Associations, Synagogues, and Congregations. Claiming a Place in Mediterranean Society.

Associations, Synagogues, and Congregations. Claiming a Place in Mediterranean Society. By Philip A. Harland. Minneapolis: Fortress, 2003. xv and 399 pages. Paper. $22.00.

This is an informative, up-to-date, richly documented and nuanced portrait of the collegia/associations of the Greco-Roman world (especially in the Roman province of Asia) and their place in and positive interaction with society. Based especially on a wealth of inscriptional evidence that allows Harland to challenge earlier assumptions and understandings of these groups, he shows how integrated they were in the fabric of civic life and how the social bonds they nurtured served the benefit of association members as well as their patrons and governors (local, provincial, and imperial).

Harland's comparison (and often equation of) Judean synagogues and congregations of Jesus' followers with associations/collegia is not quite convincing, and his critique of prevailing scholarly opinion is heavy-handed. While Judean groups resemble associations in their involvement in social networking, Harland's misunderstanding of the sectarian nature of the Christian groups (reformist groups within Israel but pushed to the margins) and of the dilemma they faced (critical of society yet intent on mission and recruitment) has kept him from assessing the details that dramatically differentiate these Christian groups and their ambiguous relation to the social order from Greco-Roman clubs and their positive involvement in the various institutions and social networks of the empire. His simplistic understanding of and one-sided argument with "sectarian-focused approaches" (pp. 182-200 and passim) fails to engage with the most extensive defense on record of the sectarian character of early Christian groups (see J. H. Elliott, "The Jewish Messianic Movement: From Faction to Sect," in Modelling Early Christianity: Social-Scientific Studies of the New Testament in Its Context, ed. P.F. Esler [New York and London: Routledge, 1995], 75-95).

The decision to focus on the issue of group-to-society relations is welcomed but ironic, for it is precisely on this score that this excellent assemblage of evidence on associations reveals the most telling differences between Christian sectarians and Greco-Roman collegia. Thus his repeated claim (pp. 109, 157, 160, 162, 183) that synagogues and Christian groups were not just analogous to but actually constituted associations or guilds remain assertions still requiring proof. His work makes even clearer than earlier studies how certain similarities shared by associations, synagogues, and Christian groups should not be allowed to obscure their strategically different activities, aims, social networks, and "responses to the world." Judean and Christian groups, like associations, did not isolate themselves vicinally or "withdraw" from the larger society--a notion Harland erroneously attributes to scholars employing sectarian theory. In contrast to the associations, however, they did insulate themselves, as sects always do, through various mechanisms, so as to preserve their distinctive identity, cohesion, and commitment. Had they not done so, they would have disappeared into the dustbin of history as thoroughly as did the well-connected associations that Harland so ably describes.

Written initially as a Canadian doctoral thesis under the direction of John Kloppenborg (University of Toronto), this study deserves close attention and judicious use by all students of the social world of early Christianity.

John H. Elliott

University of San Francisco