actors interacted as fellow citizens. But this is already an overly simple
account of the proposition.
Each of these groups inhabited a highly differentiated social world of
its own construction. In that construction, the other had a defined, legiti-
mate place, not infrequently as a friendly co-inhabitant. To be sure, there
is nothing startling about this proposition; it has an air of self-evidence
about it. But perhaps because of that self-evidence, we have given too lit-
tle attention to its implications. Acceptance of this proposition invites us to
think of a religious group’s social formation and emerging identity as being
worked out not only over against the other but also by means of mapping
out a pattern of interaction with the neighbouring other. Such a perspec-
tive suggests that we remember that rivalry extends beyond the quest for
group survival in the face of detractors among, or competition for member-
ship from, the camp of the other.
Rivalry includes (perhaps foremost) competition and rivalry among
religious communities living cheek-by-jowl in the narrow physical con-
fines of the second- and third-century Levantine urban setting, each seek-
ing to lay their respective mappings over the same urban social landscape.
This landscape they must continue to cohabit, as well as divide amongst
themselves, a core issue in any minority group’s “struggle for success” (cf.
Vaage, chapter 1). Moreover, as Philip Harland (chapter 2) reminds us, the
social structures of the city constrained all religious communities, on the
one hand, and, on the other, made both rivalry and cooperation a “natu-
ral” consequence of city life.
- From this last-mentioned element follows an important conceptual
corollary. A religious community’s map of those social arenas in which the
religiously other is a welcome co-participant will not necessarily result in
a consistent fit with the neighbouring group’s equivalent map. Conse-
quently, an important area for inter-religious debate and conflict relates pre-
cisely to the categorization of social spheres as either competitive or
co-operative arenas. That is to say, religious community A may welcome
members of religious community B in zone X; indeed, A may expect and
demand B’s co-participation. But B’s social map may not permit access to
A in what in B’s world corresponds to zone X. Much conflict between reli-
gious communities in the second- to fourth-century CELevant derives from
precisely this sort of asymmetry, and the conflicting expectations it causes.
Sometimes, those expectations surface as concern within a community
about the potential for its members to drift into, or to be overly influenced
by, the community of the other. This would result from the other’s accept-
ance of members of one’s own community into social arenas, which one’s