The lecture by Jodi Magness last evening was splendid. It is worth summarizing the key points. With irreproachable archaeological arguments, she laid out the evidence for the claim that synagogues once thought to date to the 2nd to 3rd centuries of this era, such as the synagogue in Capernaum, date instead to the late 4th to 6th centuries.
There is little doubt that Byzantine
Period Judaism was, in the words of David Milson, “a healthy and flourishing
community in close contact with its neighbors” (236). It seems to have
flourished so greatly that – this is my hypothesis, not that of Magness, who seems
to agree instead with Milson that Byzantine-period synagogues are in imitation
of and a reaction against Christian architecture – we have been left
with no solid archaeological evidence of synagogues from the second to early 4th
centuries of this era. Thus far cautious scholars would agree: evidence of razed
and dismantled structures and destroyed pavements beneath Byzantine period
synagogues is not hard to come by, but so far has eluded certain identification
as synagogal in type.
The ambitious and controversial thesis Magness
put forward: that the god Helios in Byzantine synagogue iconography contains a
covert reference to Metatron = Enoch of the Hekhalot literature, and bespeaks a
priestly (as opposed to rabbinic) provenance, complete with a commitment,
perhaps, to a solar calendar. A bridge too far, it seems to me, but food for thought. She also put
forward a more modest thesis, one which I find convincing: that Helios was not
actually a worshipped divinity among Byzantine Jews (duh) but, in terms of his
appearance in synagogue art, a mythological trope for the sun, one among many such tropes found in said art.
For key bibliography on ancient synagogues, I
refer the reader to the readings in Katharina Galor’s Ancient Synagogues, Churches
and Mosques in Palestine Bibliography course syllabus (here), taken
together with those of Anders Runesson’s The Ancient Synagogue:
Birthplace of Two World Religions course syllabus (here),
to which the following volumes must be added:
Mark A. Chancey, Greco-Roman
Culture and the Galilee of Jesus (Cambridge: CUP, 2005); David Milson,
Art and Architecture of the Synagogue in Late Antique Palestine: In the
Shadow of the Church (Ancient Judaism and Early Christianity 65; Leiden:
Brill, 2007) [here]
Galor’s readings + Runesson’s readings +
Chancey + Milson: lots of Magness in the foreground and background of this
starter bibliography on ancient synagogues.
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