Jewish Leadership in Roman Palestine from 70 CE to 135 CE
| Junghwa Choi Abstract:The period immediately following the destruction of the Second Temple proved to be a significant turning point within Jewish history. However, compared to the decades up to 70CE, it has been insufficiently dealt with in scholarly research. Students of Christianity, in general, have limited their interest in Jewish history to the issues that serve as background to their studies of the NT, whilst students of Roman history tend to concentrate on the lives of the inhabitants of the cities that formed the administrative framework for Roman rule and have less to say about Judaea after the destruction of Jerusalem. Similarly, students of Jewish history have tended to focus more on the Bar Kokhba revolt, for which we have relatively rich sources since the discoveries in the Judean desert, than on the preceding sixty years. The difficulty in reconstructing the history of this period lies in the dearth of sources and their problematic nature. Most of the few available Greek and Latin sources are revolt-centred. Josephus' controversial testimonies deal only with the period before 70, although they were written up to the end of the first century CE and may reflect to some extent the period from 70 to 100 CE. All rabbinic literature, our main source for this period, was redacted long after 135 CE and is questionable in terms of its historicity for political history. This problem of sources suggests a methodological limitation on a purely text-based approach for reconstructing the history of Jewish leadership of this period. It is more or less like assembling a puzzle without a frame and with only a few problematic pieces. The text-based approach is particularly problematic because the texts preserved were only a very partial selection from what was originally written. Christians, who by c. 100 CE had their own literature, no longer preserved Jewish texts (i.e., non-pseudepigraphical texts written in Greek after c. 100 CE), and the rabbis only preserved their own writings written in Hebrew and Aramaic. Therefore we are left with only a select representation of the literature of the period, which cannot by themselves provide an accurate historical picture. In order to overcome these problems, an alternative approach will be tried in my dissertation. The alternative is to outline different models of Jewish leadership that might have been available in the first two centuries CE; and different models of local leadership within the Roman world. Both these models would have been available for adoption by Jews in the first two centuries CE. Through examining these models, which cover both internal and external forces of possible influence, I hope to reconstruct the way Romans are likely to have governed Judaea and the probable Jewish response to Roman government in terms of their own systems of leadership. Each model will be examined along with the surviving fragmentary evidence in the hope of reconstructing the most plausible overall model for contemporary Jewish leadership in Judaea in this period. For that purpose, my dissertation has three main chapters. In chapter 3, Jewish ideas of leadership in the first two centuries CE will be examined. Seven types are distinguished: kingly figures, priestly figures, warriors, learned figures, prophets, messiahs, and nesi'im. In the following chapter, chapter 4, I shall examine three different types of local leadership within the Roman world; that is village council, city council, and client king. In chapter 5, the evidence for the extent of realisation of the types of Jewish leadership described in chapter 3 will be investigated in the light of their feasibility against the background of normal Roman methods of provincial government. I hope that this approach may shed more light on the socio-political history of our period. |