Religious Diversity in the Graeco-Roman World: A Survey of Recent Scholarship.

RELIGIOUS DIVERSITY IN THE GRAECO-ROMAN WORLD: A SURVEY OF RECENT SCHOLARSHIP. Edited By Dan Cohn-Sherbok & John M. Court. Sheffield, UK: Sheffield Academic Press, 2001. Pp. 237. Paper, $39.95.

Although this collection of essays is several years old, it warrants review in this journal because of its interest in social-scientific issues. As the subtitle suggests, the goal of the essays is to describe the state of the field in various areas of the history of religion in the ancient world. The essays are of an inconsistent quality, and inconsistently edited, but mostly of a high quality and interesting.

Philip F. Esler opens the collection by making some fine social scientific observations on Palestinian Judaism. First be challenges the terms Jew and Judaism as translations of Ioudaio/Ioudaismos, arguing instead that the root represents a geographical and ethnic designation, and is better represented as Jadean/Judeanism. He then points out three important aspects of first-century Palestine: it was an "advanced agrarian" society, characterized by the production of agricultural surpluses; this surplus led to a social schism between elite and non-elite interests, based on wealth and land-ownership; the institution of religion was not a stand-alone phenomenon, as it is in the modern world, but was embedded within other social institutions, namely kinship and politics. These three features are the foundation of Esler's distinction between political religion and domestic religion, and between the "great tradition" (elite interests) and the "little tradition" (non-elite interests). For Esler, the Temple and its cult, the Sadducees, High Priests, Pharisees, and Herodians are all examples of elite political religion, while synagogues, banditry, prophets and messiahs, and open revolt offer examples of non-elite domestic (and millenarian) religion. This is an excellent paper.

Also excellent is John M. G. Barcley's treatment of Diaspora Judaism. The term Diaspora Judaism is preferable to Hellenistic Judaism because it represents the variety of places Jews lived that were not Palestine (focusing on the geographical element), and at the same time recognizes that living in an often (though not exclusively) hostile environment, with the challenges of acculturation or isolation, gave Diaspora Jews a different experience of their religion from that of Palestinian Jews.

In the final of these three essays on Jewish topics, Charlotte Hempel simply surveys the arguments concerning the inhabitants of Qumran--whether or not they were Essenes--and the way the discovery of the Dead Sea Scrolls affected that debate.

In the first of three essays on Christianity, Donald A. Hagner discusses the recent proliferation of Historical Jesus studies, suggesting that what characterizes such studies--both old and new--is not that they seek a truer Jesus but simply a non-traditional one. For Hagner, only portraits of Jesus that are canonical are free of this characteristic. In line with this, Hagner takes tired pot-shots at the Jesus Seminar and at individual works produced by its members, and champions the work of Meier, Evans, and Wright, not because of their superior methodological insights, but because they are "the least upsetting to an orthodox understanding of Jesus" (p. 99). It is not clear how this essay belongs in this collection.

James D.G. Dunn shows how the Apostle Paul introduced a level of diversity into Second Temple Judaism that stretched it past the breaking point; at the same time he shows the great diversity in Paul's thoughts on such topics as his Christology, his ideas of salvation and church, and his principle of praxis. These show Paul not contradicting himself, since there are common elements in his diversity, but rather "ransacking the language and imagery of his day" (p. 120) in order to adequately express his sense of the mystery behind these ideas. Finally, Thomas O'Loughlin shows how recent material discoveries (manuscripts, archaeology) and methodological advances (social scientific criticism, post-modernism) have forced scholars to recognize a far greater degree of diversity and complexity in the early church than is reflected in the scholarly work of the nineteenth century.

Graham Anderson shows that where scholars have often argued for diversity there is in fact uniformity in the practice of Greek religion. That is, scholars have tended to draw stark distinctions between elite and non-elite, intellectual and popular, and urban and rural religious expression, but Anderson shows that there is more uniformity than diversity. Robert McLean Wilson treats Gnosticism, referring to the various debates concerning its relationship to earliest Christianity. Wilson shows that much more work must be done before we can fully understand this relationship. And finally, John M. Court looks at the mystery religions, focusing on Mithraism and its relationship to Christian Origins. Court outlines the pitfalls of drawing parallels between the mystery religions and earliest Christianity too quickly, but also of rejecting them too easily. In the end, we know too little about them to draw strong conclusions.

Zeba A. Crook

Carleton University 

Ottawa, ON