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Introduction: Focus and Objectives From the inception of the work of the CSBS’s seminar on religious rivalries and the struggle for success, participants have profited conceptually, theoretically , and methodologically from the definition of the seminar’s focus by Leif Vaage (1995). First, Vaage insisted from the outset that inter- and intra-religious rivalries should not, and could not, be analyzed as a distinct issue within a sui generis realm of religious thought, institutions, and identity. The realm of religious self-definition and religiously informed social formation in the late Roman world usually presupposed the significant , close-at-hand “other” in a complex, multi-faceted social landscape that had become increasingly large, complex, and diversified. Moreover, a greater number of social actors in that landscape were mobile. Hence, Vaage’s second major point. While the rhetoric and discourse serving preaching, apologetics, or polemics often described or caricatured the social, ritual, or theological traits of the other in “ideal” terms—as the “ideal” or “mythical” foil to “us” and, therefore, as people with whom to shun social and religious concourse—day-to-day separation from, and shunning of, “the other” was in fact socially impossible and patently undesirable. Therefore, it is essential to understand how diverse and often competing religious communities inhabiting the same social landscape managed their social relationships in order to effect the dual objectives of maintaining both their intra-group socio-religious identity and solidarity, and the requisite level and types of social interaction with “others” that underpinned the social, economic , and political conditions upon which the welfare of all depended. It is precisely within Vaage’s framework that the meaning and place of the discourse and rhetoric of inter- and intra-religious rivalry has become Notes to chapter 14 start on page 293 211 14 Urbanization in the Roman East and the Inter-Religious Struggle for Success Jack N. Lightstone “problematized” in new and significant ways. Concretely put, it is no longer self-evident what is going on when a Christian presbyter or bishop demonizes Jews and polytheists in speech or treatise in one moment, in full knowledge that he and the members of his community will necessarily do business with them in the next, and then participate with Jews and polytheists in some important civic celebration, which often has religious overtones . (Indeed inversely, the polytheist Roman emperors sponsored regular sacrifices at the Jerusalem Temple in their name to the Jewish God, and polytheists and early Christians were regulars among the pilgrims to the Temple.) It is no longer sufficient to say that Christian characterizations of Jews or polytheists as the demoniacally “other,” or rabbinic characterizations of polytheists as morally no better than animals, are merely polemic or caricature , or that they represent the language of social labelling. All this raises the question about the meaning of such characterizations in context—a context of complex social interaction, even mutual interdependence, in addition to social differentiation and avoidance. This leads to another particular insight that seminar members gained from Peter Richardson’s contributions to our joint work (Richardson 2002)— an insight that seemed to hit me like a bolt of lightening, although I cannot understand why it did not previously so impress itself upon me. As Richardson described the physical layout and material evidence of urban archaeological sites, I attained a new-found realization of how crowded and dense was the physical stage for the inter- and intra-religious social relations about which Vaage talks. The groups “struggling” for success in competition with, or in the face of, one another truly lived cheek by jowl. As Richardson has repeatedly brought to our attention, the material loci for specifically Christian, Jewish, and polytheist activity and ritual took place virtually next door to one another in neighbouring churches, temples, and synagogues, with the civic space and institutions of the basilica and forum equally close—all tightly surrounded by dwellings.1 With this image in mind, the cogency of Vaage’s understanding of the seminar’s focus, as well as his conceptual and methodological exhortations , is all the more apparent. It is clear because most of the evidence for the topic of our seminar comes from and reflects the social reality of life in and around the cities of the late Roman period. In our evidence, village and country life figures less significantly, principally in the narratives of the Synoptic Gospels and in evidence from late second- and early third-century Galilee and southern Syria. However, even here the literary evidence...

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