Reblogging for future reference.
In an earlier posting I referred to Anna Collar’s recent book, Religious Networks in the Roman Empire (2013), and I return to it to mention something that puzzled me in her chapter on epigraphic evidence of Judaism. She posits an escalation of evidence of Jews emphasizing their Jewish identity across the second to fourth century CE, and ascribes this in part to the success of “rabbinic” Judaism. But I recall an earlier study focused on papyrological evidence that posited a noteworthy “re-Hebraization” and renewed emphasis on Jewish particularly already in the early Roman period: Corpus Papyrorum Judaicarum, by Victor A. Tcherikover, Alexander Fuks and Menahem Stern, eds. (3 vols; Cambridge: Harvard University Press), 1957-1964. (Hereafter, CPJ.)
This work draws on papyrological data about Jews and Judaism across the Ptolemaic and Roman periods, which means lots of attention to “everyday” data, such as marriage contracts, etc.
The 110-page analysis…
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