Judaism in Transition 175 BCE to 150 CE: Christian and Jewish Perspectives, edited by James S. McLaren

This little book touches only briefly on Jesus, to history and posterity the most important figure in the period it covers, but it provides a good picture of the fertile soil from which Christianity grew 2000 years ago.

Jewish society of the time was diverse, lively, literate and reasonably well recorded by ancient standards. There were many itinerant preachers and healers like the Jesus of the gospels, ascetic sects like the Essenes of the Dead Sea, various politically active Jewish extremists, an aristocratic high priestly caste, the hypocrisy-prone pharisees who were the middle managers of Judaism, other groupings, much intellectual discussion, debate and development. Messiahs, as forecast in the Old Testament, were often claimed.

The Jesus of the gospels (which contain 90 per cent or more of the material we have on his life) seems, excluding the difficult questions of miracles and resurrection, a credible figure of this society, and Christianity as it developed seems a very likely outcome.

The belief in “end times”, the end of this world and believers being born again into a new, more perfect world, a “kingdom of God”, was common. It was a key part of Jesus’ teaching—the usual explanation today is that he had a compelling sense of mission, but interpreted in the way of the time, not as the start of a new religion. It is not clear how far these ancients believed in the destruction of the physical world and how far something more spiritual, given the common allegorical style of the day.

This book covers the period from the substantial completion of the Old Testament as we know it, to the zealot revolts against the Roman overlords in 68–70 AD and again in the next century. In the first of these, Roman forces destroyed the Temple in Jerusalem, the centre of Jewish worship, and many militants were deported. In the second, a series of struggles in the middle of the second century brought more destruction, expulsion and exile. With further emigration and conversion to Christianity, Jews gradually became a small minority in the homeland until recent times.

The revolts were usually complicated in background, not just “freedom fights”. Often one side or another had crossed a “line in the sand”. Sometimes internal rebel tensions were involved.

The Jews in what later became Palestine usually spoke Aramaic, the presumed first language of Jesus, a Semitic tongue akin to Hebrew and Arabic. It is still spoken in remote parts of Lebanon and Syria. Many Palestinian Jews, especially in the higher social ranks, also spoke Greek, the common tongue of the eastern Roman empire. There was also a large Jewish diaspora around the Mediterranean, mostly “Hellenised” (Greek in culture and language) as well as many “God fearers”, who were sympathetic to Judaism but did not convert.

The Jewish population has been estimated at anything from 2 to 20 per cent of the population of the Roman empire. Here it is put at about 10 per cent. They were partly descended from the old Hebrew tribes and partly from more recent converts.

One of the themes of Jewish contributors to this book is that relations between their Roman overlords and the new Christian breakaways were often better in this period than supposed, though prone to bad patches. Jewish contributors echo the common Jewish view that the gospels, particularly that of John, make the Jewish society out to be more intolerant and difficult than it usually was, making for much bad blood later. In an esoteric argument that is still important but better tempered, some Christian scholars disagree.

The contributors here are from Jewish, Catholic and Uniting Church backgrounds. The editor, James McLaren, is a reader in theology at Australian Catholic University. Their sources are mostly secondary, but numerous, usually American and British in origin. They bring together in a concise volume a vast amount of scholarship on the period, some of which would otherwise be rather technical.

There is abundant original material on the period, however, though not enough for it to be fully understood. The Old Testament and the New (written in the second half of the first century AD) are only one source. Other sources include:

• The works of the first-century Jewish historian Josephus and philosopher Philo.
• The Torah, Mishnah and much other contemporary rabbinical and other Jewish, Roman and Greek writing.
• The Dead Sea Scrolls, found in caves in Jordan in 1947, nearly 2000 years after the ascetic Jewish Qumran community left them.
• Lesser non-biblical gospels such as St Thomas, an ancient copy of which was found in recent times, and others referred to in various writings.
• The results of a huge amount of archaeological work over the years.

All these sources have their difficulties and biases, but collectively they open a bigger window into the ancient world than is available for most societies of that time.