This volume assembles eleven papers by scholars of Religion, Classics, Ancient Near East, Second Temple and Rabbinic Judaism and Early Christianity. Readers will find intrinsic value in the individual contributions – some of which are excellent – though a lack of cohesion among the papers will thwart attempts to draw substantial conclusions regarding the overall character of ‘religious travel’ in the Classical and Near Eastern worlds.
The volume's introductory chapter outlines the sections of the book. The subsequent chapters are organised thematically into five unequal sections, though they might have been better distributed by period, region or cultural group. H. uses his introductory remarks to highlight trends in research and address how the present essays fit into and build upon them.
The essays suggest that the contributors are more keenly aware of ‘travel’ than they are ‘religion’. While the former is continuously defined and redefined throughout, the latter's definition is rarely addressed and treated inconsistently. Because ‘religion’ overlaps so readily with terms like ‘culture’, ‘society’, ‘ethnicity’ and ‘mores’, this is somewhat frustrating.
S. Muir considers travellers' personal use of city-cults. According to M., the patron-deity of one's home-city served as a homeward link and identity marker. M. notes that the Greek and Roman traveller often established a connection to the city-cult by replicating practices abroad or ‘anchoring’ personal beliefs to those back home, as for example with the erection of herms by Athenians as road markers. To make his case, M. uses literary, art historical, archaeological and epigraphic evidence.
The late S. Haber examines separately the evidence for Jewish pilgrimage and purity practices in the late Second Temple period (third century b.c.e. to first century c.e.), in order to provide a possible, even plausible, scenario for Jesus' purity-related activities during the Passover festival. The underlying question of H.'s essay concerns whether Jesus' practices were standard or exceptional. Her answer is unquestionably the former, and as such H. follows the trends in historical Jesus research of recent decades. Regardless of her tenuous conclusions, the chapter serves as a handy consolidation of the literary and archaeological evidence for pilgrimage and purity rites in Jesus' day.
W. McCready's chapter will appeal to those interested in theoretical applications to sacred sites and meaningful ‘place’. McC. relies heavily on the research of E.S. Casey, D. Massey, A. Gussow, Y.-F. Tuan and A. Morinis. Not surprisingly, he is the only contributor explicitly to offer a definition of ‘religion’. The specific area of inquiry, the Jews of Elephantine, provides a good test case, since so little is known about the site's temple. As a result, the chapter constitutes one of the most thought-provoking contributions.
K. Feuerherm addresses the conceptualisation of Mesopotamian deities. Local celebrations, such as the akitu festivals, (re-)enacted divine travel with grand processions. The statue's physical journey helped the worshippers cognitively transform the inanimate image into the deity incarnate. According to F., visualising divine travel provided adherents with a means of ‘manifesting the sacred’.
In the first two chapters of Part 2, I. Scott and H. search for genre-defining commonalities among religious travellers. In considering the roles of four divine men – Apollonius of Tyana, Pythagoraas, Alexander of Abonuteichos and Peregrinus Proteus – S. successfully complicates the old scholarly construction of the ‘wandering divine shaman’. Their common denominator seems to be the use of travel as a legitimising tool. (Of course, one would be hard-pressed to find a culture worldwide in which worldliness was not related in some sense to knowledge or wisdom.) In the end, the reader is forced to agree with S.'s primary conclusion: ‘there seem to have been no common expectations in late antiquity about the travel patterns of human beings who gained divine status’ (p. 119). H. then picks up where Scott left off, notably, by pointing out that travel could be viewed either positively, as described by S., or negatively, as in a ‘source of anguish or rootlessness’ (p. 127). Both chapters highlight the varied nature of religious travel in antiquity and the problems surrounding its classification.
R. Schellenberg then moves the discussion back to a specific case: Paul's mission. According to S., past characterisations of Paul's travels have romanticised the reality behind the hardships of travel, which are more accurately depicted in the Pauline epistles than the Book of Acts. S. suggests that Paul was a ‘contingent’ and often lucky traveller, and neither the bold missionary of ecclesiastical readings nor the beneficiary of pax Romana. S.'s critical readings present a convincing argument that should challenge New Testament scholars.
The next two sections comprise only one chapter each. In the first, J. Rives examines how Greeks and Romans interpreted the religious practices and deities of foreigners. R. describes how this linguistic ‘travel’ could take place and the complexities behind the process of transmission, in which cultural significance was reshaped or stripped. As R. notes, the Romans were largely aware of these complexities, and so modern scholars must move beyond understanding the process as mere cultural imperialism.
In Section 4 J. Lightstone addresses the relationship among diaspora Judaism, the rabbinic movement and travel. L. suggests that the rabbinic movement developed not as a response to the destruction of the Jerusalem temple, but rather in dialogue with the diaspora communities who had already established the cultural and religious institutions to deal with a temple-less Judaism. L. uses non-rabbinic and epigraphic sources, which demonstrate little concern for the affairs of Palestine. According to L., diaspora Judaism provided a relatively cohesive model to Palestinian Judaism for dealing with ‘Judaism-without-a-temple’. The topic fits into the ongoing debate over how representative rabbinic literature is of reality.
The last section (two chapters) opens with M. Murray on how the Nabataeans' nomadic lifestyle was reflected in their religion. M. interprets a variety of archaeological sources, including standing stones, bas-relief memorials and figurines. Taken together, they form an interesting array of data; considered individually though, some of M.'s explanations require a leap. For example, she suggests that betyls (standing stones) were transported as part of nomadic lifestyle, but provides no evidence. In general, her approach relies heavily on Eliade – as well as Uzi Anver's use of Eliade in his work on the Uvda Valley – to which some scholars of religion will undoubtedly object. Nevertheless, M. poses an interesting question and test case for ‘travel and religion’, and the field would no doubt benefit greatly from a more thorough and nuanced study of this interesting topic.
In the final chapter, L. Blumell brings an ironic twist to the subject of travel and religion by raising the point that most travel in antiquity was not for religious purposes, but more often related to occupation. According to B., the notion is significant not only for the present volume, but also for the study of the Oxyrhynchus papyri, which are typically characterised as ‘Christian’ documents. Despite their presumed religiosity, the documents tend to be mundane and non-religious. Thus B.'s essay is a sobering conclusion.
Bringing an edited volume to fruition is a laborious task, and H. should be commended for a polished and well-presented volume (though it lacks an index). That said, the collection suffers from the same problem as many edited volumes: the lack of cohesion. Part of the difficulty may result from the failure to define adequately the concepts of ‘religion’ and, to a lesser degree, ‘travel’ from the outset, exacerbated by the variety of sub-disciplines represented. While there is a natural benefit to the book's cross-disciplinary approach, most of the authors fail to relate their specific topic back to the general. Some contributors manage to reference their colleagues' papers, but H. does not provide any overarching question or a firm template in which the authors can frame their studies and there is no concluding chapter to help the reader see the connections. As a result, it is unlikely that those interested in this fascinating topic from a categorical or phenomenological perspective will find great value in the papers as a group. Instead, the benefit of the volume is in the individual papers, for which New Testament scholars will be interested in the chapter on Paul, Ancient Near East scholars will be interested in the chapter on Mesopotamian deities, Classicists will be interested in the chapters on Roman translation and travelling philosophers, and so forth. For that reason, the volume will no doubt find a broad and varied audience among scholars of antiquity.
