12. Judaism beyond the Rabbis
Greek Judaism
The bright light shone by the writings of Josephus and Philo on the
world of Greek- speaking Jews in the Mediterranean diaspora in the last
century of the Second Temple is dimmed after c. 100 ce, since for the
next thousand years and more almost no literary source composed by a
Greek- speaking Jew survives. As we have already noted in Chapter 10,
the cessation of such evidence should be taken to reflect not the end of
distinctive forms of Greek- speaking Judaism during these centuries, but
simply a change in the mechanics of survival of Jewish religious writ-
ings: the rabbis preserved Jewish works only in Hebrew and Aramaic,
and because from the early second century Christians had a literature of
their own, they ceased to use and preserve the writings of non- Christian
Jews, so that anything written in Greek by Jews after that date was not
preserved in the medieval manuscript traditions.
Despite the lack of such literary remains, survival of numerous Greek
Jewish inscriptions from the second to seventh centuries ce confirms
the existence of Greek- speaking communities around the Mediterra-
nean rim throughout late antiquity. Excavation of synagogues at a
number of sites confirms the commitment of these communities to Juda-
ism, although there has inevitably been much debate about the precise
religious significance of the wording of the inscriptions (mostly funerary
or honorific) and of the style and decoration of the synagogue buildings.
As we shall see, something can be learned from comments about Jew-
ish religious life in the Roman law codes. Comments by Christian
writers about Jews frequently reflect the image of Jews in the New Tes-
tament rather than the Jews of their own time, but there are exceptions,
such as the attacks by John Chrysostom in Antioch in the late fourth
century on the Jews who were (so he asserted) luring his Christian con-
gregation into their synagogues. Only a small number of Greek Jewish