112 A History of Judaism
world, and conversion to Judaism, when it occurred, was generally on
the initiative of the proselyte. We do not know how many such converts
there were. We do not even know how many Jews there were in the first
century ce: the claim, common since the mid- nineteenth century, that
by the mid- first century ce a tenth of the fifty million or so people living
in the Roman empire were Jews is an error which originated with Bar
Hebraeus, a Syriac Christian author of the thirteenth century ce. Bar
Hebraeus claimed that the emperor Claudius ordered a census of the
Jews and came up with a precise figure of 6,944,000 men. But Bar
Hebraeus had evidently failed to understand his source. Jerome in the
late fourth century ce noted that precisely the same figure was reported
by Eusebius as the number of Roman citizens recorded by Claudius in a
census. A census of citizens was standard practice in the Roman empire;
a census of Jews would be bizarre.
In the one extended conversion narrative which survives from the first
century ce, the shift made by a gentile from the status of an outsider
interested in aspects of Jewish practice to that of a full convert was
clearly on the initiative of the convert himself. According to a folkloric
narrative preserved in Josephus’ Antiquities, Izates, king of Adiabene,
learned about Judaism from a passing Jew named Ananias and took on
many Jewish customs, but it was only when he was visited by a second
visitor called Eleazar that he decided to undergo circumcision in order to
follow the law fully. By the time that Izates underwent the operation,
presumably by the court doctor, neither of these Jews was around. There
does not seem to have been a recognized conversion ceremony in the first
century ce to correspond to baptism in early Christianity and conver-
sion in rabbinic Judaism from the third century ce onwards. Nor was
there any local Jewish community to confirm the new status of the king
as a full member of the Jewish people. It seems that Izates decided for
himself that he was now a Jew and therefore bound by the covenant
between God and Israel encapsulated in the Torah. In due course he dis-
covered that his mother, Queen Helena, had been similarly converted.
She was to settle in Jerusalem, where she became a major benefactress of
the city in time of famine. Her status as a prominent proselyte was
known not only to Josephus in the late first century but to the compilers
of the Mishnah in the early third.^3
Evidence for the great variety of interpretations of the Torah that
abounded within Jewish society already in the first three centuries after
the completion of the Bible survives in such plenty because of its