If ancient rabbis and church leaders agreed about one thing, it was that the pious should not attend the theater—the most popular of entertainments in the Roman-ruled Mediterranean. The fact that both groups of clergymen devoted so much attention to this problem, argues Courtney Friesen in a new book, suggests that many of their congregants did indeed patronize the theater. Menachem Wecker writes:
Friesen notes that a Jewish dramatist named Ezekiel who lived in Alexandria, perhaps 100 years before the Common Era, created a tragedy about the Exodus story. “We can’t be certain whether it was intended for actual performance, and if so in what venue,” Friesen said.
Ezekiel’s Exodus play—modeled particularly on Euripides—is both by a Jewish author and the “most complete Greek tragedy to survive from any Hellenistic playwright,” beyond the 5th century BCE, he noted.
One of the scholar’s arguments in the book is that even as rabbis and church leaders scolded their flocks for going to the theater, Jewish and Christian practices were shaped by the theater. For example, synagogue and church layouts mirrored designs of Greek theaters, with the “audience” or worshippers surrounding the central “stage” where clergy delivered sermonic “performances.”
Josephus, the Jewish military leader and historian who lived from 37 or 38 to the year 100, recorded that Jerusalem Jews “opposed the theater complex under Herod because of the religious images that surrounded it, among other things,” Friesen told JNS.
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