Stark further speculates that socially marginal Diaspora Jews would not
have been easily put off by the facts of crucifixion. Not only did they know
that Roman justice was opportunistic, but they also would have believed
reports concerning the machinations of the high priests in Jerusalem (Stark
1996, 62). In addition, it “seems reasonable to suppose” that escalating
conflict between Rome and various Jewish nationalist movements would
have added to the burden of marginality experienced by Hellenized Jews
(Stark 1996, 62). On the other hand, there is no evidence that the Jewish
revolt in 70 or the Bar Kochba revolt in 132–135 CEhad any serious impact
on relations between Christian and Jewish communities in the Diaspora.
Rather, these wars might have added to the growing weakness of “tradi-
tional Orthodoxy” in the Diaspora and therefore would have increased the
potential appeal of Christianity (Stark 1996, 64).
For marginal Jews such as these, Stark argues, the God-fearers, Gen-
tile “fellow-travellers” who did not take the final step of fulfilling the Law,
might have represented an attractive model of “an alternative, fully Greek
Judaism” (1996, 59). Of course, Jews were unable to cast aside ethnicity to
become God-fearers. But the decision of the Apostolic Council against
requiring converts to observe the Law created a religion free of ethnicity, a
religion that would have satisfied the desires of Hellenized Jews as Stark
has described them (1996, 59).
In fact, states Stark, early Christianity offered the same things to Hel-
lenized Jews that the Reform movement gave to emancipated Jews in nine-
teenth-century Europe (1996, 54). The processes of emancipation allowed
these Jews to move outside their tightly knit and homogeneous commu-
nities within the Jewish ghettoes and opened up new professional, politi-
cal, and social opportunities. When Jews left the ghetto, they found it more
difficult to maintain Jewish law as well as less desirable to do so. Emanci-
pation fostered a desire to shed the highly distinctive aspects of Jewish
dress and appearance as well as to relax dietary and other restrictions that
prevented free association. In these ways, emancipation caused hundreds
of thousands of European Jews to become socially marginal, that is, to
enter into a situation in which their membership in two groups posed a con-
tradiction or cross-pressure, such that their status in each group was low-
ered by their membership in the other (Stark 1996, 52). Some Jews tried
to resolve this pressure by converting to Christianity; others considered
conversion distasteful after centuries of Christian hostility to and persecu-
tion of Judaism (Stark 1996, 69). Of the latter group, many turned to
Reform Judaism. The Reform movement within Judaism was designed to
provide a non-tribal, non-ethnic religion rooted in the Old Testament and
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