Abstract
This volume, containing collected papers from the Travel and Religion in Antiquity Seminar of the Canadian Biblical Seminar, is divided into five parts, each related to an aspect of travel in antiquity: travel to honor deities, to promote the efficacy of a god or way of life, for migration, to encounter other ways of life or peoples, and for occupational or vocational reasons. Philip A. Harland's introduction to the volume, “Pausing at the Intersection of Religion and Travel,” provides examples of each of these types of travel and suggests that travel was fairly widespread among all levels of society in the Greco-Roman world.
The first section of the book, containing four essays, focuses on travel to honor deities. Stephen Muir, “Religion on the Road in Ancient Greece and Rome,” distinguishes between short, purposeful journeying and wandering, a type of travel in which the threat of meaninglessness was always present. Religious practice while on the road maintained the relationship with one's deity or deities and one's identity as one traveled into territories in which she might be separated from those with whom she shares primary relationships. Susan Haber, “Going Up to Jerusalem: Pilgrimage, Purity, and the Historical Jesus,” notes the heightened interest in purity in Jerusalem, suggested by large numbers of stone vessels and mikvaot, and argues that Jesus would likely have undergone purity rites upon entering the city before entering the temple. Wayne O. McCready's “Pilgrimage, Place, and Meaning Making by Jews in Greco-Roman Egypt,” describes pilgrimage to both the Jerusalem and the Elephantine temples as emplacement in that “it highlights the dynamic between travel and places, be those beginning places, destination places, or in-between places” (pp. 74–75). The final essay in the first section, Karljürgen G. Feuerherm's “Have Horn, Will Travel: The Journeys of Mesopotamian Deities,” analyzes the akitu festival of Marduk. In the festival, the king receives the marks of kingship in Marduk's temple and leaves to retrieve Marduk's son, Nabû. While this journey occurs Marduk leaves his temple and retreats to an akitu house. When the king returns, he is stripped of his vestures and shamed. On the sixth day of the festival, Marduk returns to his temple and is met by the king, Nabû and other Babylonian deities. F. sees the whole procession as a journey undertaken to reinforce both Marduk's and the king's legitimacy to rule.
The second section of the book has three essays. Ian W. Scott, “The Divine Wanderer: Travel and Divinization in Late Antiquity,” examines the lives of four notable philosophers: Apollonius, Pythagoras, Alexander of Abonuteichos, and Peregrinus Proteus. Due to the differences among types of travel in these accounts, S. concludes that there was not one set pattern for a traveling wonderworker in the Hellenistic and Roman periods. The next essay, Harland, “Journeys in Pursuit of Divine Wisdom: Thessalos and Other Seekers,” describes a pattern of journey to pursue divine wisdom. The particular case upon which the chapter focuses is the story of Thessalos in “Thessalos the Philosopher on the Virtue of Herbs.” In the text, Thessalos travels to Egypt, visits with Egyptian priests at Thebes, converses with Asklepios, and discovers the ability to enact cures for human maladies using herbs. H. includes both a Greek text and translation of the text. The final essay in this section, Ryan S. Schellenberg, “‘Danger in the wilderness, danger at sea’: Paul and Perils of Travel,” sees two distinct phases in scholarship on Pauline travel: a 19th and early 20th century focus on Paul as a heroic missionary figure, quite like the missionaries sent from Europe during this period, and a more recent phase stressing Paul's ability to overcome the hardships of travel due to “commitment to his mission” (p. 145). Neither of these views is sufficient since both are heavily influenced by the presentation of Paul in Acts, underplay the difficulty of travel in the first-century Roman world, and do not take seriously Paul's references to the his own difficulties in travel or his desire, though inability, to travel to certain places.
The third section of the book has only one essay, James B. Rives, “Roman Translation: Tacitus and Ethnographic Interpretation.” Focusing on the description of the Nahanarvali in Tacitus' Germania, R. considers that Tacitus' description likening the deities honored by the Nahanarvali to Castor and Pollux was part of a larger interpretatio Romana that identified elements and attributes of other people's gods and linking them to Roman gods. Identifying such instances as conveying one constant identity for each deity represents a feature of modern interpreters' understanding more than an ancient conception.
In the one essay in the fourth section, “Migration and the Emergence of Greco-Roman Diaspora Judaism,” Jack N. Lightstone claims “… early rabbis did not so much influence, let alone determine, the character of Jewish life and practice in the Greco-Roman diaspora (or In Israel, for that matter) as they were influenced by it” (p. 201) since commonalities among Jewish communities outside of Palestine were evident before the destruction of the Temple by the Romans.
The final section of the book contains two essays. Michele Murray, “Religion and the Nomadic Lifestyle: The Nabateans,” suggests that the Nabateans, a seminomadic people, carried their religion with them through the use of “betyls,” or standing stones, that represented their deities, the building of temples outside of their empire, and the use of ritualized travel involving circumambulation around ritual spaces. Finally, Lincoln H. Blumell, “Christians on the Move in Late Antique Oxyrhynchus,” shows through the evidence of about 200 papyri letters written by Christians from Oxyrhynchus that, for the most part, “Christian” travel was for many of the same reasons as travel by other people.
This collection is very interesting and will serve as a useful starting point for those interested in the intersection of travel and religion. The authors have done a wonderful job of raising interesting and pressing questions that deserve further study.