Teachers, Prophets and Exegetes: Jewish and Early Christian Intellectual History, 200 BCE – 200 CE

Abstract

Jewish thinkers operating in and around Palestine from roughly 200 BCE to 200 CE, thought the most important question for determining their respective worldviews was: how do we know the things we believe or the right way to behave? While they certainly thought right beliefs and behavior themselves were important, they saw those things as a natural outgrowth of adopting correct procedure. Moreover, these thinkers saw their opponents not necessarily as people with the wrong behavior or beliefs, but rather as people who adopted wrong procedures. Adhering to the correct procedure, in this view, would assure correct substantive conduct. To the extent that groups emerging from within the world of early Judaism engaged in the process of self-identification during these four centuries, they were just as likely, if not more so, to do this on the basis of procedure as they were on the basis of substantive behavior – on the question of “How do we know what to do or believe?”, rather than “What should we do or believe?”