CHRISTIANIZATION AND ITS CHALLENGESsources to indicate that pagan practice still continued. This will have been
more the case in rural or remote areas – such as the Negev, where despite the
building of churches in the towns most inscriptions were still pagan until the
sixth century^65 – but was by no means confi ned to them. As Alan Cameron
argues,^66 there was no single and clearly identifi able ‘paganism’, and pagan
practice and belief took many different forms. One persistent theme which
recurs in many different kinds of Christian texts of the period is the tendency
to believe in fate and especially in astrology, and the stories of cures by heal-
ing saints and the many surviving amulets from this period show a wide range
of continuing beliefs, just as Christian healing shrines sometimes continued
earlier pagan practices. While Robert Markus has suggested that by the sixth
century Christianization in the west involved a ‘closing in of horizons’,^67 it
would be a mistake to imagine that Christianization was ever total, either in
the west or in the east.
Jews and Christians in late antiquityA key development in recent scholarship has been a greater emphasis on the
role played by Jews and Judaism in late antiquity; this has gone alongside a
renewed debate about when it can be said with confi dence that Christianity
and Judaism were truly separate religions and with a tendency to set this proc-
ess much later than previously assumed.^68 A particularly striking piece of evi-
dence is provided by inscriptional evidence from Aphrodisias in Asia Minor
which commemorates a ‘memorial’ set up by sixty-eight Jews, three proselytes
and fi fty-four theosebeis (‘godfearers’, that is, persons who attended the syn-
agogue but had not yet fully converted to Judaism). Previously thought to
date from the early third century, the two inscriptions which together give the
names of all these people are now dated to the fourth and fi fth centuries, and
indicate a large and thriving Jewish community, which has also left its trace in
numerous Jewish graffi ti.^69 Late antique synagogues and Jewish communities
have also been identifi ed elsewhere – for instance, at Sardis (sixth-century)
and at Hierapolis in Phrygia, Gerasa (Jerash) in modern Jordan, and recently
Saranda in modern Albania – and we know from Christian complaints, among
which those of John Chrysostom are particularly shrill, that Christians were
often attracted enough to Judaism to attend the synagogues; this seems to
have continued until a late date. Late antique Judaism was fragmented, and
varied greatly from place to place, but it is clear from recent research that
diaspora Judaism fl ourished and was well integrated into Roman society. It
was also late antiquity that saw the fl ourishing of the great rabbinic schools
of Palestine and Babylonia which produced the Mishnah and the Talmud.
But from the reign of Theodosius I imperial legislation was increasingly nega-
tive towards the Jews, and while Judaism was never declared illegal, imperial
legislation often classed Jews together with heretics and pagans; the Jewish
patriarchate came to an end c. 425 and during his reign Justinian suppressed
two Samaritan revolts with great severity. A string of literary dialogues,