devoted to the interpretation of Torah and traditional law like the rabbis, to whom the leaders may have delegated this responsibility or to whom the people turned. Two types of individual Judaeans may have been particularly suited to function as legal-ritual experts for the common Judaeans of cities or villages: the priest and the synagogue leader. Priests traditionally served just this role of legal-ritual expert, as evidenced by Josephus’s claim that in his youth (he was a priest), the high priests would consult him for his expertise on ta nomima (“customs,” “legal matters,” or perhaps traditions of the Torah).77 Abundant evidence, including that of the Mishnah, shows that despite the loss of the Temple, many continued to be identified as priests.78 These priests may not have formed separate groups—as evidenced by the presence of a number of priests in the rabbinic group—yet individual priests may have continued to claim traditional authority to determine ritual practice, and groups of Judaeans may have sought (non-rabbinic) priestly expertise.
Though there are no explicit references in the Mishnah to such competing priestly authority, there are hints of such competition. On more than one occasion, brief narratives recall courts of priests in Temple times that seem to stand in contrast to and in competition with the main court or with sages—groups that, I will argue, the rabbis saw as their predecessors in Temple times. Thus in Mishnah Rosh Hashanah 1:7, a certain doctor named Tōviyāh (Tobias), together with his freed slave, witnesses the first sliver of the new moon: “and the priests accepted him and his son but invalidated his freed slave. And when they came before the Court [bēit din], they accepted him and his freed slave, but invalidated his son.”
The story is presumably set in Temple times (indicated by “the Court”), but in depicting a group of priests who form an alternative to the (pre-)rabbinic Court, it is quite likely projecting contemporary tension with competing priests back into Temple times.79 In another passage, Rabban Yoḥanan ben Zakkai, of the earliest generations of rabbis, criticizes the priests’ interpretation of a verse that tends to serve their own advantage. Though it is unclear whether in the story Yoḥanan ben Zakkai refers to priests of his own generation, and thus whether the text imagines groups of post-destruction priests who claim competing legal-ritual authority, the passage suggests that such competition may have existed even in the time of the Mishnah.80
In addition to priests, a second type of functionary who may have exerted authority over ritual practice was the synagogue leader. Though there is no uncontested archaeological evidence of monumental synagogues—large-scale decorated synagogue buildings of a variety of architectural types—in Roman Palestine at the time the Mishnah was produced, the Mishnah and several early Christian texts presume that the institution of the synagogue (בית הכנסת [bēit hakkĕneset] in the Mishnah) existed, and there is evidence that there were non-monumental synagogues at the time.81 On a number of occasions in the Mishnah and Tosefta, there is mention of leaders or functionaries in the synagogue (rōsh hakkĕneset or ḥazzan hakkĕneset) who play a central role in the performance of its ritual.82 If, as some argue, the rabbis had no authority in the synagogue, these leaders or functionaries of the synagogue may have been the ones to determine how ritual was practiced, and so may have been competition for the rabbis.83 This may be why there is a case story in Tosefta Terumot 2:13 in which a synagogue head (rōsh hakkĕneset) consults with Rabban Gamliel over a matter of ritual practice. The story of such a functionary asking a rabbi to tell him how to act may well be a fantasy in which the competing ritual authority actually depends on a rabbi in order to know the proper way of doing the ritual. Despite the portrayal in this toseftan story, synagogue heads—who were likely associated with the “people” of a given city or with the non-rabbinic Judaean “commoners”—may in fact have had more authority than rabbis.84
Among the other “hybrid” subgroups of Judaean society—whether or not they formed cohesive communities—there were likely also ritual authorities particular to those groups. These authorities, too, may have been political leaders or ritual experts without any particular political power. And they may have been priests, synagogue leaders, scribes, or others, like the rabbis, dedicated to the interpretation of the Torah and its traditional practices. To the extent that Romanized Judaeans, those engaged with Samaritan society (even perhaps full Samaritans), Judaean believers in Jesus, and those whom the rabbis believed observed the traditional way of life incorrectly were distinct from the “people of” a given city or village (that is, “common” local Judaeans), they likely had their own experts to whom they turned. The Christian Didascalia Apostolorum may be instructive on this point. According to the Didascalia (which may be, as Fonrobert argues, partially addressed to Judaean believers in Jesus within a larger Christian community), bishops are empowered to determine the detailed ritual practices such as are laid out in the text, and they are empowered to adjudicate disputes, perhaps through unofficial arbitration. The Christian community imagined in this text is subject to the authority of its leaders, who, according to the text, are ritual and legal experts.85 In parallel, leaders of the various Judaean and hybrid groups likely claimed similar authority over their own communities.
Based on the various hints provided by the rabbinic and non-rabbinic evidence, it seems that others in Judaean society besides rabbis also claimed the authority to determine how traditional rituals should be performed. The rabbis were but one small group in the complex social and political landscape of late second-or early third-century Roman Palestine. As I argue, they aimed to be the ultimate authority over traditional Judaean practice, but others likely claimed the same authority.
The Roman Context and Cultural Mimicry
Living under Roman imperial rule in the presence of numerous expressions of the dominant colonial culture and competing against other Judaean groups and ritual authorities, the rabbis appear to have appropriated the model of the jurist in order to lay a unique claim for their own importance and power. As Amram Tropper has suggested, it is highly probable that the rabbis were familiar with this cultural model. Based on a variety of evidence, Tropper argues: “It [is] likely that Greek-speaking lawyers who possessed at least a rudimentary knowledge of Roman law flourished throughout the east. In short, the presence of Roman legal jurisdiction and Greek-speaking lawyers in the Near East indicates that the fundamentals of Roman law were probably well known throughout the Graeco-Roman environment in Palestine.”86 Thus the rabbis would have been at least generally familiar with elements of Roman law and the institution of the Roman jurist. By fashioning themselves jurists of Jewish ritual law, the rabbis seem to be borrowing from the Roman cultural model with which they were familiar.87
Following Beth Berkowitz’s insight in her analysis of rabbinic mimicry of Roman methods of capital punishment, this cultural mimicry can be seen as an “appropriation of power” achieved by “cleverly constructing rabbinic power out of the cultural materials of Rome.”88 In Roman culture, legal ingenuity in juristic argumentation was a source of prestige for those of relatively high social standing who engaged in this activity. Indeed, Alan Watson argues that this feature of Roman law explains the continuing importance of legal interpretation by experts for many centuries.89 Rabbis were not, for the most part, from the same upper stratum of society from which the Roman jurists emerged. Nevertheless, this model seems to have presented an opportunity for rabbis to attain a modicum of power or expand the minimal power they already had simply by fashioning themselves this way.90
The rabbis mimicked Roman cultural forms pertaining to the law and legal practice in many ways, and this seems to be one of them. In addition to fashioning themselves jurists, the rabbis also appropriated Roman conceptions of capital punishment, as Berkowitz has shown; they imitated the form and ideology of the scholasticism and sophism of the Second Sophistic and perhaps even conceived of their traditional system of practice as law in imitation of Roman notions of the law, as Tropper has shown; and they mimicked the style of presenting legal material in a heterogeneous manner, as Simon-Shoshan has shown.91 In part, each of these similarities between the Mishnah and Roman literary and cultural forms stems from a shared cultural universe, as Tropper and Simon-Shoshan
