In this published version of a doctoral dissertation submitted at the University of Groningen, Marius Heemstra dedicates an entire study to the effect of the Fiscus judaicus upon the parting of the ways between Judaism and Christianity. His argument is clearly laid out. The original didrachma tax of Vespasian was levied upon all Jews registered in synagogues throughout the Diaspora, and was essentially ethnic in its scope. Domitian instituted a change to the tax, recorded in Suetonius, Domit. 12.2, whereby those who led a Jewish way of life without publicly acknowledging it (understood by Heemstra as God-fearers and Gentile Christians), and those who concealed their origins and did not pay the tribute, i.e. tax evaders (understood by Heemstra as Jewish tax evaders, proselytes, apostate Jews, circumcised non-Jews, and Jewish Christians) came, often through the work of informers, to be liable to the tax. Such an extension of the tax led to the persecution of some Christians. Nerva, Domitian's successor, very publicly, as seen on a famous coin legend reading, ‘fisci judaici calumnia sublata’, reformed the tax so that ‘Jews paid the Jewish tax to the fiscus Judaicus if they wanted to practice their religion following the custom of their forefathers as members of the synagogue’ (p. 83), a change, then, from an essentially ethnic definition of the tax to a religious one, reflected in the contrast between Josephus' and Suetonius' account of who should be liable to the tax (an essentially ethnic view), and Dio's (a religious one). In this interpretation calumnia is understood as ‘wrongful accusation’, not ‘abuse’, associated here with delation, as some scholars have argued. This led to the exemption from the tax of apostate Jews and Jewish Christians, who, as non-Jews, were now perceived, like Gentile Christians, as illegal atheists (in this argument Heemstra assumes that Nerva held Christianity to be a form of atheism, encouraged, so he argues, by the Jewish leadership, who disliked Judaism being associated with Christianity in any way, not least because of its proselytic tendencies), and some of the consequences of Domitian's reforms are seen in 1 Peter, Hebrews and Revelation, which give evidence of persecution (Heemstra here restores the view that Domitian persecuted the Church, an opinion now largely in disfavour, but does so by appealing to the manner in which the liability for the fiscus was extended). Heemstra argues that Jewish Christians had already come under attack from rabbis, together with apostates, as a result of Domitian's changes to the tax, which had the effect of pushing both categories of people back into the Jewish synagogue, leading to a clearer definition of the word ‘heretic’ and to the related introduction of the birkath ha-minim. John's Gospel, according to Heemstra, is a document responding to this difficult situation (note, for instance, its clear sense of the difference between its audience and the ‘Jews’). It was precisely this separation of Jewish Christians from ‘mainstream’ Judaism, together with the institution of the so-called birkath ha-minim some years earlier, which led to the parting of the ways.

This is a book which is of interest not just in its overarching thesis, which builds upon the work of Martin Goodman, while disagreeing with him on certain points, but in its individual details and observations, some of which are only tangentially connected with the subject of the fiscus. So, for instance, Heemstra has some thoughtful things to say about the current debate concerning the ‘parting of the ways’, noting at one point that there does not seem to be a clear definition of the issue with some scholars attempting to answer the question ‘when did Judaism and Christianity become mutually exclusive?’, and others investigating the question ‘when did all interaction between Christianity and Judaism cease?’ (see especially p. 208). He goes on to suggest that this latter group claim that because there was interaction between Jew and Christian up to and beyond the fourth century we cannot talk about a parting of the ways. This might be considered a slight misrepresentation of the position of such scholars, but in its perception of varieties of positions on this subject, Heemstra is on the mark. Significantly, his own thesis, with its strong insistence on a moment of separation, and its invoking of the birkath ha-minim, as well as the fiscus, cuts against more recent tendencies in the discussion of the parting of the ways which tend to avoid such levels of specificity.

Heemstra's thesis might be supported by the fact that after ce 96 there is a good deal of evidence for pagans seeing Christianity as an entity separate from Judaism (note in particular Tacitus' account in Annales 15.44; and Pliny's letter to Trajan in which he discusses what appropriate action should be taken against professing Christians); and also by some of the evidence from Christian sources, not least Revelation, of Christians being sent into exile, a punishment associated with the tax evasion that Domitian sought to curb. Moreover, it is reasonable to assume that any attempt to clarify who was liable for the fiscus might have led to a clearer definition of what it was to be a Jew, and so a clearer sense of who was not such a person.

But there are weaknesses to the thesis, too. The first concerns the relative lack of information that we have for a measure to which the author attributes so much importance. This is especially the case from the Christian side where the fiscus is never explicitly mentioned at all, though Heemstra, in an intriguing argument, claims that 1 Peter v.9 with its use of ‘epiteleisthai’, should be translated ‘for you know that your brothers and sisters throughout the world are paying the same tax of suffering’, here hinting at the fact that the fiscus was being used as a means of persecuting the Gentile Christians to whom 1 Peter is addressed. Interestingly, the only explicit place in the New Testament where there is a discussion of the temple tax, Matthew xvii.24–7, does not hint at the fact that the issue of its payment in some other form was current, an oddity, one might think, in a text where the question of Jewish-Christian interaction looms so large. Secondly, the only author to refer to Nerva's reforms, namely Dio (68.1.2), seems to imply that the calumnia on the coin legend (Dio does not refer to an abuse explicitly) describes the abuse of delation, rather than an abuse connected with wrongful accusation. This argument is dismissed by Heemstra on the grounds that we would expect to have a reference to ‘abuses’ in the coin legend but in fact we only have one in the singular (this observation led Goodman to argue that the abuse referred to the tax itself, implying abolition, a point that he supported by arguing that there is no extant evidence from the principate of Nerva that the tax was paid, a point dismissed by Heemstra on the grounds that, given the brevity of Nerva's reign, such a statistic is insignificant. But in this Heemstra does not refer to the handsome depiction of a palm tree, symbolising Judaism, on the coin, a depiction which possibly bespeaks something more than the ending of abuses connected with the tax's collection. Connected to this criticism, it might be argued that ending delation as a means of collecting the tax need not have led to a different understanding of who a Jew was: all that was being ended was an abuse; and all that Nerva appears to have been doing was restoring the situation to what had been the case before Domitian where the determination of liability for this tax was left to the Jews, no doubt eliciting the same type of questions which Heemstra associates with the reforms of Nerva. Finally, Heemstra's argument that Christians, of whatever sort, would have been included in the fiscus' extension under Domitian is not obvious. Would not Jewish Christians have already been payers of the tax, and willing ones, especially if they were still members of the synagogue? And can we assume that Gentile Christians would have been part of that group forced to pay the tax under Domitian (in the relevant discussion Heemstra fails to note Robert Eisler's opinion, found in his Orpheus – the fisher [London 1921], 91–100, who argued that Domitian extended the tax to Gentile Christians, a point reflected in Matt. xvii.24–7; and that it had the effect of precipitating a growth in ‘law-free’ Christianity, resulting from people's desire to avoid paying the tax)? And should we be as hasty as Heemstra is to dismiss the importance of Nero's persecution of the Christians in Rome as evidence of an evolving sense amongst Romans that Christians were not Jews? And if Christians were so to the fore when Domitian adopted his harsher attitude to the collection of the tax, and similarly to the fore in Nerva's attempts to reform Domitian's innovations, why, then, is Pliny so unclear about how to proceed against Christians in his famous correspondence with Trajan?

Much more, both positive and critical, could be said about this interesting book, and the hope must be that it stimulates further discussion.