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Rome or Syria? This article addresses the issue of the provenance of Mark's Gospel by exploring affinities between the second Gospel and Jewish sectarian groups of the first centuries bce and ce. It is argued that Mark displays certain sectarian tendencies, and that these tendencies, most notably seen in the Gospel's negative evaluation of the Jerusalem temple and its priestly overseers, strongly suggest that the Gospel was written in close geographical proximity to Jerusalem and its temple. Accordingly, an area in the Syrian Decapolis is a much more likely place of origin for Mark's Gospel than that of Rome. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article examines how different levels of internal organization are reflected in the residential patterns of different population groups. In this case, the Haredi community comprises sects and sub-sects, whose communal identity plays a central role in everyday life and spatial organization. The residential preferences of Haredi individuals are strongly influenced by the need to live among 'friends' - that is, other members of the same sub-sect. This article explores the dynamics of residential patterns in two of Jerusalem's Haredi neighbourhoods: Ramat Shlomo, a new neighbourhood on the urban periphery, and Sanhedria, an old yet attractive inner-city neighbourhood. We reveal two segregation mechanisms: the first is top-down determination of residence, found in relatively new neighbourhoods that are planned, built and populated with the intense involvement of community leaders; the second is the bottom-up emergence of residential patterns typical of inner-city neighbourhoods that have gradually developed over time. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

4QMMT is one of only a few epistles among the Dead Sea Scrolls. It represents the Qumran community's effort to correct impure priestly practice in the Jerusalem Temple, so that when God descends in final judgment at the end of days, his Temple will not be defiled and Israelites will rejoice in their atonement rather than suffer for their wickedness. The authors of 4QMMT create identification by citing scriptural laws that would be commonly agreed upon. Yet they also create distinction by criticizing the Temple priests' incorrect interpretations of more ambiguous laws. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The author discusses the prohibitions of heresies imposed by premodern Judaism and argues that the mechanism for defining and the circumstances for the prohibition of Jewish heresy varied greatly according to time and place. She discusses three cases of Karaites, scripturalists who departed from rabbinic tradition and focused on the Bible for interpretations, in an attempt to understand the importance of doctrine to medieval and early modern judgments about religious conformity in Judaism and that the changing circumstances of heresy's articulation changes its definition over time.