and not simply over the law in the abstract can be seen in the handful of mishnaic case stories that imagine anonymous men and women coming before rabbis for a juristic ruling in a matter of ritual law.43 In Mishnah Niddah 8:3, for example, it is purported that a woman actually came before a rabbi for advice on a matter of ritual law that would affect the way she performed the traditional ritual: “The case [ma‘ăśeh] of a certain woman who came before Rabbi Akivah and said to him, ‘I saw a (menstrual) blood stain.’ He said to her, ‘perhaps you had a wound?’ And she said, ‘Yes, and it healed.’ ‘And perhaps it could have been opened up and thus produced blood?’ And she told him, ‘Yes.’ And Rabbi Akivah declared her pure.”
Charlotte Fonrobert argues that in this passage, “rabbis are staged as ‘gynecologists,’ so to speak, as authoritative interpreters of women’s bodies.”44 But the rabbis are being constructed as more than simply experts on female bodies. They are also being constructed as experts on the law and on how the law should be applied to the practice of the ritual. This can be seen in other examples as well. In Yadayim 3:1, for instance, a woman comes to Rabban Gamliel’s father about a matter of purity; in Nedarim 9:10, people bring a man to Rabbi Yishmael for a ruling about a vow. Similarly, in Ta‘anit 3:9 people follow Rabbi Tarfon’s instruction on the fasting ritual; and in Yevamot 12:6, Rabbi Hurkenos (Hyrcanus) determines how a ḥălitsāh ritual is performed. In each of these examples, rabbis are presented as arbiters of traditional ritual practice, and people—seemingly ordinary Judaeans—follow their dictates. Even if these case stories and other reports are invented, they show that the rabbis are claiming authority not only over Judaean ritual law in the abstract but over Judaean ritual as practiced as well.45
Rabbinic Claims against Competing Claims for Authority
Rabbis were likely not the only ones who would have claimed authority to determine how Judaeans should practice the traditional rituals ultimately deriving from the Torah. Judaean society—the subsociety within Roman Syria Palaestina of those sharing a common “Israelite” ancestry and set of cultural practices—consisted of multiple subgroups, each overlapping the other in complex ways.46 Rabbis were only one small group within this variegated social landscape. Presumably, the leaders or ritual experts within each of these other groups would have asserted their own primacy and power to determine how the group and perhaps how others should practice the traditional way of life.
Post-destruction literary sources of the first, second, and third centuries all imagine that multiple groups were living within the territory that was once Judaea and that became Syria Palaestina. As throughout the Roman Empire, these groups were defined largely in ethnic terms. Aside from those native to Judaea and sharing a common ancestry and culture (including biblically derived ritual practice), termed Israelites (Greek, ioudaioi [Judaeans]), authors speak of Romans, Greeks, and Samaritans (כותי [kuti] in the Mishnah). By the later second century, the nonethnic category of “Christian” also came to be used in distinction to “Judaean” and to the other ethnically defined categories.47 Even among Israelites/Judaeans themselves, according to various authors of the time, there were multiple subgroups—Pharisees, Sadducees, and Essenes; rabbis and non-rabbis (of a number of distinct types); and Judaean believers in Jesus.48 On the larger scale of the entire multiethnic province and the smaller scale of the Judaean ethnic group, post-destruction authors frequently treated the boundaries between these groups as sharp. Yet these same authors’ writings provide ample evidence that there was boundary blurring between all these groups and subgroups and that, as a consequence, there was extensive multiplicity within Judaean society—well beyond the discrete subcategories they mention.49
The case of Judaean believers in Jesus provides a good starting point to explain this finding. It has long been recognized that all the initial and many of the subsequent followers of Jesus in the first century, including especially the Jerusalem Church described in Acts and in several of Paul’s letters, were in some way “Jewish.”50 The history of defining these “early Christians” has, as Matt Jackson-McCabe shows, been ideologically fraught, yet quite a few scholars now argue that many, if not all, “early Christians”—those who followed Jesus and created many of the canonical Christian texts—were, in fact, Judaean, rather similar to other “Jewish” groups in the first century and beyond.51 As Daniel Boyarin points out, even those believers in Jesus marked as ethnically non-Judaean were—in the first and early second centuries—understood to have become Judaean in some way, as “proselytes, … theoseboumenoi [Godfearers], and gerim (resident aliens, who were required to keep precisely the laws marked out in Acts for Gentile followers of Jesus).”52
In the latter part of the second century and into the third century, even as Justin Martyr and others were defining “Christian” as a new category of identity—one distinct from, but fundamentally bound up with, Judaean ethnicity—there nevertheless remained numerous and diverse types of Jesus believers who could still be called “Judaean.” Boyarin, who has devoted much energy to elaborating the theoretical framework for picturing the sociocultural landscape, has argued: “We might think of Christianity and Judaism in the second and third centuries as points on a continuum from the Marcionites, who followed the second-century Marcion in believing that the Hebrew Bible had been written by an inferior God and had no standing for Christians, and who completely denied the ‘Jewishness’ of Christianity, on one end, to many Jews on the other end for whom Jesus meant nothing. In the middle, however, there were many gradations that provided social and cultural progression across this spectrum.”53
One of Boyarin’s main points is that despite the rhetoric that began to be employed at the time that there was a pure “Judaism” (or perhaps “Israelitism”) and a pure “Christianity,” most subgroups could be considered “hybrid” in some sense and part of a larger “religious dialect map,” that is, a set of groups interrelated in the same way that different language dialects are interrelated. While it is possible to critique this model, it is particularly useful in pointing to both the hybridity that could exist between the categories posited as distinct and the diversity of ways that different subgroups may have embraced both traditional Judaean practices and belief in Jesus.54 Some Christians might fall outside of Judaean society (and not only because of ideology), yet even within Judaean society, there were likely a number of different subgroups for whom Jesus was a central figure.55
A similar blurring of boundaries, hybridity, and diversity among those hybrid groups that fall within the Judaean ethnos (people sharing ancestry and customs) seems to have existed in other categories as well. Even though many—including the authors of the Mishnah, of several New Testament and early Christian works, and Josephus—considered Judaean/Israelite and Roman/Gentile (gōyim) mutually exclusive categories, evidence suggests that there were Judaeans who embraced a Roman way of living and that for these Judaeans, the border between Roman and Israelite/Judaean was not so sharp.56 In the Galilee, including the cities of Sepphoris and Tiberias, the population was largely ethnically Judaean. Among the archaeological remains from throughout the Galilee, but especially from Sepphoris, stone (chalk/limestone) vessels and stepped pools were found—types of material culture earlier associated with the Jerusalem Temple and unique to Judaeans.57 Earlier and later authors tended to consider the Galilee wholly Judaean; even in the Mishnah (and Tosefta), Galilean locations—unlike the Gentile cities of Akko (Ptolemais) and Bet She’an (Scythopolis)—seem to be largely Judaean.58 At the same time, there is evidence of the embrace of a Roman lifestyle, perhaps including pagan ritual practices. As Mark Chancey argues, beginning in the early to mid-second century, there was a “transformation in the landscape” of Sepphoris and Tiberias. Paved streets, aqueducts, bathhouses, theaters, additional public buildings, and private houses with lavish Greco-Roman mosaics were built—including the well-known elaborate Dionysian scene in a Sepphoran house.59 This transformation corresponds with a change in the iconography of local city coins minted by the local leaders of Sepphoris and Tiberias, which now included images of pagan gods.60 Along with evidence of
