“Include Me Out”: Rituals of Inclusion and Voluntary Self-Exclusion

in the Graeco-Roman City

In Antiquity:

• GODS RUN IN THE BLOOD
• CULT MAKES GODS HAPPY/UNHAPPY GODS MAKE FOR UNHAPPY HUMANS
• ETHNICITY IS A CULT DESIGNATION/CULT IS AN ETHNIC DESIGNATON
• ANCIENT CITIES ARE RELIGIOUS INSTITUTIONS
• NO FENCES MAKE GOOD NEIGHBORS
• ALL MONOTHEISTS WERE POLYTHEISTS
• THEOLOGY NOT NATIVE TO “RELIGION”/CULT
• THE EMPEROR IS DIVINE
• RELIGIOUS PERSECUTION AN ANOMALY

 
My questions:

• How does ritual “include”? How does “ethnicity” affect the question?
• How is non-participation in inclusive ritual enacted and understood?
• What is at stake, for whom,  in (proper) ritual activity?

Our time-frame:

          From Alexander to Theodosius II. 

Urban “inside” outsiders: Jews; Gentile Christians.

+100-250 local persecutions of Gentile Christians;

+250-303 pagan imperial persecutions of Gentile Christians;

+324  Council of Nicea, effort to separate Easter from Passover; purification of Xn cult/Christian imperial persecution of Christians.

GODS IN THE BLOOD

Cult as a Family Affair/kinship designation:

 1. “It is not lawful for a xenos to enter.” (Delos; shrine of Anios Archigetes)

2. “No man of another nation to enter within the enclosure around the temple.” (Jerusalem)

3. Greekness (to Hellenikon) defined in terms of blood (homaimon), language (homomglosson), shared  sanctuaries and cult (theon hidrumata koina kai thusiai) and customs (ethea homotropa)., Herodotos Hist. 8.144.2; cf. Romans 9:4 (below).

Worshipers or their rulers are the god’s “family”/genos/natio:

     Ps 2:7 “You are my [God’s] son, today I have begotten you;”

    2 Sm 7:14 “I [God] will be a father to him [David’s son who will build the temple], and he will be my son.”

    Rom 9:4 “They [Paul’s suggenoi] are Israelites, and to them belong the sonship [huiothesia], the glory [doxa/kavod], the covenants, the giving of the law, the worship [cult: latreia/avodah].”

 
MESSY ‘MONOTHEISM’

 
Other families have other gods:

 Micah 4:5 “All the peoples walk, each in the name of its god; but we will walk in the name of the Lord our god forever and ever.”

Exodus 22:28 “Do not revile God”  LXX: “Do not revile the gods.”

 
These gods exist:

 
          1 Cor 8:5-6: “Though there are many so-called gods in heaven or on earth – as indeed there are many gods and lords – yet for us there is only one God, the Father. . . .”

2 Cor 4:4 “The god of this cosmos has blinded the minds of the unbelievers.”

ETHNICITY AND CULT: NO FENCES MAKE GOOD NEIGHBORS

Practical arrangements with other gods: Jews

1. Moschos Iudaeos son of Moschion freed a slave “having seen a dream, at the orders of the god Amphiaraos and Hygieia,” 3^rd c. BCE, in Greece.

2. Niketas from Jerusalem gave 100 drachmas in support of the Dionysia festival, c. 150 BCE (Iasus).

3. Herod the Great built shrines to foreign gods (especially of the imperial cult), was a patron of the Olympic games. AJ 16.

4. Manumission inscriptions from the Bosphorous call on the witness of sky, earth and sun: Zeus, Gē, Helios.

“To the Most High God, Almighty, blessed, in the reign of king Mithridates, the friend of [?] and the friend of the fatherland, in the year 338 [41 CE], in the month of Deios, Pothos son of Strabo, dedicated to the house of prayer . . . his slave Chrysa, on condition that she be unharmed and unmolested by any of his heirs under Zeus, Gaia, and Helios.” (Levine, The Ancient Synagogue, p. 114).

5. Education (ephebate), city government, athletics, theatre, the army: Jews present.

Practical arrangements with the Jewish god: Gentiles: Literary evidence speaks of “fearers of God”: phoboumenoi, sebomenoi; epigraphy, theosobeis or theon sebeis; Latin metuentes; Heb. yirei shamayim

1) Pagan complaints: Juvenal, Sat. 14 Roman godfearers breed sons who eventually “convert,” spurning their own law and follow Jewish law (Romanas. . .contemnere leges/Iudaicum ediscunt ac servant ac metuunt ius”); Tacitus, that they abandon the “religionibus patriis” and disown their own gods, country and family, Hist. 5.1-2; Dio, Hist. Rom. 37 and 67 gentiles joining Jews keep ta nomima autōn, worship a single deity and do not honor the other gods; when aristocrats do this (Domitian) they become “atheists” and join the ethē tōn Ioudaiōn; cf. Roman governor of Scilli urging martyrs not to abandon the mos Romanorum.

2) Jewish inscriptions: benefactions by wealthy pagans (including a priestess of the Roman imperial cult, Julia Severa); inscription in Aphrodisias lists 54 pagan donors, among whom nine members of the town council. Included in synagogue ritual activities. See copious evidence assembled in L.I. Levine, The Ancient Synagogue (Yale 2001). Jewish god invoked by pagan magicians (“not only by Jews, but by almost all who deal in magic and spells,” Origen, c. Cel. 4.33).

3) Gentile Christian complaints: Ignatius (c. 100) “It is foolish to talk of Christ and to Judaize,” (Magnesians 10:3); better to hear of Christianity from a circumcised man than “to hear of Judaism from someone uncircumcised,” (Phil 6:1). Complaints about synagogues allowing gentile pagans to participate in worship: Tertullian (c. 200) some Gentiles keep Sabbath and Passover but worship at altars, ad Nationes 1.13; Commodian (3^rd c.? 5^th c.?) mocks the medius Iudaeus who runs between synagogue and altar, which Jews are wrong to tolerate, Instruct. 1.24; Cyril of Alexandria (5^th c.) men call themselves theosobeis who follow consistently neither Jewish nor Greek custom, de adoratione 3.92. Xn complaints about synagogues including gentile Christians: eating in the synagogue on Saturday and in church on Sunday (Origen); Chrysostom, nototriously before the high holidays in 387: Christians fast, keep Sabbath, go to synagogue, take oaths in front of torah scrolls, co-celebrate Passover and Sukkot (“When did they ever feast on Epiphany with us?”). Elvira in 303 also legislates against Christians serving as pagan priests.

The ruler is a special human, a mediator between earth and heaven. Roman emperors are also the pontifex maximus, especially responsible for the pax deorum.  In a sense, the emperor is “everybody’s” god.

• Except the Jews’ (I Macs; Caligula; exemption written in Roman imperial law and maintained even after Constantine)
• Which it had to be, b/c emperor cult continued after Constantine: games, gladiatorial contests, feasts, priests, incense, adoration of  image, just no blood sacrifice. Constantine regarded as a god (hōs theos) in 5^th c. Constantinople; Theodosius II legislates on adoration of his image and of his own numen, CTh 15.4.1, in 425.
• “Why has the Spring renounced its accustomed charm? Why has the summer, barren of its harvest,deprived the laboring farmer? . . . Why all of these things, unless nature has transgressed the decree of its own law, to avenge impiety?” Theodosius II, NTh 3, in his constitution against pagans, Samaritans, and Jews (430). Cf. his covening IIIrd Ecumenical Council in 429, so that “the condition of the church might honor God  and contribute to the safety of the Empire,” Acta consiliorum oecumenicorum I.1,1,114; cf. Tertullian, Apol. 40.