By the time of Jesus, all Judaism was Hellenistic Judaism. Martin Hengel's dictum, articulated in his massive book Judaism and Hellenism and elaborated upon in follow-up projects, has been enormously influential.1 His review of evidence from the Persian through the early rabbinic periods demonstrated that Hellenistic influence was felt in many spheres of Jewish life in Palestine: linguistic, literary, educational, architectural, religious, philosophical, artistic, political, economic, and military. Collectively a tour de force, his works exposed the problematic nature of sharp differentiations between Judaism in the Mediterranean Diaspora and Judaism in Palestine. Hengel argued that any use of the phrase “Hellenistic Judaism” that excludes Palestinian Judaism is inappropriate, and any effort to portray Palestinian Judaism as more “orthodox” than Diaspora Judaism on the basis of its supposedly lesser Hellenization is doomed to failure. Hengel has had his critics,2 but his main point is rightly accepted as conventional wisdom in most sectors of New Testament scholarship: Palestinian Judaism must be understood as a part of, not apart from, Hellenistic Judaism.
Judaism in Galilee was no exception. It, too, felt the impact of Greek culture, and no one can any longer imagine Jesus living, as it were, on an isolated and untouched island of Semitic culture in a sea of Hellenism.3 Like the rest of Palestine, it came under the influence of yet another empire's culture when it fell into the orbit of Rome, a point that Hengel and others also correctly made. Many scholars regarded archaeological finds in the 1980s and 1990s as further confirmation of Hengel's arguments. Images of the region had varied in earlier scholarship, with some portraying it as thoroughly Hellenized and others as backwater and uncultured.4 The weight of majority view has now shifted towards the view that Galilee fully exhibited key aspects of Greco-Roman culture. Hengel had argued that Greek was widely used in Palestine; excavations in Galilee found numerous Greek inscriptions. Hengel had drawn attention to the presence of Greco-Roman architectural forms; archaeologists uncovered new examples of such buildings in Galilee. Hengel had noted the importance of Greco-Roman artistic influence; projects in Galilee discovered mosaics, frescoes, figurines, and other artifacts reflecting that influence.
Excavations at Sepphoris, located less than four miles from Nazareth, took pride of place in discussions of the region, at least within New Testament scholarship. A theater had been uncovered there in 1931, and more recently, bathhouses, a basilical building, and an aqueduct have been excavated. At least some of the city's streets were shown to be organized in a grid pattern, a characteristic feature of both Greek and Roman cities. The city's spectacular mosaics contained Dionysiac imagery, including a depiction of a procession in honor of Dionysos as well as a symposium with Heracles. Another mosaic showed flora and fauna of the Nile, and yet another portrayed Orpheus. These mosaics bore Greek inscriptions, as did the city's coins, a market weight, and other objects.5
Though Sepphoris received the lion's share of attention, numerous other sites were also excavated and older digs attracted renewed interest.6 The necropolis at Beth She'arim had been investigated in 1936–1940 and 1953–1958, but the full report had not been translated from Hebrew into English until the 1970s. With nearly three hundred inscriptions, the catacomb complex was increasingly cited as an exemplar of the region's Hellenistic milieu. So was Tiberias, though the presence of the modern city by the same name made it difficult to excavate. On the basis of several categories of evidence – architecture, coins, various forms of art, inscriptions, Greek and Latin loanwords and names in Jewish sources, the presence of imports from elsewhere in the Mediterranean – Lower Galilee, especially, was increasingly seen as no less Hellenized and urbanized than anywhere else in the Roman world.7
In light of these findings, few New Testament scholars would seriously dispute that Galilean culture indeed reflected Greek and Roman influences. Yet, if consensus exists on that basic point, confusion abounds about how extensive those influences were at different times and about the specific ways in which they were manifested. As impressive and influential as Hengel's work has been, some of his specific claims were oversimplified. Furthermore, much subsequent scholarship has gone well beyond Hengel in its characterizations of Greco-Roman culture in the world of Jesus. A review of statements often made about Jesus, his earliest followers, and their Galilean setting highlights issues that merit further examination.8
Scholars have frequently suggested, on the basis of numismatic and other inscriptions, that Greek was frequently spoken in the region, though it did not displace Aramaic as the dominant tongue.9 The use of Greek was not limited to the cities of Sepphoris and Tiberias; it might be heard in other Galilean communities as well, such as Capernaum, Magdala/Taricheae,10 and Chorazin.11 Overall, it was proposed, the language was as common in Galilee as it was in Egypt and Asia Minor.12 The fact that at least two of Jesus’ disciples, Andrew and Philip, had Greek names showed that the language had gained usage even among the lower socio-economic classes.13 It was thus quite likely that Jesus himself spoke at least a little Greek, raising the possibility that the gospels preserved some of his sayings verbatim. It was also now more easily imaginable that one or more of the gospels, perhaps Matthew or Mark, had been written in the region.14 An even earlier document, Q, believed by many to have been composed in Greek, might also have originated there.15
The proximity of Sepphoris to Nazareth made it likely that Jesus was exposed to the full range of Greco-Roman culture. He would have needed Greek to communicate with the city's diverse population, one that included a large number of gentiles. Antipas's construction projects could have created employment opportunities for a tekton like him, and the city, like others in the area, included many buildings characteristic of Greco-Roman urbanization – temples, bathhouses, a theater, and other monumental architecture. Jesus might have sat in the theater, watching classical plays. He might also have heard popular philosophers preaching on the city's corners.16
Sepphoris was not alone in its mixed population. Tiberias, too, was home to a considerable number of gentiles, and the region as a whole could be characterized as “semipagan.”17 Jesus need not leave Galilee to encounter non-Jews; he would have had frequent interaction with them throughout his life. Some of these pagans were indigenous Galileans, while others were Phoenicians, Arabs, or descendents of Greek settlers.18 The region's roads were major trade routes that bustled with merchant convoys and other travelers.
Galilee, like the rest of Palestine, was occupied by the Roman army, perhaps even settled by Roman colonists, according to some scholars.19 Two gospels preserve a memory of Jesus' encounter with a Roman centurion (Matt. 8:5–13 and Luke 7:1–10). Roads built and paved by the Roman army and marked by Roman milestones crossed the region.20 Sepphoris itself was a Roman administrative and military center.21 After finishing their lengthy terms of service, some Roman soldiers chose to stay in Antipas's Galilee, retiring there.22 The region's Romanization was thus no less thoroughgoing than its Hellenization.
In light of Galilee's cosmopolitan and diverse cultural atmosphere, a wholesale re-imagining of Christian origins was in order. Both Jesus and his earliest followers – according to influential reconstructions of the earliest stratum of Q, a rootless, itinerant group of Galileans23 – could be best understood as Cynic-like philosophers.24 The argument has sometimes been framed as one of influence: Jesus had heard the teachings of Cynic philosophers at Sepphoris or while he traveled through the region. Though explicit evidence of Cynics in Galilee was lacking, to imagine a Cynic-free Galilee would be to imagine a Hellenism-free Galilee – and thus, by implication, an impossibility. If all Hellenism was Hellenistic Judaism, and Galilee's architecture, art, and inscriptions confirmed the region's full participation in the larger culture of the Greco-Roman world, then envisioning Jesus as a Jewish Cynic was not a problem. One scholar even suggested that protestations that Cynics were unlikely to be found in Galilee were, in fact, covert apologetic attempts to defend early Christianity's uniqueness.25 At other times, the proponents of the Cynic thesis have utilized an argument of analogy: regardless of whether or not Jesus and the Q community actually encountered any Cynics, they were much like them and a comparison with them was especially illuminating. This argument, too, has frequently been accompanied by appeals to the high level of Hellenization purportedly attested in the archaeological record.
Such positions have not been universal, of course, and their conflation above for brevity's sake should not be interpreted as suggesting that a scholar who holds one also holds the others. Some of these statements, as will be seen in the course of this study, are quite reasonable, but most are built on shaky foundations. They sometimes seem to reflect one or more of several assumptions: that Greek and Roman cultures were homogenous across the Mediterranean region; that more evidence of those cultures has been found in early first-century CE Galilee than is actually the case; that finds in Jerusalem, the coastal cities, and the Decapolis were representative of Galilee; or that evidence from the second or later centuries accurately reflects the situation in the early first century. The last assumption is especially common. At times, depictions of the Galilee of Jesus have relied so heavily on late data that is it almost as if Jesus were being contextualized within the third century, rather than the first.26
If we are to understand the particularity of the Galilean context of Jesus and his followers, we must acknowledge the significance of chronological development, regional variations, and class distinctions in the ways Hellenistic, Roman, and local cultures interacted. With these factors in mind, this study investigates the emergence of certain aspects of Greco-Roman in Galilee and the significance of that cultural interaction for the Historical Jesus and early Judaism. The chief challenges to such a project are deciding what phenomena to include within the terms “Hellenistic” and “Roman” and determining how to envision the interaction of those cultures with local ones.
Writing specifically of “Hellenism,” Hengel pointed out that the word is so broad and all encompassing that it is not always useful: “it says too much, and precisely because of that it says too little.”27 As several scholars have noted, “Hellenistic” can be used to indicate a wide variety of things:
The word “Roman” lends itself just as easily to ambiguity. Studies that use terms like these must be explicit in identifying which specific aspects of culture they are investigating, careful not to imply that other phenomena should be excluded from the meanings of the terms, and mindful of the danger of lapsing into essentialism. A brief survey of related studies shows how other scholars have handled such issues.
G. W. Bowersock has argued that many studies of Hellenistic culture start with a problematic model: an understanding of “Hellenization” as “the deliberate or inevitable imposition of Greek ways over local ones.” In his view, the concept of “Hellenization” is “a useless barometer for assessing Greek culture” because it implies the replacement of one culture by another, a process that rarely actually occurred. Local cultures did not disappear under the weight of Greek culture but instead found new ways to express themselves by adopting aspects of that culture. If “Hellenization” is a misleading word, the concept of “Hellenism” is nevertheless quite helpful. “Hellenism . . . represented language, thought, mythology, and images that constituted an extraordinarily flexible medium of both cultural and religious expression.” Thus, “it provided a new and more eloquent way of giving voice” to various peoples.28
Lee I. Levine provides another possibility, describing “Hellenism” as the “cultural milieu (largely Greek) of the Hellenistic, Roman, and – to a somewhat more limited extent – Byzantine periods,” and “Hellenization” as “the process of adoption and adaptation of this culture on a local level.”29 Other cultures also spread beyond their points of origin in the “Hellenistic world,” that is, the territories conquered by Alexander and his successors, and distinctions should be made “as to the degree of receptivity in each area [aspect of culture], as well as from region to region and from class to class.”30 At particular places, particular groups might adapt specific aspects of Greek culture to their own needs, while other groups might reject those aspects. Furthermore, Levine emphasizes the importance of chronology, noting that evidence of Hellenism increases with the passing of each century.
The most thorough recent examination of the interaction of Hellenism and Judaism is that of John M. G. Barclay.31 Focusing on the Diaspora, Barclay defines Hellenism as a fusion of cultures after Alexander, characterizing it as “common urban culture in the eastern Mediterranean, founded on the Greek language . . . typically expressed in certain political and educational institutions and largely maintained by the social élite.”32 Noting several different spheres of culture (political, social, linguistic, educational, ideological, religious, and material culture), he argues that Jews might engage Hellenism in one area of life while ignoring it in others, and that there were differences in the degree of engagement. To deal with these phenomena, he utilizes the sociological concepts of assimilation, acculturation, and accommodation. He defines assimilation as the extent of social integration and interaction between Jews and non-Jews and acculturation as the level of familiarity with various aspects of Greek culture. Accommodation is conceptualized as the use to which acculturation is put, whether to embrace Greek culture fully, or to resist it by reinterpreting and expressing Jewish distinctiveness in new ways.33 Barclay applies this model to describe the interplay between Judaism and Hellenism in various regions, with considerable attention to class differences. He might be critiqued on some points; he does not always differentiate clearly between Hellenistic and Roman cultural elements, and his discussion does not always pay sufficient attention to chronological developments.34 His overall project, however, is a significant contribution, precisely because his guiding model is inherently flexible enough to handle diverse responses.
James F. Strange has addressed the issue of how Romanization affected material culture in Jewish Palestine. He suggests that we envision certain features of material culture – the Jerusalem temple, synagogues, particular styles of tombs, and symbols like the menorah – as a Hellenistic Jewish foundation, upon which the Romans imposed an “urban overlay,” one that was itself also influenced by Hellenism. That overlay included “baths, hippodromes, theaters, amphitheaters or circuses, odeons, nymphaea, figured wall paintings, statues, triumphal monuments, temples,” and other features. The overlay and foundation interacted to produce a new cultural atmosphere that was distinct from either one alone.35