Not long ago, Jordan Lavender, Ph.D. posted a short note about Paul. Dr. Lavender is an independent scholar who writes on Paul and the first-century Mediterranean world. [1] I replied, and he answered. Here is the exchange as it happened.
Jordan Lavender, Ph.D.: “Lots of anti-Paul material. He was applying historical Jesus’ message to non-Jews[.]”
Jeremy Prince: “Hi, Jordan! I appreciate where you’re coming from and I’m not trying to parse [a] 13-word posted-note, but in the spirit of collegial peer-review with one another, I offer this one thought: I think that rounding the world down into “Jews” and “non-Jews” is problematic. There were many non-Judean or non-Judahite (i.e. non-“Jewish”) Torah-keepers in the long first century. There were Samaritans, there were Nasoreans, there were Essenes, there were Ebyonim, there were Therapeutae, there were Tsadduqee (“Sadducees”). There were Galilean Bnei Nevi’im around Carmel, there were Hillelites (like Paul, Nicodemus, and Gamaliel), there were Shammaite Hasidim (like Simon the Zealot and Judah the Galilean) - and both groups laid claim to the name Perushim (“Pharisee”). There were Idumean, Iturean, Decapolean, Arab-Nabatean, and Syrian-Aramean (forced) converts to Hasmonean Judahism. There were Libertini (“Freedmen”) who were nominally Torah-keeping but largely had forsaken it in favor of Graeco-Roman socio-economic and political integration (like Josephus). There were Herodians, who occupied a liminal space between Romano-Hellenistic patronage, forced conversion to Hasmonean Judahism through Tsadduqee administration, and Diasporic colonization paired with ruthless local extraction and brutal repression. All of these groups were, to varying degrees, Torah-keeping. Only one or two of these groups would have identified as Judean/Judahite or “Jews”. The rest would have spurned the title in favor of something more specific to their community - or to be called Bnei Yisra’el as a general term. So, when we talk about who Paul was, and who Paul was proselytizing, and just what exactly he was teaching, those of us who have been writing critically of Paul and his [effect] on the trajectory of the broader “Jesus movement” may not be misunderstanding Paul so much as your post would imply. Might it not possibly be that in studying a broader range and scope of communities, under a much larger umbrella of identities, whole new categories of criticism for Paul are opened up and accessible? Perhaps where you see “Paul the Jew teaching Jesus to the new-Jews”, people like Katheryn Greenleaf, Rev. R L Brandner, and others are writing from a critical vantage point of Paul the Tarsian Herodian-Hillelite preaching a religio licita of Theos and Xristos to Romans and Hellenists.”
Jordan Lavender, Ph.D.: “In the first century, there were Jews and Samaritans and then the nations. The division between Jews and Samaritans was not yet fully demarcated (early rabbinic texts still consider them Israelites). So, I think you try to make a rather simple picture complicated. There were movements of a kind, mostly Pharisees, Essenes and Sadducees, and a smattering of much less significant sects in order of numerical strength, but most were simply Jews. If Josephus is to be trusted, there were 6,000 Pharisees among millions of Jews. So, my characterization is accurate and not controversial at all in scholarship. Your overly complicated presentation would need to prove itself based on textual and epigraphic evidence.”
Dr. Lavender’s answer did something reasonable. When a stranger pushed him, he stepped back onto the ground most of his field stands on, and he said so plainly. He was right about that. What he described is the scholarly consensus. This essay is about that consensus, and about why I think it is wrong.
The Consensus, Stated Fairly
The consensus deserves a fair hearing first, so here it is in its strongest form.
It rests on four claims that hold each other up. The first claim is that the Greek word Ioudaios, usually translated into English as “Jew,” named a single people in the first century. That people shared one Temple in Jerusalem, one Torah, and one line of ancestry. The second claim is that the sects were small. The Pharisees, Sadducees, and Essenes were real, but most people belonged to none of them. Those people were ordinary members of the one people. The third claim is that the Samaritans were the only real exception, and even they were only partly separate. The fourth claim is that everyone else belonged to “the nations,” the non-Torah faithful peoples of the world.
Put the four claims together and a simple picture appears. There were Jews, there were Samaritans, and there were the nations. Paul was a Jew who carried a Jewish message to the nations. That is the picture in Dr. Lavender’s note, and it is the picture in most textbooks.
Serious scholars built this picture. E. P. Sanders gave it a name, “common Judaism,” and showed how widely ordinary practices like the Sabbath, the food laws, and pilgrimage were shared. [2] Seth Schwartz argued that belief in one deity, one Temple, and one Torah held the whole people together as a single ideology. [3] Mark Chancey and Mordechai Aviam dug in Galilee and found villages that looked much like Judean ones. [4] Shaye Cohen traced how the word Ioudaios opened up in the Hasmonean era, so that outsiders could join the people by conversion. [5] Paula Fredriksen, Mark Nanos, and Pamela Eisenbaum applied the picture to Paul and read him as a faithful member of his people speaking to the nations. [6]
The consensus also did important moral work, and it deserves real credit for that. For much of the twentieth century, Christian scholars painted the world of Yehoshua (or Jesus) as a dead religion of rules waiting to be replaced. That caricature fed centuries of contempt. Sanders broke it in 1977 with Paul and Palestinian Judaism. [7] The movements that insist on a Jewish Jesus and on Paul within Judaism grew from his work, and they made the field more honest. The consensus also corrected an overcorrection. In the 1980s, Jacob Neusner and his colleagues began speaking of “many Judaisms,” and the field splintered into dozens of separate systems. [8] Sanders and Schwartz pulled it back toward what the communities shared.
So when Dr. Lavender answered me with the consensus, he chose safe and well-defended ground. He could cite it. His colleagues would recognize it. Most careful scholars, pushed by a stranger on a Saturday afternoon, would have done the same.
From here on, my argument is with the consensus alone.
Why the Consensus Fails
The picture of one people, plus Samaritans, plus nations, is the picture three later institutions needed. The Torah-keeping world of the long first century was far larger and far more divided. Here is why I say the consensus is wrong.
The Hidden Premise
The consensus rests on an assumption it rarely states. It assumes that the maps drawn by the institutions that survived show us the whole territory. Three institutions drew those maps, and each of them needed the map to be simple.
The first was Josephus. He wrote in Rome, for Roman readers, living on a pension from the Flavian emperors who had destroyed Jerusalem. [9] He sorted the homeland into three “philosophies,” because his readers already understood Greek schools of philosophy. [10] Steve Mason has shown how carefully Josephus shaped these portraits for that audience. [11] When a fourth movement refused to fit, Josephus simply added a “fourth philosophy” and moved on. [12]
The second was the rabbinic movement. Around 200 CE, the rabbis compiled the Mishnah and traced their authority back through the Pharisees to Moses. Everyone outside that line became minim, sectarians. The rabbis had good reason to remember their own lineage as the norm. They were rebuilding a people after two catastrophic wars.
The third was the church. It took Paul’s two-part world, his own people and the nations, and made it doctrine. Its heresy-hunters then sorted every remaining group into Jews, Christians, or heretics. Daniel Boyarin has shown that writers on both sides drew the hard border between the two religions during the second through fourth centuries. [13] Constantine sealed that border in 325 CE, when he separated the date of Easter from the Jewish calendar and told the churches to have nothing in common with that people. [14] The Theodosian Code later turned the border into law. [15]
So, the clean map of one people and the nations is a product of the fourth century. Scholars have projected it back onto the first. The same enclosure that produced the creed also produced the category. I have traced elsewhere how the canon and the creed drew the boundaries of the church. [16] The same process drew the boundaries of “the Jews.”
The Four Walls
In an earlier essay, I argued that every people rests on four load-bearing walls. [17] Those walls are its altar, its ruler, its rules of membership, and the Name it calls upon. If the Torah-keepers of the first century were one people, they should have shared those walls. They did not.
They had no single altar. Jerusalem claimed to be the one lawful place of sacrifice. The Samaritans held that Gerizim was that place. A Zadokite priest named Onias built a working temple at Leontopolis in Egypt, and it offered sacrifice until Rome closed it in 73 CE. [18] The community of the Dead Sea Scrolls rejected the Jerusalem priesthood altogether.
They had no single scripture. At least four families of text were in use: the Samaritan Torah, the proto-Masoretic Hebrew, the Greek translation, and the wider collection kept at Qumran. [19]
They had no single calendar. Jerusalem kept a lunar calendar. The authors of Jubilees, Enoch, and many of the scrolls kept a solar calendar of 364 days. [20] Two communities with different calendars celebrate their holy days on different dates, so in practice they cannot keep the same festivals together.
They had no single priesthood or ruler. Zadokite priests lived in exile at Qumran and in Egypt. Hasmonean and then Herodian appointees ran the Temple in Jerusalem. The Oniad priests of Egypt commanded armies for the Ptolemies. [21] The royal house of Adiabene, a kingdom under Parthian rule, took up the Torah on its own terms.
Sanders was right that these communities shared many practices. Those practices sat on top of foundations that nobody shared. A people with no common altar, scripture, calendar, priesthood, or ruler shares a family resemblance. A family resemblance is real. It is also much weaker than designating that family as one people.
The Ancients Counted More
The ancient writers saw far more division than the modern consensus allows. Justin Martyr, writing in the middle of the second century, lists seven groups among his opponent’s people: Sadducees, Genistae, Meristae, Galileans, Hellenians, Pharisees, and Baptists. [22] Hegesippus, writing a little later, lists seven sects “among the circumcision,” and he counts the Samaritans among them. [23] Epiphanius, in the fourth century, lists seven sects in the homeland, including Nasaraeans and Herodians, and four more among the Samaritans alone. [24] The Jerusalem Talmud says that Israel went into exile only after it had split into twenty-four sects. [25] Josephus himself needed a fourth philosophy when his three ran out.
These writers agreed on almost nothing. The church fathers and the rabbis were rivals, and each wrote against the other. Yet every one of them describes many houses where the consensus portrays just one.
The consensus is simpler than its own sources.
Whose Name, Whose Label
The consensus often takes a label used by outsiders and treats it as the name people gave themselves. Roman writers did lump these communities together. Tacitus describes one people with one strange set of customs. [26] Roman officials watched Temple money flow to Jerusalem from across the empire. [27] From the outside, it all looked like one thing.
The communities themselves used many names. The Torah-keepers of Delos carved “Israelites” into stone. [28] Paul called himself a Hebrew and an Israelite. [29] When Herod took the throne, his rival Antigonus mocked him as a “half-Judean,” because Herod’s family came from Idumea. [30] Luke calls a Samaritan a “foreigner.” [31] A label imposed from outside tells us how an empire saw a people. The names they chose tell us how they saw themselves. The consensus has given the empire’s view the last word.
Counting Officers as Nations
The consensus also makes a counting mistake. It treats the number of a group’s leaders as the size of the group.
The best-known example is the Pharisees. Josephus reports that more than six thousand of them refused to swear loyalty to Caesar and to Herod. [32] That figure came from Herod’s own court historian, Nicolaus of Damascus. [33] A royal official counting the men who refuse an oath is counting a security problem. The six thousand were most likely the sitting sages and judges of the towns, the men who “sat on the seat of Moses.” [34]
Josephus himself gives us the arithmetic. He says the law of Moses called for seven judges in every city, and he says he appointed seven in each Galilean city during the war. [35] He also counts 204 towns and villages in Galilee alone. [36] Seven judges in two hundred places makes about fourteen hundred in Galilee. Add Judea, Perea, Idumea, and the northeastern districts, and a judging class of six thousand looks about right. Josephus’s village count is probably inflated. The arithmetic shows this reading is possible, and it stops short of proving it.
The Essenes follow the same pattern. Josephus and Philo each count “more than four thousand.” [37] The site at Qumran could hold perhaps fifty to two hundred people at a time. [38] Josephus says the Essenes lived in large numbers in every town, and the Damascus Document gives rules for whole “camps” of families living under the order’s discipline. [39] The four thousand were the sworn core of a much larger movement.
The larger picture works the same way. Torah-keepers in the first century numbered in the millions across the Roman and Parthian worlds, though no one can pin down the total. [40] A population that large, spread across two empires and multiple languages, is exactly where we should expect division. The consensus calls most of these people ordinary members of one people who belonged to no sect. That category is simply whatever remains after the sects are subtracted. The people in it were Galileans, Pereans, Idumeans, Alexandrians, and Babylonians, and the sages and judges of the sects led them.
Calling this whole world “simply Jews” erases the minority communities within it. It takes peoples who fought to keep their own names and files them under the name of the group that survived. Empires did this to them while they lived. Rome counted them, taxed them, and filed them under one heading. Scholarship should not finish the empire’s work for it. These communities deserve to be named in their own right, so here they are.
The Many Houses of Torah
What follows is a map, drawn in rings moving outward from the Land. For each community, I give the best evidence and say how solid it is. Rock means a primary source states it directly. Firm ground means careful scholars infer it from converging evidence. Moss means a reconstruction that could be wrong.
Inside the Land
The Tsadduqim, the Sadducees, were the priestly and aristocratic party of Jerusalem. Josephus says they accepted only the written Torah and denied any life after death. [41] The Mishnah preserves their legal disputes with the Pharisees, and the rabbis remember a separate priestly house, the Boethusians, with rulings of its own. [42] Lawrence Schiffman has argued that the legal rulings in the Dead Sea Scrolls often match Sadducean positions, which shows how tangled even the priestly world was. [43]
The Perushim, the Pharisees, split into two houses. The house of Hillel leaned toward accommodation with the ruling order. The house of Shammai held the harder line. The rabbis remember a day when Shammai’s followers forced through eighteen rulings, with swords and spears in the room. [44] Our sources for both houses were written down centuries later, so this is firm ground. [45]
The Essenes rest on Josephus, Philo, Pliny the Elder, and the scrolls themselves. [46] Their rule books describe a sworn order with its own courts, its own calendar, and its own shared economy. [47] That is rock.
In Galilee and across the Jordan, the rabbis remember a line of Hasidim, holy men known for prayer and wonders. Honi the Circle-Drawer prayed for rain, and he was stoned during a civil war around 65 BCE for refusing to curse either side. [48] Hanina ben Dosa, a Galilean, was remembered as the last of the wonder-workers. [49] Geza Vermes and Shmuel Safrai showed how different these rural holy men were from the scholars of Jerusalem. [50]
The movement Josephus calls the fourth philosophy has a family history. Around 47 BCE, the young Herod, then governor of Galilee, hunted down a Galilean leader named Hezekiah and executed him and his men without trial. Josephus calls Hezekiah a “chief brigand.” The Galileans remembered him differently. The mothers of the dead men came to the Temple day after day to demand justice, and the Sanhedrin put Herod on trial for the killings. [51] After Herod died in 4 BCE, Josephus names a Judas, son of Hezekiah, who seized the royal arsenal at Sepphoris. [52] Many scholars identify this Judas with Judas the Galilean, who led the revolt against the Roman census in 6 CE and founded the fourth philosophy. [53] If they are right, the movement began with Hezekiah. His line then runs through Judas, through Judas’s sons Jacob and Simon, crucified around 46 CE, and through Menahem, who seized Masada at the start of the great revolt. It ends with Eleazar ben Yair, who commanded Masada at its fall in 73 CE. [54] That is one family resisting empire for more than a century. The Archive counts Hezekiah as the first of ha-Qana’im, the Zealous, at the root of the movement’s earliest layer. Josephus never gives him that title, and the link between the two Judases is firm ground. One of Yehoshua’s own companions carried the name: Simon the Zealot. [55]
Two more names belong to the movement around Yehoshua. Acts calls Paul a “ringleader of the sect of the Nazoraeans,” so that name is rock. [56] Epiphanius claims a group called the Nasaraeans lived east of the Jordan before Yehoshua was born, and that claim is moss. [57] Paul’s letters speak of “the poor” in Jerusalem, the Ebyonim, as a group he was asked to remember and support. [58] Irenaeus names the Ebionites as a movement in the second century. [59] The link between that later name and Paul’s “poor” is firm ground.
The Herodians appear in Mark as a party working with the Pharisees against Yehoshua. [60] They belonged to the world of the Herodian house, Idumean by origin, Torah-keeping by conversion, and Roman by patronage. Antigonus’s jibe about the “half-Judean” king shows how contested that standing was from the start.
At the Edges of the Land
The Samaritans kept their own Torah, their own priesthood, and their own holy mountain. John Hyrcanus destroyed their temple on Gerizim around 111 BCE, and excavations on the mountain have confirmed the site. [61] Early rabbinic texts do sometimes count Samaritans as Israelites, and that is a fair point for the consensus. The Samaritans still counted themselves as Israel on their own terms, beside the Judeans and never under them.
The Idumeans in the south and the Itureans in the north became Torah-keepers by force. Hasmonean rulers conquered them and required circumcision and the law. [62] During the revolt against Rome, an Idumean army marched on Jerusalem under its own commanders and spoke of the city as a shared mother city. They claimed Jerusalem as their own, and they marched as Idumeans.
Mount Carmel held an altar with no image and no temple building, and Vespasian consulted its priest, Basilides, on his way to the throne. [63] The Archive connects that holy mountain to a long-lived prophetic brotherhood, the Bnei ha-Nevi’im, heirs of Elijah and Elisha. That connection is moss, and I mark it as moss.
Across Syria, Josephus reports something the consensus struggles to hold. Every Syrian city, he says, had its “Judaizers,” people who lived partly by the Torah and whom their neighbors could not classify. [64] At Antioch, he says, the Torah-keepers drew a great crowd of Greeks into their worship and made them “in a sense a part of themselves.” Josephus is describing people who fit in neither box.
The Western Diaspora
The Israelites of Delos dedicated offerings to “holy Argarizein,” Mount Gerizim, in the third and second centuries BCE. They named themselves in stone.
The Oniads of Leontopolis ran a Zadokite temple in Egypt for more than two centuries. The sons of Onias served as generals for Cleopatra III. The Mishnah itself rules on vows made at “the house of Onias,” which shows that even the rabbis had to reckon with that altar. [65]
The Therapeutae lived near Lake Mareotis, outside Alexandria, as a community of Torah-devoted contemplatives, men and women together, according to Philo. [66]
Alexandria’s own community was vast, and it governed itself with its own ethnarch and its own courts. [67]
The Libertini were the freedmen. Philo says most of Rome’s Ioudaioi descended from prisoners of war who were enslaved and later freed. Tacitus reports that in 19 CE Rome shipped four thousand men “of the freedman class” to Sardinia for practicing these rites. [68] Acts names a “Synagogue of the Freedmen” in Jerusalem, with members from Cilicia, Paul’s home province. The Theodotus Inscription, found in Jerusalem in 1913, records a priest whose father carried a Latin freedman’s family name and who built a synagogue with guest rooms for visitors from abroad. [69] The stone is rock. Its link to the synagogue in Acts is moss.
At Rome, around 49 CE, Claudius expelled Torah-keepers from the city for rioting “at the instigation of Chrestus.” [70] Most historians read that as a fight inside Rome’s synagogues over claims about a Messiah.
The Eastern Diaspora
Babylonia held communities as old as the exile. Nehardea and Nisibis served as collection points for Temple money bound for Jerusalem. In the first century, two brothers from Nehardea, Asinaeus and Anilaeus, built an armed principality of their own that lasted about fifteen years. [71] The rabbis remember Hillel himself as a Babylonian who came up to Jerusalem. [72]
The royal house of Adiabene, a kingdom under Parthia, took up the Torah in the first century. A merchant named Ananias taught King Izates that he could keep the law without circumcision. Then a teacher named Eleazar arrived from Galilee, found the king reading Moses, and told him he was breaking the very law in front of him. Izates was circumcised. [73] Two teachers from two schools gave two answers to one king. His mother, Queen Helena, fed Jerusalem during a famine and built her tomb there, and princes of Adiabene fought on the walls in 70 CE. [74]
The Southern Road
In Nabataean Arabia, tomb inscriptions at Hegra from the first century CE name individual Torah-keepers. [75] One tomb owner describes himself with the word yhwdy, a Judean. The inscription does not say whether he was an immigrant from Judea or a local Arab who had joined the Covenant, and we should leave the question open. Paul himself went into “Arabia” after his turn, and Luke lists “Arabs” among the pilgrims at Pentecost. [76]
Far to the south, the kingdom of Himyar in Yemen became a Torah-keeping state around 380 CE. That date falls well after the long first century, so Himyar shows the pattern continuing, and it does not count as evidence for the period itself. A stone column found near Sanaa lists the twenty-four priestly courses and the Galilean towns where their families settled, and the record around it shows no rabbis at all. [77] Christian Robin reads Himyar’s faith as priestly, and Iwona Gajda reads it as rabbinic. Either way, a non-Roman Torah kingdom was still carrying Galilean priestly memory four centuries after the Temple fell.
At the Edge of the Nations
The second half of the consensus breaks here too. Greek sources speak of theosebeis, “reverers of the divine,” and Acts speaks of people who “fear” the divine. Modern scholars call them “God-fearers.” They came from the nations, attended synagogues, kept parts of the Torah, and gave money. [78] Josephus describes wealth sent to the Temple by such people from Asia and Europe, and Juvenal mocks a Roman father who keeps the Sabbath while his son goes on to full circumcision. [79] An inscription from Aphrodisias lists dozens of theosebeis by name beside the members of the synagogue, though its date is disputed and may be as late as the fourth or fifth century. [80] A. T. Kraabel questioned whether such people formed a real class at all. [81] Even on his reading, the category of “the nations” had people standing halfway inside it.
Count the houses on this map. One people, plus Samaritans, plus nations, cannot hold them.
What the Map Does to Paul
Now we can return to Paul and see what the fuller map does to the simple picture of him.
Paul used several names for himself. “Are they Hebrews? So am I. Are they Israelites? So am I. Are they descendants of Abraham? So am I.” He described his earlier life with a rare word, Ioudaismos, which before him appears mainly in Second Maccabees as the name for resistance to Greek rule. [82] Then, when his mission needed it, he divided the whole world in two: “We who are Ioudaioi by birth, and not sinners from among the nations.” [83] The two-part world is Paul’s own tool. He built it to explain his mission. When scholars adopt it as a neutral description, they begin their study of Paul inside Paul’s point of view.
The roster shows us who Paul was talking to. Acts describes his hearers, in synagogue after synagogue, as a mix of Torah-keepers and those who “fear” the divine. [84] Many of the people Paul won stood between the two categories he drew. His map had no room for them as they were, so it absorbed them into one side of its line.
The roster also helps us place Paul himself. He calls himself a Pharisee, and that is rock. Acts says he came from Tarsus and held Roman citizenship from birth, which is firm ground. Jerome preserves a tradition that Paul’s parents were carried from Galilee to Tarsus as captives, and Jerome Murphy-O’Connor suggested the family later gained freedom and citizenship. [85] If so, Paul came from the world of the Libertini, whose Jerusalem synagogue counted Cilicians among its members. That is moss. Acts says Paul studied under Gamaliel, whom later rabbis placed in the line of Hillel. [86] Our sources for Hillel are late, so that link is thin. Paul’s own letters, which are rock, counsel submission to the ruling powers and the payment of tribute. [87] Robert Eisenman has argued for Paul’s Herodian connections, pointing to his greeting to “my kinsman Herodion,” and Katheryn Greenleaf has gathered that case into a useful synthesis. [88] It remains moss.
There is one source I am choosing not to use. The Pseudo-Clementine writings seem to attack Paul behind the mask of Simon Magus, a figure cast as a deceiver. They would help my case. They also passed through at least two later editions and an editor with his own agenda, and I cannot tell which layer says what. So I am setting them aside. [89]
Here is my reading, offered as a reconstruction. A movement built on land, debt release, and covenant spread among many houses of Torah. Paul’s two-part map gave that movement one door out of its world and into a form Rome could license and live with. [90] Paula Fredriksen reads Paul very differently, as a Torah-loyal apostle to the nations working entirely inside his ancestral tradition.[91] Hers is the strongest opposing case, and readers should weigh it.
Where the File Cuts the Other Way
The consensus has real strengths, and honesty requires putting them in plain view. Sanders was right that shared practices ran wide. Chancey and Aviam were right that Galilean villages looked much like Judean ones, with stone vessels, ritual baths, and almost no pig bones. Schwartz was right that the Temple and the Torah worked as powerful unifying ideas, and the Temple tax flowed to Jerusalem from everywhere. Josephus himself describes Galilean pilgrims as Ioudaioi on their way to a festival.[92]
Several communities on my roster also rest on contested evidence. Morton Smith argued that “the Zealots” appear as a named party only during the war with Rome. Troels Engberg-Pedersen argued that Philo’s Therapeutae may be an idealized portrait. Kraabel questioned the God-fearers. Himyar falls centuries after the period, and the Carmel brotherhood is moss. I have marked each of these where it appears.
None of this rescues the simple map. Shared practices and shared outside labels can sit alongside deep divisions in altar, scripture, calendar, priesthood, and name. The roster shows those divisions everywhere we look.
What Would Change My Mind
Four kinds of evidence would change my view. The first would be inscriptions from before 70 CE in which Galileans, Idumeans, or Samaritans regularly call themselves Ioudaioi in their own voice. The second would be evidence that the six thousand Pharisees came from a census and not from an oath. The third would be evidence that ordinary farmers and tradesmen joined the Pharisees as full members in large numbers, beyond the sages and judges. The fourth would be proof that the ancient lists of sects were pure invention, describing groups that never existed.
The Last Voice Left Talking
There was never one Hebrew Bible. There was the one that kept its scribes, and the others kept copying anyway, in Nablus, in Greek, and in the caves above the Dead Sea. There was never one Israel, either. There was the name that survived, and the many houses it came to cover. The Samaritans still pray on Gerizim. The stones of Delos still say “Israelites.” A column in Yemen still lists the priestly courses of Galilee.
So, I will leave you with a question:
How many houses do we have to ignore before a map this simple starts to look true?
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Onward unto Jubilee. For the restoration of everything to the Commons of the Heavens.
Recommended Reading
The case for the consensus: E. P. Sanders, Judaism: Practice and Belief, 63 BCE-66 CE (SCM/Trinity, 1992); Seth Schwartz, Imperialism and Jewish Society, 200 B.C.E. to 640 C.E. (Princeton University Press, 2001); Paula Fredriksen, Paul: The Pagans’ Apostle (Yale University Press, 2017).
The case against it: Daniel Boyarin, Border Lines: The Partition of Judaeo-Christianity (University of Pennsylvania Press, 2004); Steve Mason, Josephus, Judea, and Christian Origins (Hendrickson, 2009); Shaye J. D. Cohen, The Beginnings of Jewishness (University of California Press, 1999); Reinhard Pummer, The Samaritans: A Profile (Eerdmans, 2016); Meron M. Piotrkowski, Priests in Exile (De Gruyter, 2019).
Notes for the Nerds
[1] The exchange is reproduced verbatim from a public comment thread. Dr. Lavender holds a Ph.D. from the University at Albany, SUNY, and publishes on Pauline studies and early Christian history. This essay engages the position he stated in the thread, which is the scholarly consensus. It does not attempt a review of his published work.
[2] E. P. Sanders, Judaism: Practice and Belief, 63 BCE-66 CE (London: SCM; Philadelphia: Trinity Press International, 1992). “Common Judaism” is Sanders’s term for the practices and beliefs shared by priests and people alike, beneath the level of the sects.
[3] Seth Schwartz, Imperialism and Jewish Society, 200 B.C.E. to 640 C.E. (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2001). Schwartz describes a unifying ideology built on one deity, one Temple, and one Torah, sustained by the Temple and its priesthood until 70 CE.
[4] Mark A. Chancey, The Myth of a Gentile Galilee (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002); Mordechai Aviam, Jews, Pagans and Christians in the Galilee (Rochester: University of Rochester Press, 2004). Both argue that Galilean material culture aligned closely with Judea’s.
[5] Shaye J. D. Cohen, The Beginnings of Jewishness: Boundaries, Varieties, Uncertainties (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1999). Cohen traces the shift of Ioudaios from an ethnic and geographic term toward one that converts could enter.
[6] Paula Fredriksen, Paul: The Pagans’ Apostle (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2017); Mark D. Nanos and Magnus Zetterholm, eds., Paul within Judaism: Restoring the First-Century Context to the Apostle (Minneapolis: Fortress, 2015); Pamela Eisenbaum, Paul Was Not a Christian (New York: HarperOne, 2009).
[7] E. P. Sanders, Paul and Palestinian Judaism (Philadelphia: Fortress, 1977). Sanders’s “covenantal nomism” dismantled the Protestant caricature of Second Temple religion as a system of earning favor through works.
[8] Jacob Neusner, William Scott Green, and Ernest S. Frerichs, eds., Judaisms and Their Messiahs at the Turn of the Christian Era (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1987). The plural “Judaisms” became the hallmark of this school.
[9] Josephus, Life 422-423, on the residence, citizenship, and pension Vespasian granted him in Rome.
[10] Josephus, War 2.119; Antiquities 18.11. Josephus uses the Greek philosophiai for the schools, a term his Roman readers would have associated with Stoics, Epicureans, and Pythagoreans.
[11] Steve Mason, Flavius Josephus on the Pharisees: A Composition-Critical Study (Leiden: Brill, 1991).
[12] Josephus, Antiquities 18.9 and 18.23-25.
[13] Daniel Boyarin, Border Lines: The Partition of Judaeo-Christianity (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2004). Boyarin argues that heresiologists on both sides invented the border between the two religions after the fact.
[14] Eusebius, Life of Constantine 3.18-19, preserving Constantine’s letter to the churches after Nicaea on the Easter computation.
[15] Codex Theodosianus 16.8, the title of the Theodosian Code governing the legal status of Jews, compiled in 438 CE from laws issued across the fourth and early fifth centuries.
[16] Jeremy Prince, “Compromised Canons & Creeds of Containment,” Ebyonim, June 2, 2026, on the canon and the creed as coordinated administrative enclosures.
[17] Jeremy Prince, “There Was Never One Hebrew Bible,” Ebyonim, June 2, 2026. That essay locates the textual disagreements among the four scriptural traditions at the altar, the throne, the boundary of the people, and the Name.
[18] Josephus, Antiquities 13.62-73 (the founding under Onias IV) and War 7.420-436 (the closure under Vespasian in 73 CE). See Meron M. Piotrkowski, Priests in Exile: The History of the Temple of Onias and Its Community in the Hellenistic Period (Berlin: De Gruyter, 2019); and Joan E. Taylor, “A Second Temple in Egypt: The Evidence for the Zadokite Temple of Onias,” Journal for the Study of Judaism 29 (1998): 297-321.
[19] Emanuel Tov, Textual Criticism of the Hebrew Bible, 3rd ed. (Minneapolis: Fortress, 2012), especially his account of textual plurality at Qumran and his abandonment of a single “original text.”
[20] Jubilees 6:32-38 condemns the lunar reckoning in the strongest terms. See James C. VanderKam, Calendars in the Dead Sea Scrolls: Measuring Time (London: Routledge, 1998).
[21] Josephus, Antiquities 13.285-287 and 13.348-349, on Chelkias and Ananias, sons of Onias, as generals under Cleopatra III.
[22] Justin Martyr, Dialogue with Trypho 80.4. Justin wrote around 155-160 CE and presents the list in the voice of his debate with a Torah-keeping interlocutor.
[23] Hegesippus, preserved in Eusebius, Ecclesiastical History 4.22.7. His seven sects are the Essenes, Galileans, Hemerobaptists, Masbotheans, Samaritans, Sadducees, and Pharisees.
[24] Epiphanius, Panarion 9-20, trans. Frank Williams, 2nd ed. (Leiden: Brill, 2009). Epiphanius lists four Samaritan sects (Essenes, Sebuaeans, Gorothenes, and Dositheans) and seven homeland sects (Sadducees, Scribes, Pharisees, Hemerobaptists, Nasaraeans, Ossaeans, and Herodians).
[25] Jerusalem Talmud, Sanhedrin 10:6 (29c). The figure of twenty-four is symbolic, and the rabbinic claim is that division itself was the norm before the exile.
[26] Tacitus, Histories 5.1-13, especially 5.4-5. Tacitus is openly hostile, and his portrait treats the whole population as one people with one set of customs.
[27] Cicero, Pro Flacco 66-69, on gold sent to Jerusalem from the province of Asia; Philo, On the Special Laws 1.76-78; Josephus, Antiquities 18.312.
[28] Philippe Bruneau, “’Les Israélites de Délos’ et la juiverie délienne,” Bulletin de correspondance hellénique 106 (1982): 465-504. The Greek formula reads hoi en Dēlō Israelitai hoi aparchomenoi eis hieron hagion Argarizein. Most scholars identify the dedicators as Samaritans, and some suggest a mixed Israelite community. Either reading supports the point, because the community chose the name Israelitai.
[29] 2 Corinthians 11:22; Philippians 3:5.
[30] Josephus, Antiquities 14.403. Antigonus calls Herod a hēmiioudaios, a “half-Judean,” to deny his fitness to rule.
[31] Luke 17:18. The Greek allogenēs is the same word used on the Temple warning inscriptions that barred foreigners from the inner courts.
[32] Josephus, Antiquities 17.41-45. The Greek reads hyper hexakischilioi, “above six thousand.” The episode falls in Herod’s final years, around 7 to 5 BCE, and the wife of Herod’s brother Pheroras paid their fine.
[33] Daniel R. Schwartz, “Josephus and Nicolaus on the Pharisees,” Journal for the Study of Judaism 14 (1983): 157-171.
[34] Matthew 23:2. On the Pharisees as a literate leadership class of teachers, officials, and judges, see Anthony J. Saldarini, Pharisees, Scribes and Sadducees in Palestinian Society (Wilmington: Glazier, 1988; repr. Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 2001). Josephus himself says the Pharisees had the common people on their side and that the townspeople followed their rulings (Antiquities 13.298; 18.15). On the carved stone “seats of Moses” found in later synagogues such as Chorazin, see Lee I. Levine, The Ancient Synagogue: The First Thousand Years, 2nd ed. (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2005). The surviving seats date from the third century CE onward.
[35] Josephus, Antiquities 4.214 (seven judges for every city under the law of Moses) and War 2.570-571 (his appointment of seventy elders over Galilee and seven judges in each city).
[36] Josephus, Life 235. Most scholars consider the figure inflated. At the time of the oath, Herod’s kingdom included Judea, Samaria, Galilee, Perea, Idumea, and the northeastern districts later given to Philip. The oath could not bind communities outside the kingdom. Mishnah Sanhedrin 1:6 describes local courts of twenty-three, which would raise the estimate if such courts sat in the larger towns.
[37] Josephus, Antiquities 18.20; Philo, Quod Omnis Probus Liber Sit 75.
[38] Jodi Magness, The Archaeology of Qumran and the Dead Sea Scrolls, 2nd ed. (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 2021). Estimates vary with how one reads the cemetery and the living spaces, and none approaches four thousand.
[39] Josephus, War 2.124 and 2.160-161, the latter on the branch of Essenes who married; Philo, Hypothetica 11.1, preserved in Eusebius, Praeparatio Evangelica 8.11; Damascus Document (CD) VII 6 and XII 19-XIII 2; 1QS II 21-22 and 1QSa I, organizing the community by thousands, hundreds, fifties, and tens.
[40] Magen Broshi, “The Population of Western Palestine in the Roman-Byzantine Period,” Bulletin of the American Schools of Oriental Research 236 (1979): 1-10, sets a ceiling of about one million for the region. Philo claims “not less than a million” in Egypt as a whole (In Flaccum 43), an advocate’s figure. The high diaspora totals trace to Salo W. Baron, A Social and Religious History of the Jews, 2nd ed., vol. 1 (New York: Columbia University Press, 1952), who relied partly on a medieval report of a census under Claudius. For the case that no reliable total can be recovered, see Brian McGing, “Population and Proselytism: How Many Jews Were There in the Ancient World?” in Jews in the Hellenistic and Roman Cities, ed. John R. Bartlett (London: Routledge, 2002), 88-106.
[41] Josephus, War 2.164-166; Antiquities 13.297-298 and 18.16-17; compare Acts 23:8.
[42] Mishnah Yadayim 4:6-8, on disputes between the Sadducees and the Pharisees; Tosefta Sukkah 3:1, on the Boethusians.
[43] Lawrence H. Schiffman, “The New Halakhic Letter (4QMMT) and the Origins of the Dead Sea Sect,” Biblical Archaeologist 53 (1990): 64-73; and Reclaiming the Dead Sea Scrolls (Philadelphia: Jewish Publication Society, 1994).
[44] Mishnah Shabbat 1:4; Jerusalem Talmud Shabbat 1:4 (3c), which likens the day to the day of the golden calf; Babylonian Talmud Shabbat 17a. See the Archive’s “Who Were the Pharisees?” for the full account of the two houses.
[45] Jacob Neusner, The Rabbinic Traditions about the Pharisees before 70, 3 vols. (Leiden: Brill, 1971). Josephus, Philo, and the New Testament never mention Hillel by name; see Per Bilde, The Originality of Jesus (Göttingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, 2013), 188-190.
[46] Josephus, War 2.119-161 and Antiquities 18.18-22; Philo, Quod Omnis Probus 75-91 and Hypothetica 11; Pliny the Elder, Natural History 5.73.
[47] The Community Rule (1QS) and the Damascus Document (CD), in Florentino García Martínez and Eibert Tigchelaar, eds., The Dead Sea Scrolls Study Edition, 2 vols. (Leiden: Brill, 1997-1998).
[48] Josephus, Antiquities 14.22-24, where he appears as Onias the righteous; Mishnah Ta’anit 3:8.
[49] Mishnah Berakhot 5:5; Mishnah Sotah 9:15.
[50] Geza Vermes, Jesus the Jew: A Historian’s Reading of the Gospels (London: Collins, 1973); Shmuel Safrai, “Teaching of Pietists in Mishnaic Literature,” Journal of Jewish Studies 16 (1965): 15-33.
[51] Josephus, War 1.204-215; Antiquities 14.158-184. Josephus calls Hezekiah (Greek Ezekias) an archilēstēs, a “chief brigand.” On the “social bandit” reading of such figures, see Richard A. Horsley and John S. Hanson, Bandits, Prophets, and Messiahs: Popular Movements in the Time of Jesus (Minneapolis: Winston, 1985).
[52] Josephus, Antiquities 17.271-272; War 2.56.
[53] Josephus, War 2.118 and Antiquities 18.4-10 and 18.23-25, on Judas the Galilean and the census revolt of 6 CE. Martin Hengel identifies Judas of Sepphoris with Judas the Galilean in The Zealots, trans. David Smith (Edinburgh: T&T Clark, 1989). Horsley and others doubt the identification. The Archive’s designation of Hezekiah as the first of ha-Qana’im is its own reading and does not appear in Josephus.
[54] Josephus, Antiquities 20.102, on the crucifixion of Jacob and Simon, sons of Judas, under the procurator Tiberius Alexander; War 2.433-448, on Menahem; War 7.253, on Eleazar ben Yair as a descendant of Judas.
[55] Luke 6:15; Acts 1:13. Morton Smith, “Zealots and Sicarii, Their Origins and Relation,” Harvard Theological Review 64 (1971): 1-19, argues that “the Zealots” as a named party appear only during the war of 66-73 CE. The Archive reads the name as older than the party.
[56] Acts 24:5.
[57] Epiphanius, Panarion 18 and 29. See A. F. J. Klijn and G. J. Reinink, Patristic Evidence for Jewish-Christian Sects (Leiden: Brill, 1973). Epiphanius wrote in the late fourth century and was hostile to every group he catalogued.
[58] Galatians 2:10; Romans 15:26.
[59] Irenaeus, Against Heresies 1.26.2; Origen, Contra Celsum 2.1; Eusebius, Ecclesiastical History 3.27.
[60] Mark 3:6 and 12:13; Matthew 22:16. See H. H. Rowley, “The Herodians in the Gospels,” Journal of Theological Studies 41 (1940): 14-27; and Nikos Kokkinos, The Herodian Dynasty: Origins, Role in Society and Eclipse (Sheffield: Sheffield Academic Press, 1998).
[61] Josephus, Antiquities 13.254-256; Yitzhak Magen, Haggai Misgav, and Levana Tsfania, Mount Gerizim Excavations I: The Aramaic, Hebrew and Samaritan Inscriptions (Jerusalem: Israel Antiquities Authority, 2004); Gary N. Knoppers, Jews and Samaritans: The Origins and History of Their Early Relations (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2013); Reinhard Pummer, The Samaritans: A Profile (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 2016). On rabbinic texts that count Samaritans as Israelites, see Mishnah Berakhot 7:1.
[62] Josephus, Antiquities 13.257-258 (Idumeans) and 13.318-319 (Itureans, citing Strabo’s quotation of Timagenes); War 4.224-304, on the Idumean army in Jerusalem. Chancey questions how far the Iturean conversion reached into Galilee.
[63] Tacitus, Histories 2.78; Suetonius, Vespasian 5.6; compare Iamblichus, Life of Pythagoras 3.15, on Carmel as a sacred mountain. On the Cave of Elijah inscriptions, see Asher Ovadiah and Sonia Mucznik, “The Cave of Elijah on Mount Carmel: A Survey of Inscriptions,” Liber Annuus 60 (2010): 339-375. The Archive’s reconstruction of a continuous prophetic brotherhood appears in its Carmel notes and remains speculative.
[64] Josephus, War 2.462-463, on the “Judaizers” (ioudaizontes) of the Syrian cities, and War 7.43-45, on Antioch.
[65] Mishnah Menahot 13:10. See also note 18.
[66] Philo, De Vita Contemplativa. See Joan E. Taylor, Jewish Women Philosophers of First-Century Alexandria: Philo’s “Therapeutae” Reconsidered (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2003). For the argument that Philo idealized or invented them, see Troels Engberg-Pedersen, “Philo’s De Vita Contemplativa as a Philosopher’s Dream,” Journal for the Study of Judaism 30 (1999): 40-64.
[67] Strabo, quoted in Josephus, Antiquities 14.117, on the ethnarch of Alexandria; Philo, In Flaccum 55, on the community’s quarters of the city.
[68] Philo, Legatio ad Gaium 155-157; Tacitus, Annals 2.85; compare Josephus, Antiquities 18.81-84.
[69] Acts 6:9. The Theodotus Inscription is Corpus Inscriptionum Judaicarum II 1404 (Frey) and Corpus Inscriptionum Iudaeae/Palaestinae I.1, no. 9. On its pre-70 date, see John S. Kloppenborg, “Dating Theodotos (CIJ II 1404),” Journal of Jewish Studies 51 (2000): 243-280. On the freedman reading of the father’s name Vettenos, see Théodore Reinach, “L’inscription de Théodotos,” Revue des études juives 71 (1920): 46-56; and Henrik Mouritsen, The Freedman in the Roman World (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2011). The Archive’s fuller treatment appears in the Who Were They? series.
[70] Suetonius, Claudius 25.4: Iudaeos impulsore Chresto assidue tumultuantis Roma expulit. Compare Acts 18:2 and Dio Cassius 60.6.6. The date of 49 CE rests on Orosius, Histories against the Pagans 7.6.15. A minority of scholars take Chrestus as an otherwise unknown agitator.
[71] Josephus, Antiquities 18.310-379, with 18.311-313 on Nehardea and Nisibis as collection points for Temple funds.
[72] Babylonian Talmud Pesachim 66a; Tosefta Pesachim 4:13. These traditions are late.
[73] Josephus, Antiquities 20.17-48, especially 20.34-48 on Ananias and Eleazar. Josephus describes Eleazar as “from Galilee” and known for his strictness about the ancestral laws.
[74] Josephus, Antiquities 20.49-53 and 20.95, on Helena’s famine relief and burial; War 2.520 and 6.356, on Adiabenian princes in the revolt; Pausanias, Description of Greece 8.16.4-5, on Helena’s tomb. Mishnah Yoma 3:10 remembers her golden gift to the Temple.
[75] John F. Healey, The Nabataean Tomb Inscriptions of Mada’in Salih (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1993). The inscription numbers will be confirmed against Healey’s edition before publication.
[76] Galatians 1:17; Acts 2:9-11.
[77] The inscription is catalogued as DJE 23, found in 1970 at Bayt Hadir near Sanaa. See Christian Julien Robin, “Himyar et Israël,” Comptes rendus des séances de l’Académie des Inscriptions et Belles-Lettres 148 (2004): 831-908; Robin, “The Judaism of the Ancient Kingdom of Himyar in Arabia: A Discreet Conversion,” in Diversity and Rabbinization, ed. Gavin McDowell, Ron Naiweld, and Daniel Stökl Ben Ezra (Cambridge: Open Book Publishers, 2021); and Iwona Gajda, Le royaume de Himyar à l’époque monothéiste (Paris: Académie des Inscriptions et Belles-Lettres, 2009). See also the Archive’s “The Curious Case of Himyar.”
[78] Acts 10:2, 13:16, 13:26, 16:14, 17:4, and 17:17.
[79] Josephus, Antiquities 14.110 and 20.195, the latter describing Poppaea as theosebēs; Juvenal, Satires 14.96-106.
[80] Joyce Reynolds and Robert Tannenbaum, Jews and Godfearers at Aphrodisias (Cambridge: Cambridge Philological Society, 1987). On the later dating, see Angelos Chaniotis, “The Jews of Aphrodisias: New Evidence and Old Problems,” Scripta Classica Israelica 21 (2002): 209-242.
[81] A. T. Kraabel, “The Disappearance of the ‘God-Fearers,’” Numen 28 (1981): 113-126.
[82] 2 Corinthians 11:22; Galatians 1:13-14. On Ioudaismos in 2 Maccabees 2:21, 8:1, and 14:38 as a term set against Hellēnismos, see Steve Mason, “Jews, Judaeans, Judaizing, Judaism: Problems of Categorization in Ancient History,” Journal for the Study of Judaism 38 (2007): 457-512. For the opposing view on translation, see Adele Reinhartz, “The Vanishing Jews of Antiquity,” Marginalia Review of Books, June 24, 2014.
[83] Galatians 2:15. On Paul’s construction of the two-part world, see Daniel Boyarin, A Radical Jew: Paul and the Politics of Identity (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1994).
[84] Acts 13:16, 13:26, 14:1, and 17:4.
[85] Philippians 3:5-6; Acts 21:39, 22:3, and 22:25-29; Jerome, De Viris Illustribus 5, and his Commentary on Philemon 23. See Jerome Murphy-O’Connor, Paul: A Critical Life (Oxford: Clarendon, 1996); and Martin Hengel, The Pre-Christian Paul (London: SCM, 1991).
[86] Acts 22:3; compare Acts 5:34. The tradition placing Gamaliel in Hillel’s line is late (Babylonian Talmud Shabbat 15a).
[87] Romans 13:1-7.
[88] Romans 16:11; Acts 13:1; compare the Saulus “kinsman of Agrippa” in Josephus, Antiquities 20.214. Robert Eisenman, “Paul as Herodian,” Journal of Higher Criticism 3 (1996): 110-122; and James the Brother of Jesus (New York: Viking, 1997). Katheryn Greenleaf, “Paul the Herodian: How Roman Power and Elite Networks Reshaped Early Christianity,” The Wayfinder Review (Substack), June 28, 2026. Greenleaf’s essay is not peer reviewed and is cited here as a synthesis of Eisenman’s published work, which carries the evidentiary weight.
[89] On the Pseudo-Clementine Homilies and Recognitions and their layered sources, see F. Stanley Jones, An Ancient Jewish Christian Source on the History of Christianity: Pseudo-Clementine Recognitions 1.27-71 (Atlanta: Scholars Press, 1995); and Robert E. Van Voorst, The Ascents of James (Atlanta: Scholars Press, 1989). Setting this material aside follows the Archive’s hostile-witness rule. Evidence that helps the thesis must meet the same standard as evidence that hurts it.
[90] The reconstruction is developed at length in Jeremy Prince, Apostolos: Paul Against the Twelve (Teva Press). The phrase religio licita comes from Tertullian, Apology 21.1. Rome never issued a formal legal charter by that name; see Tessa Rajak, “Was There a Roman Charter for the Jews?” Journal of Roman Studies 74 (1984): 107-123.
[91] Fredriksen, Paul: The Pagans’ Apostle.
[92] Josephus, War 2.232; compare Antiquities 20.118. The Greek of War 2.232 will be confirmed before publication.
