Potter, 'Mission and Conversion: Proselytizing in the Religious History of the Roman Empire', Bryn Mawr Classical Review 9501
URL = http://hegel.lib.ncsu.edu/stacks/serials/bmcr/bmcr-9501-potter-mission
@@@@95.1.3, Goodman, Mission and Conversion
Martin Goodman, Mission and Conversion: Proselytizing
in the Religious History of the Roman Empire. Oxford:
Clarendon Press, 1994. Pp. 194. $39.95. ISBN
0-19-814941-7.
Reviewed by David Potter -- The University of Michigan
Martin Goodman proposes a number of novel and
interesting views of Judaism, Christianity and polytheism in
this lucid and intelligent book. Although his principal
contention will remain controversial, the book as a whole
rates as one of the best works on religion in the Roman
empire to be published in recent years. G.'s main contention
is that active proselytism was not a feature of Judaism before
the second/third centuries AD, and that the roots of Christian
proselytism lie in the peculiar nature of the Christian
community immediately after the crucifixion.
G.'s view is argued with admirable clarity and
intelligence through eight chapters. The first concerns the
general nature of missionary activity (or lack of it) in
classical polytheism. G. suggests that active proselytism, the
determined effort to convince people to participate in one's
own form of worship, is a very rare religious phenomenon.
Three more typical forms of missionary activity are the
informative, letting people know what a marvelous thing a
particular divinity has done; the educational, making sure that
people have the correct information about a particular
divinity; and the apologetic, the request of others that they
acknowledge the importance of one's own divinity. In the
second chapter G. discusses the diffusion of cults and
philosophies throughout the Mediterranean in such a way as
to suggest that in neither case can it be shown that people
were actively interested in acquiring converts from amongst
the unenlightened, and that "no pagan seriously dreamed of
bringing all humankind to give worship in one body to one
deity" (p. 32).
In the chapters three and four G. turns to the Jews.
He argues that no non-Christian Jew is known to have
believed that gentile renunciation of polytheism "would hasten
the arrival of future bliss" (p. 55). Thus it was unlikely that
many Jews objected to the practice of polytheism outside of
the Holy Land, and that there was no inherent pressure from
within the faith to convert them. G. builds upon this
conclusion in an effort to demonstrate that the texts that are
generally taken to reflect active proselytism by Jews in the
period before the destruction of the temple cannot bear the
weight that is placed on them.
In the following chapters G. traces what he sees to be
the Christian attachment to "a proselytizing mission that was
a shocking novelty in the ancient world" (p. 105); and then
suggests (chapter six) that it was precisely in the second
century AD that a new attitude towards gentiles becomes
evident in Judaism. Broadening the argument to be found in
his important article on Jews and the fiscus Judaicus
(JRS 79 (1989), 40-44) and elsewhere, G. suggests
that a new Jewish identity emerged after 96 AD that was the
result of the Roman interest in defining who was a practicing
Jew for tax purposes. Since the Roman state had decided to
define Jews in terms of religious behavior, many Jews adopted
this definition for themselves. The notion that Jews should
therefore be hostile to other forms of religious behavior was
adopted by Jews themselves, and it manifested itself in the
revolt of 115-117. Motivated in part by this new feeling
towards polytheism, and in part by rivalry with Christianity,
Jews subsequently became more interested in attracting
converts (p. 152, and the theme of chapter seven in general).
This manifests itself, among other things, "in the common
Rabbinic depiction of Abraham as a missionary" (p. 144). In
the final chapter G. explores the implications of his thesis for
our understanding of the rise of Christianity.
In his discussion of missionary behaviors G. seems to
be defining the issue in terms of Judaism and Christianity,
where participation in the cult involved renunciation of
others, and contrasting this simply with civic cult. His point
is that, since the decision to worship a new divinity within the
framework of classical polytheism did not mean that one
stopped worshipping the divinities whom one had formerly
worshipped, proselytism of the Judaeo-Christian sort could not
exist. Certainly the celebrants of the Mysteries of Demeter at
Eleusis did not feel impelled to run around the Aegean trying
to attract new initiates, but they were evidently quite pleased
when new people sought initiation; the search for new
worshippers does not seem to be a feature of normal civic
cult, but the point of these cults was to commemorate an
existing relationship between a divinity and a community.
The question however remains: is the distinction between
"crossing over" and leaving something behind as opposed to
"adding on" really a valid one? Should we not be talking
about the provision of information with the aim of behavior
modification as opposed to the provision of information for its
own sake? For G. the answer is clearly no. But is there not
more to be said on the other side than he allows?
Religious institutions that were "active" in the sense that
they offered new information about the divine or invited
people to add a new form of worship to those in which they
already indulged were features of traditional polytheism. It is
plain that the priests of the god Apollo who recorded and
publicized his oracles were not seeking to acquire converts
who would be devotees only of Delphic Apollo. But were
they truly disinterested in acquiring new clients for their
oracle? Two incidents at either end of the third century BC,
the epangelia of the Soteria at Delphi and the
epangelia of the games in honor of Artemis Leucophryene at
Magnesia on the Meander, may suggest that the desire for
recognition of a divine manifestation involved seeking people
who would come long distances to participate in something
that they might otherwise ignore. In the second century AD,
the rise of the cult of Glycon at Abonuteichos involved the
dispatch of informants around the Mediterranean to acquire
new clients for the oracle. These are not cases where efforts
to inform were simply aimed at the education of other people:
they were efforts at information that invited behavior
modification. Behavior modification in this sense involves
addition rather than transformation. In this sense the
technical meaning of proselyte, a person who crosses over
from one faith to another, is inappropriate, but so too is
restriction of missionary activity that involves change of habit
to acts that must involve abandoning prior convictions.
G.'s further argument is that information, education
and apologetic were the essence of Jewish communication
with outsiders before the destruction of the temple in 70 AD,
and that informing with the aim of acquiring converts to
Judaism only became common when Christianity was
perceived as a major success and rival. There are two
problems with G.'s view. The first is the need to explain
away evidence prior to 70 AD that points to proselytism with
the aim to convert, and the second is the implicit assumption
that Christianity was a major religion in the Roman empire
prior to Constantine. The latter view is founded upon the
work of Harnack at the beginning of this century, and, to my
mind at least, is highly questionable. Fundamental to this
position is the view that people were increasingly finding their
traditional cults unsatisfactory, and were turning toward forms
of worship that offered greater personal satisfaction. Half a
century of work by Louis Robert seems to me to suggest that
this view lacks any solid foundation, and that the conversion
of Constantine was the crucial event for altering the religious
balance in the Mediterranean world. The martyrdoms of
Polycarp and Pionius may be adduced as evidence for
particular rivalry between the Church and the Synagogue, but
they both occurred in Smyrna, and there is little evidence
anywhere else of Jewish participation in Christian persecution.
There is also some evidence to suggest that trouble between
the two faiths could be provoked by Christians seeking
martyrdom rather than by Jews attempting to suppress rivals.
The specific argument that proselytism was not a
feature of Judaism before 70 AD is based upon two
propositions. These are that Judaism was significantly
reformed after the destruction of the temple, and that four
passages usually taken to prove the existence of active
proselytism in pre-Flavian Judaism do not do so. One is a
passage of Cassius Dio in which the historian appears to say
that the reason that Jews were expelled from Rome was that
they were converting Romans (Dio 57. 18.5). The second is
Horace Sat 1.4.142-3: veluti te Iudaei cogemus
in hanc concedere turbam, the third is Philo, De vita
Mosis 2.25-36, a description of the reasons for the
translation of Jewish scripture; the fourth is Matt 23.15. G.'s
arguments are, in turn, that Dio is unreliable (his account
differs from Josephus' more detailed version in AJ
18.81.1-3); that Jewish apologetic literature was addressed to
Jews and thus that Philo's words don't reflect a general
attitude towards outsiders; and that the real meaning of
Matthew is a criticism of Pharisees who are trying to convert
other Jews to their way at the time that the Gospel was
written in the late first century. He further suggests that
prosFlutow does not only mean "convert to Judaism" in
pre-second century AD Jewish literature (p. 69-74). It is also,
as G. observes, a word used in the Septuagint to translate
terms for resident aliens. This is entirely beside the point
here: the Scribes and Pharisees are not crossing land and sea
to make a resident alien. So too, in his discussion of the
Horace passage (p.74), G. suggests that the reference may be
to the forced conversion of Idumaeans or to the general
tendency of the "Jewish crowd" to force people to misbehave.
The whole passage reads: hoc est mediocribus illis | ex
vitiis unum: cui si concedere nolis, | multa poetarum veniat
manus, auxilio quae sit mihi (nam multo plures sumus), ac
veluti te | Iudaei cogemus in hanc concedere turbam.
In the context of this poem, the reference is surely to
something familiar to the Roman experience: we will force
you (despite your complaints about poets) to become a poet,
just as the Jews force people to become Jews. It seems to me
that G.'s effort to remove the conversion of outsiders from
Judaism before 70 AD is therefore unsuccessful, though his
further caveat that Judaism should not be seen as a
monolithic faith with a single doctrine is truly important.
Opinion was divided on this matter, just as it was in the
earliest church.
In addition to the passages cited above, G. suggests that
the view of Abraham as a convert rather than a proselyte was
typical of the Hellenistic world, and that the view of Abraham
as the archtypical proselyte was characteristic of the new
world of the Talmud (p. 89; 144-48). The Hellenistic
evidence, as Erich Gruen has shown, is rather more
ambivalent on this point than G. admits: both Abraham and
Moses appear in traditions connecting the Jews with Greeks
and others at very early periods in their history
(TAPA 123 (1993), 10-12). This may not be quite
the same thing as the active proselytism, but the evolution of
this kind of interpretatio Judaica suggests an interest
in convincing outsiders of the superiority of the Jewish
tradition. On a more problematic level, G. cites an
unpublished oracular text from Oxyrhyncus as evidence for
hostility to impious Jews who are interested in destroying
pagan temples as being from the period around 115 AD (p.
127). This has been the prevailing view in modern
scholarship, as it appears that the papyrus was copied in the
second century AD. But copying and composition are not the
same thing. A re-examination of the contents of the oracle by
Gideon Bohak shows that it was written in the Ptolemaic
period (Journal for the Study of Judaism
[forthcoming, 1996]). Thus two features of Judaism that G.
suggests are developments of the period after 70 appear to be
options within Judaism before the birth of Christ.
In the final chapter of his book, G. deals with the
implication of his earlier argument: if proselytism to gain
active converts was extremely rare, and not a feature of
Judaism, whence came the Christian urge to acquire converts?
It is well known that this was not an inevitable development,
and that Paul appears to have been the crucial figure in
setting this path for the church. But where did he get the
idea? G. suggests that:
eschatological fervour, the peculiar personality of Paul, and
the gradual disappointment of early Christians waiting in vain
for the Parousia, all contributed to the enthusiasm of those
believers to do something; in such conditions lack of action
might too easily lead to depression and loss of faith. But
some extra factor was needed to ensure that the direction
taken by these enthusiasts was the mission to the gentiles (p.
167-8).
This extra factor was a Christian reaction to "hostility inside
their own ranks to the indiscriminate acceptance of gentiles by
declaring that this was not only permitted, but positively
desirable." The Christians reached this decision because it
was characteristic of Jews to argue about God's will in a way
that polytheists did not, and that, "it was a further
characteristic of some elements of Judaism at least that fierce
polemic might sometimes result in one side positively urging
an action which they logically only wished to insist was
permitted" (p. 170-71). This is very persuasive, and, to my
mind, all the more so, if it is allowed that the active search
for gentile converts was already established as a point of
discussion within the framework of Judaism.
Despite obvious disagreement on several important
points, I should stress that this book is an extremely valuable
contribution to our understanding of important issues in the
religious history of the Roman world.