‘jewish doctrine takes three forms’ 113
*
preservation through both rabbinic Judaism and Christianity, two reli-
gious traditions continuous to the present day. But it is striking that the
evidence preserved for religious purposes by later Christians is very dif-
ferent from the material transmitted by the rabbis. In part, this is a
matter of language: Christians passed down to later generations only
those Jewish texts written in Greek (although what now survives is
often a later Christian translation from the Greek into another lan-
guage, such as Syriac, Ethiopic or Latin); rabbis kept texts only in
Hebrew or Aramaic. Some literary genres to be found in one tradition,
such as the philosophical discourses of Philo preserved by Christians or
the legal disputes preserved by the rabbis, are completely unknown in
the other. In each case, preservation was naturally for the purpose of
religious edification in later ages. The discovery in 1947 of the Dead Sea
scrolls provides some perspective, since they were preserved by chance
rather than selected by the rabbis or by Christians. They reveal that
some expressions of Judaism were preserved by neither of the later trad-
itions, and they raise the suspicion that Judaism may have been even
more varied in this period than one might have gathered from the
material that does survive.
Among the Jewish writings preserved only through Christian use in
late antiquity are the histories of Josephus, on which depends our know-
ledge of the post- biblical political history which had such a profound
effect on religious developments. It is sobering to consider what would
be known about events between the founding and the destruction of the
Second Temple if only the rabbinic texts survived. Rabbinic liturgy pre-
served a memory of the Maccabees, but in a historical vacuum only
marginally filled by obscure references in the Seder Olam, a work edited
in the second century ce summarizing the history of the world and, in
particular, of the Jews. A chronicle of anniversaries of glorious deeds
and joyous events in the Second Temple period was preserved in Megil‑
lat Ta’anit in order to forbid public fasting on these days, but the allusive
references to historical events are often impossible to interpret. In the
Mishnaic tractate Avot, compiled probably at the end of the third cen-
tury ce, the chain of tradition jumps at alarming speed from the fourth
century bce to the end of the first, from ‘Simeon the Just’ in the third
century bce via five generations of sages about whom almost nothing is
known to Hillel and Shammai in the time of Herod. It is on Josephus
that the historian of late Second Temple Judaism must primarily rely,
and it is with his account of the Jewish schools that we shall start.^4