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I have two items for my write-up today of Louis Feldman's Jew and Gentile in the Ancient World:
1. On page 406, Feldman states regarding fourth century Christian John Chrysostom's sermons against Judaizing that they actually made his listeners more curious about Judaism. That happens a lot. People try to ban the book, and that ends up making others want to read it. I remember reading Charles Spurgeon say that he doesn't engage in debates because that could lead to a situation in which people are first learning about a heresy from Spurgeon's lips. And I have read about evolutionists who first learned about evolution when they were in conservative Christianity and encountered creationist attempts to refute it. Personally, I think there's nothing wrong with learning!
2. Page 418 has the following:
"During the Hasmonean and Roman periods, the Jewish masses strongly resisted paganism, as we can see from their passionate opposition to attempts to introduce busts of the emperor into Jerusalem both in the early and in the middle portions of the first century C.E. That the Jews in the land of Israel frowned on learning the Greek language may be seen from Josephus' remark (Ant. 20.264) that the Jews do not favor those people who have learned foreign languages and from the statement that Josephus, though he labored strenuously (Ant. 20.263) to master Greek literature, yet had to employ assistants (Against Apion 1.50) to help him compose his version in Greek of the Jewish War. Indeed, it is quite clear from many sources that the predominant language of the Jews in the Land of Israel throughout the Hellenistic and Roman periods was not Greek but Aramaic. The very fact that the rabbis had the audacity to challenge the patriarch himself for teaching Greek in the first century implies strong discontent."
This is one take on the status of Greek in Israel during the Hasmonean and Roman periods, which I should know about.
