The Christian Church and the Jews of the Diaspora gogue, since the second inscription speaks of ‘‘the first synagogue.’’^34 The
first names Leontios, son of Iakob, and the second Isaki(os), who was curator
‘‘of the most holy first synagogue,’’ and who completed the marble paving
from theamboto thesēmma(simma,orsigma) and saw to the cleaning of the
two seven-branched (heptamyxoi) candlesticks (approximately as in Sardis).
Even without further data, we catch a glimpse of the context of communal
Jewish religious life in the Theodosian age.
This survey has been concerned only to highlight some particularly signifi-
cant concentrations of evidence, revealing either the physical character of
diaspora synagogues or their communal organisation, or features of religious
life. It has left aside a large range of other evidence which may or may not
date to the Theodosian period, or which merely attests the presence of indi-
vidual Jews (e.g., the Oxyrhynchus papyrus of.. which shows the lease
of a house by two nuns there from a man named Aurelios Iosē son of Ioudas,
identified as a Jew,Ioudaios).^35 But the evidence listed above, scattered as it
is, is perhaps sufficient to suggest why the presence of Jewish communities,
exhibiting a form of monotheism involving a different form of attachment
to the Old Testament, and a rejection of the New, played so large a part in the
consciousness of their Christian contemporaries, who apparently enjoyed an
unchallenged dominance. The evidence of Christian sources will show that
communal aggression was not confined to the Christian side, though it is
more fully attested there, and that on the whole the emperors and the secular
authorities, rather than promoting anything which came close to persecu-
tion, tried to impose restraint, on both sides.
Jews and Jewish Communities
as Represented in Christian Writers
Christian evidence reveals very clearly why restraint by the civil or military
authorities might well be necessary. For instance, the Syriacactaof the sec-
ond Council of Ephesus in record an element in the accusations brought
against Sophronius, the bishop of Tella (Constantina) in Osrhoene. His son
was alleged to have taken a Jew with him into the bishop’s house there and
to have eaten with him ‘‘in the manner of the Jews.’’ During the Lenten fast
. For the fullest treatment, see J. Nollé,Side im Altertum: Geschichte und Zeugnisse(In-
schriften Griechischer Städte aus Kleinasien, ) II, nos. – (pp. –). SeeIJudOII,
ff., –.
.P. Oxy. XLIV, no. .