The Ancient Synagogue from Its Origins until 200 C.E. : Papers Presented at an International Conference at Lund University October 14-17

This conference volume is structured by the five research areas of the Lund syna-gogue project “The Ancient Synagogue: Birthplace of Two World Religions,” funded by The Bank of Sweden Tercentenary Foundations, and by its time limit up to ca 200 C.E. The aim of the conference was to give an opportunity for young, emerging scholars to interact with some of the most prominent and established scholars of the field.
Lee I. Levine, in his opening paper, carefully defines the results and the main problems of the synagogue research of today, and the main papers contribute to five central themes: the origins of the synagogue (J. F. Strange, A. Runesson, P. Richardson), the life in the Diaspora synagogues (C. Claussen, M. Zetterholm, J. Lieu), the languages of the synagogue (E. Tov, G. Walser, J. Watt), the worship of the synagogue (R. Kimelman, I. von Görtz-Wrisberg, D. K. Falk) and the herme-neutics of the synagogue (K. Hedner Zetterholm, P. V. M. Flesher).
Introductions and evaluations of the contributions to these areas and a discus-sion about the synagogue at ancient Ostia are included.
Old positions are refined and discussed, new hypotheses are presented. Persian colonial strategy is the beginning of the synagogue in Palestine; local temples devel-oped into synagogues in Egypt; a special variety of Greek, formed by the Penta-teuch in Greek, was used by Jews and Christians; a Palestinian Targum was used already at the end of the second century; the separation into two competing groups, Judaism and Christianity, is an “inner-Christian” process in a synagogue context among Jesus-believing Jews and Jesus-believing non-Jews.
The summarizing presentation and discussion of results and problems, the broad approach to the ancient synagogue as such, the combination of several methods, the use of theories and models, new definitions, new hypotheses, new insights, new combinations of older results and new questions make the conference volume a challenging contribution to the investigation of the an-cient synagogue today.