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.

Why so much has been lost

We know a good deal about Hellenistic philosophy, but by no means as much as we would like to know. The reason is that with very few exceptions no works written by the Hellenistic philosophers themselves survive. The situation is therefore quite different from that in which we find ourselves with regard to the great classical philosophers, Plato and Aristotle. Plato's complete works have been preserved. Much of Aristotle's vast output has perished, but the philosophically more important part of his writings is still available. The reason for the preservation of these Platonic and Aristotelian corpora is that these works continued to be taught and studied in the philosophical schools. Treatises of Aristotle were taught by the late Neoplatonists as a preparation for the study of a set of dialogues by Plato, and those of his works which were not part of the curricula have mostly perished. The professional teachers of philosophy themselves were required to have perfect knowledge of practically everything these great masters had written.

But by the end of the third century AD the schools (in the sense both of institutions and schools of thought) which had been founded in the early Hellenistic period had died out. The works of Epicurus and his immediate followers, or of the great early Stoics for example, were no longer taught, though a preliminary instruction in the views of the main schools could still be part of a decent pagan education in the fourth and to a much lesser extent in the fifth and sixth centuries AD.

A map of logic

The Stoics were the innovative logicians of the Hellenistic period; and the leading logician of the school was its third scholarch, Chrysippus. Most of this section of the History will therefore describe Stoic ideas and Stoic theories. Its hero will be Chrysippus.

Logic is the study of inference, and hence of the items upon which inference depends – of propositional structure (or ‘grammar’), of meaning and reference. That part of their subject which the Hellenistic philosophers called γoλiκη (logikē) was a larger discipline; for logikē was the science which studies γóλoς in all its manifestations, and logic is included in logikē as a part. Indeed as a part of a part. For the Stoics divided logikē into two subparts, rhetoric and dialectic; and logic is a part of dialectic.

The founder famously distinguished rhetoric from dialectic by a gesture:

The gesture is picturesque, and it caught the imagination; but the thought behind it was neither original nor enlightening.

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.