The Memory of the Temple and the Making of the Rabbis. Naftali S. Cohn
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of the entire multiethnic province and the smaller scale of the Judaean ethnic group, post-destruction authors frequently treated the boundaries between these groups as sharp. Yet these same authors’ writings provide ample evidence that there was boundary blurring between all these groups and subgroups and that, as a consequence, there was extensive multiplicity within Judaean society—well beyond the discrete subcategories they mention.49
The case of Judaean believers in Jesus provides a good starting point to explain this finding. It has long been recognized that all the initial and many of the subsequent followers of Jesus in the first century, including especially the Jerusalem Church described in Acts and in several of Paul’s letters, were in some way “Jewish.”50 The history of defining these “early Christians” has, as Matt Jackson-McCabe shows, been ideologically fraught, yet quite a few scholars now argue that many, if not all, “early Christians”—those who followed Jesus and created many of the canonical Christian texts—were, in fact, Judaean, rather similar to other “Jewish” groups in the first century and beyond.51 As Daniel Boyarin points out, even those believers in Jesus marked as ethnically non-Judaean were—in the first and early second centuries—understood to have become Judaean in some way, as “proselytes, … theoseboumenoi [Godfearers], and gerim (resident aliens, who were required to keep precisely the laws marked out in Acts for Gentile followers of Jesus).”52
In the latter part of the second century and into the third century, even as Justin Martyr and others were defining “Christian” as a new category of identity—one distinct from, but fundamentally bound up with, Judaean ethnicity—there nevertheless remained numerous and diverse types of Jesus believers who could still be called “Judaean.” Boyarin, who has devoted much energy to elaborating the theoretical framework for picturing the sociocultural landscape, has argued: “We might think of Christianity and Judaism in the second and third centuries as points on a continuum from the Marcionites, who followed the second-century Marcion in believing that the Hebrew Bible had been written by an inferior God and had no standing for Christians, and who completely denied the ‘Jewishness’ of Christianity, on one end, to many Jews on the other end for whom Jesus meant nothing. In the middle, however, there were many gradations that provided social and cultural progression across this spectrum.”53
One of Boyarin’s main points is that despite the rhetoric that began to be employed at the time that there was a pure “Judaism” (or perhaps “Israelitism”) and a pure “Christianity,” most subgroups could be considered “hybrid” in some sense and part of a larger “religious dialect map,” that is, a set of groups interrelated in the same way that different language dialects are interrelated. While it is possible to critique this model, it is particularly useful in pointing to both the hybridity that could exist between the categories posited as distinct and the diversity of ways that different subgroups may have embraced both traditional Judaean practices and belief in Jesus.54 Some Christians might fall outside of Judaean society (and not only because of ideology), yet even within Judaean society, there were likely a number of different subgroups for whom Jesus was a central figure.55
A similar blurring of boundaries, hybridity, and diversity among those hybrid groups that fall within the Judaean ethnos (people sharing ancestry and customs) seems to have existed in other categories as well. Even though many—including the authors of the Mishnah, of several New Testament and early Christian works, and Josephus—considered Judaean/Israelite and Roman/Gentile (gōyim) mutually exclusive categories, evidence suggests that there were Judaeans who embraced a Roman way of living and that for these Judaeans, the border between Roman and Israelite/Judaean was not so sharp.56 In the Galilee, including the cities of Sepphoris and Tiberias, the population was largely ethnically Judaean. Among the archaeological remains from throughout the Galilee, but especially from Sepphoris, stone (chalk/limestone) vessels and stepped pools were found—types of material culture earlier associated with the Jerusalem Temple and unique to Judaeans.57 Earlier and later authors tended to consider the Galilee wholly Judaean; even in the Mishnah (and Tosefta), Galilean locations—unlike the Gentile cities of Akko (Ptolemais) and Bet She’an (Scythopolis)—seem to be largely Judaean.58 At the same time, there is evidence of the embrace of a Roman lifestyle, perhaps including pagan ritual practices. As Mark Chancey argues, beginning in the early to mid-second century, there was a “transformation in the landscape” of Sepphoris and Tiberias. Paved streets, aqueducts, bathhouses, theaters, additional public buildings, and private houses with lavish Greco-Roman mosaics were built—including the well-known elaborate Dionysian scene in a Sepphoran house.59 This transformation corresponds with a change in the iconography of local city coins minted by the local leaders of Sepphoris and Tiberias, which now included images of pagan gods.60 Along with evidence of these public displays of Roman material culture, a small number of pagan ritual implements have been found in Sepphoris and Tiberias.61 The most plausible explanation of this evidence is not that non-Judaean Roman leadership was suddenly and temporarily introduced, or that the Judaean leadership was simply accommodating Roman rule, or that Judaeans threw off the traditional way of life in favor of a Roman one, but that these leaders and elites were Judaeans who embraced a hybrid Judaean-Roman culture that, in some cases, included pagan ritual.62 The existence of such hybridity can perhaps best be seen in a contemporaneous inscription in Ḳatsyōn, in the Golan, by a group of self-identified Judaeans (ioudaioi) who dedicated the monumental building that contained a stone eagle and an altar and a dedicatory inscription to the emperor Septimius Severus and his sons.63 These Judaeans, like many of their Galilean urban brethren, seem to have embraced Roman culture. Though there is no specific available evidence, it is likely that there was diversity here as well in the ways that different Judaeans in various locations throughout Syria Palaestina embraced Roman culture and mixed this embrace with adherence to traditional cultural and ritual practices.
In the case of the Samaritans, there likely existed a similar intermingling and perhaps diversity of views on how Samaritanism may have related to Judaeanness. In the Mishnah, Samaritans (kutim) are not Israelites, since they are a distinct category contrasted to the Israelite (ישראל), yet they are frequently treated as legally the same as the Israelite and are imagined to observe at least some of the same rituals.64 The category itself, in the Mishnah, seems to be hybrid; Samaritans are at once Israelite but not Israelite. To the extent that Samaritans are different, the Mishnah seems to imagine them mingling in a fundamental way with Judaeans who would have been interested in rabbinic legal rulings. A case story in Mishnah Giṭṭin 1:5 claims that there were Judaeans in Kefar ‘Otnay (Caparcotna/Legio) who had Samaritans sign on their divorce contract.65 These purported interactions may point to a genuine mixing and overlap that belie the strict divisions implied by the very categories used.66
Outside of the diversity among those who may have embraced Roman or Samaritan culture or embraced Jesus, there seems to have been diversity (and boundary blurring) as well within the polity that the rabbis, at least, firmly identified as Judaean. In the Mishnah as well as the Tosefta, the rabbis frequently admit that there are other (non-rabbinic) Judaeans who practice the traditional way of life differently from the way that the rabbis believe that it should be practiced. There are ‘ōvrēi ‘ăvēirāh (sinners) and ‘ammēi hā’ārets (the people of the land [a biblical term])—both of whom are Israelites yet do not practice as they should, in the rabbinic view.67 As Stuart Miller has demonstrated, rabbinic sources also speak of the people of a given city (termed the “people of” [bĕnēi or ’anshēi] a given place).68 The rabbis take these people as fully Israelite (Judaean) but distinct from themselves. They practice the traditional way of life but not quite as the rabbis imagine that it should be practiced. These “common” Judaeans from the city or from towns and rural areas form a distinct subgroup within society, one that may be the core of what Miller calls “complex common Judaism.”69 While it is impossible to get more than a rough picture about these other non-rabbinic Judaeans from what is largely rabbinic evidence, the rabbinic evidence shows that there were other, possibly diverse, non-rabbinic groups who formed the majority of Judaean society. I strongly suspect that these other Judaeans, too, overlapped in complex ways with the other subgroupings in society—those