Mission and Conversion: Proselytizing in the Religious History of the Roman Empire (review)

Abstract

Reviewed by: Mission and Conversion: Proselytizing in the Religious History of the Roman Empire A. T. Kraabel Martin Goodman. Mission and Conversion: Proselytizing in the Religious History of the Roman Empire. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1994. Pp. xiv 1 194. $39.95. Despite its sweeping title, this path-breaking volume is mainly about alleged Jewish missionary activity in the Roman world. (The author is successor to Geza Vermes as Reader in Jewish Studies at Oxford.) Thus chapter 5, “Mission in the Early Church,” is bracketed symmetrically by four chapters about Jews, specifically on their “attitudes to gentile paganism” and on “proselytes and proselytizing”: chapters 3–4 deal with the third century b.C.E. to the first century C.E., and 6–7 on the Talmudic period. The opening chapter is a clear statement about what is at stake. Goodman will not write an account of the phenomenon of conversion à la A. D. Nock, but raise a prior issue: was mission an inevitable component of religion, any religion, in the Greco-Roman world? Or does that idea rather “reflect an unconscious Christianization of the study of ancient religions”? (The second chapter will take up commonly cited examples of “mission” in the spread of pagan cults and philosophies in Roman times.) Goodman distinguishes four types of mission—informative, educational, apologetic, and proselytizing—but focuses on the last, the only one whose goal is conversion. He mentions a fifth briefly: forcible inclusion of a ruler’s subjects in a state religion seen as a unifying factor for that society. Under Goodman’s critical analysis the traditional picture of a “Jewish mission” evaporates. He separates the two pairs of chapters on Judaism at the latter part of the first century C.E.: the destruction of Jerusalem and of the Temple, the introduction of the fiscus Judaicus, and the beginning of the rabbinic movement. These years are his hinge for eight centuries of Jewish history. Earlier Jews had condemned any worship of pagan deities by Jews, but were tolerant of or disinterested in gentile paganism in the Diaspora. (Pagans in the land of Israel were a problem; the issue was ritual pollution.) Proselytizing had not been of interest either, contra Schürer, Juster, Jeremias, M. Stern, D. Georgi and a shelf-full of NT handbooks. Conversions to Judaism happened, in anticipation of marriage, sometimes at the point of a sword. But had there been missionary campaigns, had proselytizing been a priority, we would have heard much more about it both from Jews and from their detractors; the references would have been unmistakable. Goodman dismantles the proof-texts from Philo, Horace, and Cicero commonly used [End Page 114] to “prove” the contrary, and argues that Matt. 23.15 is not about making gentile proselytes but about Pharisees trying to persuade other Jews to follow Pharisaic halakha. And those Jews who wrote in Greek did so not in “outreach” to gentiles, but to reach their fellows and their offspring for whom Greek was their first language; the LXX itself is the parade example. In the Talmudic period large shifts occurred within Judaism, results of major historical change. To fuel its propaganda, the Flavian dynasty had transformed the destruction of Jerusalem from “the suppression of insurrection in a comparatively minor provincial backwater” into a mighty Roman victory. The fiscus Judaicus necessitated clearer distinctions between Jews and non-Jews. An important example for students of the early Christian mission to gentiles is the case of gentiles sympathetic to Judaism. Thus, pace Acts, there probably had been no “formal category of gentile Godfearers recognized as such by Jews in the 1st cent[ury].” But the famous Aphrodisias inscription suggests to Goodman a change in Jewish attitudes two centuries later. No review will do justice to the riches of this provocative monograph. This journal’s readers will want their own copies. While agreeing with the thesis and most of the argument, I would raise several points for consideration: 1. I would see even more diversity, especially in Diaspora Judaism, than Goodman does. We are just coming to realize the great variety present in pre-Constantinian Christianity. Judaism in the same time and space had a weaker network, no bishops preaching consensus...