From Burton Mack’s book Who Wrote the New Testament?
[While most “Quests for the Historical Jesus” situate the life of Jesus in the context of Israel, I think the actual Gospel stories of Jesus need to be understood as writings stemming from small communities of people living in the Mediterranean world outside of Israel. I’ve recently come across this book by Burton Mack, whose first chapter gives a very broad summary of much of the history of this world leading up to Jesus’s time, and social conditions in this world, which is the context in which I think we need to see the origins of the Christian movement. I find Mack to be also a very good writer. His book in its entirety is available for $10 on Amazon Kindle.]
Chapter One: CLASHING CULTURES
Cultures clashed in Greco-Roman times, and the Eastern Mediterranean filled to bursting with a heady and volatile mix of peoples, powers, and ideas. Confusing foremost, exhilarating for some, the energies unleashed by these uncertain times peaked during the first century C.E. and resulted in extravagant social experimentation and imaginative intellectual projections. The reason for the outpouring of intellectual energy, and for the struggle to find new ways to group, was that the cultural traditions flowing into the mixing bowl were no longer supported by the social institutions that had produced and sustained them. People were on their own to manage as best they could with only the memory of provincial values to guide them in a helter-skelter cosmopolitan age. Most rose to the challenge, and the inventiveness of some proposals for dealing with multicultural forces and surviving the machinations of the blind goddess called Fate (tyche) was nothing short of genius. We need to understand both the malaise and the creativity of these times, for it was just at this juncture that [Rabbinic] Judaism and Christianity emerged. As we shall see, the attractiveness of early Christianity is best explained as one of the more creative and practical social experiments in response to the loss of cultural moorings that all peoples experienced during this time.
Three model societies were in everyone’s mind during the Greco-Roman age (second century B.C.E. to second century C.E.): the ancient Near Eastern temple-state, the Greek city-state (polis), and the Roman republic. Eventually, they all came tumbling down in the aftermath of Alexander the Great’s campaigns. We are accustomed to thinking of Alexander as the enlightened ruler who introduced the peoples of the ancient Near East to the glories of Greek culture and so created the Hellenistic age, where we locate the foundation for Western civilization. We do not usually consider the negative effects of his campaigns which brought to an end the last of the illustrious empires of the ancient Near East, especially those of the Persians and the Egyptians, and tarnished the classical Greek ideal of the polis by using its model for imperialistic purposes.
These effects must be in mind as we proceed. After Alexander, the memories of both the temple-state and the polis were still alive. They were the models proper to civilization. But the societies organized on those models were gone forever. In their place were warring kingdoms, with the Romans waiting in the wings.
[The Temple State]
The temple-state was a model of civilization that had been honed to perfection by three thousand years of fine tuning. Historian of religion Jonathan Z. Smith (1987) has helped us see that the model consisted of two systems of social stratification governed by the notions of power and purity.
A king occupied the apex of a system of power that filtered down through a hierarchy of control in which all members of the society had their places. He had the authority to organize labor, tell people what to do, and get things done. The king was sovereign, and his power determined that he be regarded as the locus of what we now call the sacred with its capacity both to attract and terrify.
Purity, on the other hand, was the notion that governed a classification of things and people concerned with the order, stability, and harmonious hum of society. Society was understood as an organic unit of human activity and social well-being. Priests presided over a system of temple sacrifice designed to set right things that had gone wrong or gotten out of place.
At the apex of this system in which everyone and everything had a proper place, the high priest represented sanctity or holiness. Holiness was the pristine splendor that evoked awe. The two systems of power and purity were merged in such a way that everyone knew his or her place in relation to both authority (power) and propriety (purity).
The two systems also worked as binary opposites. The king was highest in power, lowest in purity (by virtue of his function as warrior and “executioner”), while the high priest was highest in purity, lowest in power. The importance of Smith’s work is enormous, not only for explaining the social logic invested in the Jerusalem temple of Greco-Roman times, but also for understanding how precious and profound life could be in a society working on this model.
The temple-state was not a church or “worshiping community” as traditionally imagined by Christians with only their Old Testaments to guide them. The temple-state organized labor, administered justice, and distributed goods by means of bureaucracies centered in the temple buildings and palace compound. The temple announced national pride, served as monument to the achievements of the past, put people in touch with the world of the gods, provided daily pageantry, dispensed prescriptions for the healing of all ills, and called for civic processions, feasts, and festivals on the grandest scales possible.
As civic center, the temple also supported priests, artists, artisans, granary experts, couriers, accountants, scribes, teachers, and intellectuals. For the people, this social arrangement resulted in a tightly knit, patriarchal system of religion and politics that placed great value on stable families, public honor, social propriety, and personal loyalty to the king and the cult of the temple deity who ruled over the land.
The book of Psalms in the Hebrew Bible and the Wisdom of Ben Sira in the Apocrypha of the Christian Bible contain fine examples of the pride and piety possible in a temple-state. The temple-state had been the basic form of vigorous and complex civilizations in the ancient Near East since the third or fourth millennium B.C.E.
The temple-state also produced a particular kind of law. With an all-powerful king on the one hand, and priests in charge of righting wrongs on the other, laws were needed to strike a balance between the two systems of governance. An intellectual class of scribes filled the niche between power and purity and mediated between the interests of the king and the temple priests. They had to do this cautiously, without calling attention to themselves or taking any credit for their ideas and achievements.
Thus we have no name for the influence they exercised similar to the “power” of the king or the “purity” of the high priest. And they did not sign the works they authored. But it is obvious that the codes of law developed in the course of ancient Near Eastern civilizations, as well as the myths and ritual texts for the temple liturgies, were created by scribes as a professional class of intellectuals.
No king in his right mind would have legislated the famous code of Hammurabi, for instance, for it severely limited the king’s power to do as he pleased. Nevertheless, the scribes who achieved this legislation gave full credit to the king for being so enlightened, as the prologue to Hammurabi’s code shows. The prologue harks back to the creation of the world when the gods gave Hammurabi the task of causing “justice to prevail in the land.” Hammurabi himself is cast as the speaker who, after reporting on his divine commission, provides almost one hundred lines of self-praise in the pattern of “I, Hammurabi, the one who designed the temple, …who made his kingdom great, …who plumbed the depths of wisdom.” At the end of the prologue, just before the code begins, his words are, “When Marduk commissioned me to guide the people aright, to direct the land, I established law and justice in the language of the land, thereby promoting the welfare of the people. At that time [I decreed]….” (Pritchard 1955, 163–80). Reading this prologue and turning to the code that follows, however, we see a marvelous stroking of the king’s ego on the one hand, and the record of a great advance in legal theory on the other, both authored by anonymous intellectuals during the seventeenth century B.C.E.
It was the same for the myths that portrayed the will of the gods, for the rules that determined how purity was defined, and for working out the logic of which sacrifices took care of which transgressions. The detailing of the rules governing purity was not a particularly religious act, and priests would not have deduced them automatically from the temple sacrifices. Priests were a professional intellectual class concerned with the well-being of society as a whole. Persons and things were “clean” when they were in their usual place doing their ordinary, healthy thing in the regular pattern of activity customary for the society; “unclean” when out of place, broken, and in need of mending. Persons became unclean when “contaminated” by illness or when untoward circumstances prevailed, such as handling a corpse for burial, or when acting in such a way that social relationships were violated.
Professional intellectuals codified the sacrificial system of the temple and merged it with a kind of household guide for healthy living. Purity codes were the way these ancient civilizations defined social well-being, diagnosed social and personal ills, and prescribed remedies for healing all manner of social and physical disorders.
The book of Leviticus in the Hebrew Bible contains illustrations of both kinds of law, civil and cultic. Leviticus can also serve as an illustration of the mythic strategy, widespread in the ancient Near East, for the scribes to attribute their legal legislation to the will of the gods of the royal temple cult. Only so could the fundamental dynamics of the social structure retain its creative tension between the two systems of difference represented by the king and the high priest. When the Jews returned from exile in Babylon in the late sixth century B.C.E., they wanted to rebuild Jerusalem on the ancient model of the temple-state, holding in mind as a golden age the kingdoms of their own David and Solomon.
But they were confronted with a very serious problem. They were allowed to rebuild the temple but were still governed by foreign powers and thus could not install a king. Since kings belonged to the model, and being ruled by a foreign king had always meant contamination, Jews were challenged to exercise a bit of ingenuity. They did it. They cheated a bit on the model by denying that the presence of foreign kings was all that critical, and by daring to think of their own high priest as the “sovereign” of the temple-state.
This stratagem worked quite well during the fifth and fourth centuries under Persian hegemony and during the third century as well under the Ptolemies, the successors of Alexander’s conquests in Egypt. Then, however, around 200 B.C.E., the armies of the Seleucids took over, the heirs of Alexander’s dominions centered in Antioch. The Seleucids were more aggressive in their programs of Hellenization and political control. Jews tensed. Internal conflict divided the people on the question of allowing the Seleucids to turn Jerusalem into a Hellenistic city.
Guerrilla warfare erupted under the Maccabees, a family of seven brothers from the Judean countryside who called for national independence under the banner of the “traditions of the fathers.” The Maccabees (from “hammer,” a nickname originally given to one of the seven brothers) eventually succeeded in taking control of Judea and then assumed the roles, not only of high priest, but of king as well. This was a very presumptuous move without precedence, and it startled and angered other leading Jews. The Maccabean dynasty, also called Hasmonean after their family name, lasted only eighty years, from 142 to 63 B.C.E. The Maccabees spent the first forty years annexing their neighbors’ lands of Idumea, Samaria, Transjordan, and Galilee.
Alas. The lands were already occupied, and the people living in these lands did not regard their annexation as a great homecoming. So the Maccabees spent the next forty years trying to convince their converts in these adjacent lands and their fellow Jews at home that they had the right to rule them. It did not work. The Hasmoneans were no match for the ideological conflicts that increased dissension within or the cultural forces of Hellenism that continued to penetrate from without.
The Samaritans, for example, remained surly. A strong reaction against the Hasmonean control of the temple among some priestly families in Jerusalem resulted in the withdrawal of these priests to a barren shelf above the Dead Sea and their establishment of a commune at Qumran. And a party called the Pharisees (probably from the Hebrew word meaning separatists) developed schools of ethics, piety, and politics based on the law of Moses to counter Hasmonean accommodation to Hellenistic practices.
The Pharisees were harsh critics of the Hasmonean establishment and, together with the priests at Qumran, they wore the Hasmoneans down. When second-generation Hasmoneans could not resolve an internecine struggle for power in 63 B.C.E., one of the two brothers involved appealed to Rome for help, and the Roman general Pompey solved the problem by turning Palestine into a Roman province. From that time on it was Rome who appointed the high priests and kings in Palestine.
The Herodians who ruled in Palestine during the time of Jesus were Roman puppets from Idumea and could not lay claim to Jewish traditions and loyalties. With Pompey’s intervention in 63 B.C.E., the Jewish experiment we call the second-temple kingdom was over. The Romans kept the temple system alive for another one hundred years, however, for it did provide the basic structure for economic and political control in Palestine. But in the end the fragmentation of Jewish society took its toll, and the Romans, responding to warring factions of new guerrilla movements in Judea, marched on Jerusalem and destroyed the temple in the Roman-Jewish war of 66–73 C.E. That event was final. It marked the failure of the last attempt any people had made in the wake of Alexander to continue to organize society on the model of the ancient Near Eastern temple-state.
By dint, and against all odds, the Jews had kept the model alive. But the tides of cultural change had finally overwhelmed them. Their achievement was not to put the model into practice, but to etch it so deeply into the collective memory that its image would continue to haunt and trouble the Jewish imagination from that time until the present. Christians also would not be able to put the image of the temple at Jerusalem out of their minds.
[The Greek City State]
The story of the Greek city-state is different. The polis was a creation of the Greek spirit of independence and free thinking on the one hand, and the practical need for aristocratic clan leaders to band together on the other. In the course of the eighth and seventh centuries B.C.E., the patriarchal heads of large, landed family estates formed councils, defined citizenship, and voted on officers to administer cooperation in matters of common interest such as commerce, the games, and the defense of their territories.
The city arose as the place where these country barons met and had their townhouses, supporting a pattern of moving back and forth between the center of civic activity and the country estates where their households and production were located. Thus the notion of democracy was born (from krateo, to rule, and demos, meaning a “district” in the countryside, and ultimately, the “people” of the country). It was a notion firmly lodged in a particular, aristocratic, social construction of the city-state.
And from among the many cities in Greece that practiced crude forms of democracy, it was Athens, with its assemblies, speeches, debates, binding votes, and legislation, that rose to prominence and defined the model. Athens was not the city where all the institutions and intellectual achievements characterizing Greek culture originated. Homer and the early philosophic traditions had their home in Ionia, the games at Olympus, and the art of rhetoric in the Greek colony at Syracuse.
But Athens was the place where all of these cultural manifestations flowered and took their place as part of the ideal city. Schools of various kinds were developed for instruction in primary education, art, philosophy, and the professions (such as rhetoric and medicine). The Athenian assembly took the form of a deliberative body whose judgments were recognized as the legislation of law (nomos). A calendar of feasts and festivals turned archaic, local rituals into civic affairs. Pomp and an exceptionally high spirit of competition attended the theater and the games. When in the fourth century B.C.E. Plato and Aristotle set the philosophic agenda for scientific thinking, including theorizing about politics, law, and the city-state, they did so with the culture of Athens in mind. In the turmoil created by Alexander’s campaigns, Greek thought and culture took the eastern Mediterranean by storm. The Greek city-state was the major symbol and vehicle for the spread of Hellenizing institutions. Hellenistic cities by the dozens popped up from Antioch to Alexandria, founded by the Ptolemies and the Seleucids as the primary means for consolidating and maintaining their control of the Alexandrian legacy in the east. By the classicist James Kinneavy’s count (1987, 67) thirty-five Hellenistic cities had been established in Palestine before the Roman-Jewish war brought all of that activity to an end. With these cities came Greek learning and the institutions that sustained it: theaters, schools, gymnasia (athletic fields), games, processions, and the agora, or marketplace, styled as a forum for public debate and display.
The slogans that undergirded both the city and the culture it represented were freedom, citizenship, and autonomy. It was this package that promised to replace the ancient temple-state with something far superior. It did not take long for the peoples of the east to read the signs of the times, learn some Greek, and see how far they might go in exploring Greek ways of looking at the world.
Alas and alack. Athens was not an article for export. Then as now, democracy was not easily transplanted in other lands. Problems soon surfaced that threatened the tight combination of the Hellenistic city and the culture it symbolized. One was that the polis was now being used as an implement of conquest by foreigners.
The Ptolemies and the Seleucids developed the strategy of founding a new polis close to an old indigenous city at the center of a district’s commerce and governance in order to supplant the native city. Another problem was that the foreigners were not really Greeks, but Macedonians and others whom Alexander had collected along the way as those most loyal to his military campaigns. That gave a distinctly militaristic cast to the whole enterprise. A third was that citizenship, or full participation in a city’s governance, was reserved for colonists, denying franchise to the people of the territory who now had to trek to the new city and kowtow in order to carry on mundane business. And a fourth was that these cities ruled their districts at the pleasure of the “great kings” in Alexandria and Antioch. Since kings and foreign franchise did not fit the rhetoric of the democratic model, the Hellenistic city actually debased the polis ideal. Instead of enhancing the grand traditions of classical Greece, the Hellenistic city generated ideological confusion and cultural conflict.
What happened was that Greek culture lost its connection with the Greek city-state. Greek philosophy, learning, and ways of thinking could now be used to criticize the colonial civilization created by the Greek city. The polis and the ancient Near Eastern temple-state had collided, and neither was able to work effectively. Only the cultures they once symbolized, and the patterns of thought that belonged to them, were left to converge as best they could in the new Hellenistic age.
This period of social and cultural history was not an age of Greek enlightenment for the benighted peoples of the east, as has frequently been imagined in modern times. It was a period of strenuous cross-cultural encounters. New ways of living together in a suddenly expanded universe of many different peoples had to be explored without guidance from the centers of power.
As for the Roman republic with its patrician and senatorial traditions, it outfoxed itself when, in the course of the second and first centuries B.C.E., its military influence rapidly spread throughout the Mediterranean world. Power shifted to field commanders who first formed the famous triumvirates and then fought for the office of princeps, or emperor, to rule over the lands Rome had accidentally inherited from the failed successors of Alexander. Like dominoes falling in line, beginning with Magnesia in Lydia (taken from Antiochus III in 190 B.C.E.), then Pydna in Macedonia (168 B.C.E.), Corinth and Carthage (146 B.C.E.), Pergamum (133 B.C.E.), and on to Palestine and Egypt, the lands of the eastern Mediterranean became Roman provinces in a very short period of time. The old aristocracy at Rome with its senate and republican traditions could not control the new distribution of power required to govern such a vast empire.
The Romans were rather good at keeping order throughout the Mediterranean world, building roads, quelling civil disturbances, and ridding the lands and seas of pirates and bandits (hence the so-calledpax romana). They were also good at public works. What they added to the cities where their legions took up residence were aqueducts, civic buildings, and baths. They did not demand ideological loyalty of their provinces, only cooperation with their Roman governors and the payment of taxes (hence procurator, meaning both governor and procurer). And they developed a practical approach to legislation that made it possible for them to mediate in matters where ethnic and cultural strife threatened social harmony. But law and order is one thing, building public works another, and creating a common culture still another. None of their subject peoples was fascinated with Roman history, religion, and culture. Roman law and order were cold. Some said ruthless, but that overlooks the limited interest Rome took in the peoples they governed. The Romans were more efficient than ruthless. They had no desire to create either fear or loyalty on the part of their subjects. Thus the city on the Tiber was respected, but it was not loved. The dramas and intrigues of Rome’s leading families were considered gross and offensive. And even though a provincial people might be thankful to the Roman legions for clearing their territories of bandits and highwaymen, no one appreciated their obviously superior and repressive military presence. The Romans did not inspire loyalty, and the empire they created did not have a cultural soul. Law and order are never enough to keep a people dancing.
What were the people to do, living in such a mixed-up world? Many found themselves transplanted throughout the large empire of cities, peoples, and different cultures that resulted from the wars of the Greco-Roman age. Warring was constant from the death of Alexander in 323 B.C.E. to the annexation of Egypt as a Roman province in 30 B.C.E. However, these wars were localized and spotty, leaving vast areas of the empire to govern themselves as best they could as long as they caused no trouble and paid their taxes. So being transplanted by force of a foreign power was not the only way dispersion occurred. Many people moved of their own accord to seek a better livelihood in one of the Hellenistic cities that had sprung up, armies and ethnic tensions notwithstanding. And those still living in their own lands were not deprived of the mixing of peoples taking place. Foreign presence and military power, contact with other peoples, and the need to deal with cultural conventions that differed from their own were all too obvious for that. Thus the mix of peoples, cultures, and political powers was the single most obvious and challenging feature of the times. Not only were peoples of all ethnic extractions living together in cities without a common culture, the histories of incessant warring and rapid political changeovers settled into convoluted layers of bitter memories and hatreds. How to live in a multicultural world that lacked adequate guidelines for such cross-cultural transactions was the challenge. Some were now calling the Mediterranean basin “the inhabited world” (oikoumene, from oikeo, to inhabit, colonize, administer), but to inhabit such a world without losing one’s sense of identity, the kind of identity one had by belonging to a people, now required skills that one’s own traditional culture could not provide. Even the Hellenes were now under the rule of the Romans, living in diaspora ghettos, and struggling with ethnic conflicts in the very cities they had built as colonies, such as Alexandria and Antioch.
[Reactions among the common people, creating smaller alternative communities.]
So what were people to do? At the surface level, people responded in all of the ways one might expect. Most understood that the situation and its terms were a fait accompli, learned enough Greek (the lingua franca) to get by, created monikers to stereotype people who were different from their own kind, engaged in ethnic joking, held their heads high, and got on with the business of making a living. Some even found the diversity invigorating and took it as an opportunity for esoteric adventures or entrepreneurial activity that traded on the breakdown of traditional institutions. Business boomed, and a new class of parvenus arose that changed forever the old patterns of wealth and property characteristic of aristocratic empires and their landed estates.
But the breakup of established social units and the erosion of conventional territorial and cultural boundaries created some raw edges as well. Social tensions rooted in culturally conditioned values, taboos, and attitudes toward the other are not easily overcome. And so, beneath the surface, serious cultural conflict swirled around such issues as homosexuality (a moral problem for Jews, for instance, but not for the Greeks); prostitution (accepted by the Greeks as a fact of city life but regarded by the Jews as threatening family values); the laws that governed marriage, divorce, and the treatment of slaves; the cultural and cultic significance of foods and family meals; the public role of women; proper attire; and attendance at the baths, athletic events, banquets, civic feasts (“sacrifices”), and festivals.
Differences in codes of purity, propriety, ranking, honor, and shame created friction for people of diverse cultural and ethnic backgrounds. Lifestyles, gestures, and behavioral characteristics otherwise taken for granted among one’s own people were now on display as features that marked an ethnic minority. Ethnicity was the common coin for stereotyping. On the street, the first thing someone wanted to learn about a stranger was where he or she was from and of what ethnic extraction. The trick was to find out who the other was—Cyprian? Syrian? Egyptian? Greek?—before having to tell on oneself. It was shrewd to do so and safer that way. No wonder people tended to seek out their own kind in foreign cities and form z communities where familiar signs of recognition prevailed. In Alexandria, for example, Jews, Greeks, Egyptians, and others tended to live in ghetto-like districts of the city known as their quarters.
How to keep one’s culture alive was the question. The artifacts of erstwhile societies were in fragments, and any conscious attempt to reconstruct a “little Syria” or a “little Egypt” in one’s own quarter of a foreign city had to work with the transportable bits and pieces that remained. One would have to take a few of these pieces, cluster them as signs that the group’s traditions were not dead, and create a center for people to meet in mutual recognition of their common cultural heritage. Movable artifacts included books, rituals, calendars, statues, symbolic attire, and adornment. Social conventions that could be kept alive in distant lands included special foods, the structure of family life, kinship arrangements, patterns of hospitality, and traditional ways of resolving conflict internal to the group.
But without the support of one’s own land and its institutions, innovation was called for. Innovation was on display everywhere during this period. Shrines popped up in memory of or in devotion to traditional gods or heroes. Upright stone markers, called stelae, could be inscribed with the virtues of a homeland god or goddess to announce at a crossroads in some foreign land the presence of an ethnic people. Enclaves were also possible, where real retreat and the intentional cultivation of a lost culture could be pursued. Such, for instance, were the monastic-like therapeutae (caretakers, or those attending to the cultivation of the religious traditions) described by first-century Jewish philosopher Philo of Alexandria. Schools, libraries, oracles, and healing cults also spread throughout the Mediterranean basin from origins specific to particular lands and localities. Professional entrepreneurs of divination, dream interpretation, and magic capitalized on the demise of ancient religious institutions where functions such as these had formerly been integrated into and controlled by the regular round of cultic activity integral to a society (Brown 1971; J.Z. Smith 1993, 172–89).
It was also during this period that the famous mystery cults spread, complete with myths, rituals, priests, and priestesses (Burkert 1987). These cults are best understood as replications away from home of religious institutions that were once located in a particular land and people. The “mysteries” of Isis, Osiris, Serapis, Attis, Adonis, Mithra, the “Great Mother,” and the Syrian Goddess are examples of diaspora cults that represented archaic religions and cultures rooted in other times and lands. The mysteries of Demeter, on the other hand, resisted transplantation but were still available as a kind of pilgrimage goal for Greeks throughout the empire. Lovely stories are still available to us of dreams in which a homeland god or goddess requests a devotee in a foreign land to build a shrine or a little temple there so as not to be forgotten. And once the processions began everyone would have to take note of the people and the gods from another land that now resided in their midst. We have accounts of the priests of Isis processing through a town in lands far from home. They would go down to the sea on the yearly navigium Isidis, the festival of Isis, protectress of ships at sea, and everyone would have to acknowledge the power and presence of the Egyptian goddess. Of even greater importance for the early history of Judaism and Christianity was another way to create a small social unit within a larger urban environment. Variously called fellowships (koinoniai), festive companies (thiasoi), or clubs (collegia), associations sprang up wherever people got together regularly around a common interest. Interests ranged from ethnic fellowship and craft guilds, through societies that aimed at the preservation of cultural traditions and the care of religious shrines, to funeral associations and mystery cults. The basic pattern of association was the same. Members would meet approximately once a month, share a common meal in the midafternoon (the usual time for the “evening” meal), invoke the patron mascot or deity, acknowledge the club symbols, conduct business, and spend the rest of the early evening socializing. Associations elected officers, charged dues, and took steps to protect their interests. Associations often substituted for societies that had been destroyed. Signs and symbols of the homeland culture could be displayed. A little taste of home away from home could be cultivated in the cuisine. With the doors shut, conversation could turn to matters unfit for the public arena.
And building a network of associations from city to city was a distinct possibility. Guests and friends from afar could be received and entertained at the meetings of the association and at the homes of members of an association. Networks provided hospitality for members who traveled to other cities and created the sense of belonging to a people who had spread throughout the empire.
In the case of Jewish associations, at first called “houses of prayer” and later “synagogues” (from the Greek synagoge, gathering), buildings were actually constructed to serve as educational, religious, and social centers. There is even some evidence for a banking system centered at the temple in Jerusalem and supported by synagogues throughout the empire.
Associations allowed for patterns of social intercourse that did not readily mesh with the social conventions of the society at large. Such was the case with the social role of women, for whom the association provided a semipublic arena beyond the confines of their traditional place in the home. There is evidence of women serving as members, patrons, and leaders of various kinds of associations. Thus the association should be seen as a very creative and important moment in the history of Western civilization. Its novelty was that a way had been found to sustain subcultural, or minority groups within a large, diversified society and to experiment with new ways to construct social units.
The Romans were not always comfortable with the existence of associations. And they did, on occasion, take steps to control or even outlaw them. But there was little they could do to contain the energies that people invested in this social experiment. The combination of concepts was just too attractive: free association, membership, self-governance, the cultivation of shared interests, having a name and a place, rules, symbols, signs of recognition, and so on. To think that a traditional culture could be kept alive by a small, intentional social unit in the diaspora was a very attractive idea. As we shall see, the Christians also, though experimenting with a cross-cultural rearrangement of antique artifacts and not the preservation of a single cultural heritage, found the association a ready-made vehicle for their own assemblies (ekklesiai).
But for many intellectuals, trying to preserve a cultural heritage in miniature was not an adequate response to the Greco-Roman age. They wanted to see the world as a whole. They wanted to see the many cultures fitting into some large design. The world had always been viewed as a whole. Every people of antiquity had imagined themselves at the center of a vast universe that had been created just for them, with a special place for them to construct their kind of society. Their intellectuals had reflected deeply on the matter and worked out all the ways in which their temple-state or city-state was a fitting reflection of the universe.
With the Greeks, the world was a cosmos, an arrangement of basic elements held together by a kind of glue and adorned with loveliness (cosmos means adornment or beautiful arrangement), like a splendid garment. For the Jews, the world was a chorus of living creatures, carefully planned in the wisdom of God and rejoicing daily, as did the sun, moon, and stars, to take their place once again in making the earth a fit habitation for humankind. God would ask, “Stars, where are you?” and they would answer, “Here we are.” With the Egyptians, the sun’s rotation around the world created a precisely balanced undulation of the forces of life and death. The gods had set things up that way just for the purpose of fostering life in the Nile valley. According to one theology, the rays of the sun came down to caress the earth on either side of the Nile and so nurtured its coming to life. And the gods! Every universe was home to the gods, personified abstractions of those forces imagined to have put the world together as the “house” for human habitation. No person, no generation, can ever take credit for constructing such a complex arrangement of negotiated agreements as a human society. And besides, a society is always already there when any given person comes along and finds it pulsing.
Myth is the way we humans have of saying that the world was already there. And since the gods were imagined as agents, connections could be made to bring the rhyme and reason of the universe into contact with the social world in which people lived. In the ancient Near East, kingship dropped from heaven to validate the city of the king. In second-temple times, the wisdom of God’s creation sought for a resting place among humans and found it in the temple at Jerusalem (Sirach 24). And in Egypt, the bas (essences) of all the gods came down daily to dwell in their statues in the temples throughout the land.
We think that the people of antiquity imagined the universe on the model of the society they had constructed. They, however, thought that their society had been planned or built at the beginning of the world on the model of the universe they inhabited. And that thought was critical. It made them right, legitimate, centered, and at home in the world. It was the correspondence of the “little world” (microcosm) to the universe (macrocosm) that mattered.
In Egypt, when in a temple, one looked up and saw the starry heavens painted on the ceiling, a reminder of the big house that the little house resembled in miniature. And as for the Greeks, once the notion of society as a polis had been conceptualized, the cosmos itself was imagined as a great world city. During the Greco-Roman age the people of the “inhabited world” (oikoumene) were referred to by Greek philosophers as citizens of the world city (cosmopolitans).
But what was the shape of that world city now in the wake of Alexander and the Romans? And what should be the shape of the new multicultural society below? That was the question. None of the older models, either of the universe or of the city-states and temple-states they had supported, was good enough to encompass the new world in view. And the older models differed too much from one another to answer the question merely by being squeezed into one. The only thing they all had in common was a pattern of thought that viewed the world as a hierarchy of concentric circles with the universe all encompassing, society in the middle ring, and the individual in the center, surrounded by both the city and the cosmos.
Thus the Greeks frequently thought in terms of a correlation between cosmos, polis, and anthropos (human being). The Jews thought in terms of creation, the temple-state in Jerusalem, and the Jewish people centered there.
With both the polis and the temple-state crossed out of the equation, the middle term was missing, and the individual was now left standing in the midst of a large and confused universe to negotiate with the gods and the uncertain forces of human destiny as best one could. And suddenly, standing there looking directly at the universe, with only the fragmented memories of sane city-states to guide one’s meditation and all the old worldviews blinking for attention on the cosmic screen, there were just too many gods and heroes, pictures of priests and kings, ideal cities and perfect laws, powers and creation myths to comprehend. All were bright lights floating free in the heady mix of images available for contemplating the structure of a new world order. But how to rearrange them? How to find the key that would make it possible to see the world as a whole again, account for the human diversity and cosmic expanse that had come into view, and understand all the powers that had been unleashed as capable of working together for human well-being?
Some despaired of integrating religion and society, culture and the present political system, or even of imagining the world as a divinely ordered home for human habitation. Every intellectual tradition pouring into the Greco-Roman world focused its energies on this question. Egyptian priests, Jewish sages, Syrian scribes, Greek philosophers, Hellenistic teachers, Roman historians, and many others turned their attention to the problem of reimagining the world as a place fit for human habitation. Some tried to match the gods of one cultural tradition with the gods of another, thinking that the differences might not be so great after all.
Thus the Greek god Hermes and the Egyptian god Thoth were thought to be the same deity since both were “messengers” in their respective pantheons. Other scholars set to work reducing the myths of the gods to rational accounts of the natural order by means of allegory, thinking that beneath all of the fantastic stories, there must be a reasonable view of the world. Thus Hermes-Thoth was allegorized by the first-century Stoic philosopher Cornutus as the poetic expression of the scientific concept of the logos, the “logic” at the heart of the universe. Plato’s myth of the creation of the world by a divine craftsman (demiurgos) who followed the plans in the mind of the highest god was very popular. Plutarch used it to allegorize the myths of Isis and Osiris as stories that encoded profound understanding about the structure of the cosmos.
Jews used Plato’s myth to imagine how the world could have gotten so out of shape when it was God’s wisdom that had planned it. It was the demiurgos who did it, or perhaps it was the material that was faulty, or maybe humans had just been too dense or contrary to see the perfect pattern behind it all. Surely the failures of human societies cannot have ruined God’s perfect plan for the world. The world created by wisdom must indeed exist. Perhaps it exists as a spiritual realm known only to those who could “see through” the corruption of the physical world by means of divine inspiration.
A fine example of this kind of thought is available in the Wisdom of Solomon and in the works of Philo of Alexandria. And so attempt after attempt was made to salvage the fragments of bygone myths and worldviews in the hope that their secrets might reveal some reason to think that the universe was still a good place, a divine creation with human well-being in mind.
Slowly, however, it dawned on people that the universe might not be all that friendly. The only thing about the universe that seemed to be ordered was the movement of the stars. And that movement was like clockwork, unfeeling and predetermined. But it was calculable. Astrology flourished. There was also much talk about tyche, the goddess of fate, and fortuna, the goddess of fortune. Unfortunately, both of these divine powers were fickle.
And there was great interest in dreams and magic; dreams because they might at least give you a chance to know ahead of time what would befall, and magic because it gave you a slight chance to be in control of something in an otherwise capricious world. So with the elision of the city from the ancient equation of cosmos, polis, and anthropos, the world itself was no longer comprehensible, and human existence was threatened with insignificance.
The human spirit is amazingly creative and resilient. Not to be overwhelmed by the unfeeling forces of fate in the universe, and the fact that the Romans were firmly in control of their soulless empire, many intellectuals refused to give up on the quest for a social model fit for the times.
The quest took two quite different directions. Some turned to the schools of Greek philosophy in order to get started, while others turned to the national epics to re-search the wisdom of the past. Those working in the traditions of the schools of Greek philosophy seemed to know that they would have to do theory in a vacuum. They could not draw upon any feature of the present state of affairs as if it were an essential ingredient for imagining an ideal world. So what the philosophers came up with, as they pursued what we could call a social-political anthropology, was very speculative mythology. It was not the rationalization or justification of any contemporary social formation, or a glorification of some presently grand human accomplishment such as the pax romana. It was an exercise in theory, exploring the ways in which certain forces fundamental to social life might possibly be understood to relate to one another.
Three factors immediately came to the surface, and the attempt to understand them exercised the best minds in all of the school traditions struggling to revise their conceptual grasp of the world: (1) how to define law, (2) how to understand political power, and (3) how to describe personal virtue. These are the very questions that confront us as well in our global, multicultural situation at the end of the twentieth century. A concept of law was fundamental to the Greek design of the polis, the Jewish charter for the temple-state, and the Roman system of courts and governance. In the case of the Greeks, law was the term that linked the city to the cosmos on the one hand, and to its citizens on the other. The term was nomos, meaning “convention,” the result of traditional agreements, especially those that had been reached by debate and legislation in the council of the city-state. Nomos was the standard for judging legality and rightness.
To be right in a legal sense was good, but it did not make one virtuous. In the case of the Jews, on the other hand, law was divine instruction and command. It was not the result of human legislation. To live according to the law of Moses was not only right, it made one righteous. As for the Romans, law was a very practical matter, flowing from the will of the emperor and the senate as decree, but judged constantly by its effectiveness in maintaining peace and order. If a decree made matters worse, it was a simple matter to change it.
Thus the philosophical discussions about the law came to focus on a fundamental problem of definition. The question was whether one might imagine a law that was written into the structure of the universe. Legislation, the ultimate foundation for nomos, was no longer thought of as a mark of democratic advance. It was now thought of as merely human wisdom at best or as a convenience for self-serving kings and tyrants at worst. The alternative to nomos had always been the will of the gods, but now that there were so many gods in the picture, the notion of the will of the gods had also become very fuzzy.
If it were possible to imagine something like a “law of nature,” that would really do it. It would not be legislation. It would not be based on a parochial claim to special revelation from the gods, such as in oracles or the Jewish myth of the law given to Moses. Law would be rooted ultimately in the divine creation of the ordered universe.
And so the terms of this debate throughout the Greco-Roman period were the famous contrasting pair: nature (physis) and law (nomos). In Alexandria, for instance, a line of Jewish thinkers from Aristobulus in the early second century B.C.E. to Philo in the first century C.E. expended immense effort in allegorizing the laws of Moses as coded expressions of “natural law.” The effort was worth it. It countered the charge that Jewish myth and laws were silly, and it gave Jewish laws the kind of philosophical muscle that everyone was eager to claim for his or her own traditions.
But what about power in the hands of a king whose word also counted as law? It was not easy to imagine how the divine law, written into the structure of the universe, could make any difference in the real world. This problem was serious, and the only recourse available to the philosophic tradition was, first, to distinguish between a good king and a bad king, and then to connect the good king to the law of nature. Thus the terms of this debate were the famous contrasting pair: kings and tyrants. “Tyrant” meant autocratic, self-serving, and bad, while “king” became an abstract ideal for the perfect ruler.
Intellectuals squirmed. No one really wanted a king. Kings certainly did not fit well with the city-state ideal or the notion of natural law. But kings were all there were. Kings and commanders. You couldn’t seem to get rid of them. So why not try to imagine one that would be acceptable? Scribes researched the traditions. Allegorists looked for mythic models. Philosophers made lists of fitting attributes.
And descriptions of the ideal king began to fill the libraries of the intellectual community. Finally, all seemed to agree, the perfect king would be the one who lived completely in accordance with the divine law of nature. He would be the very embodiment of the law (nomos empsychos). His laws would be more like instruction than decrees. And his power to influence conformity with the law would be more a matter of setting an example than of executing justice (Goodenough 1928). Some king!
An example of just such a picture can be found in chapter 17 of the Psalms of Solomon. As you can see, fantasy and the Greek penchant for abstract definition took over at this point. But no one was fooled. No one thought that it was actually possible to have a king like that. These intellectuals were still living in the real world, fully aware of how that world actually worked and how one had to work it. So what was the point of all this intellectual labor? It was a serious attempt to tackle fundamental issues of human well-being and go as far as one could in conceptualizing a sane and equitable society. The image of the! ideal king could be used to chide and criticize the tyrants. That was something. And knowing that the actual state of affairs was not conducive to the collective well-being of society as a whole also had its value. It allowed for a savvy critique of the status quo. And it forced the question of whether it was possible for anyone to live with integrity in the Greco-Roman world with its confusions about laws and the fact of illegitimate uses of power.
This question resulted in a purely personal, individualistic approach to the question of virtue. Philosophers and teachers in the schools of popular ethical philosophy, Stoics especially, but Cynics as well, gave up on the idea that building abstract models of perfect societies might change the world for the better. They instead turned all their attention to the plight of the lone individual. Personal virtue was all that mattered, they said. And anyone could be virtuous by living in accordance with (the laws of) nature. Virtue was, after all, the highest and noblest human pursuit. Why not accept the fact that the individual was all alone in the universe without the support of a social world that guaranteed well-being? Wasn’t it possible for a person to know what needed to be known about the structure of the universe and do what needed to be done in order to live “according to nature” (physis) and so achieve honorable character? The world was filled with popular philosophers, teachers, books, and self-help guides for living with integrity even under the untoward circumstances of the Greco-Roman age.
The Stoic recommendation was particularly popular. The idea was that a person could learn or discern what was “naturally” right and live “according to nature” if one only would. The goal was to be unaffected by the crowd, untouched by the accidents of life that otherwise would be felt as pain, and unmoved by the power that tyrants and others might have over you. The Stoics were fully aware that this would require a heroic effort, and might even get you in trouble with the powers that be. But therein lay the reward of a chance to manifest true nobility.
And then a funny thing happened. The Stoics learned how to use the social model of the ideal king as an icon for personal meditation. The only true king was a sage, they said, and as for the mark of the sage, it was knowing and living in accordance with nature. If one did that, they said, one would truly be a citizen of the great world city. One would become a cosmopolitan, a sovereign example of virtue at its highest imaginable level of human achievement.
This philosophy was a radically individualistic response to the breakdown of cultures in the Greco-Roman age, and it spread like wildfire. The Stoics had succeeded in reducing the entire system of cosmos, polis, and anthropos to the status of a psychological metaphor.
For other thinkers, especially those with cultural roots in the eastern Mediterranean provinces, radical individualism was hardly an answer. Ancient Near Eastern cultures had developed a strong sense of the importance of belonging to a people. Theirs was a social anthropology that placed high value on family, kinship, genealogy, tradition, purity, social justice, cultic law, and religious piety. These values were very deeply ingrained in the collective unconscious, and they determined the way in which people thought about the world. In response to the troubled times, for these people, only a social vision would do.
And it would not be enough to construct an ideal kingdom simply on the foundation of systematic thought and logic. It would have to honor the achievements of the past, reflect the promise of the past, account for the present malaise, and project an imaginable future for all the people who were now crowding into the picture. The ideal kingdom would have to offer a social alternative to the social confusion of the Greco-Roman age.
This social approach to cultural critique led to passionate interest in the grand epic traditions that every people brought with them to the Greco-Roman mix. The Greeks had their combination of Homer, Hesiod, and age-old tales about the gods and heroes. The Syrians had their chronicles; the Samaritans their books from Moses; the Egyptians their dramatic cycles of Isis and Osiris; the Romans their records of Romulus and Remus; and the Jews their history from the foundation of the world. Every aristocratic family, local shrine, and city with any pretense at all also had its genealogy and history intact even though its power and glory were threatened or gone. What was left from the past was illustrious epic, but of course all epics were now tarnished.
Some intellectuals thought, nonetheless, that the epics were still of value. Epics contained information that a study of the cosmos could not provide. Epics brought the gods into the story. Epics might go all the way back to the creation of the world where the connections were first made between the cosmic order and the origin of civilization. Epics were the reservoir of the wisdom of the past. They revealed the characteristics of a people, explained their attitudes toward neighboring peoples, recorded failures and achievements, and marked the moments when certain features of a social order were established. Epics were instructive. Epics accounted for a people as a people. They must hold the clues to what went wrong. They might provide some hints about how to set things right again. They could at least be used to mourn the loss of ancient glories and view the Romans with disdain.
Two epics attracted the most attention, and competition between them was fierce. Homer had the edge because the dominant culture was Greek. But the story of Israel also created a great deal of interest even outside Jewish circles. That is because Jewish culture drew upon its epic tradition in order to undergird a set of ideas and values that, although threatened by the Greco-Roman age, were still found attractive. The concepts of a righteous god, a divine law, a creation designed to enhance both wonder and morality, a vision of society based on social justice, and rituals for the observance and celebration of sane, rational, family-centered life could all be gathered from their epic. It was a story of the people that stretched from the creation of the world to the construction of the temple-state in Jerusalem. It was a reasonable contrast to the stories of fickle gods and arrogant heroes with which the Greeks had to make do. And Moses, the author of the five books called torah (instruction), was clearly a match for Homer. Some said Moses was earlier than Homer, that he had lived somewhere near the very beginning of human history, and that whatever Homer knew, he must have learned from Moses.
But the more important advantage was that the “law of Moses” was not just law, even though everyone had learned to translate torah with nomos, but real epic. Creation, the origin of the species, and culture bringers, along with violence, folly, the rainbow’s promise, patriarchal legends, eternal covenants, and the destiny of a people all took shape before laws in the narrower sense ever entered the picture. It was something to think about.
And many did. Scholars with social questions in mind became obsessed with the books of Moses as the second-temple history ran its course. Some retold the story at length in the interest of saying how grand the history of Israel had been and how respectable the Jewish people were (Josephus, Jubilees). Others highlighted aspects of the story that gave the present shape of society its epic constitution, leaving out the parts that did not fit (Sirach 44–50; Mack 1985). And others still read Moses and the prophets to lift up a forgotten ideal, use it to criticize the status quo, and say what had to happen in order to set things right (Qumran). In every case, the strategy was the same: revising the epic in light of present circumstances from a particular point of view to support a critical judgment about the present state of affairs.
Historians of religion would say that these Jewish scholars followed a typical pattern of mythmaking. This pattern works in the following way. The current state of affairs is not living up to the promise of the past. The recent past comes under critique. The stories of the more distant past are rehearsed to make sure of the promise. The aim is to see the promise more clearly, more precisely, and test the reasons for having thought that it was true. This brings focus to bear upon a certain moment, epoch, or feature of the history that can serve as a key to its fundamental logic and promise. Reseen, and lifted from its ancient history as an ideal model, the figure can then be used as an image of what the people and their culture were, are in essence, or should be. The image can then be used as a contrast to the present situation in order to render a critique, provide a model for rebuilding, or project a hopeful future. In our time, this pattern of thinking can be recognized in the frequent reference to the Judeo-Christian tradition, the American dream, or the Constitution of the United States.
In second-temple times, the epic of Israel was a rich reservoir of ideal types, and all of them were used at one time or another in the process of mythmaking. Adam, Abraham, the covenants, Moses, the exodus, the law, the temple charter in Leviticus, the entrance into the land, David, Solomon, the building of the temple, the kingdoms, the prophets, and so forth could all be cast as icons of Israel’s sociology and used for comparison and contrast with the contemporary situation.
The Jews did not need to learn a new set of tricks to use their epic this way. Jews had been revising their epic history since the time of David and Solomon. Reimagining the past was their way of mythmaking. The past provided standards for contemporary social critique. It could also lend authority to proposals for shaping society anew.
Biblical scholars count four major revisions of the epic before the deportation of Jews in 587 B.C.E. brought to an end the kingdoms of Israel and Judah. These revisions are traditionally known as J for the Yahwist, E for the Elohist, D for the Deuteronomist, and P for the Priestly school. In each case, these revisions markedly changed the constitution of Israel by rewriting the epic.
In the case of P, for instance, the book of Leviticus was added to Moses’ instructions and the stories of sacrificial covenant were added to the legends of the patriarchs in order to locate the legal foundations for the temple-state at the beginning of the epic.
After the exile no one dared to actually rewrite the story in this way, for the five books of Moses were now in many hands in many lands, “published,” as it were, so that changing the text itself was not the thing to do. But other ways were found to rehearse the story from a revisionist perspective. The author of Chronicles rewrote the history in a separate account, adding some things and leaving out some things to make it read another way. Ben Sira summarized the epic in a poem that gave him the opportunity to recast it radically.
At Qumran and in the synagogues of Alexandria, two different methods of writing commentaries on the Jewish scriptures were devised. Everyone was involved in retelling the story of Israel. The problem with this approach as a response to the Roman era was that an ethnic bias belonged to every national epic. How could reading a provincial epic ever produce enlightenment fit for a multicultural scene? Jewish intellectuals were painfully aware of this problem, especially in the diaspora where the cultural mix was a fact of daily life and the Jews were on display with their meetings, associations, and schools.
It was there that scholars with a philosophic bent tackled the problem of Jews and “the nations” (ethne, later translated by the old Latin, gentilis, “foreign,” from which we get the English “gentiles.”). A great deal of speculation centered on the figure of Adam, the first human being. It is important to realize that, in early Jewish thought, a personified abstraction could be storied as an individual without losing its generic or social significance. Thus “Adam” meant humankind, and “Israel” meant the people of Israel, even though each could also be pictured and storied as a particular person. One of the two stories in Genesis about the origins of the human race said that humankind had been created in the image of God. That was certainly cause for reflection, and scholars in the wisdom tradition, from Ben Sira, through the author of the Wisdom of Solomon, to Philo, lingered long over that text. The story of Noah, also, was a good place to reflect on the standing of the nations in the eyes of the God of Israel. The rainbow’s promise was not the private property of the Jews. And even Abraham, the figure with whom the story of Israel actually began, was curiously blessed and chosen by God to receive the promises long before the divine instructions were given to Moses.
What about the way God treated Abraham as a sign that the gentiles must be welcomed into the family of God? It may seem strange to us that, given the availability of very sophisticated anthropologies and psychologies in the Greek philosophical traditions, Jewish thinkers would prefer to work out their classifications of human beings by worrying these old stories into making a point or two about where the gentiles stood in the larger scheme of things divine. But to see the point about the gentiles there in one’s own epic, that is what made the point telling. This approach did not break out of the ethnic bias inherent in the Jewish epic, but it did allow Jewish intellectuals to recognize their multicultural world and deal with it without having to give up on their own grand traditions.
And it did force the issue of exclusivity. Philo’s allegorical commentaries on the five books of Moses document a major effort in the Alexandrian synagogue to interpret the laws of Moses so that gentiles could understand them, appreciate them, and keep them.
We now know that non-Jews found diaspora synagogues to be a very attractive subcultural association, and that gentiles did gather around to study the scriptures, rehearse the epic, honor the one God, celebrate the feasts and festivals, and learn to keep the Jews’ laws with their high ethical standards. Naturally there were debates galore about whether the gentiles would have to go all the way in order to belong to the association of Israel. That would have meant being circumcised, keeping whatever form of kosher was in practice, and perhaps paying a temple tax. Some Jews said yes, they should go all the way. Others said no, it did not matter.
But either way, the result of the Jewish preoccupation with their scriptures was that Homer and the Greek philosophical tradition were not the only resources available for doing social critique or for thinking about better and less better ways to live together in the Greco-Roman age.
Galilee happened to be a perfect place to experiment with social critique and try out new ideas about a better way to live. Its people were wide awake, worldly wise, and protective of their way of life. They had survived the foreign rule, at one time or another, of all the powers in the ancient Near East without, apparently, taking sides. There is no record of Galileans fighting under their own banner, trying to rid their land of unwanted foreign kings. They had no capital city to defend and no king to rule them. They granted token allegiance to each new foreign king and then looked for ways to protect themselves from the king’s long arm. They could do that because they enjoyed a bit of distance from the cultural and political forces that swirled around them. That was because Galilee was not open to or easily annexed by either the kingdoms to the north or to the south. It formed a little inland district of its own, bounded by mountains to the north, west, and south, and the Lake of Genneseret (or Sea of Galilee) to the east.
Their way of life was worth protecting. They lived among rocky hills and gentle valleys, dotted with small villages and abundantly watered by springs and rains. They were self-sufficient, producing a healthy economy of fish, wine, grains, olives, and fruits, as well as crafts. There were mineral hot springs at Tiberias and Gadara. These, and the tropical climate around the Sea of Galilee, made the area attractive as a health resort. And with major roadways open to the main north-south highways, one along the seacoast and another across the highlands of the Transjordan to the east, Galilee had constant contact with the rest of the world.
It is important to remember that Galilee was ruled by the kings of Jerusalem only twice in the preceding one thousand years, and then for only brief periods of time. David did add Galilee to his kingdom, it is true, and the old stories tell about the tribes of Naphthali, Asher, Issachar, Zebulun, and Dan settling there. However, these stories also say that the tribes of Israel were not able to drive out the indigenous inhabitants.
And as for belonging to the kingdoms of David and Solomon, an arrangement that lasted less than eighty years (1000 to 922 B.C.E.), Solomon gave twenty Galilean cities back to Hiram, king of Tyre, in exchange for building materials. Then, what was left of Galilee was part of the old northern kingdom of Israel centered at Shechem (Samaria), not Jerusalem. After that kingdom came to an end in 722 B.C.E., Galilee was ruled by Damascus, Assyria, Neo-Babylonia, Persia, the Ptolemies, and the Seleucids before it was again overrun by kings in Jerusalem (the Hasmoneans) in 104 B.C.E. There is nothing to suggest that the Galileans were happy about this annexation. The people who lived in Galilee were Galileans, not Syrians, not Samaritans, not Jews. It was, as the later rabbis would say, the “district of the gentiles.” During the Hellenistic period, Galilee was introduced to Greek language, philosophy, art, and culture through the founding of cities on the Greek model in strategic locations up and down the Jordan river valley (Caesarea Philippi, Philoteria, Scythopolis), on the eastern side of the Sea of Galilee (Bethsaida, Hippos, Gadara), along the seacoast to the west (Ptolemais, Dora, Caesarea), and eventually within Galilee itself (Sepphoris, Tiberius, Agrippina). With them came Greek learning, Greek schools with their gymnasia, theaters, forums, and political institutions.
During the time of Jesus there were twelve Greek cities within a twenty-five-mile radius of his hometown, Nazareth. Jesus grew up in Galilee and apparently had some education. He was certainly bright enough, judging from the movements that remembered him as their founder. But as we are now coming to see, it is all but impossible to say anything more about him as a person, much less write a biography about his life. The “memories” of him differ, and they are so obviously mythic that the best we can do is to draw a conclusion or two from the earliest strata of the teachings attributed to him. These teachings belonged to the movements that started in his name.
We have to infer what kind of a teacher he was from the teachings that developed in these movements. He must have been something of an intellectual, for the teachings of the movements stemming from him are highly charged with penetrating insights and ideas. He also must have been capable of suggesting ways to live with purpose in the midst of complex social circumstances. But he was not a constructive, systematic thinker of the kind who formulate philosophies or theologies. He did not create social program for others to follow or a religion that invited others to see him as a god. He simply saw things more clearly than most, made sense when he talked about life in his world, and must have attracted others to join him in looking at the world a certain way.
What we have as evidence for this is the way his followers learned to talk about living in the world. They said that Jesus had talked that way too. The tenor of that talk can be seen in the teachings of Jesus his followers preserved. These teachings are really a collection of pithy aphorisms that strike to the heart of ethical issues, not the usual proverbs, maxims, or principles that one would expect from the founder-teacher of a school tradition.
But a close analysis of these aphorisms reveals the interweaving of two themes that mark the genius of the movement. One is a playful, edgy challenge to take up a countercultural lifestyle. This challenge was made in all seriousness, but it was marked by humor, and one can still sense the enjoyment these Jesus people took in watching the conventional world do double takes at the very thoughts they expressed and the behavior they enjoined.
The closest analogy for this kind of invitation to live against the stream is found in Cynic discourse of the time. It does appear that Jesus was attracted to this popular ethical philosophy as a way for individuals to keep their integrity in the midst of a compromising world.
The other theme is an interest in a social concept called the “kingdom of God.” This concept was not worked out with any clarity, but the ways it was used show that something of a social vision appeared in the teachings of Jesus. The kingdom of God referred to an ideal society imagined as an alternative to the way in which the world was working under the Romans. But it also referred to an alternative way of life that anyone could take at any time. In this sense the kingdom of God could be realized simply by daring to live differently from the normal conventions. The kingdom of God in the teachings of Jesus was not an apocalyptic or heavenly projection of an otherworldly desire. It was driven by a desire to think that there must be a better way to live together than the present state of affairs. And it called for a change of behavior in the present on the part of individuals invested in the vision.
Thus the teachings of Jesus can be described as the creative combination of these two themes, or a challenge to the individual to explore an alternative social notion. If so, Jesus’ genius was to let the sparks fly between two different cultural sensibilities, the Greek and the Semitic. The Greek tradition of philosophy had been forced to focus on the the question of individual virtue as a last-ditch stand for human dignity and integrity in a world without a polis, one that was no longer structured as a sane society. The Cynic-like challenge in the teachings of Jesus picked up on this bottom line from the grand traditions of Greek philosophy.
The ancient Near Eastern legacy said that individualism would not do. People were only people when they lived together. A person had to belong to a working society in which ethical values addressed the well-being of the collective. A social anthropology determined that some social vision give guidance to a critique of the Roman world and suggest a better way to live together. By bringing the two cultural traditions together and making contact between them, the pitch for a change in personal lifestyle and the vague but potentially powerful symbol of an alternative society, the electrodes short-circuited, and Jesus started a movement. Everything essential was present in the package: social critique, alternative social vision, divine sovereignty, and personal virtue.
And yet, nothing was present except general ideas. Nothing was spelled out. Everything was left to more talking, thinking, and experimentation with the new ideas. And that is exactly what happened. Kingdom talk started with the teachings of Jesus and then attracted more and more people. We can’t be sure of all the ways little groups formed, or how the kingdom movement spread from place to place.
What we do know is that, by the time writings from the Jesus people began to appear, talk about the kingdom had resulted in the formation of wondrously different kinds of association. One line can be traced from the earliest Jesus movement, through Matthew’s gospel, to later communities that understood themselves as Jewish Christians. These people emphasized lifestyle and found a way to bring the behavior of the Jesus movement into line with more traditional Jewish codes of ethics. This approach produced communities that lasted for centuries, such as the Ebionites and Nazareans.
But they were not the ones that gave birth to the Christianity of the Bible. Another line takes off from the Sayings Gospel Q, runs through the Gospel of Thomas where Jesus’ teachings were understood to bring enlightenment about one’s true self, and ends up in gnostic circles. These people cultivated the invitation to personal virtue and thought of the kingdom of God as an otherworldly dimension of spiritual existence where true human being had its origin and end.
This approach may have been the most attractive form of Christianity during the second to fourth centuries. But it was finally squelched by the institutional form of Christian tradition that called itself the church. The church’s trajectory had worked its way through northern Syria and Asia Minor where the Christ cult formed to justify the inclusion of both gentiles and Jews in the kingdom of God. It was this trajectory that converged on Rome, developed the notion of the universal church (from catholicus, meaning “general”), and created the Bible as its charter. And so a new religion emerged.
[Preparation for the chapters to follow in Mack’s book.]
As we prepare to enter into the provincial world of its first manifestations in Galilee, trying to keep up with its rapid spread throughout the eastern Mediterranean, eventually to see it become the religion of the Roman Empire, a word of caution may be in order.
The ways these Christians addressed the issues of their time will often appear to be silly, sometimes absurd, frequently extravagant, and only once in a while breathtaking. We will need some good shoes with very sharp spikes to keep from falling off the logs as we jump from text to text in this period of rapid social and cultural change.
The present chapter was written to help us keep our balance as we proceed. Every feature of the Greco-Roman age mentioned here will return for reconsideration in the early history of Christianity: law, kings and tyrants, kingdoms, associations, meals, myths, rituals, cosmologies, cosmogonies, the gods, the mystery cults, noble deaths, redeemers, oracles, epic history, and ethics. That Christianity emerged just when it did, that it drew now upon some Jewish roots, now upon Greek ideas, and that it eventually found itself infatuated with the thought of Roman power, are all crucial for the story about to be told. Only by keeping the larger world in view will it be possible to see that these early Christians were not gullible, eccentric, or mad, given to ecstasies, visions, and religious experiences of personal transformation. Though their claims were often wild and extravagant, we need to see that they were actually engaging their troubled times. Early Christianity was a creative, if daring, response to the multicultural challenge of the Greco-Roman age.
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