In Search of Paul

HarperSanFrancisco

Chapter One

Jewish Faith and Pagan Society

The influence of Judaism on non-Jews in the Roman Empire was profound and lasting. This is paradoxical. For the exclusiveness of Jewish worship, and the strictness of the Jewish food laws, served as a barrier between Jew and gentile. Moreover the Jews do not as a rule appear to have actively propagated their religion. So evidently there was something in the nature of Jewish religion, and of the Jewish community, which satisfied a need felt by many within and even beyond the frontiers of the Empire.

-- Wolf Liebeschuetz, "The Influence of Judaism Among Non-Jews in the Imperial Period" (2001)

Judaism throughout the Hellenistic and Roman periods and even after thetriumph of Christianity showed tremendous vigor not only in strengtheningitself internally with the development of that remarkable document, the Talmud,but also in reaching out to pagans and later to Christians and winninglarge numbers as proselytes and as "sympathizers." ... Even after the threegreat revolts of 66?74, 115?17, and 132?35, the Jews were hardly powerless and indeed continued to win proselytes and especially "sympathizers." In short, the lachrymose theory of Jewish history, highlighting the weakness and suffering of the Jews, would not, on the whole, seem to apply to the ancient period.

-- Louis H. Feldman, Jew and Gentile in the Ancient World (1993)

Judaism, by the early third century, may well have been a more popular religionamong the pagans, and therefore a more powerful rival to Christianity inthe race for the soul of the Roman world, than we have had any reason to think until now. This helps us understand the tension between the Churchand the Synagogue in the first few centuries A.D.

-- Robert F. Tannenbaum, "Jews and God-Fearersin the Holy City of Aphrodite" (1986)

In the City of Aphrodite

Overture

You come to Aphrodisias on a full-day visit from Denizli, in southwesternTurkey. As you leave that city its innumerable modern textile factoriescontinue the area's ancient importance for the manufacture of cotton, linen,and woolen garments. So also do the flocks of sheep and goats that takeright-of-way across the narrow roads as you shortcut through the mountainsoff the main Denizli-Antalya road. It is a beautiful mid-September day in2002, cool and cloudy, with an odd shower early and late, so not really inconvenient.

Two thousand years ago, Octavian, the not-yet Augustus, said, "Aphrodisiasis the one city from all of Asia I have selected to be my own," and the citizenscarved that accolade on the archive wall of their theater. Since theGreek goddess Aphrodite was the Roman goddess Venus, from whom theJulian line was allegedly descended, the city was most fortunately named atthat precise historical moment. Millennia later, in Aphrodisias: City of VenusAphrodite, the frontispiece poem by L. G. Harvey says,

when all paper words
are turned to ash
there will remain
one scarred hillside
beautiful enough to last
forever.

Kenan Erim, of New York University, the city's Turkish-born excavator andthat book's author, spent his professional life there and is now buried most appropriately beside the reconstructed gate to Aphrodite's temple. He saidthat "of all the Graeco-Roman sites of Anatolia, Aphrodisias is the mosthauntingly beautiful" (1). Agreed.

The hamlet of Geyre once sat atop the ancient site, but was removed andrebuilt in its nearby location after an earthquake in the 1960s. That openedthe site for archaeology, but the old village square still underlies the new entranceplaza ringed by restrooms (very elegant), a restaurant (very limited),and a museum (very beautiful). You get there around 11:30 a.m. and have thesite almost totally to yourself. The morning tour buses heading west fromHierapolis and the hot-spring pools of Pamukkale are just leaving, and thosereversing that itinerary will not arrive until much later. You sit high up inthe once thirty-thousand-seat theater, eat a quiet picnic lunch, admire thestands of stately poplars amid the marbled ruins (Figure 7), and look east towhere the seven-thousand-foot tip of Baba Dag emerges periodically fromscudding cloud cover. At the foot of that mountain are the marble quarriesthat gave the city ready material for sculpture or inscription and made itsproducts famous far beyond its own borders. The Dandalaz tributary, fedfrom the snows of that eastern mountain range, circled the city's south sideand took sculptures northwestward to the ancient Meander, the modernBüyük Menderes, which carried them westward to the coast and the world.

Overview

What text do you read to see most clearly Paul's life, and what site do youvisit to see most clearly Paul's world -- even, or especially, if Paul himselfneither wrote that text nor visited that site? In this chapter two chosen sites,the city of Aphrodisias, now in southwestern Turkey, and the island of Delos,now in mid-Aegean Greece (Figure 8), frame two contradictory aspects ofthe chosen text, Luke's Acts of the Apostles, now a prelude to Paul's letters inthe New Testament.

We begin this chapter at Aphrodisias because it illustrates most forciblytwo major themes of this book, the relationship of Paul to Roman imperialtheology and to his Jewish religious tradition. The former theme focuseshere on the Sebasteion, or Augusteum, whose elegant gate, three-storiedfacing porticoes, and high-stepped imperial temple celebrated the RomanJulio-Claudian divinities by inserting them among and above the ancientgods and traditions of Greece. The latter theme focuses here on a Jewish inscriptionthat explicitly distinguishes Jews, converts, and a third category of"God-worshipers," with rather surprising numbers in each category ...

Excerpted from In Search of Paulby Crossan, John Dominic Excerpted by permission.
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