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  • Religious Networks in the Roman Empire: The Spread of New Ideas by Anna Collar
  • Pieter W. Van Der Horst
Anna Collar. Religious Networks in the Roman Empire: The Spread of New Ideas. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2013. Pp. xii, 322. $99.00. ISBN 978–1-107–04344–2.

Publishers are invited to submit new books to be reviewed to Professor Gareth Williams, Department of Classics, Columbia University, 1130 Amsterdam Ave., 617 Hamilton Hall, MC 2861, New York, NY 10027, email: gdw5@columbia.edu.

In this ambitious book, originally an Exeter Ph.D. thesis supervised by Stephen Mitchell, Collar attempts to answer the question of whether the modern social science of network theory can be used to tell us something about the ancient world, more specifically about the spread of new religious ideas in the Roman Empire. In a theoretical introduction, she sketches for the uninitiated what network theory is all about and, in one of its important insights, she states that “instead of judging the success of an innovation on an objective quality of the innovation itself, its success and adoption can rather be viewed as an indication of the connectivity of the network structure in which it happens to be situated” (16, her italics). Since in this short review it is impossible to summarize this chapter, I shall focus on what Collar says network theory contributes to the study of religious innovation in the first centuries of our era.

Although chapter 2 is entitled “Networks and religion in the Roman world,” we are again treated to a considerable amount of sociological theory. One important aspect of network theory that can be applied to ancient religions is the observation that “the adoption of a new religious form and the success or failure of a religious movement can be seen as a result of social interactions” (74, her italics). Chapter 3 deals, at last, with an ancient religion, the cult of the North Syrian storm god Jupiter Dolichenus. On the basis of some 430 inscriptions (there are no literary sources for this cult), Collar explains its amazingly swift and wide spread (from northern Syria to southern Scotland; several maps illustrate the diffusion patterns) not as a result of an intrinsic appeal or inherent quality of this cult but because Roman officers adopted it and the cult spread across their highly mobile and communicative military network. Its success should be attributed to the “social connectivity” of its adherents, especially the middle- to high-ranking officers who were the overwhelming majority of its dedicants. Their network follows the geographical features of the northern frontier, concentrated in particular on the Danube and Rhine.

In chapter 4 Collar argues, on the basis of Jewish epigraphy, that one can observe in the Western diaspora after 70 c.e. (when the temple in Jerusalem was destroyed) a gradually increasing “Hebraisation” of these communities, visible in occasional Hebrew words or phrases on (otherwise Greek) epitaphs, the adoption of biblical or Jewish names, and the use of typically Jewish decorative symbols such as the menorah. She argues at length that these signs of explicit Jewish identity are due to the growing influence of the Palestinian rabbis after 70, and she sees these signs as the consequence of “the gradual acceptance of the new, universalizing halakhah [rules for life] of the rabbis” (166) who used their networks to this purpose. I find this very improbable. One can find similar signs of Jewish identity in pre-70 material, when the rabbinic movement did not [End Page 299] yet exist; the centrality of the Torah and the synagogue is a generally Jewish phenomenon, not only a rabbinic one. Moreover, the numerous Jewish inscriptions from the diaspora do not evince a single indication of the existence of typically rabbinic ideas; on the contrary, although one does find such inscriptions in Palestine, where the rabbis lived. It is generally agreed that only after the sixth century c.e. does a slow and gradual rabbinization of the Western diaspora take place, not earlier. It does not help when Collar presses Samaritan inscriptions into service for her thesis (78–79, 202–203), for Samaritans were anti-rabbinic. Here network theory leads to an untenable...

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