Introduction

As the previous chapter has shown, Epicurean psychology is physicalist in ways that have some affinity to contemporary use of that explanatory model. The Stoic theory is harder to characterize though no less intriguing so far as scientific and philosophical issues are concerned. Modern western thinkers are likely to find the Stoics to be considerably more sophisticated than the Epicureans in analysing the faculties and subjective content of the mind but less plausible than their rivals in accounting for the mind's ontological foundations. By way of introduction, we may note some striking similarities and differences between the two theories.

Like the Epicureans, the Stoics identify the principle of sentient life with a corporeal psuchē. In both theories the psuchē is distributed throughout the limbs and organs of the animal, whether human or non-human. Like the Epicureans again, they draw a sharp distinction between the human mind (which they call ‘thought’ or the ‘governing part’ of the psuchē), located in the heart, and the rest of the psuchē (the ‘spirit’ in Lucretius’ Epicurean terminology), situated in all the other parts of the body. Ignoring differences of detail concerning the relation between the mind and the rest of the psuchē, we have something broadly analogous in both theories to the modern allocation of functions to the brain and the central nervous system respectively.

The physical constituency of the Stoic psuchē, together with its functional division into governing and instrumental parts, differentiates it sharply from the psychology of Aristotle as well as Plato. However, the Stoics’ similarity in these respects to Epicurus should not be overemphasized.

GNOTICISM

Jewish elements in gnosticism: the problem defined

It should be obvious even from a cursory reading of Gnostic literature that there are Jewish elements in Gnosticism. These elements are of many different kinds, and may be classified in many different ways, but for our present purposes it will be sufficient to distinguish two broad categories – biblical and non-biblical. To the first category belong the quotations from, or allusions to, the Old Testament in the Gnostic texts. (For convenience we may include here also much Gnostic exegesis of the Old Testament.) Into the second category may be put all those Gnostic ideas, motifs, literary genres, technical terms and formulae which have been paralleled more or less convincingly in post-biblical Jewish literature. It is important to realize that the significance of an element will vary according to the category into which it falls. The Jewishness of elements in category one is not, in the last analysis, open to question. We may speculate on how Old Testament materials found their way into Gnosticism (whether through Christianity, pre-Christian Jewish Gnosticism, or by direct borrowing from Judaism), but that they are Jewish can hardly be disputed. The Jewishness of elements in category two, on the other hand, is often problematic. We are dealing here in the first instance with parallelism, and that creates a host of problems. We must establish that the parallelism we perceive is real and significant – in itself no small task. Then we must face the question of origins: who has borrowed from whom? There is a tendency for scholars to assume that in cases of parallelism Gnosticism is indebted to Judaism.

DEFINING APOCALYPTIC

Much of the material in the Apocrypha and Pseudepigrapha dealt with in chapter 12 in volume ii is concerned with what is referred to as apocalyptic. This is an aspect of Judaism over which there has been much dispute as to its interpretation and significance, and it is appropriate at this point in the history to attempt to assess it. This is not because, as has sometimes been erroneously asserted, apocalyptic became a spent force after the Roman period: it continued, and broke out with volcanic intensity in the Sabbatianism of the seventeenth century and is still alive. An assessment is necessary here for another reason. The increasingly dominant Rabbinic form of Judaism, which gained ascendancy after the collapse of the revolts against Rome in the first century, overshadowed apocalyptic, sometimes aggressively rejected it and often came to regard concentration upon it as a menace. Perhaps particularly under the vast influence of the great work of G. F. Moore, who had reacted against what he considered an over-concentration on apocalyptic to the neglect of Rabbinic sources, the view became common that, like Seventh Day Adventism, for example, within contemporary Christianity, apocalyptic belonged to the fringes of Judaism. As a result it was urged that apocalyptic materials should not be taken as representative of essential Judaism: this distinction was reserved for more strictly Rabbinic sources.

This view was contested by W. D. Davies and others who rejected any sharp distinction between Pharisaic or Rabbinic Judaism and apocalyptic. And in recent years there has been renewed interest in apocalyptic and in its place in Jewish and Christian theology.

Whereas Judaism represents a highly distinctive phenomenon, especially in the history of religions, in several phases of its evolution it was exposed to outside influences. Already in earlier eras the geographical position of Syria and Palestine meant that the area was very open to commercial and cultural penetration from the direction of both Mesopotamia and Egypt, and of this there is abundant archaeological evidence. The early Israelite experience of Egypt is reflected in the traditions concerning Abraham's sojourn in that country and Joseph's splendid career there, however shadowy the historical background may seem, as well as in the much more fundamental impact of the tradition concerning Moses and the Exodus. Judaism belongs to a period of increasingly intimate contacts with other peoples. During the Persian period Jewish soldiers served their Persian masters in many areas, and their garrison at Elephantine on Egypt's southern border has well illustrated the tendencies which were apparent in the Diaspora. When Persian power yielded to Alexander and his successors, an era of quickened converse between nations ensued; and under Rome and Byzantium the process gathered still further momentum.

SOME EQYPTIAN RELIGIOUS CONCEPTS

It was in religion that Egypt exercised her most potent attraction. For close on three thousand years the religion of Pharaonic Egypt was preeminently a national religion. Theologically it was firmly linked to kingship, for each Pharaoh was in life equated with the national god Horus, while in death he became Osiris, the father of Horus; he was also called the son of Rê.

Introduction

Early in the Hellenistic period the Academy went sceptic. Sceptic it remained until the two leading figures in the school at the beginning of the first century BC, Philo of Larissa and Antiochus of Ascalon, adopted more sanguine positions on the possibility of cognition – albeit mutually incompatible positions. The philosopher who effected this change of outlook in the Academy was Arcesilaus, scholarch from c. 265 BC until his death around twenty-five years later, and reputed as a dialectician whose employment of the Socratic method led him to suspend judgement about everything. He impressed the contemporary polymath Eratosthenes as one of the two leading philosophers of his time. And in his assaults on the Stoic theory of cognition he established the principal focus of argument between the Stoa and the Academy for the best part of the next two hundred years.

The most notable of Arcesilaus' sceptical successors was Carneades, the greatest philosopher of the second century BC. Although like Arcesilaus – and in similar emulation of Socrates – Carneades wrote nothing, his pupil Clitomachus published voluminous accounts of his arguments on issues across the whole range of philosophical inquiry; and it is principally to this source that – albeit indirectly – we owe our knowledge of a subtle system of thought. In the course of his engagement with both Stoicism and Epicureanism Carneades worked out for the first time in Greek philosophy an alternative non-foundationalist epistemology, sometimes misleadingly dubbed ‘probabilism’ in modern discussions of his views – although whether Arcesilaus or Carneades had any views of their own, or were simply dialecticians intent on undermining the positions of others, is a disputed question.

Philosophical theology

Though theology without some form of religion to prompt it would be an odd phenomenon, it is by no means the same thing as religion. Theology, or at least philosophical theology, is a rational enterprise or at any rate an attempt to rationalize the irrational. Rationalist forms of reflection concerning the gods, or the divine, are part of Greek philosophy from its very beginning. On the one hand, the primary principle or principles were often said to be divine or provided with divine attributes, while on the other traditional views of the gods were criticized and other proposals formulated. But the first philosopher to elevate theology (at least in principle) to the status of a part of philosophy was Aristotle, who at Metaph. E 1.1026a19 affirms that there are ‘three theoretical disciplines: mathematics, physics, theology’. Before Aristotle, Plato had argued that those who write about the gods should follow certain ‘models’ (Rep. 379a6). According to this prescription, a god is good and so not the cause of evil but only of what is good, and he does not change but always remains the same. The sharp contrast with the gods of traditional Greek religion, who assume different shapes at will and may not only favour human beings but also deceive and harm them, is very deliberate.

Divinities which conform to this ideal play a decisive part in Plato's and Aristotle's cosmologies. According to Plato's Timaeus we live in the best of all possible worlds because it has been constructed by a Divine Craftsman and his help-mates.

THE SOURCES

Unlike the Pharisees and the Essenes, the Sadducees left no writings. Some scholars have thought to discover a Sadducaean tendency in First Maccabees, but it certainly cannot be considered a Sadducaean book. All the texts on the Sadducees at our disposal were written by their opponents or, at the least, by outsiders. They are necessarily selective and tendentious. Our main witness is Flavius Josephus who, being a scion of a high-ranking priestly family, might be expected to be close to the Sadducees or, at the least, to have inside information about them. He says that in his youth he tested the Sadducaean teaching and way of life, but his writings betray no special knowledge of them. He speaks of the Sadducees almost exclusively in connection with the other groups of the Judaism of his time.

The New Testament provides the earliest references to the Sadducees, in the Gospel of Mark. This gospel frequently names them among the opponents of Jesus, but it does not develop a coherent picture of them. For the New Testament, the Sadducees are entirely secondary to the Pharisees, who are represented as the main group of Judaism and the only important opponents of Jesus.

The Rabbinic sources frequently mention the Sadducees. But these texts have to be used with extreme caution: one has to discard those texts in which the term Sadducees replaces an original mín (which had to be removed because of Church censorship); only a few Tannaitic texts remain, and even they are not fully reliable historically; later texts display no specific knowledge of the historical Sadducees and offer clichés without revealing new information that can be trusted.

LIFE

Few scholars have been neutral in their judgement of the life of Josephus. In the nineteenth century there was an almost unanimous condemnation of him by Jews and Christians alike, a major exception being the Jewish scholar Hamburger, who regarded Josephus' own steadfast adherence to Judaism and his able literary defence of its tenets as providing sufficient ground for pardoning his supposed wrongs to the Jewish people.

Aside from Josephus' own autobiography and the references to his career in the Jewish War, the sources for his life are slight. Among pagan writers Suetonius (Vespasian 5.6), Appian (fragment 17) and Dio Cassius (lxvi.1) mention Josephus' prediction that Vespasian would become emperor; and Porphyry (De abstinentia et esu animalium iv.11) cites Josephus' discussion of the three philosophical schools. Perhaps the silence of the Talmud about him is due to the fact that he was an ‘outsider’, though Brüll has attempted to find a hidden reference to him in a minor Talmudic tractate (Der. Er. Rab. 5, Pirke Ben Azzai 3) which mentions a visit of several sages to a nameless (to be sure, pagan) philosopher in Rome seeking his intercession with the Emperor Domitian.

We know nothing of Josephus' life until the age of fourteen, when, according to Josephus (Vita 8), the chief priests and leaders of the city of Jerusalem constantly resorted to him for information concerning the laws. This is, however, a traditional motif in biographies, as we see, for example, in Luke 2:46–7.

Background

Our principal topic will be the views of the Stoics and Epicureans, and the various sceptical attempts to undermine their pretensions to explanatory understanding. Much of this is the history of polemic and dispute; but we may at the outset identify certain points of contact shared by all or most of the adversaries.

Most importantly, the Hellenistic causal theorists were materialists. And whatever materialism may be taken to amount to, most of them agree that causing is essentially corporeal: causal power is transmitted by bodily contact. Sextus notes that ‘some [sc. of the Dogmatists] say that body is what can act and be acted upon’ (S.E. PH III. 38; cf. M IX. 366), thus defining corporeality in terms of causal efficacy. Congruently, the Hellenistic period sees the emergence of the notion that, properly so called, a cause is something active. Plato had defined aition (‘cause’) quite generally as ‘that because of which (δι' ο) something comes to be’ (Crat. 413a); and Aristotle's four ‘causes’ (aitia: Phys. II. 3) include the material from which something is made, its structure, and its purpose, as well as whatever it is which made it. By contrast, for Seneca a cause is id quod facit, ‘that which actually does or produces something’ (Ep. 65.4); he objects to the ‘crowd of causes’ associated with the Platonists and the Peripatetics; design, purpose, and goal drop out of the causal vocabulary. Not that they disappear altogether; but for something to be a cause, an aition, now implies more than merely that it is an irreducible feature of a complete account or explanation of something, as it was for Aristotle.

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).

The origins of the question

The notion of universal causation was ubiquitous in later antiquity; to loosen those ties threatened the irruption of chaos. How could the evident continuity and regularity of the world survive the intervention of casual elements into its structure? Still, there is a clear distinction, one exploited by the Epicureans, between the assertion of a universal principle of causation and any determinism. It is one thing to accept that every event is caused, quite another to believe that the nature and sequence of all events is rigidly fixed for all eternity. The latter belief forms the core of any determinism – and it is its prima-facie implausibility, along with what are taken to be its unacceptable consequences (for human freedom, for the concept of responsibility), that lays it open to attack.

The origins of the problem in the Greek world were not, however, metaphysical. The Sophistic movement of the late fifth century BC was particularly interested in new forms of forensic argument, especially defence argument. Gorgias' Helen is a case in point: Helen of Troy is innocent of adultery, he argues, because she did what she did either under physical compulsion, or under the influence of love, or at the whim of some god, or persuaded by arguments. In none of these eventualities can she be held responsible for her actions, since in all of them she is compelled by some external force; the list is exhaustive; hence she is not responsible for what she did. Gorgia's rhetorical exercise is not serious philosophy, but it raises serious philosophical points. If our actions are indeed conditioned by factors that lie outside our control, how can we reasonably be held responsible for what we do? Society is, indeed, to blame: Gorgias is the Ur-progenitor of hard determinism.

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’.

Introduction

The Stoics are leading champions of the continuum, the Epicureans its leading opponents. Any such division of Hellenistic schools into continuists and discontinuists provides a useful skeleton, but one which needs careful fleshing out.

The Stoic world – like the Aristotelian world before it – is a continuum both materially and structurally: materially because it contains no void gaps, structurally because it is infinitely divisible, or divisible at any point. The Epicurean world is discontinuous in both ways: materially to the extent that it consists of bodies separated by void gaps, structurally both because those bodies are themselves unbreakable (‘atoms’) and because at a still lower level there is an absolute unit of magnitude not capable of analysis into parts (the ‘minimum’).

In case such a characterization should suggest that the material and structural continua are inseparably united, it is important to appreciate that this was by no means assumed by the contemporaries and immediate forerunners of Epicurus and Zeno. Strato of Lampsacus, head of the Peripatos during the later part of their careers, viewed the world as materially discontinuous, thanks to the existence of minute interstitial pockets of void, but as structurally continuous. If, as seems probable, he gave matter a particulate structure, this was in order to account for change, mixture and the like, and his particles were in no obvious sense indivisible. The same can probably be said of the puzzling theory of ‘dissoluble lumps’ (αναρμοι ογκοι) proposed by the Platonist Heraclides of Pontus in the mid or late fourth century BC.