Religious Rivalries and the Struggle for Success in Sardis and Smyrna (review)

This volume is one in a series originating in the 'Religious Rivalries' Seminar of the Canadian Society of Biblical Studies. The seminar looked each year at different aspects or local instances of the 'coexistence, co-operation, competition, and conflict' between Jews, Christians, and polytheists in the Roman empire. It is a pleasure to report not only that the articles in this volume are of high quality throughout but also that the volume as a whole is more than the sum of its parts – always the acid test of multi-authored works.

In this as in other volumes of the 'Rivalries' project the emerging scene is one of coexistence and limited co-operation rather than of open competition and conflict, and where the latter two c-words are in play the contested issues are not always what they first seem to be. The grand narratives of religious triumph and defeat are our – or our grandparents' – constructions. On the ground it was more a matter of muddling through together in the confined spaces of the ancient city.

A general introduction to religion and its manifestations in Sardis and Smyrna by the editor, Richard Ascough, precedes studies of each of the rival groups in the two cities: Lloyd Gaston on the Jewish communities, Dietmar Neufeld on the Christian communities, Ascough on the Greco-Roman polytheistic religions, and Philip Harland on the 'voluntary associations' which are increasingly seen (thanks largely to Harland's own researches) as the vehicles for the expression of religion in the lives of ordinary people. A chapter by Michele Murray adds useful comparative material from the not far distant city of Priene.

Sardis and Smyrna were chosen as typical of the prosperous, largely self-governing Greek cities in the Roman province of Asia (the Aegean coast and hinterland of modern Turkey). The assumption of typicality is reasonable, but inevitably the record both archaeological and literary from any one city or even a pair of cities is spotty and uneven, with large gaps both in time and in type of evidence.

Particularly problematic is the evidence for Jewish-Christian relations. For the Jewish community alone, the large and well-appointed synagogue at Sardis, with its honorific insciptions, witnesses the relatively high status of that community and the integration of its leadership on the fringes the city's elite. The literary sources, however, are Christian, and they tell a tale of enmity and malevolence between the two communities: the Peri Pascha ('On the Passover') of Melito of Sardis and the Martyrdom of Polycarp, bishop of Smyrna (chapters by Wayne McCready and Reidar Asgaard respectively). Both texts should be read primarily as exercises in Christian self-definition. The latter tells a story of fanatical Jewish involvement in Polycarp's martyrdom; it is in this respect a fiction calqued on the passion narratives of Jesus. The former is a theological exercise in 'supercessionism,' the discarding of the old Israel in favour of the new. It is entirely possible that the much more established Jewish communities never even noticed these early Christian ankle-biters, tragic portents of worse to come.

The Christian communities in Sardis and Smyrna were two of the 'seven churches' of Asia to which was addressed what became the the New Testament's final book, the Revelation of John. Three articles are devoted to it, two of which, by Timothy Hegedus and John Marshall, address the polytheistic and Jewish astrological influences on John's visions. Just what this marginal figure was smoking remains an intriguing question, and Hegedus and Marshall have substantially refined the analysis of the ingredients. The third article, by James Knight, addresses another fraught question, 'Was [the goddess] Roma the Scarlet Harlot?' Answer – in that she instantiated Rome's malignant imperial power, yes.

Space precludes all but a listing of the remaining three chapters: one by Steven Muir on '"Caring for All the Weak": Polytheist and Christian Charity in...