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76 Lightstone Late Second Temple Judaism: A Reconstruction and Re-description as a Religio-Cultural System

Jack N. Lightstone

Introduction

By the turn of the 1990s, when E.P. Sanders outlined the principal elements of what he called the “Common Judaism” of the late Second Temple era, it had become an implausible scholarly exercise to posit the existence of, and to seek to describe, an overarching, shared religion of the Jewish people in the time of Jesus.1 One reason why Sanders’ work was significant is that it went against the grain of emerging caution in use of ancient Judaic and Christian sources, which had become much more highly problematized by the 1970s and 1980s, in the decades preceding Sanders’ publications on this theme. Indeed, this state of affairs was likely one motive for Sanders’ exercise. A number of factors led to that problematization. Scholars increasingly rec- ognized the cacophony of ancient textual voices, particularly with the study of the Dead Sea Scrolls and the Nag Hammadi documents; these voices, including Philo’s,2 could no longer be easily harmonized with notions of a “normative” Judaism. In tandem, serious challenges had been proffered about the once-as- sumed authority of rabbinic and proto-rabbinic (assumed-to-be-Pharisaic) teachings among first-century Jews. So, much of a previous scholarly genera-

1 E.P. Sanders, Jewish Law from Jesus to the Mishnah (London: SCM, 1990); E.P. Sanders, Judaism: Practice and Belief, 63 bce-66 ce (Philadelphia: Trinity Press International, 1992); see the review essay by Martin Hengel / Roland Deines, “E.P. Sanders’ ‘Common Judaism’, Jesus, and the Pharisees,” JThS 46/1 (1995): 1-70. Wayne McCready / Adele Reinhartz, “Common Judaism and Diversity within Judaism,” in Common Judaism: Explorations in Second Temple Judaism, ed. Wayne McCready / Adele Reinhartz (Minneapolis: Fortress Press, 2008), 1-10. See also E.P. Sanders, “Common Judaism Explored,” in Common Judaism: Explorations in Second Temple Judaism, ed. Wayne McCready / Adele Reinhartz (Minneapolis: Fortress Press, 2008), 11-23. Other essays in this volume are also useful. 2 Erwin R. Goodenough’s reading of Philo’s work as representing a philosophical-mystical Judaism is a case in point; see Erwin Ramsdell Goodenough, By Light, Light: The Mystic Gospel of Hellenistic Judaism (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1935), as well as his Introduction to Philo Judaeus (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1940). Goodenough then went on to use his “mystic Philo” as a key to interpreting the symbols of Jewish material culture in Jewish Symbols in the Greco-Roman Period, 13 vols. (New York: Pantheon Press, 1953-1968).

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Late Second Temple Judaism 77

tion’s work, such as that of George Foote Moore,3 seemed increasingly unten- able. Moreover, material evidence about Jews and Judaism in the Greco-Roman world, especially in the aftermath of scholarly debates about E.R. Goode- nough’s interpretations of Jewish symbols,4 could no longer be squared with a supposed rabbinic or proto-rabbinic “normative” Judaism. Even the growing appreciation of the diversity of the early Christian movements and their lon- ger-than-previously-surmised entanglement with an equally diverse set of contemporary Judaic groups served to mitigate against any easily achievable reconstruction of a normative Judaism in the first several centuries ce. All of the foregoing factors made work like Sanders’ fraught, even question- able and ill-conceived, and certainly daring. With such a cacophony of voices, for whom and to whom did each source speak? Which ancient audience could be shown to be listening to what traditions and their purveyors? To what ex- tent did their depictions of Judaic life, belief and religious practice represent those of historical communities, rather than those of some authors’ ideal Ju- daic polity? These questions drove, and continue to drive, a plethora of schol- arship. Moreover, the use of early rabbinic literature, especially Mishnah and Tosefta, to fill in the details of such a religion had been highly seductive, as demonstrated by the classic work of George Foote Moore, among others. Only the Pentateuch, produced approximately half a millennium before Jesus, prof- fered detailed descriptions of religious rites, institutions and religiously legiti- mated law for a “Second Temple Judaism” that approximated the apparent comprehensiveness of the tractates of Mishnah and Tosefta, produced near the end of the second century ce and sometime after (perhaps well after) the second half of the third century, respectively. Other than these, one must turn to the Qumran documents, which are decidedly sectarian. Because of the na- ture of the early rabbinic corpus as he understood it, on the one hand, and on the other, because of the diversity reflected in non-rabbinic, late Second Tem- ple documents and the material evidence, Jacob Neusner vociferously cri- tiqued Moore’s use of early rabbinic sources and argued against Sanders’ attempt to define one “Common Judaism.”5

3 George Foote Moore, Judaism in the First Centuries of the Christian Era, 3 vols. (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1927-1930). 4 Goodenough, Jewish Symbols. 5 See Jacob Neusner, “Judaism: Practice and Belief, 63 b.c.e. – 66 c.e. A Review of Recent Work by E.P. Sanders,” BBR 6 (1996): 167-178; Jacob Neusner, Rabbinic Literature & the New Testament: What We Cannot Show, We Do Not Know (Valley Forge: Trinity Press International, 1994); Jacob Neusner, Rabbinic Judaism: Structure and System (Minneapolis: Fortress Press, 1996), especially the introduction; Jacob Neusner, “Mr. Sanders’s Pharisees and Mine,” BBR 2 (1992): 143-169. For Neusner’s assessment of the work of George Foote Moore, see for instance, Jacob Neusner, Judaism: The Evidence of the Mishnah (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1981), 1-15. Neusner