Sean Freyne presents a set of essays which reflect his thought on the role of the Bible in modern theology. He shows throughout his abiding concern to read the Bible with an awareness of the different contexts in which the texts were produced and are received.
265 pp, Veritas, 2002. To purchase this book online, go to www.veritas.ie .
CONTENTS
Maps
Introduction
Context
1. East meets West – early Judaism and early Christianity as the places of encounter
2. ‘And so we came to Rome’
3. From Jesus to Constantine – Jerusalem in early Christian piety and imagination
Gospels
4. Reading the gospels in the light of the ‘window of evangelists’ at Chartres Cathedral
5. Mark’s urgent message
6. ‘In the beginning was the Word’
7. Christological debates among Johannine Christians
Historical Jesus
8. The quest fro the historical Jesus – some theological reflections
9. Galilee and Judea in the first century – the social world of Jesus and his ministry
10. Millennium, Jubilee and Jesus
Paul
11. The apostle Paul, the first Christian mystic?
12. Faith and culture – reflections on the early Christian experience
Theological Themes
13. Jesus Christ: the anchor of hope
14. God as experience and mystery: the early Christian understanding
15. From Messianisms to Messiahs: the Jewish search for redemption in history
16. The Bible and Christian theology: inspiration, projection, critique?
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Review |
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CHAPTER 1: East meets west: early Judaism and early Christianity as places of encounter
This paper was delivered as one of a series dealing with the United Nations proposal for ‘Civilisations in Dialogue’. It is indeed a sad fact, as true for the modern as for the ancient world, that when civilisations or cultural realms do encounter each other, it is generally not for dialogue, but for destruction. This perception of conflict is reflected even in the manner in which academic disciplines have traditionally been organised into Departments of Classics on the one hand, and Departments of Biblical Studies or Near Eastern Studies on the other, simply mirroring the perceived endemic conflict between East and West. However, as the title of Jonathan Z. Smith’s book, Map is not Territory, (1978), pithily suggests, when it comes to cultural allegiances and cultural borrowings, our politically motivated divisions do not always hold good. It is all the more important, therefore, to identify those moments in human history where things appear to have been different, and where genuine reciprocity and receptivity were achieved.
The Hellenistic Age, that is, the period initiated by the extraordinary achievements of Alexander the Great in the decade from 333-323 b.c.e up to and including the period of the early Roman empire (first century c.e.), has often been seen as one such epochal moment in human history. While this period was certainly not without its wars of aggression and military conquest, it is more often judged as having laid the foundations of what we today describe loosely as ‘western civilisation’. It gave rise not only to the spread of Greek culture and technical skills over a vast territory, but also to the development of Roman legal and political institutions and the stability that they achieved. Furthermore, this period saw the emergence of two world religions from the region, Judaism and its young offshoot, Christianity, as well as providing the underpinning for a third, Islam, each in their different ways living examples of the east/west exchanges that our series is addressing.
Alexander the Great has captured the imagination of scholars, schoolboys and other starry-eyed savants as the initiator of a ‘Golden Age’ in which dreams of a one-world culture were set in motion by the power and indefatigable nature of one man and his vision. (1) This picture is, to some extent at least, a myth of modern consciousness, one that expresses the enduring dreams of humankind and is increasingly in vogue in some versions of our modern, global culture. The very fact that Hellenism and Hellenisation have been appealed to for purposes of supporting various modern, and often conflicting ideologies is a clear indication of the significance of this legacy from the past for the modern period. It should also put us on our guard against any simplistic descriptions of the process of Hellenisation itself, either positive or negative, especially in an age when notions of a global culture are rampant.
At the outset it is good to be reminded that the Hellenistic Age was not the first cultural encounter between east and west. Indeed, the more one explores the issue, the more the question arises when is east, east and west, west? Where are we to draw the imaginary line between the two cultural realms? In our current state of knowledge it is not possible to trace all the details of the evolution of the system of writing from the hieroglyphics of the Egyptians and the cuneiform pattern of the Mesopotamians, through the cuneiform-syllabic script of Ugarith, to the development of the North West Semitic alphabets, of which the Phoenician one is the best known. Herodotus, the father of Greek history, writing in the fifth century, spoke of the Greek alphabet as grammata phoinikeia ‘Phoenician letters’ (Hist. 5, 58), thus acknowledging their indebtedness to the Phoenician alphabet. Nevertheless, in adopting, the Greeks also adapted the Phoenician system. This latter, like all Semitic systems of writing, had no signs for the vowel sounds, but only for consonants, twenty-two in all. To this the Greeks added separate notations for the vowels, and in addition added several consonants not found in the Phoenician system. This development meant that a more complete description of a word according to Greek pronunciation and phonetics was possible, since the absence of notations for vowel sounds made the reading and understanding of the Semitic languages more problematic.
It was scribes, not military conquerors, who were responsible for these developments, thereby leaving a legacy of great significance for future generations. As long as writing was essentially pictographic, as in cuneiform and hieroglyphics, writing (and reading) remained confined to a very small elite, since mastery of over six hundred signs made huge demands on memory. Abstract thought was impossible and communication difficult and cumbersome with so many signs to be learned. The reduction of this number to twenty-two characters in Phoenician and twenty-nine in Greek meant that far more people could master writing and reading, even though illiteracy was to remain high in all ancient cultures for a very long time. Thus the development of the shorter alphabet by the Phoenicians and the Greeks has rightly been hailed as a democratisation of learning, and this in turn lead to a greater democratisation of political life.
From the possibilities for expression that this development offered, the great Homeric epics, The Iliad and The Odyssey emerged, usually dated to the eight century b.c.e. Much has been written about these works as the product of an oral culture. While there may be some element of truth in these claims, anyone who is vaguely familiar with the imaginative power of the similes and descriptions, the subtlety of the characterisations and the narrative skill of the various episodes can scarcely doubt that there is a creative authorial genius, probably the same person, behind both works. In this regard, certain sections of the Hebrew Bible, such as the narratives about the Patriarchs, the accounts of the exploits of various Judges and the Court Succession Story make for highly interesting comparisons in terms of narrative techniques, characterisation and plot development. Yet both are heirs to a much older mythological and epic tradition from the Ancient Near East, which provides the context within which this literature should be judged, even when one must allow for the creative geniuses lying behind both the Homeric and the Biblical traditions also. Such epics as Enuma Elish and Gilgamesh have long been studied as backgrounds for the creation and flood stories in Genesis, but their possible relationship with Hesiod and Homer has not got the recognition it deserves. (2) Just as some Biblical scholars, had, for theological reasons, felt uneasy with regard to any ‘external’ comparisons with their texts, Classical scholars, too, considered that comparisons with Semitic antecedents might impugn the originality and creativity of the Greek authors. Once this modern bias of racial superiority is ignored, however, many detailed points of comparison between the two traditions emerge.
A well-known account by the Jewish historian, Josephus, claims that Alexander marched on Jerusalem on his way to Egypt, but was met outside the city by the Jewish high-priest and the populace wearing white robes. On seeing them Alexander reputedly recalled a dream he had had that he should invade Asia, and now declared himself to be under the protection of the God of the Jews, entering the city in triumph. He offered sacrifice under the direction of the priests at the temple and gave permission for the Jews to continue to practise their laws, promising the same treatment for the Jews of Babylon and Media (Jewish Antiquities 11, 329-40). Versions of this story circulated in other Jewish writings also, indicating that in all probability it was a piece of later Jewish propaganda, based on the fact that unlike the coastal cities of Tyre and Gaza that resisted Alexander’s advance to Egypt, Jerusalem remained untouched. Even so, it is of considerable interest for our discussion, since it suggests that from a Jewish perspective there was nothing essentially incompatible between Judaism and Hellenism, and that indeed each could be mutually beneficial to the other. Alexander’s main objective was to pursue the Persian king, Darius, whom he had previously defeated at the Issus river in Asia Minor, to the very heart of his empire. He traveled first by the coast to Egypt, where he visited the shrine of the Egyptian god, Ammon, at Siwa, and was crowned as Pharoah and given the title ‘Son of Ammon’. He then established the city of Alexandria in the Nile Delta, a city that was to become the outstanding statement of the wedding of Greek and Oriental cultures. From Egypt he travelled through modern day Jordan and Syria. Having routed Darius for a second time at the river Tigris, he marched on to the important Persian cities of Babylon, Susa, Persepolis and Ecbatana. Eventually, he caught up with the retreating Persian forces, and the deposed Darius surrendered to him. Alexander was now the undisputed king of the vast Persian territories. Imperceptibly, he had also become’ orientalised’ in terms of dress and manner, much to the disgust of the closest of his Macedonian troops. His eventual marriage to Roxana, the daughter of Darius, was a symbolic statement of his desire to join east and west together in one empire.
Given the vast scale of Alexander’s journeys that brought him to the borders of India, as well as his daring character, it is easy to see how the so-called Alexander legend developed. The various extant Lives of Alexander are, in part at least, based on contemporary records, some of which had been compiled by members of his travelling retinue. In time, however, there arose an idealised picture of the philosopher-king who had a vision of creating a one-world culture, an account that may well have begun already in his own life-time. The reality, however, was in all probability much less high-minded. One of his ancient biographers speaks of his pothos or desire constantly to go further, but this was undoubtedly a combination of military pragmatism and a sense of adventure in exploring the (to the Greeks) very strange world of the Orient. It is difficult to separate fact from legend in the various accounts, but it must be remembered that even if the idea of a one-world culture did not originate with Alexander, his younger contemporary, the Stoic philosopher, Zeno, could speak about the ‘whole inhabited world’ (oikumene) as being ‘like a city state where law reigns supreme.’ In other words, the idea of the ideal human society as described by Plato and Aristotle, the polis or city state with its constitution encompassing the demos or body of free-born citizens, now became the symbol for the total human family, all sharing in the same law of nature, thereby nullifying local laws and customs, which must have struck the Greeks as very strange as they heard reports from the troops on the eastern front.
It is against this larger backdrop that we can best assess the encounter between Greek and Jewish culture in the centuries after Alexander. Apart from one brief period in the mid-second century b.c.e., it must be said that the Jewish encounter, though distinctive when compared with their near neighbours – the Phoenicians, the Itureans and the Nabateans, for example – was not at all as hostile as modern scholarship has tended to portray the situation. (3) The brief interlude, in the reign of one of the successors of Alexander, Antiochus IV, Epiphanes, the king of Syria, was a short-lived attempt to outlaw distinctive Jewish practices altogether, identifying the cult of Yahweh with that of Zeus and Dionysus. It is debatable to what extent this episode was instigated by some Jewish aristocrats who had wanted to assimilate totally to Greek culture (1 Macc 1, 11), or whether it was due to Antiochus’ ambitions to emulate Alexander’s one-world culture. At any rate, the Jerusalem temple was profaned by the erection of an altar to Zeus in the temple area – ‘the abomination of desolation’ of which the Book of Daniel (9, 27) speaks – and the active persecution of those observing Jewish practises throughout the country. This gave rise to the Maccabean resistance movement and the rededication of the temple after three and a half years, a moment of Jewish history that has ever since been seen as the paradigm of Jewish refusal to succumb to political pressures, no matter how severe. As Jewish historian Tessa Rajak notes: ‘What has happened is that the militant Judaism depicted in the Books of Maccabees has, by extension, been attached to the entire history of the dynasty … And the view of Palestine as deeply polarised between Greek and Jew is only a step away.’ (4)
Archaeological evidence from this very period of emerging Jewish nationalism, points to commercial contacts even in Jerusalem with the Greek world – imported fine ware, Greek coins, jar handles for import of wine, mostly officially stamped from the island of Rhodes. This evidence suggests not just passing contacts, but more permanent associations that were part of an ongoing process over centuries. Thus a much more complex situation than that of simple polarity has to be envisaged, one that points both to changing attitudes on the Jewish side and the changing nature of Hellenism itself, as it encountered various near eastern cultures, including Judaism. The acid test will always be changes in the religious realm, especially in the ancient world. Just to take one pertinent example, one of the most sacred realities of Jewish belief was, and is, attachment to the ancestral land as God-given. The Maccabean wars of conquest are portrayed in 1 Macc as the re-acquisition of this national territory that had been unjustly taken from them. Yet, despite this deep attachment to the land one finds that in the very same period the Jewish population of Egypt, of all places, given the Exodus story, increased dramatically. This emigration did not mean any diminution of loyalty to the homeland and its religious attachment, since we hear from Josephus of disputes as to which of the native sanctuaries – that of Jerusalem and the Samaritan one on Gerazim – should receive the offerings from the Egyptian Jewish community.
There had been a long history of Jews in Egypt since the time of the Babylonian captivity, and it was natural that other Jews might gravitate there with the increased opportunities and contacts of the Hellenistic Age in terms of travel and commerce. In the century immediately following Alexander, for example, the Bible was translated into Greek in Egypt (the LXX) c. 250 b.c.e., presumably to deal with the needs of pious Jews there who could not deal with the Hebrew original, despite the status of that language as the ‘holy tongue’. Increasingly, a body of literature from Alexandrian Jewry in particular begins to emerge, as well as the ongoing process of translation of books written in the homeland in Hebrew such as 2 Macc and the Wisdom of Ben Sirach. However, it is with the first-century Greco-Jewish philosopher, Philo, that one finds the most complete synthesis of the two worlds of Greece and the east. Much has been written about his Jewish identity and his philosophy, as though it were necessary to choose between them. Philo himself had no difficulty in achieving a thoroughly Platonic reading of his own tradition in a number of commentaries, based on Moses’ insights as the true philosopher-ruler. Thus, in the Life of Moses he puts flesh on the standard Jewish apologetic claim that Moses was the first philosopher. In Philo’s hands, as distinct from the Pentateuchal account, Moses was the wise ruler whose insights were based on his intimate knowledge of the divine, ‘sharing in the very darkness where God is.’ One can detect here a conscious contrast with some of the current Lives of Alexander in which he was treated in similar terms as the son of Ammon-Zeus. A narrative pattern of a Life or ‘Bios’ was thus at hand for the early Christians to adapt in writing their Gospel Lives of Jesus of Nazareth.
The intellectual achievements of Philo and other Jewish apologists had the effect of winning many adherents to Judaism from the various pagan mystery religions then flooding the empire. We hear of an increasing numbers of ‘god-fearers’ attached to Jewish diaspora synagogues, attracted by Jewish ethical as well as’ religious claims, it would seem. (5) In the homeland also the encounter of Jewish faith with the Hellenistic zeitgeist took on many different expressions, so that the image of a monolithic and monochromic Jewish identity, implacably opposed to the ‘evil’ of Hellenism is a modern stereotype. It is based on the much later image of the European Jewish ghetto, which refused to assimilate, that is, abandon the Jewish faith and practises for the Enlightenment culture of reason, which was supposed to bring about the brotherhood of all. Many nineteenth-century German-Jews were rightly suspicious of such claims, since behind them lay the doctrine of the super-race, which eventually gave rise to the policy of Jewish genocide in Nazi Germany.
The reality of the Hellenistic age was different and more complex. Greek had gradually replaced Aramaic as the lingua franca of trade, commerce and administration with the demise of the Persian Empire. This meant that Jews who participated in the administrative life of the various kingdoms that emerged after Alexander’s untimely death, and were, therefore, city-dwellers, were likely to be more Hellenised. Yet this did not necessarily mean abandoning their Jewish belief system. We know from Egypt and elsewhere that the native elites were able to maintain their positions side by side with the Greek administrative officials, and indeed after a few generations the two classes were likely to be merged, as we see with the Jewish priestly aristocracy, for example, in the first century c.e. It is no surprise that we hear of a Greek school in Jerusalem and a Greek-style education that cultivated the body as well as the mind. It is a moot point whether this school should be regarded as an outright attack on Jewish life and belief, as portrayed in the Books of Maccabees, or whether it should not rather be seen as a development similar to that of the Jews in Alexandria taking place also in the ‘mother city’ of all Jews. (6)
Two writers from the third and second centuries b.c.e. can illustrate the battle for Jewish identity that was being waged in the encounter with Hellenism. The author of the Book of Qoheleth (Ecclesiastes) would appear to have been attracted to the Greek, Epicurean philosophy eat drink and make merry – since life is an unfathomable mystery that makes the future uncertain. There is nothing in this book to enliven the picture with a hope for the future according to Jewish messianic expectations. The author of this work and the circles of Jewish aristocrats that he represents has thoroughly assimilated to the extent that it is difficult to see how his book came to be included in the Hebrew canon, were it not for the fiction that it is the work of Solomon, and a few more orthodox aphorisms became attached to it in time. The Wisdom of Ben Sirach (Ecclesiasticus) represents another voice from the literature. He is the self-confessed member of the Jerusalem leisured classes, who has therefore, time to study. He contrasts his own life as a professional scribe with that of others whose work makes up the fabric of the city life – the potter, the smith, the glass-blower, the seal maker, the farmer (Sir 38,24 – 39, 11). The picture is that of the typical Greek city and the social stratification within it. Sirach sees himself as belonging in the company of kings and rulers, and hence a member of the elite rather than the retainer class, and yet, theologically, he is far removed from Qoheleth’s scepticism. While there are echoes of Greek philosophical and moral teaching in the work, he sees the law as a special gift to Israel that marks it off from other nations (ch 24). He delights in the temple and its worship (ch 50) and he prays for the restoration of Israel to its former glory (ch 36). While both of these writers pre-date the attack of Antiochus Epiphanes on Jewish religion, they do represent two contrasting strands that can be documented into the later period also, when a more normal situation was restored again. Thus the encounter of Hellenism and Judaism should be seen more in terms of shades of assimilation and resistance rather than a downright polarity.
It is this plurality that was to continue into the early Roman period (first century b.c.e. – first century c.e.), manifesting itself in the phenomenon of Jewish sectarianism, as the different groups known as Pharisees, Sadducees, Essenes and Zealots, have been labelled in modern scholarship, thus perpetuating the stereotype of an isolated and isolationist Jewish identity. Undoubtedly, there were real tensions between various elements in regard to the administration of the temple and the interpretation of Torah, and these can be attributed, in part at least to different responses to the reality of Jewish life within a thoroughly Hellenised environment for all Jews. In identifying these differences it is useful to examine them in the context of various trends in the Hellenistic world more generally, as Jewish historian, Josephus, suggests.
At one end of the continuum are the Essenes, who had opted for life away from the cities, including Jerusalem, with their thoroughly Greek ethos. They are best known to us from the Dead Sea Scrolls found in the region of Qumran in the Judean desert. Yet even there it was impossible to escape all aspects of the new cultural matrix within which Judaism of all hues was refashioning its identity. In fact, all the distinctive aspects of the group’s philosophy and lifestyle – dualistic determinism, the solar calendar, communal property, belief in a spirit world, celibacy, utopian ideas and communal structures – are not to be found in earlier Jewish tradition, but can be matched from various parts of the Greco-Roman and eastern worlds. Little wonder that of all the Jewish groups this one proved to be of great interest to Roman writers such as Pliny.
The zealots, or extreme nationalists, of the Roman period may also be judged as outright rejectionists, but from another perspective. Their roots were not in the Jerusalem clergy but in the country peasant class and the urban poor. As mentioned already, in addition to generating the idea of a one-world culture, Alexander’s conquests also gave rise to a lively interest in ethnography, or the study of other peoples, their characteristics and their territories, since peoplehood and territory went together. Jewish ethnography was based on the account of the emerging peoples from the sons of Noah (Shem, Japheth and Ham) to each of whom and their descendants were attributed different territories within the oikumene or inhabited world. It is within this understanding of the ‘ideal’ world of new beginnings after the flood, that Jewish nationalism and territorial claims are to be understood. The Jews were not the only people to have resisted Rome’s imperialistic ambitions, but it was the zealots’ combination of religious fervour and ethnic identity that made them such doughty opponents. It is necessary to take account of both aspects of their make-up if one is to avoid the stereotypes of the recalcitrant and xenophobic Jew in discussing what Josephus describes as the Fourth Philosophy. (7)
The Pharisees, despite their name, which suggests separatism, were in many respects the most attuned of all the Jewish groups to the spirit of the Hellenistic world. (8) For them, as for Zeno’s Stoics, ‘law reigned supreme,’ except that in their case it was the Jewish Torah, not the law of nature that was paramount. Thus the Pharisees developed a philosophy of law as the maintenance of an order, which had been established at the beginning. The human task was to bring one’s life into conformity with that pattern, and by formulating as comprehensive a system as possible the Pharisees guaranteed their adherents divine blessings wherever they went. For their Greek neighbours, familiar with the idea of different charters sanctioned by the patron gods of different cities, there was nothing strange or hypocritical about the Pharisees or their attitudes, provided they did not seek to propagate them among non-Jews. They were merely different, as the Athenians, the Spartans or the Thebans had different customs, while all were also Greeks. Only if the Jewish law was declared to be the universal law, thereby sanctioning rejection of Rome’s universal rule, would Pharisaic Judaism run into difficulties, since the right to follow ‘one’s ancestral customs’ was enshrined in Hellenistic and Roman legal practice. Thus, the Pharisees were the only ones of the various Jewish groups to survive the calamities of two defeats at the hands of the Romans in the revolts of 66-70 and 132-5 c.e., passing over eventually into what we today call Rabbinic Judaism.
On the other hand the Sadducees were the priestly aristocratic class, whom Josephus likens to the Epicureans. He also characterises them as boorish and unpopular with the common people. Qoheleth, it has already been suggested, represented an early Jewish example of the aristocratic lifestyle of the Hellenistic age. While the later Sadducees may not have been as assimilated as this third-century b.c.e. character, they nevertheless represented that class of Jewish aristocrats who had emerged around the native ruling Hasmonean house following the success of the Maccabean revolt and the collapse of Greek rule in Palestine. While less is known about them than the other groups, in all probability they were mainly represented by the Jerusalem priestly elite, espousing a theologically conservative position on such issues as the after-life, while maintaining a luxurious lifestyle in comparison with the peasants whose offerings supported them.
Christianity and the reception of Hellenism
Writing towards the end of the second century c.e. the Christian apologist Tertullian defiantly asks: ‘What indeed has Athens to do with Jerusalem?’ implying that Christian faith had no need to engage with Greek philosophy, since its certainty came from elsewhere. ‘Away with all attempts to produce a Stoic, Platonic and dialectic Christianity,’ he declares, with a splendid sense of the uniqueness of Christian claims (De Praescriptione Haereticorum 7). In the light of the discussion thus far, a Jewish apologist such as Philo or Josephus would have given a very different answer to the same question. An answer from a Christian perspective would call for a paper in its own right. Suffice to say that despite his confident assertions, other Christian apologists saw the need for, but also the opportunities of, dialogue with Greek culture. (9) Indeed, so well did the early Christians adapt to the Greek culture as preserved by the Romans, that some one hundred and fifty years after Tertullian it behoved the empire to embrace it as its official religion. Overnight it had been transformed from outlawed to legitimate, providing the new emperor, Constantine, with the best available option for reuniting a divided empire. Thus, according to the standard account, the triumph of Christianity was the result of its ability to shed its Jewish past and embrace wholeheartedly the universalist, Hellenistic spirit of the age. Such a portrayal requires a critical evaluation, since it operates with stereotypes of both Judaism and Hellenism that ignore the complexity of the relationship.
Any account of the origins of Christianity that seeks to drive a wedge between Jesus and Paul, seeing the latter as the real or ‘second’ founder of Christianity, because of his alleged openness to the Hellenistic spirit, is deeply flawed. Equally, depictions of Jesus as a Galilean Hellenist breaking with the narrow confines of Jerusalem, are also grossly distorted. Yet both versions – the Hellenist Paul as the true founder of Christianity and the Galilean Jesus abandoning his own tradition – are still frequently advanced for the success of the early Christian movement, in order to free that movement from its mooring within Judaism. The evidence will not support either contention: first-century Galilee was Jewish, and Jesus did not, nor could not bypass Jerusalem as the spiritual centre of that religion. Likewise, Paul was, and remained, deeply rooted in his own Jewish identity, despite his acceptance of the claims of Jesus to messianic status. (10) It is all too easily forgotten that the Hellenists mentioned in Acts of the Apostles (ch 6) as the first Christian missionaries, and Paul likewise, were Jewish Hellenists from various parts of the Diaspora, but for whom Jerusalem, not Athens, was their cultural and spiritual home. Jewish prophets such as Isaiah and Ezechiel had articulated a Jewish version of the one-world culture long before Alexander in terms of the coming messianic age. The second century b.c.e. Book of Jubilees, drawing on Jewish universalist ideas and in order to counteract the claims of extreme Hellenists, had developed a picture of the seventy nations of the earth being descended from the three surviving sons of Noah in the aftermath of the flood. Thus, Shem had inherited Asia, Japheth Asia Minor and Europe and Ham Africa. Jerusalem stood at the centre of this map, a veritable garden of Eden around which the nations of the earth were located. The universalism of Isaiah, which envisaged the nations coming on pilgrimage to receive wisdom from a restored Zion, received a new and nuanced treatment in line with Hellenistic ethnographic ideas. It was these actualisations of their own ancient texts in the light of the new context of the Hellenistic world, rather than one-world ideas attributed to Alexander or his successors, that in my opinion prompted the universalism of the early Christian missionaries. (11)
As those Christian missionaries moved out from Jerusalem and beyond the confines of Palestine they were indeed able to communicate with a range of diverse audiences, east and west, because of the wide diffusion of Greek as the lingua franca, as already mentioned. The Roman provincial structures provided some protection, and the increased commercial activity of the eastern Mediterranean made for the relative ease of travel. These aspects of the Hellenistic world and its benefits were not lost on Luke as he depicts the movement of Christianity from Jerusalem to Rome in Acts of the Apostles. Yet despite all the benefits it had to offer, Hellenism as adopted and adapted by the Romans had not succeeded in obliterating ethnic differences among the peoples of the east. In a brilliant study entitled The Roman Near East 31 BC- AD 337 (1993) the Oxford Ancient Historian, Fergus Millar, has shown that despite the veneer of Greek culture everywhere, the older cultures of the east have all left various traces of their past in terms of bilingual inscriptions, Semitic customs and religious practises that continued on into the Byzantine period in some instances. Religious practises have a capacity to endure and survive changes in other areas of life. Very often what has taken place is an interpretatio Graeca by which an old Semitic deity or custom is retained, but in a Greek dress. However, many examples show that the Greek equivalents were not randomly taken over, but were chosen with special reference to the god or goddess in question and his or her perceived characteristics, as, for example, when the god of Tyre, Melqart is named Heracles, since both were know as travellers and founders of cities, and Eshmun, the god of Sidon, was identified as Asclepios, since both were venerated as healing deities. (12)
This was the world that Christian missionaries encountered as they moved in the direction of the four points of the compass – north to Syria, east to Arabia and Mesopotamia, south to Egypt and North Africa and west to Asia Minor and Europe. Luke’s highly graphic account of Paul’s movements to the west can give the impression that that was the totality of Christian missionary activity. Even Paul himself was active for some time in Arabia, Damascus and Syria before joining forces with Barnabas in the journey to the west. But we know virtually nothing about that earlier activity, not to mention that of the many other wandering evangelists and preachers that felt impelled to share their good news. Paul declares his own missionary strategy as being Greek to the Greeks and Jew to the Jews, viewing the world from a Jewish perspective as being constituted by Jews and others (Greeks), just as the Greeks divided the world into those who spoke Greek (Hellenes) and Barbarians. Paul presumably meant that he tried to show an awareness of the cultural diversity of his different audiences, a policy that is graphically illustrated by Luke in his account of Paul’s Areopagus speech in Athens where he is made to quote one of the Greek poets in making his point (Acts 17,2231). In this he and others were merely following the pattern set by Jewish Diaspora missionaries and apologists who had ‘translated’ Moses into categories that were accessible to those of Greek background. We know nothing about the earliest decades of either Syriac or Egyptian Christianity, even though both Churches have left a sizeable body of Christian literature from later centuries, and the Gospels were translated into both languages. It is only from this later perspective that we can’ begin to fill in the gaps left by Luke for the earlier period, and acknowledge the great diversity of early Christian self-expression in~ different cultural contexts from the beginning, both Greek and oriental. It would go well beyond the bounds of this talk to pursue the issue of Christianity and Hellenism further. Suffice to say that many of the great Christian Patristic theologians of later centuries as well as the earlier apologists were deeply imbued with Greek philosophical ideas and used these to articulate an understanding of the new religion in their efforts to portray it to interested pagan intellectuals as a philosophy and not a superstition. (13)
At the same time Rabbinic Judaism was developing its strategy of adaptation and survival within imperial structures that had become increasingly Christianised, from the early fourth century onwards in the wake of Constantine’s conversion. When the intricacies of Rabbinic midrash and commentary are studied today within the larger Greco-Roman context, we can see how the dialogue between Judaism and Hellenism continued into the Byzantine period. It can be argued that the more Jews had to come to terms with the loss of political autonomy and temple, the more Hellenistic influences in the religious sphere seem to have been acceptable. Nowhere is this more graphically demonstrated than in the acceptance of figurative art in synagogue decoration, something that was earlier strictly prohibited. Pagan motifs such as Helios, the Sun god with his four-horse chariot, as well as the signs of the zodiac on the floors of many synagogues represent a Judaisation of pagan symbols that matches Christian appropriation and reinterpretation of the same symbols. (14) Could this phenomenon be interpreted as a case of religious competition between the parent and the sibling for possession of the soul of the pagan world whose externals were crumbling all around? It would be two centuries later before a third light from the east was to emerge, namely Islam, and in that case also the classical tradition of Greece, especially in science and philosophy, was taken over and was to play an important role in the spread of the new religion in the world previously inhabited by Jews and Christians. The rapid spread of Islam in the east was as sudden as it was surprising, and the contribution of Hellenism to that success is a story that needs to be explored in detail. But that is for another day.
Conclusion
The Roman poet Horace, writing about Rome’s fascination with classical Greek culture wrote: ‘captured Greek conquered the arms of its capturers.’ By this he meant that Greek culture in terms of philosophy, literature, drama and sculpture – to name the most obvious examples had a capacity to attract the admiration of people long after the political and military power of Greece had waned. It has been one of the arguments of this paper that Greek culture itself owed much to older, eastern cultures, which it appropriated and developed in its own distinctive idiom and style. It has also been suggested that it is not through military conquests or control that true, creative cultural interchange occurs. The everyday contacts of peoples leave very little trace in the official records, then as now. We must be grateful therefore to modern socio- and ethno-archaeologists for giving us a ‘text’ from below that opens some tiny windows on those processes of genuine cultural interchange and their more lasting effects, which do not always respect the boundaries drawn on a map for political purposes. In these everyday contexts the true nature of the interchange is neither assimilation nor purely formal borrowings from one culture by another, but rather the tension between acceptance and resistance. This process may be seen as the testing by each culture of the other, that eventually gives rise to new configurations where respect for both is maintained, because the best of each can be represented.
Both Judaism and Christianity (but also Islam) are the bearers of these cultures into the modern world as lived realities still. The received wisdom has been that Judaism belonged to an oriental world that, in the eyes of western explorers from the time of Napoleon onwards, was deemed decadent and backward, however exotic it may have appeared in other respects. This also played into the anti-Semitic attitudes of the times generally. The account of Christianity that emerged as a result of these biases was that it represented the new, enlightened world of the Greeks with their universalist outlook. My contention has been that this picture is wrong in both respects. Judaism, cautiously perhaps, and with certain clear identity markers, accepted Hellenism as a positive influence, and Christianity moved east as well as west and was able to adapt itself to both cultural traditions. We who are heirs to western (or Latin) Christianity have largely ignored our eastern inheritance, following the break-up of the Roman empire with the dominance of Islam, and more especially following the great schism between eastern and western Christianity, usually dated to 1054 c.e. Perhaps the time has come for us to begin to dismantle the barrier our intellectual arrogance has erected!
1. For a brief but useful biography which discusses the man and the myth, see Richard Stoneman, Alexander the Great, (London: Routledge, 1997); also Ian Worthington ed. Alexander the Great: A Reader, (London: Routledge, 2002).
2. Walter Burkert, The Orientalising Revolution, Near Eastern Influences on Greek Culture in the Early Archaic Period (Cambridge, Mass: Harvard University Press, 1992).
3. Lee Levine, Judaism and Hellenism in Antiquity: Conflict or Confluence? (Seattle and London: University of Washington Press, 1998) 3-32.
4. Tessa Rajak, ‘The Hasmoneans and the Uses of Hellenism,’ in Philip Davies and Richard White eds. A Tribute to Geza Vermes. Essays in Jewish and Christian Literature and History, (Sheffield: JSOT Press, 1990) 261-280. See also John J. Collins, ‘Cult and Culture: the Limits of Hellenisation in Judea,’ in John J. Collins and G. Sterling eds. Hellenism in the Land of Israel, (Notre Dame, Ind: University of Notre Dame Press, 2001) 38-61.
5. See John R. Bartlett, ed. Jews in the Hellenistic and Roman Cities, 94-115 (London: Routledge, 2002).
6. Robert Doran, ‘The High Cost of a Good Education,’ in Collins and Sterling eds. Hellenism in the Land of Israel.
7. See Doron Mendels, The Rise and Fall of Jewish Nationalism. Jewish and Christian Ethnicity in Ancient Palestine, (New York and London: Doubleday, 1992).
8. See Anthony J. Saldarini, Pharisees, Scribes and Sadducees in Palestinian Society, (Edinburgh: T. and T. Clark, 1989); Jacob Neusner From Politics to Piety. The Emergence of Pharisaic Judaism, (Englewood Cliffs: Prentice Hall, 1973).
9. See William R. Schoedel and Robert L. Wilkin eds. Early Christian Literature and the Classical Intellectual Tradition, In Honorem Robert M. Grant (Paris: Editions Beauschene, 1979; Henry Chadwick, The Early Church, (London: Penguin, 1978)
10. See Sean Freyne, ‘The Geography of Restoration: Galilee-Jerusalem Relations in Early Jewish and Christian Experience.’ New Testament Studies 47 (2001) 289311; and ‘The Jesus-Paul Debate Re-visited and Re-Imaging Christian Origins,’ in K. O’Mahoney ed, Christian Origins, (Sheffield: Sheffield Academic Press, 2003) (forthcoming).
11. James M. Scott, Paul and the Nations. The Old Testament and Jewish Background of Paul’s Mission to the Nations, WUNT 84 (Tübingen: ].C. B. Mohr, 1995).
12. Sean Freyne, ‘Galileans, Itureans, Phoenicians: A Study of Regional Contrasts in the Hellenistic Age,’ in Collins and Sterling eds. Hellenism in the Land of Israel, 182-217, especially 184-188.
13. Robert Wilkin,. The Christians as the Romans Saw Them, (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1984).
14. Lee Levine ed., Ancient Synagogues Revealed (Jerusalem: The Israel Exploration society, 1981); and Judaism and Hellenism in Antiquity, 149-60.
FOOTNOTES
