Although these debates have been helpful in some ways, I see little
point in asking whether Judaism was a missionary religion. All of the key
terms are problematic: Judaism (which kind? represented by whom?),
missionary (does mission require a central body or charter?), and religion
(how was ancient religion in these contexts distinct from ethnic culture?
from philosophy?). Further, we cannot penetrate through the surviving
texts to uncover such psychological motives as missionary zeal. We shall only
progress, therefore, if we narrow the question to particular places, times,
documents, and individuals. In such local conditions, did Gentiles embrace
Judean culture in any significant numbers, and, if they did, how is that
process best explained?
Accordingly, this chapter deals with one author, one text, one place, and
one time: Josephus’s Contra Apionem,written for Gentiles in Rome at the end
of the first century CE. This document, I shall argue, is best understood as
an invitation to already interested Gentile readers to embrace Judean phi-
losophy. Of course, the text does not plainly say this, so anyone who insists
that texts tell us everything we should like to know about them, will not
find the argument convincing. But the author and first readers shared
extratextual resources that were critical to their communication. In an
effort to recover those resources, the best that we can do is to sketch out
what is known of Josephus’s broad social context in postwar Rome and of
the immediate (personal) literary context provided for Contra Apionemby
Josephus’s earlier works. Taking into account both the context and the
content of Contra Apionem,I shall argue that the closest parallels to this
work are among the so-called logoi protreptikoi,or discourses and dialogues
intended to promote “conversion” to a philosophical community.
SOCIAL CONTEXT: ATTRACTION AND AVERSION
TO JUDEAN CULTURE IN ROME
Attraction
Fortunately, some germane features of Judean-Roman relations in Rome are
well attested. On the one hand, Judean culture attracted considerable inter-
est among Romans, even to the point of a conversion that was perceived to
involve the renunciation of one’s native tradition. This conclusion does not
depend on courageous inference from a jug handle, but is the only rea-
sonable explanation of an array of evidence. It raises problems from a soci-
ological perspective, for how could a Roman plausibly adopt the ways of
another ethnic group and truly forsake his or her own (Goodman 1994,
1–37)? But we must bracket that question while we survey the sources.
Because they have been widely discussed elsewhere, and my conclusions