Jesus Remembered: Christianity in the Making, vol. 1

FROM THE GOSPELS TO JESUS §9.1
and though there is a question as to whether he was referring only to the coastal
strip south of Phoenicia (the territory of the Philistines), Josephus had no doubt
that Herodotus meant the Jews/Judeans (Ap. 1.168-71). And Aristotle in the
fourth century BCE refers to the Dead Sea as 'the lake in Palestine'
(Meteorologica II, p. 359a). 15 So 'Palestinian Judaism' is an accurate enough historical
description for the Judaism of the first century CE, whatever the sensitivities
occasioned for modern scholarship by the political realities of present-day
Israel and Palestine. 'Judaism in the land of Israel' would be equally acceptable
and give more weight to Israel's covenant perspective.
Equally problematic has been the temporal connotations attached to 'Judaism'.
As already noted (§5.5), an older scholarship spoke of first-century Judaism
as Spätjudentum (late Judaism), a usage which persisted into the late 1960s.
This was an astonishing designation since it reduced Judaism to the role of serving
solely as forerunner to Christianity and left a question mark over how one
should describe the next nineteen centuries of Judaism! The still more common
'intertestamental Judaism' reduced the significance of this 'Judaism' to bridging
the gap between the (Christian) Testaments and implied a coherence ('Judaism')
for the documents chiefly referred to, which is by no means clear. The natural reaction
has been to choose the opposite adjective and to speak of 'early Judaism',
or 'formative Judaism'. 16 The actual period covered is of uncertain length, particularly
its starting point — whether from Ezra, or from the Greek period (300
BCE), the most favoured option, or from the close of the Jewish canon (from Bible
to Mishnah), or from the Maccabees, or from the emergence of the Pharisees
as a religious force, or indeed from the beginnings of the reformulation of Judaism
after 70 CE. The end point is more obviously 200 CE, on the grounds that the
codification of the Mishnah (about 200) marks the beginning of rabbinic Judaism
proper. 17 The designation 'early Judaism', however, runs a risk similar to that of
the objectionable Spätjudentum, since it can be taken to imply that the only significance
of first-century Judaism was as a precursor to rabbinic Judaism.
The further alternative of designating the period 300 BCE to 200 CE as
15. See GLAJJ 1.2-3, 7, 349 (§§1, 3,142) with commentary.
16. So, e.g., the title of the volume edited by Kraft and Nickelsburg, Early Judaism;
Neusner has also promoted the term 'Formative Judaism' in the series produced by him under
that title. In contrast, the series of volumes edited by W. S. Green (Approaches to Ancient Judaism)
use 'Ancient Judaism' to cover everything from the post-exilic period to the early rabbis.
M. Z. Brettler, 'Judaism in the Hebrew Bible? The Transition from Ancient Israelite Religion to
Judaism', CBQ 61 (1999) 429-47, suggests speaking of the biblical period as 'emergent' or
'earliest' Judaism.
17. For the equivalent questions regarding the beginning of 'the rabbinic period', see
I. M. Gafni, 'The Historical Background', in S. Safrai, ed., The Literature of the Sages (CRINT
II.3.1; Assen: Van Gorcum, 1987) 1-34.
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