Below is a summary by Claude.ai of an interview of John J. Collins by Bart Ehrman titled Surprising Origins of Judaism Before Jesus in advance of Collins’ 20-lecture course at BSA in the summer of 2026. The transcript of the interview sent to Claude.ai is in John Collins’ directory in Dropbox.
Prompt: Summarize the attached transcript of the interview with John Collins. Particularly note the evolution and timeline he presents.
Overview
This is a conversation between Bart Ehrman and biblical scholar John Collins on the origins and development of Judaism during the Second Temple period (roughly 586 BCE–70 CE). Collins argues that what we think of as “Judaism” — a religion defined by rigorous Torah observance — did not emerge fully until surprisingly late, shaped by a series of historical crises.
The Timeline Collins Presents
Pre-586 BCE — “Yahwism,” not Judaism. Before the Babylonian destruction, Judah was a small, local kingdom much like neighboring peoples (Moabites, Ammonites, Phoenicians). Collins calls its religion “Yahwism” — essentially a local cult tied to place and kingship. There was no strong sense of the Torah as a binding national law, and “being a Judahite” simply meant living in Judah.
586 BCE — The Babylonian Exile: The Pivotal Disruption. The Babylonians destroyed Jerusalem, demolished Solomon’s Temple, and deported the leadership to Babylon. This catastrophe, however inadvertently, became a catalyst. The priestly class was allowed to preserve and develop their traditions in exile, and Collins argues this is where the Torah likely took its essential shape.
538 BCE — The Persian Return (Cyrus’s Edict) Cyrus of Persia allowed the exiles to return. The initial agenda was practical: rebuild the Temple and restore the kingship. They managed the former but not the latter. Collins notes that messianic expectation flared briefly here and then largely disappeared for several centuries. Importantly, there is little evidence the returning community actually possessed the full Law of Moses in written form at this stage.
c. 460 BCE — Ezra and the Introduction of the Torah Roughly 75 years after the return, the scribe Ezra arrived in Jerusalem with a scroll of the Law and Persian authorization to enforce it. Crucially, when Ezra read the law publicly, the people reacted as though they had never heard much of it before — the Festival of Sukkot, for instance, came as apparent news. Collins interprets this as evidence that the Torah was not yet widely known or practiced. Some ethnic markers (like Sabbath observance) were adopted in principle, but compliance was uneven. Books like Proverbs and Qoheleth, datable to this era, don’t even cite the Torah.
c. 538–200 BCE – The Persian and Early Hellenistic Period – Judaism spreads throughout the diaspora — more Jews come to live outside Judea than within it. The religion begins transitioning from a local cult to a recognizable international identity. Collins cites the Elephantine papyri from Jews in Egypt who identified as Judeans but showed no knowledge of the Law of Moses and even worshiped a goddess. Diversity was the norm. [The following events were not cited by Collins and were inserted from here.]
- 538-332 – Persian Period
- 332-63 BCE – Alexander the Great arrives, Hellenistic Period
- 323 – Death of Alexander the Great
- 323-198 Ptolemaic Rule in Judea
- 198-167 Seleucid Rule in Judea
After 200 BCE — Seleucid (Syrian Greek) Pressure. When the Seleucid Greeks took control, financial pressure on their empire (partly from tribute owed to Rome) led them to plunder temples and meddle in Jerusalem’s high priesthood, replacing legitimate priests with compliant ones. Political instability followed.
c. 167 BCE — The Maccabean Revolt: The True Watershed. This is Collins’s central inflection point. When the Seleucid king Antiochus IV banned Jewish ancestral law, the reaction was fierce. Collins argues this prohibition paradoxically created the intense Torah-observance that would define Judaism going forward — people who had been largely indifferent to the law suddenly died for it. After the Maccabean and subsequent Hasmonean victory, observable changes appear in the archaeological and textual record: ritual purification pools (mikvaot) spread across the country, texts like the Book of Jubilees show obsessive concern with legal fine points, and sectarian disputes emerge (e.g., the Dead Sea Scrolls community arguing over whether liquid streams can transmit ritual impurity). Collins cites Israeli archaeologist Jonathan Adler as independently reaching the same conclusion from the archaeology alone.
2nd–1st Century BCE — Apocalypticism Emerges. Alongside the surge in Torah observance, a radically new worldview appears: apocalypticism. Books like Enoch and Daniel introduce the idea of a final cosmic judgment and resurrection/afterlife with angels — concepts Collins says would have been completely alien to Ezra. Previously, the goal of life in the Jewish tradition was to live long, prosper, and die peacefully; the afterlife expectation (“go to Sheol like everybody else”) was minimal. This shift — Collins calls it the other “big thing” of the period — is what made Christianity possible in its particular form.
70 CE — Second Destruction and the Rise of Rabbinic Judaism. The Romans destroyed the Second Temple, and after the Bar Kokhba revolt (132 CE), Jews were largely expelled from Jerusalem. The Essenes (the Dead Sea Scrolls community) disappeared entirely. The Pharisees, Sadducees, and sectarian diversity of the Second Temple period largely collapsed. What emerged was rabbinic Judaism, led by a narrower intellectual class in Yavne and Babylonia — not representative of the full diversity of pre-70 Judaism. The Talmud, compiled around 500–600 CE, is therefore some 600–700 years removed from Jesus’s time and cannot simply be read back to explain it.
Collins’s Overarching Argument
The common assumption — that Judaism was a stable, Torah-centered religion stretching from Moses through to Jesus — is historically wrong. What we recognize as Judaism (defined by rigorous law observance, synagogue culture, and religious identity independent of land or kingship) was forged primarily in the crucible of the Maccabean crisis of the 2nd century BCE, not in antiquity. Apocalypticism, which gave Christianity much of its framework, was a Second Temple innovation that later faded from mainstream Judaism. The Dead Sea Scrolls and pseudepigrapha revealed just how diverse Judaism was in the century before Jesus — a diversity that rabbinic texts largely obscure.
