The Oxford History of the Biblical World (98 page)

Campenhausen, Hans von.
The Formation of the Christian Bible.
Trans. J. A. Baker. Philadelphia: Fortress, 1972. Classic analysis of the transmission and canonization process for the Old and New Testaments.

Dunn, James D. G.
Unity and Diversity in the New Testament: An Inquiry into the Character of Earliest Christianity.
2d ed. Philadelphia: Trinity Press International, 1990. Dunn elucidates a variety of issues and approaches found in the New Testament documents, but he also argues for particular thematic points of unity.

Georgi, Dieter. “Who Is the True Prophet?” In
Christians among Jews and Gentiles: Essays in Honor of Krister Stendahl,
ed. George W. E. Nickelsburg and George W. MacRae, 100–126. Philadelphia: Fortress, 1986; also
Harvard Theological Review
79 (1986): 100–126. A provocative
look at the interplay of imagery between Roman imperial propaganda and the earliest Jesus movement.

Harris, Stephen L.
The New Testament: A Student’s Introduction.
3d ed. Mountain View, Calif.: Mayfield, 1998. A good, basic introduction to the Greco-Roman world and New Testament literature.

Henig, Martin, ed.
A Handbook of Roman Art: A Comprehensive Survey of All the Arts of the Roman World.
Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 1983. An insightful collection of essays.

Horsley, Richard A., ed.
Paul and Empire: Religion and Power in Roman Imperial Society.
Harrisburg, Pa.: Trinity Press International, 1997. An illuminating collection of essays on Roman social, political, and religious realities, and the development of the church within that context.

MacMullen, Ramsay.
Paganism in the Roman Empire.
New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 1981. Building on extensive literary evidence and material remains, MacMullen explores fundamental questions about what the Romans believed and why.

Millar, Fergus.
The Emperor and the Roman World 31
BC-AD
337.
Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 1977. Emphasizes the increasing significance of the emperor’s relationship with the provinces throughout the imperial period.

Price, S. R. F.
Rituals and Power: The Roman Imperial Cult in Asia Minor.
Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1984. A fundamental reassessment of scholarly approaches to honors offered to emperors in Asia Minor.

_________. “From Noble Funerals to Divine Cult: The Consecration of Roman Emperors.” In
Rituals of Royalty: Power and Ceremonial in Traditional Societies,
ed. David Cannadine and Simon Price, 56–105. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1987. Price surveys and interprets evidence for the deification of Roman emperors.

Roetzel, Calvin J.
The Letters of Paul: Conversations in Context.
Louisville, Ky.: Westminster, 1991. A solid introduction to Paul, his world, and his letters.

Safrai, S., and M. Stern, eds.
The Jewish People in the First Century: Historical Geography, Political History, Social, Cultural and Religious Life and Institutions. 2
vols. Assen, The Netherlands: Van Gorcum; Philadelphia: Fortress, 1974–76. A sweeping consideration of formative Judaism.

Schüssler Fiorenza, Elisabeth.
In Memory of Her: A Feminist Theological Reconstruction of Christian Origins.
New York: Crossroad, 1983. A fundamental work of feminist New Testament criticism, highlighting the ways in which stories of women’s involvement in the earliest churches have been lost and hidden in the transmission of traditions.

Stark, Robert.
The Rise of Christianity: How the Obscure, Marginal Jesus Movement Became the Dominant Religious Force in the Western World in a Few Centuries.
Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1996. A leading sociologist examines the origins of the church and its rise to prominence.

Suetonius.
The Lives of the Twelve Caesars.
Trans. J. C. Rolfe. 2 vols. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1979. Latin text with facing English translation, with introduction and limited notes.

Zanker, Paul.
The Power of Images in the Age of Augustus.
Trans. Alan Shapiro. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1988. Explores the use and effectiveness of political and religious imagery in Augustan art.

Jews and Christians in the Roman Empire

BARBARA GELLER

A
mid great upheaval in Palestine, the first century witnessed the emergence of Christianity and rabbinic Judaism. Both were survivors of what was, before the Roman-Jewish War of 66–73/74
CE
, a more diverse Judaism. Shared characteristics contributed to their survival. First and foremost, neither the Pharisaic-rabbinic nor the Christian communities fought as organized groups against the Romans. Second, neither required for its survival the Jerusalem Temple, which the Roman army destroyed in 70, although both continued to maintain an attachment to the city. Moreover, both were portable and as such were not location-dependent. Each offered its adherents the identity of “Israel” and an understanding of Torah that enabled it to adapt readily to changing times, and each developed its own authoritative scriptural canon. Finally, both rabbinic Judaism and Christianity offered believers a retributive afterlife and the possibility of right relationship with God and eternal salvation, and they encouraged their devotees to develop mechanisms to care for the needy and the oppressed.

The Gospel of Matthew, a late first-century Jewish-Christian document, likens the scribes and Pharisees (the antecedents of the rabbis) to hypocrites, paradoxically acknowledging the similarities between the Matthean and the Pharisaic-rabbinic communities. In terms of doctrine, the differences between the Pharisee-rabbis and the Matthean community may have been modest, especially from the Roman perspective. Nor was it clear at the time that a belief in Jesus as the risen Messiah would evolve as a permanent boundary marker between Judaism and Christianity. By the close of the century, however, the process of separation was well under way. This may be the context for the Gospel of John’s use of the term
the Jews
as a multipurpose designation for the opponents of Jesus. The language of John 8.44 is especially forceful:
in response to the Jews’ assertion that they have one father, God, Jesus says, “You are from your father the devil, and you choose to do your father’s desires.” Such language probably reflects the pain and anger of the Jewish-Christian Johannine community, a tiny group within a small minority community, as it became separated—divorced in a sense—from the larger Jewish community, and as it sought to develop its own identity outside this “other” Judaism in the often hostile environment of the Roman Empire.

In the aftermath of Titus’s capture of Jerusalem in 70
CE
, the Roman senate honored Titus and his father, the emperor Vespasian (69–79), with a grand triumphal procession, later memorialized in the Arch of Titus, which still stands in Rome. However, although the Roman army had succeeded in crushing the Jewish rebels, it failed to crush the spirit of rebellion, fueled in part by anti-Roman and militant messianic sentiments, which exploded again during the reigns of Trajan (98–117) and Hadrian (117–38). Papyri, inscriptions, and archaeological data, as well as the writings of Appian and Dio Cassius and of the later Christian historians Eusebius and Orosius, provide evidence of a massive uprising of the Jews of Egypt, Cyrenaica, and Cyprus.

The revolt probably began early in 115 and was quelled roughly two and a half years later. Although its causes are uncertain, longstanding tension between the Jewish and Greek communities of the region, especially in Alexandria, was a factor, and Palestinian Jewish refugees who had fled to Egypt and elsewhere after 70 may have fanned nationalistic and messianic sentiments. Even if the revolt began as a conflict between the Jewish and non-Jewish populations, however, Rome was soon involved. Trajan sent Marcius Turbo, one of the leading generals from his ongoing campaign against the Parthians, to suppress the rebellion. Dio names one “Andreas” as the leader of the uprising in Cyrenaica; Eusebius may be referring to the same individual as “Lucuas their king.” The significance of the designation
king is
unclear, but the uprising may have had messianic underpinnings, and, if so, Lucuas may have been regarded as a messianic figure by some. In either case, the data clearly reveal the widespread and devastating character of the revolt, including not only the deaths of thousands of Jews and non-Jews but also the great destruction by Jewish rebels of land and property, including many temples and sacred precincts. In its aftermath, the Jewish communities of Cyrenaica and the formerly populous Jewish communities of Alexandria and the Egyptian countryside decreased in number and significance. The situation in Cyprus was only slightly better.

Although the data are sketchy, it is likely that the Jews of Mesopotamia, newly annexed by Rome, participated in an anti-Roman rebellion that began in 116. It was suppressed by another of Trajan’s leading commanders, Lusius Quietus, who was awarded with an appointment as the first consular legate of Judea. Quietus also took steps to suppress unrest among the Palestinian Jewish population.

This unrest probably in turn contributed to the outbreak of the third and final major Jewish anti-Roman rebellion, the war of Bar Kokhba. This uprising centered in southern Judea, the region of biblical Judah, and lasted from 132 to 135
CE
. Here, too, the causes, character, and course of the revolt are imperfectly known. The pagan, Christian, and rabbinic sources are mostly later, are often inconsistent, and have their
respective biases and concerns. But recent discoveries at sites in the Judean desert, including coins and letters from the rebel forces, have allowed historians to look anew at the revolt.

The leader of the revolt was Simeon bar Kosba, or Kosiba, referred to in Christian sources (and perhaps by those Jews who regarded him as the Messiah) as Bar Kokhba—literally, “son of a star.” Rabbinic sources portray the venerable Rabbi Akiba as having regarded Bar Kokhba as the Messiah, although many other sages did not. Indeed, the belief in Bar Kokhba’s messiahship was not necessarily widespread among his followers. The coinage of the rebels identifies him as the
nasi,
or head, of Israel, and his letters further substantiate the scope of his authority among the rebels to whom he issued orders concerning military, economic, and religious matters.

The strength and early successes of the rebels alarmed the Roman government. Hadrian went so far as to summon, from the opposite end of the empire, one of his top generals, Julius Severus, then serving as governor of Britain. And Hadrian himself, writing from the front, failed to greet the Roman senate with the customary opening, “If you and your children are in health, it is well; I and the legions are in health”—another indication of the severity of the situation. According to the historian Dio Cassius, Hadrian’s lapse was due to the great losses suffered by his troops. But the Roman army finally prevailed, defeating the rebels decisively at Bethar, southwest of Jerusalem.

The revolt had many causes. Anti-Roman nationalistic unrest and militant messianic sentiments were key factors, as probably was the confiscation of Jewish land by the Roman government in the aftermath of the First Jewish Revolt. The latter contributed to the growing impoverishment of the Judean peasantry, many of whom may have participated in the uprising. If Dio is correct, Hadrian’s plans to build a Roman city on the site of Jerusalem precipitated the revolt, while a later source attributes it to the emperor’s prohibition of circumcision.

In the aftermath of the revolt, the Roman government changed the name of the province from Judea to Syria Palaestina. Jews may have been banned from Jerusalem and its vicinity, although the degree to which such a ban was enforced by later emperors, as well as its duration, are unclear. Jerusalem was transformed into the Roman city of Aelia Capitolina, and it was given the coinage and architecture typical of Greco-Roman cities of this era, continuing Hadrian’s policy of hellenization in the Roman east.

The War of Bar Kokhba resulted in great loss of life and in the destruction of many Judean towns and villages, and the heartland of the Jewish population shifted to Galilee, which became the center of the emerging rabbinic movement. The militant anti-Roman agitation and messianism that had fueled the Jewish revolts of the first and second centuries
CE
quieted. Antoninus Pius (138–61) modified Hadrian’s ban on circumcision to allow Jews to resume its practice. Overall, later rabbinic literature reflects a kind of rapprochement with pagan Rome, an attitude of “live and let live,” and an appreciation as well of the perils of imminent messianic expectations and of false messiahs. Rabbinic literature preserves contradictory assessments of Bar Kokhba, depicting him both as the false messiah, a son of lies (Bar Koziba) who
brought ruin to his people, and also as an almost larger-than-life military and national hero.