Many societies in the first millennium had traditional religious customs which are usually seen as group activities. An aspect of religion that became much more important in late antiquity is the very idea of belief, something a group might do but also something that unattached individuals might do. The Hebrew Bible does not seem to refer to people believing in something that others did not. There are stories of the conflict of cultures and religion, and in late texts the idea of conversion, of turning one’s back on one’s own traditional religion and accepting someone else’s is present in the Book of Ruth and elsewhere, all in texts firmly from the first millennium BCE. But these converts may not have changed what they believed but rather what they did. At some point belief became important, perhaps for Judaism and its offshoot Christianity after the destruction of the Second Temple in ce 70, since that destruction closed the question of whether you should do most ritual actions but underscored what people thought about what you should do.
This turn from traditional religion to confessional religion seems important and self-evident, but there are many continuities between the two, especially in the two Near Eastern traditions that tended toward the simplicity of monotheism, Zoroastrianism and Judaism. And there is no very clear moment when one can assert that the religion of the individual had definitively overtaken the religion of the group; of course the groups persisted and gave contexts to the individuals. Perhaps only in the time of the Protestant Reformation did anyone imagine that religion was a matter only between an individual and God, though even there the church and its authority continued and continues to be important (Brown 1961: 210-11).
World History
