Religious Rivalries and the Struggle for Success in Caesarea Maritima

Terence L. Donaldson

• Publisher: Wilfrid Laurier University Press
• Year: 2000
• ISBN:
  9781554586707
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: Ancient History
• Index: History

We know how the story of the Roman Empire ended with the "triumph" of Christianity and the eventual Christianization of the Roman Mediterranean. But how would religious life have appeared to an observer at a time when the conversion of the emperor was only a Christian pipe dream? And how would it have appeared in one particular city, rather than in the Roman Empire as a whole?

This volume takes a detailed look at the religious dimension of life in one particular Roman city Caesarea Maritima, on the Mediterranean coast of Judea. Caesarea was marked by a complex religious identity from the outset. Over time, other religious groups, including Christianity, Mithraism and Samaritanism, found a home in the city, where they jostled with each other, and with those already present, for position, influence and the means of survival.

Written by a team of seasoned scholars and promising newcomers, this book brings a new perspective to the study of religion in antiquity. Along with the deliberate goal to understand religion as an urban phenomenon, Religious Rivalries and the Struggle for Success in Caesarea Maritima studies religious groups as part of the dynamic process of social interaction, spanning a spectrum from coexistence, through competition and rivalry, to open conflict. The cumulative result is a fresh and fascinating look at one of antiquity's most interesting cities.

CHAPTER ONE

Introduction

Terence L. Donaldson

Among the archaeological discoveries at Caesarea Maritima is a mosaic containing a portion of Rom 13:3: “Do you wish to have no reason to fear the authority? Then do what is good, and you will receive its approval.” The mosaic formed part of the floor of a public building dating from the Byzantine period (sixth century) that was apparently used as an imperial revenue office.¹ The irony is to be savoured. Just 500 m to the south stand the remains of Herod’s Promontory Palace, almost certainly the place where the author of the text, the apostle Paul himself, had been imprisoned by the Roman authority (Acts 23:35) and where he had appeared before the Roman procurators Felix and Festus (Acts 24:1–2; 25:6). Here we have a text, written by one whose religious beliefs and activity were perceived as a threat to the good order of the state, being used sometime later to bolster the authority of the same state which had now come to espouse those very beliefs. Paul may have failed to make much headway with the imperial appointees Felix and Festus (Acts 26:24!), but his successors and co-religionists eventually won over not only the emperor but the empire as a whole.

Of course, evidence for the triumph of Christianity is richly apparent at Caesarea, nowhere more so than the site just 150 m to the north where we find the remains of a sixth-century Byzantine church built on the foundation of Herod’s Temple of Roma and Augustus. In fact, in the history of Caesarea as it unfolded between the construction of these two religious edifices—Herodian temple and Byzantine church—we can see in miniature the whole process of the Christianization of the empire. Here we have a city founded to honour the emperor and to provide a visible embodiment of the Roman reality; here we find a full complement of Greco-Roman cults and growing Christian and Jewish minorities, striving to maintain themselves and jostling for position in a crowded and often competitive environment; here, thanks to native son Eusebius, we can see as clearly as anywhere the final (as it turned out) confrontation between the state and the burgeoning Christian movement in the Diocletian persecutions, followed in quick succession by the dizzying reversal of Christian fortunes under Constantine; here we can see the increasingly Christian character of the empire’s new clothes, as the triumph of Christianity led gradually but inexorably to a reshaping of the institutions and architecture of the Roman world.

As these initial comments demonstrate, the language of competition and victory comes readily to hand when one speaks of the Christianization of the Roman Empire. From Gibbon to Harnack to Stark,² the conversion of Constantine and its aftermath are regularly described in terms of struggle and triumph. But such language needs to be used with caution when one moves back behind the Constantinian era to look at the attitudes and activities of religious groups in earlier centuries. The fact that Christianity, of the various religious groups in the empire, ended up victorious in the fourth century should not be taken to mean that there was necessarily a conscious competition for the soul of the empire in the second. The nature of the outcome should not be taken as evidence for the nature of the process. Post-Constantinian triumphalism provides no sure index as to how religious groups viewed each other and what their stance towards the larger social order might have been, at a point in the process when the outcome was by no means predictable.

Still, there is plenty of evidence for conscious competition and conflict, and even where it might be more appropriate to speak of religious coexistence, there was nevertheless a kind of implicit competition at work wherever a multiplicity of religious groups attempted to maintain an existence in the same locale. In order to maintain themselves successfully, groups needed a variety of subsistence items that were in limited supply: replenishment of membership; space in which to meet; the support of patrons; a degree of honour and status; the goodwill, or at least tolerance, of the civic authorities; and so on. Even where such a struggle for success did not take the form of overt rivalry, there was nevertheless a competitive element to the social realities of religious life in antiquity.

The purpose of this volume is to examine the relationships and rivalries among Jews, Christians and other Greco-Roman religious groups, as they struggled to establish themselves and to maintain their existence in one particular locale—Caesarea Maritima, the city founded by Herod the Great on the Mediterranean coast of Judea. The volume has emerged out of the Religious Rivalries Seminar, a multi-year seminar operating within the Canadian Society of Biblical Studies. Begun in 1995 with an initial term of five years, the seminar was established to explore “Religious Rivalries and the Struggle for Success: Jews, Christians and Other Religious Groups in Local Urban Settings in the First Two Centuries, ” to use the title of the seminar’s prospectus. As this title indicates, the broad area of the seminar’s interest—religion in Roman antiquity—has been given focus and momentum by two more specific considerations, one having to do with the urban context, the other with the element of interaction among religious groups. These considerations were first articulated in a programmatic paper by Leif Vaage, a revised version of which will appear in a companion volume (Vaage, forthcoming). But since these considerations shape the present study as well, it is appropriate to describe them here in more detail.

First, we are interested in seeing religious groups not as isolated or self-contained entities, but as social and, more particularly, urban phenomena. While religion was by no means restricted to the city, the development, spread and interaction of religious movements took place primarily in urban settings in the Greco-Roman world, as in preindustrial societies generally (Sjoberg 1960: 256–84). It was in the city that one found the necessary concentration of people and resources to support a religious infrastructure; here the major shrines, temples and synagogues were located; here was the social space that made religious diversity and innovation possible. As nodal points in the networks of trade and transportation, cities not only facilitated the distribution of material commodities but provided opportunities for the spread of religious commodities as well.

As urban phenomena, then, religious groups cannot be understood apart from the cities in which they are embedded, nor can the relationships between and among them be understood without an understanding of the social dynamic of their urban matrix. Thus we have attempted to immerse ourselves in the concrete realities of city life–architecture, production, trade, government, politics, status, patronage, benefaction and so on—and to see the various religious groups of interest to us as another aspect of this complex social reality.

Our interest has been directed, however, not simply to the city in general but to specific cities in particular; for its first three years the seminar concentrated on Caesarea Maritima, shifting its attention to Sardis and Smyrna more recently. This concentration of focus is not simply a matter of convenience, an approach chosen simply because the Roman Empire is too large to study all at once. Rather, it arises from the conviction that there was considerable local variation from city to city in the Roman world, religious life and activity included. The mix of religious groups, the nature of their interaction, even to a certain extent the nature of the individual groups themselves—these were not uniform across the cities of the empire but displayed considerable variety. Larger patterns, of course, are not to be ignored; to be unaware of the ways in which preindustrial cities as a group differed from modern cities, for example, is to run the risk of allowing modern assumptions to shape the interpretation of ancient data (Rohrbaugh 1996). Still, history is the domain of the particular and the unique, and this study of religion in Caesarea Maritima wants to give due recognition to the unique features of this particular locale.

One goal of the seminar on which this volume is based, then, has been to study religious groups as integral aspects of urban life in particular Greco-Roman cities. The project has been shaped by a second consideration, however, having to do with the relationships between and among the various groups in their particular urban contexts. As has already been observed, one fact looms large over any discussion of religion in late antiquity: the “triumph” of Christianity. Of all the groups that proliferated throughout the cities of the Mediterranean basin, one of them—Christianity—became dominant and emerged as the official religion of the empire (or should the order of these two predicates be inverted, dominance the result rather than the grounds of official recognition?).

Here the historian needs to proceed with a great deal of care. On the one hand, any account of religious life and interaction in the earlier centuries needs to be consistent with such an outcome. The conversion of the emperor may have been an unpredictable event, one that introduced new and unforeseen factors into the religious equation. Still, it was not disconnected from social realities; Christianity had already experienced a striking degree of growth and diffusion, which would have had its own historical consequences in any case.

Yet on the other hand, as has already been observed, the stunning reality of the Christian “triumph” can easily skew our scholarly reconstructions of religious interaction in the earlier period. We are not to assume that religious groups in the early centuries of the “Christian” era (not even our chronological indicators are immune!) saw themselves as engaged in a competition whose prize was the empire itself. Goodman complains about an “unconscious Christianization of the study of ancient religions, ” by which he means the assumption that other religious groups were just as interested in winning converts and in engaging in organized proselytizing efforts as (he assumes) were the Christians (Goodman 1994:3). But even within Christianity it is difficult to find evidence for the kind of deliberate, coordinated, worldwide mission that is often taken for granted (MacMullen 1984: 33–35). Perhaps we need to recognize an “unconscious Christianization” of the study of early Christianity itself!

What is required, then, is an interpretive model more appropriate to the situation than that of competition and victory (an athletic image) or of conflict and triumph (military). The answer is not to be found at the opposite extreme, however, emphasizing peaceful coexistence and benign interaction;³ our evidence reflects the full spectrum of possible interrelationships, from peaceful coexistence, through competition implicit and explicit, to confrontation and conflict. A more helpful model emerges from the work of Lieu, North and Rajak (1992), especially the essay by John North. North argues that any account of the development of religion in the Roman Empire needs to begin not with the individual religious movements themselves but with a recognition of a fundamental change in the whole social environment in which religion functioned. The change has to do with the emergence of religious pluralism in the Hellenistic and, especially, the Roman eras, a change

from religion as embedded in the city-state to religion as choice of differentiated groups offering different qualities of religious doctrine, different experiences, insights, or just different myths and stories to make sense of the absurdity of human experience (North 1992: 178).

In earlier society, North reminds us, religion was a given part of a person’s life in family, clan and city. To use the language of cultural anthropology, religion was “embedded” in other “domains, ” specifically kinship and politics (Hanson and Oakman 1998: 8–10, 20). That is, religious institutions and associations were totally incorporated into family and civic life; there were no separate, differentiated religious institutions to which one might choose to give one’s allegiance or which operated independently of the dominant social structures.

With the development of the Hellenistic and, later, the Roman empires, however, came a shift in the social location of religion. Toleration of local tradition on the part of the conquerors, mobility, migration, trade, the emergence of ethnic diasporas—all served to create a new situation of religious pluralism. While cities still had their local gods and civic religions, these existed alongside a whole array of other religious groups, now differentiated from the structures of the polis and no longer embedded in kinship and political domains. With this development in the direction of pluralism came the possibility of choice, where religious involvement was not necessarily determined by one’s ethnic or civic identity, where religious groups were distinct entities to which one could become an adherent.

This shift from embedded religion to religious pluralism created a situation where religious groups were, at least potentially, in competition with each other—for members, status, honour, patronage, physical resources and so on. For this reason North suggests that the marketplace might provide a more appropriate model for thinking about religious interaction in the Roman Empire—a situation where no one any longer held a monopoly, but where various religious groups existed side by side and offered their wares for public sale. As North readily acknowledges, the model has its limitations. The various “merchants” had quite different understandings of the “market, ” for example, and of their place in it. Not everyone was as aggressive in hawking their wares as were the Christians; some, undoubtedly, were not even consciously seeking customers at all. Still, there was an implicitly competitive nature to the situation itself, independent of the conscious awareness and intentions of the various groups. The Christians might have been more attuned to it but they did not create it; they simply were the first to take advantage of it. Indeed, their very success perhaps made it necessary for Judaism and, later, “paganism” to develop a more aggressively competitive spirit themselves (Goodman 1994: 129–53; North 1992: 187–92).

In any case, despite its limitations the marketplace analogy provides a fruitful model for the investigation of local religious interaction. It captures the situation of pluralism that was present in Caesarea and elsewhere, with its resultant atmosphere of (at least implicit) competition. But at the same time, it allows for a much broader spectrum of interaction—coexistence, implicit competition, overt competition, confrontation, conflict—than is the case with a model based simply on conflict.

In the chapters to follow, then, we will investigate religious coexistence, competition and conflict in Caesarea Maritima. While the description of the seminar cited above indicated an interest in the “first two centuries, ” it should be clear from the preceding discussion that our interests are not restricted to this period in any rigid way. While the interests and expertise of the seminar members as a whole might tend towards this earlier period, we are interested in placing our study within the whole process of religious interaction that results in what MacMullen describes as “the Christianizing of the Roman empire” (MacMullen 1984). The level of our direct interest might attenuate the more we move into the third and fourth centuries, but these later centuries are by no means beyond the range of our investigation. Indeed, in the case of Caesarea, where second-century evidence is sparse, it is necessary to include later material in order to get a sense of the earlier process of development.

And so to Caesarea Maritima, Herod’s spectacular construction on the Mediterranean coast. Situated on the edge of Herod’s realm, in territory never an integral part of Judea, and built both to honour Augustus Caesar and to control trade and communication with the rest of the Mediterranean basin, the city functioned from the outset as one of the most significant channels of interaction between Judean life and the wider Roman world. Ships docking in the busy harbour of Sebastos carried wine and oil, silk and spices, kings and prefects, merchants, civil servants, soldiers and—more than once—the spoils of war. The city itself provided the infrastructure not only for this commerce in goods and government, produce and politics, but also for commodities of a less tangible, but nevertheless highly valued, sort—philosophies, teachings, mysteries, religions. Evidence literary, archaeological and epigraphical suggests the presence of a wide variety of goods on offer in the religious marketplace—Judaism, Samaritanism and Christianity; the official religions of the great Temple of Roma and Augustus, or of the city’s Tyche; traditional Greco-Roman cults associated with Artemis, Apollo and Demeter; the more innovative oriental religions of Isis, Sarapis and Mithras.

In the first section of this volume we survey the various types of evidence for religion in Caesarea, with special attention to the evidence for religious coexistence, competition and conflict. We begin on the ground, with the archaeological evidence (chap. 2). Here Peter Richardson describes not only the religiously significant archaeological remains, but also the influence of religious factors in both the original plan and the adaptive development of the city. Chapter 3, by Lee Johnson, provides us with a guide to the literary evidence for Caesarea—rather sparse in Roman sources but rich and variegated in both Jewish and Christian literature. Then, Bradley McLean selects from his larger collection of Caesarean inscriptions (McLean 1997, 1999) those that bear on the religious life of the city (chap. 4). Finally, Elaine Myers provides us with a classified and annotated bibliography on Caesarea, with particular emphasis on archaeological studies (chap. 5).

The second section contains surveys of the various religious groups whose existence in the city can be documented: various Greco-Roman religions (Jackson Painter; chap. 6); Judaism (Michele Murray; chap. 7); Christianity (Richard Ascough; chap. 8); Samaritanism (Reinhard Pummer; chap. 9). In each case we are provided not only with a history of the various groups (such as can be reconstructed), but also with a discussion of how factors of religious interaction in the urban context have played into this history.

The third section contains a variety of case studies—treatments of individual situations or themes that bear on the issue of religious coexistence, competition and conflict. In chapter 10 Jackson Painter investigates the rise and spread of Mithraism; he shows how Caesarea provides us with evidence for the way in which Mithraism was able to penetrate the upper echelons of urban society, and he suggests that Caesarea, in its role as centre of military...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Contents
• Preface
• Abbreviations
• Contributors
• Maps
• 1. Introduction
• Evidence
• Religion
• Perspectives
• Works Cited
• Index of Ancient Texts
• Index of Modern Authors