03/21/2016
GODFEAR (Part 2 of 2)
How did these Jews manage? Our inscriptional and papyrological evidence in particular should caution us against taking at face value the confluence of classical ethnographers’ complaints of Jewish ἀσέβεια and ἀμιξία, rabbinic prescriptions in Avodah Zara, and modern notions of “orthodoxy” or of “monotheism.” Different Jews negotiated their responsibilities differently. The ephebes Jesus son of Antiphilos and Eleazar son of Eleazar appear in a first-century inscription that was itself dedicated to Heracles and Hermes, the gods of the gymnasium. A papyrus fragment of roughly the same period alludes to an athlete whose “Jewish load” (circumcision) publicly emphasized his Jewish identity precisely when his prowess in foot racing publicly expressed his Greek identity. One inscription, a synagogue manumission, invokes the God of Israel at its beginning while closing with the witness of Zeus, Gaia, and Helios; another, marking a tomb, likewise commemorates funds to be distributed on Passover, Pentecost/Shavuot, and Kalends. Jews in the city of Miletus reserved seats in the theater; they turn up elsewhere in hippodromes and odeons; they both watched and acted in pantomime performances. These sites host divine–human interactions as well as intra-human ones.
If we find Jews in pagan places, we no less find pagans in Jewish places. Some traveled to the temple of the Jews’ God in Jerusalem, where they collected in the largest courtyard (i.e. the court of Gentiles at temple mount in Jerusalem). Others, closer to home, appear variously engaged in diaspora Jewish activities, most specifically in and around the Jews’ “ethnic reading houses,” their prayer-houses or synagogues. These pagans range across a broad spectrum of activity, from occasional contact, to the voluntary assumption of some Jewish ancestral practices, to major benefaction and patronage. The first point to note about these crossover activities is that they seem to have been ad hoc, voluntary, and not all that unusual: after all, the pagan–Jewish foot traffic went in both directions. The second point to note is that such mutual and fluid arrangements—pagans (and, eventually, gentile Christians) in Jewish places and Jews in pagan (and, eventually, in gentile Christian) places was on the evidence both extremely widespread and extremely socially stable: for centuries into the Common Era, well into the post-Constantinian period, ideologues of separation—Christian literati, bishops, emperors, and rabbis—all still complain about it. In the cities of Mediterranean antiquity, it seems, often if not always, no fences made good neighbors.
How do we identify all these ancient actors as they comfortably cross these ethnic/cultural/“religious” lines? And do the data themselves give us any assistance in this effort? Some ancient formulations emphasize the “ethnic” aspect, though what we think of as “religious” behaviors would also be entailed: Jews can act “gentilely” or “paganly” (ἐθνικῶς) and pagans can act “Jewishly” (Ἰουδαικῶς) (Gal 2:14); non-Jews can “Judaize” and Jews can “Hellenize.” Other formulations emphasize the “religious” aspect, but they thereby entail an ethnic aspect as well. In this second category, in first- and second-century Hellenistic Jewish literary sources, we find pagans who “fear god;” and in later inscriptions, third through fifth century (and most dramatically in Aphrodisias), we find non-Jews who are identified as “godfearers.”
As with the English, so with the Greek: sometimes “godfearing” simply means “pious,” indicating nothing particularly about ethnicity. But sometimes, and especially in Jewish contexts, “godfearing” indicates what we might elsewhere find designated as “Judaizing” (e.g., as in Josephus, J.W. 2.18.2). Its “religious” cast notwithstanding, “godfearing” also connotes “ethnic” behaviors. This is all to say that we are looking at, and endeavoring to speak about, ancient Mediterranean phenomena; and in that cultural context, gods and humans formed family groups, and cult is another expression of ethnicity.
When can we as historians know which kind of “godfearer”—a pious person full stop, or a voluntarily Judaizing pagan—our ancient evidence bespeaks? As usual, we have to consider critically each case, without expecting complete agreement among our different interpretive arguments. Sometimes the “ethnicity”—thus, also, the “religious” orientation—of an inscription or (especially) of an incantation will elude us, thus reinforcing the larger social-historical interpretive point: different peoples mixed with and borrowed from each other. But sometimes we will find in our evidence a Roman synagogue benefactor (such as Julia Severa) or a Septuagint-celebrating pagan (Philo, Life of Moses 2.41–42) or a non-Jew who rests on the Sabbath (as in Juvenal’s satire). Such pagans are “sympathizers” or (to use another contemporary term) “Judaizers.” The particular inscription or mosaic or literary reference itself might not designate these Judaizing non-Jews specifically as “godfearers.” But as historians, might we?
I think so. “Godfearing” is one of those terms, like “Judaizing,” that is both emic and etic: that is, one of its ancient cultural definitions maps closely onto its modern, academic one. Historiographically, “godfearing” can serve us as an identifier for a long-lived and internally various sub-group that evinced a broad range of behaviors (pious, political, practical) across this specific ethnic divide: the one between Jewishness and everything else.
Of course, “to Persianize” (Μηδίζειν) or “to Egyptianize” would likewise indicate crossover behavior between “everything else” and a particular ethnic/religious group. “Godfearing” specifically—that is, pagan Judaizing—is significant to historians of ancient Mediterranean religions, however, because of the ways that it complicates our conceptualization both of Roman-period Judaism and of ancient Christianity. If so many and such different diaspora Jewish communities over so great a stretch of time so readily accommodated such a broad range of interests and involvements from pagan neighbors, a standing separateness cannot be presupposed, for example, to account for Paul’s remarks in Galatians 2, or for “Peter’s” in Acts 10. Pauline communities need not be imagined as having the sort of biblical literacy crash courses that would be the envy of modern Methodists. And the later gentile Christian pattern of keeping Saturdays as the Sabbath, or of fasting on Yom Kippur, or of taking oaths before Torah scrolls need not be explained by appeal to a sudden interest, via the “Old Testament,” in Jewish practices, but can be seen for what it is: a long-lived social pattern within the Greco-Roman city.
Diaspora Jewish involvement in pagan cult and culture also needs to be seen, and to complicate our conceptualization of Roman-period Judaism and of ancient Christianity. We do not have a contemporary term for this ancient (and entirely unremarkable) Jewish behavior in the way that we do, with “godfearing,” for the corresponding pagan behavior. Terms such as “assimilated” or “not orthodox” come from much later periods of European Jewish history, and inevitably embody anachronistic value judgments. (And “Hellenized” seems too non-specific: after Alexander, what eastern Mediterranean culture was not to some extent “Hellenized”?) Still, the nonexistence of an ancient term for “paganizing Jews” does not, it seems to me, require that we let go of an existing ancient term for “Judaizing pagans.”
These normal Jewish negotiations with the majority culture should also complicate our construction of what it meant for a pagan to “become” an “ex-pagan”—a “convert” in our modern terms, a προσήλυτος (and that only eventually) in Hellenistic Greek. If native Jews (such as, perhaps, Pothos [Ameling, Inscriptiones Judaicae Orientis, 1:303–7]) summoned lower gods to witness synagogue manumissions, or if one (such as Moschos son of Moschion [Ameling, Inscriptiones Judaicae Orientis, 1:177–80]) placed inscriptions honoring foreign gods in foreign temples while identifying himself as “Ἰουδαῖος,” how uninvolved with his former gods need a προσήλυτος actually have been? And what would it mean, via ritual actions, to change ancestors and ethnic groups? What, indeed, would it mean in antiquity “to convert”?
These are important and interesting questions, none of which I can address in the space remaining here. But, given the difficulties that we have when speaking of all these mixing and mingling gods and humans, it seems overfastidious to shelve our hybrid emic/etic term that can still work, should we choose to let it, to identify some of these ancient actors: a “godfearer” is a pagan who voluntarily assumes (like the sympathizing father in Juvenal’s Satire 14), or who supports (like the patron Julia Severa, who builds the οἶκος for Acmonia’s Jews [Ameling, Inscriptiones Judaicae Orientis, 2:348–55]), or who utilizes (like the adept who invokes “the God who was a pillar of fire by night” in order to work his spell, PGM 11.3,007–85) some aspects of Jewishness, which eo ipso implies some degree of contact both with (local) Jews and (thus and also) with their god. As an identifying category, such a term may indeed be “sweeping,” but so is the phenomenon that it names.
For all the reasons reviewed above, then, but especially for this last one, I would not give up the “godfearers.”
“If It Looks like a Duck, and It Quacks like a Duck . . .”: On Not Giving Up the Godfearers - Paula Fredriksen, The Hebrew University, Jerusalem
