Institute for Travesty

Having considered history both from an Israel perspective and a Diasporan perspective, it is possible to take Diasporans seriously. We’ve started with Paul entering a synagogue in Thessalonica. That is a convenient starting point for a general consideration of Diasporan character.

Fairly arbitrarily, we will consider that with the beginning of the Silent years, say 400 to 200 B.C. we are in a blossoming stage of Diasporan reality in the midst of a Gentile world. From about 200 BC. or 150 BC. to the time of the destruction of the Second Temple in 70 A.D.—from the mid-Silent Years on—there is a qualitative shift which we will symbolize as a blossoming into full flower. While Rome had brought a Pax Romana to the Mediterranean world by the end of the Silent Period, the full bloom of Jewish influence was not characterized by peace.

What then do we additionally know or what more can we reasonably assume for dispersions in their seed time and in their early development?

If we have started at the end with Paul walking into a synagogue in Thessalonica, we will clearly need to think of the Diaspora in terms of the Synagogue and synagogue-related issues, what the Synagogue was as a center of prayer and a receptacle of sacred documents as well as a center for Hebrew-Jewish culture and community. Perhaps foremost, it was the accepted place for the communal study of the Word of God. The character of Diasporan-centered as opposed to Jerusalem-centered Judaism both starts and ends in consideration of the sacred Scriptures which the Diasporans could carry with them.

Accepted Hasidic Judaism

It is generally accepted that Jews in Diaspora routinely accepted for their synagogues an Hasidic consensus. Put in terms more familiar to the modern world, Diasporan Jews accepted the progressive ideas of the scribal class and the teachings of rabbinical figures interpreting the Law as itself found in the Torah. In New Testamental terms, Hasidic Jews throughout the Roman Empire took their lead from the Pharisaic party and rather ignored the ideas of the Sadducean party which was founded on uninterpreted literal obedience to the Law found in the five books of Moses, the Torah.

This is all generally accepted, but it should be noted that careful wording notwithstanding, it is hard to think that the Diasporans were doing anything more than accepting Pharisaic doctrine promulgated mainly from Jerusalem itself.

If one likes, one can try to imagine such people getting all their ideas from Jerusalem and somehow transferring these ideas enough to influence the pagan nations in which they resided. Classical scholarship through the ages suggests that such an approach has made it easy to let the pagans develop entirely on their own without Jewish influence.

The present study, however, suggests the reverse, that despite an acceptance of Hasidic doctrine, Diasporan populations were very different in psychology and practical reality from anything known in Jerusalem. They wouldn’t be human if they didn’t adjust or adapt to some extent to their very different reality, and it is in these adapted forms that most pagans were at all cognizant of as living Jewish realities. And it was that alternate universe living side-by-side with them in their own homelands and mostly in their leading cities which had real likelihood of putting new ideas on the table of Western thought, ideas which routinely the pagans would use and yet refuse to ascribe to Jewish sources.

Key Aspects of Diasporan Perspective

A National Capital, if without a Geographical Nation

Before the Silent Years, a new Temple had been built under orders from Persia. And by the end of the Silent Years, that Temple had been immensely enhanced under the Romans through their puppet, King Herod. So while Jews didn’t have a homeland in the dispersion, they did have a national capital in Jerusalem. They had a priesthood established by Moses, offering the required sacrifices at the Temple in Jerusalem. And under the Romans, Jews from all over the Mediterranean world could travel to Israel and Jerusalem for any and all of the scripturally sanctioned offerings, celebrations, and feasts of the biblical year. We know that in the time of Christ, Jerusalem routinely overflowed with pilgrims for such festal events, and we know that that temporary population was polyglot in its languages even while Temple worship and synagogue readings remained in Hebrew.

On a Mission, Possibly Despite Themselves

Pilgrimage to Jerusalem is a very physical, objective, and central key to Diasporan perspective.

At the other extreme, totally subjective and consistently underrepresented both in theology and in Classical historical understanding, Hebrews in Diaspora were, intentionally or not missionaries carrying Hebrew Scriptural ideas and values.

No doubt Jews in dispersion often lost contact with their historical faith. But those who remained with the synagogue were, willy-nilly, missionaries to all of the polytheistic, chaotically syncretic Roman and Greek world throughout the Silent Years. And even if individuals believed almost nothing, what little they believed was that there was God, one God. “Hear, O Israel, the LORD your God is one!”

The verse from Deuteronomy, quoted at the start of every synagogue service as the Shema, was the bomb that shook the Mediterranean world.

The full consideration of adaptations separating Hasidic Diasporans from Hasidic Pharisees in the homeland, would be a highly valuable, probably multi-volume effort. Here we can no more than suggest central elements of that discussion.

Diasporans’ Major Possession, the Word of God

In Roman times, the stock phrase, “poor Jews,” was endemic. The average Jew was not seen as well-off, and persecution of Jews could be expected to routinely set them back financially from any advances they had already made. Being members of an international brotherhood probably offset some of these great disadvantages and helped Jews repeatedly bounce back.

But what couldn’t be taken away from the Diasporans was that they were the Chosen People as much as anyone back in Israel and that they had available to them the sacred Scriptures. (Moreover, they had a very unusual thing, the community-sponsored education necessary to read the Scriptures they had. It is a digression but worth extensive thought to consider what the ability to read would give the average Jew living in a highly illiterate culture.)

Diasporans having the Word of God is often subtly misunderstood as the Diasporans having the Torah. They did have the Torah, they did emphasize living Pharisaically within the Torah, but they also had everything else that was considered Hebrew Scripture as well, and it is the everything else that often influenced the pagan nations.

The Everything Else: Psalms

So what is this “everything else” that supposedly the Diasporans might emphasize that would influence the nations around them? Probably foremost would be the Psalms, the Songbook of Judaism. Did people in the homeland have the songbook. Most certainly yes, so that Christ in the Gospels and just about everyone else among New Testament writers seems addicted to referring to it.

Many of the Psalms are recognized in modern theology as “prophetic,” speaking to an assurance of what had not yet been fulfilled and might be a very long time in the future. The New Testament is particularly fond of quoting:

“The LORD said to my Lord, ‘Sit down at my right hand until I have made your enemies a footstool for your feet.”

Diasporans probably often felt like footstools themselves. They certainly knew that Adonai, God’s anointed, was not in charge of the pagan world around them—yet.

Consider then a Roman, even a Roman emperor wanting to know a little of what the Jews resident in Rome were thinking:

The Lord’s anointed does not have charge of the pagan world—yet.

Or perhaps Augustus Caesar had somehow gotten word that Jews in Rome sang the 100^th Psalm:

“Make a joyful noise unto the Lord, all ye lands. Serve the Lord with gladness: come before his presence with singing” (1-2).

had a clear internationalist viewpoint and a teleology that Yes, yes, of course! But, wait a minute, who did they say should be making joyful noise? Who should be singing? Didn’t they say, “all ye lands”? In other words, Augustus could very well know that the Psalms moved beyond Israel into all the world, Caesar’s world.

Many of the Psalms were attributed to King David, thus written around 1,000 B.C. Rome didn’t make it back to 800 B.C. A Roman priest of Jupiter or Mars could hear that Roman Jews thought “The LORD is my shepherd; I shall not want.” Evidently, Poor Jews thought themselves rich.

The Everything Else: Wisdom Literature

There were also books of practical understanding, Wisdom Literature mainly centering on hundreds of proverbs collected in a single source.

The Greeks were addicted to Wisdom—Sophia—and exported it through higher education to the elites of the Mediterranean world. Certainly the Jews were bidding for a place at the Wisdom table along side the Greeks. Any Greek would certainly hope an inferior place at the table.

And yet with respect to that place at the table-- and yet.

A philosophical pedant of the first century A.D. teaching noble Romans at the Academy or the Lyceum in Athens could happen to some off-hand interaction with a commercial, Diasporan Jew.

“Well, Mordecai, how goes it today”?

“Well, Aristides, much like any other days, one day at a time, ‘Trusting in the LORD and not leaning on my own understanding,’ as the Good Book says.”

Aristides may have been well-mannered enough not to retort that, Good Book or no, it was Man who was the measure of all things, so he better get used to leaning on his own understanding.

If he did demur, Mordecai might rise to the bait and add, “In all your ways, acknowledge Him, and He will direct your paths.”

Aristides would know that there wasn’t any point in further discussion. Man’s mind was the only path to finding good answers. It might disturb him, however, to remember that one of his own classics indicated clearly that Odysseus, the clever Odysseus wasn’t clever enough to stay alive without the direct intervention of Wisdom to give him the edge.

One could start almost anywhere in Proverbs and be jolted by the sense that what the Jews thought was Wisdom didn’t sound at all like Pythagoras, Socrates, Plato, or Aristotle. It might take centuries of thought to get it all mentally sorted out.

The Everything Else: History

In volume, a great deal of the everything else of Jewish Scripture was History. In modern divinity schools, it is frequently emphasized that history can not be used to establish doctrine or dogma. There isn’t any reason to think that pagan ancients wouldn’t find this a convenient idea: let’s get away from all the religious junk; we can just be interested in what really happened all those centuries ago.

While that was a beguiling thought, it would seem nonsense to the Hasidic Jew. After all, central, and central to the Torah as history, was that God had appointed the Hebrew people as the Chosen People with a Promised Land. After, “Hear, O Israel, the LORD thy God is One,” the Chosen People and the Promised Land are very central religious tenets.

It wasn’t just Torah as History that refused to be complaisantly disinterested. Totally outside the Torh, there was a fairly detailed account of Sennacherib, an Assyrian king, delivering an ultimatum to Jerusalem that couched itself in language directly insulting and humiliating the God of Israel. King Hezekiah in despair turned to a prophet, and the prophet indicated God’s judgment on the Assyrian army. The next day, 180,000 Assyrians lay dead. Sennacherib got home to Nineveh safely, but was cut down while he worshipped in his own mascot deity's temple.

Even in brief retelling like this, a street-wise and military-wise Roman Republican, responsible audience, always susceptible to superstitious thinking, could be expected to think a little harder.

The Everything Else: Prophesy

Additionally, a substantial amount of Jewish Scripture was Prophesy. Some prophesy over the last 1,000 years or so could probably be checked for fulfillment, and people like the Romans were good at seeing how something from the Sybillean Books or an oracle from Delphi had been fulfilled.

But from a Diasporan perspective, often persecuted in a pagan sea, the numerous fulfilled prophesies might not seem all that relevant to present needs. Nevertheless, Diasporans desperately seeking to understand a hostile world and its direction could stumble almost on any page of prophesy to a possible reference to an Anointed One, a Savior, a Restorer of Israel, a Suffering Servant, a Reacher out to the Nations. The range of what this Messianic figure would look like was no doubt confusing to Diasporans themselves. But confused or not, the repeated emphasis should have been abundantly clear, and some of the statements were hardly ambiguous:

“His name will be called Wonderful, Counselor, Mighty God, the Everlasting Father, the Prince of Peace” (Isaiah: 9.6).

“The Lord you seek will suddenly appear in his temple” (Malachi: 3.1).

“But you Bethlehem are not the least among the princes of Judah. Out of you will come a governor who will rule my people Israel” (Micah: 5.2).

“Know then and understand that from the going forth of the commandment to restore and build Jerusalem unto the Messiah the Prince shall be seven weeks and threescore and two weeks.” (Daniel: 9.25). (Admittedly this got a little tricky in translation, and one had to reinterpret “weeks” somewhat.)

Whatever pagans might think, Diasporans knew that the Messiah would extend his reign to the whole earth outside Israel. And that was exactly the international world in which Diasporans lived and that the Jerusalem elite tried to entirely obliterate from their administration of Torah and the Law.

Could a Jewish Messiah possibly be as interesting to pagan Greeks or Romans as it was to Diasporan Jews. PROBABLY NOT IN THE SAME SENSE. But at the same time, we know that Romans and Greeks of the first century A.D. were religiously despondent, alienated from their own traditions and despairing about the direction of the world. We know that many of them were looking for a savior and trying to find one in a number of new religions imported from outside the empire or from very disreputable sources within the empire.

Diasporan Presentation to their Neighbors

Diasporan Presentation of Scriptural Ideas

For all of the Hebrew Scriptures outside the Torah, Jewish leadership in Jerusalem and Diasporans presumably had access to identical texts. Jewish scribes were literally in the business of guaranteeing exactly that, “counting up the number” for each page of text transcribed, a process later adopted by medieval monks for the same purpose of insuring absolute accuracy. Every letter was assigned a number value. The scribe took the new transcription and added all the now-numbers of the page together. The number had to exactly agree with the number assigned to the original.

Nevertheless, in terms of influence on Mediterranean thought, the influence of Diasporans must have been quite distinct from that of Jerusalem leadership

1) The leadership was tucked away in an insulated society in Israel which did not seek interaction with the rest of the world

2) Diasporans might literally live next door to Gentiles or at least down the way in a metropolitan area. Their representation of the Scriptural text started with a representation of life lived with those texts in mind.

3) Jerusalem leadership was mainly of the Sadducee party, mainly interested in the exact enactment of God’s commands in the Torah.

4) Diasporan interest in the Torah would be substantial given their Hasidic faith, but they had substantial reasons to pay attention to the non-Torah Scriptures, especially in relationship to personal faith and walk with God, even in the vast impurities of a pagan world.

5) Thus, Diasporans were the practical representatives of the major share of Hebrew Scriptures. Beyond that, the Diasporans had three important institutions—the Synagogue, the Second Temple as pilgrimage destination, and the Septuagint—the Scriptures themselves in Greek translation and thus directly available to the Gentile world to examine against any Diasporan presentation.

Presentation from Pilgrimage

The ever-increasing phenomenon of pilgrimages to the Second Temple by Diasporans must have impressed the Gentile world with the devotion of Diasporan Jews. They were not kidding around and, perhaps more to the point, they weren’t hiding out. The pilgrimages themselves must have made Gentile populations much more sensitive to the very ancient and very un-pagan religion in their midst.

Looking a little closer, there were three “required” feasts in Jerusalem—not that it was likely that many Diasporans could possibly afford and arrange to be at all of them.

The Feast of Passover was not like any pagan feast, instead commemorating an historical event which occurred sometime in the neighborhood of 1400 B.C. Moreover, Passover claimed to represent devastating judgment on the Egyptians and an Exodus out of Egypt and into God-covenanted-relationship for the Hebrews as the now-Chosen People.

The Day of Atonement celebrated in October approximately half a year away from Passover was the day on which sacrifices made in Jerusalem at the Second Temple covered the sins of the Hebrew nation and brought them back to at-oneness with their God. We will consider Sin separately below, but clearly Diasporan pilgrimages to the Day of Atonement proclaimed Sin and the need to cover that Sin.

The third feast, Pentecost, 50 days after Passover, was the most easily confused with a number of pagan harvest festivals. Passover and Atonement were far more likely to deeply impress Gentiles that the Hebrew faith was in all its basic tenets distinct from pagan practices. And Diasporan pilgrims made the point with every step toward Jerusalem.

We know then a great deal of what pilgrimage would present to the Gentile nations. It is the suggestion of this study that far more needs to be thought through about what effect(s) such presentation would have on those Gentiles and their thinking.

Presenters versus Bridge under Siege

In many ways then, the Diasporans could be seen as Jewish representatives presenting scriptural ideas on behalf of all of Judaism. However important such a simplified idea may have been to Jewish influence on the Mediterranean peoples, it is certainly not the only paradigm and in the final analysis may not be the most important to the development of Classical civilization.

A second major paradigm is an idea of the Diasporans as a bridge linking the Gentile nations to an other wise aloof Jewish theocracy. That bridge was, sadly, often attacked by Gentiles, especially those of Greek background. Even today Jewish rabbis speak of a contest between Athens and Jerusalem.

Less noticed, the bridge was also under subtle attack by Jewish leadership in Jerusalem, not open attack but something that must often have struck Diasporans as close to open scorn. Diasporans, as has been repeatedly indicated above, were the sloughed-off ones, the ones contaminated not just by association with the unrighteous world but by daily life in that world. There is little sense that their religious perceptions were ever given significant weight in Jerusalem.

We, therefore, close this overview account with two examples of extremely important Jewish ideas. Neither is at all controversial as a Jewish reality. Yet when looked at carefully, it is clear in both cases that Diasporans as a presentational bridge were not just opposed by Gentile interests. Diasporans also had to contend with having a clearly different outlook from the likely attitudes of official Jewish leadership in Jerusalem.

Starting with the Obvious

Let us start from a most obvious difference between Diasporans and Judeans, assuming that both relied on the same biblical base.

Jerusalem-centered Jewishness was a story of continual sloughings-off, leaving a remnant of believers in the One God Who had nominated the Hebrew family of the patriarchs as His Chosen People. Jewish history is a remnant history of concentrated continuity. And in that concentration, it is a history of separation from an unrighteous world of the Nations.

Contrastively, there were substantial historical reasons for Diasporans not to have all that much in common with one another. They were the sloughed off, those who had been almost unimaginably contaminated by constant close association with the unrighteous Nations. Whether they were displaced from Israel to Assyria or were carried into exile in Babylon or left Israel freely for commercial purposes or for employment as mercenary forces somewhere along the way, to live at all, they had to become cosmopolitan, to become rather smooth stones in a world of cosmopolitan tolerance for religious variety. The Diasporans were as various as anyone could want or tolerate. At the same time, to be Jews at all themselves, they were necessarily intolerant of any gods seeking existence alongside the one true God.

Jerusalem-based Judaism could pride itself on its haughty separation. Diasporan Judaism could only prosper by keeping a very low profile religiously and finding roles that commercially or governmentally could seem useful to their neighbors.

Diasporans did not have trouble standing out from among the people around them. Their ideas were contagious because all their neighbors were quite anxious to add new gods who might in one way or another be useful to know. But Diasporans were also obnoxious to their neighbors precisely because their ideas negated the easy tolerance everyone else was addicted to.

So, the Jerusalem-based perspective is a rather tense isolation, something of an ancient form of the American Revolution’s flag with a rattlesnake and the motto, “Don’t tread on me.” The Diasporan perspective was constantly cosmopolitan and constantly in need of minimizing the irrefutable fact that as Jews they stood in absolute contradistinction to pagan polytheism.

The Classical ancient world thus had two entirely separate mindsets to think of as Judaism. Given that both of the Judaisms proclaimed that the LORD their God was one and given that the Mediterranean was polytheist, it was easy for the polytheists to deplore the Jews and at the same time to confuse the Judaism presented before them in Diasporan realities with the aloof Judaism of Jerusalem orthodoxy, always of course to the benefit of the polytheistic majority.

A Second Symbolic Difference in Perspective: Sin

Superficially, Sin is one of those great biblical commonalities that united Jerusalem-centered Judaism with Diasporan Judaism.

Sin enters the biblical narrative on the second page, possibly on the second day of humanity. Sin enters human history as a specific act, disobedience to God’s only command. Read with some literary sophistication, the original Sin is an act of pride, a pride that sets the human race aside from a relationship to God and favoring its own self conception and its own inner sense of its self interests above the single command of self-denial that God has directly imparted.

There is no reason to think that Diasporans would object to such a description of the issue any more strongly, perceptively, or conceptually than would the most devout and orthodox of Jerusalem-centered Judaism. Despite this cognitive agreement between Diasporans and those in the Hebrew heartland, there could and probably was a strong difference based practically in Jerusalem’s central position as the site of the Temple and thus its concentrated attention to Atonement for the Sins of the Chosen People.

The Diasporans, contrastively, had no responsibility for providing Atonement for Israel. At best, Diasporans got a glimpse of the workings of a theocratic state maintaining the Temple and its sacrifices when they came to Jerusalem for one of the appointed feasts. For the rest of their lives, back among the nations, Diasporans had their hands full trying to live out an Hasidic understanding of obligations for living under the Torah and attempting to navigate their way as an often resented minority within a society awash in polytheistic ideas, attitudes, and lifestyles.

In such a context, writings other than the Torah might hold the key to godly living in an ungodly world or, in other words, a justified unsinning existence in the midst of not merely moral laxness but instead of total ignorance of God’s law and standards.

So, Jerusalem leadership and Diasporan laity had the same word, “Sin,” and probably most of the time entirely different concerns associated with it.

But whatever Sin meant to them, clearly the polytheistic world had entirely different ideas. Again, we are considering in paragraphs what should be researched in whole tomes. But speaking very generally, the Greeks had been allowed to formulate a general Greco-Roman religious synthesis, the Romans deviating wherever they liked with impunity but not making any significant case for their own variations.

Within the Greek understanding, there was very little room for Sin. Creative self-reliance was much closer to the Greek center, and by the time of the Caesars, the Greeks, having lost administrative control along with military control, became increasingly dissolute and pleasure-seeking to the utter disregard for issues of self-discipline and control. Roman religions had, of course, emphasized both self-discipline, and self-control along with personal self-abnegation. When the Roman Republic gave way to the Augustan Principate, Roman imperial culture attempted to outgrow Roman Republican puritanism and to immerse itself in the self-indulgence Greeks were anxious to advocate.

Greco-Roman Alternative to Sin

But what about Sin? In short, the Greco-Roman synthesis knew nothing about it.

The great tragedies did deal with human imperfection, but as Aristotle formulated it, Greek tragedy was concerned with the single, tragic flaw. Hardly the same thing as the constant sin-bias of human nature revealed in the Hebrew scriptures.

Considering Aristotle more closely, his word was translated “flaw,” not sin. The actual Greek word is hamartia, a falling short, normally retranslated so without further commentary.

Let us, however, further comment.

Hamartia is basically a term from archery, thus a falling short of the arrow from the target. Without commentary, we are likely to mentally picture an archer aiming at some bulls-eye target but the arrow not carrying far enough and left sticking in the ground or in the white below the bullseye. In that context, it can become rather a comforting thought: try harder next time, aim a little higher, put a little more tension on the string before letting go.

It’s a fairly reassuring idea, but it is in all probability not what any Greek would understand or what Aristotle would care to teach.

Let’s start over recognizing that archery for the Classical Greeks is not a recreational sport. It is a military discipline which is only fully meaningful on the battlefield.

Archery is not particularly relevant to Roman military thought, which had learned to rule the world through the manipular legion. The legion depended on the pilum lance and the gladius short sword to carry everything before it. If archers appeared in Roman armies, they were typically local auxiliaries, and they quite normally opened the battle along with slingers or other irregular forces operating as skirmishers screening the cohorts behind them.

But the Greek literary model imagines the archers firing in support of a phalanx front line. There would be archers on the other side firing back over the heads of their own main formations. The main formations on both sides were typically armored, but the armor was a heavy encumbrance as well as very expensive. Armor did not mean the suit of armor of a medieval battlefield but a breastplate armor covering the warrior’s chest and stomach and open in back for ventilation.

Imagine, therefore, the literary archer, firing over his own troops into the advancing main-body ranks of the enemy, perhaps two hundred yards away from the target. One would need quite an arch on the arrow as well as quite a powerful bow to propel that arrow.

But imagine further an inept archer. He fires, but he doesn’t aim nearly high enough.

Where does his arrow go?

The arrow, incidentally carries the archer’s personal identifying mark on it. And after the battle, that undershot arrow is found sticking out of the unprotected back of one of the archer’s own front-line troops.

That is the picture of hamartia that creates tragedy a la Aristotle.

And that is about as close to Sin as the ancient world wanted to get. Hamartia is a deadly mistake, an error. Hamartia is perhaps even gross incompetence or inattention to detail. Hamartia can produce fatal consequences. And hamartia is something every army works incessantly to do without through the best in formal training and constant anticipatory exercise and practice.

And it is hamartia, not sin, which everyone around the Diasporan Jew is so terribly interested in avoiding.

Presumably whole volumes could be written on the less than totally obvious differences such counter-perceptions made in daily intercourse as well as in all abstract thinking about the nature of dangerous realities around the Mediterranean world.

The Jerusalem Jew could concentrate on Sin in relationship to tithing mint and dill. The Diasporan Jew had to understand his own religious certainty of an eradicable sin nature exhibited unabashedly by a pagan world. Meanwhile people of the Nations could concentrate on disciplined mastery for competent performance.

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