RELIGION AND SOCIETY BEFORE 70C.E 73patrons may have been less interested in their clients’ support for the Temple
and Torah and thus apathetic toward local scribes and judges who attempted
to negotiate between the Torah and local practice. With respect to civil law,
their behavior may have been like that of Babatha’s family, though perhaps
biblical la w was more important for the Galileans.^59 As for ritual law, there
are scarcely grounds for speculation. We know that there were Galileans who
objected to the paintings in Antipas’s palace and the foreskins of Josephus’s
pagan friends, but this may mean only that a certain type of rigorous Jewish
pietism was a cultural option in Galilee, as we could have inferred even in
the absence of evidence. It is also interesting that the earliest post-destruction
rabbis are said to have rendered legal decisions in Galilee—more frequently
than in Peraea or Arabia, but less frequently than in Judaea.^60 We are, it may
be suggested, more likely to encounter large-scale manifestations of aberrant
behavior in Galilee and Peraea than in Judaea.
An example of radical aberrancymaybe Jesus of Nazareth, whose followers
claimed that he had an equivocal, or even hostile, attitude toward Jewish law.
However, they also claimed that he was chased around Lower Galilee (then
ruled by Herod Antipas) by a hostile Jerusalemite bureaucracy of Pharisees
and scribes. Though the first claim is slightly more plausible than the second,
both are perhaps best understood as reflecting the interests of later Christians.
In the DiasporaThe situation in the Diaspora differed in yet another way. There, membership
in a community was optional, and the leaders of the communities rarely if
ever had full legal jurisdiction over constituents (certainly, there was noPer-
sonalita ̈tsprinzip—the common medieval and early modern principle that
birth determined the legal system under which one was fated to live one’s
life and therefore that the executors of the legal system technically had full
jurisdiction over their constituents).^61 Thus, no one was compelled to submit
to the authority of the Jewish law and its local interpreters, so there was no
legal way to enforce particular standards of behavior. Undoubtedly, though,
(^59) It would be interesting to know what the legal background was, if any, of the Galilean
practice of severing the hands of certain types of criminals, repeatedly reported by Josephus in
his autobiography. It has no obvious connection with biblical law, though it can perhaps be
reconciled with difficulty with the lex talionis of Exodus 21:24–25: one who sins with his hand
(e.g., forgery—the crime of which Justus of Tiberias’ brother was accused) has his hand severed.
There is no evidence that the Galileans themselves engaged in such reasoning.
(^60) See S. Cohen, “The Place of the Rabbi in Jewish Society of the Second Century,” inGalilee
in Late Antiquity, p. 160.
(^61) Indeed, according to Rajak, “Was There a Roman Charter?” the right of the Jews in the
cities to live according to their own laws was entirely informal and received government support
only when challenged.