Who Made Early Christianity?: The Jewish lives of the Apostle Paul

BY the first century of the Common Era, Jews had lived outside of ancient Palestine for many centuries.1 In Babylon (modern-day Syria), Jews first arrived as forced exiles, following the defeat of the Israelites by Nebuchadnezzar in 587 BCE. Less than a hundred years later, when the new Persian/Achaemenid empire under Cyrus defeated the Babylonians and allowed the Jews of Babylon to return to their homeland, many had become so thoroughly settled in their new home that they chose to stay put. A thousand years later, the descendants of these early exiles, speaking the local language of Aramaic, still flourished there and created a new culture of Babylonian Jews among the learned rabbis whose post-Biblical teachings became crystalized as the Babylonian Talmud and numerous other writings.

The same events of 587 may also have seen the rise of Jewish communities in what will come to be known as Asia Minor (modern Turkey). The prophet Joel (ca. 350 BCE) writes of Jews from Judah and Jerusalem being sold (as slaves) to the Greeks (3:4). Another prophet, Obadiah, (in the first half of sixth century BCE) speaks of “exiles from Jerusalem,” probably following Nebuchadnezzar’s victory in 587, who are in Sepharad. At a much later date Sepharad will designate the Iberian Peninsula, but here it may well refer to the city of Sardis in western Asia Minor, the site of an important synagogue (discussed below). There is archeological and inscriptional evidence for Jewish communities in at least seventy-five cities in Asia Minor by the fourth century CE. As for Rome and Italy, Jewish settlements there seem to have come rather late, perhaps in the late second century BCE. Jewish communities certainly existed in the first century BCE. Roman authors speak of them frequently. When Paul arrived in Rome as a prisoner he met with the local leaders of the Jews (Acts 28:17). Some twenty or so years before Paul’s arrival, Philo of Alexandria led a delegation of Jews to plead their case against riotous mobs in Alexandria (40 CE). He reports that Jews enjoyed the protection of the emperor Augustus: “having been brought as captives (slaves), they were liberated by their owners…He [Augustus] knew that they have houses of prayer and meet together in them, particularly on the sacred Sabbaths, when they receive training in their ancestral philosophy.”² By the fourth century CE inscriptions reveal eleven different synagogues in the city, while Jewish catacombs spread out under the city. In short, well before Christians appeared on the scene at the end of the first century, Jewish communities had established themselves throughout the Mediterranean world and beyond.

In Egypt, the Jewish Diaspora reaches back at least to the same events of 587 BCE. The prophet Jeremiah, along with other Jews, wound up in Egypt (Jer 41ff.), presumably under the protection of the Pharaoh, who had supported the Israelites in their unsuccessful struggle against Nebuchadnezzar. But we learn from a trove of Aramaic papyri that, even before the time of Jeremiah’s self-imposed exile, perhaps as early as 650 BCE, a Jewish military garrison had been established in extreme southern Egypt, at a site called Elephantine or Yeb. Its function was to serve the Persians conquerors as guardians of Egypt’s southern borders. These Aramaic papyri relate events from the late fifth century—internal affairs of the Jewish community and a series of hostile encounters between the Jews and local Egyptian priests, as a result of which the Jewish Temple, not a synagogue but a Temple replete with priests and sacrifices, was destroyed. What became of the garrison after these events is wholly unknown.

By Philo’s time, the Jewish population of Alexandria and its environs had grown to many thousands. Quite naturally, Jews in Egypt had developed communal institutions—synagogues or, as they were called in Egypt, proseuchai (prayer-houses). As early as the middle of the third century BCE, an inscription refers to a proseuchê dedicated to the ruler Ptolemy III Euergetes and his wife Berenice. The surviving inscriptions and papyri make it clear these synagogues served a wide range of purposes, religious as well as financial and social. As for Philo, he speaks of them as educational centers, where Jews (and others?) gathered on the Sabbath to learn virtue from wise teachers.3 There is little doubt that Philo’s extensive commentaries reflect his own role as one of these teachers.

The number of synagogues in Alexandria is not known, although they must have been numerous. Philo speaks of “many proseuchai in the various sections of the city.”⁴ The most famous of those was undoubtedly the “great synagogue” described in the Tosefta and later Rabbinic texts. The version in the Tosefta, composed some two hundred years after the fact, reads as follows:

R. Judah [b. Ilai] said: Whoever has not seen the double stoa of [the synagogue in] Alexandria has never in his life seen the glory of Israel. It is a kind of large basilica, a stoa/colonnade within a stoa, holding, at times, twice the number of those who left Egypt. And seventy-one thrones of gold were there for the seventy-one elders, each of them worth twenty-five talents and a wooden platform [bema] was in the middle. And a chazzan of the synagogue stood on it with kerchiefs in his hand. When one took hold [of the Torah] to read, he would wave the kerchiefs and they would answer, “Amen.” And they would not sit randomly, but goldsmiths would sit by themselves, silversmiths by themselves, weavers by themselves, Tarsian weavers by themselves, and blacksmiths by themselves. And why to such an extent? So that if a visitor comes he can make contact with his trade and thus he will be able to make a living.⁵

Even granting a healthy dose of exaggeration, this must have been an impressive edifice. And like impressive synagogues in other cities, it must have attracted non-Jews. Here it is important to note that for Philo, Judaism was not just a religion for Jews; it was meant for all of humanity. The wisdom of Moses, as interpreted by Philo, far exceeded the wisdom of the Greeks; in fact, the Greek had stolen their philosophies from Moses. For Philo, the biblical patriarchs were missionaries and teachers to non-Jews, bringing them to the one true religion: “This is what our most holy prophet [Moses] through all his regulations desires to create—unanimity, neighborliness, fellowship, reciprocity of feeling, whereby houses and cities and nations and countries and the whole human race may advance to supreme happiness [eudaimonia].”6

I have little doubt that Philo saw himself as a latter-day Moses, bringing non-Jews to the higher wisdom of the Jews. It also seems likely that his instruction sessions included both Jews and non-Jews. At one point he appears to refer to such a student by name. The Roman governor Petronius, who refused to carry out the emperor Gaius’s order to place a statue of him in the Jerusalem Temple, is described by Philo as “having had some rudiments of Jewish philosophy and religion acquired either in early lessons in the past through his zeal for culture or after his appointment as governor in the countries where the Jews are very numerous.”⁷ What is certain is that Philo held proselytes in the highest regard.⁸ Speaking of what will happen in the final days of history, he gives pride of place to them: “The proselyte, exalted aloft by his happy lot, will be gazed at from all sides, marveled at, and held blessed…that he has won a prize best suited to his merits, a place in heaven firmly fixed, greater than words dare describe.”⁹ And he urges his fellow Jews to show great honor to proselytes: “While giving equal rank to all converts, with all the privileges which he gives to the native born, he [Moses] exhorts the old nobility to honor them not only with marks of respect but with special friendship and with more than ordinary goodwill…They have left their country, their kinfolk, and their friends for the sake of virtue and religion [eusebeia].”¹⁰

While there are no references in Philo or the Egyptian inscriptions to non-Jews participating in the life of synagogues, it seems more than likely that such was the case. Fifty years ago, Erwin Goodenough argued that several of Philo’s writings were directed at Gentile readers.¹¹ Given Philo’s strong admiration of proselytes and his view of Judaism as the ultimate religion of all humanity, it is hard not to see him as addressing, even teaching, a Gentile audience. That a Jewish school existed at Alexandria seems likely. That school must have included interested Gentiles. That Philo was its leading light seems certain. His writings must have served as “course packets” for his classes.¹²

In sum, by the first century CE, and increasingly through the following centuries, Jewish communities and their synagogues flourished in the Mediterranean world. Some of these communities were small, as were their synagogues; other were quite large. By and large, these communities were located in urban centers. Literary and archeological evidence finds them from North Africa to the Black Sea, from Syria to the Iberian Peninsula. Many of them had been in existence for centuries before Christians arrived. Gentiles were frequently attracted to synagogues; in turn, synagogues were open to and welcoming of Gentiles. Philo’s boast that Gentiles shared in the religious life of Jews seems entirely justified: “Not only Jews but almost every other people…have so far grown in holiness as to value and honor our laws…for who has not shown respect for that sacred seventh day [Sabbath] by giving rest and relaxation from labor…and who does not every year show awe and reverence for the fast [meaning Yom Kippur]…and especially to that great yearly festival [= Rosh ha-Shanah].”13 For Christian leaders of developing churches, these circumstances presented problems. The road to recognition and status was blocked. The solution was to attack the blockage. The result was anti-Judaism.

By now, it should be clear why I want to discuss the synagogue and Gentiles. It would be entirely reasonable to ask, “What has the synagogue got to do with non-Jews? Isn’t it a meeting place for Jews?” By itself, the evidence from Roman writers should begin to change our views. It begins to look as if synagogues were in fact places where Jews and Gentiles did meet, regularly and for a wide variety of purposes. But so far, the passages we have looked at don’t speak explicitly of synagogues. So where do we look to find evidence for Jews and Gentiles in synagogues?

We can begin with the New Testament Book of Acts. The second half of Acts (chapters 13–28) is an account of the apostle Paul’s travel to cities in Asia Minor, Greece, Cyprus, and Rome. The purpose of these journeys was missionary. As the apostle to the Gentiles, he traveled around the northeastern corner of the Mediterranean, preaching his gospel that Gentile believers had been saved by the faith of Jesus Christ. They were no longer outsiders to the goal of salvation, to claiming a share in the people of God at the End. What is peculiar about his preaching is that he regularly goes first to the local synagogue. And so the question arises, why would the apostle to the Gentiles, as he represents himself in his letters, go first to synagogues? The narrative in Acts provides the answer. Wherever he turns, he finds that synagogues consisted of a mixed congregation of Jews and Gentiles. And he knew this to be so:

One of the things we know about these god-fearers is that some of them were major donors to synagogues.15 A Roman soldier, by the name of Cornelius, is described in Acts 10 as a regular contributor to the synagogue at Caeserea (Judea), the center of Roman government in the region. Cornelius is called pious (eusebês) and a god-fearer. From the same period, an inscription from Akmonia (in central Asia Minor) describes a well-known pagan woman, named Julia Severa, who had actually built the local synagogue there for the Jews. Clearly Julia was a god-fearer like those mentioned in Acts, but she was also a distinguished member of the local elite in Akmonia. She had made donations to the local version of the emperor cult. Julia’s various donations add several important elements to our picture of Greeks in local synagogues:

There is every reason to believe that he met with some success in his efforts. But the other side of the coin—and this shows up quite forcefully in Acts—is that local Jewish leaders were not happy about this. In one city after the other, Paul is chased out of the synagogue and out of town, often with help from local civic officials.17 His preaching caused deep divisions in the synagogue and in some cases led to near riots. After all, these leaders must have argued, Paul was an outsider and a newcomer and his preaching was creating a public disturbance.¹⁸ What is more, in enticing god-fearers to leave the synagogue, the Jewish community stood to suffer a double loss: on the one hand, their prestige and social status would take a hit and, on the other hand, they stood to lose the financial support of the god-fearers. So it is not at all surprising that in one of his own letters (2 Cor 11:24) he reports that he had been in danger from his own people (meaning Jews) and that on five occasions he had received the forty lashes minus one, a punishment that dates back to biblical times (Deut 25:3) and was administered to Jews who had violated fundamental values of the Jewish community.¹⁹ Some of these occasions must reflect the stories told in the Book of Acts.

One final question must be raised: How did these Gentiles find their way to the synagogues? Put differently, was there something like an active Jewish mission to Gentiles? Much ink has been spilled over this question, with strong opinions for and against the notion of a Jewish mission. But some things seem clear. First, Diaspora synagogues were open and welcoming. For them, the presence of Gentiles created a win-win situation. Good for Gentiles, who were brought close to the true religion (Philo), and good for the synagogue in the enhanced status and financial support that came with their Gentiles. Second, some of these synagogue buildings stood in prominent locations and offered dazzling interiors.20 They were hard to miss. And third, there was something like a Jewish mission. Josephus tells of a Jewish merchant, Ananias by name, who visited the kingdom of Adiabene, presumably on business. While there, “he visited the king’s wives and taught them to worship God after the manner of Jewish tradition.”²¹ Ananias was certainly not a full-time missionary, but he was spreading the good news. The gospel of Matthew (23:15) excoriates Pharisees (like Paul the Pharisee?) who cross sea and land to make a single convert (prosêlutos). Roman authors paint a similar picture: the poet Horace (from the late first century BCE) dislikes forceful poets in Rome and likens them to Jews: “we, like the Jews, will compel you to become one of our throng.”²² Dio Cassius (d. ca. 235 CE) reports the emperor’s expulsion of Jews from Rome and states that the Jews “were converting many of the natives to their ways.”²³ And Roman law codes repeatedly ban conversion and circumcision.²⁴ Finally, in the Christian Acts of Pionius (around 250 CE), the Jews of Smyrna are said to have invited Christians into their synagogue.²⁵ All in all, it seems reasonable to conclude that there were outreach efforts among Jews in the early centuries of the Common Era. Not professional and not full-time but outreach nonetheless.²⁶

The most stunning literary testimony to Christians in local synagogues appears in a series of eight sermons preached at Antioch (present-day Turkey, Antakya) in the 380s by the towering figure of John Chrysostom, later to become archbishop in the capital city of Constantinople.27 We are now in a Christian world, with a Christian emperor (Theodosius I) on the imperial throne. The Jewish community there came into existence no later than the late third century BCE. The main synagogue must have been an impressive site. Josephus reports that the Seleucid ruler Antiochus III had donated to the synagogue all of the brass decorations plundered from the Jerusalem Temple by his predecessor, Antiochus IV Epiphanes. The result, says Josephus, was that these “richly designed and costly offerings formed a splendid ornament to the holy place.” And he adds that the Jews “were constantly attracting to their religious ceremonies multitudes of Greeks and these they had in some measure incorporated with themselves.”²⁸ In the fourth century, roughly during the time of John, the synagogue was destroyed by Christians, the first of many such cases. One of the cities’ synagogues was converted into a Christian shrine in honor of the Maccabean martyrs. Although ancient Antioch has yielded a rich find of archeological and artistic remains (especially mosaics), nothing survives of its great synagogue.

John is in an angry mood in these sermons. What set him off was the realization that members of his congregation were absent from church, absent because they were celebrating the fall festivals of the Jews in the local synagogues—Rosh ha-Shanah (New Year), Yom Kippur (the Day of Atonement), and Sukkoth (Festival of Booths). John pleads with the believers listening to him to drag their fellow Christians back into the church. He warns them not to tell others how many congregants were absent, for fear of public embarrassment. To drive home his rage, he paints a dismal picture of Jews and Judaism. He deploys the full panoply of the rhetorical skills that he had learned in school. High on the list was psogos, the art of insult and abuse. The synagogue, John roars, is no better than a brothel. It is the home of demons. Jews are wretched drunkards and dogs. No Jew worships God. To top it all off, he gives voice to what had already become something like a confession among Christian leaders: “If our way is true, as it is, theirs is fraudulent.”29 But like a good inquisitor, he interviewed the Judaizers to discover what drew them into their deviant behavior. What he learned from these conversations teaches us a great deal about what motivated these Christians. First of all, they did not share any of John’s hostile views of Jews. On the contrary, they inform John that they attend the synagogue because it is a holy place, a place of religious power.³⁰ No one would dare to violate a business deal sealed in the synagogue. And if you were sick, a night spent in the synagogue could reveal a special cure.

“What makes the synagogue holy?” asks John. “The sacred scriptures are there!” they reply. Of course, Christians had their own scriptures, the New Testament and what they called the Old Testament. But there were important differences. As numerous images from Jewish synagogues and burial sites make abundantly clear, the Jewish scriptures were written on scrolls and in the ancient and mysterious (to Greek speakers) language of Hebrew.³¹ By contrast, Christian Bibles were written in the language of everyday Greek, and a not particularly elegant Greek at that. In the time of John Chrysostom many Christians felt embarrassed by this Greek and sought various solutions to account for it.³² Worse still, their New Testaments were written not on scrolls but in books (codices), a format used in all sorts of ordinary, secular settings. Tax records, business contracts, secular histories. No mystery here. The Greek New Testament was readily, perhaps too readily, available.

But it was not just, or even primarily, the sacred scriptures that drew Gentiles, pagan and Christian, to the synagogue. It was the Sabbath and the autumn festivals of the Jewish calendar—Rosh ha-Shanah, Yom Kippur, and Sukkoth—that drew John’s Christians.33 It is no accident that John delivered his sermons in the months of September and October. As for the celebrations of these holidays, we should not imagine that they were always somber days of rest and meditation. Various Christian authors, among them John Chrysostom himself and Augustine, complained that Jews desecrated the Sabbath by dancing and drinking.³⁴ In Antioch and elsewhere the Sabbath seems to have been a festive day.³⁵ The rabbis of the Mishnah forbade dancing, clapping, and slapping (thighs) on the Sabbath and during other festivals,³⁶ but the very prohibition points to these as common activities. In their later commentary on this prohibition, the rabbis of the Babylonian Talmud seem resigned: “We have learned: People should not clap, or slap, or dance and yet we see people do this and we say nothing to them.”³⁷ John complains in his first sermon that Jews are subject to gluttony and drunkenness. On the day of fasting—probably Yom Kippur—they are embroiled in a drunken party. They were dancing “in the marketplace with naked feet.”³⁸ There is no reason to accept John’s wildly exaggerated language about drunkenness, but neither is there cause for doubting that the Jews of Antioch, and other locations, celebrated the Sabbath and other holidays with dancing and drink. Shaye Cohen states the case clearly: “if Jews danced and clapped on festivals in fourth century Babylonia…we may well believe that Jews danced and clapped on the Sabbath in fourth century Syria.”³⁹ All in all, the evidence suggests that we should not imagine the ancient synagogue as a somber place. Its festive celebrations must have appealed to pagan and Christian visitors. As we will see in the next chapter, Jews and Gentiles in Alexandria celebrated the Greek translation of the Hebrew Bible with a picnic on the beach.

Whatever the immediate effect of John’s sermons, we know that they enjoyed a long afterlife in Christian churches. Robert Wilken has observed that “the sermons have been a factor in forming Christian attitudes in times and places far removed from ancient Antioch…The eight homilies were translated into Russian in the eleventh century at a time when Jewish homes were being plundered and the first pogrom in Russian history was taking place in the grand duchy of Kiev under Prince Vladimir.”⁴⁰

The contrast between John and his Judaizers could not have been greater. Their Christian identity was flexible; it made room for Jewish neighbors, their practices, and their institutions. John’s sense of Christian identity, by contrast, was exclusive, with rigid boundaries. There was no room for Judaism, or paganism. John’s efforts to create this tightly bounded Christian identity—which was always a work in progress—were profoundly threatened by his Christian Judaizers. Hence his brutal language. Judaism has become, in these sermons, the absolute Other. It was that against which John and others defined themselves. It was all or nothing, just as Ignatius had stated in the early second century: “It is monstrous to talk Jesus Christ and to live like a Jew.”41 But in Ignatius’s time, and probably in John’s too, these figures and their views probably stood in the minority.⁴² Chrysostom also loved Paul. In his eight sermons against the Judaizers, he cites or alludes to Pauline texts some 180 times and mentions the apostle by name over thirty-five times.⁴³ In the Greek East and beyond, John’s view of Paul as his ally in rejecting Judaism will dominate the scene for centuries to come.

The city of Aphrodisias lies about sixty miles inland from the Aegean coast of ancient Asia Minor. The city survived into the seventh century when an earthquake and flooding led to its demise. The diggings there have yielded an impressive array of sculpture, inscriptions, and buildings. But no sign of the synagogue. We know that there was a Jewish community there, and thus a synagogue, from a variety of finds, among them a large stone column, standing a little over nine feet tall.⁴⁴ Where it stood originally is not known because it was reused at a later date in another building. One face, commonly referred to as face b, is covered with a long list of names; to its left, on face a, is another inscription.⁴⁵ (See figures 3.1 and 3.2.)

In fact, face b consists of two separate lists of personal names, many of them with professions or nicknames added (rag-dealer, grocer, confectioner, shepherd, bronze-smith, and so on). On the top there appear fifty-five persons, on the bottom fifty-two. The first two lines of the top list are missing but must have read something like “the Jews of Aphrodisias” or “the Jews of the synagogue” or, if this is a donation monument, “the donors of the Jews.” The lower list has preserved its title and it reads, “And all those who are god-fearers [theosebis],” followed by the list of fifty-two personal names, again with nicknames and professions (athlete, missile-maker, fuller, sculptor, butcher, stonecutter, dyer, boxer, plasterer, and so on). One striking aspect of this second list is that the first six names are identified as members of the local city council (bouleutai), the political elite of Aphrodisias. Here again we find a Jewish community wide open to the local population, welcoming outsiders, and fully integrated into the life of the city. It is worth emphasizing again that the synagogue was a welcoming institution and attractive to non-Jews. The social traffic moved in both directions. Jews reached out to non-Jews and Gentiles came in significant numbers. This is not to say that all of the god-fearers (theosebeis) were motivated exclusively by religious feelings, but they were identified, and labeled, on a public monument as members of the Jewish community.

What I find striking about this dekania is that two of its members are labeled as god-fearers, that is, not full converts. Since the dekania was obviously an important group within the synagogue, the fact that it included two god-fearers indicates that Greeks could sometimes be fully integrated into the religious and liturgical life of the synagogue, even when they fell short of full conversion. Of course, the other amazing feature of face b, with its long list of names, is the number of god-fearers. It’s almost fifty-fifty. We don’t know what the exact purpose of the stone was—a membership list of the synagogue or, more likely, a list of donors on some special occasion⁴⁷—but whatever its use, the rough balance between Jews and god-fearers on the stone suggests just how numerous Greeks could be in the synagogue life of this major city. And there is no reason to believe that Aphrodisias would have been exceptional.

Before leaving Aphrodisias, we need to look for other evidence of Jews in the city. And there is plenty. A bench in the bouleuterion (city hall) sets aside places for older and younger Jews (hebraioi) and further identifies them as members of the Blues, an empire-wide set of organized political parties and athletic fans.48 Jewish graffiti are scattered throughout the city in shops and private dwellings, along with menorahs and ethrogs.⁴⁹

One writer has called the discovery of this large stone “sensational.”⁵⁰ Perhaps. But if we had not been so quick to dismiss the words of Josephus, Philo, Roman authors on Judaism, and the Book of Acts, we might not have been taken by surprise. What we find at Aphrodisias, from the fourth and fifth centuries, is the full integration of the Jewish community into the civic life of the city, and conversely, the participation by local pagans, of various social levels, in the life of the synagogue. Some of this, in the early fourth century, may have been encouraged by the famous Edict of Toleration, issued by the emperor Galerius in 311, a decree that brought to a close the persecutions of Christians under Diocletian.⁵¹ But these relations predated and persisted long after that brief peace ended and lasted well into the time when Christian legislation sought to marginalize Jews throughout the empire. But not at Aphrodisias.⁵² And not elsewhere. Long after the construction of new synagogues was prohibited by a law of Theodosius II in 415 CE, new buildings were going up, especially in Roman Palestine.⁵³

When we move to Sardis, a city some sixty miles north from Aphrodisias, we find pretty much the same picture. Once again we are well into the Christian empire. The Jewish community there was well established already in the first century and probably much earlier.54 The Jewish historian Josephus records several decrees from Roman officials and the senate at Sardis that shed important light on the community there:⁵⁵ the decrees mention that the city had granted a place (topos) for the Jews where they could decide their own affairs; another decree describes the many privileges that had been granted to them over a long period of time and orders that the market officials of the city should see to it that Jews have “suitable food”—presumably meaning kosher victuals—for them.

At Sardis we find a second “sensational” testimony to the status of Judaism in the world of Late Antiquity. (See figure 3.3.)

In 1962, archeologists discovered the largest synagogue in the ancient world, reasonably well preserved, along with seventy or so Greek56 and a few Hebrew inscriptions.⁵⁷ The building is enormous—it measures more than 260 feet in length.⁵⁸ The main sanctuary reaches over 195 feet and the forecourt, with its lovely water fountain and three doorways opening into the main sanctuary, leads directly onto the main street of the city. (See figure 3.4.) It measures sixty-five feet square and was meant to serve as public space. The entire floor and much of the walls were decorated with polychrome mosaics and inscriptions. The sanctuary itself was lined by a colonnade on both sides. At the far end, in the nave or apse, stood three rows of semicircular marble benches for the community’s elders, just as in the great synagogue of Alexandria. In front of the apse stood a large table, flanked on either side by imposing lion statues and held up by supports showing large eagles. (See figure 3.5.)

In other words, this synagogue was not just enormous but hugely impressive. And it was located on the main street, next to the downtown bath-gymnasium complex, which local citizens frequented to celebrate their civic identity.

The building did not begin its life as a synagogue but was part of older civic structures in the city center. At some point, the building was transferred to the Jewish community and turned into the synagogue. The date of this transformation remains controversial. Some place it in the late third century,59 while others move it to the early sixth.⁶⁰ In either case, the final form of the synagogue at the time of its destruction by the Persian armies in 616 CE confronts us with a massive, open, and appealing synagogue, where Jews and Gentiles gathered, as always, for a variety of reasons.

As for the seventy Greek inscriptions found in the synagogue, nine name god-fearers who are also identified as members of the city council, just as at Aphrodisias.⁶¹ Most of these date to the later stages of the building, from the fourth to the sixth centuries. The great majority of the inscriptions, including the nine whose donors are named as theosebeis, are dedicatory in nature, recognizing donations to the building and doing so in a public setting; they honored those who had made vows or pledges of support to the synagogue:

In addition to the nine inscriptions that identify donors as theosebeis,⁶⁴ other notable figures, some of them surely non-Jews, are cited. One bears the epithet “the most honorable” (no. 45) and three held important positions in the Roman administration—a komês, or Count (no. 5); one a former procurator, or provincial governor (no. 70); and an assistant in the state archives (nos. 13–14b). Beyond these, it is virtually certain that numerous other donors were Gentile “friends of the synagogue.”

Here again—just as in Acts and just as at Antioch and Aphrodisias—we find an open and welcoming synagogue, with numerous local pagans, some of high status, who willingly identified themselves with the Jewish community. And just as at Aphrodisias, some of them received the honorific label of god-fearers. They had taken one or more steps beyond other Gentiles and had assumed something like an official status within the community.

Outside the synagogue, small finds indicate that Jewish shopkeepers regularly worked side by side with their pagan, and sometimes Christian, colleagues. As for Christianity at Sardis, its modest church on the outskirts of the city is a measure of the relative status of the two religions, as late as the early seventh century. As one scholar has put it, “there can be no doubt that the late appearance and success of Christianity in the province of Caria and its capital Aphrodisias is due to the very strong position Judaism had built up there in co-operation with the gentiles.”⁶⁵ In fact, a Christian author of the late second century, Melito of Sardis, wrote his Paschal/Easter Homily, in which he proclaimed that Christianity had surpassed and erased Judaism. His hostility to Judaism may well reflect the status-imbalance between Jews and Christians in the city. If this is so, we have yet another case in which competition with Judaism led a Christian leader to embrace anti-Judaism.⁶⁶

The last stop on our tour of sensational ancient synagogues takes us to the city of Dura Europos, fifteen hundred miles east of Rome, on the banks of the Euphrates River. Dura served as a trading and military outpost on Rome’s easternmost border, facing the menacing Persians to the East. While the city had been in existence since the early fourth century BCE, there are no indications of when Jews settled there. But in 1932,67 archeologists, digging at the western walls, came upon a synagogue structure decorated with what one scholar has called an “astounding display of Jewish art.”⁶⁸ Not just astounding but totally unexpected, for the universal assumption had long been that Jews did not produce figural representations of any kind, in obedience to the prohibition of Exodus 20:4: “You shall not make for yourself an idol/image [pesel], whether in the form of anything that is in heaven above, or that is on the earth beneath, or that is in the water under the earth.” Later synagogues in Palestine (for example, Beth Alpha, Hammat Tiberias, and Sepphoris), from the fourth century and beyond, with their images of Abraham’s binding of Isaac and scenes of the divine chariot, had showed that the earlier prohibition had given way to some extent, but nothing pointed to what occurs at Dura. The three surviving walls of the synagogue are covered, floor to ceiling, with dazzling, multicolored panels of frescoes, illustrating and interpreting a wide range of biblical passages. Each panel is separated from its neighbor by an elaborate framework. The western or back wall, divided at the bottom by a Torah niche bordered by two columns, reveals thirteen separate panels, most fully intact; the south wall has preserved three full and two very partial panels; and the north wall shows three full and two partial panels.⁶⁹ (See figure 3.6.) The Torah niche is capped by its own panel, with decorations on each side and in the recess. (See figure 3.7.) Four individual portraits, two on each side, flank the two panels above the niche. (See figure 3.8.)

The Torah niche stands just over six feet tall; the individual panels range in size from 3′9″×15′3″ (Crossing the Red Sea) to 4′2″×5′8″ (Elijah at Carmel); the central side panels of erect individuals average around 4′×2′2″. These are large paintings and easily visible from floor level. The room itself, which represents the final stage of the renovations, measures roughly 45 by 25 feet and could have accommodated as many as 120 persons. A ceiling tile with an Aramaic inscription gives a precise date for the final stages of the buildings renovation—244–245 CE. Just eleven years later, in 256 CE, the city was captured and destroyed by the Sassanian Persians.

Because there are no literary remains from the synagogue, we are reliant on the frescoes themselves and the inscriptions to learn the story of the Jews at Dura.70 Two ceiling tiles, with Aramaic inscriptions, begin the story:

This house was built in the year 556 [244–245 CE], this corresponding to the second year of Philip Julius Caesar; in the eldership of Samuel son of Yeda‘ya, the Archon [ruler/leader]. Now those who stood in charge of this work were Abram the Treasurer and Samuel son of Sapharah,⁷¹ and…the proselyte. With a willing spirit they [began] in this fifty-sixth year…And they labored in…blessing from the elders and from all the children of…they labored and toiled…Peace to them and to their wives and children all.

A second tile reads in part:

All of them with their money…and in the eager desire of their souls…Their reward, all whatever…that the world which is to come…assured them…on every Sabbath…spreading out [their hands] in it [in prayer].

There are a number of other inscriptions, in the form of twelve phrases painted (dipinti) directly on the panels in Middle Persian and three graffiti in Parthian.72 These inscriptions were produced by Persian visitors, with Zoroastrian names.⁷³ The motto that best summarizes the content of these inscriptions is—veni, vidi, admiravi. “I came, I saw, I admired.” Nine of the inscriptions refer directly to the panel on which they are written. No. 43 appears on Haman’s leg in the panel illustrating Esther’s triumph over the evil Haman:

Nos. 49 and 51, painted on or near Elijah’s foot in the scene where the prophet resurrects the widow’s child (1 Kgs 17:17–24), take special notice of that scene: “when Hormazd the scribe came and by him this [picture] was looked at: [he said,] ‘Living the child that had been dead.’ ” A graffito (no. 55) on the same Elijah panel, in Parthian and “generally beautifully written,”⁷⁴ exclaims, “Praise to God, praise! For life, life eternally he gives.” And in one of the inscriptions (no. 44) a leader (zandak) of the Jewish community accompanies the visitors, presumably to explain the frescoes. This must have been the case on other occasions as well.

What are we to make of these graphic annotations to the frescoed panels? First, visitors came and admired what they saw. They registered their delight.75 Perhaps it is not too much to speculate that the fame of the synagogue was widespread in the region and that it had become something of a tourist site, or better yet, a pilgrimage site, complete with local guides. Among these tourists/pilgrims were surely other Jews, in transit between Babylonia and Palestine.⁷⁶ Other visitors must have included non-Jews, for the synagogue was an open institution, with visitors of various sorts coming for various reasons.

In a recent study, Karen Stern has examined fifteen graffiti scratched onto different surfaces in the sanctuary, many of them of the form “may so-and-so be remembered” and “May so-and-so be remembered for good.”⁷⁷ She views these as “recorded prayers or a different form of devotional activity,” which were intended not only to be seen by other visitors but to be recited out loud by them:⁷⁸ “An inscriber’s act of writing, combined with vocal repetitions by human visitors, then, might doubly assure a named individual’s remembrance, both by humans and by the intended deity.”⁷⁹

And what about the frescoes? Overall, they are astonishing in their vigor; in the four standing individual portraits, they reach the highest artistic standards of the time. Whether or not they reveal a consistent overall program has been a matter of heated debate.⁸⁰ This need not concern us here. What is clear is that certain central themes run throughout:

Herbert Kessler has argued that these themes make sense against the background of Christian anti-Judaism: “Surely it is no coincidence that many of the biblical passages represented in the Dura synagogue are among those made central in Jewish/Christian polemics of the late second and third centuries.”82 That seems reasonable. But were they more than that? What other work did they do? Claude Lévi-Strauss once defined myths as machines for suppressing time—the time between the myth and its later observers.⁸³ Lévi-Strauss might just as well have said myth and image are machines for suppressing time and place. The frescoes were not meant to serve as mere decoration and the sanctuary was not a museum. The colored panels were performative; they invited interaction with observers. And the sanctuary was a ritual space. It is not too much to imagine that with their remarkable brilliance and vividness, the fresco panels—in combination with the richly detailed ceiling,⁸⁴ the recitation of Biblical passages, the homilies, and the singing of Psalms (and liturgical hymns?)—were intended to transport members of the community into the biblical times and places re-presented in the panels.

Nowhere are these themes more graphically displayed than in the divine hand that descends from heaven in five panels. The point here is that God’s providence governs Israel’s fate at every moment—then and now. God has not abandoned His people; the covenant with Abraham remains with the Jews; the Temple lives and will return;⁸⁵ and the Temple sacrifices will be reestablished. In this sense, an atmosphere of optimistic messianism pervades the entire synagogue.

As for the language of Christian anti-Judaism, Leonard Rutgers has noted that behind the rhetorical and physical attacks on Jews and synagogues there stood a dramatic shift in the Christian use of the term “synagogê” itself. Well illustrated by John Chrysostom but spread across a wide spectrum of Christian authors, “synagogê” came to be identified with Jews and Judaism as such. It “ceased to be an actual place” and was “abstracted into the very essence of evil…Henceforth, for Christians ‘the synagogue’ became the kind of arch-enemy that pagan or heretical Christian groups could never be.”86 Here again we find a wide gap between anti-Jewish rhetoric and social reality on the ground. Paula Fredriksen has put it succinctly: “Church canons censored social and religious mingling; imperial law lashed out at religious minorities, not just against Jews. To what effect? Our evidence suggests the usual gaps between repressive rhetoric and social reality.”⁸⁷

It is also true that not all Jewish leaders took kindly to converts and god-fearers. Some rabbis disliked proselytes, but even in Palestine they were probably in the minority.⁸⁸ M. Goodman notes that between the second and the fifth centuries “there emerged among some rabbis…a belief that Jews have a duty to win proselytes.”⁸⁹ In the Diaspora there is little evidence of Jewish antipathy toward god-fearers and converts. In the long run, the kinds of pressure illustrated by John Chrysostom’s sermons and the decrees of church councils probably made Christian Judaizing seem less appealing. But the doors never closed. In ninth-century Lyons, local Christians told their bishop, Agobard, that they preferred the homilies in local synagogues to the sermons in his church. He was angry. The result was an outburst of anti-Judaism and a bitter complaint to the emperor, Louis the Pious, about his favorable treatment of the Jews.