‘jewish doctrine takes three forms’ 111
books of the Bible, through the covenant sealed through Moses on Mount
Sinai centuries earlier. These commandments laid down precise rules for
the conduct of life from birth to death. What, then, explains the emergence
in the last centuries of the Second Temple, between 200 bce and 70 ce, of
many different types of Judaism, by no means all compatible?
Part of the answer is that the Bible contained such a rich collection of
ideas that decisions about which to emphasize differed in antiquity just
as they do now. Choices varied enormously, and some biblical ideas,
such as the Jubilee, seem never to have been adopted in practice. But of
no less importance than selective interpretations of the Bible was the
emergence of practices and ideas within Jewish society over the gener-
ations until, through force of custom, they were accorded the respect due
to ancient tradition and came to be seen by some as normative. All Jews
might claim to be following faithfully the laws as handed down in the
Bible, and those laws provided precise details about behaviour in every
aspect of life. As a result, the majority of Jews saw it as a religious duty
to refrain from work on the Sabbath, to circumcise their sons, to avoid
forbidden foods and to bring offerings, when they could, to the Jeru-
salem Temple. Such were the characteristics of Judaism as remarked by
Greek and Latin pagan writers of the first century bce and the first
century ce. For most Jews, simply keeping the Torah as they believed
that their ancestors had done will have sufficed.^2
Probably only a minority adopted any particular philosophy. For
those who did so, it seems to have been a matter of personal choice.
Josephus described in his autobiography his own spiritual odyssey
through the Jewish schools in his teenage years: ‘At about the age of
sixteen I determined to gain personal experience of the several sects into
which our nation is divided.’ Non- Jews who converted to Judaism out
of personal conviction (rather than to facilitate marriage to a Jew) may
have been attracted to specific Jewish philosophies more than native
Jews. Thus the author of the Gospel of Matthew seems to have attrib-
uted to Jesus an attack on Pharisees for instilling proselytes with
Pharisaic teachings: ‘Woe to you, scribes and Pharisees, hypocrites! For
you cross sea and land to make a single convert, and you make the new
convert twice as much a child of hell as yourselves.’
This passage in Matthew was for a long time the basis of a notion
that conversion to Judaism was encouraged in the late Second Temple
period by Jewish missionary activity which was both a precursor to,
and a rival of, mission by the first Christian generation. But the Chris-
tian mission was an exception in the religious history of the ancient