On “St. Paul's Ephesian Ministry” by George S. Duncan ***

I was hoping to read a full account of Paul in Ephesus, but this book is only that in a small sense. Duncan's main goal, it seems, it to prove that Paul was imprisoned for much of his time in Ephesus. It's an intriguing thesis. The argument allows Duncan to reposition Paul's prison epistles by several years. Many scholars claim most of those epistles were written by a person writing in the name of Paul or that they were written from Rome. There is some argument that some of them could be written from Caesarea. Duncan disposes with all those possibilities and places them all within Paul's three-year stint to the city (he doesn't really address the possiblity of a post-Roman stay in Ephesus). In part, he makes his point by looking at the minor characters in the letters, the people Paul mentions in the greetings and closings, the Tituses, Timothies, and Demases.

The rest of the book explores the implications of this for what they say about Paul's ministry and forges a chronology that Duncan usefully summarizes in a timeline at the end. But Duncan does not stop there; he claims also that the pastoral epistles were written from Ephesus during this period. What starts as an intriguing idea becomes more and more speculative as Duncan gets deeper into the text, and while he had me in the first third of the book, his continuing discussion of the topic actually made me feel like his claims were likely incorrect, as just how many problems arise with this timeline becomes apparent. Although he is right to note that Acts is not exhaustive about Paul's doings, Duncan seems to need to add more and more to that period such that it seems almost too much.

Were Duncan correct, however, he is correct to note that it would be truly revolutionary, since we would know almost nothing about his later ministry or his time in Rome (and there would certainly be political reasons that Rome would have claimed such letters for itself).

On “The Jews under Roman Rule” by E. Mary Smallwood *****

The first portion of this book is in large part a summary of Josephus's works, a tendency that can't be helped, given that Josephus is our main source of information regarding this very subject. Smallwood, however, makes the events come to life, abbreviating where Josephus fails to and expanding where more information is now available.

Then, of course, Josephus as a source comes to an end soon after the First Jewish War. The work from here, by necessity, becomes more sketchy, as Smallwood has much less in the way of source material from which to draw. That said, she does admirably, with what little primary data we have. What I liked was that she does exactly as denoted in her title—she looks not just at the Jews in Palestine but at the Jews throughout the empire, usually in alternating chapters. As such, there was much more here on the Alexandrian uprising of 115-117 than I'd read anywhere else—and Smallwood, in addition, sets it within the context of Jewish uprisings occurring elsewhere in the empire at the same time. We get similar detail regarding the Bar Cochba revolt in 135.

After these revolts, information becomes even more dificult to come by. Smallwood does as she can, looking at archeological sources, at what we can glean from the silence of other sources, and at what little can be gleaned from the Mishna. As Smallwood sees it, after the Jewish revolts, culminating in 135, the Jewish people largely came to see their Messianic hopes as being wholly supernatural, giving up on the idea of rising up themselves. What troubles did occur were usually in the context of Roman civil war, the taking of one side or another in the conflict for rulership of the empire. And while the empire did impose some anti-Jewish measures, they were usually temporary. Even the banning of Jews from Jerusalem appears to have been only partly enforced, in time. Troubles would arise, however, more so as the empire moved toward nominal Christianity.