Bible Review

Philip J. King and Lawrence E. Stager, Life in Biblical Israel (Westminster John Knox: 2001); reviewed in Reviews, BAR 28:03.

Mary Dobson, Mouldy Mummies (Oxford: 1988) and Roman Aromas (Oxford: 1997).

For the legislation against the Jews, see Amnon Linder, The Jews in Roman Imperial Legislation (Detroit: Wayne State, 1987). The laws frequently prohibit the Jewish ownership and conversion of non-Jewish slaves, but otherwise say nothing about the seeking of proselytes. For prohibitions of Manichees (and others) from seeking converts, see Mosaicarum et Romanarum Legum Collatio 15.3.4 (302 C.E.?) and Theodosian Code 16.5.11 (383 C.E.).

Migration is the explanation for the growth of the diaspora according to Philo (Life of Moses 2.232.; Embassy to Gaius 36.281–283 [a letter to Agrippa]). According to Josephus (Jewish War 7.3.3), the Jewish community of Antioch grew through the influx of converts.

P.M. Fraser calls Philo’s statement “very imprecise, but there is no better figure” (Ptolemaic Alexandria, vol. 2 [Oxford: Clarendon, 1972], p. 164, n. 315).

Philo, Against Flaccus 6.43.

Baron, Social and Religious History, vol. 1, pp. 170–171.

Adolf Harnack, The Mission and Expansion of Christianity in the First Three Centuries, 2nd ed., trans. James D. Moffat (New York: Putnam’s, 1908), p. 8. Harnack’s argument is developed by Georgi, Opponents of Paul, pp. 83–84.