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Thomas A. Robinson, "Revisiting the God-fearer Thesis in the Development of Early Christianity" (T&T Clark, 2025)
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Network
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C
hello everybody and welcome back to New Books and Biblical Studies, a podcast channel on the New Books Network. I'm Jonathan Lookedew, the host of the channel. Today we'll be talking to Thomas Robinson about his new book, Revisiting the God Fearer Thesis and the Development of Early Christianity, published by TNT Clark in 2025. Tom, welcome to the show.
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B
Thanks for having me.
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C
Yeah, well, thank you very much for being on the podcast today to talk about your book Revisiting the God Fearer Thesis and the Development of Early Christianity. Before we talk about what you've written, could you start by telling us a bit about yourself?
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B
Well, I'll tell you a bit about myself related to my education and job and so on. I won't go back to days in a baby carriage or anything like that. I had the very good fortune of Studying for my PhD and at McMaster University when EP Sanders was there, Al Baumgarten, Ben Meyer, and in addition to that had Jat Robinson there when he was working on his Priority of John book for one semester and other scholars coming into the McMaster program. So that's basically where I got my start in trying to think through questions that I thought had become widely accepted but maybe not clearly thought out. And fortunately that led to a job and for 35 years, I taught at the University of Lethbridge. I'm sure that's not a place you've ever heard of. It's a small university in Southern Alberta in Canada. I guess enrollment now is about 8,000, but it was smaller by quite a bit when I started there in the religious Studies program. So 35 years in one institution and I taught everything to do with Christianity and world religions in a small department. You do that. Maybe you know that a lot of professors know that as they struggle to maybe cover Islam or something like that from a degree in Biblical studies or whatever. But I worked with great colleagues. That's a blessing always. And even now I do dabble in things with some of these colleagues that I had for 35 years. So I've been fortunate that way.
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C
It's a wonderful thing. And yeah, it is a challenge to be able to cover an entire curriculum as one person, but that's really fantastic. Yeah. Well, I know this book. Speaking of things that you have written before or have written during your career, this book resonates with some of your prior scholarship. And in the Preface you mentioned three publications going back to 2009 in which you have discussed God Fearers. One of them is an excellent book on one of our mutual interests. Ignatius of Antioch. How did you come to be interested in God Fearers? And then how did you come to write Revisiting the God Fearer Thesis and the Development of Early Christianity?
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B
To be perfectly honest, I have no idea how I got interested in God Fearers, no idea what I did in preparation for this talk. I got my PhD dissertation out to see whether at that point that was 1985, at that point had I even mentioned God Fears. And I hadn't. So given that the publication date is 2009 and I have about a five to seven year process of producing anything that a publisher might want. I would guess somewhere late 1990s, but I have no idea what tweaked me to it. That's the honest answer.
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C
Yes. Oh, it's a great answer. Yeah. And it's such a helpful thing to try to think back and then sometimes to realize that our ideas just come to us and we don't remember how.
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B
Do note that the I spent quite a bit of time with God Fearers in the Ignatius book and that was largely about Antioch. So maybe something out of that brought God Fearers to prominence.
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C
Fascinating. Fascinating. Well, in this book you take up a terminological study of words that others have suggested refer to God Fearers. And I found this study to be really helpful since we sometimes refer to a constellation of different terms under the rubric of an English word like God Fearer. At the risk of asking too many questions altogether, who were the God Fearers? How have others discussed them? And why do you conclude that this quest to discover God Fearers is ultimately, as you say in chapter two, failed quest.
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B
I can tell you who the godfarers are in popular and scholarly literature. To tell you who the God Fearers really are, I'd have to say they're a scholarly, modern concept and construct for the convenience of modern scholars. Basically, God Fearers are in scholarship mainly connected to Christianity, but they really should be connected to Judaism. That's where they have their life. That's where they have their origin, if there are God fearers. And so out of the question of whether Judaism was a missionary religion, there comes to be emphasis on the possibility of Gentiles being interested in Judaism and perhaps some of them even converting to Judaism. And that's where God fearers could have remained as a scholarly interest. But really it came to life in a new way when Christian scholars saw a way to play with the concept of God Fearers as an answer to some questions like how did Christianity succeed? What did it look like in its early days? So God Fearers became an answer to a Christian question. Really, where it got its life was in the world of Judaism. And so God fearers are basically non Jews who become interested in in Judaism or the Jewish community. We don't know the details of that. I would assume that it is buried and differs for each person described as a God fearer. So they have an interest in some aspect of Judaism. They are non Jews. They become deeply interested in Judaism, so much so they become almost masters of the Septuagint. At least they're very much at home in the world of the Septuagint. They are perhaps ready to convert to Judaism, though they don't need to. They could just be interested in learning about Judaism, adopting some of the customs, maybe becoming interested in some aspects of monotheism, but not converting fully to Judaism. And scholars have generally connected this hesitation to convert fully to Judaism. Not to the God fearers disinterest in converting to Judaism, but to the God Fearers fearer of the circumcision life. They didn't want to be circumcised. And that becomes a big issue. It seems by some reading of the New Testament that it was a big issue for Christianity too. I think it's not, but that may come up a bit later, anyway, so there's an assumption that Christian preaching sounded a lot like Jewish preaching, except for this strange resurrection thing and death of Jesus for the salvation of all humans and so on. The standard Christian message was still wrapped in the world of Judaism, in the world of the Septuagints and such. So God fearers in the world of Judaism, it is assumed, could have easily understood the Christian message. Those without that kind of background in Judaism, it was assumed, could not understand the Christian message and therefore not readily or likely converts to Christianity, whereas God fearers would be perhaps likely converts, particularly when Christianity didn't make an issue of circumcision. And the assumption is that there was a flood of godfarers. Well, for one thing, there's an assumption and all of this I'm saying this is an assumption because I don't think there's substance to it. There's an assumption that there were millions of God fearers. That's a lot. And some people have argued that Judaism almost became a world religion as a result of the conversion of non Jews to Judaism. So anyway, there's supposedly a mass of God fearers out there waiting for and longing for something that is Jewish but doesn't involve circumcision. So they're not going to convert fully to Judaism. But if there's another option that looks Jewish that doesn't require circumcision, then that becomes attractive. At least that's the assumption. And so there's a flood of God fearers out of the association with the synagogue into whatever the Christian movement looked like in their area. And who knows what that is? We have no idea, except that people have used the God fearers to describe what the early Christian movement must have looked like. We really don't know what early Christianity looked like. And I would think it differs from town to town in various ways. And its structure of authority probably differs to we simply don't know. I tend to think of the study of early Christianity as something like a jigsaw puzzle. But we don't have the box with the picture on it. And we have a massive pieces, some from other puzzles, some pieces missing, but we think we can produce a reliable copy of what's supposedly on the box, which we happen not to have. And so I'm very cautious on how much we can say. Maybe I should expose myself in this way. I basically tear down things. I don't build things. Tearing down is easier, right? So I'm not offering a new way to see early Christianity. I'm just suggesting that there's a way we shouldn't see it or we should see it with more careful vision. So as a matter of fact, I would prefer my book to simply be wrinkles in the God fear thesis because that's basically what I'm pointing out. I'm not producing a new structure that in 100 years will still be spoken of as the reliable description of Christianity in the ancient world. But I hope I've torn down a few things.
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C
Yes. Yeah, I think so. And it is helpful to have your work and to have these questions asked to a thesis that has been prominent for how we understand we, how, how early Christian scholars have understood the development of early Christianity. And so just being able to rethink and perhaps admit that there's a lot of things we still don't know is, is a really helpful thing, I think.
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B
And, and maybe by nature I like to take things apart. I've never been that comfortable with consensus. I think people jump on bandwagons too quickly.
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C
Yeah, that can happen. Yeah, that's true. Well, one of the elements that often comes up in discussions of God fearers and early Christian studies is the belief that God fearers were somehow second class citizens in synagogues and thus would have been attracted to Christianity as a result. What evidence is there that God fearers were second class citizens in Roman era Jewish life?
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B
Well, the first question would be what evidence is there that there were God fearers or non Jews in synagogues? And if so, when did they attend? Were there secret meetings to instruct non Jews in the world of Judaism? Learning about Jacob and Esau and Noah? What do we mean? That these people, by attending synagogue or maybe just having an interest in the Jewish community, somehow develop an understanding of the literature of Judaism that is significant, that is nuanced, so that they can join the world of Christianity in its particular spin. It seems to me a lot of work has to be done about what goes on in the synagogue. And remember, we're talking about first century, first century synagogues. What are they? We don't even know exactly what Jews would have been doing and Diaspora synagogues in the first century. So the assumption that there's somehow a way that God fearers, non Jews could join the world of Judaism in the synagogue and come away with this substantial nuanced understanding of Judaism and the Septuagint seems to be fiction. So if they don't have this nuanced understanding of the Septuagint, or suppose we allow for a few that may have so dedicated themselves to the world of Judaism and the septuagint I think these kind of characters would have been extremely rare. So but for God fearers to work as a significant phenomenon in Christianity, you need masses of these God fearers filling the membership of the Christian community. And as far as God fearers being second class citizen in the world of Judaism, suppose you have a God fearers and usually God fearers are thought to be associated with the more elite or certainly not the average in society. They would have some resources, some status and sometimes very high status so that these people, these competent resource people can flood into Christianity and provide leadership. That's an important feature of it. They provide the leadership that can stabilize and move the movement forward because they have this understanding of the Jewish scriptures which of course is the scriptures of Christians at the time. So I think it. So this understanding of the Septuagint is exaggerated. I'm not even sure many Jews would have had that kind of understanding of the Septuagint. So it's guessing it's the world that you want, but I don't think it's the world that's there. And, and then if we want to keep God fearers on the stage as an important feature of Christianity to stabilize Christianity to move forward, it would be a very short act for the Godfarers because I think almost immediately what you're going to look for in Christian leadership are people that have been born into the movement or have parents in the movement. They grow up, they understand the Septuagint in the way that Christians understood the Septuagint. It's their Bible and they're the ones that are likely to become leaders. So we don't really need, even if we needed God fearers for a few years and I doubt that we need need that. I think more Jews would have filled that role as converts to Christianity than non Jews who had some association with Judaism and decided to make the switch. So do we need Godfarers? Is there a leadership vacuum that is to be filled? No. So they're not necessary. And if they're not necessary, maybe we can ease off making them a prominent feature.
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C
Makes sense. It's a really helpful set of questions. It maybe shows how much of the construction of early Christian history, at least in a narrative form, can sometimes be based on assumptions or guesswork.
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B
And I would be happy to see more information found that and would be happy if that made a solid case for God fearers. God fearers who were informed in some detailed way about the Septuagint. God fearers who've moved in mass into Christianity. I'D be quite happy if the evidence showed that they're not my relatives, they're not my friends, but I would be happy to see their success. I just don't see it in the evidence. And again, I'm just trying to find weaknesses in the theory. I don't have a replacement theory. So if God Fearers make their way in on some other basis. No, no complaints for me.
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C
Yeah, makes sense. That makes sense.
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B
But I'd still like people to buy my book.
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C
Oh, of course, yes. Yeah. Very important. Yeah. Well, another facet that does come up relatively commonly, perhaps, in the God Fearer thesis, is the belief that God Fearers would have been familiar with the Septuagint. And you've alluded to that. Since we have so many citations of the Septuagint in many early Christian writings, such a belief seems tempting. But you raise really important assumptions that are inherent in this thesis. What assumptions? Or are there other assumptions other than the ones that we've already discussed are maybe hidden in the belief that God fears would have understood, say, Paul's Septuagint citations better than others? And do you have any suggestions for how scholars might account for the high number of Septuagintal citations in ways that accord better with our historical evidence?
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B
I think the main thing is we have to understand that there's a difference between the author and the reader. The author, if you want to look at a document and try to determine what the author of the document understood, what his sources were, what his literary world was, that's a fine exercise, go for it. But there's a difference in that world and the world of the reader. The world of the reader does not require even 5% of the world of the author. The author writes in such a way very often and particularly in religious texts. They're instructing, they're explaining. So I think if you read the letter to Paul closely, at least most of them, you would find that there's nothing. Nothing that the reader. The reader without I. That there is even something called the Septuagint that the reader could read those letters and understand. So that's my challenge to those who have emphasized the role of the Septuagint. Read the letters of Paul, read the other documents and see if the author is not providing the kind of information that might be necessary. Or the references to the Septuagint are understood not as a reference to the Septuagint, but simply as something that makes sense. That little story makes sense no matter where it comes from. So the emphasis on the septuagint for knowledge of the Septuagint for the reader I think is just so exaggerated that it has to be discarded now. And I would say take a look at Paul's letters. In many of the letters, there's very little reference to the Septuagint. There's certainly direct quoting of the Septuagint. It's not there. And take the Bible today, take the New Testament, take a letter of Paul and give it to the average person in a church pew, okay? They're likely to have almost no understanding of the Old Testament at any significantly deep level. They know that Adam and Eve and somebody got killed shortly after a few little stories like that. But there's nothing. They don't need that whole world of the Old Testament to read much of the New Testament writings. They make sense even if they're referring to the Old Testament. The reader doesn't have to know that because the story itself works. And I would guess many of the. Unless you have somebody that is a Bible reader, they read the Bible from COVID to cover 48 times by the time they were 23 or something. Unless you have that kind of. And there's always somebody like that. But the average person in the church pew would not have that kind of knowledge of the Old Testament that supposedly the God fearer said of the Septuagint and made them competent readers of Paul's letters. So it seems to me that the whole thing is misguided.
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C
I think that's a really helpful illustration with the church pew. And it becomes even perhaps stronger if we're using that as an analogy back to the Roman world because we have so much easier access to text, whether digital or in print, but so much easier access to scriptural books. And yet few of us walk around with outlines of Habakkuk sitting in our minds.
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B
Right? And so it's a lack of easy access to the Septuagint itself, like who has the copy, copy, scrolls, whatever. I would say hardly anyone. And in the Christian church or in the synagogue, where is much of the instruction? It's in the reading. And so in the Christian church, if a letter of Paul is read or if the Septuagint is. Is read, there's going to be ministers there in the congregation, some poorly trained, some quite brilliantly trained, that can offer explanation. So we shouldn't talk about author and reader, as I do, as others do. It's a common expression. Author, reader, it's authority. Hear and not hear with headphones by themselves. It's here in an assembly of people that can some of whom can instruct them further if questions come to mind. And often we read things fiction, wild fiction. Right. Has no background in anything, but we understand it.
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C
Right.
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B
The author has made it possible to read. And you have understanding of what's going on, plot and so on, who these characters are, they're wild, they're imagined in the mind of the author. The reader has never heard of them before, yet it works. I'm not saying God fears are like that, but. Maybe close friends.
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C
Yeah. There's other possibilities to imagine, which I think is a really helpful thing to bear in mind.
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B
And again, I want to emphasize I'm just trying to pick holes in the weak spots. I suppose I could have spent more time praising the good spots, but I haven't found many good spots actually in the Godfrey theory, and I haven't found in the latter half of my book. I try to examine the evidence put forward. It's surprisingly little evidence. And then when you look at how the evidence has been, I think maybe stretched for the need of the day with the God fear thesis that things look fairly weak at that level too.
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C
Yeah, that's really helpful. And I actually, I want to pick up on that, that evidence that you discuss in several of the appendices to your book. One of the appendices is devoted to inscriptions that are found on a column from Aphrodisias that contains two references to God fearers. Can I ask what do the inscriptions on this column say? And how have they been understood as evidence for a distinct class of God fearers? And then why might we need to reconsider our views?
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B
Well, what we know there's a column, it's seems to be for honoring in some way at least recognizing the contribution of a range of people to the construction of something in the Jewish community. And on one side of the column there's a list of people that are Jewish that's reflected in their names and. And so on. And on the other side, there's a break in the list of names, a clear break. So you realize whoever is doing this consciously separated the first group, that's fairly diverse from the second group. And these are referred to as by a word that I think is a compliment, but without content. A common enough word, but it means just some note of appreciation or praise for their moral or decent act in donating for this construction of this project, whatever that project was. The question is, are these people God fearers? Do we have evidence here for God fearers? It seems to me we don't. We have evidence Here of donors. That's what the column is about. They're donors. They have gentile names. They are. Some of them may be connected loosely to the Jewish community. They at least have some interest in what's going on. Some are high officials and their occupations. Often I think about half or more, maybe a little less. The occupation of the donor is. Is given. It almost sounds like they want to get their advertising dollar. So you want some benefit from the contribution you made. That these people are God fearers is complicated by the fact that there's two on the other side of the inscription. Two. Two are referred to as God fearers by this word that's translated God fearers. So what's going on? Why do some get two get in one column? But are these God fearers? It seems to me it's too complicated to pretend that all of these could be God fearers. How do you determine that? Who makes the judgment that somebody associated with. With the Jewish community there ought to be considered a God fearer? And given that honor, did no one contribute to the project? What about some of these dignitaries? People are expected, some of these elites would be expected to contribute to community projects and that it's just much easier to say that you have a reference to donors here and not to something more specific. Here's the question. If non Jews can be associated with Judaism in a variety of ways, some almost fully adopting the practices and beliefs of Judaism, others less connected but nonetheless are involved in some way, either adopting a practice or connected in some way to some Jewish person, how does one determine who gets the label of God fearer and who doesn't? There's no evidence that there is a recognition in the society of a term that speaks of a formal group of God fearers of non Jews connected to the synagogue. Who determines that? Do you have to be able to quote several of the psalms by heart? What's the mechanism? I don't think anyone calls themselves a godfarer in the ancient world. I don't think anyone is recognized as a God fearer in the ancient world. We just don't have evidence of that kind of definite recognized group structure that God fearers would fit into and be identified as. So the column I think does not contribute to our understanding of God fearers as a recognized group. I think. But when you have so little evidence, you make even slight evidence appear stronger. And I think that's people were quite happy to find that evidence. But I don't think it works in the way that had been hoped.
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C
Yeah, that makes sense. Particularly if there's other understandings of that. Like that it's just an acknowledgment of their piety or their God fearingness rather than a separate distinct class of citizens.
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B
Right? Yeah. And I argue I'm not so clear tonight on the argument but the book does provide that. Now, it's probably not worth $150 to buy the book just for the sake of that argument but I think that kind of evidence and also for the evidence of the theater at my latest, I think has been misused terribly.
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C
Yeah, it's very, very helpful, I think, to consider this evidence and to be focused on what the particular strands of evidence are that we have. I guess I wonder. So, given your work on the history of earliest Christianity can I maybe ask a broader question? What implications do you think this study of God fearers has for how we should understand recent attempts to describe relationships between Jews and Christians, if I can use those terms during the second half of the first century? Or in other words, to what degree does questioning the prominence of God fearers have implications for studies on the so called parting of the ways?
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B
I wish I knew. I think that's a major question. I don't think we can put God fearers into that equation for very long or in any great numbers. But it's difficult to know. Did Jews, did a mass of Jews join the Christian movement? Were a lot of people who joined the Christian movement not Jews, not non Jews who were interested in Judaism but simply the average Joe on the street who hearing about Christian miracles or stories about this guy Jesus and a community that may have been open to the poor. I wouldn't be surprised that a lot of the Christian membership came from that kind of thing. There's more reference to miracles and supernatural acts and demons and magic in Luke then there is references to God fearers and the Septuagint. It's a world of demons and devils and magic. And that's the world that Luke seems to be comfortable in, both the Gospel and in Acts. And in that world, I think you have other reasons for joining the Christian movement than simply that it meshes with the Septuagint.
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C
It's really helpful, I think, and does encourage us to think more broadly about reasons why people may have joined the early Christian movement.
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B
But wouldn't it be great to be able to have more clarity on what happened in that second part of the first century? I mean, we build on and that's why it's so important to get the Godfrey issue right, because it's what has filled that gap, and it may have prevented other things from being considered as important. So I leave that to somebody else to do at age 75, you know, take on big projects.
- [42:05]
C
Well, it is an important project. And, yeah, reflecting on ways in which the Godfrey thesis has perhaps led us astray is an important task. And so the book is well worth the read for anyone who's out there reflecting and thinking about this.
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B
Borrow it from a library, don't buy it from a bookstore. The whole academic publishing monster, right?
- [42:36]
C
Yes, yes. The economics of that can be prohibitive for individuals.
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B
And I don't mean my words to get back to the publisher. The publisher has been very good and promoted my work and so on, but the academic publishing is a different kind of beast.
- [42:57]
C
Well, Tom, I know that we've taken a lot of your time today. We've been talking with Thomas Robinson about his book revisiting the God Fearer thesis and the development of early Christianity. But can I ask, what are you working on now and what should we keep our eyes out for from you in the future?
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B
Oh, well, I do a fair amount of chauffeuring of grandchildren. Okay. I have been working on something for maybe two decades, and that is how early Christian texts on Judaism had been sanitized in light of the Holocaust. And whether we need to live with that historical grime and dirt and find some other way to be decent and to do the right thing than to change a text, an ancient text that seems to be so controlling of our behavior. So I don't want to get rid of the Bible or the New Testament, but I think this idea of cleansing the text from just fairly negative views of Jews and Judaism is an effort in the wrong direction. We have to have another way of being fair with the text and being just with our neighbors. I don't want the New Testament to be treated like Hittite text. Curious, but of no importance to us today. Obviously, the text is important to Christianity and will be, and it's a source of comfort and direction to billions of people. But I think to change the meaning of the text and make it look very nice or less elderly is not helpful in the long run. We need an honesty about it, and we need to learn that we never need permission to do the right thing, whether a biblical text or anything else. We don't need permission from the Gospels or anywhere else to do the right thing. And I think we know what the right thing is generally in regard to the treatment of others. But again, I just play with this idea and that if it becomes something that's fine if it doesn't, it's also fine. It keeps my mind a little at work, which is important as you age.
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C
Well, it sounds like a really timely project to think about and a very important project as well for how we deal with the text and understand it rightly.
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B
And you know how the new Paul and that sort of thing just seems to me it's going in the wrong direction. So be honest with the text and don't dress it up so that you can bring it into the debate. In Jewish Christian dialogue, it's an ugly uncle at times, but it is that and you can't really scrub it and come up with something that it's not so. But what happens to that ever becoming anything that's possible? I have no idea.
- [47:14]
C
It sounds wonderful and yeah, very much working in the same world of ideas as this particular project. Revisiting the God Fear and the development of Early Christianity. So Tom, thank you so much for being on the show to discuss your book today. And listeners, thank you very much for being here. Tom, again, this has been a privilege, so thank you very much.
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B
Well, I thank you for promoting the book.
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C
Thank you, thank you. And thanks everyone. You've been listening again to Thomas Robinson revisiting the God Fearer thesis and the development of early Christianity. Take care.