Jewish and pagan literature
Once we move away from writings by and about the Christians
themselves to look at what non-Christians wrote about them, we
enter a realm of evidence that presents a whole range of different
difficulties. One problem is definition. If we want to understand
the sort of world in which Christianity developed, then it could
be argued that anytext written in the ancient Mediterranean
world after about 200 BCis relevant. To an extent, that is true:
texts that tell us something about Jewish and pagan religion, for
example, will provide us with hints as to the possible responses
that Christianity might have provoked among the inhabitants
of the Roman world. Throughout the rest of this book I will cite
a range of non-Christian sources, but for the purposes of the
present chapter I want to limit my remarks to a number of specific
problems relating to their interpretation.Jewish writings
Since Christianity developed from within Judaism (see chapter 4)
it might be expected that Jewish writings of the period will
provide insights. Indeed, many modern authors concerned with
Christian origins have sifted through Jewish sources looking for
material that might help to ‘explain’ the careers of Jesus, Paul,
and those who came after them. The results of such a quest will
often depend on the nature of the questions being asked of the
Jewish sources. A good example can be provided by the texts
known as the Dead Sea Scrolls. These documents, which first
came to public attention in 1947, were discovered quite by acci-
dent in a number of caves located near the remains of an ancient
religious community at Qumran by the north-western shores of
the Dead Sea.^7 They were written mainly in Hebrew (there are a
few in Aramaic and Greek) on leather scrolls (with the obvious
exception of the document called the Copper Scroll) and dated to
the years between c. 225 BCandAD70, with the majority belong-
ing towards the end of that period. Their contents are diverse:SOURCES AND THEIR INTERPRETATION
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