Of the religious groups in first-century Judaism dealt with so far it is the Pharisaic which has had the most lasting influence. It developed into Rabbinic Judaism and has persisted to the present. But one other contemporary Jewish group can be compared with it in continued influence. It is the one that arose in response to Jesus of Nazareth, his life, death and resurrection, and ultimately evolved into the Christian Church. The origins of Christianity are immensely complex. They have usually been approached in two main ways which, paradoxically enough, have not been mutually exclusive. One approach, not strictly historical, bearing the authority of a very long history and renewed with vigour in the first half of the twentieth century, has emphasized the radical newness of the Christian Gospel as a supernatural phenomenon breaking into the world with a startling discontinuity which defies rational analysis. The other approach, more characteristic of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, has sought to understand the emergence of Christianity as a phenomenon to be interpreted within and over against the contemporary first-century religions. The second approach has generally forked in two directions, one leading to the Graeco-Roman world and one to the Jewish. The Christian movement has correspondingly been illumined mainly in terms either of Hellenistic syncretism or of the Judaism of the first century. Only in the twentieth century has the recognition grown that the Hellenistic and Judaic cultures and religions of the first century cannot be easily separated but reveal deep interpenetration (see herein pp. 680–1).

Women took part in synagogue services in the ancient world, and sometimes received official titles like ‘ruler of the synagogue’ or ‘elder’. So much is clear, and the situation in antiquity evidently contrasts with the less prominent position of women in the synagogue at some later periods; but interpretation is hampered by lack of detailed information on the ancient synagogue. Did women worship apart from men, perhaps, as in mediaeval and later times, in a special section of the building? Did women with official titles carry out the functions of the offices concerned, and thereby take part in the government of the synagogues?

Since the early nineteenth century these historical questions have been ardently debated against the background of women's emancipation and synagogue reform. Signs of the times were the opening of the partition between the men's hall and the women's hall of the mediaeval synagogue of Worms (1843), and the discontinuance of the use of a women's gallery by the Berlin ‘Genossenschaft für Reform im Judenthum’ (1845); and in the USA ‘family pews’ and female office-holders gradually became familiar during the nineteenth century in reformed congregations.

More recent writing again reflects the impetus of women's movements in Judaism and Christianity, but can also draw on intensified study of women in the ancient world. No more is attempted in what follows than to indicate and assess evidence bearing on the two linked questions of women's place in communal worship and women as office-holders. The broader issues implied but not explored below were ironically evoked in 1913 by an essayist who entitled her study ‘Woman's Place in the Synagogue’.

The greatest problem in reconstructing the history of the Samaritans during the first centuries of Roman rule is the dearth of literary sources and the overtly hostile nature of those sources, both Jewish and Christian, which have survived.

Josephus was unwilling even to consider the Samaritans Jews: ‘When the Jews are in difficulties, they deny that they have any kinship with them, thereby indeed admitting the truth, but whenever they see some splendid bit of good fortune come to them, they suddenly grasp at the connection with them, saying that they are related to them and tracing their line back to Ephraim and Manasseh, the descendants of Joseph’ (Ant. xi.341). The polemical tone of this passage is obvious. But even in Josephus' famous description of the Jewish sects (Bell. ii.119–66), where the Samaritans do not appear at all, modern scholarship has detected anti-Samaritan motivation in his handling of his sources. It has been argued that underlying both Bell. ii.119ff and a similar description of the Jewish sects by the Patristic author Hippolytus (Philosophumena, Bk. 9, end) was a common literary source on the sects, which each writer abbreviated and expanded in a way independent of the other. The common source was an account of ‘the three’ Jewish sects, Pharisees, Sadducees and Samaritans. To this, before it came into the hands of Josephus and Hippolytus, an account of the Essenes had been added, and the passages on the Sadducees and the Samaritans had been condensed into one to keep the number of the sects at three.

If any one were to be singled out as having done most to ensure that the movement inaugurated through the life, death and resurrection of Jesus of Nazareth became predominantly Gentile in a few decades, it was a Jew. He did so with no intention that it should thereby be divorced from Jews; the threat of its becoming so caused him great agony. His Jewish name was Saul and his Roman, Paul, which in his extant works written in Greek he naturally preferred. We know of him from letters which he wrote to churches, usually those which he himself had founded. We shall here use those letters which are generally agreed to be Pauline – 1 Thessalonians, Galatians, 1 and 2 Corinthians, Romans, Philippians, Philemon – but also more cautiously 2 Thessalonians and Colossians despite the doubts cast upon their authenticity. Unfortunately, none of them is addressed to a purely Jewish or to a Palestinian church. Acts, devoted for the greater part to Paul, is a secondary source, whose historical value cannot be casually dismissed, but must, however, be subordinated to that of the explicit and implicit history in the Epistles. The strictly Jewish sources, the Mishnah, the Midrashim and the Talmud, do not refer to Paul directly: cryptic references to him testily uncovered in these add nothing of significance. This almost total silence points to the intensity of Jewish opposition to Paul from the very beginning. Other apostates from Judaism such as the Tannaite Elisha ben Abuyah (Aher) continued to be referred to by the Sages; Jesus found a place in the Talmud.

The possibility that the religion of Jews in Galilee differed markedly from that of their compatriots in Judaea has been of considerable interest to modern scholars for two reasons. First, any such distinction, if it existed, might have profound implications for the career and teaching of Jesus and for the development of the early Church. Secondly, understanding of any distinctive practices and beliefs in Galilee before ce 135 might throw light on the development of Judaism after that date, for in the middle and late second century ce, following the expulsion of all Jews from the area around Jerusalem, the main centres of rabbinic learning were to be found in Galilee.

REASONS TO EXPECT A DIFFERENCE BETWEEN THE TWO AREAS

No literary evidence survives from Galilee to suggest that the inhabitants thought of themselves as Galileans rather than simply as Jews, and the detailed narrative set in Galilee by Josephus, the only contemporary author known to have been well acquainted with the region, singularly fails to mention anything special about the Judaism practised there. However, later rabbinic texts preserve traditions that religious life differed from that in the south.

PROBLEM OF DEFINITIONS AND SOURCES

Scholars have come to apply the term ‘baptist sects’ to a series of phenomena in the post-biblical (‘early Jewish’) and early Christian phases of religious history. The most comprehensive monograph written on the subject to date is, in fact, entitled Le mouvement baptiste en Palestine et Syrie (150 av. J-C–300 ap. J-C). The meaning and legitimacy of such a title are indeed, arguable, depending on one's interpretation of ‘baptism’ and of its liturgical significance in a religious community. Not every community practising immersion, of whatever form, is a ‘baptist sect’. The act of baptism must occupy a central place in its ritual, that is, should be more than a preparatory ceremony, and must bear a special significance in the beliefs of the sect. One may also think in terms of the ceremony as a sacrament, different from the common and widespread rites of lustration or ablution, even if this is not apparent in mere externals. The ceremony commonly takes the form of partial or total immersion of the believer in ‘flowing’ (that is, running) water, so the expression ‘bath of immersion’ or baptism (baptisma) is quite in order. The periodic repetition of this ceremony is certainly a distinctive feature of the typical ‘baptist sects’, but is not necessarily their principal characteristic, since a single celebration – in its central role referred to above – may be a sufficient hallmark of a community which has, in this very respect, cut itself off from a larger community, that is, become a sect. Most representatives of these movements are both ‘sectarian’ and ‘heretical’.

An important resource for the study of Judaism from the time of Alexander the Great down to the Byzantine period is the large and ever-growing body of Jewish inscriptions. To date, over two thousand texts, the majority from the third century ce or later, have come to light. Of these, roughly one third are from Judaea/Palestine, the rest mainly from the Mediterranean provinces of the Roman Empire, Italy and, above all, Rome itself. Access to the Diasporan evidence has been greatly improved within the last fifteen years: through the efforts of scholars based mainly at Tübingen and Cambridge, England, we now have up-to-date editions of the Jewish inscriptions of Cyrene, Aphrodisias, Egypt, Rome and western Europe. And once J. H. Kroll's edition of the Sardis synagogue inscriptions and H. Bloedhorn's Corpus jüdischer Zeugnisse in Griechenland, Kleinasien und Syrien become available, we shall be able largely to dispense with the Diasporan sections of J. B. Frey's Corpus Inscriptionum Iudaicarum. More problematic is the Judaean/Palestinian material. Many texts, particularly ossuary inscriptions from the last hundred years of the Second Temple period, remain scattered and/or unedited. Such thematic assemblages as have been made (e.g. of synagogue inscriptions) are not only partial but difficult of access for the Hebrewless reader. Of many texts (e.g. the epitaphs from Jaffa), CIJII, with all its imperfections, still provides the only easily accessible version. Only of the inscriptions from Beth Shearim and Masada do comprehensive modern editions exist.

The Dead Sea Scrolls are the single most valuable source for the study of Jewish prayer in the Second Temple period. Other evidence for Jewish prayer practice during this period is notoriously ambiguous: what prayers are preserved appear almost exclusively in literary contexts – either narratives or poetic collections – and references to liturgical prayer are rare. By contrast, in the Dead Sea Scrolls are collections of prayer texts for various designated occasions and indications of a detailed cycle of liturgical prayer such as is otherwise only clearly attested after the destruction of the second temple. Thus, this body of data is potentially a valuable link between the mostly ad hoc prayers glimpsed in the Hebrew Bible and the later synagogue liturgy.

On the other hand, neither the source of these prayers nor the relationship between those who prayed them and Judaism at large are obvious. Some view the prayers in the Dead Sea Scrolls as sectarian products representing a marginal practice of limited relevance to the study of Jewish prayer in general. According to this view, the Yaḥad (a common self-designation for the sectarian community in the Qumran texts) developed its liturgy in the place of the sacrificial cult from which it was alienated, anticipating by over two centuries the ‘service of the heart’ which would emerge after the destruction of the second temple. However, a growing conviction among scholars that many of the Dead Sea Scrolls did not originate within the Qumran community – and many of the prayer texts fall into this category – raises the possibility that these prayers reflect Jewish practice more widely.

THE DEAD SEA SCROLLS

The Dead Sea Scrolls (DSS) from Qumran comprise a corpus of nearly 800 ancient Jewish documents written in Hebrew, Aramaic and Greek. The texts were recovered in varying states of repair between 1947 and 1956 from eleven caves around the site of Khirbet Qumran on the northwestern edge of the Dead Sea. On the basis of the general results of palaeography, carbon dating and archaeology, it became clear that the writings stemmed from the last three centuries of the Second Temple period. Although much important material was published in the first two decades after the discovery, it was not until 1991 that numerous outstanding texts from Cave 4 were released. This event led to a revival of interest in the DSS, as well as the official publication of works previously available only to a small coterie of scholars.

To aid discussion, it is possible to divide up the DSS collection in several ways. One fruitful approach is to split the manuscripts into three categories: (a) books in use among all Second Temple Jews and later forming the Hebrew Bible defined by the rabbis after ce 70, (b) other works, including several Apocrypha and Pseudepigrapha, also circulating beyond the confines of the Qumran group, and (c) the so-called sectarian DSS apparently composed by the religious community behind the corpus. It is worth defining each class a little more carefully.

The first comprises biblical books which are written in Hebrew – either in the palaeo-Hebrew characters of the pre-exilic period or, more normally, the square script that predominated from post-exilic times.

Of all the Jews who have written in Greek, Philo of Alexandria is undoubtedly the greatest on account of the breadth and richness of his ideas, the number of his works and his brilliant literary qualities. No other author in antiquity has attempted with so much boldness the confrontation and symbiosis of Judaism with another philosophy and another culture. This, one would think, would have assured his work and his personality a posthumous life among the generations of Jews which have followed him throughout the Mediterranean. However, in general Judaism knew absolutely nothing about him for fifteen hundred years, until in the sixteenth century Azariah ben Moses dei Rossi, a man of great learning who knew little Greek but who read in the Latin translation all the ancient Greek writers, including the Fathers of the Church, revived his name and his writings.

These writings, however, had not disappeared in the course of so many centuries; Christians from the beginning knew of them, made use of them and copied the manuscripts until the printed editions of the Renaissance; in 1552, Adrien Turnèbe published the whole of Philo's treatises in Paris for the first time. But it is above all in the nineteenth century that Philo gradually came to have an increasingly important place in the history of religious and philosophical ideas, as also in literary history. For a century, one study has followed another: sometimes detailed monographs as Zeller already attempted when he devoted nearly a hundred pages to Philo in his monumental Philosophie der Griechen (vol. iii.2, Tübingen, 1852; edn 5, Leipzig 1923); sometimes one-sided essays which overlook the complexity of a man who is both a Greek philosopher nurtured by Judaism and also a Jewish thinker moulded by Greek culture, and which claim to sum up the character of this astonishing personality in a word by choosing one of the alternatives Greek or Jew.

In rabbinic tradition, the Pharisaic sages are described as the successors of the men of the ‘Great Synagogue’ and, ultimately, of Moses: ‘Moses received the Law from Sinai and committed it to Joshua, and Joshua to the elders, and the elders to the Prophets; and the Prophets committed it to the men of the Great Synagogue. They said three things: be deliberate in judgement, raise up many disciples, and make a fence around the Law.’ Following this introduction, the Mishnah commemorates famous sages, from Simeon the Just and Antigonus of Sokho down to Rabban Simeon ben Gamaliel. Committed to writing well after ce 70, this short ‘history’ of the Sages enabled the rabbis to make sense of and systematize the development of Jewish religious teaching in the aftermath of the catastrophe. Thus, m. Av. 1 may serve as the starting point of an inquiry into the history of Pharisaism, but not as its blueprint.

Before we can embark on our task, a few words concerning our sources are called for. The ‘classic’ texts which have been used by critical scholarship to reconstruct the history of Pharisaism are the works of Josephus, the New Testament and rabbinic works such as the Mishnah, the Tosefta, Tannaitic passages in both the Babylonian and the Jerusalem Talmuds and Tannaitic midrashim. To these we can now add, thanks to the discovery of the Qumran library, 4qpNah, 1qpHab, 4qpPs37, 4qTest, 11qt and, most importantly, 4qmmt. To a certain degree, 1 and 2 Maccabees and the Psalms of Solomon can also assist our reconstruction.

‘JEWS’ AND ‘GENTILES’: TERMINOLOGY

By Hasmonaean times the people of Palestine had survived and been increased by two thousand years of invasions. The Israelite invasion had been only one in a long series. The series had produced a stock of untraceable complexity, diversified by many small groups with recognizable local characteristics. Such groups were more conspicuous than the population's general uniformity, hence classical Hebrew had no word equivalent to our ‘Palestinian’; Pelishtim means ‘Philistines’, another peculiar group of invaders. ‘Canaanite’ was sometimes pressed into service for the whole non-Israelite population, but properly speaking the Canaanites were only one of the many little peoples whom the Israelites had found living in the land. According to the stories of the Israelite invasion they had shared possession with Perizzites, Hivites, Amorites, Jebusites, etc.

Such peoples the Israelites called ‘the goyyim’. Goy (the singular) refers to ‘an ethnic group considered as a political rather than a biological entity’; it was therefore rendered by the King James translators as ‘nation’. In this sense it was occasionally used for ‘Israel’ (the Israelites considered as a single group). More frequently, however, goy and goyyim were used of non-Israelite groups, often by antithesis to Israel, and pejoratively. Both singular and plural referred to ‘nations’ only; the classical Hebrew terms for a single alien, qua alien, were nokhri and zar. There was no term whatever for an individual who worshipped gods other than Yahweh, much less for all such persons. It was taken for granted that other nations worshipped their own gods (though individuals among them might also worship Yahweh), but until the end of the monarchy the Israelites thought of aliens primarily as strangers and as members of other nations, not as worshippers of other gods; there was no term for, nor concept of, ‘the heathen’ as such.

Who were the rabbis of second-century Palestine (the ‘tannaitic’ period)? What was their role in Jewish society? What was their relationship with their fellow Jews? In what areas did they exercise authority? What were the institutional bases of their power? In sum, what was the nature of the society in which the rabbis lived and worked? These are the primary questions to be addressed by this chapter.

I admit at the outset that these questions are not fully answerable, and that the answers, whether full or partial, do not yield a complete portrait of the social history of second-century Palestine. A thorough study of Palestinian society would have to treat all the elements of the population: Jews of all sorts (not just rabbis and not just those Jews who came into contact with rabbis), pagans (of all sorts), Christians (of all sorts), and Samaritans (of all sorts). Some of the inhabitants were rich, most were poor; some lived in cities, most lived in towns and villages; some were artisans and traders, most were farmers. The land was as diverse as its population and was divided into politico-geographical regions (Galilee, Samaria, Judaea, Idumaea, the coastal plain, the trans-Jordan, etc.) and sub-regions (notably upper Galilee and lower Galilee). The power structure which governed this complex land was also complex. In addition to the central Roman administration, both civil and military, many cities (poleis) had jurisdiction over substantial amounts of terrain. Other areas (toparchies) were governed from the towns and villages. Each religious group, whether or not recognized by the Roman state, had its own functionaries and temples.

The nature of Jewish liturgical expression in the period immediately preceding the destruction of the Second Temple and the loss of any semblance of Jewish political independence in 70 ce is clearly of interest to a wide body of scholarship. Historians of Jewish religious practice, analysts of Christian origins and students of the cultic forms in existence in the Hellenistic and Roman worlds all have sound reasons for seeking to reconstruct for themselves what may for the moment, pending the more accurate assessment and definition that I hope to offer, be referred to as ‘the early liturgy of the synagogue’.

In pursuit of this reconstruction, liturgists have sometimes turned for guidance to the authoritative Jewish prayer-books of almost a thousand years later, or even of the more modern period, and sought to extrapolate backwards, making assumptions that defy the vast chasms of history, geography and ideology that separate one millennium from another. Those who have adopted such a position have transplanted some or all of the rabbinic rites and customs of tenth-century Babylon or early mediaeval Europe to first-century Judaea and the surrounding Jewish Diaspora and declined to distinguish the continuity of some liturgical traditions from the patent novelty of others. However methodologically untenable the theory underlying such an approach, the picture painted of proto-rabbinism and its liturgical practice was a clear one, unobfuscated by doubts and complications.

Recent, more reliable research in the field tends, on the other hand, to stress the lack of concrete evidence, the questionable admissibility of sources even one or two centuries after the destruction of the temple, and the complex nature of Judaism in the time of Jesus and Hillel, thus shying away from a commitment to simple description and taking refuge in a welter of doubt and hesitancy.

Ownership and the means by which it is protected are the topic of the first section of this chapter. The second and third sections are devoted to land, and in particular to legal institutions providing for its exploitation and to legal remedies against the unwelcome activities of neighbours.

OWNERSHIP

Ownership (dominium) in Roman law is difficult to define, and the Romans themselves did not trouble to do this. The best approach seems to be to deal with the main ingredients of ownership and from that allow the meaning of the term to emerge. The discussion in this section does need to go into some detail, in particular about the remedies available to owners to protect their property. This is not (intended to be) pure self-indulgence: it is only from the details that a reasonably accurate picture of the security of property rights and commercial transactions such as sales can be obtained.

In particular, it is important to see how Roman law dealt with the perennial problem of stolen goods: movable property gets stolen. Often it is sold to an innocent buyer. Someone has to lose. All legal systems have to decide whether the loser should be the original owner or the innocent buyer. The choice has serious implications: on the one hand, it is important to protect existing property rights; but on the other, if buyers in good faith are liable to lose their purchases, commerce may be adversely affected.

Chapter I dealt with the main sources of Roman private law, in the sense of the formal sources which created it. This chapter is concerned with the use of Roman legal sources by the modern student or scholar. It gives an account of those sources and problems that arise in using them. Nearly all the surviving material of Roman law is transmitted in one or other of the emperor Justinian's compilations. The chapter begins with an account of the sources which survive independently of Justinian; it then moves on to the Digest and (very briefly) other parts of the Justinianic compilations. It concludes with a general discussion of the difficulties of trying to write history based on legal sources.

The emphasis throughout is on questions peculiar to the legal sources. No detail, for example, is given about problems relating to the transmission of texts, since this is not specifically a problem of the legal sources but one which affects all ancient literature.

SOURCES INDEPENDENT OF JUSTINIAN

Legal writings

The most important of the works which survive independently of the Justinianic compilations is the Institutes of Gaius, an elementary introduction to Roman law dating from about AD 160, and still the best introduction to the subject ever written. It contains a clear account of classical law and procedure, and also some valuable historical material of which the Digest preserves no record. It is preserved in a palimpsest discovered in Verona in 1816. It raises essentially the same textual critical problems as any other ancient work, and nothing in particular turns on the fact that it is a work about law.