Pharisees outside Judea?

[John2]

So to Shaye Cohen's lucidly structured essay, 'Was Judaism in Antiquity a Missionary Religion ?' His verdict on Matt 23.15 : "Since no other text, either in the New Testament or elsewhere, ascribes missionary zeal to the Pharisees (or to the rabbis), the historical value of this verse is difficult to determine. But even if it is somewhat exaggerated, the verse is important as the only ancient source that explicitly ascribes a missionary policy to a Jewish group".
In short, there is not a lot you can do with it (I would stress the "no other text").

Cohen's article was interesting. Thank you for the reference. Other "notable exceptions" to Judaism not being a missionary religion that he discusses is one I had in mind, the conversions of Queen Helena and King Izates in Josephus, and one I was not aware of, Dio Cassius' remark about the expulsion of Jews from Rome in 19 CE being due to missionary activity, which he notes "many scholars accept." And to those I would add the Damascus Document as well, which missionizes to other Jews and refers to Gentile "joiners" to the "house of Judah." As Harrington and Himmelfarb note:

It is important to recognize that the Damascus Document is the only scroll to truly accept the ger at all ... Gentiles are not neutral; their idolatry makes them impure and contaminating. Nevertheless, presumably after an initiation and purification process, they can be included among the ger category of the sect.


https://books.google.com/books?id=o26q1 ... nt&f=false

The presence of the ger among the members of the sect shows that for the Damascus Document ... gentiles were not so essentially different from Jews that it was impossible to cross the boundary.


https://books.google.com/books?id=ZgYAx ... nt&f=false

I thus see the Damascus Document as being a missionary writing (as per Murphy-O'Connor) and one that could have been written or used by Fourth Philosophers (among whom I include Christians), and with that context in mind it's worth noting that aside from their militancy and rejection of at least some of the oral Torah, Fourth Philosophers (according to Josephus) "agree in all other things with the Pharisaic notions" (Ant. 18.1.6), as do (in my view) Christians, "notions" like messianism and the resurrection of the dead, which are in the Dead Sea Scrolls and are tenets of Rabbinic Judaism.

In other words, I see Fourth Philosophers (including Christians) --both of whom had founders who were Pharisees-- as being more or less "radical" Pharisees. I think this is why these Pharisaic "notions" and tefillin are/were found in/among the Dead Sea Scrolls and why Pharisees like Josephus, Paul and the Pharisee Christians in Acts 15:5 were drawn to the Fourth Philosophy and Christianity and why Christians are likened to Fourth Philosophers in Acts 5:36-38 (and why Jesus, in my view, walks and talks like a Fourth Philosopher).

And in the context of being a faction of the Fourth Philosophy, I see early Christians themselves as being an example of Judaism being a missionary religion, and one with Pharisaic "notions" at that (as per the Damascus Document). I would say that they are evidence of the existence of "radical" Pharisees outside of Judea, just like other Fourth Philosophers who operated outside of or fled Judea during the first century CE.

Perhaps "normative" Pharisees didn't missionize at all or as much as these "radical" Pharisees did, but that wouldn't negate the impact of the latter, given that Josephus says the Fourth Philosophy had "infected" Jews "to an incredible degree" and the (in my view related) success of Christianity.