CHRISTIANIZATION 189
by their ancestors, and clearly do not do so because of their horoscope. For it is
not possible that Ares rises for all the Jews who circumcise on the eighth day, so
that iron crosses over them and their blood flows [44]. Wherever they live they
do not worship idols and one day a week they and their children refrain from all
work, from all building, from every journey, from buying, from selling; they do
not slaughter animals on the seventh day, do not light fires, do not try cases. There
is to be found among them no one whom Fate can command on the seventh day
to be found innocent or guilty in a trial, to demolish or build, or to do anything
that men who have not accepted this Law do.
Bardesanes is contrasting the Jews with the Arabs, for his interlocutors and
audience not ethnographic exotica but part of their personal experience (de-
qariba lekon den detehezun hada). As is well known, when the Romans seized
(ahdu) Arabia, they abolished all the Arabs’ earlier laws, especially their prac-
tice of circumcision. They failed to do the same to the Jews, Bardesanes im-
plies.^27
What Bardesanes left implicit was stated more openly by his African con-
temporary Tertullian: No one, the church father wrote (Apologeticum21.1),
should imagine that just because the Christians use the Hebrew scriptures,
they are trying to draw on the the prestige of the older and more famous,or,
Tertullian adds parenthetically,at any rate, legal, religion; in fact Christianity
has nothing in common with Judaism. Scholars have tended to interpret Ter-
tullian’s comment more positively than its context warrants; indeed, scholars
who argue for the essential friendliness of Roman–Jewish relations (give or
take a few massacres) use Tertullian’s phrase (religio licita) as a shorthand
characterization of early and high imperial Roman policy. But Tertullian
never implies that the legality of Judaism was a matter of state policy. On the
contrary, Judaism is legal only in the sense that no one has ever bothered
to declare it illegal, unlike Christianity.^28 Indeed, earlier in the same work,
(^27) Bardesanes’s assertion that the Jews all observe their own laws (the same claim is made about
all the groups discussed in the ethnographic section of the treatise) is an aspect of his argument
that the stars may control human passions but not their actions; humans have free will and so
are subject to divine reward and punishment. If Bardesanes had admitted that people do not all
observe their national laws, he would have had to admit the possibility that their behavior might
be influenced by their horoscopes.
Bowersock,Roman Arabia, p. 79 n. 12, suggests that Bardesanes’s comment refers not to the
annexation of Arabia in 106 but to that of Mesopotamia by Septimius Severus.
(^28) See Baer, “Israel, the Christian Church, and the Roman Empire,” 84–86; cf. Hippolytus,
Refutatio Omnium Haeresium, ed. M. Marcovich (Berlin: De Gruyter, 1986), p. 351: some
Roman Jews, having been attacked in their synagogue by a Christian scoundrel, argue success-
fully before the urban prefect that “the Romans have permitted us to read our ancestral laws
publicly.” See also P. Garnsey, “Religious Toleration in Classical Antiquity,” in W. J. Sheils, ed.,
Persecution and Toleration, Studies in Church History 21 (Oxford: Blackwell, 1984), p. 9, who
characterizes the standard Roman approach to foreign religions as “toleration by default,” since
there was nothing the state could do about them. He claims that Judaism was the exception to