Stephen Caesar
[Christianity generally spread throughout Palestine and the Mediterranean world among the middle and lower classes. Author Stephen Caesar points to new studies which reveal everyday life of the common man and help us understand the Gospel’s impact during the days of Jesus and the Apostles.]
Recent archaeological investigations in the lands of the New Testament have revealed a previously unexplored facet about infant Christianity: the socioeconomic realities of the first-century Roman world that contributed to the successful propagation of the Christian message. Research by Neil Asher Silberman, contributing editor of Archaeology magazine, and Richard Horsley, University of Massachusetts at Boston, have made a significant contribution to our understanding of the social backdrop against which the Gospels and Acts of the Apostles were set. Along the way, they also underscored the accuracy with which the New Testament depicts social situations of the first-century Mediterranean world.
In the mid-1990’s, Silberman and Horsley conducted a two-year survey of the lands in which the events of the New Testament took place—Judea, Galilee, Syria, Jordan, Asia Minor, Greece, Italy—in order to uncover the “broader social context behind the spread of Christianity” (Silberman 1996:30). Their research indicated that the first-century Roman world was marked by widespread economic dislocation, burdensome taxation, centralized regulation of trade and commerce, and a “widespread confiscation and redistribution of land to Roman veterans and officials…” (ibid. 35). Small, independent farmers were unwillingly displaced by large estates owned by the super-rich, causing societal dislocation on a massive scale. These changes, Silberman and Horsley assert, created sufficient misery and despair to pave the way for the message of Christianity.
First century AD Nazareth was located in a high valley of Lower Galilee’s Nazareth mountains, overlooking the Valley of Jezreel (Armageddon). Somewhat like a bowl, the village sat in the bottom (where the spring was located) with mountains surrounding on all sides. Not mentioned in the Old Testament, archaeological evidence indicates the site’s first permanent settlement appeared in the first century BC. Only a tiny agricultural village inhabited soley by Jews, estimates suggest two or three clans in 35 homes spread over about 6 acres. Structures sat on, and were even carved into, bedrock, as can be seen on the grounds of the Church of the Annunciation today. Dry-farming of olives, grapes, figs, almonds, wheat and barley made the village representative of the world Jesus and the Apostles knew in the first century AD. Pictured here is the interior of the Church of the Annunciation with ancient construction on bedrock in the chancel area.
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While wealthy Roman citizens and officials built luxury homes throughout the Empire, the luxury villas of New Testament Palestine generally belonged to the local aristocracy and not Roman officials. In Jerusalem’s Upper City, on the western hill and overlooking the Temple Mount, such a home was excavated. With remains on two stories, the “Palatial Mansion” was a true palace with fresco walls and mosaic floors, multiple bathing facilities and expensive household utensils. The ground floor had elaborate living rooms, while the basement contained numerous water installations and service rooms. Eastern and western wings flanked a central courtyard. While it may have been home to a wealthy Saducee or even priest, it was sufficiently elaborate to be home for the high priest.
New Testament Palestine
The two scholars began their survey, logically enough, in the cradle of the Gospel, Judea and Galilee. The social disruption endemic to the Mediterranean world was particularly acute in the Holy Land of Jesus’ time. A corrupt local aristocracy, epitomized by the Herodian dynasty and the priesthood, served as puppets for their Roman overlords. With enormous rapacity and callousness, the landed gentry taxed the Jewish peasantry and gobbled up their land. According to such scholars as Uriel Rappapon of the University of Haifa and historian Martin Goodman, author of The Ruling Class of Judea, the pauperization and mistreatment of the common people resulted in widespread Messianic fervor, with the masses looking heavenward in hopes of a deliverer from the hated Romans and their oppressive client rulers. Silberman (1994; 39) remarks:
A row of Hellenistic tombs, including two burial caves and two free-standing stone-carved monuments, sit in the Kidron Valley facing the Temple Mount. Wrongly attributed to Absalom (2 Sm 18:18), King Jehosaphat, St. James and the prophet Zechariah, they actually were tombs of anonymous but prominent and wealthy citizens of Jerusalem. Only the tomb attributed to St. James can actually be attributed to anyone with certainty, A Hebrew inscription in the tomb named the priestly Hezir family. Jesus possibly had these very tombs in mind when he suggested the Pharisees were like “whitened sepulchers” (Mt 23:27). Most citizens of New Testament Jerusalem struggled under the power of politicos, priests, and the city’s aristocracy who built for themselves extravagant monuments like these.
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Corinth was a major Greek commercial center strategically situated between two harbors. One harbor (Cenchrae—see Acts 18:18) opened to Asia Minor and the other (Lechaion) opened toward Italy. According to Athenaeus (second century AD), ancient Corinth numbered 300,000 citizens and 460,000 slaves. It was at Corinth, when rejected by the Jews, that Paul declared he would now go preach to the Gentiles (Acts 18:6). Ancient writers spoke of Corinth’s widespread immorality as one of the factors which contributed to the city’s wealth.
Benefiting directly and disproportionately from the taxes and tithes flowing into the expanding temple city of Jerusalem, the priesthood and secular aristocracy were gutting richer and the poor were becoming poorer, many even disenfranchised. Traditional land-tenure patterns of Judea were changing, and on the basis of a close reading of Josephus Flavius and rabbinic references, Goodman suggests that small family holdings were bought up by the aristocrats and priests, condemning their former owners to lives as tenant farmers or hired laborers.
This growing disenfranchisement naturally engendered profound resentment on the part of common Jews, steeped as they were in the Old Testament concept of God-given (not Roman-given) kingship and a fundamentally classless society. This resentment in turn fostered a growing desire for a divinely-nominated Savior/Messiah/King to deliver God’s People Israel. In their book. Bandits. Prophets, and Messiahs (1985:131), Horsley and John S. Hanson observe:
It appears that the ancient Israelite tradition of popular anointed kingship, though dormant during the [comparatively salutary] Persian and Hellenistic periods, remained alive. It certainly reemerged in vigorous form just before and after the life of Jesus of Nazareth. In response to foreign domination, severe repression, and illegitimate Herodian kingship, peasant attempts to set things right took the form of messianic movements.
Indeed, the Gospels and Acts often allude to the common Jewish people’s earnest hope that Jesus was the sword-bearing Messiah Who would set up His kingdom and deliver His people, through apocalyptic warfare, from Rome and her Herodian puppets (Jn 1:41, 4:25, 6:15; Acts 1:6). Furthermore, Jesus’ teachings suggest that economic hardship and dislocation were a reality in His day, with parables referring to peasant indebtedness, extremes of poverty and wealth, and violent resentment by tenants towards landlords (see Mt 18:23–35; Lk 6:20, 24; 16:1–6; Horsley and Hanson 1985:1–3).
In the Gospels
Recent archaeological discoveries have elucidated these economic disruptions and their relationship to Christianity’s infancy. Excavations in Galilee by Mordechai Aviam of the Israeli Antiquities Authority and by teams from Hebrew University, Duke, University of Southern Florida, and Tel Aviv University illuminated the reality of Roman domination in the first century. Contemporary to the archaeological evidence, Josephus notes the increasing Herodian taxation and Roman military activity, which added to the common people’s misery. “Such demographic shifts and new levels of taxation,” noted Silberman ( 1996:35), “would have had far-reaching effects on the rural population from Nazareth to the Sea of Galilee.” He further observed that (Silberman 1996:35):
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this cultural milieu was part of a wider social system that served the interests of the rich over those of the poor. We tend to assume that the teachings of Jesus were purely religious, yet we must remember that those he rebuked, ‘who are gorgeously appareled and live in luxury’ (Luke 7:25), are those whose homes, monuments, places of entertainment, and tombs are the most conspicuous in the archaeological record. That is why archaeology is so significant in understanding the rise of early Christianity and its spread across the Mediterranean.
Elsewhere Silberman (1994:40) wrote:
This evidence has now become the raw material for a far-reaching historical reassessment of first-century Judean and Galilean life….In the coming years New Testament archaeology will continue to deepen our understanding of Christianity in its first-century context….
Among the Acts of the Apostles
Moving from the Gospels to the Acts of the Apostles, scholars see the same picture emerging. Regions visited by the Apostle Paul, for example, display similar evidence of this unfortunate shift in favor of the landed aristocracy. Research in the area of ancient Galatia by Stephen Mitchell of the University College of Swansea, excavations in central Greece by the Boeotia Survey Project of the Universities of Bradford and Cambridge, and expeditions at Corinth by the American/Greek/British Nemea Valley Archaeological Project and by David Gilman Romano of the University of Pennsylvania
reveal a pattern of rural depopulation, expanding and shrinking cities, and changing trade routes and administrative and religious centers, all of this enabled Roman authorities to incorporate these regions into the empire (Silberman 1996:36).
The disruption of traditional ways of life, the impoverishment of local populations, and the increasing heavy-handedness of the imperial administration, provided fertile ground for Paul’s message of grace, mercy, and hope for a better afterlife in which people would be “deliver[ed] from the present evil age” (Gal 1:4). “[E]arly Christianity,” Silberman (1996:36) asserts, “offered a more practical way to resist this new world order by rejecting the basic principles of power and status upon which it was built.”
Paul’s message, with its rejection of material concerns and self-aggrandizement (e.g., 2 Cor 10:24, I Tm 6:8), struck a chord with the increasingly disillusioned, pauperized masses, who saw little hope for improvement in “this present evil age.” The Apostle James perhaps hit even closer to home with the poor, given his withering condemnation of wealthy exploiters:
The wages you failed to pay the workmen who mowed your fields are crying out against you. The cries of the harvesters have reached the ears of the Lord Almighty. You have lived on earth in luxury and self-indulgence. You have fattened yourselves in the day of slaughter (Jas 5:4–5).
Such attitudes, coupled with the new archaeological discoveries, led Silberman (1996:36) to conclude:
It is in this specific historical milieu of urbanism and economic change that the roots of Christianity lay…The movement that began 2, 000 years ago in Galilee and spread across the Roman Empire through the efforts of Paul and the other apostles can be seen as a unique event in Western religious history and as a tangible historical process. Their wide-ranging quest for the Kingdom of God may well have been both a spiritual journey and an evolving social response to the changes wrought by Roman rule.
Silberman and Horsley’s findings have demonstrated that the New Testament documents, rather than being anachronistic fiction, are the products of authors whose eye for detail and accuracy extend even to the intangible social forces that formed an extremely vital—albeit difficult-to-perceive—element of the subject on which they were writing. As Silberman pointed out, recent discoveries have greatly enhanced our knowledge and appreciation of the New Testament as a book of real history, much more so than anyone had previously suspected.
Bibliography
Horsley, R. A., and Hanson, J,S.
1985 Bandits, Prophets, and Messiahs. Minneapolis: Winston Press.
Silberman, N. A.
1994 Searching For Jesus. Archaeology 47.6:30–40.
1996 The World of Paul. Archaeology 49.6:30–36.
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