the limits of variety 189
began against the Church in Jerusalem, and all except the apostles were
scattered throughout the countryside of Judaea and Samaria’, the con-
tinuation of a Christian community in the city down to the outbreak of
revolt in 66 ce suggests that non- Christian Jews in general treated those
who preached salvation in Christ as mavericks rather than dangerous.
Despite occasional persecution, there was still a community in Jeru-
salem throughout the 50s and early 60s ce, and they continued to preach
and pray in the Temple. That is how Paul was to end up being arrested
there by the crowd some years after Stephen’s martyrdom. The execu-
tion of James the brother of Jesus in Jerusalem by the Sadducee High
Priest Ananus, discussed above (Chapter 6), took place in 62 ce. Chris-
tian Jews were no odder in first- century Jerusalem than others, such as
the prophet Jesus son of Ananias who proclaimed woe in Jerusalem
from the year after James’ death to the eventual destruction of the city
in 70 ce, about whom more will be said in Chapter 8.^46
Paul himself could not have been clearer in his letter to the Philip-
pians about his own status as a Jew:
If anyone else has reason to be confident in the flesh, I have more: circum-
cised on the eighth day, a member of the people of Israel, of the tribe of
Benjamin, a Hebrew born of Hebrews; as to the law, a Pharisee; as to zeal,
a persecutor of the church; as to righteousness under the law, blameless.Similarly in his letter to the Romans, towards the end of his life: ‘I ask,
then, has God rejected his people? By no means! I myself am an Israel-
ite, a descendant of Abraham, a member of the tribe of Benjamin.’ When
in his second letter to the Corinthians he boasted in replying to his crit-
ics that he was as much a Hebrew, Israelite and descendant of Abraham
as them, he went on, while demonstrating his devotion to Christ by the
floggings he had undergone for the sake of his mission, to indicate in
passing the lengths to which he would go to maintain his membership
of the Jewish community, claiming: ‘Five times I have received from the
Jews the forty lashes minus one.’ Punishment by a Jewish court implied
inclusion. The judges in a Jewish court in a city of the eastern Roman
provinces in the mid- first century ce could try, convict and punish only
fellow Jews. And since Paul could have stopped the punishment at
any time by claiming no longer to be part of the Jewish community (like
for instance, his younger contemporary Tiberius Julius Alexander), his
willingness to undergo such a lashing demonstrates powerfully the
importance to him of continuing to belong within Judaism.^47
If Paul was a Roman citizen, his submission to a Jewish court will