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These three extraordinary articles began when we read a technical paper in the obscure scholarly journal Numen. Titled “The Disappearance of the God-Fearers,” the paper was written by A. Thomas Kraabel, dean of Luther College in Decorah, Iowa. Kraabel is one of the most prominent specialists in Hellenistic Judaism and an expert in the archaeology of ancient synagogues.
The God-fearers are commonly thought to be that large group of “semi-Jews,” referred to several times in the New Testament, who provided some of the earliest and most important converts to Christianity. The God-fearers frequented the synagogue, professed monotheism and observed many, but not all, Jewish religious laws. They are of major significance in the study of early Christianity and Judaism.
If the God-fearers were indeed “disappearing,” this was a major scholarly development that needed to be brought to the attention of BAR readers. So we contacted Tom Kraabel and asked him to write up his findings in a way that would be understandable to a lay audience. Kraabel teamed up with his former student Robert MacLennan, now Reverend MacLennan, to produce the article “The God-Fearers: A Literary and Theological Invention.”
In the course of preparing the MacLennan/Kraabel article for publication, it became obvious that the matter was more complicated than we had at first thought. Kraabel’s scholarly paper had not won universal agreement among the coterie of experts who speak to one another through arcane journals. One of the dissenters was Professor Louis Feldman of Yeshiva University in New York. If Kraabel could speak of the “disappearance” of the God-fearers, Feldman would make them “reappear,” he said.
Feldman has a mind that in an earlier day we would have called encyclopaedic. Today, we liken it to a 045mainframe computer. There is simply no one in the world who has a better grasp of Hellenistic Jewish literature than Louis Feldman. So we invited him to write a response to MacLennan and Kraabel (“The Omnipresence of the God-Fearers”).
In the course of our editorial labors we also learned of an extremely important, recently discovered, but unpublished inscription allegedly containing a long list of God-fearers juxtaposed with a list of Jews. The inscription had been excavated at Aphrodisias in southwest Turkey. We contacted the excavator of Aphrodisias, Professor Kenan Erim of New York University, and learned from him that the publication of the inscription had been assigned to Joyce Reynolds of Cambridge University, England. From Reynolds we learned that she was collaborating on its publication with the noted writer and scholar Robert F. Tannenbaum.
BAR readers know how difficult it is to obtain access to unpublished archaeological data, but we finally prevailed on Dr. Erim and Miss Reynolds to allow Tannenbaum to write a description and analysis of the new God-fearer inscription about which the scholarly world was buzzing (“Jews and God-Fearers in the Holy City of Aphrodite”).
The initial draft of the MacLennan/Kraabel article made no mention of the so-called God-fearer inscription from Aphrodisias, although the authors were, of course, aware of it. Now we could ask them to discuss it, which MacLennan and Kraabel agreed to do.
The result is a penetrating series of articles that approaches an issue of enormous historical importance from a wide variety of sometimes conflicting scholarly perspectives. Our readers are in for an exciting intellectual adventure.
One final comment: Note that Professor Feldman reveals details of the God-fearers inscription that are not mentioned even by Tannenbaum. In fact, as Feldman tells us, there are two God-fearer inscriptions!
These three extraordinary articles began when we read a technical paper in the obscure scholarly journal Numen. Titled “The Disappearance of the God-Fearers,” the paper was written by A. Thomas Kraabel, dean of Luther College in Decorah, Iowa. Kraabel is one of the most prominent specialists in Hellenistic Judaism and an expert in the archaeology of ancient synagogues.
