In August 1947, a few months after President Harry S. Truman pledged the United States to fight communism around the globe, Time magazine delivered a stern warning to its wide readership from Reinhold Niebuhr, the nation's best-known theologian: “The new idolatry in the U.S. may be a blind, uncritical worship of democracy.” The Time article excerpted a Christianity and Crisis piece on “Democracy as a Religion” in which Niebuhr stressed the hidden dangers of the increasingly ubiquitous paeans to democracy in postwar America. That spring's commencement addresses, he noted, would give any sensible observer the distinct impression that “Americans have only one religion: devotion to democracy. They extol its virtues, are apprehensive about the perils to which it is exposed, pour maledictions upon its foes, rededicate themselves periodically to its purposes and claim unconditional validity for its ideals.”

As is well known, no Pharisaic document has survived. What we know of this Jewish faction has been transmitted through the mediation of other, frequently hostile, factions, or later sources. The sudden discovery of a Pharisaic document hidden in a cave somewhere would certainly arouse profound interest and excitement. In what follows, I would like to propose that the story of the rupture between King Jannaeus and the Pharisees recounted in b. Qiddušin 66a is actually such a discovery, except that it was not concealed in a sealed jar but rather embedded in the Babylonian Talmud (BT).

In January or February of 384 c.e., the Christian pilgrim known to us as Egeria left Jerusalem, where she had been based, and headed east. According to her own account, she felt impelled by God to climb Mount Nebo. With her traveled “some holy men from Jerusalem, a presbyter and deacons, and several brothers (monks).” The trip, which took them through Jericho and Livias, went very well. Her guides were able to point out further local sites, and, after some instructive detours, they reached their goal. Mount Nebo was high and steep, but the group of pilgrims, now swollen in number by the addition of local monks, made the climb successfully. Close to the summit they found a church commemorating the site of Moses's death. After a short service consisting of readings from Scripture and prayers, the local holy men asked Egeria if she would like to see “the places which are described in the Books of Moses.” This proposal “delighted” her, and together they climbed up to the actual summit.

Past historical-critical research into Amos 1–2 has typically relied on one of two strategies in relating the historical Amos's identity as a prophet to the authority and scriptural status of the book. In the first strategy, many interpreters have detected in these eight stanzas allusions to and descriptions of particular political relations, economic contexts, or military engagements, supposing that such correlations secure the book's roots in the eighth century b.c.e. Such chronological benchmarks, in turn, are implicitly thought to sustain the importance of Amos's prophetic identity—i.e., the Amos of Tekoa named in 1:1—in effect constituting the text's nature as scripture. A second, somewhat related strategy has centered on the reconstructed “original” or “secondary” status of certain passages. In this redaction-critical variation of the historical-critical endeavor, interpreters assume that an understanding of the text's chronological development can help to flesh out the picture of Israel's (and Judah's) developing theology or theologies. Again, this model tacitly accepts that prophetic identity plays an intimate and necessary role in the text's authenticity (and conversely, that redactional composition contributes to a passage's supposed “inauthenticity”) and also, therefore, in its authoritativeness within various temporally-constrained interpretive communities.

At the pinnacle of his career, the renowned sociologist Robert Bellah did not choose to write a magnum opus refining the influential work of a lifetime, focused particularly on contemporary American society. Nor did he choose to offer an unbuttoned reflection on the future of his discipline or the culture he had so closely studied. Instead, he devoted thirteen years to a project of breathtaking scope, religion in the evolutionary history of the human species, from the primordial soup to the Dalai Lama. He asked where religion had come from, not where it was going. He eventually felt compelled to truncate this story at the “axial age,” in the first millennium before the Common Era. This 700-page “fragment” of the original vision (before his recent death, he held out hope for a smaller companion book to round it off) is a work of judicious audacity. It is high tribute to Bellah's intellect and industry that it merits the first modifier no less than the second.