Hellenistic Judaism in Recent Scholarship
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Few episodes in ancient history have had more profound and lasting implications than the encounter of Judaism and Hellenism. The spread of Greek culture to the east was the first great encounter of east and west, the first instance of a clash of civilizations that has been repeated in various forms down to the present. Few people in antiquity could have anticipated that the Jews would be the most enduring representatives of ancient Near Eastern culture. Alexander can scarcely have given Judea a second thought. The eventual importance of Judaism on the world stage would be due in part to the extraordinarily distinctive self-consciousness of the Jewish people, and in part to their historic link to the Christian religion, which would dominate so much of western history. But for the Christian connection, the remarkable corpus of literature produced by Greek-speaking Jews might well have been lost, like the literature of other Near Eastern peoples. Be that as it may, the Jews are the only eastern people of the Hellenistic world who have left behind a substantial literature. For surveys see J.J. Collins, Between Athens and Jerusalem (New York, 1983; revised ed., Grand Rapids, 2000); M. Goodman, “Jewish Literature Composed in Greek,” in E. Schuerer, The History of the Jewish People in the Age of Jesus Christ (rev. and ed., G. Vermes, F. Millar, and M. Goodman; 3 vols.; Edinburgh, 1973–1987), vol. 2, pp. 470–704; E. Gruen, Heritage and Hellenism. The Reinvention of Jewish Tradition (Berkeley, 1998). Only in the case of Judaism do we have the material to assess the response of an eastern people to Hellenism, and to see how an eastern tradition was adapted in light of the different and dominant culture of the Greeks.
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Hellenistic Judaism in Recent Scholarship
in Encyclopaedia of Judaism OnlineSearch for other papers by John J. Collins in
Current site
Google Scholar
(8,054 words)