Religion
THROUGHOUT THE FIRST CENTURY CE, Greek religion and culture dominated the eastern Mediterranean, with the exception of such cultural islands as Roman colonies (e.g., Corinth in Achaia, founded in 44 BCE; Patra in Achaia, founded in 14; Philippi in Macedonia, founded in 42; Berytus in Syria, modern Beirut, founded in 15). Greek religion had changed very little over the centuries, with each city carefully preserving its own distinctive traditions (Pausanias describes the great variety of Greek religious practices in the second century CE). An exception was the innovative development of Hellenistic ruler cults beginning in the late fourth century BCE.
Greek religion took three main forms: public cults fostered by the Greek cities and largely restricted to citizens; private cults practiced by associations with limited membership (including mystery cults); and domestic cults practiced by Greek families in the privacy of their homes. Greek public cults were highly visible and part of the public space of each city. Athens, one of the wealthiest Greek cities, had a stunning acropolis studded with important temples dominated by the Parthenon, dedicated to Athena, the city’s patron deity. Temples, shrines, statues, and altars permeated public spaces. Paul was reportedly distressed because the city was so full of idols (Acts 17.16), and he was probably reacting as many other visitors had when he told a group of Athenians how extremely religious they were in every way (Acts 17.22).
Greek cults were not based on a set of coherent doctrines (like early Christianity), but rather on the careful observance of such traditional rituals as processions, feasts, prayers, libations, and sacrifices. As in Judaism (and Islam), orthopraxy was valued over orthodoxy. Greek cults had little interest in ethics unless cultic issues were involved, e.g., the impurity resulting from homicide; it was the philosophical schools (see below) that were primarily concerned with the moral life. The primary object of such public cults was the fostering of proper relationships with the gods to ensure the well-being of the city, protection from war and disease, and the prosperity that resulted from good harvests and successful commerce. Traditional Greek gods were neither omnipotent nor omniscient; they did not create the cosmos but were thought to have come into being after the cosmos. The sun, moon, and stars (part of the cosmos) were therefore called “eternals,” and Olympian deities (e.g., Zeus, Hera, Poseidon) and the chthonic or earth deities (e.g., Dionysius, Demeter) were designated “immortals” both were separated by a great gulf from humans, who were “mortals.” Though gods were more powerful than mortals, both gods and humans were thought to be subject to moira, or “fate.” During the Hellenistic period the traditional Greek distinction between mortal and immortal became blurred; this was encouraged by myths of humans who became immortal and the availability of immortality through some “mystery religions.”
Though Rome was a single city-state that became the political seat and administrative center of an enormous empire centered on the Mediterranean, native Roman religious cults and cultic practices had very little influence on non-Romans, with the noteworthy exception of Roman ruler cults in the Greek East. The development of the ruler cult of Alexander the Great in the Greek world, followed by the cults devoted to subsequent Hellenistic kings and queens, appears to have been a functional adjustment to the political reality that cities were no longer independent, but required a type of cult appropriate to their new subordinate status. In the tradition of Alexander, Hellenistic ruler cults (with priests, processions, sacrifices, and games) were established to honor powerful Greek rulers and benefactors, such as Lysander of Sparta and Dion of Syracuse. Greek cities typically received privileges, benefactions, and financial aid from those whom they honored with cults (a quid pro quo based on the patron-client social relationship). Cities normally took the initiative in founding ruler cults, which were integral to the public affairs of each city-state. Since the Ptolemaic dynasty constituted the thirty-second pharaonic dynasty, each Ptolemaic pharaoh could claim to be an incarnation of Amon-Ra. After the death of Ptolemy I (ca. 280 BCE), his son and successor, Ptolemy II Philadelphos, arranged the formal deification of his father as well as his mother, Berenike, as theoi soteres, “savior gods.” In the 270s, Ptolemy II and his wife Arsinoe II were officially deified while yet living as theoi adelphoi, “sibling gods,” and were offered divine worship in the shrine of Alexander the Great. After Ptolemy II, each successive Ptolemaic king and queen was deified upon accession and worshiped as part of the royal household.
The ruler cults of the Hellenistic kings were antecedents of the Roman imperial cult. Beginning in the third century BCE the Greek cities sometimes devoted cults to the Roman magistrates who governed them. Octavian arranged for the official deification of Julius Caesar by the Roman Senate on January 1, 42 BCE. Thereafter, Octavian, as Caesar Augustus, assumed the official title divi filius (“son of the god [Julius Caesar]”), though he discouraged worship both at home and in the provinces. The deified Julius Caesar and the other emperors deified upon death by official acts of the Roman Senate became parts of the official pantheon of the Roman people, though the imperial cult was more important in the provinces than in Rome itself. In Roman Asia the imperial cult provided a ritual presence for a physically absent emperor. In the traditional form of the imperial cult, the emperor was worshiped as a god only after his death and apotheosis. In the imperial cults in Anatolia, the divinized emperor was usually associated with other, more traditional gods such as Dea Roma or various groups of Olympian deities. The divinization of human rulers finds an echo in the story of the acclamation of Herod Agrippa as a god by the people of Tyre and Sidon and his subsequent death because of hubris (Acts 12.20–23).
Three main types of voluntary Greek private associations (thiasoi or collegia) existed, each of which had a greater or lesser cultic component: professional corporations or guilds (e.g., fishermen, fruit growers, shipowners, and silversmiths; cf. Acts 19.23–41); funerary societies (collegia tenuiorum); and religious or cult societies (collegia sodalicia), centering on the worship of a deity. The last category includes “mystery religions,” a general term for a variety of ancient private cults that shared several features. The term “mystery” is related to a Greek term meaning “initiate,” and “mystery” itself means “ritual of initiation,” referring to the secret initiation rites at the center of such cults. The mystery religions did not enter suddenly into the Mediterranean world during the Hellenistic period, though the period of their greatest popularity appears to have been the first through the third centuries CE. Little is known about them, but they seem to have consisted of three interrelated features: dromena, “things acted out,” i.e., the enactment of the cult myth; legomena, “things spoken,” i.e., the oral presentation of the cult myth; and deiknoumena, “things shown,” i.e., the ritual presentation of symbolic objects to the initiate. Initiates who experienced the central mystery ritual became convinced that they would enjoy soteria (“salvation”), health and prosperity in this life as well as a blissful afterlife. Mystery religions were once thought to focus on a divinity that represented the annual decay and renewal of vegetation through his or her death and restoration to life, but in recent years the great diversity among those cults formerly lumped together as “mystery cults” has become increasingly apparent.
More than a century ago, German scholars associated with the Göttingen-based “history of religions school” argued that early Christian sacramentalism (particularly the baptismal experience of sharing the death and resurrection of Christ reflected in Rom 6) was dependent on the Hellenistic mystery cults, with their focus on a dying and rising god with whom initiates identified and through whom they received salvation. It now appears that the mystery cults had no standard theology centering on the promise of immortality through ritually sharing the death-and-resurrection experience of the cult deity, nor is the view that the mysteries offered immortality through the ritual identification of the initiate with such a deity verified by the surviving evidence about the significance of such mystery initiations.
/> Philosophy
DURING THE HELLENISTIC PERIOD, the most important philosophical schools in the Greek world were no longer Plato’s Academy or Aristotle’s Peripatetic tradition, but rather the three Hellenistic philosophical traditions of Stoicism, Epicureanism, and Skepticism. Cynicism, a countercultural movement that fostered no school tradition, ran a distant fourth. The philosophical schools of the classical period (ca. 480–323 BCE) typically organized their dialectical efforts into three areas, physics, logic, and ethics; the main Hellenistic philosophical traditions, however, tended to focus on logical arguments in pursuit of eudaimonia, “the happy life” or “the flourishing life.” During the Hellenistic and Greco-Roman periods, therefore, philosophy was thought of not as an abstract intellectual exercise but rather as therapy for the soul in which the philosopher played the role of a moral physician.
Early Christianity and early Judaism regarded conformity to moral norms as a primary expression of faithfulness and obedience to God, but there were no counterparts to ethical monotheism in the public cults of the Greek world. Emphasis on individual happiness was in part the result of the decline of the Greek city-state through subordination to Hellenistic monarchies and Roman imperialism, resulting in a growing stress on the role and importance of the individual in society.
Epicurus (341–270 BCE) moved to Athens in 307, where he bought a house with a garden; there he and his school lived a secluded life in order to avoid the negative influences of city life. Though they had the reputation of being hedonists, they actually pursued a spartan standard of living. The limit of pleasure for Epicureans was the absence of pain, and seeking more pleasure only served to introduce the pain of unsatisfied desire. Since pleasures of the soul were preferable to pleasures of the body, the greatest pleasure was a life of philosophical contemplation. For Epicureans, the universe existed only out of chance. They thought the gods were uninterested in the human world, as they enjoyed their own perfectly blessed life; thus humans were free from the irrational and superstitious fear of the supernatural. The private life of Epicureans ensured that their influence on Hellenistic and Greco-Roman culture was minimal.
Zeno (335–263 BCE), the founder of Stoicism, arrived in Athens in 313 and began teaching in the Agora in the Painted Porch (stoa poikile), from which the school derived its name. Stoicism was perhaps the most influential philosophical school in the Hellenistic world, surviving in modified form into late antiquity. When Paul arrived in Athens in the mid-first century CE, he found Epicurean and Stoic philosophers arguing their views in the Agora (Acts 17.18). For Stoics, philosophy is not a pastime but a way of life, and the goal of the good life produces eudaimonia, or “happiness.” The good is achieved by “living in agreement with nature.” Virtue alone is adequate for happiness, and nothing but virtue is good. All emotions (the primary emotions are appetite and fear) are bad, and Stoics must be “apathetic,” i.e., not allow emotions to rule reason. Emotions are not experienced by the ideal sage (one who had attained moral and intellectual perfection). Stoic ethics emphasized self-sufficiency (autarkeia) and obedience to the dictates of reason.
Elements of these major intellectual traditions appear within the NT and became more influential as Christianity became more assimilated to the culture of the Greco-Roman world.
The Bible and Archaeology
ERIC M. MEYERS
THE STUDY OF THE RELATIONSHIP between the Bible and archaeology has traditionally been identified with the field of biblical archaeology, a discipline that goes back over a century and a half to the time when the West began to rediscover its rich cultural legacy in the ancient Near East. Adventurers, explorers, clergymen, and biblical scholars in the nineteenth century set out to recover the larger setting of the world of the Bible in a charged atmosphere of scientific rationalism that had been created as a result of the forces unleashed in the Enlightenment. Napoleon Bonaparte’s expedition to conquer Egypt in 1798 was accompanied by a Commission of Arts and Science, a group of scientists and orientalists who would study the land and its linguistic heritage along with all its material aspects. Their work was the trigger that inaugurated a new era of discovery and study of the Old World that was to dominate Western circles till today. Interest in Mesopotamia soon followed, and at the beginning of the nineteenth century in Ottoman Palestine, an English explorer and geographer, Edward Daniel Clarke, set out to identify the major sites of the Bible. A student of Clarke, Jean Louis Burckhardt, soon followed his teacher’s lead in his exploration of Transjordan and Palestine and was the first to identify Petra.
The two Americans who came after and who inaugurated a project of systematic exploration of biblical sites were Edward Robinson, professor of Old Testament at Andover Theological Seminary in Massachusetts, later at Union Theological Seminary in New York, and Eli Smith, a young missionary from Beirut who possessed the necessary linguistic abilities to navigate through the Holy Land. Robinson and Smith set out in 1838 to follow the route of the exodus from Egypt. They realized their goal of producing a scientific geography of biblical lands but also professed a profound belief in the historicity of the Bible and looked upon their explorations as part pilgrimage and part science. This mixture of faith and scientific inquiry characterized the beginning of an era of continuous study of the Holy Land; this has carried forward through the twentieth into the twenty-first century and is part of the mixed legacy of this extraordinary era. The publication of their work, Biblical Researches in Palestine (London, 1841), marked the end of the era of missionaries and pilgrims and the beginning of biblical archaeology as a subject of intellectual pursuit.
Among the first expeditions to follow Robinson and Smith was the Lynch Expedition, sent by the U.S. Navy to explore the Jordan Valley and Dead Sea region in 1849. In 1865 the British established the Palestine Exploration Fund (PEF), which served as the vehicle for the first full survey of Palestine conducted by royal engineers Charles Warren and Charles Wilson in 1872–78 and 1881. One of the primary purposes of the PEF was to illustrate the Bible. The American Palestine Exploration Society, a forerunner of the American Schools of Oriental Research (ASOR), was established during this period (1870–84) for the purpose of “the illustration and defense of the Bible.” The marriage between the Bible and archaeology, therefore, was very much a part of the formative period in which Americans and British cemented their ties to the Holy Land through exploration, research, and ultimately excavation of biblical sites. All this occurred at a time when higher criticism of the Bible was gaining new visibility, best signified by the publication of the English edition of Julius Wellhausen’s Prolegomenon to the History of Ancient Israel (Edinburgh, 1885).
The first “modern” scientific excavation of a biblical site in Palestine came at the end of the nineteenth century. In 1890 Sir Flinders Petrie led an expedition to Tell el-Hesi to determine for the PEF the extent of Egyptian influence in Palestine. An American, Frederick Bliss, joined Petrie there in 1894. Petrie is credited with establishing the fundamentals of stratigraphic archaeology and the typological analysis of pottery, which he separated by period. In making judgments about the peoples associated with the various stratified layers, however, Petrie became associated with the eugenics movement of Francis Galton; this association influenced racial thinking about Near Eastern archaeology until the 1940s in a most negative way.
The establishment of the American Schools of Oriental Research in Jerusalem in 1900 was a watershed event that led to some of the most important archaeological developments of the twentieth century. These included excavations, historical and linguistic research relating to the biblical world, the discovery of the Dead Sea Scrolls, and ultimately the geographical broadening of the horizon of research and the construction of centers in Baghdad, Amman, and Nicosia. The suggestion for establishing such an institution in Palestine came from J. Henry Thayer, professor of New Testament at Harvard University and president of the Society of Biblical Literature (SBL), in 1895. Thayer referred his idea to a committee, which pub
lished a circular to solicit support for the project. In that document the committee expressed the rationale for the school in this way: “The object of the school would be to afford graduates of American theological seminaries, and other similarly qualified persons, opportunity to prosecute biblical and linguistic investigations under more favorable conditions than can be secured at a distance from the Holy Land;…to gather material for the illustration of the biblical narratives; to settle doubtful points in biblical topography; to identify historic localities; to explore and, if possible, excavate, sacred sites.”* This document illustrates well the strong dedication to recovering biblical history typical at the turn of the twentieth century. In their disregard for the nonbiblical aspects of Near Eastern culture the founding fathers betray their Western bias, which was subsequently modified by the organizing committee of universities and seminaries that constituted ASOR’s first academic consortium.
Although the focus on the Bible dominated American and British interest in recovering the archaeological heritage of Palestine and neighboring lands when ASOR set down its first institutional roots in the Holy Land, the oversight committee eventually extended ASOR’s interests and purview to the rest of the Levant and the greater Near East to include “nonbiblical cultures.” In the early part of the twentieth century the SBL published ASOR’s research that was clearly biblical in focus, and the Archaeological Institute of America (AIA) the nonbiblical material. The relationship between the Bible and archaeology at that time was thus very much framed as a dialogue between societies, one focused on the biblical heritage (SBL), the other on the classical heritage (AIA) but with an openness to the archaeology of the ancient Near East. With the publication of the first Bulletin of the America Schools of Oriental Research (BASOR) in 1920, ASOR at least in theory allowed the possibility of bringing the two worlds of the Bible and archaeology together within a single society as well as of bridging the gulf that separated the archaeology of the Near East from the world of classical archaeology. These developments illustrate how biblical studies and the study of ancient Near Eastern civilizations, as well as classical culture to a lesser degree, were linked together early in the history of scholarship in the field.
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