.

In my view, Käsemann and Stendahl represent two distinct attitudes to Paulinism.

Käsemann was content to modify Bultmann’s existentialist approach but Stendahl wanted a fresh start. Stendahl was in fact seeking a new perspective, whereas Käsemann because of his concern for justification by faith was seeking to defend what for many was then the Pauline consensus. But Käsemann did not seek to found a school, and he was so critical of inadequate, uncritical scholarship that few doctoral students were brave enough to choose him as their Doktorvater. The historical roots of at least some of the current conceptions of Pauline apocalyptic thought are very mixed, more of doubtful, hybrid parentage than of Käsemann alone. For Käsemann, apocalyptic was his favorite weapon against a narrow South German pietism as well as an individualist existentialism that could not fully represent the breadth and depth of Paul’s thought. His debate with Stendahl in reaction to Stendahl’s famous 1963 essay “The Apostle Paul and the Introspective Conscience of the West” (“Justification and Salvation History in the Epistle to the Romans,” New Testament Questions of Today [London: SCM, 1971], 60–78), demonstrates the difficulty of relating his work to other contemporary strands of Pauline scholarship indebted also to Stendahl and Sanders, not to mention his blind spot in relation to “the pious Jew” (“Paul and Israel,” New Testament Questions of Today, 183–87). This is not to deny Käsemann’s enormous contribution to Pauline scholarship as e.g. in his emphasis upon concrete obedience to the lordship of Christ, his stress upon the “extra nos” and corporate aspects of salvation in opposition to individualism, his opposition to all forms of realized eschatology, his precise targeting of all earthly ideologies, and his unremitting stance on the social outworking of the gospel in the political scene—not commitments that all scholars interested in apocalyptic in Paul seem to have inherited!

20 On this see my chapter “Self-Understanding and the People of God: Israel in Romans” in Paul and the Creation of Christian Identity (London, New York: T&T Clark, 2008), 121–39; also S. G. Eastman, “Israel and the Mercy of God: A Re-Reading of Galatians 6:16

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Christ-event God did not choose to work by magic or naked power. Even the “word of the cross” in Pauline thought does not operate by divine fiat. Jesus is depicted as refusing the easy way to success and working through the mean and lowly. In Paul’s perspective, the Resurrection did not introduce an entirely new miraculous gospel as if God had totally changed his way of relating to his creation, but in Christ he vindicated the way of the servant, already glimpsed in Isa 53, thus affirming the traditions and hopes of the people Israel as the way of righteousness in this world, and God’s faithfulness to the whole of Israel.

The Remnant Has Crucial Relevance for Gentiles in Christ The relevance of the remnant for Christ-following Gentiles is not that it enables the remnant and the Gentiles to join forces, thus combining to take over the inheritance of Israel and to ignore the rest of Israel who do not trust in Christ.

But the remnant does have genuine significance for Gentiles. If Israel were completely rejected by God, the promises would not be available to Gentiles, since they are to the Jew first, and only available to Gentiles as a result of Israel’s prior receipt of them.

On writing Romans to Gentile congregations, it could be anticipated that Paul might teach about a remnant of faithful Israelites as a prelude to understanding the arrival of the gospel. But Paul in Romans is not concerned merely about the remnant within the history of Israel in times past, a possible inference from his reference to ὑπόλειμμα in 9:27. We note that in 11:5, the second of his only two uses of the term, he stresses that just as there has always been a remnant within the history of Israel so too there now exists a remnant in his own day—ἐν τῷ νῦν καιρῷ. 21 The remnant has significance for God’s

and Romans 9–11,” NTS 2010, 367–95. See also J. B. Tucker, Remain in Your Calling: Paul and the Continuation of Social Identities in 1 Corinthians (Eugene: Pickwick Publications, 2011), 133 n. 83.

21 In this emphasis, Paul is in keeping with other contemporary Jewish literature uses of the remnant concept as, e.g., in the Damascus Document and 4 Ezra. The use of this theme represents how in an intra-Jewish debate, an author handles the scriptural traditions of Israel to demonstrate that his version of Judaism is the authentic continuation of biblical tradition. Cf. Shayna Sheinfeld, “Who Is the Righteous Remnant in Romans 9–11?,” a paper read at the Third Nangeroni Meeting of the Enoch Seminar on “Paul as a Second Temple Jewish Author,” June 2014, to be published in the conference findings in 2016.

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continuing purposes for Israel but also, though it does not include Gentiles, through Christ it provides a vital historical and theological link for them with the people of Israel. Without a remnant of the faithful, that is, human flesh and blood, there can be no transmission of the blessings of the promises to Gentiles.

The blessings are mediated through Christ but this good news is transmitted by the faithful. In Paul’s theology, Christ is depicted as the obedient one, the representative of the righteous, who overcomes the disobedience of Adam, the representative of sinful humanity. Is it not therefore legitimate to view Jesus Christ, the representative of all his faithful and obedient followers, as the only necessary and valid link with Judaism? On the contrary, a righteous remnant of people is a sine qua non for the purpose of God in history both for the people of Israel and for the Gentile ἐκκλησία’s links with Israel. It is a gross misconception to view Paul as the founder of a new creation, a new religion without historical precedent, an ἐκκλησία with no necessary connection to the people Israel in the here and now. Christian identity is not a creatio ex nihilo; in Pauline theology some degree of Jewishness is absolutely essential for an adequate Christian selfunderstanding.

As J. C. Beker notes, “The salvation of Gentiles alongside the complete failure of the promise to Israel is ruled out. Such a rejection of Israel by God would simply cut the connection of the gospel to its foundation in the Hebrew Scriptures, and degrade the God of Jesus Christ into the God of Marcion—a new God who has no relation to creation or to Israel’s salvation history.” 22 On the other hand, should the Jewishness of Christianity not be perceived as only a foundational element soon to be relinquished as the developing ἐκκλησία leaves aside her childhood patterns? And then, of course, the question arises, as it does repeatedly throughout Paul’s letter to the Romans: How much Jewishness is really necessary? That is the question repeatedly raised since the time of Marcion, whose stance appears to mark a crucial boundary in the limitation of Jewish influence in Christianity.

Just as in Israel’s previous history, when the righteous remnant functioned as a link between the people punished and diminished because of their unfaithfulness, and their future restoration, so too in Paul’s day, the righteous remnant functions as a bridge between the Jewish people and the incoming of the Gentiles; but it in itself does not and cannot include Gentiles. If this were so, it would mean that Gentiles are part of Israel, and thus may be 22

“The Faithfulness of God and the Priority of Israel in Paul’s Letter to the Romans,” The Romans Debate, ed. Karl P. Donfried, rev. & exp. ed. (Peabody: Hendrickson, 1991), 327– 32 (330).

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designated as Israelites. And if the promises are made to Israel, and Israel may also mean Gentiles, how many Israelites would necessarily be included in order for the title Israel still to retain any valid meaning as heir to the promises? 23 By making Gentiles into Israelites, the meaning and significance of Israel’s peculiar title and status is diluted, and this results, as history has shown us, in a “church of Gentiles” arrogantly displacing Israel, and deliberately defining herself over against Israel. 24 For Paul, the people of Israel is a historical entity, and must first be considered historically, rather than merely theologically. It is not an abstract or purely symbolic theological term that can be redefined at will, though examples of this appear as early as the third century C.E. Israel for Paul remains a particular historical people.

We conclude, then, that for Paul the remnant refers only to part of his own historical people, and functions as a vehicle to transmit the gospel to the Gentiles, without any confusion of identity between the two. Thus, via the righteous remnant, there exists a real historical continuity for Paul between Israel and the ἐκκλησία of Jews and Gentiles.

The Extent of the Remnant: This Remnant Is Not Constituted by Christ Alone The consideration of the remnant theme in Paul is closely intertwined with his understanding of Abraham’s seed. In my opinion, Christ cannot legitimately be viewed as the one singular seed in Rom 4, as C. K. Barrett views him in his 23

Cf. Karin H. Zetterholm’s comment, “Sadly and paradoxically, the idea of the inclusion of Gentiles carried within it the seed of later Gentile Christian persecution of Jews. Most Jesus-oriented communities in antiquity seem to have been made up of a mixture of Jews and Gentiles and in those communities that embraced and developed the “remnant theology” position, emphasizing the continuity between biblical Israel and their own communities, the Gentile Jesus-adherents likely adopted this view from the Jews. As many of these communities became more and more dominated by Gentiles, and Jews increasingly identified with non-Jesus-oriented rabbinic Judaism, a formerly intra-Jewish debate turned into a conflict between Jews and non-Jews and an originally biblical/Jewish theology directed against the Jewish people.” “Alternate Visions of Judaism and Their Impact on the Formation of Rabbinic Judaism,” JJMJS 1 (2014), 127–53 (145), also 142–43.

24 “As long as Judaism and the Hebrew Scriptures are regarded as simply preparatory to Christianity, then it is inevitable that the Gentile mission will be viewed as the climax of God’s work, and the Christian church will continue to be confused with the kingdom of God.” R. K. Soulen, The God of Israel and Christian Theology, (Minneapolis: Fortress, 1996), 19 (emphasis mine).

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Romans commentary: “It is important to recall here that the seed of Abraham contracted till it became ultimately Christ, and was subsequently expanded to include those who were in Christ. . . . [Election] . . . takes place always and only in Christ.” 25 In Gal 3:16, Paul does deliberately argue on the basis of a singular σπέρμα. But in Rom 4:16, παντὶ τῷ σπέρματι is further defined, despite the collective term, as “not only to the adherents of the law but also to those who share the faith of Abraham,” clearly indicating a diversity and multiplicity of people. 26 We note also that when Paul cites Isaiah in Rom 9:29, the term σπέρμα is cited again, referring not to an individual but corporately to the remaining faithful of the Northern Kingdom. 27 We have claimed already in this essay that it is inadequate to hold that for Paul Jesus Christ is the only necessary link between the ἐκκλησία and Judaism. That Paul views Jesus Christ as the representative of faithful obedience just as Adam represents humanity under the power of sin is certainly part of the apostle’s theological spectrum, 28 and thus can only be affirmed. But to claim that because Christ represents Israel, he displaces her by becoming Israel and taking over all the function of Israel without remainder, is by no means warranted by the term “representation.” Moreover, Rom 9:4 cannot refer to Christ but only to Israel and Israel’s inheritance. “They [plural], are Israelites, and to them belong [present tense] the sonship, the glory, the covenants, the giving of the law, the worship and the promises. . . .”

A representative operates on behalf of his or her clients, but what a strange business where the agent takes over all the heritage and functions of the corporation, and becomes instead the sole replacement for that body alongside another group of clients who formerly had nothing invested in the corporation.

Thus I cannot agree with N. T. Wright’s view of Christ as embodying in himself all the heritage and responsibilities of Israel. I can concur with such claims as “all the promises of God find their yes in him.” Christ can well be described as the ideal Israelite fully dedicated to do the will of God, and thus the perfect exemplar for his people, but he and they remain as two related, though separate, entities.

25

The Epistle to the Romans (BNTC, London: Black, 1961), 183, but see also 181 and 191–92.

Cf. J. C. Beker, “Contrary to Galatians 3, Romans 4 maintains the distinctiveness of Jew and Gentile as Abraham’s seed (4:12–16)”; similarly, “Paul intends to stress not uniformity but unity in diversity. The pluralistic diversity of peoples in their ethnic and cultural variety is maintained, although in Christ this pluralism becomes nevertheless a unity.” “The Faithfulness of God and the Priority of Israel,” 330–32.

27 In 11:1, Paul does refer to himself as of the seed of Israel.

28 Cf. Stephen Westerholm, “Righteousness, Cosmic and Microcosmic,” Apocalyptic Paul: Cosmos and Anthropos in Romans 5–8, ed. B. Gaventa (Waco: Baylor University Press, 2013), 21–38 (36).

26

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Even Paul’s “in Christ” language, though it denotes believers in union with Christ and, to a lesser extent, Christ in them, does not indicate fusion or union so that the identity of either is displaced or eradicated without remainder. 29 I myself, being concerned to stress the corporate dimension in Pauline theology, find some attraction in the view that the people of the Messiah are included in him as one corporate entity, 30 but not in the sense that Israel as a whole is thereby swallowed up and can have no further separate existence or distinguishable identity.

Paul uses a scriptural basis in Rom 11:2–6 for his argument concerning the extent of the remnant. Using the example of the prophet Elijah who, in a moment of extreme despair and self-pity, complained against Israel, “Lord, they have killed thy prophets, they have demolished thy altars, and I alone am left, and they seek my life.” Paul stresses the divine response to Elijah’s mistaken perception of himself as the one and only faithful Israelite: “I have kept for myself seven thousand men who have not bowed the knee to Baal.” It is significant that these faithful 7,000 are depicted as “kept by God.” The remnant has not been reduced to only one individual, as if God had deserted his wayward people 31—there are still 7,000 faithful. The number 7,000 indicates the complete number of the faithful. It fits well with such references as “all Israel,” using rounded numbers of people rather than a precise number of individuals.

Nevertheless, 7,000 represents a substantial portion of the people, at least a remnant and not a minimal representation. 32 It is small only by comparison with the sand of the sea—“only” [a remnant] is not in the Greek text. 33 29

For a comprehensive investigation of all the uses of union with Christ language in Paul, see Constantine Campbell, Paul and Union with Christ: An Exegetical and Theological Study (Grand Rapids: Zondervan, 2012), esp. 310, 390–91, and 437–44.

30 As, e.g., where N. T. Wright commences this discussion with reference to Philemon; Paul and the Faithfulness of God (Minneapolis: Fortress, 2013), 16–18.

31 If the term μὴ γένοιτο (11:1, 11) represents, as many scholars believe, Paul’s response to a misrepresentation of his gospel, then here Paul affirms his positive attitude to his own people and presents a hopeful, rather than negative, image of their response. Cf. Abraham J Malherbe, “μὴ γένοιτο in the Diatribe and Paul,” HTR 73 (1980), 232.

32 See John P. Heil, “From Remnant to Seed of Hope for Israel: Romans 9:27–29,” CBQ 64 (2002), 703–20.

33 Cf. Robert Jewett’s comment, “Whilst most commentators take the remnant reference to be a threatening comment on Israel, even inserting the interpretive ‘only’ in their translations, a primarily positive interpretation is suggested by the link with ‘will be

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Thus, in Paul’s view, it is not by accident but by divine purposefulness that a faithful remnant has continued to exist in Israel. Even after the golden calf incident, according to Paul, God’s presence exists within Israel, and to suggest otherwise is simply to ignore the scriptural evidence to the contrary. 34 The use of the term election of grace—ἐκλογὴν χάριτος—and κατέλιπον, “kept by God,” indicates both the providence and necessity of a remnant in the history of Israel.

The phrase “theirs is the worship” in Rom 9:4 indicates continuing divine presence; Israel’s covenant with God remains intact, and even a period of exile could not destroy it or prevent the rebuilding and restoration of the temple, and, according to Paul, also the eventual re-ratification of the covenant through the death and resurrection of Christ. 35 For Paul in Romans, Israel exists in two forms, the remnant and the non-remnant—i.e. “the elect,” whom Paul identifies as those Jews who are already Christ-followers, and “the rest of Israel,” who have not responded positively to the claims about Jesus as the Christ. Yet Paul does not ignore “the rest” but sees a future hope of their salvation by means of the incoming of the Gentiles. But where a somewhat realized eschatology is adhered to, such as is suggested by Wright’s use of the term “climax,” there can be no real future for the Jews who presently, in Paul’s time, do not trust in Christ. The climax has arrived and they as a people are not included. But, as J. C. Beker has emphasized, “When futurist, cosmic eschatology is minimized or neutralized, the final triumph of God at the end of history becomes so identified with the triumph of

saved’ as well as by the context established in vv. 6–8 and v. 24,” Romans, 602–3.

Similarly, Wagner comments, “The language of ‘remnant’ and ‘seed’ resonates with promises of a future and a hope for Israel on the other side of judgement” (Heralds of the Good News, 94).

34 Contra Wright’s view of Israel as continuing to be in exile (even after the return from the exile); see John M. G. Barclay’s critique that because Wright’s notion of a narrative template based on Deut 27–30 is overstated, and poorly evidenced in Paul, “Without it the language of ‘exile’ becomes a general and potentially misleading metaphor for unfulfilled Jewish hopes of many different kinds.” “N. T. Wright, Paul and the Faithfulness of God (SPCK 2013),” Scottish Journal of Theology 2015, Durham Research Online (accessed March 20, 2015).

35 On this see Thomas R. Blanton, “Paul’s Covenantal Theology in 2 Corinthians 2:14– 7:4,” Paul and Judaism: Cross-Currents in Pauline Exegesis and the Study of JewishChristian Relations, ed. Reimund Bieringer and Didier Pollefeyt (London: T&T Clark, 2012), 61–71; also my essay, “Covenantal Theology and Participation in Christ: Pauline Perspectives on Transformation in Christ,” in the same volume, 41–60.

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God in the Christ-event that the theo-centric apocalyptic focus of Paul is absorbed into the Christocentric triumph of Christ.” 36 In Wright’s view, Christ represents Israel as the true Jew in Paul’s thought; Israel and her vocation as light to the nations are taken over without remainder by Christ and the rest disappears because all Israel is thus redefined. 37 But if Christ is the true Jew, then why are those incorporated into Christ not Jewish by definition and in practice? 38 Surprisingly, although Christ represents the true Jew, the Jews are so incorporated that the rest of Israel disappears. They lose their social and historical embodiment as Jews and are theologized out of existence. Those Jews in Christ lose their Jewish identity and those Jews not in Christ, i.e. “the rest,” disappear without trace, since according to Wright Christ was “Israel’s representative Messiah who summed up the life and story of the people in himself [and] brought Israel’s story to its disappointing but shocking and unexpected climax.” 39 In effect this “solution” of the Israel problem represents a universalization of Gentile “in Christ” identity and a total repudiation of Jewish identity as such. This is a surprising outcome of the thesis that Jesus is the only true Jew. This extreme view of Wright is not entirely atypical of much of Christian theology of the past century. Wright has developed and perhaps even brought to its logical conclusion a particular strand of universalistic Christocentric theology. I would like to depict his view as isolated and extreme, but unfortunately I see so much commonality in some elements of his grand master narrative that many aspects he promotes by themselves are not unrepresentative of current scholarship. 40 Perhaps he has done scholarship a 36

Paul the Apostle: The Triumph of God in Life and Thought (Philadelphia: Fortress, 1980), 356.

37 Paul and the Faithfulness of God (Minneapolis: Fortress, 2013), 405, 815–16, 825–36, esp. 830–31.

38 According to Wright, “. . . they are incorporated into the true Jew, the one in whom Israel’s vocation has been fulfilled” (Faithfulness, 830).

39 Faithfulness, 405.

40 As e.g. in his emphasis upon Paul’s political stance over against Roman imperialism, cf.

Faithfulness, 1304–19. My interest here is only in how Wright depicts Christ as taking over the vocation of Israel, as e.g. “when Paul uses the word Messiah he evokes a word in which the Messiah, the king of Israel sums up his people and their story in himself” (Faithfulness, 17). It is how Wright proceeds to develop this theme that I find most unconvincing, especially as he candidly admits he cannot claim that the concept of the

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favor by demonstrating where certain theological tendencies will proceed unless critical attention is devoted to this neat dismissal of the Jewish people and the Jewish heritage of Christianity. 41 Christian theology inevitably arrives at conclusions not dissimilar to Wright’s wherever Paul’s view of being in Christ is not perceived as including the diversity of Jew as well as Gentile. There is differentiation/distinction in Christ: “the Jew first and also the Greek” (Rom 2:9–10; 10:12), but, as Paul emphasizes, there is no discrimination in Christ. 42 Attitudes toward ethnicity are transformed, but one’s ethnicity is not thereby abolished. 43 To be one in Christ is not to be or become the same, 44 but where this is not recognized then it is inevitable that Christians will perceive themselves as having a supernatural

binding together of the Messiah and his people was already well-known and widespread in Paul’s day (827).

41 Wright himself is very critical of the views of J. L. Martyn because he regards them as being extremely anti-Jewish, cf. e.g. 480–83. I accord with some aspects of this criticism; however, it is not the avowed intention of Wright’s depiction of Jews and Judaism that I oppose, but rather the effect and influence of what I view as a misinterpretation of Christ’s relation to Israel, cf. his useful discussion of various scholars in relation to apocalyptic thought, pp. 1477–84.

42 There is no agreed New Testament interpretation meaning for the term διαστολή; see my essay “No Distinction or No Discrimination? The Translation of Διαστολή in Romans 3:22 and 10:12,” Erlesenes Jerusalem: Festschrift für Ekkehard W. Stegemann, hrsg.

Christina Tuor-Kurth and Lukas Kundert (Theologische Zeitschrift 69; Basel: Friedrich Reinhardt Verlag, 2013), 353–71. My argument is that οὐ γάρ ἐστιν διαστολὴ (Rom 3:22; 20:12) has to be read in conjunction with οὐ γάρ ἐστιν προσωπολημψία παρὰ τῷ θεῷ (Rom 2:11), thus designating this as a theological rather than an anthropological assertion.

43 At this point Wright follows J. D. G. Dunn’s view of ethnicity in his claim, “In the Messiah Jesus, God has launched his project of bringing the human race together into a new unity . . . in which their previous differences are transcended” (Faithfulness, 833). As Caroline Johnson Hodge has noted, “The choice to privilege ‘belief’ as central to Christianity results in a downplaying of features viewed as bodily, including ethnicity.” If Sons Then Heirs: A Study of Kinship and Ethnicity in the Letters of Paul (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2007), 48.

44 Cf. K. Ehrensperger’s emphasis upon Israel and the nations as “Unity with a Difference” in “The Question(s) of Gender: Relocating Paul in Relation to Judaism,” Paul Within Judaism: Restoring the First-Century Context to the Apostle, ed. Mark D. Nanos and Magnus Zetterholm (Minneapolis: Fortress, 2015), 245–76; also, “The Pauline Εκκλησίαι and Images of Community in Enoch Traditions,” Rereading Paul as a Second-Temple Jewish Author, ed.

Gabriele Boccaccini (Minneapolis: Fortress; forthcoming, 2016).

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identity transcending the normal ethnicities and identities of human beings, a new race of people, the third race of theological imagination. 45 In the end, in Wright’s reading of Paul Jewish existence and identity disappear, if not because there is something intrinsically wrong with being Jewish then, in a seemingly more humane way, these are obliterated by a theology of being in Christ—different means of arriving at the same end through a process of universalization. 46 There unfortunately appears to be an ongoing tendency in Christian theology to denigrate the spirituality of Israel, and to deny the (saving) remnant any meaningful role toward Israel, as if the two faiths were in a competition that Christianity had to win. But this is only the case when

45

As far as I am able to discern, in the modern era Markus Barth was the first scholar who explicitly emphasized that in the Pauline tradition Jews and Gentiles retain their historic distinction even within their communion in Christ: “the members of the church are not so equalized, leveled down, or straightjacketed as to become a ‘genus tertium’ that would be different from both Jews and Gentiles.” Ephesians, AB (New York: Doubleday, 1974), 310. Cf. also William Rader’s Basel doctorate, The Church and Racial Hostility: A History of the Interpretation of Ephesians 2:11–22 (Tübingen: Mohr, 1978). Rader holds that for the fathers of the first three centuries, Eph 2:11–22 witnessed primarily to the continuity of the church with Israel, but thereafter the church tended to understand herself as “the church of the Gentiles” rather than as “the church out of Jews and Gentiles.” It was John Chrysostom in his commentary who, more than any other, stressed discontinuity between the church and Israel, and even though Augustine stressed continuity, in the East Chrysostom’s interpretation prevailed. The concept of a third entity re-emerged in Adolf Harnack’s Die Mission und Ausbreitung des Christentums in den ersten drei Jahrhunderten, 4 Aufl. (Leipzig: Hinrichs, 1924), 259–81; but von Harnack was careful to speak of a third “kind” rather than a third race, i.e. another group alongside Jews and Gentiles. Von Harnack himself, in line with his philosophy of history, regarded Christianity as the ultimate stage of humanity’s development when the previous two forms were “aufgehoben.” But in his historical studies, he noted that in the Praedicatio Petri (Clement of Alexandria, Strom. 6.5.41) the term τρίτον γένος is used to refer to a third kind of worshipping which distinguishes Christians from Greeks and Jews. Von Harnack explicitly states that the first occurrence of τρίτον γένος means that “hier die Christen selbst noch nicht ‘das dritte Geschlecht’ heissen, sondern ihre Gottesverehrung als die dritte gilt. Nicht in drei Volker teilt unser Verfasser die Menschheit, sondern in drei Klassen von Gottesverehrern.” Cf. Kathy Ehrensperger, “Paul, His People and Racial Terminology,” Journal of Early Christian History, Vol. 3 no. 1 (2013), 17–32 (24–25).

46 By this, I mean the making of Gentile identity the preferred norm for Paul, to which all Christ-followers ought now, or in the near future, begin to conform.

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supersessionism is regarded as compatible with Paul, for which there is no solid evidence. 47 To deny to Jews as Jews any place in the on-going purpose of God may seem a small matter. Some Pauline scholars have been critical or negative toward the function and future of Israel in previous generations, as e.g. C. H. Dodd. 48 But the particular thesis that Christ is Israel in person 49 is not just another theological doctrine in the milieu of those that continue to proliferate in the academy. It strikes at the heart of Christian understanding of the Jewish people and their ongoing role in the purpose of God ἡ κατ’ ἐκλογὴν πρόθεσις (Rom 9:11, cf. 8:28). Plainly put, their function has been served in the birth and flourishing of Christianity, and they are now, as a people, superfluous to God’s plans. That represents their close association with Christians as only a temporary phenomenon in the history of the people of God. This people to whom the promises were originally given are now relegated to a non-identity, “nonpeople,” as the former people of God. They have, in such Christian theological perspective, lost that significance that Paul described as “to the Jew first and also to the Greek” (Rom 10:12).

According to this perception, it is not just that Christianity has outgrown its Jewish connections, but rather that the divine purpose no longer includes this people in any special sense. As individuals, they can give up their Jewishness, but as a people the Jews no longer have any salvatory significance.

The fact that individual Jews may join the Christ movement but not as part of the Jewish people, only as individuals, proclaims to all that it is Jewish identity as such that is being abrogated, a whole tradition and way of life repudiated en

47

Despite Wright’s useful discussion of this issue (cf. Faithfulness, 403–04, 417), I am not convinced that his view allows any meaningful future for Israel as Israel, since he claims that Jesus the Messiah is “Israel in person” (857–8, 890). See also his claim that “those Jews who do not embrace Jesus Christ as their Messiah are thereby embracing an identity marked out by blood and soil, by ancestry and territory, in other words by the works of the ‘flesh’” (“Paul’s Gospel and Caesar’s Empire,” in Paul and Politics: Ekklesia, Israel, Imperium, Interpretation, ed. R. Horsley [Harrisburg, PA: Trinity Press International, 2000], 160–83 [176]).

48 Dodd is critical of Paul’s deep concern for the salvation of his fellow Jews, viewing it variously as due to patriotic sentiment, etc. He also claimed, “Therefore, even if the entire Israelite nation is rejected, the promise has not been broken. It has been fulfilled by God in his own way,” (Romans, 154–55 and 183). Dodd tended to regard the election of Israel as a sign of divine favoritism, cf. 43, 63, 179–83.

49 Cf. “the-Messiah-as-Israel-in-person” (Faithfulness, 842), and “He was . . . the vindicated-Israel-in-person” (930).

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bloc! 50 My question is this: how can such a denigration not severely affect the status and image of those who continue to practice Judaism? The presumption in this view is that, after Christ, God deals only with individuals, not peoples.

This modern perception fails to note that Paul does not deal with individuals only, despite saying “and thus save some of them” (Rom 11:14). Even though individual Jews may follow Christ, for Paul this does not represent the faithfulness of God to Israel, and he still seeks the salvation of “all Israel” (Rom 11:26) .This is simply to assert that God does not deal with “homo generalis” but with peoples in their appropriate contexts.

The Faithfulness of God Means Faithfulness to Israel The attraction for Christian theology of the view of Christ as Israel, or similarly, the church as “new Israel,” stems from the fact that there has been from the second century onward a recurring tendency among Christian theologians to claim the title and heritage of Israel. To incorporate Israel into Christ might seem to finally get rid of this dilemma. Israel is not eliminated, just taken over.

From a Christian perspective, Israel now has only past history and, as Israel, no future of any kind. Israel is necessary only for the period of “Christian” origins, not for its continuance. But the implication of this is that henceforth God is no longer the God of Jews and Gentiles, but of Gentiles only, contrary to what Paul is arguing. More significantly, the complete final severing of the church’s destiny from that of Israel means that the church can claim uniqueness without concerns about rivalry with Judaism. The church is the sole claimant to the promises. Christians, in this perspective, appear to be granted a license for triumphalism. But this is never Paul’s view. Jew and Gentile, the Christmovement and Israel—despite the latter not being convinced that Jesus could be the Messiah—are still tied in an intertwined purposeful destiny under God that 50

This unfortunately resonates with the Nazi theologians’ attempt to de-Judaize Christianity. Cf. Anders Gerdmar, Roots of Theological Anti-Semitism. Gerdmar notes that Johann Salomo Semler was the first Protestant writer to call for a de-Judaizing of Christian theology for theological reasons, a strand in tradition that emerged again with the work of Walter Grundmann et. al. in the Third Reich. Semler held that religion must be universal and cosmopolitan, that Christianity is therefore something new and different, in essence no continuation of Judaism, and the redemption of Christ annuls Judaism (39–41). Cf. also Susannah Heschel, The Aryan Jesus: Christian Theologians and the Bible in Nazi Germany (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2008).

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will not allow a consummation in which the one finds salvation without reference to the other.

Thus, in stressing the incoming of the Gentiles, Paul does not forget about Israel. Many have thought the three chapters of Rom 9–11 are an unnecessary appendage to Paul’s theologizing in the letter. 51 Far from it: Paul seeks to determine how the incoming of the Gentiles affects the salvation of Israel. Instead of rejoicing in the blessings that have come to Gentiles, he immediately relates this to what he sees as a possible influence in relation to Israel’s restoration. Paul’s hope is that they will make Israel jealous, and thus affect her future. It then emerges that the restoration includes both Jews and Gentiles, the incoming of the Gentiles being not the final but rather the first step in the eventual restoration of Israel. Surprisingly, the apostle to the Gentiles has his gaze fixed not on the increasing number of Gentile Christ-followers but rather on a future for Israel. “The rest” remain significant for Paul, because unless they are included in some manner at some time, God cannot be said to be faithful to Israel.

For Paul, God’s faithfulness is not a blank check, the recipient of which can be adjusted in changed circumstances. Anyone who makes such an offer is naive or thoughtless, but not faithful. This is not to allow a deterministic claim upon God by Israel that denies the possibility of Israel’s failure. The prophets and psalmists of Israel are witnesses that Israel only has security in obedience and in calling upon her God. Presumption has fatal consequences and judgment is the correlative of mercy, as Walter Brueggemann so clearly demonstrates. 52

51

See e.g. Dodd’s view that Rom 12:1ff. seems to be the sequel to 8:39, rather than chapters 9–11, which are a somewhat self-contained unit, a treatise or sermon possibly in existence prior to the writing of Romans (Romans, 148). Käsemann, in line with most scholarship since Johannes Munck’s Paul and the Salvation of Mankind (London: SCM, 1959) is well aware of the significance of Rom 9–11, and notes that the great F. C. Baur’s emphasis on these chapters, which brought to light the Reformation’s failure to integrate 9–11 with the message of justification, would have had a much stronger impact upon subsequent scholarship had he not been so concerned with his mistaken presupposition of Jewish Christian dominance at Rome (Käsemann, Romans, 253–55 and 403).

52 See e.g. A Biblical Theology of Provocation: Ice-Axes for Frozen Seas (Waco: Baylor University Press, 2013), 124–30. Cf. also Martha Himmelfarb, “The Parting of the Ways Reconsidered: Diversity in Judaism and Jewish-Christian Relations: ‘A Jewish Perspective,’” Interwoven Destinies: Jews and Christians Through the Ages, ed. E. J. Fisher (New York: Paulist Press, 1993), 47–61, esp. 56–57.

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For Paul, divine freedom always accompanies divine faithfulness. 53 To assert the freedom of God is to claim that he is not subject to a system of retributive justice in which he is obliged to save one group and condemn another. 54 Rather, he will oppose and overcome all unrighteousness, but in his own way and in his own time. God is resourceful enough to use the nations to discipline Israel as required, and thus to achieve his desired outcome even with people often recalcitrant and weak, as is usual with human beings. Israel may fail, but God’s purpose for both her and the nations is not finally frustrated. 55 Concluding Reflections: Hermeneutical Implications of Paul’s Use of the “Remnant” Concept Paul is the earliest, most explicit, and in my view most important witness to the fact that, alongside a successful mission to the Gentiles, the God of Israel still retains an ongoing role for the people Israel. Paul’s emphasis on the function of the remnant, his clearly expressed hope for the salvation of “all Israel,” and his prayers on their behalf in Rom 9–11 provide the historical evidence for this positive theological perspective. In my view, the message of Paul about a remnant of Israel is a positive hope that refuses to allow the weakness of human beings to ultimately frustrate God’s purpose for all people. The remnant theme in 53

Cf. my essay “The Freedom and Faithfulness of God in Relation to Israel,” in my Paul’s Gospel in an Intercultural Context: Jew and Gentile in the Letter to the Romans (Frankfurt/Berne: Peter Lang, 1991), 43–59.

54 Cf. K. Barth’s assertion, “We are concerned with the new creation, and not with the sequence of cause and effect.” The Epistle to the Romans, trans. E. C. Hoskyns (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1968), 364.

55 Cf. Wagner, Heralds of the Good News, 94. The remnant is not to be equated with Israel itself, as if that were the totality of Israel that find salvation, but points beyond itself as a bridge to Christ-following Gentiles and a sign and pledge that “all Israel” will be saved. See Terence L. Donaldson, “Jewish Christianity, Israel’s Stumbling and the Sonderweg Reading of Paul,” JSNT 29.1 (2006): 27–54 (51). On Jeremiah’s negative use of the olive tree metaphor, see Mark Reasoner’s essay “The Redemptive Inversions of Jeremiah in Romans 9–11,” Biblica vol. 95 (3) (2014), 388–404, in which he argues that there are seven points of focused dissonance between Jeremiah’s judgment language against Judah and Paul’s use of the olive tree image in Rom 9–11. Paul, like Deutero-Isaiah, performs inversions on the negative judgments of Jeremiah, and the inversions thus highlight these chapters’ positive stance toward ethnic Israel and provide another argument against interpreting “all Israel” in Rom 11:26 as the church (404).

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Paul is pivotal within the ongoing relation of Jews and Gentiles in this divine purpose. As such, it is not only hopeful with reference to both of these entities but implies, moreover, both the present and ultimate significance of reconciliation, keeping on center stage the plurality of God’s creation. Paul envisaged the inauguration of a new era in Jesus of Nazareth, whom he came to recognize as the Messiah of Israel. However, a view that interprets Paul as essentially equating Jesus Christ with Israel is not an adequate understanding of Paul in his first century historical context. There is no text in the Pauline letters on which such an interpretation can be fully justified. As argued above, to conflate Israel with Christ effectively allows no future for Israel as Israel in Christian theology. Nor does such a view take account of the recent reception history of Romans in relation to supersessionism, as indicated in the revised statements of many mainline churches, most notably the Nostra Aetate of Vatican II. Biblical interpreters always address an implied audience, and therefore a contextual situation. If biblical interpretations are to have the intended effect of making biblical perspectives available today, then exegetes and interpreters must seek to ensure that the outcome of their work adequately represents those perspectives, and is in fact the outcome they had anticipated. But, unfortunately, the history of biblical—especially New Testament—interpretation demonstrates that in many instances this interpretation has continued, despite the Holocaust, to transmit an ongoing negative image of Jews and Judaism that lacks any historical relationship to Paul’s writings, yet serves as a foil for the construction of Christian identity.

If we did not live in a world in which anti-Judaism is almost endemic in some countries, and if there had not been a tendency to denigrate Jews in Christian tradition throughout its history, then theological statements about Israel in Christian theology would not be quite so dangerous. But anti-Semitism is on the increase throughout Europe, and continues to neccesitate police guard on synagogues in Berlin, Brussels, Paris, and elsewhere. 56 Biblical scholars are responsible for the effects of their interpretations even though these may not be foreseen or intended. 57 Where there is any doubt, they must be careful not to be the instigators of prejudice or of the perpetuation of an evil that cost the lives of millions of people across the world within the last century. The negative symbolic representation of a people is never neutral, since such symbolic 56

Note that this was first written in June 2014, prior to the Paris and other shootings!

See Daniel Patte, Ethics of Biblical Interpretation (Louisville, KY: Westminster/John Knox Press, 1995).

57

Campbell, ‘A Remnant of Them Will Be Saved’ 101

representation often precedes hostile action that confirms its negative import, from Chrysostom to the Holocaust. What I am advocating is socially responsible interpretation that assesses the potential effect of one’s theological opinions before presenting them publicly. My considered view is that any theological opinion that negates the place of the people of Israel in the divine purpose, wittingly or unwittingly, adds fuel to the smoldering fires of inter-ethnic and other kinds of prejudice. Such prejudice cannot be shown to be attributable to Paul; as such it is lacking a historical foundation and can only be regarded as problematic theology.

Moreover, it is indeed equally serious that such a perspective represents and promotes an inadequate Christian self-understanding. Historically, there can be no denying the fact that Jews and Christians share historical roots, as is clearly evidenced in the scriptures of the two Testaments. Any view that fails fully to acknowledge or promote such a view of the intertwined history of these twin entities fails to produce or to allow the emergence of an adequate expression of Christian identity. To permit or promote negative images of Jews and Judaism merely as foils in the construction of Christian identity is a sectarian attitude foreign to the Pauline self-understanding, whereby he was able both to engage in a mission to Gentiles and still be willing to anathematize himself for the sake of Israel. The existence of an unreceptive majority in Israel did not pose any threat to Paul or his understanding of God’s purpose for the world. If this pluralistic vision of God’s purpose is to be acknowledged, then it demands that Christianity not define itself in such a manner as to in any way denigrate Judaism or suggest that the divine plan for the world is limited to Christians only. Such a narrow, exclusivist vision is inadequate both for understanding Paul historically and likewise for the theological understanding of Christian identity today. The faithfulness of God as symbolized by the motif of the remnant is basic to theological understanding, but in order to maintain the separate existence and identity of Israel as envisaged by Paul, and also in order for this faithfulness to become an adequate foundation for Christian faith, that faithfulness must mean faithfulness to Israel.

www.jjmjs.org

Jesus Followers in Pompeii: The Christianos Graffito and “Hotel of the Christians” Reconsidered Thomas A. Wayment Brigham Young University | thomas_wayment@byu.edu Matthew J. Grey Brigham Young University | matthew_grey@byu.edu JJMJS No. 2 (2015): 102---146

Since the 19th century, archaeologists and historians have debated the presence of Jews and Christians in the Roman city of Pompeii before its destruction in 79 C.E. As a reflection of the unique enthusiasm inherent in this topic, claims regarding the presence of these minority groups have been extremely polarized, ranging from the wildly sensationalistic to the rigidly minimalistic. Some scholars have postulated the existence of robust Jewish and Christian communities at Pompeii, often by pointing to highly problematic evidence to support their claims. 1 In reaction against such speculation, other scholars have flatly rejected this proposal, often by dismissing evidence that could legitimately attest the presence of at least some Judeans and Jesus followers in the city and its vicinity. 2 Yet, despite the important historical implications of this debate, very little has been done in recent decades to sort through the claims and polemics,

We thank Dennis Mizzi and the two anonymous reviewers for reading early drafts of this article and for offering valuable suggestions for improvement. We also thank Massimo Osanna, Gabriel Zuchtriegel, and the Soprintendenza Speciale per i Beni Archeologici di Pompei, Ercolano e Stabia, for granting us access to relevant sites in and around Pompeii during the summer of 2015. Finally, we thank our student assistants Jasmin Gimenez, Juan Pinto, and Haley Wilson for their help in the research process.

1

See, for example, the maximalist interpretation of the evidence in Agnello Baldi, La Pompei Giudaico-Cristiana (Emilio de Mauro: Cava di Tirreni, 1964) and in the popular study of Carlo Giordano and Isidoro Kahn, The Jews in Pompeii, Herculaneum, Stabiae and in the Cities of Campania Felix (3rd ed.; Rome: Bardi Editore, 2001).

2 An example of a more skeptical and minimalistic approach to the topic can be found in Giancarlo Lacerenza, “Per un riesame della presenza ebraica a Pompei,” Materia Giudaica 6.1 (2001): 99–103.

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properly evaluate and contextualize the extant evidence, and determine what can be reasonably reconstructed of Jewish and Christian dynamics in first-century Campania. 3 For example, in the early 1860s, a Latin graffito was discovered in Pompeii (Region VII Insula 11.11,14) that seemed to refer to the presence of Jesus followers in the city by its inclusion of the word Christianos. The publication of the Christianos graffito subsequently led to the popular dubbing of the building in which it was found as the Hospitium Christianorum (“Hotel of the Christians”) and prompted a wide range of opinions regarding the find’s significance. Some devout scholars have optimistically claimed that the graffito is the “earliest Christian artifact” reflecting an active Christian community in the city and that the hotel functioned as a base or “apostolic school” for Christian teaching in the region during the 60s and 70s C.E. 4 Others have reacted to these sensational claims by simply dismissing a Christian reading of the graffito as “a figment of pious imagination,” although typically without carefully engaging the full range of relevant evidence. 5 In short, the impulse to either prove or debunk the presence of Christians in Pompeii has resulted in a polarized debate in which some scholars have greatly exaggerated their claims based on uncritical interpretations of the data, and others have responded by categorically ignoring data that could provide valuable insights into the topic.

In an attempt to offer a fresh consideration of a key piece of evidence for the possible presence of Jesus followers at Pompeii, this paper will reevaluate the Christianos graffito and “Hotel of the Christians” in light of past scholarship, previously neglected epigraphic and archaeological observations, and sociohistorical perspectives that can assist in contextualizing the extant evidence. To 3

One recent (though currently unpublished) attempt to bring more methodological rigor and balance to this topic is Jaimie Gunderson, “Inscribing Pompeii: A Reevaluation of the Jewish Epigraphic Data,” MA thesis, University of Kansas, 2013.

4 As will be discussed further below, one of the first scholars to make such claims was Giovanni de Rossi, “Una memoria dei Cristiani in Pompei,” Bulletino di Archaeologia Cristiana 2 (1864): 69–74. Similar claims were made most famously in a series of publications by Matteo Della Corte; see “Le più remote esplorazione di Pompei. Nuovi contribute allo studio su Pompei ed i Cristiani,” Historia 8 (1934): 354–72 esp. n. 21; “Revisione di un famoso graffito Cristiano,” Rendic. Pontif. Acad. Rom. Di Archeol. 13 (1937): 127; and I Cristiani a Pompei (Napoli, 1939), 5.

5 See, for example, Mary Beard, The Fires of Vesuvius: Pompeii Lost and Found (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2010), 302.

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accomplish this, we will first reexamine the graffito itself by summarizing its discovery and various interpretations, by providing a new critical edition of the text, and by offering some preliminary commentary on its contents. We will then examine the building in which it was discovered—an analysis that, inexplicably, has not yet been undertaken in the debate—in order to provide the context necessary to assess claims that it was a hotel somehow associated with Jews or Christians. In conclusion, we will consider the possible historical implications of this graffito and insula for understanding the social location of Judeans and Jesus followers in the region of Pompeii between 62 and 79 C.E. Part I: Reexamining the Christianos Graffito Discovery and Interpretations Because the Christianos graffito is the lynchpin for any discussion of the possible presence of Jesus followers in Pompeii, it is necessary to begin with a description of its discovery and subsequent interpretations. The complete body of scholarship on the graffito is too large to discuss exhaustively in a single article, but a brief summary of key events and proposals will provide important background for the analysis that follows.

The discovery of the graffito was made in 1862 by Giuseppe Fiorelli, whose team of archaeologists excavated a large building near the end of the Vicolo del Balcone Pensile (“Alley of the Overhanging Balcony”) now identified as Region VII Insula 11.11,14. 6 During excavations, Fiorelli uncovered a charcoal graffito on the southwest wall of the building’s atrium that appeared to include the word Christianos (“Christians”). Within a few days the graffito had already begun to deteriorate from its exposure to the elements, 7 but not before it was viewed by at least two additional eyewitnesses—first by the Italian scholar 6

There are multiple and conflicting accounts in academic literature of the graffito’s discovery and it is often difficult to substantiate the various claims, including who saw the graffito and when. See, for example, the different order of events described in Paul Berry, The Christian Inscription at Pompeii (Lampeter: Edward Mellen Press, 1995), 22–25; and in Margherita Guarducci, “La più antica inscrizione col nome dei Cristiani,” Romische Quartalschrift 57 (1962): 116. A close examination of the early Italian reports shows that, between the two, the account given by Guarducci is more reliable.

7 Charcoal graffiti are common at Pompeii and Herculaneum, and in the excavations prior to the 20th century they were left in situ without any attempt to protect or photograph them. Typically, a transcription was made and later published in the CIL, although many inscriptions were never published. Unfortunately, the charcoal graffiti often washed away in the first rains following their discovery, as was the case with the Christianos graffito.

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Giulio Minervini and later by the German archaeologist Alfred Kiessling. 8 Of the three known eyewitnesses, Minervini made the earliest transcription of the graffito (see fig. 1, p. 144), which was published in 1864 by Giovanni de Rossi, an Italian archaeologist renowned for his recording of catacomb inscriptions but who had not personally viewed the Pompeii artifact before it faded. 9 The edition published by de Rossi, based on Minervini’s notes and drawing, reads as follows: 10

5

VINA ṂARIA ADIA · A·V BOVIG̣SAVDICHRISTIANOS SEVOSO ONIS X ... ̅ .̅

As was common with specialized reports on Latin epigraphy, de Rossi provided Minervini’s transcription of the graffito without a full translation into a modern language or an analysis of the entire text. 11 Instead, he commented on select

8

See Giulio Minervini, “Collected Works (1854–1862),” published in Bullettino Archeologico Napoletano (Naples, 1862).

9 Berry, Christian Inscription, 24–25 reports that de Rossi saw the graffito following a second cleaning of the wall. However, this claim contradicts de Rossi’s own statement that by the time he arrived at the site the graffito had already disappeared completely (see de Rossi, “Una memoria dei Cristiani,” 70–72). Furthermore, we have not been able to confirm Berry’s report of a second cleaning of the wall after the graffito’s initial discovery.

10 See de Rossi, “Una memoria dei Cristiani,” 69–72. We have not been able to determine if Minervini’s original notes have survived, although we have done a careful search for them at the library and archives associated with the National Archaeological Museum in Naples. In the editions of the graffito reproduced here, the dot underneath a letter signifies that the letter is restored with some caution and it may be read differently. These dots do not appear in the original editions, but have been noted in our editions to show where discrepancies may exist. A period signifies the presence of indecipherable marks in the graffito.

11 The decipherable portions of the text de Rossi recorded likely read, “Wine . . . Mary . . .

Bovi(o)s is listening to the Christians . . . ,” but he is not explicit about this translation or its full meaning.

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words and the possible readings of some phrases, 12 placing a particular emphasis the graffito’s fourth and fifth lines which he reconstructed as audi Christianos s(a)evos olores (“hate the Christians, cruel swans”). 13 Naturally, this reading highlighted the prominent use of the word Christianos, suggesting that the graffito was the earliest attestation of Christianity outside of the New Testament.

However, while de Rossi’s translation of the word Christianos as “Christians” was a reasonable reading of the word Minervini transcribed, a careful evaluation of his report shows that the remainder of his translation departs from the transcription in unexpected ways, such as the curious reconstruction of sa(e)vos olores (“cruel swans”) from the letters SEVOS O ONIS. 14 Shortly after Minervini made his transcription of the graffito, a second transcription was produced by Alfred Kiessling, the last scholar to view the artifact in person. Although Kiessling’s edition was the first to be published (in 1862), his transcription was made after Minervini’s, when portions of the graffito had partially deteriorated. Despite this disadvantage, Kiessling was able to make a more complete drawing of the entire graffito than the one provided by Minervini/de Rossi (see fig. 2, p. 144). 15 Kiessling’s printed edition, however, only reproduced lines four and five: 16

12 For example, de Rossi noted that Fiorelli read line three as A D K A, i.e. A(nte) D(iem) K(alendas) A(priles) (“before the first day of April”), a reading that has only infrequently been noted in secondary literature. He also reported that Minervini and Fiorelli thought the inscription might read, audi Christianos . . . | sorores, even though the first “r” of sorores was not seen by Minervini; see de Rossi, “Una memoria dei Cristiani,” 71.

13 Ibid., 72.

14 In addition, it is interesting to observe that the transcription he provided shows that the graffito actually consists of two separate graffiti (note the different handwritings between the first three lines and the last three lines; see fig. 1, p. 144), though de Rossi does not extensively discuss this feature.

15 According to Guarducci, “La più antica inscrizione col nome dei Cristiani,” 117, Kiessling’s more detailed drawing later became the foundation for Karl Zangemeister’s official CIL edition (see below).

16 Alfred Kiessling, “Scavi di Pompei,” Bullettino dell’ Istituto di Corrispondenza Archeologica 1 (Rome, 1862), 92–98. Guarducci, “La più antica inscrizione col nome dei Cristiani,” 118, transcribes Kiessling’s edition differently in line four, where she reads, “P—G· VI GAVDI··HRISTIANI.” Determining a transcriber’s intent when relying on a line drawing is not always straightforward. In this case, some letters could be read as one of two letters. For example, in Latin epigraphy, “E” is often written in its cursive form “II” so that if one vertical line remains it can be the vestiges of either “E” or “I.”

Wayment and Grey, Jesus Followers in Pompeii 107

5

P̣G · VI GAVDI . . HRISTIANI 8X̅ SICV. SO . . ORIIS

His transcription of these two lines clearly resembles that of Minervini/de Rossi in important ways. 17 It also reflected the fact that some letters had already deteriorated since Minervini made the initial transcription. For example, by the time Kiessling saw the graffito, the “C” of Christianos had faded and the final “s” was no longer visible, but instead appeared to be an “i.” 18 Still, Kiessling expressed confidence in the overall content of the critical fourth line, which he suggested could be restored as igni gaude Christiane (“rejoice in the fire, Christian”). While agreeing with de Rossi regarding the meaning of the fading word for “Christian” (rendered here in the singular), Kiessling’s rendering of the rest of the line differs slightly from the letters he reproduced in his edition. 19 He did not explain his reasons for this, but his reading of “fire” in line four suggested to Kiessling that the graffito was a reminder to a Christian in Pompeii about the Neronian persecution in the mid60s as reported by Tacitus. 20 Naturally, with these two published transcriptions

17

Kiessling’s more complete drawing, though not fully reproduced in his printed edition of the graffito, also agrees with Minervini’s transcription of the words “Wine” and “Maria” in lines one and two; cf. Zangemeister’s edition, which was based on Kiessling’s drawing (see fig. 2, p. 144).

18 Rex E. Wallace, An Introduction to Wall Inscriptions from Pompeii and Herculaneum (Wauconda: Bolchazy-Carducci, 2005), xxxi, notes that the final “s” is rarely dropped in the Pompeii graffiti, and therefore it is unlikely that the final “s” was simply omitted in the graffito. In this case, the discrepancies between the two editions likely favor a final “s” because it was seen by Minervini before the graffito began to fade.

19 Specifically, Kiessling reported the first part of the line as reading P̣G · VI GAVDI. Although one can construe these letters in various ways, igni gaude would imply that the first letter, clearly a “B” or “P,” was in fact an “I.” There are also other noticeable differences between Kiessling’s more complete drawing (see fig. 2, p. 144) and his published edition of lines four and five. These differences seem to reflect Kiessling’s attempts to make sense of the vocabulary and grammar of this difficult and fragmentary graffito.

20 See Tacitus (Ann. 15.44). Kiessling’s romantic reading leaves us to wonder whether he was attempting to rectify it with popular notions of Nero’s persecution of Christians, and thus created a literary influenced reading. See Lacerenza, “Per un riesame della presenza

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the graffito was immediately touted as evidence of Christianity in Pompeii and a flurry of academic interest surrounding it followed at rapid pace. 21 Almost a decade after the publications of these two eyewitnesses and after the graffito itself was no longer visible, Karl Zangemeister authored the official edition of the graffito for the Corpus Inscriptionum Latinarum (CIL IV.679) based on the previous edition of Minervini/de Rossi and the fuller (unpublished) drawing of Kiessling. 22 However, despite the fact that he had never personally seen the graffito, Zangemeister authored a significantly different edition without fully justifying the changes he made to the text. 23 The edition of Zangemeister reads: VINA NERVII . . . . . ΛARIA Λ DIA · AV PG·VIG SAVDI CIIRISTIRAII 5

8X SICVI · SO . . ONIS ......F

Unfortunately, it is not possible to translate the Zangemeister edition because so little of it makes sense. This difficulty was introduced through Zangemeister’s unexplained changes of several letters from the previous editions. Most importantly for the purposes of this article is Zangemeister’s rendition of line four, in which he altered several letters relating to the word Christianos, resulting in a significant change to the meaning of the text. For example, Zangemeister introduced the second “R” into the word, despite the fact that neither of the previous editions suggested the word’s ending was in doubt (both read it as “IAN”). Through this and other alterations, Zangemeister changed the word ebraica a Pompei,” 99–103; and Eric M. Moormann, “Jews and Christians at Pompeii in Fiction and Faction,” Assaph 10–11 (2005): 53–76, for discussions on how literary representations of Pompeii have long shaped the public imagination of what occurred prior to the eruption of 79 C.E. 21 A helpful survey of the scholarship on the graffito, including the early reactions to the claims of Minervini, de Rossi, and Kiessling, can be found in Berry, Christian Inscription, 22–37.

22 Karl Zangemeister, Corpus Inscriptionum Latinarum (Berlin: G. Reimer, 1871), IV.679.

23 Zangemeister did acknowledge, however, that the inscription was difficult to read and that a clear meaning for it could not be discerned: “animadvertas inscriptionem esse evanidam indeque lectionem recognosci non posse” (see CIL IV:461).

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Christianos into ceristirae or christirae (depending on how one renders “II”). In either instance, the meaning of the word is not immediately obvious and its spelling departs in unexpected ways from the previous editions on which the CIL entry is based, particularly in the last five letters. In fact, Zangemeister’s reconstruction of the entire fourth line—PG·VIG SAVDI CIIRISTIRAII—is almost completely unintelligible without positing odd grammatical variations or unique spellings. 24 It is possible that Zangemeister’s edition reflects his own personal skepticism of the possibility that the inscription referred to “Christians.” 25 In any case, the official CIL edition significantly impacted the subsequent discussion of the graffito, particularly among those scholars who began to dispute its association with Christianity. 26 In the decades following the publication of the graffito in the CIL, numerous scholars commented on its contents and significance, resulting in the circulation of a wide range of views. Many agreed that the graffito contained the word “Christians” and thus attested the presence of early Christians in Pompeii before its destruction in 79 C.E. 27 Some of these authors began to note other subsequent (and often highly dubious) finds they believed related to Christians

24

For other criticisms of Zangemeister’s CIL edition, see L. De Feis, Alcune Memorie Bibliche Scoperte a Pompei (Florence: Libreria Fiorentina, 1906), 23.

25 Both Berry, Christian Inscription, 27–28, and Guarducci, “La più antica inscrizione col nome dei Cristiani,” 119, claim that Zangemeister does not exclude the possibility of a Christian reading of the graffito, but the CIL entry does nothing to confirm or even allow for such a reading.

26 It is interesting to note that, around this time, Fiorelli himself (the discoverer of the graffito) began to question this association. Although it is not clear if Zangemeister’s 1871 edition influenced him in this shift, in 1873 Fiorelli expressed concern that the editions of Kiessling and de Rossi showed notable discrepancies and instead indicated that he believed the graffito simply referred to five amphorae of wine; see G. Fiorelli, Gli Scavi di Pompeii, (Naples, 1873), 97–103.

27 Although each had slightly different interpretations of the graffito’s significance, those scholars that read the fourth line as a reference to “Christians” included Johannes Overbeck and August Mau, Pompeji in seinen Gebäuden, Alterhümern und Kunstwerken (Leipzig: Engelmann, 1875), 436–37; Victor Shultze, “Die Christen-Inschrift in Pompeji,” Zeitschrift für Kirchengeschichte 4 (1881): 125–30; Paul Allard, Historie des Persécutions: Pendant les deux premiers siècles Volume I (3rd ed.; Paris: Librairie Victor Lecoffre, 1903), 73–76; Antonio Ferrua, “Epigrafia ebraica,” La Civiltà Cattolica 87 (1937), no. 3, 127–37; and F. Filson, “Were There Christians in Pompeii?,” Biblical Archaeologist (1939): 14.

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(such as various “cross” images) and, as a result, offered extremely speculative reconstructions of a well-organized Christian community in the city. 28 Others, reacting against the more sensational claims, expressed extreme skepticism regarding a Christian reading of the graffito, the presence of Christians in the city, or both. 29 Naturally, this debate prompted additional (if highly conjectural) readings of the graffito which appeared well into the early 20th century. 30 Almost a century after the graffito’s initial discovery and in response to this remarkable array of proposals, Italian scholar Margherita Guarducci published what has been perhaps the most important modern academic study of the graffito to date. 31 Guarducci’s interest was, in part, to sort through all previous publications on the topic and to present her own conclusions based on a responsible evaluation of the evidence. In the process, Guarducci offered a compelling reading of the graffito and an analysis that stands out as exemplary in its caution and careful use of previously published editions. Although she did not address the first three lines of the text, she read the critical fourth and fifth lines as BOVIOS AUDI(T) CHRISTIANOS | SEVOS O[S]ORES: “Bovio is

28

The most enthusiastic and speculative proponent of this position was Matteo Della Corte, “Le più remote esplorazione di Pompei. Nuovi contribute allo studio su Pompei ed i Cristiani,” 354–72 esp. n. 21; “Revisione di un famoso graffito Cristiano,” 127; and I Cristiani a Pompei, 5.

29 August Mau, Pompeji in Leben und Kunst (Leipzig: Engelmann, 1899), 17–18; Domenico Mallardo, “La questione dei cristiani a Pompei,” Rivista di Studi Pompeiani 1 (Naples, 1934–1935), 116–65, 217–61.

30 Perhaps the most novel approach to the graffito was suggested by William Newbold, “Five Transliterated Aramaic Inscriptions,” American Journal of Archaeology 30 (1926): 291–95. In addition to accepting the reading of the Latin word “Christian,” Newbold creatively argued that the rest of the text was actually an Aramaic graffito written in Latin letters, which he rendered from his reconstructed Aramaic as: “A strange mind has driven A. and he has pressed in among the Christians who make a man a prisoner as a laughingstock [to the people of Pompeii?].” Newbold claimed that this graffito reflected the (Jewish?) writer’s disdain for those who spent long hours listening to a Christian apostle in the building’s atrium. Although Newbold’s study is occasionally mentioned in the academic literature (e.g., Giordano and Kahn, Jews in Pompeii, 84–88), it has received virtually no serious engagement and has been dismissed by most critical scholars; see in particular the assessment of Newbold’s “stupefying conclusion” in Guarducci, “La più antica inscrizione col nome dei Cristiani,” 118–19. For the most part, however, Newbold’s idiosyncratic work on this graffito has only received “a profound silence” (Berry, Christian Inscription, 33).

31 Guarducci, “La più antica inscrizione col nome dei Cristiani,” 116–25.

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listening to the Christians, cruel haters.” 32 A significant contribution of Guarducci’s translation and discussion is that she clearly articulated what seemed obvious from the eyewitness transcriptions of Minervini and Kiessling— that the most natural reading of the graffito contains a reference to an individual named “Bovio(s),” a rare but attested name, who appears to have heard and possibly adhered to some form of Christian teaching. 33 Guarducci also attempted to discuss the ramifications of her reading in the context of first-century Pompeii. She concluded that in all likelihood the graffito reflects a local memory of Christianity that was “hostile” and possibly alludes to Christians as the “haters of mankind” (a common perception of Christians by outsiders). She saw it as almost certain that there were Christians as well as Jews in Pompeii prior to the earthquake of 79 C.E., and she connected them with the Christian community of nearby Puteoli mentioned in Acts 28:13– 14. Showing restraint in dealing with the other allegedly “Christian” artifacts from Pompeii, she cautiously noted that a few may be genuinely Christian, although she did not state which ones in her opinion fell into that category. She did, however, dismiss the frequent claim that the insula in which the graffito was discovered was a meeting place for Christians (see below). 34 Although Guarducci’s analysis of the graffito and its implications were methodologically sound, her work—which was published in Italian and has not received much attention in English scholarship—did not put an end to the longstanding debate over the reading, interpretation, and significance of the Christianos graffito. In recent decades, some writers have continued using the graffito to promote the more sensationalistic reconstructions of Christians in

32

Ibid., 121–22. In her edition, Guarducci notes that sevos would be an orthographic variant of saevos, a variant that is present in at least two third-century Latin documents.

The translation of her Italian is our own.

33 In her commentary, Guarducci notes several examples of the Latin name Bovius; see “La più antica inscrizione col nome dei Cristiani,” 122, esp. n. 18. For three examples of Bovii, one of them from nearby Puteoli, see Wilhelm Shulze, Geschichte Lateinischer Eigennamen (Berlin: Weidmann, 1966), 234; cf. Heikki Solin and Olli Salmies, Repertorium nominum gentilium et cognominum Latinorum (Hildesheim: Weidmann, 1988), 37. Iiro Kajanto, however, does not list any such examples (Iiro Kajanto, The Latin Cognomina [Helsinki: Keskuskirjapaino, 1965]). See also Wallace, Introduction to Wall Inscriptions, XXIX–XXX. 34 Guarducci, “La più antica inscrizione col nome dei Cristiani,” 124–25.

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Pompeii, 35 some more responsible scholars have acknowledged the legitimacy of Guarducci’s reading and the presence of at least some Christians in the city (though without the more sensational overlays of the previous century), 36 and yet others have continued to dismiss both, either by ignoring the graffito entirely or by simplistically denouncing it as “a figment of pious imagination.” 37 In the latter category are even unfounded accusations of fraud, including the claim that the original eyewitnesses invented the graffito and that “in fact, probably no one ever saw it!” 38 In light of this long and tumultuous history of scholarship (most of which has been in Italian and inaccessible to non-specialists), as well as its significant implications for the study of early Christianity in Italy, we believe that a new critical edition of the graffito based on the extant evidence would be a valuable resource for the future study of this important artifact. We also hope

35

For example, see the treatments of the graffito in Giordano and Kahn, Jews in Pompeii, 83–88, and Berry, Christian Inscription, who uses the graffito and several dubious artifacts from Pompeii to argue for the presence of a robust Latin-speaking Christian community in the city (for example, see Berry, Christian Inscription, 7–12).

36 See, for example, Antonio Varone, “Giudei e cristiani nell’area vesuviana, in AA.VV. Pompei 79,” Antiqua 15 (1979): 131–46; W. H. C. Frend, The Rise of Christianity (Philadelphia: Fortress Press, 1984), 131; Peter Lampe, From Paul to Valentinus: Christians at Rome in the First Two Centuries (trans. Michael Steinhauser; Minneapolis: Fortress Press, 2003), 7–10; and Alastair M. Small, “Urban, Suburban and Rural Religion in the Roman Period,” in The World of Pompeii, ed. John Dobbins and Pedar W. Foss (New York: Routledge, 2007), 194.

37 Beard, Fires of Vesuvius, 302; cf. Alison E. Cooley and M. G. Cooley, Pompeii and Herculaneum: A Sourcebook (2nd ed.; London: Routledge, 2014), 107–108, 159. The latter are open to the possibility that Christians were in the city of Pompeii, but do not include the Christianos graffito as evidence for this in their sourcebook.

38 See Moormann, “Jews and Christians at Pompeii,” 68 (cf. Mallardo, “La questione dei cristiani a Pompei,” 137–38). We cannot find compelling evidence to suggest that such skepticism is warranted. There were multiple independent witnesses to the inscription and, while their editions show variations, there is no reason to discount their work as sheer fantasy. For example, de Rossi claimed that Minervini and Fiorelli showed him the place of the inscription because they had seen it in situ a few days earlier (“Una memoria dei Cristiani,” 70–72), but he is compellingly honest that it had already vanished by that time: “[Fiorelli] showed me the site [of the inscription], but no matter how much I forced my eyes to see it, my every effort was in vain: no vestige remained.” Furthermore, the discrepancies between the two eyewitness accounts seem to confirm that a process of the graffito’s deterioration was underway, with some faded letters absent in Kiessling’s later transcription.

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that, after having sorted through the previous scholarship and polemics surrounding the graffito, a methodologically responsible edition will refocus attention on the artifact itself rather than the speculative interpretations that have often been associated with it.

A New Edition Before presenting this new edition, a few observations must be made regarding our approach and methodology. Unfortunately, because of the complete deterioration of the graffito it is not likely that the evidence for its reconstruction will ever move beyond what was preserved in the line drawings of Minervini/de Rossi and Kiessling. 39 However, without any compelling reasons to discount them, these eyewitness transcriptions should provide enough information to establish a fairly reliable reconstruction of the fragment. A careful comparison of the two original drawings shows that both agreed on critical letters in their observations. These agreements form the basis of our reconstruction and are presented without annotation. Letters that were disputed in the original drawings are presented with an underdot so as to clearly indicate points of possible disagreement. In order to avoid any unnecessary eclecticism, we omit those words or characters that appear without explanation in a single edition and only include features which are substantiated by both eyewitnesses. We believe that such a minimalist reconstruction will result in the most secure edition of the graffito for future analysis. 40 Because the graffito was clearly fragmentary at the time of its discovery, it is also necessary to delineate what we know about its contents, what we do not know, and what can be reasonably reconstructed. Therefore, we have inserted brackets to indicate places where we think a portion of the text is missing; where 39

Berry, in Christian Inscription, claims that by using modern imaging equipment he was able to see traces of the charcoal inscription that was inscribed with a stylus. However, his claims strain credulity. Aside from there being no evidence for the graffito being “inscribed,” Berry provides no scientific data that resulted from his activities and no new evidence for a better reading of the graffito than what was transcribed by its eyewitnesses.

40 Practices of publishing editions of graffiti and inscriptions have changed significantly over the years. Because we are reliant upon 19th-century editions to create a modern edition, some difficulties naturally arise in discerning the intent of the original authors.

While the earliest transcriptions of the graffiti are reproduced in several publications, we have found Guarducci’s publication of them to be reliable and most accurate to the originals; see “La più antica inscrizione col nome dei Cristiani,” 117–18.

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no brackets are used we believe we have reached the end of a line. In addition, we have provided accompanying notes for each line of the graffito to allow for comparison between our reconstruction and the earlier editions. Finally, the eyewitness transcriptions clearly indicate that the graffito actually consists of two graffiti written by separate individuals, as shown by the distinct differences in letter-forms in the graffito’s upper and lower portions. This change in handwriting is indicated in our reconstruction by “(m. 2).” Based on these observations and approaches, we propose the following reading: 1

(m. 2) 5

]ṾINA ]ṂARIA ].DIA ·A·V ] ḄỌVIOS AVDI C̣ḤRISTIANỌṢ ]SẸV ỌS Ọ[RATI]ONIS ]X . . . . .

Translation: “Wine . . . Mary . . . Bovios is listening to the Christians . . . if the face of the o(rati)on . . .”

Notes 1) Kiessling’s drawing of the inscription (followed in Zangemeister’s edition) allows for ]NINA. 2) Minervini’s edition restores only the right half of the first letter, which is clearly an “M.” Kiessling (followed by Zangemeister) read NERVII . . . . . ΛARIA. The first five letters were placed directly above PGVIGS (of Kiessling/Zangemeister’s edition) in the line below and formed what looks to be the basis for a left hand margin of the graffito.

Kiessling/Zangemeister’s edition also appears to indicate that the handwriting of NERVΙΙ (=Nerve?) was the same as that of lines four to six. Minervini suggested the end of the line could also read VARIA, but the line tracing of his edition does not suggest this as a reasonable reconstruction given what appears to be the ductus of the first letter.

3) Minervini restored ADIA A · V. The first letter of this line could be a crude “N” or even “M.” It is possible that the name Secu]ṇdia or stipe]ṇdia was intended. The first suggestion represents the Latin name Secundia and the second represents the word “tax” or “payment.”

4) Kiessling read PG · VI GAVDI . . HRISTIANI, but his edition allows for the reconstruction offered here. Later commentators discussed the possibility that there were two separate hands at work here, and both transcriptions (Kiessling’s and Minervini’s) strongly suggest two different hands. 41 41

D. Mallardo was critical of the idea that there are two separate graffiti and instead argued for a single graffito written by the same person, “La questione dei cristiani a

Wayment and Grey, Jesus Followers in Pompeii 115 We are fairly confident that two different graffiti are evidenced here. The upper one is more upright and crude in its letter forms. The lower tends to slant slightly to the right. In the copies of Minervini and Kiessling, the first “s” is terminal and indicates an intentional ending of a word. The terminal “s” was extended so that it created a top bar above “x” in the line below. Minervini’s edition also contained a terminal “s” at the end of the line.

5) Kiessling/Zangemeister read 8 X SICVI · SO . . ONIS. The “e” of SEU is restored with some hesitancy because later editors interpreted Kiessling’s line drawing as “SICU,” but his transcription could equally be rendered as SEU based on the cursive Latin “e” that is written using two vertical lines, which in Kiessling’s edition is rendered with a slight curvature of the right member thus allowing for IC instead of II “e.” Minervini offered the restoration of one word of line five as SORORES (“sisters”) beginning with the second “s” of that line.

6) In Minervini’s edition, there are two abbreviations noted by a supralinear stroke following a letter. The supralinear strokes were apparently visible to Minervini, but the letters were sufficiently obscured that it is impossible to determine what they were. The abbreviated words could refer to many different things, including a name of the person writing the inscription or even a dating reference. The “x” at the beginning of the line suggests a dating formula. Kiessling’s line drawing contains a more precise rendition of what he saw, but it is equally garbled: “|| . . . ϝ.” The final letter appears to be a Greek digamma and the first letter would represent “e.” Currently, nothing reasonable can be made of this line.

Commentary Attempting to wrest meaning from this extremely fragmentary graffito is no easy matter, and the fact that it is potentially the earliest physical attestation of Christianity in the Roman Empire encourages us to proceed with caution. In our preliminary commentary, we will first consider the meaning and significance of lines four and five (the lower graffito), followed by some additional observations on lines one and two (the upper graffito). To begin, it is important to note that, based on this reconstruction, Guarducci’s reading for line four remains the most compelling, with a personal name in the nominative case (ḄỌVIOS) followed by a finite, third person singular verb (AVDI) and a direct object (C̣ḤRISTIANỌṢ).

This reading accords well with both eyewitness drawings and is most reasonably translated as “Bovios is listening to the Christians.” Naturally, such a translation has significant historical implications for the presence of Jesus followers in Pompei,” 291–95, esp. n. 1. A. Baldi, La Pompei Cristiano-giudaica, 25, ridicules the work of Mallardo, which he calls a fantasy.

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Pompeii and must be carefully analyzed, starting with the critical word Christianos.

Assuming that this word was transcribed correctly by its eyewitnesses and in the absence of a more compelling alternative, it appears to us that the most natural reading of Christianos is, indeed, as a reference to early followers of Jesus. The formation of the word Christianos was done through combining a Greek noun with the Latin ending -ianus and by adding the accusative plural ending -os to the noun. By forming a Latin noun in this fashion, the author of the graffito seems to have assumed that Christus (or perhaps Chrestus) was a proper name and that Christianos (the accusative plural object of audit) was a group of his followers to whom Bovios was listening. 42 Of course, it is reasonable to ask whether the individual being followed by the group was Jesus of Nazareth or some other individual referred to as Christus/Chrestus, 43 but the attested use of the word “Christian” as an early popular designation for Jesus’ followers strongly suggests that the former was intended. 44 Particularly relevant to this

42

Typically the noun audio would require an accusative or dative object to render it in the sense of “to hear” or “to listen to” or even “to follow.” In this graffito, the case ending in -os is important because it identifies the Christians as the object of the finite verb. It also indicates that the author of the graffito understands the word as a Latin noun/name. For similar examples of this form of group designation (e.g., the Caesariani, Galbiani, Herodiani), see C. K. Barrett, Acts: International Critical Commentary (2 vols.; Edinburgh: T&T Clark, 1998), 1:556. This idea originates with H. B. Mattingly, “The Origin of the Name ‘Christiani,’” JTS 58 (1958): 26–37.

43 CIL VI.24944 does mention an individual named Iucundus Chrestianus and, of course, there has been much discussion regarding Suetonius’s mention of Jews being expelled from Rome at the instigation of Chrestus. Many scholars believe that the latter was a reference to Jesus of Nazareth, but D. Slingerland argues that this was not the case; see “Chrestus: Christus?” in A. J. Avery-Peck, New Perspectives on Ancient Judaism 4 (Lanham: University Press of America, 1989), 143. Cf. Suetonius, Claudius 25.4; Dio Cassius 60.6.6; Acts 18:2; Orosius, Adversum Paganos 7.6.15; D. Slingerland, “Suetonius Claudius 25.4 and the Account in Cassius Dio,” JQR 79 (1989): 305–20; D. Slingerland, “Suetonius Claudius 25.4, Acts 18, and Paulus Orosius’ Historiarum Adversum Paganos Libri VII: Dating the Claudian Expulsion(s) of Roman Jews,” JQR 83 (1992): 127–44.

44 The formation of the name Christians is attested textually in the New Testament in Acts 11:26; 26:28 (Antioch and Caesarea Maritima), and 1 Pet 4:16 (Rome). For Acts 11:26 there is some variation in the textual tradition between the two readings: Χριστιανούς is attested in the majority of witnesses, but ‫ *א‬81 1243 read Χρηστιανούς and B P74 D read Χρειστιανούς (D* Χρειστιανοί). For Acts 26:28 B reads Χρειστιανόν, and ‫ *א‬reads Χρηστιανόν. The same holds true for 1 Pet 4:16, where ‫ *א‬alone reads Χρηστιανός. The earliest literary usages of the term Christian, either as a self-designation or applied to

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graffito is the statement by Tacitus (ca. 110 C.E.) regarding events in Rome under Nero (ca. 64 C.E.), in which followers of Jesus were considered “a class of men, loathed for their vices, whom the crowd styled Christians [vulgus Christianos appellabat].” 45 According to Tacitus, the name of this group was based on the name of its founder, Christus. Although Tacitus’ statement was made a few decades after the destruction of Pompeii, it adds plausibility to the suggestion that the Christianos graffito was written by a working class individual who viewed “Christ followers” in a negative light. 46 In light of this conclusion, it is also important to consider whether such an early reference to Christians would likely refer to them as Christians, Chrestians, or in some other way. 47 In papyri from around this period ι, ιε, η, and ε are often interchangeable, meaning that the author could have intended Chrestianos when writing Christianos, or vice-versa. 48 There is also evidence that by the second century, Christian authors had grown sensitive to the fact that people were confusing the name of their founder Christ with the Greek adjective them by Roman authors, are: Clement, Strom. 4; Tertullian, Apol. 3; Lactantius, Div. Inst.

4.8; Ignatius, Eph. 11.2; Rom. 3.2; Magn. 10.3; Pol. 7.3; Pliny, Epistles 10.96; Suetonius, Nero 16.2; Lucian, Alexander 25; 38; Peregrinus 11, 12, 13, 16. See also Dio Cassius 60.6.6; Acts 18:2; Orosius, Adversum Paganos 7.6.15.

45 Tacitus, Ann. 15.44.

46 Another attestation of the word “Christian” outside the New Testament is found in the writings of Josephus, who stated that the “tribes of the Christians” (Χριστιανων) were named after their founder (Ant. 18.64).

47 Unfortunately, as anyone who has worked with Roman period Greek or Latin inscriptions and documents can attest, little can be made of the spelling differences between Christianos, Chrestianos, and Chrēstianos unless there are other factors that can help determine whether scribes intentionally spelled the name in a particular way. This is precisely the intent of the study by W. Shandruck, “The Interchange of ι and η in Spelling χριστ- in Documentary Papyri,” BASP 47 (2010): 205–19, who concludes that there are valid reasons for considering Χρηστιανός the earliest spelling of the title Christian. See also the issues noted by L. Blumell, Lettered Christians: Christians, Letters, and Late Antique Oxyrhynchus (Leiden: Brill, 2013), 37–38.

48 Discussion of this phenomenon can be found in Shandruck, “Interchange of ι and η,” 205–19; G. H. R. Horsley, New Documents Illustrating Early Christianity 3 (Macquarie: Macquarie University, 1983), 129–30; and Anne Marie Luijendijk, Greetings in the Lord: Early Christians and the Oxyrhynchus Papyri (Cambridge: Princeton University Press, 2008), 140–41 n. 56. Cf. F. Gignac, A Grammar of the Greek Papyri of the Roman and Byzantine Periods (2 vols; Milan: Istituto Editoriale Cisalpino–La Golia, 1976), 1:235.

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Chrestos (“useful or good”), and thus were mispronouncing the name Christian as Chrestian. 49 In short, then, if line four of the graffito has been transcribed correctly, the most reasonable explanation is that it refers to an individual who was listening to a group of Jesus followers in Pompeii or its vicinity. 50 Unfortunately, little can be said of Bovios, the person who was listening to the Christians. In the graffito, this name is attested only as a nomen without the cognomen or the tripartite name of a citizen, and thus may represent a slave name. 51 The expected Latin form of the name would be Bovius, but in this instance the Latin nominative ending was substituted by the Greek –os, which may provide some insight into Bovios’s cultural origins. Latin forms of the name are attested in inscriptions from nearby Puteoli, 52 although there is no compelling evidence to identify any of those individuals with the Bovios at Pompeii. Given the setting in Pompeii where the Christianos graffito was discovered, it is possible that Bovios was a transient merchant or worker in one of the nearby textile workshops (see below). The fragmentary nature of the graffito also makes it impossible to determine if Bovios was being ridiculed by the author for being a Christian or merely for having listened to Christians. In either case, it seems that the actual author of the graffito was not a Jesus follower, since at this point in the first century (pre-79 C.E.) the word “Christian” was a likely contemptuous epithet applied to Jesus followers by outsiders and not yet used by believers as a selfdesignation. 53

49

For example, Justin Martyr seems quite sensitive to the issue of confusion between the Χριστιανοί and the adjective χρηστοί; see 1 Apol. 4.1; 4.5.

50 In support of this reading, P. Lampe, Die stadtrömischen Christen in den ersten beiden Jahrhundert: Untersuchungen zur Sozialgeschichte (Tubingen: Mohr, 1989), 8, calls the Christianos graffito at Pompeii an “interesting example” of possible Christian presence in Pompeii. Barrett, Acts, 1:556 also thinks the graffito should be taken in this way, i.e. that it represents affiliation with a group of Jesus followers.

51 See Gunderson, “Inscribing Pompeii,” 34; Joanne Berry, The Complete Pompeii (New York: Thames & Hudson, 2007), 91; E. Mary Smallwood, The Jews under Roman Rule (Leiden: Brill, 2001), 187, 424, 528, and 556.

52 See n. 33 above.

53 See the discussions in E. A. Judge, “Judaism and the Rise of Christianity: A Roman Perspective,” Tyndale Bulletin 45 (1994), 355–68 (esp. pg. 363); J. Elliot, 1 Peter: A New Translation with Introduction and Commentary (New York: Doubleday, 2000), 789–94; and Philip F. Esler, Conflict and Identity in Romans: The Social Setting of Paul’s Letter (Minneapolis: Fortress Press, 2003), 12–13.

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Regarding the contents of line five, it appears that Guarducci’s rendition of the phrase as SEVOS O[S]ORES (“cruel haters”) is much more questionable. Both eyewitness transcriptions agree that the letters “SO” were followed by a lacuna of several letters, which was clearly followed by the Latin case ending -onis/-ores. Based on the positions of the letters in the lines above and below the lacuna we estimate that Minervini’s and Kiessling’s transcriptions left enough space for approximately two or possibly three missing letters. Both editions also appear to indicate that the line began with seu/sicu (cf. Latin sive), followed by three letters, and then ended with the singular genitive case ending. 54 Therefore, the final word of line five could be plausibly reconstructed as o[rati]onis (“of the oration” or “belonging to the oration”); since it follows what appears to be a nominative noun (os “face”), the line could have the sense of “the head/face of the oration,” but this is admittedly conjectural since there is no surviving artifact to consult and the letters “rati” might not fit comfortably in the conjectured position. Although such a phrase is not attested in literature, it would appear to convey the idea of the beginning of an oration or in light of an oration, which may be appropriate in the context of the previous line which mentions Bovios “listening” to Christians.

On the upper graffito, written in a different hand by someone other than the author of the lower graffito, little more can be said beyond the apparent reference to wine (Latin vina) and the presumably Jewish name “Maria.” The close proximity of this name with the lower graffito mentioning “Christians” is quite intriguing, leaving us to wonder about the possible relationship of the two inscriptions; could one have been written in response to, or “in conversation with,” the other? 55 Was Maria a Jewish woman somehow associated with the group of Christianos to whom Bovios was listening? Unfortunately, the graffiti are simply too fragmentary to be certain. Similar uncertainty surrounds the third line of the upper graffito, which contains two letters at the end separated by a mid-point dot suggesting an abbreviation, but without more context it is difficult to determine the precise meaning.

54

Given typical orthographic variations, it is possible that the author of the graffito intended -ones, which would have a significant effect on the meaning but little effect on the potential nouns used to reconstruct the lacuna.

55 On the practice of nearby graffiti being in conversation with each other, see Kristina Milnor, Graffiti and the Literary Landscape in Roman Pompeii (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2014), 164.

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In summary, a careful comparison and analysis of the eyewitness transcriptions suggests that the graffito found at Pompeii by Fiorelli makes the most sense as a reference to an individual named Bovios who was listening to Christians, and who was apparently ridiculed for it by the author of the graffito (who used “outsider” terminology in mentioning the group). Furthermore, the graffito may refer to some kind of Christian preaching, particularly if the restoration of the word “oration” is credible, and it appears that a Jewish(?) woman named Maria somehow figured into the adjacent graffito. Obviously, there is much we do not know about the full content and meaning of this fragmentary graffito. However, if this reading is accurate, then it is important to consider its possible implications for the presence of Judeans and Jesus followers in the region and their relationship with the building in which the graffito was discovered.

Part II: Reexamining the “Hotel of the Christians” Having shown that the Christianos graffito can reasonably be read as a reference to Jesus followers, it is now necessary to assess the claims that the building in which the graffito was discovered was associated with a community of Christians in Pompeii. Such claims regarding this building have, from the beginning, been made in tandem with the interpretation of the graffito, thus leading to the popular dubbing of Region VII Insula 11.11,14 as the Hospitium Christionorum, or “Hotel of the Christians.” Naturally, speculations on the nature of this structure quickly became as sensational as the interpretations of the graffito, resulting in a variety of claims regarding the building’s ownership, use, and relationship to Christian activity. Although Giuseppe Fiorelli, the excavator of the building, simply described it as a “grande caupona” (“large inn”) without speculating on its relationship to the Christianos graffito, 56 his colleague Giovanni de Rossi was the first to claim that building was a meeting place for Pompeii’s purported Christian community. In particular, de Rossi asserted that the Christianos graffito discovered in its atrium was evidence of the building’s use as a Christian “school” in which an apostolic figure taught his disciples similar to the way Paul taught the message of Jesus from a rented room in Rome (see Acts 28:30–31).

56

Fiorelli, Gli Scavi, 25. Of all the eyewitnesses to the graffito, Fiorelli seems to have been the most hesitant to identify the building as “Christian” in his later reports. Fiorelli’s associate, Alfred Kiessling, originally referred to the structure as “una bottega” (“a store”); see Kiessling, “Scavi di Pompei,” 92–98, and Mallardo, “La questione dei cristiani a Pompei,” 139.

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De Rossi supported this suggestion by referring to other graffiti which were clustered around the Christianos graffito on the southwest wall of the atrium; these included the phrase MVLVS HIC · MVSCELLAS (“This mule, to the little flies”), 57 which he read as a pagan derision of the disciples gathered around a Christian teacher, and the line MENDAX VERACI UBIQUE SALUTE (“liar salutes truth everywhere”), 58 which he understood as a derision of the Christian teacher himself. De Rossi also suggested that a graffito outside the building’s taberna (Insula 11.13) warning idlers to not loiter at that establishment—OTIOSIS LOCVS HIC NON EST DISCEDE MORATOR (“This is not the place to linger, move along, idler”) 59—was the owner’s attempt to dispel pagan neighbors who might be suspicious of the Christian activities being conducted inside the “apostolic school,” 60 thus presenting an elaborate scenario of Christian presence and interactions in the city of Pompeii.

This description of the building and its use as a Christian gathering place had a far-reaching impact and was generally accepted in subsequent decades. 61 Perhaps the most influential scholar in perpetuating and expanding upon this hypothesis in the mid-20th century was Matteo Della Corte, who may have been the first to dub Insula 11.11,14 the “Hotel of the Christians.” 62 Della Corte championed the claim that the building and its graffito (along with numerous other graffiti and artifacts throughout the city) indicated the presence of a robust Christian community in Pompeii.63 In regard to the “hotel,” he added the claim that a small crystal fish (which he viewed as a Christian symbol) was 57

CIL IV.2016.

CIL IV.2018c.

59 CIL IV.813.

60 De Rossi, “Una memoria dei Cristiani,” 72.

61 For example, see de Feis, Alcune Memorie, 12–14, who, following de Rossi, considered the building’s atrium to be the place where Christians gathered for instruction and prayers. Newbold, “Aramaic Inscriptions,” 294, similarly imagined Christian converts spending long hours listening to an apostolic missionary in the same room where pagan observers wrote their derisive graffiti. One contemporary scholar who was open to a Christian reading of the graffito but critical of de Rossi’s description of the building as an early Christian house church was Bernard Aube, Academie des Inscriptions et Belles Lettres (Paris: Seance du Juin, 1866), 184–91.

62 Matteo Della Corte, “Sigillum-Devotio,” Rendic. R. Accademia di Napoli 16 (1938): 6.

63 See Matteo Della Corte, “L’Albergo Dei Cristiani a Pompei,” Civilta 3.9 (1942): 73–80; and Case ed Abitanti di Pompei (3rd ed.; Napoli, 1965), varia.

58

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found in the insula, further attesting the use of the building for Christian meetings. 64 In his later writings, Della Corte elaborated upon this reconstruction by suggesting that the owner of the hotel was a Jewish man who was sympathetic to Christians and allowed them to meet on his premises.

This claim was prompted by the discovery in the adjacent taberna (Insula 11.13) of a bronze food warmer (foculus authepsa), the lid of which was decorated with a statuette of a bearded prisoner whose hands were tied behind his back and whose face looked up in defiance. By pointing to a similar image on coins minted by Gaius Sosius to commemorate the conquest of Jerusalem in 37 B.C.E., Della Corte argued that the statuette represented a Jewish prisoner, perhaps taken captive in the first Judean revolt against Rome. The rebellious attitude depicted on the statuette convinced Della Corte that its owner (assumed to be the owner of both the hotel and the adjacent taberna) was a Judean who still took immense pride in his recently subdued nation. It was this “Hebrew innkeeper,” according to Della Corte, who brought Christians (fellow Jews?) into his hotel for their gatherings. 65 Variations on these claims have persisted into the late 20th century and occasionally still appear in the academic literature. For example, the popular study of Carlo Giordano and Isidoro Kahn refers to Insula 11.11,14 as both the “Hotel of the Christians” and the “Hotel of the Jews,” and fully endorses the reconstruction of the hotel being owned by a Jew and used for Christian gatherings. 66 Similarly, Paul Berry recently maintained that Christians met in the building’s living rooms to practice their secret rituals. 67 Apart from these uncritical repetitions of previous claims, many academic references to the insula since the mid-20th century have simply referred to the building by its traditional name—the “Hotel of the Christians”—without commenting on the sociohistorical implications of that title. 68 Unfortunately, most published descriptions of Insula 11.11,14 have been extremely brief and selective, typically offered by those writers who have 64

Della Corte, “L’Albergo Dei Cristiani,” 79.

Della Corte, “L’Albergo Dei Cristiani,” 80. The food warmer, which had a receptacle for heated charcoal, was supported by four lion feet and was decorated with bronze images of lambs and Medusa heads along its side. An image of the statuette and the possible comparanda on the Gaius Sosius coins can be seen in Giordano and Kahn, Jews in Pompeii, 68–69.

66 Giordano and Kahn, Jews in Pompeii, 66–69, 83–88.

67 Berry, Christian Inscription, 7.

68 For example, see Eugene J. Dwyer, Pompeii’s Living Statues: Ancient Roman Lives Stolen from Death (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2010), 37.

65

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promoted the more sensationalistic claims outlined above. Yet, despite the significant implications of these claims, no study to our knowledge has offered a critical analysis of the building and its surrounding neighborhood—i.e., the physical setting of the Christianos graffito—in order to properly assess the assertions that the building was a hotel used by Christians as a place of gathering, teaching, and prayer. Since we have shown that the graffito likely does refer to Christians, it is now important to sort through the various claims about the building in an attempt to determine its function and socio-religious dynamics. We will begin with a regional contextualization and physical description of the insula itself, followed by an evaluation of the claims that it was associated with Jews or Jesus followers.

Region VII Insula 11.11,14 The “Hotel of the Christians” is located in Pompeii’s business district immediately to the east of the forum, central marketplace, and forum baths, and slightly to the northwest of the prominent Stabian baths off the Via dell’Abbondanza. One of the oldest sections of the city, Region VII originally consisted of large aristocratic domestic structures, many of which were, over time, extensively renovated for commercial use. Between the earthquake of 62 C.E. and the eruption of Vesuvius in 79 C.E., this region was characterized by irregular urban backstreets, narrow alleyways, and dense housing that distinguished it from the more elite residential areas of the city. 69 Region VII is particularly noteworthy for its industrial activities, with a high concentration of bakeries and textile workshops. 70 Among the latter were over a dozen facilities 69

For general surveys of Region VII, see Fiorelli, Gli Scavi, 23–26; Amedeo Maiuri, Pompeii (trans. V. Priestly; 4th ed.; Rome: La Libreria dello Stato, 1949), 57–60; Angelo Amoroso, “L’ultima fase di vita dell’insula VII 10 di Pompei. Analisi stratigrafica e prime proposte di ricostruzione,” in Pompei, Capri e La Penisola Sorrentina, ed. Felice Senatore (Capri: Oebalus, 2004), 391–427; and Ray Laurence, Roman Pompeii: Space and Society (2nd ed.; London: Routledge, 2007), 15–16, 52.

70 According to the analysis in Laurence, Roman Pompeii, 67–71, Pompeii’s highest concentration of bread production was found in Region VII, including seven bakeries along the Via degli Augustali just one block to the north of Insula 11.11,14. This distribution of bakeries suggests that the bread produced in this area was sold throughout other regions in the city. For a listing and description of at least 14 textile workshops in the region, see Walter O. Moeller, The Wool Trade in Ancient Pompeii (Leiden: Brill, 1976), 29–56.

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with vats, furnaces, and loom weights used for processing, washing, fulling, and dyeing wool, several of which existed along the Vicolo del Balcone Pensile (the street shared by Insula 11). 71 Graffiti indicate that many of the workers and managers of these workshops also lived within the region and in close proximity to the “hotel.” 72 The location of Region VII near the forum, markets, and public baths also contributed to its transient and less reputable character. 73 Spatially separated from the city’s more respectable residential quarters, Region VII included numerous taverns (tabernae) and smaller stands for food and drinks (popinae and thermapolia), 74 as well as several small prostitute rooms (cella meretricia) and larger brothels, the most famous of which was the lupanar (Region VII Insula 12.18–19) directly across the street to the northwest of Insula 11.11. 75 To accommodate the many travelers coming through Pompeii to conduct business in the city’s forum and central market, Region VII also had up

71

See Moeller, Wool Trade, 54–56, and Laurence, Roman Pompeii, 71–73. There is a debate over the intended clientele of the region’s textile production, with Moeller claiming that the wool products were exported, and Willem Jongman, The Economy and Society of Pompeii (Amsterdam: Gieben, 1988), 155–86, arguing that they were intended for the local market.

72 See Amoroso, “L’ultima fase,” 391–427.

73 In this part of the region, the east-west streets all dead-end into the backs of the Macellum (marketplace) and the Temple of Vespasian on the east side of the forum.

Therefore, most of the traffic to this area would have come from the north of the forum or from the south near the Stabian baths. Without a major thoroughfare connecting it to the rest of the city, this part of the region was largely isolated from the more respectable residential neighborhoods to its north, south, and east (see Laurence, Roman Pompeii, 120–26, 132). For the types of weekly market activities that would have drawn travelling merchants from the forum area to the lodgings of Region VII, see Joan M. Frayn, Markets and Fairs in Roman Italy (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1993), 38–46.

74 For a listing and description of 35 identifiable restaurants, taverns, and wine shops in Region VII (most of which were located east of the forum in the vicinity of the “Hotel of the Christians”), see Sharon Marie Ruddell, “The Inn, Restaurant and Tavern Business in Ancient Pompeii” (MA thesis, University of Maryland, 1964), 98–109, and John DeFelice, Roman Hospitality: The Professional Women of Pompeii (Warren Center: Shangri-La Publications, 2001), 260–85.

75 For a listing and description of almost 30 possible brothels and cella meretricia, see Thomas A. J. McGinn, The Economy of Prostitution in the Roman World (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2004), 277–82, 291–94. Laurence, Roman Pompeii, 83–92, points out that, although there was no official moral zoning in Pompeii, Region VII had an unusually high concentration of such buildings and rooms.

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to five hotels (hospitia) and smaller inns (cauponae). 76 These included at least three buildings in the immediate vicinity of the “Hotel of the Christians”—the smaller Hospitium of Sittius (Insula 1.44–45) across the Vicolo del Lupanare to the northeast, a large adjacent hospitium in the shared insula to the southwest (Insula 11.6, 8), and a medium sized hospitium to the west across the Vicolo del Balcone Pensile (Insula 12.34–35). Together, these establishments added to the region’s disreputable atmosphere of gambling, drinking, dancing girls, and prostitution which typically accompanied temporary lodgings. 77 Considering the larger context of Region VII, therefore, the designation of Insula 11.11,14 as a “hotel” (hospitium) is not unreasonable and is, in fact, well supported by the extant remains of the building. Unfortunately, the building is a casualty of the early excavations at Pompeii for which no detailed stratigraphic reports, architectural analysis, or records of small finds were provided by its excavators. 78 Instead, we only have general descriptions of the building’s layout and main features as they existed at the time of its destruction, mostly based on the initial report of Fiorelli, who excavated the entire insula in 1862. 79

76

For a listing and description of these buildings, see Ruddell, “Inn, Restaurant, and Tavern Business,” 98–109, and DeFelice, Roman Hospitality, 260–85. Laurence, Roman Pompeii, 91–101, discusses the high concentration of hotels and taverns in Region VII and, as a result, the region’s less respectable reputation. Local graffiti confirm that travelers sought accommodations in this region; for examples of travelers in the famous lupanar (Insula 12.18–19), see CIL IV.2183. Cf. Alison E. Cooley, The Cambridge Manual of Latin Epigraphy (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2012), 114–15.

77 For discussions of the many disreputable activities associated with hotels and inns in ancient Roman literature, see Wilhelmina F. Jashemski, “A Pompeian Copa,” The Classical Journal 59.8 (May 1964): 337–38, 347–48; DeFelice, Roman Hospitality, 23–27, 34–38, 92–99; and Laurence, Roman Pompeii, 91–101.

78 For laments over the deplorable condition of the excavation reports for most of the early excavations at Pompeii, see Andrew Wallace-Hadrill, Houses and Society in Pompeii and Herculaneum (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1994), 65, and Laurence, Roman Pompeii, 1–2.

79 See Fiorelli, Gli Scavi, 25–26 and Table 8, which is the earliest report on the insula. A more detailed description of the building (apart from its sensational interpretation) can be found in Della Corte, “L’Albergo,” 74–79. The most thorough documentation of the building (given without interpretation) is by Valeria Sampaolo in Pompei: Pitture e Mosaici. Vol. 7 Pt. 2 (Roma: Istituto della Enc. Italiana, 1997), 463–77 [cited hereafter as PPM]. Because of Fiorelli’s role as the building’s excavator, Della Corte’s work in

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Nevertheless, the available descriptions allow for a modest reconstruction of the building’s final phase between the earthquake of 62 C.E. and the eruption of Vesuvius in 79 C.E., the phase to which to the Christianos graffito belongs. 80 Although there is no precise typology for hotels in first-century Campania (no two buildings identified as such are exactly alike), features consistent with the general function of lodging establishments support the traditional identification of Insula 11.11,14 as a hotel with reasonable certainty. 81 These features include the presence of multiple dining rooms, a garden triclinium, a kitchen, numerous bedrooms (both in the lower and upper levels), and associated tabernae, all of which are found in Insula 11.11,14 (see below).

As is typical of other hotels in the city, Insula 11.11,14 seems to have been an old aristocratic domestic structure that was renovated for commercial use after the earthquake of 62 C.E. 82 During its final phase (see fig. 3, p. 145), the hotel had two entrances which provided access to its lower level: the main entry to the northwest off the Vicolo del Balcone Pensile (doorway no. 11, directly across the street from Pompeii’s most famous brothel) and a secondary entrance to the east off the Vicolo del Lupanare (doorway no. 14, not far from the Stabian baths; see photo 1, p. 145). 83 Past doorway no. 11 (a) is the hotel’s atrium (b)

systematically recording Pompeii’s excavated remains, and Sampaolo’s descriptions of otherwise unpublished details, we will heavily rely on these reports in our description of the building, noting any relevant differences or divergences.

80 See Guarducci, “La più antica inscrizione col nome dei Cristiani,” 116.

81 For the classic treatment of hotels and inns at Pompeii, see Tönnes Kleberg, Hôtels, Restaurants et Cabarets dans L’Antiquité Romaine (Uppsala: Almqvist & Wiksells, 1957), 34, who accepts Della Corte’s designation of Region VII Insula 11.11,14 as a hospitium. For further discussion of features consistent with hotel architecture in Pompeii, see Ruddell, “Inn, Restaurant, and Tavern Business,” 1–4; J. E. Packer, “Inns at Pompeii: A Short Survey,” Cronache Pompeiane 4 (1978): 5–53; and DeFelice, Roman Hospitality, 16–38.

82 Fiorelli, Gli Scavi, 23–24; Della Corte, “L’Albergo,” 74; PPM 7.2:463.

83 For the sake of convenience and consistency, in our top plan (fig. 3, p. 145) we have designated the main features of the building with the numbers and letters assigned to them by Fiorelli in his initial report (see Fiorelli, Gli Scavi, 25–26 and Table 8). This system was also adopted by Ruddell, “Inn, Restaurant, and Tavern Business,” 105–106 (no. 107) and PPM 7.2:463–77, but was altered by Della Corte, “L’Albergo,” 74–79. The description that follows generally reflects the reports of Fiorelli and PPM, noting where Della Corte, Ruddell, and other scholars either supplement them or diverge from them in their identification of specific features. These divergences serve as a reminder that additional research needs to be done on the building in order to clarify the precise function of each room. However, for the purposes of this article, the most important

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which may have contained a small impluvium with a well and a cistern (though few traces survive). The atrium was decorated with a black plinth and was likely an area of high traffic in the hotel, as guests came in and out of the building and gathered for the types of social activity often associated with ancient hotels. 84 It was on the southwest wall of this atrium that the Christianos graffito was written along with the derogatory graffiti mentioned previously. 85 Additional graffiti found in the atrium included two erotic references (one of which preserves the Egyptian name Rete), 86 a graffito with a crude sketch of the Emperor Vespasian, 87 and mention of an Ἀθηνοδώρος whose name is written in Greek rather than Latin letters. 88 Some of these graffiti attest to the transient and multiethnic character of the hotel’s guests. 89 At the north/northwest of the atrium and flanking door no. 11 are “two little rooms” (c and d) which likely served as guest bedrooms. 90 In the north

observation is that the cumulative evidence seems to support the scholarly consensus that the building operated as a hotel in its final phase.

84 For descriptions of the entryway and atrium see PPM 7.2:465 (no. 1), which indicates that the entryway was paved with cocciopesto (lime mixed with crushed pottery). For discussion on the activities typically associated with hotel atriums, see the references in n. 77 above.

85 See CIL IV.813, 2016, and 2018c.

86 De Rossi was the first to note that there were two erotic graffiti in this room, but he did not describe their contents; see de Rossi, “Una memoria dei Cristiani,” 72. These probably refer to CIL IV.2010, which depicts a phallus alongside the name “Rete,” and CIL IV.2013, which may refer to “Nicerate,” a “treacherous slut” (or “vain little pig”) who seduces her lover(s?); see Antonio Varone, Erotica Pompeiana: Love Inscriptions on the Walls of Pompeii (trans. Ria Berg: Roma: L’Erma di Bretschneider, 2001), 116.

87 CIL IV.2014.

88 CIL IV.2017.

89 Several dozen other graffiti were found in or near Insula 11, but imprecise (and likely incomplete) reports in the CIL make their exact location difficult to determine with certainty; see CIL IV.677–679, 812–815, 1996–202IV, 3579–3580, and 9062–9077a. In any case, most of the graffiti associated with Insula 11 or discovered on one of the three adjoining streets deal with mundane matters such as greetings, names, and dates.

90 Della Corte, “L’Albergo,” 75, mentions two beds found in these rooms, leading Ruddell, “Inn, Restaurant, and Tavern Business,” 105–106, to identify them as “bedrooms.” This is a reasonable identification but, as far as we can determine, no traces of the beds survive.

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corner of the atrium is the hotel’s kitchen (e), 91 and another room which may be a decorated bedroom (f). 92 South of these is a staircase (g) leading to the upper level, under which is a small prostitute room (cella meretricia) with a concrete bed (see photo 2, p. 146), an entrance (no. 12) opening onto the Vicolo del Lupanare to the east, and a carved tufa phallus above the entrance. 93 To the south of the atrium is what might be a small decorated triclinium (h), 94 a small room for wine storage built from the earlier passageway/fauces (i), 95 and what is either a larger triclinium or tablinum that provided access to the southern portion of the building (k). 96 Along a northeast-southwest passageway (l) is a latrine (n) that provides access to a windowed triclinium to the southwest (o), 97 and to the northeast is another room used for wine storage (p) and possibly a small decorated oecus (q). 98 91

PPM 7.2:466 (no. 3). The kitchen is a triangular area with a high window opening to the Vicolo del Lupanare. In the original building, this room opened up to the Vicolo del Lupanare on the east, but the entrance was sealed after the renovations in 62 C.E. 92 Fiorelli, Gli Scavi, 25, and Della Corte, “L’Albergo,” 75, refer to this as a “storage room,” but Ruddell, “Inn, Restaurant, and Tavern Business,” 105–106, describes it as a “bedroom” without further explanation. PPM 7.2:463, 466 (no. 4) calls it both a “little room” and a bedroom, and describes the room’s now faded decoration.

93 Fiorelli, Della Corte, Ruddell, and PPM 7.2:476–477 (nos. 31–32) all agree that the small room under the staircase (accessed by doorway no. 12) was a cella meretricia. In addition to the concrete bed with pillow (which is still extant), Della Corte, “L’Albergo,” 75, and idem, Case ed abitanti, 204–205, points to the phallus carved by the room’s entrance to support this identification. The common use of phallic symbols for apotropaic purposes complicate this part of Della Corte’s argument, but most scholars still acknowledge the room’s likely association with prostitution (see DeFelice, Roman Hospitality, 117–18).

94 Fiorelli and Ruddell both agree on this identification, whereas Della Corte, “L’Albergo,” 75, simply identifies it as a “little room.” PPM 7.2:466–67 (nos. 5–6) calls it a cubiculum and describes the traces of its poorly executed decoration, including a stucco cornice.

95 For the post-62 conversion of the earlier fauces into storage rooms (i) and (p), see and PPM 7.2:463.

96 Fiorelli, Gli Scavi, 25, only mentions a “little table” and passageway, while Della Corte, “L’Albergo,” 75, describes it as a “grand dining room”/triclinium. Ruddell, “Inn, Restaurant, and Tavern Business,” 105–106, refers to it as a tablinum which functions as a walkway. PPM 7.2:463, 467 (nos. 7–9) also refers to the room as a tablinum and describes its décor, which included painted panels of black, red, and white.

97 Fiorelli and Ruddell both refer to this room as a triclinium (cf. PPM 7.2:463), while Della Corte, “L’Albergo,” 75, merely calls it a “small room.”

98 PPM 7.2:463. Fiorelli, Gli Scavi, 25, suggests that, after the building was renovated into a hotel, this room was used for dyeing cloth. However, he does not provide evidence to support this claim. PPM 7.2:469 (nos. 11–13) identifies this room as a cubiculum and

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Further to the southeast is the secondary doorway, no. 14, along with two staircases (r) leading to the upper level and a (servants?) sleeping area (s) with a latrine. 99 To the west of these features is a small enclosed garden (m), 100 which provided access to a large uncovered area (t), another small (bed?)room (u), and a large vegetable garden (v) used both for growing produce for the hotel and for guests to dine in an outdoor garden setting. 101 This garden had three alcoves (y) along its northwest wall, 102 which were all decorated with painted panels, large candelabras (which may have been adorned with theater masks), birds, and nature scenes. 103 The rest of the garden’s northwest wall was decorated with First Style wall paintings along with plant designs. 104 The southwest wall of the garden similarly had painted panels and garden scenes, along with a semicircular lararium niche and altar (x; see photo 3, p. 146). 105 The lararium, built for honoring the household gods, included a depiction of the family Genus (or possibly the emperor Claudius) holding a large cornucopia and Jupiter, who has rays radiating from his head, a red tunic covering his left describes its faded decoration, which included Fourth Style wall painting, a stucco cornice, and scenes depicting swans.

99 Fiorelli, Gli Scavi, 25, suggested that this was the servants room but provided no supporting evidence for this claim (cf. PPM 7.2:463). The report that this room contained a latrine is found in Della Corte, “L’Albergo,” 75.

100 The walls of this enclosed garden were decorated in a similar manner as the atrium and were encircled by a low partition wall (pluteo), likely used for the planting of the garden’s vegetation; see PPM 7.2:468 (no. 10).

101 While this large garden may have originally served as a pleasure garden, by the time the building was converted into a hotel the garden was used to grow produce for the hotel’s guests. This is indicated by the rectangular plots of cultivated rows (used for irrigation) and trellises of varying heights preserved in the northern part of the garden.

See Della Corte, “L’Albergo,” 75; Jashemski, “Pompeian Copa,” 344–46; and idem, The Gardens of Pompeii, Herculaneum, and the Villas Destroyed by Vesuvius (New York: Caratzas, 1979), 171–72.

102 PPM 7.2:463 suggests that at least two of these alcoves were used as garden triclinia for guests of the hotel, clients of the small prostitute room at doorway no. 12, or customers of the tavern at doorway no. 13. For other identifications of the three features along the northwest wall, including as storage compartments or arbors, see Fiorelli, Gli Scavi, 25; Ruddell, “Inn, Restaurant, and Tavern Business,” 105–106; and Jashemski, Gardens, 172.

103 See PPM 7.2:472–76 (nos. 21–29).

104 PPM 7.2:470 (no. 14).

105 See PPM 7.2:470–73 (nos. 15–20).

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shoulder, and sandals on his feet. Jupiter is also shown holding a scepter and lightning bolt, and is pouring out a libation on a cylindrical altar. 106 There is clear evidence that the hotel also had an upper level, including the three staircases, traces of the second story walls and windows, extant portions of a sloping roof over doorway no. 11, and remains of a spacious balcony along the east wall overlooking the Vicolo del Lupanare. However, without additional evidence it is difficult to reconstruct the precise layout of this upper level. Based on the few remaining features, Della Corte estimated that the relatively cramped second story contained at least 15 rooms for the lodging of guests. Along with the 8 rooms on the lower level that may also have been used for sleeping (presumably rooms c, d, f, h, o, q, s, and u), Della Corte suggested that the hotel may have had a total of 23 bedrooms accommodating up to 50 guests, making it one of the largest hotels in the city. 107 In addition to the main sections of the hotel entered by doorways nos.

11 and 14, several rooms in the insula to the east along the Vicolo del Lupanare may have been part of the larger establishment (see photo 1, p. 145). This includes the small prostitute room (cella meretricia) accessed by doorway no. 12 (above which is a carved phallus that served either as an advertisement for the room or as an apotropaic symbol to ward off evil), 108 and a small three-room tavern (taberna) with a latrine accessed by doorway no. 13. Outside this tavern there were depictions of Mercury with a bird (meant to invoke blessings upon the establishment) and two entwined serpents meeting at a circular altar (a

106

George K. Boyce, Corpus of the Lararia of Pompeii (Rome: American Academy in Rome, 1937), 69 (no. 310), pl. 14.1; cf. PPM 7.2:470–71 (no. 17).

107 Della Corte, “L’Albergo,” 75, 78. Ruddell, “Inn, Restaurant, and Tavern Business,” 105–106, seems to have misunderstood Della Corte’s statement by claiming that there were 50 bedrooms between the two levels of the building (unfortunately, no locations are given for these rooms). Similarly, PPM 7.2:463 claims that there were a total of 50 beds in the hotel (also without indicating their location in the building). Based on our assessment of the building and reports, it seems that Della Corte’s more modest estimate is the most realistic and, in fact, may be slightly too high. His count of eight potential guest rooms on the lower level include three rooms that Fiorelli identified as either triclinia or an oecus (h, q, and o), one room that Fiorelli identified as a sleeping area for servants (s), and one room that Della Corte himself identified as a storage room (f). With the limited data given in the excavation reports, it is possible that any of these could have served as guest rooms. However, if any of them did not function in this way, Della Corte’s estimate of 23 bedrooms and 50 guests would need to be lowered.

108 See n. 93 above.

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common Pompeian symbol of prosperity). 109 A two-room storage area or shop was accessed by doorway no. 15, 110 and a second (larger) two-room storage area or shop was accessed by doorway nos. 16 and 17. 111 It is difficult to determine if all of these rooms were owned and utilized by the hotel, leased out by the hotel owner, or were owned independently of the hotel. 112 In any case, they all likely interacted with the hotel and its guests in important ways, both socially and economically.

A “Jewish/Christian” Hotel?

Now that we have established the context of the Christianos graffito by examining Region VII Insula 11.11,14, we are in a position to consider the various scenarios proposed for the nature of this building and its socio-religious 109

PPM 7.2:477 (nos. 33–34). Fiorelli, Gli Scavi, 26, described this tavern as a “little store” with a side room for provisions and a latrine. In a rare report of small finds, Della Corte, “L’Albergo,” 78, noted that five bronze stamps decorated with shells and pastries were found within. In addition to the depictions just mentioned, signs in front advertised that fine wine (“lympha Romanensis”) was served here (CIL IV.815), that the tavern keeper’s name was possibly Drusus (CIL IV.814), and that loitering in front of the tavern was forbidden (CIL IV.813); see Ruddell, “Inn, Restaurant, and Tavern Business,” 106 n. 108.

Accompanying the depiction of Mercury on the pilaster between the entrances of the hotel (no. 14) and the tavern entrance (no. 13) there is a graffito which mentions the name of the god, MERCVRIVS (CIL IV.812); see Boyce, Corpus of the Lararia of Pompeii, 111 n. 21.

110 Fiorelli, Gli Scavi, 26, referred to this room as a “little store” with a storage area. Della Corte, “L’Albergo,” 75, cannot confirm if it was used as a tavern or store, but suggests that after the earthquake of 62 C.E. it might have been enlarged as a part of Insula 11.16–17 immediately to its south.

111 Fiorelli, Gli Scavi, 26, identifies these rooms as two stores with a large storage area.

Della Corte, “L’Albergo,” 75, suggests that this large spacious area was for the use of the hotel, either for storing wood or coal, or possibly as a garden or winery.

112 If, as has been suggested, the sign forbidding loitering outside of the tavern in Insula 11.13 (CIL IV.813) refers to clients waiting on the street for their turn with a prostitute in Insula 11.12, then it would seem that the tavern keeper and the owner of the cella meretricia had competing business interests (see DeFelice, Roman Hospitality, 118).

However, it is not clear whether this is the case and what their relationship might have been to the owner of the hotel. Perhaps the cella meretricia in Insula 11.12 was an extension of the tavern in 11.13, and the sign forbidding loitering was directed to potential clients of the large lupanar across the street (Insula 12.18–19).

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dynamics. As mentioned previously, such scenarios have ranged from seeing the building as a hotel owned by a nationalistic Judean who allowed Christians to meet there, to the hotel serving as an “apostolic school” in which a Christian teacher gathered his disciples for instruction, prayer, and secret rituals, thus leading to the names “Hotel of the Jews” or (more famously) the “Hotel of the Christians.” As also mentioned previously, these claims are almost completely based on the presence of the Christianos graffito in the hotel’s atrium with little consideration of the building’s other features or functions. It is this flawed methodology, which starts with the graffito in isolation and then reconstructs the dynamics of the hotel based on a single decontextualized artifact, that has resulted in the highly speculative, sensationalistic, and idiosyncratic claims of the past 150 years.

A more responsible interpretation of the hotel would begin with viewing the building in its entirety in order to understand its broader socioreligious dynamics, and then proceed to situate the Christianos graffito as one part of those dynamics. Since the graffito likely does contain a reference to Jesus followers and possibly a Jewish woman named Maria, we must also consider the potential scenarios that could account for these references, assess the relative likelihood of these scenarios within the larger context of the building, and determine if the results would justify calling the building a “Hotel of the Jews” or “Hotel of the Christians.” Simply put, was this hotel a likely setting for Jewish or Christian activity and, if so, to what extent? In theory, the range of scenarios that could explain the Jewish or Christian associations with the hotel include: (1) the hotel was owned by Jews or Christians (a claim made by the more sensationalistic scholarship surveyed in this article); (2) that Jews or Christians were prominent guests in an otherwise “pagan” hotel and gathered for religious purposes in that setting; or (3) that “pagan” guests of the hotel had simply encountered Jews or Christians (either in Pompeii or somewhere nearby) and made mention of the encounter through graffiti in the hotel’s atrium.

The major challenge to the first and possibly the second scenario is the fact that the hotel is saturated with elements common to Greco-Roman society but not conducive to typical Jewish or Christian sensibilities in the first century.

As seen in the previous section, these elements include the honoring of Roman deities by the owners of the hotel and adjacent tavern such as the household lararium in the large garden depicting Jupiter and honoring the family Genus, the references to Mercury between doorways 13 and 14 to invoke the deity’s blessing on the establishment, and the depiction of entwined serpents around a

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circular altar to symbolize the establishment’s prosperity. 113 Similarly, there are traces of emperor veneration in the hotel shown by a possible depiction of Claudius in the household lararium and a sketch of Vespasian in the hotel’s atrium. 114 Finally, the hotel reflects the associations with prostitution and erotic behavior typical of Roman hospitality establishments, with a small prostitute room under a staircase in the hotel (no. 12), 115 two phallic images associated with the building (pointing either to erotic or magical interests), 116 and graffiti in the hotel’s atrium that have erotic overtones. 117 These elements suggest that the owners and presumably most of the guests of the hotel were fully immersed in the social, civic, and religious life of Pompeii in a way that appears discordant with the cultural and religious attitudes of most Judeans and Jesus followers in this period. 118 These features make the first scenario—that Jews or Christians owned the hotel—an extremely unlikely possibility. In fact, the only artifact presented

by Della Corte, Giordano, and Kahn as evidence for a Jewish owner (the statuette on the bronze food warmer) itself seems to undermine that claim. If, indeed, the statuette depicts a Jewish prisoner (an interpretation which remains

113

Della Corte, “L’Albergo,” 78, notes that 47 bronze and terra cotta lamps with relieved figures were found in association with the hotel. Although he did not describe the scenes depicted on the lamps, they were presumably decorated with pagan motifs.

114 For the possible depiction of Claudius in the lararium, see Boyce, Corpus of the Lararia, 69 (no. 310; pl. 14:1). For the graffito and sketch of “Vespasius,” see CIL IV.2014.

An additional reference to “Caesar” may be found in CIL IV.9076 (“C[a]sareo”?).

115 In addition, DeFelice, Roman Hospitality, 118, suggests that the prostitutes who used this room or worked in the lupanar across the street may have lived in rented rooms in the hotel.

116 One was the phallus carved in tufa above the cella meretricia at doorway no. 12 (see n. 91 above), and the other was associated with the “Rete” graffito in the hotel’s atrium (CIL IV.2010).

117 DeFelice, Roman Hospitality, 117, suggests that CIL IV.2013, 2015, 2016, and 2021 have sexual overtones, but of these only IV.2013—the mention of Nicerate and her lover(s)—seems to contain an overtly sexual reference. He may have omitted from the list CIL IV.2010 (the phallus accompanying the “Rete” graffito) because of his argument that Pompeii’s phallic images were apotropaic rather than erotic symbols.

118 Mallardo, “La Quistione dei Christiani,” 160–63, also pointed out that the erotic graffiti and disreputable nature of Region VII cast doubt on the claims that Christians met in the hotel.

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uncertain), then it more likely reflects a Roman sense of triumph over Judea— similar to the sentiment expressed on the JUDEA CAPTA coins—than the supposed Judean nationalism of its owner. Furthermore, the Medusa heads and other figural images depicted on the artifact suggest that its owner (Drusus?) was Roman and not Jewish. 119 Therefore, without any compelling evidence, there is simply no reason to think that the food warmer, tavern, or hotel were owned by Judeans or Jesus followers. Rather, the cumulative evidence strongly suggests that the establishment was owned by a common Roman innkeeper who honored the local gods, venerated the emperor, promoted (or at least benefitted from) prostitution as part of his business, and may have actually held anti-Judean sentiments.

In these aspects of Greco-Roman life, Judeans and Jesus followers were notorious for not acculturating to their surrounding society. Unlike the owners and presumably most guests of the hotel, Jews and early Christians typically rejected Roman polytheism, refused to pay ritual homage to the Roman emperor, and shunned the sexually deviant behavior common in Roman culture, making the atmosphere of the hotel an unlikely setting for Jewish or Christian gatherings. To be sure, not all Jews and Jesus followers maintained the same level of cultural resistance traditionally attributed to them; 120 some Jews and Christians were more open to honoring and praying for Roman government officials than others, 121 some Jesus followers were known to engage in sexual

119

For descriptions and images of the food warmer and its decoration, see Della Corte, “L’Albergo Dei Cristiani,” 80, and Giordano and Kahn, Jews in Pompeii, 68–69. Despite the pagan imagery on the artifact, both of these studies argue in favor of Jewish ownership for the item and the building. “Drusus,” according to Zangemeister’s CIL entry (IV.814), was the name of the individual who owned the tavern (no. 13) in which the food warmer was found, although his relationship to the larger hotel is uncertain.

120 Philip A. Harland, Associations, Synagogues, and Congregations: Claiming a Place in Ancient Mediterranean Society (Minneapolis: Fortress Press, 2003), 8–14, 182–95, shows that while virtually all Judeans and Jesus followers rejected the offering of imperial cult honors, there were varying degrees of acculturation on other social issues. This broad spectrum of responses included sectarian resistance, extensive accommodation, and moderate positions, which encourages us to be cautious when assigning moral positions to an entire social group.

121 For example, unlike the Apocalypse of John, which strongly prohibits any form of emperor veneration (see Rev 2:13–23; 13:1–18), the writer of 1 Peter—a letter traditionally understood to have been written in Rome (1 Pet 5:13)—encourages Jesus followers to pray for the emperor and other government officials (1 Pet 2:13–17; cf. Rom 13:1–7).

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immorality, 122 some Jewish women (slaves?) may have been part of Pompeii’s prostitution industry, 123 and some Judeans in first-century Italy were highly acculturated into Roman society. 124 Therefore, it is possible that some Judeans or Christians would have been more comfortable gathering in this building than their compatriots. It might also be possible that small groups of Jews or Christians gathered to meet in the hotel’s otherwise “pagan” setting. 125 However, with no positive or compelling evidence for the presence of such groups in the hotel, it is best not to draw any hasty conclusions regarding Jewish or Christian religious activity there. The mention of the potentially Jewish name “Maria” in the second line of the Christianos graffito is intriguing and may suggest that at one time she was a guest or servant of the establishment, but this portion of the graffito is too fragmentary to know for sure.

As far as we can determine, there is also no evidence in the literary sources that early Christian teachers or communities operated out of Roman 122

For Jesus followers who, from the perspective of New Testament writers, apparently engaged in sexually immoral activity, see 1 Cor 5:1–13 and 6:12–20 (Christians who were associating with prostitutes in Corinth) and Rev 2:13–23 (Christians in Asia Minor who committed acts of fornication).

123 Among the likely Jewish slave women attested at Pompeii (see below), three different women sharing the name Maria may have been forced into prostitution as a part of their captivity (CIL IV.1840; IV.7866; IV.8224); see McGinn, Economy of Prostitution, 299.

124 See below for references to individual Judeans in Roman imperial circles, Jewish actors in Italy, and possible evidence for Jewish gladiators in Pompeii. At Herculaneum there was a Jewish(?) slave girl named Maria who fulfilled a vow at the temple of Venus (Cooley and Cooley, Sourcebook, 129–30 [E29]). Also in Campania during the eruption of Vesuvius was a young Judean elite named Agrippa, who was the son of Felix (the Roman procurator of Judea) and Drusilla (a Herodian princess); see Josephus, Antiquities 20.141–44. These examples show that there were some individuals in the region who were ethnically Judean yet highly acculturated to Roman life.

125 David L. Balch, “Rich Pompeiian Houses, Shops for Rent, and the Huge Apartment Building in Herculaneum as Typical Spaces for Pauline Churches,” JSNT 27.1 (2004): 27– 46, considers the Pompeian domus as a theoretical setting for early Christian assemblies.

Curiously, he does not include the hotel in Region VII Insula 11.11,14 in his discussion.

Nevertheless, Balch does consider the tensions that could exist between households who honor the family gods with lararia and the Jewish/Christian veneration of the “one true God.” The inclusion of Isis worship in some traditional Roman households suggests that such households were open to the introduction of foreign deities, but whether this could have included the monotheistic veneration of the God of Judea is uncertain.

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hotels, as opposed to the well attested gatherings of Jesus followers in synagogues, workshops, or privately owned houses. 126 The second-century Acts of John tells a story of the apostle spending one night in a deserted inn near Ephesus, but this falls far short of the scenarios often proposed for the “Hotel of the Christians.” 127 Instead, early Jewish and Christian literature tends to speak disparagingly of the atmosphere that typically attended Roman hospitality establishments. 128 Again, it is not impossible that individual Judeans or Jesus followers stayed in the hotel on occasion, but there is simply no positive evidence to suggest that groups of them gathered in or operated out of the hotel in any significant way. 129 Therefore, the titles “Hotel of the Jews” or “Hotel of the 126

There is literary and epigraphic evidence that groups of like-minded people gathered in Roman hotels (including at Pompeii) to discuss politics, business, or other common interests (see Ruddell, “Inn, Restaurant, and Tavern Business,” 58–59), but specifically Christian gatherings in hotels are not attested in ancient sources. However, it is interesting to note that the region in which Insula 11.11,14 is located (with its many textile workshops) fits well with the early descriptions of lower class Jesus followers gathering in parts of Roman cities with a high concentration of “workers in wool and leather, and fullers” who met in “leather shop(s) or fuller’s shop(s)” to discuss Christian teachings (see Origen, Contra Celsus 3.55). Since such trade networks fostered the spread of early Christianity within urban contexts, Region VII at Pompeii may provide a valuable case study on the type of social setting in which some Christian communities seem to have developed, even if there is no positive evidence for Christians meeting in Insula 11.11,14. For discussion of the spread of Christianity among the guilds and occupational networks of Roman cities, see Harland, Associations, 2–7, and idem, Dynamics of Identity in the World of the Early Christians: Associations, Judeans, and Cultural Minorities (London: T&T Clark, 2009), 29–36.

127 Acts of John 60:1.

128 For example, Philo, Vit. Cont. 40–41 and Flaccus 136–37, denounces the revelry, drunkenness, and debauchery that attended Greco-Roman banquets and drinking parties.

Similarly, Tertullian, Apology 39.5–6, states that Christians were opposed to spending their money on “feasts, drinking-bouts, and eating-houses,” each of which were commonly associated with Roman hotels. For a larger discussion on Jewish and Christian moral critiques of such behaviors among Greek and Roman associations, see Harland, Dynamics, 176–78.

129 As far as we can determine, the only find beside the graffiti that has been used as evidence for Christian gatherings in the hotel was the small crystal fish mentioned by Della Corte, “L’Albergo Dei Cristiani,” 79. Della Corte assumed this fish was a Christian symbol, but subsequent scholarship has shown that fish images were not used by Christians in this way until after the first century; see Graydon F. Snyder, Ante Pacem: Archaeological Evidence of Church Life before Constantine (Macon: Mercer University Press, 2003), 11, 13, 30–35.

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Christians” for Insula 11.11,14 appear to be misleading and are completely unjustified.

However, the cumulative evidence does suggest that the third scenario is highly plausible—that one of the guests of the hotel (Bovios) had encountered Christians and had listened to Christian teachings, for which he was ridiculed by a friend or fellow guest. This scenario would account for the thoroughly Roman character of the hotel, its owner, and its guests, as well as the derogatory nature of the Christianos graffito and the accompanying graffiti in the hotel’s atrium. As shown previously, if the Christianos graffito was properly transcribed its most reasonable meaning is that “Bovios is listening to the Christians.” There is no indication that Bovios was necessarily a Christian himself, although he seems to have been interested in the Christian message. As also discussed previously, the graffito’s use of the word “Christian”—a disparaging term originally used by outsiders to designate Jesus followers—suggests that its author was amused by Bovios’s interaction with such a peculiar minority group.

This scenario might also make sense of the other graffiti surrounding the Christianos graffito. According to de Rossi, in close proximity on the same wall were scrawled the phrases “this mule, to the little flies” and “liar salutes truthfulness everywhere.” 130 Both graffiti are difficult to interpret on their own, but it is possible that they were written “in conversation” with the Christianos graffito, meaning that later guests responded to the name “Christian” written on the wall with their own unflattering feelings toward Jesus followers. 131 In this light, it is also possible that the name Maria—written in a second hand directly above the word “Christians”—was inscribed “in conversation” with the graffiti by a guest who knew a Jewish-Christian woman (or a Jewish woman he mistook

130

CIL IV.2016 and 2018c; see de Rossi, “Una memoria dei Cristiani,” 72, who describes the close proximity of these graffiti on the wall and notes the graffiti’s derogatory attitude toward Christians, but then inexplicably uses this graffiti cluster as evidence that the room was used for Christian meetings. If anything, the “pagan” jokes seem to be evidence that most of the hotel’s guests were not Christian.

131 For other clusters of graffiti “in conversation” with each other at Pompeii, see Ruth Benefiel, “Pompeii, Puteoli, and the status of a Colonia in the mid-first century AD,” in Pompei, Capri e la Penisola Sorrentina, ed. Felice Senatore (Capri: Oebalus, 2004), 356– 57, who discusses different visitors in the lupanar (Insula 12.18–19) expanding upon an original graffito with their own comments. Cf. Milnor, Graffiti and the Literary Landscape, 164.

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as a Christian) by that name. Of course, with the fragmentary and enigmatic nature of the graffiti, this reconstruction is admittedly conjectural.

In any case, the discernable graffiti and the larger Roman context of the hotel all suggest that the most likely scenario supported by the evidence is that one or more of the hotel’s guests had encountered Christians and that others were amused by this interaction, thus showing a clientele that was generally derisive toward the early Jesus movement. With no positive evidence that such encounters occurred in the hotel itself, the final remaining question is where these guests would have encountered Christian teaching—in the city of Pompeii itself, or elsewhere in the region of Campania?

Conclusion: Implications for Judeans and Jesus Followers in Campania In this article we have suggested that, despite much of the sensationalism that has surrounded it, the Christianos graffito likely contains a reference to an individual listening to a group of Jesus followers, a possible reference to Christian preaching, and a mention of the potentially Jewish name Maria.

Unfortunately, the fragmentary nature of the graffito prohibits us from saying much more about its contents, and a careful analysis of the building in which it was found has provided no evidence of Jewish or Christian activity associated with the hotel. Nevertheless, although the more elaborate and speculative claims regarding the find have not been substantiated, the discernable content of the graffito still has potential significance for our understanding of Jewish and Christian dynamics in first-century Campania.

In recent decades, numerous scholars have examined the evidence for the presence of Jews in ancient Italy, with a particular focus on the Jewish community in the city of Rome. Jewish presence in Rome began at least by the second century B.C.E. and continued throughout the first century C.E., with diplomatic envoys being sent to the city from Jerusalem, Jewish communities developing in less affluent neighborhoods of the city, Judean elites studying, living, and working in the imperial court (such as Josephus and various Herodians), the influx of prisoners of war as slaves following the conquest of Jerusalem in 63 B.C.E. and the suppression of the First Judean Revolt in 70 C.E., and possibly the establishment of early synagogues. 132 Additional work has been 132

See the sources and discussions in Harry J. Leon, The Jews of Ancient Rome (Philadelphia: The Jewish Publication Society of America, 1960), 1–45, 135–42; John M. G. Barclay, Jews in the Mediterranean Diaspora: From Alexander to Trajan (323 BCE– 117 CE) (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1999), 282–319; Karin HednerZetterholm, “The Jewish Communities of Ancient Rome,” in The Synagogue of Ancient

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done on the spread of Christianity in the region, again with an emphasis on Rome, with evidence for the presence of Jesus followers in the city by the midfirst century. Such evidence includes the political disturbances involving Christians in the 40s and 60s C.E., the journeys of Paul and Peter to Rome during the reign of Nero, and gatherings of believers (both Judeans and Gentiles) that may have composed the communities behind several New Testament writings, including the Letter to the Romans, the Gospel of Mark, and the letter of 1 Peter. 133 Therefore, we can confidently say that groups of Judeans and Jesus followers had spread to the capital of the empire in the decades leading up to Pompeii’s destruction in 79 C.E. For the region of Campania and for Pompeii in particular, however, the historical, archaeological, and epigraphic evidence for the presence of both groups has been much sparser. Josephus indicates that a sizeable Judean community existed in the port city of Puteoli/Dicaearchia by the time of Augustus, 134 and there is evidence that some Jews were brought to the Neapolis (Naples) region as slaves after the Judean revolt in 70. 135 Because of the close proximity and regional interaction of these cities, it is not improbable that some sort of Jewish minority population lived in Pompeii and its vicinity before 79 C.E. 136 Indeed, epigraphic evidence found throughout Pompeii seems to support

Ostia and the Jews of Rome: Interdisciplinary Studies, ed. Birger Olsson, Dieter Mitternacht, and Olof Brandt (Stockholm: Svenska institutet i Rom, 2001), 131–40; and Esler, Conflict and Identity, 86–88, 98–100.

133 See Esler, Conflict and Identity, 100–108, and Bernard Green, Christianity in Ancient Rome: The First Three Centuries (London: T&T Clark, 2010), 1–59.

134 Josephus, War 2.104; Ant. 17.328. Harland, Dynamics, 114–16, discusses the evidence for other ethnic minorities (such as Syrians and Tyrians) who had also established communities in Puteoli during the first century.

135 For example, a first-century epitaph found near Naples (CIL X.1971) mentions a young Jewish woman, Claudia Aster, who was taken prisoner after the destruction of Jerusalem in 70 C.E. and brought to Campania, where she eventually integrated into Roman society; see David Noy, Jewish Inscriptions of Western Europe Vol 1: Italy (except for Rome), Spain and Gaul (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993), 43–45. Also relevant may be the presence of a Hebrew or Aramaic inscription found in the “Villa of Poppaea” at Oplontis; see Tibor Grüll and László Benke, “A Hebrew/Aramaic Graffito and Poppaea’s Alleged Jewish Sympathy,” in Journal of Jewish Studies 62.1 (Spring 2011): 37–55.

136 There are hints that some Jews lived in nearby Herculaneum, including an inscription mentioning a man (or perhaps alluding to the biblical king) named David (CIL IV.10584;

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this scenario; this includes the appearance of several Semitic names which may be Judean (such as Jonas, Jesus, Ieshua, one or two Marthas, at least four Marias, and two references to the name “Youdaikos”), 137 traces of Hebrew and Aramaic graffiti, 138 possible indications of kosher fish sauce (garum), 139 a reference to Sodom[a] and Gomor[a] from the Hebrew Bible, 140 and possibly other items. 141

Noy, JIWE, 1:60), and a slave woman named Maria, who seems to have become fairly acculturated by fulfilling a vow to Venus on behalf of her master (Cooley and Cooley, Sourcebook, 129–30 [E29]). In Stabiae, a marble sarcophagus was found dedicated to a Iulius Longinus by his wife Iulia Maria (CIL IX.966), possibly a Jewish slave who was freed and married to her master. Josephus also mentions the presence of a Judean elite named Agrippa (the son of Felix and Drusilla), who lived in Campania when Vesuvius erupted (Ant. 20.141–44).

137 See CIL IV.2402–2404, 2406 (Jonas/Ionas); 4287 (Jesus/Iesus); 8010 (Ieshua); 3763 and 5224 (Martha); 1507, 1840, 7866, and 8224 (four attested Marias, not including the Maria mentioned in the Christianos graffito); 6990 and 9757 (Youdaikos). For a brief discussion on the Jewish origins of these names, see Grüll and Benke, “A Hebrew/Aramaic Graffito,” 38–40. Gunderon, “Inscribing Pompeii,” 36–65, offers a more detailed but also more skeptical evaluation.

138 A mostly indecipherable Aramaic inscription was found at Pompeii in the House of the Cryptoporticus (Region I Insula 6.2, 16; CIL IV.8010). Also, in Region I Insula 11.14 was found an inscription of the Hebrew word cherem (either ‫ חרם‬or ‫ )כרם‬written in Latin letters alongside a five pointed star, possibly serving an apotropaic function in the house’s vestibule; see Noy, JIWE, 1:58–59. For a fuller treatment of the Aramaic graffiti at Pompeii, see Giancarlo Lacerenza, “Graffiti aramaici nella casa del Criptoportico a Pompei (Regio I, insula VI, 2),” Annali dell’Istituto Universitario Orientale di Napoli 56 (1996): 166–88.

139 For references to “castum (pure)” garum inscribed on amphorae found at Pompeii, see CIL IV.2569, 2609, 2611, and 5660–5662. There has been a significant debate over the nature of this phrase, with some scholars arguing that it reflects a form of “kosher” fish sauce meant for Jewish consumption (cf. Pliny, Natural History 31.95) and others arguing for interpretations apart from a Jewish context; see Cooley and Cooley, Sourcebook, 159 (E98); P. Berdowski, “Garum of Herod the Great: A Latin Greek Inscription on the Amphora from Masada,” Qumran Chronicle 16.3–4 (2008): 117–18; and Hannah Cotton, Masada II: The Latin and Greek Documents (Jerusalem: Israel Exploration Society, 1989), 166.

140 CIL IV.4976; see Noy, JIWE, 1:57–58, and Cooley and Cooley, Sourcebook, 159 (E99).

It is likely that this charcoal graffito was written after the eruption of Vesuvius by a Jewish individual who, returning to Pompeii after its destruction, recalled the biblical story of the cities’ destruction by fire from heaven (Gen 19:24–25).

141 For example, Samuel Rocca, “A Jewish Gladiator in Pompeii,” in Materia giudaica: bolletino dell’Associazione italiana per lo studio del giudaismo 11.1–2 (2006): 287–301, argues that a gladiator helmet found in the large barracks belonged to a Judean gladiator

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Much more work needs to be done in order to properly contextualize and evaluate each one of these artifacts, but among them there are almost certainly legitimate and insightful glimpses into the experiences of Judeans who lived in the city before its destruction, even if there is no evidence for a robust and well organized Jewish community as has often been suggested.

As to whether or not some of these Judeans in Pompeii had heard about Jesus (either in Palestine before the revolt or from local preaching) and had joined the Jesus movement, the extant evidence is much more tenuous. In theory, of course, the existence of a sub-group of Judeans who believed in Jesus is a real possibility, 142 though little positive evidence can been identified as pointing to a Christian presence in the city. Unfortunately, most of what has been presented as evidence for Christians in Pompeii has been extremely dubious, including several imagined “crosses,” 143 two ROTAS-SATOR squares thought to be Christian anagrams, 144 and a host of enigmatic symbols and based on its prominent depiction of a seven-branched date palm (a symbol typically associated with Judea). Much more dubious are the claims that an insula at Pompeii contained paintings depicting biblical stories of Solomon and Jonah; see J. Gutmann, “Was there Biblical Art at Pompeii?” Antike Kunst 15 (1972): 122–24, and T. Feder, “Solomon, Socrates, and Aristotle: In Earliest Biblical Painting, Greek Philosophers Admire King’s Wisdom,” Biblical Archaeology Review 34.5 (September/October 2008): 32–36.

142 Harland, Associations, 2–3, discusses the networks of Jewish communities throughout the Roman Empire and their importance for the spread of Christianity in these regions.

143 See, for example, the claims regarding the “living cross” symbol (CIL IV.10062) and an imagined cross at the “Christian bakery” in Della Corte, Case ed Abitanti, 115, and H. Kähler, “Christliche Kreuze aus Pompeji und Herculaneum,” Bollettino dell’ associazone internazionale degli amici di Pompei 1 (1983): 279–308. Similarly, some scholars have argued for the presence of Christian Chi-Rho symbols on various amphorae found throughout the city (e.g., CIL IV.10477; cf. 6175); see Della Corte, Notizie degli Scavi, 156.

In response, Lampe, From Paul to Valentius, 8, points to another amphora marked with a Chi-Rho that is unequivocally pagan (CIL IV.9812).

144 E.g., CIL IV.8623. Scholars who have argued that this word play is Christian include Jerome Carcopino, “Le Christianisme secret du ‘carré magique,’” Museum Helveticum 5 (1948), 16–59; Giordano and Kahn, Jews in Pompeii, 76–83; and Berry, Christian Inscription, 10. Duncan Fishwick, “On the Origins of the Rotas-Sator Square,” Harvard Theological Review 57.1 (1964): 47, has instead claimed that it is Jewish. Scholars who argue more persuasively that the squares simply represent a Roman word play adopted centuries later by Christians include Lampe, From Paul to Valentius, 8, and Cooley and

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inscriptions that have been read as references to Christian worship. 145 Since most of these symbols and supposed references are not attested in Christian contexts until centuries later, these claims have all proven to be highly questionable at best. 146 In fact, the only artifact in the city that appears to be a legitimate reference to Christianity is the Christianos graffito considered in this article.

Unlike the dubious items listed above, this graffito provides reasonable evidence by its use of a well-attested word and thus should not be simplistically dismissed as “pious imagination.”

However, from the content of the graffito it is difficult to know if its reference to “Christians” attests the presence of Jesus followers in Pompeii, reflects the activities of itinerant Christian teachers passing through the city, or simply indicates an encounter with Christians in the larger region of Campania.

Although the evidence is too limited to know with certainty, there is good reason to believe that a community of Jesus followers had developed in nearby Puteoli at least by the early 60s C.E. For example, the book of Acts reports that a group of believers in Puteoli invited Paul to stay with them for a week before he began his final journey to Rome (Acts 28:13–14); assuming that this narrative is historically reliable, it indicates that groups of Christians lived in Campania for over 15 years before the eruption of Mount Vesuvius in 79 C.E. 147 Therefore, it is reasonable to postulate that some Jesus followers came to live in Pompeii, visited Pompeii for teaching or trading purposes, or that individuals like Bovios and

Cooley, Sourcebook, 107–108 (D100). See also Rebecca R. Benefiel, “Magic Squares, Alphabet Jumbles, Riddles, and More: The Culture of Word Games among the Graffiti at Pompeii,” in The Muse At Play: Riddles and Wordplay in Greek and Latin Poetry, ed. J. Kwapisz, D. Petrain, and M. Szymanski (Munich: de Gruyter, 2012), 65–80.

145 For example, Lorenzo Falanga, “Sul significato di ‘Fidelis in p’ e su altre iscrizioni pompeiane,” Rivista di Studi Pompeiani 1 (1987): 209–19, has pointed to over 200 symbols found in Pompeii graffiti, including various triangles, stars, palms, and crosses, that he claims could indicate a robust Christian community in the city. He also argues that the word FIDELIS appearing in graffiti (e.g., CIL IV.520, 1812, and 4812) refers to an early Christian liturgy; cf. Della Corte, Notizie degli Scavi, 180; idem, “L’Albergo,” 73–74; and Berry, Christian Inscription, 9–12, 37.

146 See the discussion in Erich Dinkler, Signum Crucis (Tubingen: Mohr, 1967), 141–45.

147 Lampe, From Paul to Valentius, 7, suggests that the mention of a Christian community in Puteoli in Acts 28 comes from a pre-Lukan source, since its details appear superfluous to the overall narrative of Paul’s journey.

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other hotel guests in Pompeii had encountered Christians elsewhere in the region. 148 Such interactions are especially plausible in light of Puteoli’s centrality to the regional trade network, which included Pompeii; as Italy’s major port before the development of Ostia further north, Puteoli was the main distribution center of commodities imported from the eastern Mediterranean to the cities of Campania. The strong economic interactions between Puteoli and Pompeii in particular is evident from the large amount of pottery produced in Puteoli that was found in Pompeii, as well as the numerous graffiti in Pompeii left by travelling merchants from Puteoli. 149 Socio-religious dynamics likely followed similar patterns of regional interaction, making it likely that Christian presence or at least stories about Christians made their way to Pompeii from Puteoli in the years (or even decades) before the eruption of Vesuvius. 150 These interactions provide an important context for the Christianos graffito in Pompeii.

Although its insights are not vast, the Christianos graffito joins Acts 28:13–14 in providing valuable confirmation for the presence of Christians in the Campania region, even if not conclusively in Pompeii, before 79 C.E. If we have read its fragmentary contents and intentions correctly, the graffito also hints at how some Romans in Pompeii viewed Jesus followers; as expected, the graffito and possibly the graffiti surrounding it appear to be disparaging of this peculiar foreign minority group. Furthermore, even though the hotel in which the graffito was discovered contains no positive evidence for Jewish or Christianity activity, the industrial region of Pompeii in which the building was located (Region VII) can provide a valuable case study for the type of urban 148

Tertullian’s statement in Apology 40.8 that there were no Christians in Pompeii when Vesuvius erupted is clearly apologetic and should not be taken as conclusive evidence; see Lampe, From Paul to Valentius, 7.

149 Laurence, Roman Pompeii, 63–65, discusses the large amount of terra sigillata pottery found at Pompeii that was produced in Puteoli, as well as the central role of Puteoli in the Campanian trade network. Benefiel, “Pompeii,” 354–57, examines the connections between Puteoli and Pompeii as seen in Pompeian graffiti, which reflect business transactions and merchant travel between the two cities. Some of these graffiti were found in the famous brothel (Region VII Insula 12.18; CIL IV.2183) and an inn (Region VII Insula 12.35; CIL IV.2152) near the “Hotel of the Christians.” Other graffiti at Pompeii that mention Puteoli include CIL IV.1472, 3525, 3890, and 4262.

150 See Frend, Rise of Christianity, 113, and Lampe, From Paul to Valentius, 7–10.

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social setting in which some Christian communities developed during the first century. 151 We hope that by sorting through the speculative claims and polemics surrounding the graffito and hotel, by carefully examining and contextualizing both, and by considering their socio-historical implications, this study has brought some balance to the debate over the presence of Jesus followers in the Pompeii region, provided a helpful reassessment of a key piece of evidence in that debate, and opened some potential avenues for future research on the topic.

Images

Fig. 1: Line drawing of the Christianos graffito made in 1862 by Giulio Minervini and published in 1864 by Giovanni de Rossi. (Back to text)

Fig. 2: Line drawing of the Christianos graffito made and partially printed in 1862 by Alfred Kiessling. (Back to text)

151

See n. 126 above.

Wayment and Grey, Jesus Followers in Pompeii 145

Fig. 3: Top plan of Region VII Insula 11.11,14. (Back to text)

Photo 1: View of Region VII Insula 11.11,14 (including entrances no. 12 and 13) from the Vico del Lupanare. (Back to text)

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Photo 2: The cella meretricia in Region VII Insula 11.12. (Back to text)

Photo 3: The household lararium in Region VII Insula 11.11,14, with its depiction of Jupiter and possibly the family Genus. 152 (Back to text)

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152

All photos were taken by Thomas A. Wayment with the permission of the Soprintendenza Speciale per i Beni Archeologici di Pompei, Ercolano e Stabia. Every effort has been made to secure rights for the images included in this article. If there are any questions about permissions, please contact the editor-in-chief.

Between Polemic and Propaganda: Evoking the Jews of Fourth-Century Antioch Christine Shepardson University of Tennessee, Knoxville | cshepard@utk.edu JJMJS No. 2 (2015): 147---182

Despite narratives that Jews had a long history in ancient Antioch (Antakya, Turkey), modern perceptions of the late antique city are often still shaped by John Chrysostom’s aggressive Christian rhetoric. John’s sermons encouraged readers to imagine shadowy rhetorical “Jews” lurking in demon-filled synagogues, rather than Jews as otherwise undifferentiated synagogue-attendees among the crowd at the hippodrome, members of the bouleutērion, and fellow vendors in the agora who closed their shops on the Sabbath and contributed public festival celebrations to the city’s already busy calendar. 1 Decades ago Robert Wilken, Wayne Meeks, and others gathered the extant evidence for Jews in fourth-century Antioch, 2 but the quantity and lurid quality of the anti-Jewish 1

It is difficult to represent the various shades of rhetorical construction and historical reality that the extant data represents. I have put the term “Jews” in scare-quotes when I want to highlight the narrative construction of the category, and have left it without when I intend the term to lean closer toward the historical than the rhetorical. Nevertheless, this binary choice does not capture the complexity of the situation.

2 Robert Wilken’s groundbreaking work explicitly addressed the problem that in his view most scholars except for Marcel Simon had largely “ignored” the Jews’ “vital” presence in Antioch: Robert Wilken, John Chrysostom and the Jews: Rhetoric and Reality in the Late Fourth Century (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1983), xvi; see Marcel Simon, Verus Israel: Étude sur les relations entre chrétiens et juifs dans l’empire romain (135–425) (Paris: Editions de Boccard, 1964). Emmanuel Soler’s book also asked readers to remember Antioch’s Jews: Le Sacré et le Salut à Antioche au IVe siècle apr. J.-C.: Pratiques festives et comportements religieux dans le processus de christianisation de la cité (Beirut: Institut français du Proche-Orient, 2006), 2–3, 5, 107–11; see also Carl Kraeling, “The Jewish Community at Antioch,” Journal of Biblical Literature 51.2 (1932): 130–60; Glanville Downey, A History of Antioch in Syria: From Seleucus to the Arab Conquest (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1961); Wayne Meeks and Robert Wilken, Jews and Christians in Antioch in the First Four Centuries of the Common Era (Missoula: Scholars Press, 1978); Johannes Hahn, “Die jüdische Gemeinde im spätantiken Antiochia:

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and anti-Judaizing rhetoric in Chrysostom’s Adversus Iudaeos homilies have continued to capture scholars’ attention disproportionately to the other evidence. 3 Furthermore, developments in the methodological norms of historical scholarship mean that many scholars today do not share Meeks and Wilken’s confidence in the historical reliability of some of their sources, and have a more nuanced vocabulary for discussing the complexities of people and practices that seemed to John Chrysostom too “Jewish” to be “Christian” than existed when Meeks and Wilken wrote over thirty years ago. 4 These methodological shifts also mean that recent scholarship more often sidesteps discussion of actual fourthcentury Antiochene Jews to focus instead on the rhetorical world of Antioch as John Chrysostom imagined and presented it. Thus, despite these earlier studies, it is not uncommon for scholars whose explicit interest is not already Judaism to

Leben im Spannungsfeld von sozialer Einbindung, religiösem Wettberwerb und gewaltsamem Konflikt,” in Jüdische Gemeinden und Organisationsformen von der Antike bis zur Gegenwart, ed. Robert Jütte and Abraham Kustermann (Vienna: Böhlau Press, 1996), 57–90; Bernadette Brooten, “The Jews of Antioch,” in Antioch: The Lost Ancient City, Exhibition Catalogue, Worcester Art Museum, October 7, 2000–February 4, 2001; The Cleveland Museum of Art, March 18–June 3, 2001; The Baltimore Museum of Art, September 16–December 30, 2001, ed. Christine Kondoleon (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2000), 28–37; and Ari Finkelstein, “Julian among Jews, Christians and ‘Hellenes’ in Antioch: Jewish Practice as a Guide to ‘Hellenes’ and a Goad to Christians” (PhD diss., Harvard University, 2011), 19–25.

3 See, for example, Christine Shepardson, “Controlling Contested Places: John Chrysostom’s Adversus Iudaeos Homilies and the Spatial Politics of Religious Controversy,” JECS 15.4 (2007): 483–516; Klaas Smelik, “John Chrysostom’s Homilies against the Jews, some comments,” Nederlands theologisch tijdschrift 39 (1985): 194–200; A. M. Ritter, “John Chrysostom and the Jews, a Reconsideration,” Ancient Christianity in the Caucasus (1998): 141–54, 231–32; Pieter W. van der Horst, “Jews and Christians in Antioch at the End of the Fourth Century,” in Christian-Jewish Relations through the Centuries, ed. Stanley E. Porter and Brook W. R. Pearson (Sheffield Academic Press, 2000), 228–38.

4 Daniel Boyarin’s work is an excellent example of the wealth of scholarship in recent decades that challenged the coherence, separation, and monolithic nature of Roman “Judaism” and “Christianity,” let alone so-called Jewish-Christians, Judaizers, or demiChristians: Daniel Boyarin, Border Lines: The Partition of Judaeo-Christianity (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2004). The nuances that such scholarship has introduced means that some of the assumptions and vocabulary of Meeks, Wilken, and other early scholars are dated, even though their scholarship was careful and sophisticated in its time. While I hope that this essay will update the conversation, I remain deeply indebted to the insightful and influential work of these earlier scholars.

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paint a picture of fourth-century Antioch whose general public still seems largely devoid of Jews. 5 Recent comments from Blake Leyerle, Paula Fredriksen, and Ross Kraemer have led me to revisit the evidence for Jews in fourth-century Antioch between the extremes of John Chrysostom’s polemic and rabbinic propaganda, 6 including material evidence from Apamea and Beth She’arim and literary evidence from Libanius, John Chrysostom, and the Palestinian Talmud. 7 The variety of extant sources for fourth-century Antioch makes the city a valuable case study for late antique Jews and Jewish practices. The present essay offers a carefully contextualized analysis of this literary and material evidence, informed by the

5

See, for example, Isabella Sandwell and Janet Huskinson, eds., Culture and Society in Later Roman Antioch (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2004), 3; and Jaclyn Maxwell, Christianization and Communication in Late Antiquity: John Chrysostom and His Congregation in Antioch (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2006). Raffaella Cribiore’s book on Libanius and religion has large index entries for Christianity and paganism, but none for Jews or Judaism: Raffaella Cribiore, Libanius the Sophist: Rhetoric, Reality, and Religion in the Fourth Century (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2013).

Isabella Sandwell’s book takes seriously the category of “the Jew” in John Chrysostom’s writing, but she focuses on the rhetoric of identity construction rather than Jews themselves: Isabella Sandwell, Religious Identity in Late Antiquity: Greeks, Jews and Christians in Antioch (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2007).

6 Blake Leyerle challenged those at the 2014 meeting of the Society of Biblical Literature to remember that John Chrysostom’s vitriolic Adversus Iudaeos homilies were in some ways not representative of his larger corpus; Paula Fredriksen asked me to consider how my recent work on fourth-century Antioch could inform conversations about Jews in that city; and Ross Kraemer organized a 2015 Moskow Workshop at Brown University that asked participants to consider the evidence beyond rabbinic sources for Jews in the late antique Mediterranean. I thank them for being the muses behind this essay. I would also like to thank the two anonymous readers whose critical feedback proved to be extremely constructive.

7 While the emperor Julian wrote from Antioch in 362–63, including his text Against the Galileans, which specifically talks about Judaism and Christianity, most of his Antiochene writings do not say much about Jews in the city. For an excellent study on Julian’s descriptions and relations with Jews, see Finkelstein, “Julian.” Although it is tempting to include the fifth- and sixth-century writings of Antiochene natives and church historians Theodoret of Cyrrhus and John Malalas, in addition to those of the fifth-century Constantinopolitan church historian Socrates, their later contexts makes the relation of their stories to fourth-century experiences of the world more difficult to confirm.

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methodological expectations of twenty-first century scholarship. It aims to rejuvenate academic conversations about Jews in late antiquity, and in fourthcentury Antioch specifically, while also modeling an approach to highly rhetorical texts that grants neither their complete transparency nor opacity with respect to their historical context. While the number and location of synagogues in Antioch and its suburb Daphne, and the daily habits and self-descriptions of their attendees, remain unknowable, the evidence for the existence of synagogues and people in the community who are named Ioudaioi, archisynagōgos, presbyteroi, and gerousiarchēs is still persuasive, albeit to be used with a bit more caution about some of the details than earlier scholars expressed. Against the backdrop of that evidence, I argue, John Chrysostom’s descriptions of contemporary practices that he associated with the synagogue and local Jews—explicitly differentiated in these cases from biblical “Jews”—provide a rare and therefore valuable non-rabbinic representation of post-temple Jewish practices.

Glimpsing Antiochene Jews: Inscriptions, Libanius, and the Palestinian Talmud Despite Jews’ participation in the daily life of the Roman Empire, scholars have historically tended to separate them and highlight their difference from other Romans, in part because it is only when Jews were distinct from their neighbors that they became visible as Jews in the sources that survive. 8 As Shaye Cohen has notably brought to our attention, however, “the Diaspora Jews of antiquity were not easily recognizable—if, indeed, they were recognizable at all.” 9 Cohen observed that “the boundary between Jews and gentiles in antiquity was not always clearly marked; the degree of social interaction between Jews and nonJews was sufficiently great that it was not always easy to tell who was a Jew and who was not,” 10 and that most of the time Diaspora Roman Jews “looked like everyone else, dressed like everyone else, spoke like everyone else, had names and occupations like those of everyone else, and, in general, closely resembled their gentile neighbors.” 11 Late antique Jews joined their neighbors at the theater

8

Leonard Rutgers has noted, for example, “Whereas Jews were traditionally seen as an isolated and inward-looking group, scholars expounding the new view of Jewish history turned this view upside-down” (Leonard Rutgers, Making Myths: Jews in Early Christian Identity Formation [Leuven: Peeters, 2009], 4).

9 Shaye Cohen, The Beginnings of Jewishness: Boundaries, Varieties, Uncertainties (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1999), 67.

10 Ibid., 341.

11 Ibid., 67.

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and the baths, 12 and talked with them on the streets. 13 Wealthy Jews owned slaves like other Romans of their social position. 14 Wilken wrote, “Jews served as watchmen; as clerks in the market; in municipal waterworks; as police officers; in the military; and in other positions in the cities,” and “elsewhere in Syria, inscriptions mention other Jews . . . : goldsmiths, perfume makers, manufacturers, and traders in silk. . . . Jews in Caesarea were bakers, bathhouse attendants, workers in metal, and weavers. Some even worked in the theaters and 12

Hayim Lapin commented both on rabbinic efforts to stem such participation as well as hints that their ideals were not reality when he wrote, “Those entertainments, theaters and what goes on in them about which rabbinic texts occasionally betray knowledge, are consistently coded as ‘gentile’ and negative”: Hayim Lapin, Rabbis as Romans: The Rabbinic Movement in Palestine, 100–400 C.E. (New York: Oxford University Press, 2012), 140. Theaters were likewise maligned by Christian leaders like John Chrysostom, who also associated Jews with horseraces (Jud. 1.4). See Blake Leyerle, Theatrical Shows and Ascetic Lives: John Chrysostom’s Attack on Spiritual Marriage (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2001). Pieter van der Horst has written about a bench in the Odeon of Roman Aphrodisias “inscribed with two seat-markers, one of them stating that the seats there belong to the Jews [τόπος Ἑβρέων], the other one on the adjacent row that these seats belong to the elderly Jewish Blues” (i.e., the circus faction), and van der Horst cites other evidence from Miletus and Tyre: Jews and Christians in their Greco-Roman Context: Selected Essays on Early Judaism, Samaritanism, Hellenism, and Christianity (Tübingen: Mohr Siebeck, 2006), 54; see also Ross Kraemer, “Giving Up the Godfearers,” Journal of Ancient Judaism 5.1 (2014): 78. Lapin has noted that according to Palestinian rabbinic texts, Jews “may bathe in baths despite their ritual problems,” and he noted the “naturalization of bathing and bathhouses” in this Roman literature, in contrast to condemnations in the Babylonian Talmud (Lapin, Rabbis, 126–32). On Tertullian’s Christian antipathy for the baths, and on Jews participating in Roman bathhouse culture, see Paula Fredriksen and Oded Irshai, “Include Me Out: Tertullian, The Rabbis, and the Graeco-Roman City,” L’identité à travers l’éthnique (2015), esp. 122–23, 126–27. I thank my colleagues at the 2015 Moskow Workshop at Brown University for the citations to these Jewish seats in Aphrodisias, Miletus, and Tyre.

13 Wilken cited first-century inscriptional evidence from Cyrene for Jews as ephebes, boys who participated in their local gymnasium (Wilken, John Chrysostom, 48); compare also an inscription from Iasos in Asia Minor (L. Robert, “Un corpus des inscriptions juives,” Revue des Études Juives 101 [1937]: 85–86). On the integration of Jews into Roman cities, see also Paula Fredriksen and Oded Irshai, “Christian Anti-Judaism: Polemics and Policies,” in The Cambridge History of Judaism, v.4, ed. Steven Katz (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2006), 985–98.

14 CTh 16.9.1; cf. 3.1.5. Wilken also noted these passages (John Chrysostom, 60).

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participated in athletic events”; 15 and Jews could be nominated to the municipal council. 16 In Antioch Jews bought and sold in the marketplaces, celebrated festivals publically, 17 and participated in local, regional, and imperial patronage systems. 18 While it is not possible to construct a complete history of Jews in Antioch, Josephus claimed that Jews had lived in the city ever since Seleukos I Nikator founded it in 300 B.C.E., and references in Galatians (2:11–14), the Acts of the Apostles (11:19; 14:19), and Josephus describe Jews in the first-century city. 19 Evidence from the second and third centuries is scarce, but since inscriptions and literary evidence survive for fourth-century Antiochene Jews, most scholars argue that significant numbers of Jews lived in the city throughout this period. 20 A close survey and analysis of the non-Christian evidence will

15

Wilken, John Chrysostom, 48–49, 62. On Jews as gladiators, charioteers, and other athletic competitors, see Zeev Weiss, Public Spectacles in Roman and Late Antique Palestine (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2014), 146, 192–93, 209–11. I thank Paula Fredriksen for pointing me toward this reference.

16 CTh 16.8.3.

17 E.g., John Chrysostom, Jud. 1.1.

18 E.g., Libanius, Ep. 1251; cf. CTh 12.1.157–58. In integrating Jews into narratives of late antiquity, Rutgers has reminded scholars not to overlook “the harsh realities that confronted so many inhabitants of the later Roman Empire when they found themselves in inter-group settings” (Rutgers, Making Myths, 4–5).

19 Meeks and Wilken relied heavily on Josephus and John Malalas for their far-reaching history (Meeks and Wilken, Jews, 1–13; Wilken, John Chrysostom, 36–37, 55; e.g., Josephus, c. Ap. 2.39; Ant. 12.119; J.W. 7.44); compare, for example, Downey, History, 79– 80, 107–11. See also Kraeling, who engaged the rabbinic sources in greater depth (“Jewish,” 130–60). Meeks and Wilken also found “no reason to doubt the accuracy” of Acts’ basic representation of Antioch (Jews, 13). Given the methodological challenges of determining the reliability of these sources for centuries much earlier than their authorship, I have not followed these scholars in mixing contemporary and noncontemporary witnesses for fourth-century Antioch.

20 E.g., Meeks and Wilken, Jews, 6; Wilken, John Chrysostom, 65. Socrates recorded a story of Christian violence against Jews in a small town between Antioch and nearby Chalcis (Socrates, HE 7.16), and scholars like Downey (History, 459–61) and Beat Brenk (“Die Umwandlung der Synagoge von Apamea in eine Kirche: Eine mentalitätsgeschichtliche Studie,” in Tesserae Festschrift für Josef Engemann [Munster: Aschendorff, 1991], 13) have related this to the early-fifth-century imperial legislation regarding synagogues (CTh 16.8.25–27). Mayer and Allen, however, have correctly noted that the story cannot be verified and the legislation need not relate to an incident near Antioch: Wendy Mayer and Pauline Allen, The Churches of Syrian Antioch (300–638 CE) (Walpole, MA: Peeters, 2012), 38n, 112–13. I have thus removed this discussion from the current study of fourth-

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provide an important foundation for the examination of John Chrysostom’s Christian rhetoric that follows.

Material Evidence for Antiochene Jews Constant habitation has unfortunately prevented any thorough archaeological search for Antioch’s Roman past. In the 1930s, when the region was under French control, however, a Princeton-led excavation discovered numerous mosaic carpets from the wealthy Roman suburb of Daphne (Harbiye, Turkey), several Antiochene baths, and an important church in the Kaoussie (Qausîyeh) district; others of Antioch’s Roman remains, such as aqueducts, the hippodrome, and city walls (as well as some Crusade-era architecture) are still visible around the city today. 21 Modern building projects in the city continue to unearth new evidence on occasion, such as the third-century marble sarcophagus that was found near the Daphne Gate and is now on display in the Hatay Archaeology Museum. In addition, a Turkish and German team has recently done additional archaeological work around the city. 22 Nevertheless, there has not yet been much material evidence recovered from Antioch that can definitively be identified with Jews, apart from a surface find of a broken marble slab with a menorah and

century Judaism in Antioch, though many earlier scholars include it (e.g., Meeks and Wilken, Jews, 36).

21 The Princeton excavations were published in a series of volumes: Antioch-on-theOrontes, Publications of the Committee for the Excavation of Antioch and its Vicinity, vol.

1: The Excavations of 1932, ed. George W. Elderkin (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1934); Antioch-on-the-Orontes, vol. 2: The Excavations, 1933–1936, ed. Richard Stillwell (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1938); Antioch-on-the-Orontes, vol. 3: The Excavations, 1937–1939, ed. Richard Stillwell (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1941); Antioch-on-the-Orontes, vol. 4.1: Ceramics and Islamic Coins, ed. Frederick O. Waagé (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1948); Antioch-on-the-Orontes, vol. 4.2: Greek, Roman, Byzantine and Crusaders’ Coins, ed. Dorothy B. Waagé (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1952). See also the more recent study of Antioch’s churches: Mayer and Allen, Churches.

22 Hatice Pamir has released some initial observations: “Preliminary results of the recent archaeological researches in Antioch on the Orontes and its vicinity,” in Les sources de l’histoire du paysage urbain d’Antioche sur l’Oronte (Paris: Université Paris 8, VincennesSaint-Denis, 2012), 259–70. The results of this project are planned in a three-volume series. See also Gunnar Brands, “Antiochia in der Spätantike: Prolegomena zu einer archäologischen Stadtgeschichte” (forthcoming).

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partial inscription carved on it. 23 Some of the city’s other material objects of course could have belonged to Jews, but there is no way to tell. 24 While there is little archaeological evidence from Antioch or Daphne that is distinctively Jewish, there are mosaics further south in Apamea that refer to a fourth-century archisynagōgos of the Antiochenes. In 1934, Belgian archaeologists excavated a building in Apamea that they identified as a latefourth-century synagogue, situated “in the very heart of the city” on the beautifully colonnaded cardo maximus “approximately one hundred meters south of the main intersection.” 25 The floor had a mosaic carpet that included a menorah, twenty Greek dedicatory inscriptions, and what appear to be a lulav and an etrog. 26 Inscription 1 read as follows: “At the time of the most honored archisynagōgoi Eusebios and Nemios and Phineos, and Theodōros the

23

Brooten’s article contains an image and brief description of this artifact (Brooten, “Jews,” 28, 34). While the partial inscription is in the Greek alphabet, it appears to represent an Aramaic or Hebrew word (ibid., 34); cf. Meeks and Wilken, Jews, 57; Stillwell, Antioch-on-the-Orontes, vol. 2, 150–51.

24 See Leonard Rutgers, “Archaeological Evidence for the Interaction of Jews and NonJews in Late Antiquity,” American Journal of Archaeology 96.1 (1992): 101–18.

25 Lee Levine, The Ancient Synagogue: The First Thousand Years, 2nd ed. (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2005), 258. While Levine agreed that the floor belonged to a synagogue, he has noted that one of its inscriptions used the term naos to refer “to the synagogue building” (ibid., 260). This is Inscription 6 in the report published by E. L. Sukenik, “The Mosaic Inscriptions in the Synagogue at Apamea on the Orontes,” Hebrew Union College Annual 23 (1950/51): 541–51. The summary of the first field report for the 1934 excavation is F. Mayence, “La Quatrième Campagne de Fouilles à Apamée: Rapport sommaire,” L’Antiquité Classique t.4.1 (May 1935): 199–204. This building was destroyed by the early fifth century and at some point also in the early fifth century a church was built on the spot (Sukenik, “Mosaic,” 543); cf. Brenk, “Umwandlung.”

26 Rachel Hachlili has published a helpful survey of the archaeology of this building: Rachel Hachlili, Ancient Jewish Art and Archaeology in the Diaspora (Leiden: Brill, 1998), 32–34, 198–204. Hachlili wrote, “The only Jewish symbol in the mosaic pavement is a simple menorah” (ibid., 34; cf. 203); cf. Steven Fine, Art and Judaism in the Greco-Roman World: Toward a New Jewish Archaeology (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2005), 126; Levine, Ancient, 258; Brenk, “Umwandlung,” 8; Meeks/Wilken, 53–54. Nevertheless, a photograph in Sukenik’s article suggests to me that the floor might also represent a lulav and etrog at the end of Inscription 17 (Sukenik, “Mosaic,” 549 and Plate VIII between pages 544 and 545). I rely on Sukenik (“Mosaic,” 543–50) for the Greek texts of these mosaic inscriptions and their numbering; I have made small changes to some of Sukenik’s English translations. The inscriptions relevant to Antioch are also published with English translations in Meeks and Wilken, Jews, 53–54.

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gerousiarchēs, and the most honored presbyteroi Eisakios and Saoulos and the rest, Ilasios, archisynagōgos of the Antiochenes, donated the mosaic entryway, 150 feet, in the year 703, the seventh of Eudyneos [January 7, 391]. Blessings on all.” 27 Another mosaic in the same floor (Inscription 2) said, “Ilasios son of Eisakios, archisynagōgos of the Antiochenes, for the security [ΣΩΤΗΡΙΑΣ] of his spouse Phōtion [ΦΩΤΙΟΥ ΣΥΜΒΙΟΥ] and children, and for the security of Eustathia his mother-in-law, and in memory of Eisakios and Edesios and Hesychion [ΗΣΥΧΙΟΥ] his ancestors, donated the mosaic entryway. Peace and mercy on all your holy people.” 28 While these inscriptions tell us nothing about the practices of Ilasios or his family, or the size or location of Antioch’s synagogue building(s) or community, they do offer independent attestation for Antiochene Jews fewer than five years after the hostile Adversus Iudaeos homilies that John Chrysostom preached in the city in 386 and 387 C.E. 27

Sukenik, “Mosaic,” 544.

Sukenik, “Mosaic,” 544–45. The last name in this inscription has the same ending as the two men’s names before it, though scholars have taken it to refer to a woman, in part because Inscriptions 3 and 5 from the same floor refer to someone named Hesychion as the spouse [ΗΣΥΧΙΩ ΣΥΝΒΙΩ] of Thaumasis in one inscription and of Theodōros in another, just as Phōtion is the spouse [ΦΩΤΙΟΥ ΣΥΜΒΙΟΥ] of Ilasios in Inscription 2. It is worth noting that the inscription makes it grammatically impossible to distinguish whether these names should be rendered in English as Hesychios and Photios but still as wives, as Sukenik preferred (“Mosaic,” 545), suggesting that Hesychios was Ilasios’s mother (“Mosaic,” 551). Meeks and Wilken translated the names as Phōtion and Hesychios (Jews, 54), and Ross Kraemer believed that Inscription 3 represented a woman named Hesychion who was the wife of Thaumasis (Ross Kraemer, ed., Women’s Religions in the Greco-Roman World: A Sourcebook [New York: Oxford University Press, 2004], 165), although she has since pointed me to a more recent translation, for which I am grateful; see David Noy and Hanswulf Bloedhorn, eds., Inscriptiones Judaicae Orientis, v.3: Syria and Cyprus (Tübingen: Mohr Siebeck, 2004). These editors translated Inscription 3 as “‘Thaumasi(us) with his spouse Hesychion’ [or ‘Thaumasis with her spouse Hesychius’]” (95). I have chosen to use Hesychion and Phōtion to set them apart from the more self-evidently masculine names that end with –os. It is worth noting, however, that Inscription 4 from this mosaic refers much more clearly to Ourania as the wife of Hierios by choosing the term gynē [ΟΥΡΑΝΙΗ ΓΥΝΕΚΙ] rather than symbios/synbios, just as Inscription 17 uses gynē for the wives [ΓΥΝΕΞΙΝ] of Eusebios and Veturios, and Inscription 18 uses anēr/andros, for Eupithis’s husband [ΑΝΔΡΟΣ]. If the mosaic intended to distinguish the relationships marked by symbios from these others, those distinctions are no longer clear.

28

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Interestingly, there are also marked burials in Beth She’arim in the Galilee that appear to belong to the same wealthy family attested in these two mosaics from Apamea, with the “burial chamber of Aidesios, the gerousiarchēs of Antioch” and six more tombs in the chamber “belonging to Aidesios,” including one for “Hesychis.” 29 It is tempting to read this latter inscription in light of the mosaics from Apamea, as scholars have done, and to see Aidesios the gerousiarchēs of Antioch buried in Beth She’arim as Edesios, the ancestor of Ilasios the archisynagōgos of the Antiochenes from the synagogue inscriptions; perhaps, too, we might associate the Hesychis buried in Beth She’arim with Ilasios’s and Edesios’s relative Hesychion. 30 Even if the similar names, each with ties to Antioch, are only coincidence, though, the inscriptions still mark the existence of Antiochene synagogue elders. Rachel Hachlili has observed that this Jewish necropolis in Beth She’arim was “the central burial ground for Jews from the Land of Israel and the Diaspora in the third–fourth centuries C.E.,” noting that it often contained the primary burial of Jews who lived in the area and “the reinterred remains of Diaspora Jews.” 31 This evidence suggests that the secondary burial of notable Antiochene Jews in the necropolis at Beth She’arim would not have been unusual, distances notwithstanding.

The mosaics’ geographical and chronological proximity to John Chrysostom’s sermons cannot help but titillate the historical imagination. The named references in the inscription to Ilasios’s father, spouse, mother-in-law, children, and ancestors paint a picture of a wealthy extended family active in a well-established synagogue. 32 Did Ilasios and his family live in Antioch in the late fourth century? 33 Were they members of the very same synagogue

29

I rely on the Greek text in Meeks and Wilken (Jews, 55); cf. Moshe Schwabe and B. Lifshitz, Beth She’arim (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 1973), nos. 141–44.

30 Meeks and Wilken also included a more fragmentary Greek inscription from Tiberias that referred to Antioch in a burial for a woman named Leontina, which they dated to the late third or early fourth century (Meeks and Wilken, Jews, 56; cf. Wilken, John Chrysostom, 57).

31 Rachel Hachlili, Jewish Funerary Customs, Practices and Rites in the Second Temple Period (Leiden: Brill, 2004), 514.

32 Sukenik also noted that a woman named Eustathia was mentioned in another inscription in the floor (Inscription 3), “where she takes part in a donation together with her son-in-law Thaumasis and her daughter Hesychios.” Sukenik posited, “Possibly Ilasios and Thaumasis were brothers-in-law” (“Mosaic,” 551).

33 Sukenik observed, “It is difficult to decide whether Ilasios was archisynagogos [sic] of the Jewish community at Antioch, or of an Antiochene Jewish community at Apamea” (“Mosaic,” 551).

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community that John Chrysostom had only a few years earlier so viciously demonized? Did their titles signify their financial support of the synagogue and/or some role in its leadership? 34 Did Ilasios support the building in Apamea early in 391 in addition to, or instead of, a synagogue in Antioch and/or Daphne? Was Greek the family’s primary language? What were the responses, if any, of the earlier generations of Edesios, Eisakios, Hesychion, and Eustathia to the emperor Julian’s promise to rebuild the temple in the early 360s? Did the later generations of Ilasios, Phōtion, and their children hear about John’s fiery sermons in 386–87? While such discussions would remain speculative, this material evidence at least reminds scholars to consider what our constructions of fourth-century Antioch would look like if we added Jews more substantively back into the cityscape.

Telling Tales: Non-Christian Literary Sources In addition to the material evidence from Apamea and Beth She’arim, there are also some literary references from Libanius and the Palestinian Talmud that are relevant to the study of Jews and “Jews” in fourth-century Antioch. Libanius, the native son and official Greek sophist of Antioch from 354 until his death in 394, wrote copious letters and orations, some of which mention or address Jews. 35 The Talmudic references are much more difficult to date than Libanius’s texts, but Meeks and Wilken included some rabbinic references that are useful in their study of Jews and Christians in Antioch. While I am not inclined to accept the Talmud’s descriptions of earlier events in Antioch at face value, the stories themselves came to have their own canonicity and authority over time. Since scholars date the final redaction of the Palestinian Talmud to the late fourth or early fifth century, the rabbinic stories as we have them were almost certainly in circulation in, and are thus relevant for, our context of late-fourth-century

34

Levine has documented “the extent to which the title archisynagogos [sic] was to be found throughout the Jewish world of late antiquity” (Ancient, 417), and concluded that while the meaning is not always clear, it appears to suggest “not only religious and financial roles, but political and administrative ones as well” (Ancient, 416). For the full discussion, see Levine, Ancient, 415–27.

35 These sources are available, for example, in Meeks and Wilken, Jews, 59–81; and Menahem Stern, Greek and Latin Authors on Jews and Judaism, v.2 (Jerusalem: Israel Academy of Sciences and Humanities, 1980), 580–99.

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Antioch in a way that is more difficult to guarantee for earlier periods or for places further from Roman Palestine. 36 In Ep. 1251 from the summer of 364, Libanius wrote to Priscianus, a Roman official of Palestine and Libanius’s former student, 37 apparently on behalf of some Jews from Antioch. 38 Unfortunately, the term Ioudaioi is only found in the Vatican manuscript of this text, and in abbreviated form, but scholars have so far accepted the conclusion of Johann Jakob Reiske and the great Libanius scholar Richard Foerster that the term is original to the letter. 39 If this is correct, then Libanius knew people whom he called Ioudaioi in Antioch in 364, who appealed to him for help in his position as the influential sophist of the city. 40 Libanius wrote that “the Ioudaioi with us [τοῖς παρ’ ἡμῖν . . . Ἰουδαίοις]” hoped to prevent Priscianus’s reappointment of an unnamed senior official whom they strongly disliked and who had already once been put out of office. This takes place in the immediate wake of the emperor Julian’s promise to rebuild the temple in Jerusalem, his death in Persia, and the hasty appointment of the emperor Jovian. It is interesting to picture Antiochene Ioudaioi at this time as hoping to intervene in what they understand to be an unfavorable appointment, 36

On the dating of the Palestinian Talmud, see Lapin, Rabbis, 42.

For more information on Priscianus, see the entry for Priscianus (1) in A. H. M. Jones, J. R. Martindale, and J. Morris, The Prosopography of the Later Roman Empire, v.1 (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1971), 727.

38 Meeks and Wilken were more sweeping in their claim that in this letter Libanius “acted as a patron for the whole Jewish community of Antioch” (Jews, 11).

39 The Vatican manuscript served as the basis for the critical edition by Richard Foerster but not for the earlier edition by Otto Seeck, as discussed by Martin Jacobs: Die Institution des jüdischen Patriarchen: Eine quellen- und traditionkritische Studie zur Geschichte der Juden in der Spätantike (Tübingen: Mohr Siebeck, 1995), 269n209.

40 Libanius described the Ioudaioi who approached him as “so many [τοσούτων]” and a “crowd [ὄχλος],” though it would be commonplace to exaggerate for rhetorical effect; I have translated this letter from the Greek text in Richard Foerster, ed., Libanii Opera, vol.

11 (Hildesheim: George Olms, 1963), 327; cf. Stern, Greek, 598. Richard Saller observed that local Roman officials participated in the ubiquitous patronage system, offering their influence, particularly in legal matters, in exchange for gratia such as monumental dedications, orations in their honor, or monetary gain: Richard Saller, Personal Patronage under the Early Empire (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1982), esp. 145–68.

Saller used Libanius’s interactions with Strategius on behalf of other Antiochenes as one example of this patronage system (cf. Christine Shepardson, Controlling Contested Places: Late Antique Antioch and the Spatial Politics of Religious Controversy [Berkeley: University of California Press, 2014], 41–42). I am grateful to the University of California Press for permission to include in this essay a few small sections from my recent book.

37

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and as asking a well-positioned Greek rhetor (and friend of the former emperor) in their own city to write to an official in Palestine to do so. 41 Libanius positioned those who had come to him as a group separate from himself, but the fact that he agreed to write on their behalf, as he often did for other Antiochenes in need, shows that at least in his willingness to grant patronage he did not distinguish between these Ioudaioi and other citizens who came to him for help in negotiating the politics of their local and regional systems. 42 In addition to Ep. 1251, in Oratio 47 from the late 380s or early 390s, 43 soon after John Chrysostom’s Adversus Iudaeos homilies, Libanius referred to people who had worked as tenant farmers for four generations on land that his family owned (perhaps in the agriculturally rich plain of Antioch outside the city) as Ioudaioi. Scholars have interpreted Libanius’s phrase Ioudaioi tōn panu [Ἰουδαῖοι τῶν πάνυ] in numerous ways (Libanius, Or. 47.13), 44 but what led Libanius to call these farmers Ioudaioi and what the farmers would have understood by that nomenclature remain uncertain. At the very least, however, Or. 47 offers additional evidence that Ioudaioi was a category that Libanius used in order to identify and to distinguish these from other farmers (and in Ep. 1251,

41

I use Ioudaioi rather than the English word Jews here to stress that in comparison to John Chrysostom or the rabbinic texts, we have even less understanding what this Greek term signified to Libanius.

42 Sandwell commented that Ep. 1251 “shows us that Libanius was at least on speaking terms with some senior members of the Jewish community at Antioch and that these Jews saw him as someone they could ask to speak for them at a moment of crisis” (Religious Identity, 238).

43 For a discussion about the date of this text, see A. F. Norman, Libanius: Selected Orations, v.2 (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1977), 497–99.

44 My reference to the Greek text of this oration is from the edition in Richard Foerster, Libanii Opera, vol. 3 (Leipzig: Teubner, 1906), 404–22, as also found in Norman, Libanius, 500–35. Norman included a useful summary of the many different ways that scholars have understood this phrase, including Zulueta’s understanding that it referred to Judeans with land in Palestine; Juster’s interpretation of “proper Jews,” suggesting a religious difference from other Jews, a reading that Sandwell repeats (Religious Identity, 179); and Harmand’s understanding that the term is derogatory, with which Norman agrees (Norman, Libanius, 496–97). Wilken documented earlier examples from Alexandria of Ioudaios being used as “a term of opprobrium” (Wilken, John Chrysostom, 40). Meeks and Wilken translated the phrase as “some Jews—of that famous people” (Meeks and Wilken, Jews, 71).

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Ioudaioi Antiochenes from others). 45 Whether or not the tenant farmers of Or. 47 were recognizably “Jews” to John Chrysostom, to Antioch’s synagogue leaders, or even to themselves, Libanius’s letter at least suggests, as Wilken noted, that Jews lived not only in Antioch and Daphne but also in the rural communities outside the city walls, an image that appears also in the Tosefta (Dema’i 2.1). 46 Eight other relevant extant letters by Libanius come from 388–93 and address someone he called “the Patriarch,” whom Moshe Schwabe persuasively identified as the Jewish Patriarch, or Hebrew nasi’, in Palestine. 47 In 388, Libanius wrote to “the Patriarch” that the sophist was “grieved that such a genos [τοιούτου γένους] has suffered for so long a time” (Ep. 914.1), 48 and in 393 Libanius noted to the same addressee that people “who belong to that genos” have a habit “of helping everybody” (Ep. 1084.1). 49 While these letters never use the term Ioudaios, scholars have followed Schwabe’s detailed confirmation of Otto Seeck’s brief earlier suggestion that these letters addressed a Jewish rather than a Christian or other Roman leader, thus showing Libanius corresponding with a Jewish leader with some regularity on behalf of some of Antioch’s citizens. 50 While there are a few late-fourth-century references in Gregory of 45

The different academic presumptions of earlier decades led Meeks and Wilken to speculate more freely about these workers than I have done here (Meeks and Wilken, Jews, 10–11).

46 See Wilken, John Chrysostom, 37; Brooten, “Jews,” 36. Sandwell reasonably described the farmers mentioned by Libanius in Or. 47 as “Jewish peasants” (Religious Identity, 114).

47 As Schwabe summarized, Wolf (1738) suggested that this patriarch was the Christian bishop of Antioch; Sievers (1868) suggested that he was more likely a Christian bishop in Palestine, though he allowed that it could be the Jewish Patriarch; and Seeck said that the recipient was the Jewish Patriarch Gamaliel, though he did not specify which Gamaliel (Moshe Schwabe, “Letters of Libanius to the Patriarch of Palestine” [in Hebrew], Tarbis 1/2 [January 1930]: 86; cf. Meeks and Wilken, Jews, 59). I am grateful to Jacob Love for correcting my understanding of the details of Schwabe’s Hebrew article. Sandwell assumed that Libanius’s letters to the Patriarch addressed “the Jewish patriarch in Jerusalem [sic]” (Sandwell, Religious Identity, 113). For a thorough history of the institution of the Jewish Patriarch, see Martin Jacobs, Institution.

48 For this letter, I have checked Foerster’s Greek text in Libanii Opera, vol. 11, 61–62; cf.

Stern, Greek, 589. I have used Stern’s translation with only minor changes (Greek, 590).

Note that “such a genos” implies a genos of an admirable quality; cf. Libanius, Ep. 1084.1.

49 For this letter, I have checked Foerster’s Greek text in Libanii Opera, vol. 11, 200–201; cf. Stern, Greek, 593. I have used Stern’s translation with only minor changes (Greek, 593).

50 See Meeks and Wilken, Jews, 11; Schwabe, “Letters,” 85–110; Otto Seeck, Die Briefe des Libanius zeitlich geordnet (Leipzig: J. C. Hinrichs, 1906), 162. See also Martin Jacobs,

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Nyssa and Gregory of Nazianzus that introduce the idea that a Christian leader could be called a patriarch, 51 late antique texts applied the term most commonly to the biblical patriarchs of Genesis and then to a series of Jewish leaders in Palestine, and only rarely in the late fourth and increasingly in the fifth century to certain Christian bishops, making Schwabe’s 1930 conclusion that Libanius’s letters addressed a Jewish leader still the most plausible. 52 A fourth-century Palestinian Jewish leader’s familiarity with Greek culture and his integration within the patronage systems of the empire will surprise scholars less now than they did almost forty years ago when Meeks and Wilken wrote that these letters by Libanius “provide an interesting and . . . astonishing picture of the relationship between cultured Jews and pagans at the end of the fourth century.” 53 Nevertheless, the letters are still rare and valuable witnesses to some of the social networks and patronage processes between these influential figures. One of these letters (Ep. 1098) is “a charming letter on behalf Institution. These letters represent Libanius’s only use of the term “patriarch.” His only uses of Ioudaios are in Or. 47 and Ep. 1251.

51 In 374 Gregory of Nazianzus described his father shaming other Christian leaders, who then bowed to him as their “patriarch,” lawgiver, and judge (Or. 18.36); and in 381 at the Council of Constantinople, Gregory claimed that bishops could more accurately be called “patriarchs” (Or. 42.23). Gregory of Nyssa, at the funeral oration for Meletius at the same council in 381, referred to great bishops like Meletius as “patriarchs” (Oratio funebris in Meletium episcopum). Schwabe noted several of these late-fourth-century uses of the term (Schwabe, “Letters,” 91).

52 It is unlikely to be a coincidence that Christians began to apply the title of patriarch to some of their bishops just as the Palestinian Jewish Patriarchate came to an end. On the end of the Jewish Patriarchate in 429, see Lapin, Rabbis, 20. For an overview of the Palestinian Jewish Patriarchate more generally, see Lapin, Rabbis, 20–25, 52–55; and especially Martin Jacobs, Institution. John Chrysostom used “patriarch” to refer to certain contemporary Jewish leaders, “those whom you are now calling patriarchs are not priests” (Jud. 6.5; cited also in Schwabe, “Letters,” 96). The Theodosian Code referred to the Jews’ contemporary patriarchs in three places (CTh 16.8.8 from 392, 16.8.13 from 397, and 16.8.14 from 399). For the dating, I rely on Clyde Pharr, The Theodosian Code and Novels and the Sirmondia Constitutions: A Translation with commentary, glossary, and bibliography (Union, NJ: The Lawbook Exchange, Ltd., 2001), 468. See also Epiphanius (Pan. 30). I am grateful to Andrew Jacobs for conversation about the use of the Greek term, and for the reference in Epiphanius.

53 Meeks and Wilken, Jews, 11. On scholars’ growing acceptance of Jews’ integration in the Roman Empire, see, for example, Rutgers, Making Myths, 3–4; Lapin, Rabbis.

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of the Patriarch’s son, who has dropped out of school after studying briefly with Libanius” 54 that led Meeks and Wilken to conclude, “It is apparent that the Patriarch himself was educated in Greek culture. . . . It is also clear that for some Jews in Antioch it was perfectly natural to work through the network of relationships involving the curial class and the old rhetorical schools.” 55 If these letters indeed addressed the Jewish Patriarch, then they support a picture of at least one Jewish student in Libanius’s classroom and of Jews’ participation in the complex social and political networks of the region. In addition, the generosity that Libanius attributed to the Patriarch’s genos in Ep. 1084 provides a welcome contrast to Chrysostom’s hostile rhetoric. 56 The Palestinian Talmud, like Libanius, also refers to Jews in Antioch.

While none of its stories alone tell us much about Jews in the fourth-century city, particularly since the Talmud’s narratives should not be conflated with historical reality, it is worth noting where the rabbinic references echo other extant sources. Meeks and Wilken summarize the collection of material from the Palestinian Talmud that relates to Jews in Antioch as follows: 57 The Palestinian rabbis knew of a Beth Din in Antioch (p.Sanh.

3:2, 14a), and a number of them are reported to have visited the city. Some of the stories of R. Tanhuma bar Abba’s disputes with gentiles over Jewish beliefs are set in Antioch (Gen. Rab. 19:4), and R. Simlai (3rd century) was also associated with Antioch (p.Kidd. 3:13, 35a). On occasion the Patriarch traveled to Antioch because of dealings with the Roman legate of Palestine who was often in Antioch (Sifre

54

Meeks and Wilken, Jews, 12.

Meeks and Wilken, Jews, 12. See Schwabe’s discussion of the letters’ classical allusions (“Letters,” 106); I am grateful to Jacob Love for translating Schwabe’s conclusion from the Hebrew for me.

56 Sandwell noted that in Ep. 1084, Libanius complimented the Patriarch in the process of requesting a favor (Religious Identity, 113). John Chrysostom regularly used polemical language to describe “Jews,” often conflating them with biblical characters, but sometimes using more contemporary accusations, such as his description of their patriarchs as “the peddlers, the merchants, those filled with all indecencies” (Jud. 6.5); see also his claim that Jews were gluttons (Jud. 1.4) and covetous thieves (Jud. 1.7).

57 Meeks and Wilken had a tendency to grant greater historical reliability to the rabbinic texts’ descriptions of earlier events than is current in some recent scholarship, so my interpretation of this evidence differs slightly from theirs (e.g., Meeks and Wilken, Jews, 9; Wilken, John Chrysostom, 37, 64–65).

55

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Num. 84 [22a, ed. Friedmann]). After the revolt under Gallus two rabbis visited Ursicinus in Antioch, and the Palestinian Talmud depicts them as respected by the Roman general and on good terms with him (p.Ber. 5:1, 9a). 58 It is certainly likely, for example, that Jews traveled with some regularity between Antioch and Palestine, especially to the Galilee, not least based on the Beth She’arim burials of Antiochene Jews. 59 The reference in Sifre Numbers to the Jewish Patriarch’s business trips to Antioch, and the Talmudic claim of visits from Palestinian rabbis to Roman officials in Antioch in the 350s, also supplement the material evidence from Beth She’arim. These in turn offer a narrative consonant with the conclusion that Libanius represented some Jews to a Roman official of Palestine in 364, corresponded with a Palestinian Jewish leader from 388 to 393, and briefly taught that leader’s son. The descriptions in Genesis Rabbah 19:4 of disputes with Gentiles in Antioch, on the other hand, echo numerous literary descriptions throughout Christianity’s early history that are not distinctive to Antioch. Nonetheless, whatever the relationship of these episodes narrated in Genesis Rabbah to reality, they reveal a similar literary enterprise to that undertaken by John Chrysostom, whose stories of “Jews” and “Christians” discussing differences in their beliefs and practices on the streets of Antioch will be discussed below. 60 Taken together, this material and literary evidence tells us little that is concrete about particular Jewish practices in Antioch, and would not be of much help in identifying anyone either as a synagogue-goer or a “Jew” as they walked down the city’s streets. It does, though, confirm the likelihood that there was at least one well-established synagogue in fourth-century Antioch, 61 that Greek was 58

Meeks and Wilken, Jews, 12–13.

While I am unaware of other evidence for a Beth Din in Antioch, which Meeks and Wilken accept without further discussion (Jews, 12), it would not be implausible since the other evidence suggests that there was a sizable community of Jews in the city, at least some of whom had financial resources and were engaged in political networks.

60 Even Galatians 2 is relevant in this regard, although of course the category of “Christian” would have been anachronistic in Paul’s time.

61 Like most scholars, I find the literary evidence for at least one synagogue in fourthcentury Antioch and another in Daphne persuasive. There remains some confusion, however, over the interpretation of a reference in the sixth-century works of the Antiochene John Malalas. Downey notes that Malalas depicts Didius Julianus acquiring 59

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a familiar language in Antioch’s synagogue(s), that the titles of archisynagōgos, presbyteros, and gerousiarchēs marked people of significance among the participants, and that some of the people who bore those titles in the fourth century had connections with Apamea and Beth She’arim as well as the financial resources to donate part of a mosaic floor to the former and have their remains translated to a necropolis in the latter. The rabbinic sources suggest that, like Josephus, later Palestinian Jewish leaders assumed a history of Jews in Antioch and had something at stake in representing a connection between themselves, Antioch, and that city’s Roman officials. For claims about what people might actually do in fourth-century Antioch to be recognizable as “Jews,” however, we must turn to the polemical rhetoric of the Christian priest John Chrysostom.

John Chrysostom: Recognizing Jews and “Jews” through Christian Eyes John’s well-known homilies sought to prime his audience members to identify, among other things, fourth-century “Jews” according to John’s definition. 62 Such identifications may have required his audience to give new meaning to some familiar behaviors, such as celebrating holidays like Rosh Hashanah, and to add to that picture new information that might have surprised his audience, such as the house of a prominent Jew named Asabinus in 193 C.E. (Downey, History, 499).

Arthur Darby Nock has pointed out that Downey interpreted a Church Slavonic reference to “a synagogue named Savinian” as evidence for a synagogue named for this Asabinus, but Nock does not seem persuaded by Downey’s “conjecture”: Arthur Darby Nock, “Downey’s Antioch: A Review,” Greek, Roman, and Byzantine Studies 4.1 (1963): 51. Hahn refers to a synagogue named for Asabinus that was destroyed in the fifth century without addressing these concerns (Hahn, “Die jüdische Gemeinde,” 3), citing Meeks and Wilken (Jews, 8–9). Finkelstein has quite recently accepted Hahn’s claim (Finkelstein, “Julian,” 20), but the evidence remains problematic. Scholars writing after Downey, Meeks, and Wilken have also challenged earlier scholars’ claims that there was a synagogue that contained the relics of the Maccabean martyrs in Roman Antioch (see the discussion in note 76 below).

62 The provenance of most of John Chrysostom’s sermons is difficult to determine. Even while earlier scholars have made suggestions, Wendy Mayer’s careful study demonstrates that many of these attributions were based on assumptions that are difficult to substantiate definitively: Wendy Mayer, The Homilies of St. John Chrysostom— Provenance: Reshaping the Foundations (Rome: Pontificio Istituto Orientale, 2005).

Mayer’s careful scholarship strips away all but the most indisputable evidence, and concludes that many attributions are not certain (ibid., 469–73). Nevertheless, in most cases the traditional assignments are still the most plausible academic conclusions even if her work reveals the sometimes tentative assumptions that support them. This essay relies on texts from Antioch as much as possible.

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John’s claim that “the synagogue is not only a brothel and a theater, but also is a den of thieves and a lodging for wild beasts” (Jud. 1.3) and that “even demons dwell there” (Jud. 1.6). 63 John grew up in Antioch, became a deacon in 381 under Bishop Meletius, and was ordained as a priest in 386 under Bishop Flavian. His colorful and popular sermons later earned him the nickname “golden-mouth,” and he spent the final years of his life as the controversial bishop of Constantinople, from 398 until his death in 407. Toward the beginning of his preaching career in Antioch, in 386 and 387, John preached a series of fierce sermons against the synagogue and all those who would enter it. 64 Descriptions of “Jews” in these and others of Chrysostom’s homilies mix biblical depictions with additional vituperations against Antiochenes who saw no conflict in attending church sermons and synagogue festivals, baptized Christians who had defensible disagreements with him about Christian orthodoxy and orthopraxy, and contemporary Sabbath-keeping synagogue-goers who might well have considered themselves Jews, along with a healthy dose of imagination. 65 63 All translations from John Chrysostom’s Adversus Iudaeos homilies are my own from the Greek text in PG 48.843–942. See also the English translation by Paul W. Harkins in FC 68 (Washington, D.C.: Catholic University of America Press, 1979). I accept the scholarly consensus that John’s concern in these homilies is primarily those who participate in his church and also visit the synagogue, but in the process of this discussion John also makes several comments about how to identify “Jews” that are useful to the current study. On the difficulty of drawing clear distinctions between “Jews” and “Christians,” see, for example, Boyarin, Border Lines.

64 Wendy Pradels, Rudolf Brändle, and Martin Heimgartner have suggested a revised and more specific chronology for these Adversus Iudaeos homilies based on the additional manuscript that they published of the second homily in the series. Their analysis dates Homily 1 to either late August or early September 386, just before the Jewish holidays of Rosh Hashanah and Yom Kippur; Homily 4 to the same festival time the following year, August 29, 387; followed soon after by Homily 2 (September 5); Homily 5 (September 9); Homily 6 (Yom Kippur on September 10); Homily 7 (September 12); and Homily 8 (September 19). Wendy Pradels, Rudolf Brändle, and Martin Heimgartner, “The Sequence and Dating of the Series of John Chrysostom’s Eight Discourses Adversus Iudaeos” ZAC 6 (2002): 90–116. See the text they published in Wendy Pradels, Rudolf Brändle, and Martin Heimgartner, “Das bisher vermisste Textstück in Johannes Chrysostomus, Adversus Judaeos, Oration 2,” Zeitschrift für antikes Christentum 5 (2001): 23–49.

65 Excellent scholarship already exists on the challenges and dangers of trying to see “real” Jews behind the polemical anti-Jewish rhetoric of early Christian leaders. See, for example, Andrew Jacobs, Remains of the Jews: The Holy Land and Christian Empire in

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Nevertheless, his texts sometimes distinguish in interesting ways between the practices of contemporary Antiochene “Jews” and those of their biblical antecedents, contemporary practices that, he suggested, his audience could verify from personal experience. Narrative depictions cannot be taken at face value, and one person’s polemical rhetoric seldom represents another individual’s lived experience. In fact, scholars now routinely and persuasively note that Chrysostom’s hostility and effort to stress difference and force separation between “Christians” and “Jews” challenged the norms of his city. 66 Nevertheless, it remains worthwhile to examine what behaviors Chrysostom specified to his audience that they could expect from “Jews” who lived in their city in contrast to “Jews” he drew from Scripture. 67 The following analysis draws from a substantial but not exhaustive search of John’s writings that are most likely from his time in Antioch. My focus in reading John’s texts was to set aside his numerous depictions of “Jews” or Jewish practices that cannot be separated from scriptural references, such as references to Jesus’ gospel opponents, as well as his sweeping and most polemical claims, such as that all “Jews” are demonic or murderers. In both cases Late Antiquity (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2004), 200–209; idem, “The Lion and the Lamb: Reconsidering ‘Jewish-Christian Relations’ in Antiquity,” in The Ways That Never Parted: Jews and Christians in Antiquity and the Middle Ages, ed. Adam H. Becker and Annette Yoshiko Reed (Tübingen: Mohr Siebeck, 2003), 95–118; Judith Lieu, “‘The Parting of the Ways’: Theological Construct or Historical Reality?” Journal for the Study of the New Testament 56 (1994): 101–19; idem, Image and Reality: The Jews in the World of the Christians in the Second Century (Edinburgh: T&T Clark, 1996), 12–13; Miriam Taylor, Anti-Judaism and Early Christian Identity: A Critique of the Scholarly Consensus (Leiden: Brill, 1995), esp. 1–2, 166; James Carleton Paget, “Anti-Judaism and Early Christian Identity,” Zeitschrift für Antikes Christentum 1 (1997): 195–225. Most of my earlier scholarship has joined those who prefer to read such rhetoric for what it suggests about the text’s author rather than about Jews in their context: see, for example, Christine Shepardson, Controlling, 92–116; idem, Anti-Judaism and Christian Orthodoxy: Ephrem’s Hymns in Fourth-Century Syria (Washington, D.C.: Catholic University of America Press, 2008). In this essay, however, I find it instructive to investigate the ways in which Chrysostom rhetorically distinguished Antiochene “Jews” from a variety of “Jews” he drew from Scripture, and how he represented contemporary practices associated with Judaism in Antioch.

66 This was already strongly argued by Wilken (John Chrysostom, 66–94).

67 Blake Leyerle has helpfully observed that another useful project would be to de-center John’s polemical Adversus Iudaeos homilies from his other texts to see what image of Jews and Judaism emerges without the disproportionate influence of those texts. I look forward to reading her discussion of this in the future.

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the relation of John’s rhetoric to fourth-century Antiochene Jews is imperceptible. Instead, I focused on his claims that are not so self-evidently grounded only in his Scripture, and particularly passages in which John told his audience that “Jews” acted a certain way “now” in Antioch, suggesting that his audience could confirm these claims for themselves. 68 While still rhetorically sophisticated, this narrative strategy of John’s differs from his others; and although numerous studies examine his most polemical anti-Jewish language, none has focused exclusively on this other rhetorical approach in John’s writings. While the majority of these passages are in John’s Adversus Iudaeos homilies, additional discussions are scattered in his other writings, as Blake Leyerle reminded an audience at the 2014 SBL meeting in San Diego. Gathering and evaluating any available evidence that might offer information about Jews and Jewish practices in Antioch during the decade of John’s preaching in the city will then supplement the material and literary evidence studied above to provide as full a picture as possible.

Locating “Jews” in Time and Place One way that Chrysostom taught his audience to recognize “Jews” was by location. 69 “Jews” were in “Jewish” places, which for John included synagogues, a healing cave in Daphne, and the sites of distinctly “Jewish” festival celebrations.

Suggesting in 386 that he had particular local synagogue buildings in mind, Chrysostom argued, “Although no idol stands [in the synagogue], still demons inhabit the place. And I say this not only about the synagogue here [in town], but about the one in Daphne as well” (Jud. 1.6). Chrysostom even implied that he had more specific knowledge of local synagogues, claiming, “There are some who think that the synagogue is a holy place” because “the Law is stored in it, and the books [τα βιβλία] of the Prophets” (Jud. 1.5). 70 Chrysostom repeated his

68

Wilken includes many such passages in his own discussion of Jews in Antioch (John Chrysostom, esp., 55–94), although his analysis also includes John’s hostile rhetoric (ibid., 116–27). Wilken also sometimes appears to take John’s narratives at face value when I would not, such as John’s claim to have rescued a woman from being dragged into a synagogue in Antioch to swear an oath (John Chrysostom, Jud. 1.3; Wilken, ibid., 79–80).

69 I have discussed this material in more detail in Shepardson, Controlling, 92–116.

70 Wilken also discussed Chrysostom’s rhetoric about holy places and holy books (John Chrysostom, 79–83), as did Steven Fine, who contextualized Chrysostom’s rhetoric in a

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reference to familiar “synagogues of the Jews, those in the city and those in the suburbs” in 387 (Jud. 5.12); and in his reply to people in his church audience who respected them, he acknowledged that the books of the Law and the Prophets were indeed in the synagogue, but he rejected the argument that the sacred books made the place that contained them also holy (Jud. 6.6).

Chrysostom declared that he particularly hated the synagogue in fact precisely “because although they have the Prophets, they do not believe the Prophets; because although they read the writings, they do not accept the witnesses” (Jud. 1.5). Chrysostom did not dispute that Jews “brought the Prophets and Moses along with themselves” into the synagogue (Jud 1.5); he did reject their understanding of those texts. 71 In addition to the books of the Law and the Prophets, Chrysostom also made some titillating references to an ark that he seemed to know stood in Antioch’s synagogue. 72 He asked his church audience to compare this fourthcentury ark to that described in the Bible, such as in Exodus and 1 Kings, noting that “the ark [κιβωτός] that is with the Jews now” has “no oil of anointing [χρισμός], no tablets of the covenant (1 Kgs 8:6–9), no Holy of Holies (1 Kgs 6:19), no veil (Exod 26:31–33), no high priest, no incense, no holocaust, no sacrifice, nor the other things that made that other ark then revered” (Jud. 6.7). 73 much broader discussion: This Holy Place: On the Sanctity of the Synagogue during the Greco-Roman Period (Notre Dame: University of Notre Dame Press, 1997), 137–41.

71 Margaret Mitchell made the interesting observation that this phrase inverts the order of the Torah and Haftorah that developed in liturgical practice. Unfortunately, there is no way to know what significance John’s inverted phrase has for Antiochene synagogue practice in the late fourth century, particularly given his reference to the Law and Prophets (in this expected order) in Jud. 1.5, 6.6.

72 The term kibōtos is usefully flexible. In Chrysostom’s writings it usually refers to Noah’s ark, and sometimes to the ark of the covenant described in the Bible, but more rarely, as here, it can refer to a kibōtos in the synagogue, and occasionally to the container that held the relics of a Christian martyr (e.g., John Chrysostom, In s. Iulianum martyrem 4). The last example raises questions about efforts in Chrysostom’s community to compete with the kibōtos of the synagogue with a new powerful martyr-kibōtos of their own. I thank Margaret Mitchell for noting that Chrysostom also refers to Paul’s letters as a greater kibōtos than Noah’s (Chrysostom, De laudibus sancti Pauli 1.5).

73 Compare Chrysostom’s similar list of missing accoutrements when he criticized the sounding of trumpets for Rosh Hashanah (Jud. 4.7). Joan Branham is among the scholars who have commented on the apparent effort to map the Jerusalem temple onto later synagogues: Joan Branham, “Mapping Sacrifice on Bodies and Spaces in Late-Antique Judaism and Early Christianity,” in Architecture of the Sacred: Space, Ritual, and Experience from Classical Greece to Byzantium, ed. Bonna Wescoat and Robert

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Lee Levine has argued that Torah shrines were common in late antique synagogues, and mentioned that the building in nearby Apamea, for example, had a niche in its main hall that archaeologists believe held the Torah scrolls. 74 Steven Fine has found Chrysostom’s descriptions of Antioch’s synagogue consonant with other evidence for post-temple synagogue practices in their references to the Torah being read there and having a special place to store the Torah scrolls, and in their rhetoric of comparing the synagogue to the Jerusalem temple. 75 Chrysostom even made an intriguing comment that compared the ark [κιβωτός] that the Jews had in their local synagogue to little arks or containers that were for sale in Antioch’s agora [τῶν ἐπὶ τῆς ἀγορᾶς πωλουμένων κιβωτίων], suggesting that unlike the harmless little arks for sale, the ark in the synagogue caused harm to everyone who approached it (Jud. 6.7). 76 Chrysostom’s distinguishing here between biblical and fourth-century arks and practices raises the question of how much Chrysostom knew about a contemporary synagogue in Antioch, let alone what boxes/arks he expected his audience to recognize from the agora.

It is further noteworthy that Chrysostom tried to delegitimize the contemporary synagogue, its ark, and the practices of its congregants by reinterpreting the shared Scripture that he said granted the synagogue respect in the first place. 77 Preached to an audience whom he claimed was overly familiar Ousterhout (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2012), 201–30.

74 Levine discussed this in more detail in a section on the Torah chest and Torah shrine (Levine, Ancient, 351–56). The beautiful Torah shrine from the synagogue in Dura Europos is also noteworthy, as Margaret Mitchell observed, though it is earlier than the fourth century and not as geographically or culturally proximate to Antioch as Apamea was.

75 Steven Fine, Sacred Realm: The Emergence of the Synagogue in the Ancient World (New York: Oxford University Press, 1996), 39–47. Regarding temple imagery in synagogues, see Branham, “Mapping,” 201–30.

76 As a reviewer noted, John begins his discussion of the ark in Jud. 6.7 with a reference to the capture of the ancient ark by the Philistines (1 Sam 5). While this narrative focuses on competition with the Philistine’s sacred places, and while John does also compete in fourth-century Antioch to make Christian places more powerful and more visible than the traditional temples and festivals of the gods, in Jud. 6.7 John compares the ancient Philistine temple to the fourth-century Antiochene synagogue rather than to Antiochene temples of the gods. For John’s arguments regarding Antiochene temples, see Shepardson, Controlling, esp. 58–91, 163–203.

77 See, for example, the discussion in Shepardson, Controlling, 98–116.

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with these buildings, these homilies offer persuasive testimony that such kibōtosand Scripture-laden buildings were actual Antiochene gathering places where leaders were reinterpreting the Law and the Prophets to support fourth-century Antiochene celebrations of Rosh Hashanah, Yom Kippur, and Sukkot that were not bound to the temple or Jerusalem. This is a useful reminder that not only Christians, but all fourth-century scriptural communities among the empire’s various “Jews” and “Christians,” were actively marketing new and competing interpretations of the Scriptures of Israel in an effort to accommodate their new contexts.

Besides the synagogue, another local place that Chrysostom associated with “Jews” was a healing shrine in the suburb of Daphne known as the cave of Matrona, which was apparently popular among ailing Antiochenes regardless of their other ritual habits. Scholars have debated the cave’s history and whether or not it was named for the mother of the Maccabean martyrs, but the locations of the cave and any fourth-century Antiochene buildings associated with the Maccabees are unknown today. 78 Chrysostom lamented that some people whom

78

Martha Vinson distinguished between a place within the southwestern “Kerateion” region of the walled city of Antioch that she associated with a memorial of the Maccabees’ death, and a cave in Daphne that she identified as a Jewish shrine that contained the Maccabees’ relics, though Raphaëlle Ziadé rejected the cave’s association with the Maccabees: Martha Vinson, “Gregory Nazianzen’s Homily 15 and the Genesis of the Christian Cult of the Maccabean Martyrs,” Byzantion 64 (1994): 179–85; Raphaëlle Ziadé, Les martyrs Maccabées: de l’histoire juive au culte chrétien, les homélies de Grégoire de Nazianze et de Jean Chrysostome (Boston: Brill, 2007), 119–20. Mayer and Allen survey the sources for our knowledge about places associated with the Maccabees in Antioch (Mayer and Allen, Churches, 90–93; cf. 143). Vinson linked the Antiochene site with a later Christian church dedicated to the Maccabees that Wendy Mayer says may have existed already in the time of John Chrysostom and that was called recent by Augustine (John Chrysostom, pan. mart. 1; Augustine, sermo 300). Vinson and Lothar Triebel reject the claim, however, that this church was a converted synagogue, although Leonard Rutgers allowed that such a conversion was possible if it had not been a martyrium until its Christian phase: Lothar Triebel, “Das angebliche Synagoge der makkabäischen Märtyrer in Antiochia am Orontes,” Zeitschrift für Antikes Christentum 9 (2005): 464–95; Leonard V. Rutgers, “The Importance of Scripture in the Conflict between Jews and Christians: The Example of Antioch,” in The Use of Sacred Books in the Ancient World, ed. L. V. Rutgers, et al., 287–303 (Leuven: Peeters, 1998). See also Mayer and Allen, Churches, 92–94, 142–44, 185–86; Shepardson, Controlling, 114–15. Harkins, Meeks, and Wilken wrote before this scholarship and accepted assumptions by Marcel Simon and Glanville Downey that are no longer in the majority. See, for example, Marcel Simon, “La Polémique antijuive de saint Jean Chrysostome et le movement judaisant d’Antioche,”

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he considered to be “Christians” frequented this “Jewish” healing cave in Daphne: “For the pit [βάραθρον] there is more wicked, that which they call Matrona’s. For I heard that even many of the faithful go up there and sleep beside that place” (Jud. 1.6). In a later homily on Titus, Chrysostom referred to “those who observe the same fasts [with the Jews], who keep the Sabbaths, who go off to the places that are made holy by them; I speak about the place in Daphne, that cave [σπήλαιον] that is called Matrona’s, and that place in Kilikia that is called Kronos’s” (In Titum hom. 3.2). 79 These references could lead to evocative speculation about interactions among various Antiochenes at the healing shrine, but at the very least, they document another particular location that Chrysostom instructed his audience to associate with “Jews.”

Other places that Chrysostom asked his audience to avoid were locations of distinctly “Jewish” festivals (Jud. 1.1, 7). He expressed his concern that some in his audience would go to watch the spectacle of the festivals, and others would participate with Jews, “joining in their feasts and sharing their fasts” (Jud. 1.1), which seemed to many to “have something august and great about them” (Jud. 1.7). He warned his audience not to dance with Jews at the festival for Rosh Hashanah (Jud. 2.3), to avoid “the tents, which at this moment are pitched” among them for Sukkot (Jud. 7.1), and at Yom Kippur he criticized, “Do you fast with the Jews? Then also take off your sandals with the Jews, and walk barefoot in the agora, and share with them in their indecency and laughter” (Jud. 1.4). 80 Chrysostom argued that Scripture defined a particular place for such festivals— namely, in the earthly city of Jerusalem. 81 What excuse could Jews have to Annuaire de l’Institut de philology et d’histoire orientales et slaves 4 (1936): 140–53; Downey, History, 109–11; Paul Harkins, “Introduction,” FC 68 (Washington, D.C.: Catholic University of America Press, 1979), 44–47; Meeks and Wilken, Jews, 9, 30; Wilken, John Chrysostom, 36, 88.

79 All translations from In Titum hom. 3 are my own from the Greek in PG 62.676–82.

Wendy Mayer has called into question the assumptions that led previous scholars to identify Antioch as the provenance of this homily, though her conclusion is that there are “insufficient grounds for making a determination” for certain (Mayer, Homilies, 377–78, 472–73). The reference in this passage to the cave in Daphne seems to me to suggest an Antiochene provenance, Mayer’s useful observations notwithstanding.

80 Compare with Wilken, Jud. 1.2 and Mishnah Ta’anit 4.8 (Wilken, John Chrysostom, 65).

81 For a more in-depth discussion of Chrysostom’s understanding of the proper location for Jewish ritual, see Christine Shepardson, “Paschal Politics: Deploying the Temple’s Destruction against Fourth-Century Judaizers,” Vigiliae Christianae 62.3 (2008): 233–60.

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celebrate their festivals in Antioch, John asked, “when it is clear that those [‘Jews’ of the Hebrew Bible] neither sacrificed, nor sang hymns in another land, nor did they observe any such fasts” (Jud. 4.4) outside of Jerusalem (Jud. 4.5). Even though contemporary Jews “have no hope” of regaining the politeia of their forbearers— nor even Jerusalem or the temple—John insisted, “they cannot bear to be silent in that way” of the biblical stories and refrain from holiday celebrations outside of Jerusalem (Jud. 4.4; cf. 4.5). Such holiday celebrations were publically visible but, like the contemporary synagogue ark, scripturally illegitimate, Chrysostom argued, and he urged Antiochenes to avoid all such “Jewish” places. Like for the building with the ark and scriptural books that Chrysostom labeled a synagogue, the evidence for the celebrations of these autumn holidays in Antioch in 386 and 387 seems very strong, even if scholars have reason to resist Chrysostom’s insistence on labeling all their participants “Jews.”

Besides the significance of place for identifying a person as a “Jew,” time, both in relation to the annual calendar and in relation to the eras of divine history, also played a role in Chrysostom’s representations. 82 While all of Antioch’s citizens celebrated various festival days during the year, what days they celebrated would, Chrysostom claimed, identify them with one community or another. 83 Regarding the cyclical time of the annual calendar, Chrysostom agreed that God called upon a Christian to feast and to fast, but not at the same time as Jews. Chrysostom referred specifically to the troublesome timing of Easter, Passover, and the Feast of Unleavened Bread in Jud. 3, explaining that he would like to clarify, “What is pascha; what is tessarakostē (Lent); and on the one hand, what is Jewish, and on the other hand, what is ours? . . . What does the Feast of Unleavened Bread mean?” (Jud. 3.2), particularly since, “I hear this being said by many, that the pascha is together with the Feast of Unleavened Bread” (Jud. 3.3). He observed that Passover came once each year (Jud. 3.2), and criticized anyone who would consider “the Jews wiser” than the bishops at the Council of Nicaea in knowing what day Christians should celebrate (Jud. 3.3). 84 Margaret Mitchell usefully noted that in Jud. 1.4, Chrysostom makes a sharp distinction between the heavenly Jerusalem where Christians will live, and the earthly Jerusalem of the Jews.

82 Cf. Wilken, John Chrysostom, 149–53.

83 This is the subject of much of Soler’s book (Le Sacré et le Salut).

84 Pradels, Brändle, and Heimgartner concur that the homily traditionally identified as Jud. 3 was presented between Homily 1 and Homily 4 on January 31, 387, and note that it addressed a different topic than the other homilies in this series (“Sequence,” 91). In this homily, Chrysostom is most upset with people he calls Christians who continue their traditional practices regarding Easter rather than adopting the decisions made on that

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Comments about the calendar day of the Feast of Unleavened Bread in 387 (Jud. 3.5) and about the timing of the upcoming Jewish fast (Jud. 4.1) suggest that John was familiar with local synagogues’ festival calendar.

For Chrysostom, however, the Jews’ bad timing included not only celebrating at the wrong time in the calendar, but also celebrating festivals that were outdated in a post-Resurrection and post-temple era. 85 He argued vociferously against the ongoing celebration of temple-related biblical holidays: “When God wished [the Jews] to fast, they became wide and fat, but when [God] wished that they would not fast, then they become contentious and they fast; when he wished them to offer sacrifice, they ran to idols; when he does not wish them to celebrate the feasts, they are eager to celebrate” (Jud. 4.4; cf. 1.2). In addition to arguing against the autumn Jewish holidays, John also interpreted certain biblical passages (e.g., Deut 16; 31:10–11; Exod 12; Num 9) to criticize spring Passover celebrations in Antioch because, he said, the scripturally—and thus, historically—appropriate time for them, too, had passed. 86 Chrysostom agreed that Scripture should be revered, and conceded that Scripture included injunctions to celebrate these holidays, but he argued that with the death and resurrection of the Messiah these holidays were no longer necessary, and with the destruction of the temple in Jerusalem they were no longer even possible.

Thus Chrysostom associated “Jews” with certain places and certain festivals and fasts, and warned his congregants that where they went and when they observed holidays could make them too Jewish to be Christian. 87 matter at the Council of Nicaea in 325 (see Chrysostom, Jud. 3.1, 3.3). Both the Council of Nicaea and more immediately the Council of Antioch (341) condemned some Eastern Christians who continued to celebrate Easter on 14 Nisan; see Eusebius, VC 3.17–20; Didascalia 21; Shepardson, “Paschal,” 233–35; Wilken, John Chrysostom, 76–79.

85 Joshua Garroway provides an excellent analysis of John Chrysostom’s complex rhetoric around his understanding of the transition of the role and interpretation of the law, particularly in relation to Jesus, who followed the law according to some Gospel stories and preached its fulfillment according to others: Joshua Garroway, “The Law-Observant Lord: John Chrysostom’s Engagement with the Jewishness of Christ,” JECS 18:4 (2010): 591–615.

86 See Shepardson, “Paschal,” 233–60. On the topic of scriptural practices’ invalidity after the temple’s destruction, see also Wilken, John Chrysostom, 148–53. The emperor Julian turned the tables on these arguments in some ways, criticizing Christians in his Against the Galileans, written in Antioch in the early 360s, for not following the practices expected by their Old Testament Scripture (e.g., 305D–333D).

87 See, for example, Shepardson, Controlling, 92–128.

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Identifying “Jews” by Thought and Deed In addition to where people went and when they feasted and fasted, other behaviors could also, according to Chrysostom, identify them as “Jews,” providing an even thicker description of Antiochene Jews, refracted, of course, through John’s particular lens. In his depictions, John Chrysostom particularly focused on the celebration of Jewish festivals, as mentioned above, including the trumpets of Rosh Hashanah and the fast of Yom Kippur. In 387 Chrysostom complained that the Jews’ trumpets were “more unlawful than those in the theaters,” their fasts were worse than any drunken party, and the tents of Sukkot might as well be brothels (Jud. 7.1). Throughout his Adversus Iudaeos homilies, he described boisterous parties that accompanied the Jews’ holidays, and how they danced with bare feet in the agora along with a large crowd of other Antiochenes (Jud. 1.2; cf. 2.3). Chrysostom criticized Antiochenes’ participation in the Rosh Hashanah celebration by interpreting Amos 5:23 to support his claim that God “hates worship [λατρείαν] through kettledrums, lyres, harps, and other instruments” (Jud. 1.7). Our Septuagint text of Amos 5:23 mentions God rejecting “the sound of your songs” and “the strumming of your instruments [ψαλμὸν ὀργάνων σου],” though it does not specifically name drums. 88 Chrysostom’s polemic is extreme, but he appears to expect his audience to recognize his reference to the annual autumn holiday parties with kettledrums from first-hand experience.

Chrysostom also made other explicit claims about what “Jews” did “now”—that is, in his own time. 89 He claimed that Jews of his own day did not practice levirate marriage as described in Scripture (In Matth. hom. 70.2), and that they still practiced circumcision even though John believed that the appropriate time for it had passed (Hom. in Gen. 39.15; cf. In Gal. comm. 4.3). 90 He also specifically mentioned that Jews still observed the Sabbath (In Ioh. hom. 68.1; In Titum hom. 3.2; In Gal. comm. 1.6–7, 2.6, 4.3), that they kept the law generally (In Ioh. hom. 68.1; In Titum hom. 3.2; In Gal. comm. 2.6–7), and that they practiced a distinct ritual

88

Quotations from the Septuagint are from Alfred Rahlfs, ed., Septuaginta: Id est Vetus Testamentum graece iuxta LXX interpretes (Stuttgart: Deutsche Bibelgesellschaft, 1979).

89 In a Homily on Acts, Chrysostom lamented that no matter how often (or how loudly) he taught, those in his audience still swore in God’s name, while “in the synagogues of the Jews” the congregants did what the teacher [didaskōn] asked (In Acta apost. hom. 8.3).

This text, however, likely stems from his time in Constantinople.

90 John’s In Heb. hom. 33.2 also includes a reference to Jews still expecting the coming of a messiah, but the text cannot be located in Antioch.

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washing (In Ioh. hom. 70.2; In II Tim. Hom. 6.4; Catech. 9.16),91 the last sometimes particularly after touching a corpse (In I Cor. hom. 20.4; Catech. 9.16). 92 His Homilies on the Gospel of John say surprisingly little about its familiar “aposynagōgos” language, but in commenting on John 12:35 he asked, “How many things, then, do the Jews do now and not know what they do! But they are walking as one in the dark, supposing that they are advancing on the right path, but walking down the opposite, keeping the Sabbath, guarding the law and the observances of foods, but not knowing where they walk” (In Ioh. hom. 68.1).93 Chrysostom again commented that even “now” contemporary local Jews “abstain from defiling blood and keep the Sabbath. . . . You are doing this now, and you do not carry burdens on the Sabbath” (Jud. 6.3). He also implied that in Antioch, Jews tithed to the synagogue, a behavior that he urged his audience to imitate in his church (In I Cor. hom. 43.5).94 Such comments provide a glimpse into how Chrysostom trained his audience to recognize certain practices as belonging to “Jews” in their city.95 In the process of teaching his audience his parameters for recognizing “Jews,” Chrysostom also taught them how to identify those acting “like Jews,” in the hope that, motivated by the polemical descriptions he gave of “Jews,” his audience would avoid such behavior and prevent it in others around them. He

91 Regarding references from Chrysostom and Theodoret to Jewish ritual bathing, see also Wilken, John Chrysostom, 65.

92 Scholars have traditionally—and also recently—located John’s homilies on Matthew and John in Antioch in the years 390–91 (e.g., Garroway, “Law-Observant,” 594). John’s homilies on Genesis are traditionally dated to his time in Antioch in the late 380s, his commentary on Galatians to Antioch in the 390s, his catechetical instructions to Antioch around 390, his homilies on II Timothy and Titus to the 390s in Antioch, and his homilies on 1 Corinthians to his time in Antioch. Mayer’s important cautions notwithstanding (Mayer, Homilies, 469–73), these texts are still most likely from Antioch.

93 This translation from John Chrysostom’s In Ioh. hom. 68 is from the Greek text in PG 59.374.

94 Chrysostom again mentions Jews’ tithing in Hom. in Phil. 9.4, although in this case he appears to refer to scriptural “Jews” and does not stress as he does in In I Cor. hom. 43.5 that the tithing takes place in his local synagogue. I appreciate Blake Leyerle bringing this comparison to my attention: Blake Leyerle, “John Chrysostom on Almsgiving and the Use of Money,” The Harvard Theological Review 87.1 (1994): 45.

95 In the early 360s, the emperor Julian implied in a text from Antioch that contemporary Jews still circumcised, avoided certain foods, and celebrated the Passover and a time of unleavened bread (Against the Galileans, 238D, 305D–306A, 314C, 354A–B).

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lamented, for example, “If any of you who are present or absent go off to the spectacle of the trumpets, or enter the synagogue, or go up to the [place] of Matrona, or join the fasting, or share the Sabbaths, or observe any other Jewish custom [Ἰουδαϊκὸν ἔθος] great or small, I am undefiled [καθαρός] by the blood of all of you” (Jud. 1.8; cf. 8.5). He warned husbands to be careful that their wives were not lured to “the trumpets” lest they got caught up in the festival’s licentiousness; “For,” Chrysostom claimed, it was “the prostitutes [πόρναι], the effeminates [μαλακοί], and the whole chorus of the orchestra” who rushed to that festival (Jud. 2.3; cf. 1.2). While this rhetoric includes standard polemical slanders of sexual impropriety, 96 it is also in some ways specific about the existence of large annual festival celebrations that were associated with the synagogue but included a large and varied swathe of the city’s population. 97 In his third Homily on Titus, in this case his response to Titus 1:14, Chrysostom challenged those who added to the beliefs and practices that he condoned “as if the faith were not sufficient to justify,” asking them, “Why do you enslave yourself to the Law” (In Titum hom. 3.2). As he says a few lines below, “if they who are scrupulous about foods are not healthy, but are sick and weak [Rom 14:1],” then what about those who observe the Jews’ fasts, keep their Sabbaths, and go to their consecrated places (In Titum hom. 3.2). Those who acted “like Jews” included those who ran to the synagogue, and celebrated and fasted with “the Jews”; Chrysostom encouraged his audience to force their friends and family to break a “Jewish” fast by sharing a meal with them at home. He preferred that his audience not even “share a greeting” with “Jews” or exchange a word (Jud. 1.6; cf. 8.8), lest “the devil” steal the person and keep them “in Judaism [ἐν τῷ ἰουδαϊσμῷ]” (Jud. 1.8; cf. 2.1; 6.7).

John noted several reasons why someone in his audience might be drawn to the synagogue in these ways, including a respect for the books of the Law and the Prophets, as discussed above, and the belief that oaths sworn there “were more to be feared” (Jud. 1.3). Also on John’s list, however, was the Antiochenes’ admiration of “Jewish” healing abilities, which suggests additional behavior associated with “Jews” in the city. Dayna Kalleres has written, “In the case of fever, sickness, and disease,” Chrysostom’s congregants sometimes “went

96

See, for example, the long history traced by Jennifer Knust, Abandoned to Lust: Sexual Slander and Ancient Christianity (New York: Columbia University Press, 2005).

97 Among others, Wilken noted that Chrysostom’s condemnation of the Jewish festivals appears to have been out of step with many Antiochenes’ views (John Chrysostom, 67–68, 74–79).

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to the synagogue—a place of notable holy power—to seek amuletic healing.” 98 Chrysostom tried to counter this respect by arguing that “Jews” served demons when they offered cures to bodily illnesses (Jud. 1.7). Chrysostom asked his audience to imagine that a Judaizer might justify patronizing a Jewish healer because the cure would be successful (Jud. 8.5). John complained, “If you get some small illness, will you immediately reject [Christ] as your master and run to the demons and desert to the synagogues?” (Jud. 8.6). As Kalleres discussed, Chrysostom did not deny the efficacy of the cures offered by daimones through Jewish healers, 99 though he warned that these were to test Christians, who had been forbidden from accepting such demonic cures (Jud. 1.7; cf. 8.5–8). The Jews’ “reputation for healing,” whether from incantations, amulets, charms, or spells, or from the incubation cave in Daphne, could lead a Gentile Antiochene to mingle with the city’s Jews (Jud. 8.5).

As seen with respect to Jewish festivals, Chrysostom frequently countered the scripturally based practices that he attributed to local Jews and those who acted “like Jews” with biblical arguments, trying to turn Antiochenes’ respect for the Scripture to his advantage. While most of the rhetoric in his Commentary on Galatians focused on the apostles Peter and Paul, 100 John also

98 Dayna Kalleres, City of Demons: Violence, Ritual, and Christian Power in Late Antiquity (Berkeley: University of California Press, forthcoming), 72. See also Wilken, John Chrysostom, 83–88.

99 Kalleres, City, 72–73.

100 Given Chrysostom’s prolonged and vitriolic Adversus Iudaeos homilies, it is little surprise that most times that he accused a person of “Judaizing,” he criticized the behavior of fourth-century Antiochenes. It is worth noting, however, the ways in which Chrysostom sometimes also used the verb to refer to the behavior of the apostles Peter and Paul. In one of his Antiochene texts, In illud: in faciem ei restiti, a homily on the conflict described in Galatians between Peter and Paul in Antioch, Chrysostom sometimes distinguished between the behavior of the two apostles, though he noted that they shared the most important aspects of their preaching in common (In illud: in faciem ei restiti PG 51.381); all references to In illud: in faciem ei restiti are to the volume and page number of the PG edition of the Greek text. Chrysostom occasionally criticized Peter in distinction from Paul, however, for Judaizing by keeping food laws, circumcision, and other Jewish rites (In illud: in faciem ei restiti PG 51.381; cf. In Acta apost. hom. 32).

Thus, Chrysostom sometimes lingers on Peter’s Judaizing (In illud: in faciem ei restiti PG 51.381), while emphasizing that Paul stopped his earlier following of the law to teach the Gentiles not to Judaize (In illud: in faciem ei restiti PG 51.382; cf. PG 51.383). Chrysostom

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wrote, in response to Paul’s exhortations against Gentiles’ following the law, “Let those who even now Judaize and hold onto the Law listen, for these things are said also to them” (In Gal. comm. 2.8; cf. In Gal. comm. 2.7; In Rom. hom.

25.3), 101 making it clear that he intended to paint a picture of behaviors that he knew, such as, “There are many among us now, both fasting on the same day with the Jews, and keeping Sabbaths in the same way” (In Gal. comm. 1.7). 102 John later echoed that although “now not many” Gentiles in Antioch “are circumcised, they fast and keep the Sabbath with those [Jews],” thus excluding themselves from grace, for, Chrysostom argued from Gal 5:4, if Christ owes nothing to those who are only circumcised, how much greater is the danger on the one hand when “fasting and Sabbatizing are observed, and thus two commandments are kept rather than one” and on the other hand “due to the time that has passed” (In Gal. comm. 2.6; cf. Jud. 2.2). Circumcision, as a distinctive Jewish practice that Chrysostom suggested Gentile Judaizers were not often emulating, became a useful tool for his scriptural argument: “For if you keep the Sabbaths, why do you not also circumcise? And if you circumcise, why not also sacrifice? For if it is necessary to observe [the Law], it is necessary to observe the whole Law; and if it is not necessary to keep the whole, then neither

repeatedly portrayed Paul as preaching against Judaizing (In Gal. comm. 6.4; cf. In Gal. comm. 1.1), and argued that Paul condemned Judaizing in his own time, and that Scripture read correctly should teach his audience to condemn such behavior also in their own time (In Rom. hom. 25.3). One difficulty that John encountered in trying to separate Peter from Paul in terms of their adherence to Jewish law, however, was sparked by the description of Paul in Acts 21:20–26, which described Paul participating in temple rituals around the fulfillment of a Nazarite vow (cf. Acts 16:3, 18:18). John Chrysostom several times confirmed that Paul purified, shaved, and followed the law (e.g., In illud: in faciem ei restiti PG 51.375, 382, 384), even saying that Paul “Judaized” (In illud: in faciem ei restiti PG 51.382). John sorted this out by explaining that when they were all Jews, even Paul was compelled to Judaize, but then he stopped when he evangelized the Gentiles (In illud: in faciem ei restiti PG 51.384; compare In I Cor. hom. 22; In Acta apost. hom. 35, 46; contrast In Rom. hom. 16 and In Gal. comm. 5.3, in which Chrysostom said that Paul’s behavior never made him a Judaizer). This recalls Garroway’s discussion of Chrysostom’s nuanced engagement with Jesus’ equally complicated relationship to the law (Garroway, “Law-Observant,” 591–615).

101 All translations from John Chrysostom’s In Gal. comm. 2 are from the Greek text in PG 61.633–48.

102 All translations from John Chrysostom’s In Gal. comm. 1 are from the Greek text in PG 61.611–34.

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is it necessary to keep a part” (In Gal. comm. 2.6). 103 John thus interpreted Scripture to polarize his argument against Gentile Antiochenes, who he claimed observed the Sabbath and fasted with the Jews but chose not to circumcise and could not offer sacrifice at the Jerusalem temple. 104 Through their focus on those who acted “like Jews,” these descriptions represent further accounts of how Antiochene church-goers could recognize John Chrysostom’s “Jews” from their distinctive behavior.

In addition to where people went, when they celebrated, and what practices they observed, Chrysostom suggested that what people thought could also distinguish them as “Jews,” although such descriptions almost certainly included Christians with different doctrines than his own. 105 He frequently encouraged the people listening to his sermons to imagine a conversation with a “Jew” on the streets of Antioch. Sometimes he suggested that the “Jew” would approach the listener, and other times he instructed his listeners actively to seek out such conversations. Regarding the former, one of John’s Homilies on Romans taught his audience how to respond to challenges to Christian teachings, such as “when the Jew says to you, ‘How by the accomplishment of one, the Christ, was the world saved?’” (In Rom. hom. 10.1). 106 There are also several

103 Cf. John Chrysostom, Jud. 2 (Pradels, Brändle, Heimgartner 121rb, 122vb–123ra; Pradels, Brändle, and Heimgartner, “Das bisher vermisste Textstück,” 32, 34). Meeks and Wilken argued that Chrysostom preached against some in his church community who circumcised (Jews, 32), but I understand John’s rhetoric to apply the clear argument against circumcision from Galatians to the more pressing fourth-century issue John faced of participation in Jews’ festivals and fasts (Jud. 2).

104 It is unclear whether Chrysostom criticized people who intentionally joined in Jews’ fasts or who rather intended to observe Christian fasts on days that happened to coincide with Jews’ fasts. Chrysostom’s rhetoric does not leave room for such distinctions. I thank the reviewer who raised this question.

105 It became commonplace for Christian leaders to slander Christian opponents whom they considered to be “heretics” by calling them “Jews.” See, for example, Christine Shepardson, “‘Exchanging Reed for Reed’: Mapping Contemporary Heretics onto Biblical Jews in Ephrem’s Hymns on Faith,” Hugoye: Journal of Syriac Studies 5.1 (2002): 15–33; Averil Cameron, “Jews and Heretics—A Category Error?” in The Ways That Never Parted, 345–60; David Brakke, “Jewish Flesh and Christian Spirit in Athanasius of Alexandria," JECS 9.4 (2001): 453–81.

106 This translation from John Chrysostom’s In Rom. hom. 10, traditionally assigned to Antioch, is from the Greek text in PG 60.473–84. Compare other challenges and

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places in John’s homilies where he imagined members of his church audience intentionally seeking out a conversation with Jews (and/or with “Jews”), 107 and such conversation partners in turn evaluating and critiquing the behavior of local Christians. 108 John’s rhetoric presumes that such conversations were plausible to John and to his audience, though it is unclear who “the Jews” were that each pictured.

As scholars challenge the scope and authority of the Palestinian (and Babylonian) rabbis in these centuries, it has become ever more pressing to identify sources for Jews and Jewish practices beyond the rabbinic texts. While many of these descriptions from John’s homilies might seem largely predictable, they are still unusual in being non-rabbinic narrative perceptions of specific Jewish practices in a late antique Diaspora city. Like most early Christian antiJewish rhetoric, John’s homilies elsewhere frequently conflated “Jews” of his city with biblical characters from the Old and New Testament. At least as interesting, however, are these examples when John claimed to speak specifically about what Jews did right then and there in his city. Jews in fourth-century Antioch, he claimed, circumcised, observed the Sabbath and did not carry burdens in public on that day, had dietary differences from other Antiochenes, had a distinctive washing ritual, and tithed. They celebrated Rosh Hashanah with the blowing of trumpets and a large public festival, Sukkot with booths in the city, Yom Kippur with a fast and dancing in the agora, and Passover and the Feast of Unleavened Bread; and all of these celebrations included uncircumcised Gentiles. Some Jews were effective healers; their synagogues contained an ark and books of the Law and the Prophets; and the material evidence suggests that some had titles of archisynagōgos, presbyteros, and gerousiarchēs. While Chrysostom tried to instill

conversations that Chrysostom imagined for his audience in Hom. in Gen. 49.7; Jud. 1.3; 3.4; 4.6; 5.1–3, 12; 6.3–4; 7.1.

107 See, for example, Jud. 5.1–2; 7.6; In Matth. hom. 37.5; In I Cor. hom. 15.3.

108 Chrysostom argued vehemently against going to horseraces, in part, he claimed, because when (non-Christian) Greeks and Jews saw someone who went to church attending the races, they would presume that the church’s teachings were not followed and not powerful (Hom. in Gen. 7.2). Likewise, the fact that some of those whom Chrysostom considered to be Christians were practicing behaviors that he considered to be Jewish caused him to lament that when Jews saw those “who worship [προσκυνοῦντας] the Christ whom they crucified” following the Jews’ own practices, the Jews would believe that their own practices were superior (Jud. 1.5). Blake Leyerle was correct to notice in her 2014 presentation at the SBL meeting in San Diego that John Chrysostom stresses conflict and differences when his writings imply there was a much wider range of interactions between his congregants and other Antiochenes.

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in his audience polemical descriptions of Antiochene “Jews” as demons and crucifiers, he seemed to expect his congregants already to associate some of these other behaviors with familiar and respectable local synagogue-attendees whom John wanted to label “Jews” and tarnish with his new connotations.

Conclusion: Re-Imagining Antioch, Remembering the Jews Although many of us who have written about John Chrysostom’s anti-Jewish and anti-Judaizing rhetoric have largely focused on his highly stylized polemic, his writings also offer persuasive concrete evidence that Jews lived in fourth-century Antioch along with church-goers who still associated Easter with Passover and the Feast of Unleavened Bread, and also along with Gentiles who joined Jews’ festivals, frequented their synagogues, and sought cures from Jewish healers. Unfortunately, no first-person voice like Libanius’s or John Chrysostom’s survives from fourthcentury Antiochene Jews, so we are left to imagine them, like most Romans, through the voices of others and the scant material remains. While the rhetorical nature of Chrysostom’s homilies make them complicated sources for Jewish practices, time and again he distinguished contemporary Jewish practices from those of earlier times to an audience he assumed was familiar with Antioch’s contemporary synagogues and festivals (e.g., Jud. 6.4). John Chrysostom’s New Testament text of Galatians, for example, mentions Paul’s concern that his audience is inappropriately “observing special days, and months, and season, and years” (Gal 4:10), but the epistle particularly highlights Paul’s arguments against circumcision and dietary laws (e.g., Gal 2). 109 John himself, on the other hand, argued most vociferously against Sabbath observance and joining Jews’ fasts and festivals, explicitly stating that in his context these behaviors were of much greater concern than Gentile circumcision.

Most early Christian anti-Judaism is tied very closely to Christian Scripture, such as conflating Jews of the author’s period with Jesus’ opponents in the canonical Gospels or with the subjects of the prophets’ criticisms. While Chrysostom participated in those traditions, he also struggled to try to reattach fourth-century Antiochene Jews and their practices more closely to scriptural and temple-related rituals than they seemed currently to be, in order to make them easier to dismiss. For example, he argued that Scripture proved that

109

This quotation is from the NRSV. I am grateful to Margaret Mitchell for highlighting the relevance of Gal 4:10.

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Passover could not legitimately be celebrated outside of Jerusalem and that Sabbath observance was part of the same law that required temple sacrifice, apparently in an effort to confront a local synagogue community that accepted neither of these constraints. These arguments suggest that something in addition to Scripture and earlier temple-related practices—most plausibly observations of contemporary practices in his own city—provided the template for John Chrysostom’s descriptions of the behavior of fourth-century Antiochene Jews that did not conform to these biblical expectations.

To sketch fourth-century Antioch, we must take seriously the evidence “attesting to pagan gentiles (and eventually Christian gentiles) voluntarily in Jewish places, and to Jews voluntarily in gentile places.” 110 What did Antioch’s synagogue leaders think of these Gentiles in their midst, participating in holidays, filling out the congregation on the Sabbath, popping in when the door was unlocked to swear an oath before the God of Israel? In fourth-century Antioch, like in third-century Carthage, 111 synagogue-attendees bought and sold in the agora alongside their neighbors most days of the week, sat with them at the theater, bathed together in the public baths, exercised at the gymnasium, slept beside them at the cave of Matrona, and greeted them as they walked alongside Antioch’s famous colonnaded and lamp-lit streets. John Chrysostom’s texts employ multiple rhetorical tactics to construct “Jews,” with the result that some of his descriptions more plausibly reflect local people and practices than others. While none of Chrysostom’s hostile rhetoric depicts “reality” in any straightforward way, this study has shown some of the ways in which his representations of post-temple Diaspora Jewish practices are nevertheless valuable. It is my hope that this essay will reinvigorate conversations that are at once theoretically sophisticated and historically responsible about Jews and Jewish practices in late antique Antioch, as well as commend some of John Chrysostom’s complicated but rich writings to the catalogue of non-rabbinic sources that can help nuance our understanding of Jewish communities and practices more broadly in the late Roman world.

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110

Paula Fredriksen, “How Later Contexts Affect Pauline Content, or: Retrospect is the Mother of Anachronism,” Jews and Christians in the First and Second Centuries: How to Write Their History, ed. Peter Tomson and Joshua Schwartz (Leiden: Brill, 2014), 6.

111 Fredriksen and Irshai, “Include Me Out,” 117–32.

The Jewish Gospels: The Story of the Jewish Christ A Review Article Miriam DeCock McMaster University | decockmj@mcmaster.ca JJMJS No. 2 (2015): 183---191

Boyarin, Daniel. The Jewish Gospels: The Story of the Jewish Christ. New York: The New Press, 2012. ISBN-13: 978-1595584687.

Berkeley’s Daniel Boyarin, well-known for his revision of the understanding of the interactions between nascent Christianity and nascent Judaism in the years 100–500, looks to extend such work to the period of the New Testament in his 2012 book, The Jewish Gospels: The Story of the Jewish Christ. 1 Here he seeks to challenge the popular understanding of the first-century Jesus movement, and thus the relationship between ancient Jews and Christians. As most, if not all, of recent New Testament scholarship has demonstrated, few would dispute the “Jewishness” of the human figure of Jesus. Many, however, would dispute Boyarin’s distinctive thesis in The Jewish Gospels that the divine Christ is Jewish too. According to Boyarin, Christology is itself a Jewish discourse. Behind this claim lies the most significant argument of his book: the “germs” of both the doctrine of the Trinity and the doctrine of the Incarnation were already present within the thought-world of Second Temple Judaism.

In his first of four chapters, Boyarin addresses the title “Son of Man,” given to Jesus in the gospels. By the time the gospels were written, he writes, the title had already come to signify a divine figure in contemporary Jewish thought, and it is therefore not inconceivable that a group of monotheistic Jews now understood Jesus as the fulfillment of this tradition. To demonstrate this, Boyarin provides a close reading of Dan 7, the apocalyptic text from which the title derives. Daniel’s vision features two divine figures, the Ancient of Days and one like a human being (or literally, “one like a son of man”), to whom the

1

Most notably, see his Border Lines: The Partition of Judaeo-Christianity (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2004); Dying for God: Martyrdom and the Making of Christianity and Judaism (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1999).

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former gives eternal dominion over all nations. The author of Daniel then has the vision interpreted, and the one like a son of man is said to refer to “the holy ones of the Most High,” who are to be given dominion (Dan 7:27, HCSB).

Scholars have long disputed whether the “son of man” in Daniel refers to a divine heavenly figure or to the whole nation of Israel, as the passage provides evidence to support either position. 2 Most today would side with John J. Collins’s harmonizing interpretation, in which he identifies the Son of Man with the archangel Michael (from Dan 10–12), who represents Israel as its heavenly prince. 3 Boyarin, however, finds the text to be divided against itself, and accordingly reads the author’s interpretation of the vision as his discomfort with and suppression of an “updated” version of one of the oldest theological ideas in Israel—that is, duality within God, comparable to the relationship between the Canaanite gods El and Baal. 4 Dan 7, then, leaves us with two legacies: 1) it is the ultimate source for a heavenly redeemer figure; and 2) it is our best evidence for the continuation of a very ancient binitarian Israelite theology deep into the Second Temple period (52). 5 His reading of Dan 7 leads him to suggest that firstcentury Jews would not have disputed the theological statement made by the gospels about a second divine figure (e.g. Mark 2:5–10; 2:23–28), but would simply dispute the claim that Jesus is the Son of Man. In chapter two, Boyarin explores 1 Enoch and 4 Ezra, Jewish texts roughly contemporary to the gospels. Like the gospels, both of these texts connect the redeemer king of Dan 7 to the expectation of a Davidic Messiah. In the Similitudes of 1 Enoch, we can observe notions Boyarin claims are often thought to be exclusively Christian, such as the pre-existence of the second divine figure, as well as the idea of a human figure who is exalted to a divine state

2

See John J. Collins’s helpful discussion, “The Son of Man and the Saints of the Most High in the Book of Daniel,” JBL 93.1 (1974): 50–66.

3 Collins, Daniel: A Commentary on the Book of Daniel (Hermeneia 27; Minneapolis: Fortress Press, 1993), 318.

4 This section is a simplified version of his article “Daniel 7, Intertextuality and the History of Israel’s Cult,” HTR 105.2 (2012): 139–162. Whatever one makes of his thesis about the composite nature of Dan 7, he clearly places emphasis on his theory of the author’s discomfort with the myth here in order to argue that dispute over duality within God is a much older phenomenon than that which resulted from early Christian claims about Jesus.

5 Boyarin’s argument that we are to find a background for Dan 7 in the Canaanite Baal Cycle is simply assumed by most scholars. See, for example, Collins, “Stirring Up the Great Sea: The Religio-Historial Background of Daniel 7,” in Seers, Sybils and Sages in Hellenistic-Roman Judaism (Leiden: Brill, 1997), 139–155.

DeCock, The Jewish Gospels: The Story of the Jewish Christ 185

and, conversely, a God-like redeemer who comes down to save Israel. Boyarin rehearses here what has become commonplace for the scholarly community, however, with the implication that “all of the elements of Christology are essentially in place” (94). 6 The same pattern, Boyarin argues, can also be observed in 4 Ezra. Thus, Mark’s gospel, the Similitudes of Enoch, and 4 Ezra are independent witnesses to a thoroughly Jewish pattern of thought at approximately the same time. The great innovation of the gospel writers, Boyarin insists, is only their insistence that the Son of Man is already present in their very midst in the person of Jesus. Boyarin concludes this chapter as he did the first, by stating that all of the ideas about Christ are old; the only new development in the gospels is the claim that these expectations have now culminated in Jesus.

In chapter three, Boyarin provides a challenge to conventional readings of Mark 7, a text in which Jesus disputes the Pharisees and scribes’ adherence to the “traditions of the elders,” specifically the practice of handwashing prior to eating. Jesus’ response to the Pharisees’ inquiry as to why the disciples of Jesus eat with unwashed hands in 7:15 has long puzzled scholars. Traditionally, Christian interpreters have understood Jesus’ words “there is nothing outside a person that by going in can defile, but the things that come out are what defile” (NRSV) as Jesus’ rejection of biblical food laws. 7 Others dismiss the verse as inauthentic to the historical Jesus because of such blatant contradiction of the food laws. 8 Boyarin, however, sides with Talmud scholar Yair Furstenberg in his interpretation of Mark 7:15. 9 Furstenberg argues that the Pharisees had taken 6

Boyarin’s work here basically represents what has become the standard discussion on these two texts, such as: Adela Yarbro Collins and John J. Collins, King and Messiah as Son of God: Divine, Human, and Angelic Messianic Figures in Biblical and Related Literature (Michigan: Eerdmans, 2008), 75–110.

7 For example: Adela Yarbro Collins, Mark: A Commentary (Hermeneia 55; Minneapolis: Fortress Press, 2007), 356; Robert A. Guelich, Mark 1–8.26 Word Biblical Commentary; Mark I-VIII (WB 34A; Dallas, TX: Word Books, 1989), 380; Robert H. Gundry, Mark: A Commentary on His Apology for the Cross (Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans, 2004); Joel Marcus, Mark 1–8: A New Translation with Introduction and Commentary (AB 27; New York: Doubleday, 2000), 457.

8 H. Räisänen, “Jesus and the Food Laws: Reflections on Mark 7:15,” JNST 16 (1982): 79– 100; cf. E. P Sanders, Jesus and Judaism (Philadelphia: Fortress, 1985), 264–7.

9 Yair Furstenberg, “Defilement Penetrating the Body: A New Understanding of Contamination in Mark 7.15,” NTS 54 (2008): 176–200.

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over the Greco-Roman belief and practice surrounding handwashing before meals, and believed that the hands had the capacity to spread contamination derived from certain foods and thus cause the body to become impure. He reads Jesus’ words here quite literally, understanding Jesus as condemning the Pharisees’ halakhic ruling that eating can only be done in a state of ritual purity.

According to Mark’s Jesus, Furstenberg argues, correct interpretation of the biblical law envisions the self, and not the food that enters the body, as the source of impurity. In 7:15, then, Jesus does not abrogate Torah by rendering the Jewish food laws irrelevant for his followers. Instead, correct interpretation of this controversy must take into account the distinction between biblical dietary and purity laws and the entirely separate system of purity developed by the Pharisees, as evidenced in later rabbinic traditions that likely date to the time in which Mark wrote. 10 Jesus charges the Pharisees with an incorrect interpretation of the biblical laws within an inner Jewish dispute. Boyarin, however, makes one of the most novel and significant contributions of the book as he goes even beyond Furstenberg with his interpretation of Mark 7:19, the editorial comment which reads, “thus he declared all foods clean.” This verse has traditionally been cited as evidence of the so-called “parting of the ways” between Jews and Christians. 11 While Furstenberg cannot be placed in that group of scholars, he does read the verse as Mark’s misunderstanding of the historical Jesus’ statement in 7:15 as Jesus’ rejection of the biblical food and purity laws. 12 For Boyarin, however, Mark—along with his Jesus—was a Jew, and at odds with the Pharisaic laws of defiled foods, not kosher rules. He did not write, “thus he permitted all foods,” but that “he purified all foods” (121), a direct challenge to Pharisaic interpretation of the biblical food and purity laws. From here Boyarin moves on to say that the Gospel of Mark is therefore best read as a Jewish text, “even in its most Christological moments” (127). 13 In his fourth and final chapter, Boyarin examines the Christian messianic interpretation of Isa 53 in Mark 8:38; 9:12; and 14:62, observing that each passage also refers to Jesus as the Danielic “son of man.” The influence of Isa 53 on the gospel writers’ (and Jesus’) conviction that the Messiah Jesus must

10

For example, Zabim 5.12.

While such an interpretation is less and less common today, a recent example includes R. T. France, The Gospel of Mark: A Commentary on the Greek Text (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 2002), 277.

12 Furstenberg, “Defilement Penetrating the Body,” 179.

13 It is not immediately clear, however, what the “most Christological moments” are and what exactly Jesus and Mark’s observance of Jewish food laws contributes to Christology.

11

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suffer and die has long been noted by scholars, although Boyarin does not submit that here. 14 He repudiates those who would view the early Christian messianic interpretation of Isa 53 as an “after-the-fact” explanation of Jesus’ suffering and death. 15 Such scholars hold this view, he argues, for fear of eschewing what they believe to be the traditional Jewish reading, namely, that the suffering servant refers to the whole people of Israel. 16 Boyarin, however, argues that the early Christian reading is not an innovation, as evidenced by the idea of a suffering and dying Messiah found within later Jewish sources such as the Talmudim, various medieval Jewish commentaries, and the Spanish rabbi Moses ben Nahman’s writings. 17 How did it happen, he asks, that just centuries later, rabbinic Jews of the Talmud and midrash had no qualms about discovering the Messiah in Isa 53, just as early Christ-followers had done (134)? Again, for Boyarin, it is only the early Christian ascription of the passage to Jesus that is new.

Unfortunately, as noted throughout this review, much of what he does in The Jewish Gospels is gather together evidence that has been worked on in recent years by others as support for his rather controversial thesis. He gives due credit to some, but not to others. He is right to point to the messianic nature of most early Jewish interpretations of Dan 7, just as he correctly draws our attention to 1 Enoch and 4 Ezra’s parallels with the gospels, though he fails to submit that these particular observations are now standard in current Son of

14

For example, see R. T. France, The Gospel of Mark: A Commentary on the Greek Text (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 2002), 335. See also his earlier work: Jesus and the OT: His Application of OT Passages to Himself and His Mission (London: Chapman, 1971), 110–132.

15 As an example, he refers to the classical statements of Joseph Klausner in his “The Jewish and Christian Messiah” in The Messianic Idea in Israel, from its Beginning to the Completion of the Mishnah (trans. W. F. Stinespring; New York: Macmillan, 1955), 519–531.

16 Certainly, this reading does have its supporters. A helpful discussion can be found in R. N. Whybray, “Who is the Servant?,” The Second Isaiah (Sheffield: JSOT Press, 1983), 65–82.

17 A similar argument was made by Torleif Elgvin in his 2005 article “The Individual Interpretation of the Servant” Mishkan 43 (2005): 25–33. Elgvin, however, consulted a number of early Jewish sources, such as Jer 30:20–22, Zech 13:7–10, and 4Q541 Apocryphon of Levi, all of which are much more contemporary to Mark’s gospel than those to which Boyarin points. This allows Elgvin to assert that the New Testament writers were not being innovative in understanding the Suffering Servant as an individual.

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Man discussions. 18 Boyarin’s treatment of Isa 53 is less than convincing, particularly as it relates to the Jewish examples he provides. His evidence for Jewish messianic readings of this passage is scant indeed, even if we grant that many of the traditions found in the rabbinic sources he draws upon could have pre-dated the texts in which we now find them.

Despite Boyarin’s controversial argument that the “germs” of Trinitarian theology were already present in Jewish thought at the time of Jesus, what he actually demonstrates to us is a Jewish binitarian theology, with which few would disagree. For example, many today are on board with Larry W. Hurtado’s work in One God, One Lord: Early Christian Devotion and Ancient Jewish Monotheism, in which he demonstrates that early Judaism provided early Christianity with the conceptual categories for accommodating the exaltation of Jesus to God’s right hand. One of the more unfortunate aspects, then, of Boyarin’s work is the absence of any interaction at all with this scholar. Hurtado argues that while the earliest Christians were provided with a conceptual framework for accommodating the exaltation of Jesus in the Jewish notion of divine agency, their religious experiences produced a distinctive modification of these traditions. That Christ became an object of devotional attention so shortly after his execution led to their redefinition of Jewish monotheistic devotion.

Whatever one makes of Hurtado’s thesis, an argument that the only innovation of early Christians was their application of already prevalent binitarian notions of God to Jesus should address Hurtado’s work on early Christian pietistic practice and its implications in some manner.

More generally, although Boyarin named his book The Jewish Gospels: The Story of the Jewish Christ, what we actually encounter is a collection of close readings of Dan 7 and Isa 53 from the perspective of one gospel, Mark. Certainly the Son of Man theology found in Mark is not replicated exactly in the other gospels, nor is it as significant for the other three gospel writers. Thus, Boyarin’s frequent claims such as “in the gospels . . .” tend to be overstated and generalized, as he does not include extensive discussion in the book to support his conclusions based on gospels other than Mark. Perhaps his choice to focus on Mark was intentional, being that it is so often assumed to be of Gentile provenance. To prove Mark’s thorough “Jewishness” would, then, be most devastating to traditional interpretations. However, we are not told if this is Boyarin’s rationale.

18

For Collins’s specific treatment of 1 Enoch and 4 Ezra, see: Collins, Daniel, 79–84. Cf. Larry W. Hurtado, One God, One Lord: Early Christian Devotion and Ancient Jewish Monotheism (2nd ed.; Edinburgh: T & T Clark, 1998), 51–70.

DeCock, The Jewish Gospels: The Story of the Jewish Christ 189

Chapter three, in which he interprets Mark 7, provides us with the type of study we would most expect given the title of the work, and is Boyarin’s most helpful contribution here. However, this chapter ends up seeming out of place in relation to his main thesis. To my mind, the book has two main arguments: 1) both the doctrine of the Trinity and the doctrine of the Incarnation are already at play within the thought-world into which Jesus was born; and 2) the only innovation of early Christ-followers was their application of already-developed Jewish traditions to the figure of Jesus of Nazareth. It is not clear how Jesus (and Mark’s) Torah observance contributes to early Christian Christology, a term he fails to define from the outset.

Boyarin’s claim that two of Christianity’s most defining doctrines, namely, those of the triune God and the Incarnation, were not “Christian” innovations, but rather ideas that already existed, however preliminarily, in Jewish thought, is certainly provocative. However, the Christian tradition’s third member of the trinity, the Holy Spirit, makes not one appearance within the discussion. In this regard it seems Boyarin has overstated his case. Similarly, in the epilogue, Boyarin introduces a new thought to the book with statements that deserve to have much more space dedicated to them. Of the Resurrection, he says: The exaltation and resurrection experiences of his followers are a product of the narrative, not a cause of it. This is not to deny any creativity on the part of Jesus or his early or later followers, but only to suggest strongly that such creativity is most richly and compellingly read within the Jewish textual and intertextual world, the echo chamber of a Jewish soundscape of the first century. (160) It seems that in this work, Boyarin views the resurrection of Jesus in the same light as the Trinity and the Incarnation. However, this he does not make clear, nor does he demonstrate just how Jesus’ followers used the “Jewish textual and intertextual world” as a framework for the resurrection of Jesus. His case would have been made much more strongly had he developed the “Jewishness” of this idea through an exploration of contemporary Second Temple Jewish texts that feature such beliefs. 19 19

While there is much dispute as to whether or not each of these passages contains an unambiguous reference to resurrection, such texts are available. See 1 Enoch 51:1–5; 2

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The Jewish Gospels does have its merits in that it is, for the most part, an accessible read for its intended “lay” audience. It is not overly technical, and the ecumenical aims he clearly has are evident and indeed laudable. With a capable guide, this book has the potential to make a good introductory textbook for university courses on the nascent period of early Christianity, as well as to provide provocative food for thought in religious settings, both Jewish and Christian. That being said, even a careful and inquisitive “lay” reader or undergraduate student would wonder just which strands of the early Jesus movement held that Easter was a form of the Jewish Passover and which ones “vigorously denied it” (11). 20 Likewise, readers will ask which Christ-believing groups were written out of Christianity through the councils of Nicaea and Constantinople (14). 21 Similarly, which Jews and which Christians expected a human to be exalted to the state of divinity and which expected a divinity to come down to earth (34)? For students in particular, simple references to the texts from which he derives these ideas would have been most useful. 22 Finally, Boyarin’s work in The Jewish Gospels provides a type of springboard for further exploration of these issues. First, while he has focused primarily on the treatment of Dan 7 in Mark’s gospel, much more work could be done on the remaining three canonical gospels and their use of the Hebrew Bible/Old Testament. This may allow for a challenge to many Jews, lay and scholarly alike, who have historically accused Christians of distorting the Hebrew Bible by appropriating it for “non-Jewish” purposes (157). Conversely, his claim that the gospels are Jewish issues the implicit challenge to non-Jewish Christians, who have appropriated not only the Hebrew Bible but also, as

Macc 7; 1QH 19:12–14; 4Q 385 fr. 2 2–3. For helpful discussions of the belief in the resurrection in Second Temple Judaism, see Ed Sanders’s discussion in Judaism: Practice and Belief 63 B.C.E.–66 C.E. (Philadelphia: Trinity Press International, 1992), 298-303. He points to such texts as Josephus, War 2.154f; 2.164; 1QH 6.29f. See also George W. E. Nickelsburg, Resurrection, Immortality, and Eternal Life in Intertestimental Judaism (exp. ed.; HTS 56; Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2006). Most recently, see Daniel W. Hayter, “‘How Are the Dead Raised?’: The Bodily Nature of Resurrection in Second Temple Jewish Texts” in The Body in Biblical, Christian and Jewish Texts (New York: T & T Clark, 2014), 123–143.

20 The Christians of Asia Minor, led by Melito of Sardis, observed Easter at the same time as and in connection with the Jewish Passover, whereas Roman Christians, led by Pope Victor, denied this, and eventually won the dispute.

21 Does he refer here to such “Judaizing” groups as the Ebionites? The Nazarenes?

Docetists more generally? Arians?

22 His discussion of each of the above examples can be found in his introduction.

DeCock, The Jewish Gospels: The Story of the Jewish Christ 191

Boyarin argues, the gospels. Second, Boyarin’s work on Mark 7 should encourage us to return afresh to Matthew’s “Jewish” redaction of Mark’s gospel if Mark too is a “Jewish” text, a task which could have important implications for Matthean studies. Third, Boyarin’s thesis about the earliest Christian doctrines, often perceived as later Christian innovations, should be explored in regard to the Resurrection. Similarly, someone really ought to re-explore his thesis in regard to the Trinity, as he has left much to be developed in that area. Beyond whatever other notable strengths of the book, the mere fact that The Jewish Gospels can be said to elicit these areas of further study suggests, at the very least, the heuristic value of his contribution here.

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Issue 1 (2014)

Introducing JJMJS: A New Interdisciplinary Journal Eschatology and Messianism in the Gabriel Inscription TORLEIF ELGVIN Paul’s Non-Jews Do Not Become ‘Jews,’ But Do They Become ‘Jewish’?

MARK NANOS Shared Interpretive Traditions of Joseph’s ‘s w f r o s u /n h ’ and ‘Silence’ in De Iosepho and the Testament of Joseph DIETER ROTH The Epistle of James as a Witness to Broader Patterns of Jewish Exegetical Discourse SERGE RUZER Heresy Without Orthodoxy: Josephus and the Rabbis on the Dangers of Illegitimate Jewish Beliefs JONATHAN KLAWANS Alternative Visions of Judaism and Their Impact on the Formation of Rabbinic Judaism KARIN HEDNER ZETTERHOLM The Jewish Annotated New Testament: A Review Article CRAIG A. EVANS

ISSN 2374-7870