Ethnic Identity Jewish festivals.^50 There is no implication that there was any linguistic barrier
to such participation. Confirmation that this will have been so is provided
by the contemporary mosaic inscriptions, of.., from the synagogue
at Apamea. They are all in Greek, and two of them specifically record that a
section of mosaic in the church there had been paid for by Ilasios son of Eisa-
kios,archisunagōgosof the Antiochenes.^51 Naturally, neither the evidence of
John Chrysostom nor that of this group of inscriptions can suffice to prove
that the Hebrew Bible played no part in the communal observances of these
Jewish communities in north Syrian cities, or indeed that the Jews resident in
Antioch or Apamea did not speak ‘‘the Syrian language.’’ But it does strongly
suggest that, in a way which shows some parallelism to the character of the
still almost entirely Greek Christian Church of the area, these communities
were not visibly divided by language from their wider environment.
It would not be surprising if the pattern of linguistic relationships were
found to be different in the areas bordering on Palestine. This is at least sug-
gested by the fact that the mosaic floor of the late-Roman synagogue, perhaps
of the fifth century, discovered at Gerasa ( Jerash) revealed one inscription
in Aramaic and another in Greek.^52 In this area (the province of Arabia in
Roman terms) it would (perhaps surprisingly) not be until the sixth century
and after that a Semitic dialect, conventionally labelled ‘‘Christian Palestinian
Aramaic,’’ came to be used by Christians both for inscriptions and for texts
on perishable materials.^53 In Gerasa, therefore, the use of Aramaic for a Jew-
ish synagogue inscription, at a time when all the church inscriptions of the
region were still in Greek, must have functioned as a conscious marker of
identity, ethnic, religious and linguistic.
When we come, finally, to Palestine, we have to remember that both
Egeria/Aetheria and Jerome record that ‘‘the Syrian language’’ was used, but
in a subordinate role, in the Christian liturgy of Aelia Capitolina.^54 The Greek
cities of the Palestinian provinces, by contrast, seem to have used only Greek
in their public life and in written expressions of their public identity. It can be
taken as certain, however, that the population of the region included people
of gentile descent, both pagans and Christians, who spoke ‘‘the Syrian lan-
guage.’’ So also, we can be certain, did both Jews and Samaritans. Once again,
therefore, it is the predominance of a sacred text in Hebrew, accompanied
. See R. L. Wilken,John Chrysostom and the Jews().
.IGLSIV, nos. –, esp. –.
. J.-B. Frey,Corpus Inscriptionum Iudaicarum II(), nos. –.
. See, e.g., A. Desreumaux, ‘‘La naissance d’une nouvelle écriture araméene byzan-
tine,’’Semitica (): .
. See text to nn. – and .