This monograph, originating in a doctoral dissertation from Leiden, discusses the legal situation of religious minorities in the Roman empire. Karen Janssen rightly claims that all too often the legal situation of ‘new’ and/or ‘minority cults’ has been studied in isolation for each group, especially Christianity, and that a comparative analysis is therefore required. She considers sources up to the mid-third century, stopping short of Decius’ edict of universal sacrifice, which ‘has widely been regarded as a significant turning point in the Roman state’s approach to Christianity’ (228).
The book is clearly structured. The introduction is followed by a chapter summarising recent findings on Roman provincial administration, especially the maintenance of public order. J. then discusses in successive chapters three examples of ‘marginalized’ religions: diviners, Jews and Christians. Diviners are seen as a religious group akin to Judaism and Christianity; J. discusses the vexed terminological problems at some length, in the end defining divination ‘as a human attempt to gain access to hidden knowledge through perceived contact with the supernatural’ (56). The book concludes with a series of useful lists referencing in some detail her source texts.
J.’s hypothesis is that in all three cases we find very few general laws, but a high number of legal measures that arose from, and applied only to, particular local circumstances and necessities, such as edicts addressed to particular provinces or cities (mostly in order to uphold public order), and that may have been in force only for relatively brief periods. These legal measures might be supportive (as often in the case of Judaism) or, more frequently, repressive. Christians in particular were involved in court trials that responded to specific grievances by local individuals or groups that had come to the attention of provincial governors. In addition, a variety of local officials and members of the provincial elite were involved in implementing these repressive measures. At the heart of the accusations usually stood allegations of disruptive behaviour, especially in times of social or economic crisis, resulting in the disturbance of public order. Local officials reacted with great flexibility in trying to deal with individual challenges, their measures ranging from interrogations and tests for loyalty like sacrifices, perhaps followed by the release of defendants, to torture of various kinds and ultimately executions, both private and public.
J.’s book is wide-ranging and surveys a large number of often very brief and sometimes enigmatic texts. She thus engages with an enormous scholarly literature that has left no stone unturned in the last 150 years or so. However, this also makes it difficult to say something that has not previously been written in one way or another. Further, I see a number of difficulties in the methodology and design of her book. Unfortunately, she does not discuss her basic terminology at greater length. The concept of ‘marginalization’ describing ‘religious groups that were in some way excluded from the perceived centre of Roman society’ seems to have been borrowed from an article by Robert Knapp (2 and n. 9). These religious groups ‘did not “belong”’, because, at least in the eyes of the Roman authorities, they ‘fell outside the accepted societal boundaries of the Graeco-Roman world’ (322). However, apart from stating the fact of marginalisation, J. fails to define exactly how diviners, Jews and Christians were ‘anomalous’ in religious matters and, if so, whether these anomalies were not very different in each case and may even have differed among sub-groups of each category. Did Jews in Alexandria live on the margins of society like those in Palestine? Were Christian gnostics in Rome ‘outsiders’ like Montanists in Phrygia? To some extent, J. falls prey to the (self-)stylisation of the pagan, Jewish and Christian authors who drew a picture of ‘them’ and ‘us’ in times of crisis or outside pressure, but may otherwise have lived alongside the worshippers of other gods in happy convivencia. J. herself acknowledges that divination was widely popular in the Roman Empire, such that its practitioners can hardly be considered deviant (e.g. 122, 124).
Given past research on Jews and Christians, the local nature of the treatment of ‘marginalized religion’ does not come as a particular surprise. However, I am less inclined to believe that local measures had no implications reaching beyond their specific circumstances. Although denied by J. (cf. 213, 326f), many trials against Christians involved recourse to precedent, following, with some variations, the pattern that had been set by Trajan’s rescript to Pliny. Governors were given such rescripts at the beginning of their terms of office as part of their imperial mandate (cf. 38) and applied them regardless of whether they were originally destined for one particular circumstance only.
Likewise, although the practices of divination and Jewish and Christian worship may have been seen as disruptive to daily life, the accusations of wishing to cause harm to members of the imperial family (in the case of divination) and the charge of misanthropy or anti-social behaviour against Jewish and Christian communities appear to me to be quite different in nature. Finally, the author does not sufficiently consider that in the case of Jews and Christians we are dealing with clearly defined large communities, whereas diviners usually acted on their own or in small groups. Thus, she admits with regard to the rule of Tiberius that ‘diviners as a group simply lacked distinct, fixed characteristics’ (79). In addition, Christian congregations were growing, whereas Jewish groups, by and large, were not. This difference ultimately led to the empire-wide persecutions of Christian dissidents in the mid-third century. By then, however, it was too late to contain the new cult. Such methodological questions notwithstanding, J. offers a useful bird’s-eye view of the status quaestionis in comparative perspective.
