Piety/Godliness in Early Christianity and the Roman World

By the beginning of the 1st century ce, piety/godliness (Greek: εὐσέβεια; Latin: pietas) came to entail the dutiful fulfilment of one’s obligations to one’s household, homeland, and gods. It could also describe one’s respectful attitude toward and treatment of the dead, guests, hosts, and supplicants as well as describe keeping an oath. Numerous studies on the use of piety in the New Testament have been concerned about identifying the cultural backgrounds that influenced the biblical authors’ deployment of the term and whether such use retains its Greek and Roman meanings, derives from Hellenistic Judaism, or reflects a “Christianization” of the term to encapsulate the complete Christian life, including both proper belief and practice. Outside of the field of biblical studies, philologists in classics have studied the evolution and use of the term εὐσέβεια and its cognates in ancient Greek literature, where the term had significant purchase in philosophical literature. The Latin virtue of pietas gains significant prominence in political discourse near the dusk of the Roman Republic and at the dawn of the Roman Empire with the publication of Virgil’s Aeneid and Augustus’s restoration of priesthoods and temples. Although the term εὐσέβεια and its cognates occur in Acts and 2 Peter, the majority of attention to the significance of this term in early Christian literature has centered around its meaning and function in the canonical Letters to Timothy and Titus, also known as the Pastoral Epistles. In particular, scholars have been concerned about whether the use of the term in the Pastorals reflects the respective author’s accommodation to Greek society (and thus a further development away from the earliest/more authentic/Pauline articulations of the Christian faith) or rather reflects enculturation within Hellenistic Jewish thought. Neither the historical Jesus nor Paul in his undisputed letters describe the ideal Christian life in terms of piety—thus it remains a fascinating topic to consider the social and political implications of early Christians utilizing this terminology which held significant cultural capital and prestige in its Greek and Roman cultural contexts.

Philo and the Origins of Political Theology

This chapter discusses why Philo became an essential source for the development of political theology in the West through his conception of the prophet as nomos empsychos or living law. The chapter addresses the controversial interpretation of Philo proposed by Erwin Goodenough, which establishes a new paradigm on how to think about the relation between Athens and Jerusalem, pagan philosophy and Jewish revelation, in Hellenistic Judaism. The chapter argues that this interpretative approach to Philo sheds light on why he became a decisive source for the renaissance of Jewish political theology in the 20th century, starting with Hermann Cohen’s foundational work.

The Pentateuch

The impetus behind the translation of the Pentateuch likely emanated from a well-educated sector of the Jewish community, whose members were not unfamiliar with the Hebrew original. The translation’s language style adheres closely enough to Semitic syntax and idiom to suggest that the original’s words were never expected to be lost from view. Being the first undertaking of its kind, the translated Pentateuch is filled with renderings that speak of a spontaneous, creative procedure in which various strategies were attempted. The extent to which the Greek Pentateuch would have functioned as a theological guide for Hellenistic Judaism is not clear. Some parts do exhibit interpretive shifts, while others simply defy being counted as Torah in Greek. The Greek Pentateuch was known to later translators who depended in varying degrees upon its vocabulary.

What is the Septuagint?

In standard English usage the term Septuagint typically denotes the earliest Greek version of the Old Testament. Despite this seeming clarity, it is in fact a fuzzy concept, insofar as the boundaries of its application shift significantly from one context to another. This chapter delineates the four principal ways in which the term is currently used by biblical scholars, and discusses the historical background of each with reference to the reception of the Jewish Greek Scriptures. It begins with their inception in Hellenistic Judaism, and traces their reconfiguration by early Jewish and Christian tradents through to the advent of modernity and the rise of critical scholarship. Current issues in the field of Septuagint Studies are addressed.

Defining Hellenistic Jews in Nineteenth-Century Germany: The Case of Jacob Bernays and Jacob Freudenthal

Hellenic language and culture occupy a deeply ambivalent place in the mapping of Jewish history. If the entanglement of the Jewish and the Greek became especially conflicted for modern Jews in philhellenic Europe, nowhere was it more vexed than in the German-speaking lands of the long nineteenth century. Amidst the modern redefinition of what it meant to be Jewish as well as doubts about the genuine Jewishness of Hellenistic Judaism, how did scholars identify Jewish authorship behind ambiguous, fragmented, and interpolated texts – all the more with much of the Hebraic allegedly deprived by the Hellenic? This article not only argues for the contingency of diagnostic features deployed to define the Jewish amidst the Greek but also maintains the embeddedness of those features in nineteenth-century Germany. It scrutinizes the criteria deployed to establish Jewish texts and authors of the Hellenistic period: the claims and qualities assumedly suggestive of Judaism. First, the inquiry investigates which characteristics German Jewish scholars expected to see in Greek-speaking Jewish writers of antiquity, interrogating their procedures and their verdicts. Second, it examines how these expectations of antiquity corresponded to those scholars’ own modern world. The analysis centers on Jacob Bernays (1824–1881) and Jacob Freudenthal (1839–1907), two savants who helped establish the modern study of Hellenistic Judaism. Each overturned centuries of learned consensus by establishing an ancient author – Pseudo-Phocylides and Eupolemus, respectively – as Jewish, rather than Christian or pagan. This article ultimately reveals the subtle entanglements as well as the mutually conditioning forces not only of antiquity and modernity but also of the personal and academic, manifest both in the philological analysis of ancient texts and in the larger historiography of antique Judaism in the Graecophone world.