Jews, Christians and Polytheists in the Ancient Synagogue explores the ways in which divergent ethnic, national and religious communities interacted with one another within the synagogue in the Greco-Roman period. It presents new perspectives regarding the development of the synagogue and its significance of this institution for understanding religion and society under the Roman Empire.

Explores the ways in which divergent ethnic, national and religious communities interacted with one another within the synagogue during the Greco-Roman period.

Revised and expanded thesis (Ph.D.) - Duke University, Durham, NC, 2008.

This volume revisits issues of empire from the perspective of Jews, Christians, and other Romans in the third to sixth centuries. Through case studies, the contributors bring Jewish perspectives to bear on longstanding debates concerning Romanization, Christianization, and late antiquity.

Are the rituals in the Hebrew Bible of great antiquity, practiced unchanged from earliest times, or are they the products of later innovators? The canonical text is clear: ritual innovation is repudiated as when Jeroboam I of Israel inaugurate a novel cult at Bethel and Dan. Most rituals are traced back to Moses. From Julius Wellhausen to Jacob Milgrom, this issue has divided critical scholarship. With the rich documentation from the late Second Temple period, such as the Dead Sea Scrolls, it is apparent that rituals were changed. Were such rituals practiced, or were they forms of textual imagination? How do rituals change and how are such changes authorized? Do textual innovation and ritual innovation relate? What light might ritual changes between the Hebrew Bible and late Second Temple texts shed on the history of ritual in the Hebrew Bible? The essays in this volume engage the various issues that arise when rituals are considered as practices that may be invented and subject to change. A number of essays examine how biblical texts show evidence of changing ritual practices, some use textual change to discuss related changes in ritual practice, while others discuss evidence for ritual change from material culture.

These twenty studies ask whether changes in different fields of ancient Jewish culture were caused by the destruction of the Second Temple in 70 CE, what changed for other reasons, and what did not change despite that event.