CHRISTIANIZATION 185once believed, this decline was probably neither steep nor terminal in the third
century. The curial classes remained important for centuries thereafter, and
the massive legislation about the city councils incorporated in the second book
of the Theodosian Code offers no unambiguous evidence for a steady decline,
as opposed to imperial interest in the city councils’ smooth functioning.
Nevertheless, it is not unlikely that city councils throughout the empire
came under pressure in the later third century as silver coinage was debased
because the councillors were responsible for the collection and transmission
of most taxes, and the emperors continued to demand payment in undebased
silver. That in general they were not able to bear the traditional expenses
imposed upon them by the culture of euergetism is generally thought con-
firmed by the decline in the number of dedicatory inscriptions, taken as indi-
cations of expenditure on public construction and festivals. But this cannot
be the only reason for the general decline in epigraphy—the vast majority of
it funerary—in the third century.^16
We have no direct information about the fate of the curial classes of Jewish
Palestine in the later third century. But it would not be implausible to connect
the retreat of paganism in the Jewish cities with the decline of thecurialesfor
the simple reason that there, as elsewhere, municipal religions were expensive
to maintain. Such a retreat may have favored the counterculture, in the form
of the patriarchs and their rabbinic prote ́ge ́s. And the decline of the city coun-
cils may also explain why starting around 300 the patriarchs began to have at
their disposal young Jewish men of Greek education to serve as agents. In
their newly straitened circumstances, some city elites may have found it ad-
vantageous to seek the patronage of the patriarchs. Perhaps the same factor
may also explain the first rural synagogues, built by villagers who increasingly
felt left to their own devices.
We should consider other factors, too: the slow and incremental growth in
the influence of patriarchs and rabbis as a result of their own aggressive self-
promotion; the increasing importance of religion as a discrete category of
existence as the emperors belatedly confronted the alarming spread of Chris-
tianity;^17 indeed, the same sorts of (mainly unknown) factors that favored the
spread of Christianity. To repeat, though, the changes in Jewish Palestine in
the late third century are only poorly attested and, if they occurred, were far
from amounting to the systemic transformation that is well attested for the
fourth century and following. It is to this process that we now turn.
(^16) See S. Mrozek, “A`propos de la re ́partition chronologique des inscriptions latines dans le
Haut-Empire,”Epigraphica35 (1973): 13–18; R. MacMullen, “The Epigraphic Habit in the
Roman Empire,”AJP103 (1982): 233–46.
(^17) See J. B. Rives, “The Decree of Decius and the Religion of Empire,”JRS89 (1999):
135–54.