74 CHAPTER TWOthere were illegal ways, and in any case the force of social pressure should not
be underestimated. Despite the fact that by the first century the Jews of at
least the larger communities had, like those of Palestine, pretty well internal-
ized the ideological centrality of the Torah and the Temple, it is in the Dias-
pora that one finds clearest evidence of radically anomalous types of Judaism,
as well as a constant trickle of people both in and out of Judaism.^62
To sum up, thefunctioningof the simple ideological scheme outlined earlier
was complex, and its effects on social realities are not easy to predict. The
official status and ideological centrality of the Torah had some readily discern-
ible consequences in Jewish Palestine before 70, chiefly that public life had
in many areas a special texture and that there had come to be a class of expert
manipulators of the Torah. Furthermore, the ideological and practical impor-
tance of the Torah and Temple (but especially the Torah) provided a set of
cultural options. Mastery of the Torah was a source of prestige and power,
even to some extent, in the non-Judaean districts. The Torah thus generated
around itself a class of expert manipulators and mediators, apart from the
pious, who were dedicated to a life in full accordance with its precepts. This
class, unlike the temple priesthood, was not restricted by descent or even
necessarily by social class, though in practice the Torah itself gave priests and
levites priorityas itsinterpreters, andmainly therelatively well-to-dowere able
to educate their sons.^63 What our grasp of the normative ideological system of
first-century Jewish Palestine doesnotallo wus to do, ho wever, is describe ho w
most people actually lived their lives.
The Myth
The covenant constituted only one of the central ideological axes of Judaism
in the first century; the other intersecting ideological axis was constituted by
a mythological complex that received its classic literary formulation in some
(^62) In addition, the papyri provide little (though not no) evidence that Jews in rural Egypt (as
opposedto Alexandria)—eveninthe largevillagesand thenomecapitals wherethey werenumer-
ous and certainly in some sense constituted communities—ever followed Jewish civil law; see
part 3, chapter 8.
(^63) But note that in Deuteronomy 16:18–20, 17:8–13, it is not said that the localshofetimand
shoterim(types of magistrates) need to be priests—only those at the higher level; there is in fact
no particular reason to think that local judges, scribes, and teachers in the later Second Temple
period had to be priests or Levites, though many of them may have been, especially in Judaea,
where priests were numerous. D. Schwartz’s contention (“Scribes and Pharisees, Hypocrites:
Who Are the Scribes in the Ne wTestament,”Studies in the Jewish Background of Christianity
[Tu ̈bingen: Mohr, 1992], pp. 89–101) that scribes were generally Levites is possible but has not
been demonstrated.