What was ordinary life like in the first century?
Bruce Longenecker is Professor of Christian Origins and W. W. Melton Chair of Religion at Baylor University, Waco, Texas. He has a long-standing interest in the cultural context of the early Christian movement, and has only publishedIn Stone and Story, an exploration of the Roman world of the start century, and how Christian organized religion engaged with, related to and assorted with the world effectually it. I recently interviewed Bruce about his inquiry and the book.
IP: What was it that got you interested in the whole area of the 'cloth culture' of the ancient globe? And why Pompeii in particular?
BL: I began to take a serious interest in Pompeii and Herculaneum after the publication of my 2010 book, Call back the Poor: Paul, Poverty, and the Greco-Roman World. In that book, I studied economic structures of the Roman world at macro-level altitudes. From there I wanted to look at things from more than of a ground-level indicate of view — analyzing how a micro-level approach might help to shed low-cal on the ascension of early on Christianity past using a particular location's economic life every bit an interpretative filter. I wondered whether a close study of the realities of ordinary people would assist us to reframe our questions about the rise of early Christianity. Pompeii and Herculaneum were ideally suited as testing grounds for that exercise.
In one case I got started exploring those aboriginal sites, I constitute it impossible to pull out — a bit akin to Alice going downward the rabbit hole. There is simply something exhilarant about entering the start-century world of these two incredible, almost surreal, sites.
IP: Why practice yous think that studying the fabric culture of the ancient world is so important for readers of the Bible?
BL: The study of ancient textile civilization helps usa to see things in fresh low-cal, opening upwards new angles of vision on the import of ancient texts. At that place are, of course, other ways to read texts than through the filter of ancient material culture, but so much of what we do in the study of the Bible is based on the view that a text'southward historical context sheds important low-cal on how a text may take been read past its earliest audiences.
Studying other texts of the time often contributes to this goal, of grade. For instance, when studying texts of the New Testament, invaluable resources present themselves in the texts of Judean (or Jewish) and not-Judean Greco-Roman authors. But these texts are normally equanimous by a culture's aristocracy, with aristocracy filters informing a text'south view of the world.
Exploring material artifacts, however, tin can often supplement that elite filter by opening upwardly the vast and multifaceted world of the sub-elites — precisely the kinds of people among whom the "skillful news" of the early Jesus-move got its primary footholds. Pompeii and Herculaneum open up up that world for us, helping united states to refine our perceptions of how that "expert news" might have slowly seeped into the crevasses of the Roman world. Fortunately for united states of america, archaeologists accept been preparing the mode for over two hundred years, and then the Vesuvian resources are only waiting to be harvested for the study of early on Christianity.
IP: In your own enquiry for this volume, did you sense the earth of the first century every bit mostly strange from united states of america—or by and large easy to relate to?
BL: A flake of both. Often a single phenomenon would have both foreign and familiar aspects to information technology. For instance, people of Pompeii and Herculaneum were immersed in a earth of status-capture (as illustrated throughout In Stone and Story). I think the same is true for us today in many means, and in nearly any culture I have ever encountered. But the status culture of the first-century Roman world was 1 embedded in structures of polytheism (amid other things), and in that regard it seems repose foreign.
Or to take another example, the graffiti on the walls of Pompeii are often about honey (equally illustrated in chapter ane of In Stone and Story), and they frequently capture sentiments that would be quite at abode in the twenty-first century Western earth. Simply often love would blossom among people who were enslaved and whose lives were otherwise not their ain to determine. Their dear was frequently "vetoed" past their masters, in a way quite foreign to Western cultures today.
Or another — family ties. Ties among family members seem often to have been quite strong, equally is often the case today. But those ties were configured forth trajectories very different from ones familiar to many of us today — such as eligible women being married at roughly the age of 13–14 in what were often little more than arranged marriages between households, with these immature females taking on the role of the dame of a household that she was inserted into, and facing the very real possibility of dying in childbirth. These and more permutations give the dynamics of family ties quite a different character to the notion of family ties that we might accept today.
Even more, those ties were seen to transcend death in some means, with people feeling like they could (and should) maintain some connections with departed family members — a sentiment quite strange to many forms of mainstream Western civilisation today.
It is often these kinds of miracle, which include both familiar and unfamiliar aspects, that testify to be most fascinating, precisely because they combine both the familiar and the unfamiliar.
IP: 1 of your major sections in the book is an overview of religion and belief. What problems does this exploration throw up into strongest relief in the conventionalities of the earliest Christians?
BL: Bringing monotheism to the gentile world was a huge initiative. It was besides enormously countercultural. Equally a consequence, the reframing of temple and sacrificial imagery was a very significant project in the discourse of early Jesus-followers. In the procedure, temple and sacrifice became infused with ethical discourse in a way that outstripped comparable soapbox of the fourth dimension, with the corporate life of Jesus-followers becoming the locus for refracted imageries of temple and sacrifice.
Similarly, the mystery deities (in the town of Pompeii, these were especially Isis and Bacchus) were thought to be deities who met their devotees in shut bonds of relationality, bolstering their life in the present and, as some suspected, opening up the way to the afterlife. Proponents of the "proficient news" of the early Jesus-movement sometimes articulated their message in ways that allowed resonances with those mystery deities to exist heard – both by way of comparing and dissimilarity.
IP: In the book, you include some quite surprising observations— for example, I was struck by your comments on the high levels of literacy amongst women who managed businesses. What did you find most surprising—and what do you lot think will surprise your readers?
BL: If I could highlight just two things that struck me (and there's a whole book full of them), they would be these. First, people in the Greco-Roman world considered phenomena that we would call up of as being merely "textile" to actually take a "spiritual" component to them. For example, neighborhoods had their ain spiritual force; the same was true for colonies, residences and workshops — these all had their own spiritual identities. As I demonstrate in In Stone and Story, this ancient worldview helps to inform quite a number of New Testament texts. To take just one example, a passage like Philippians 4:23 reads all-time in this light: "May the grace of the Lord Jesus Christ be with the spirit that is among you all."
2d, information technology struck me that first-century urbanites in the Roman globe could then easily take interpreted the "memorial" of Jesus's last supper in relation to the vast number of memorials of the dead in tomb monuments that were adorned specifically to advertise the essence of a person's accomplishments in life. Whereas the memorials of the Roman world advertised the many achievements of the great and powerful, the memorial of the Lord'south Supper encapsulated the "crux" of his ain identity — a pretty powerful memorial, enacted past his followers "until he comes."
IP: You lot depict out very helpfully some of the implications of early Christian faith for social relations, including slavery. How significant do yous remember the critique in the NT is of the bones assumptions of slavery in the Roman earth?
BL: There is a strong denunciation of slavery in Revelation xviii:13. When read in its literary context, that verse depicts slavery equally embedded within a "satanically enlivened" economic system. But in that location aren't whatever New Testament voices that explicitly call for the eradication of slavery (much to our modern thwarting). Since slavery was like the electricity of the Roman globe, most early Jesus-followers seem simply to have taken slavery for granted, similar the air that they breathed.
But even though some New Testament authors may accept expected Jesus-followers to be living largely within the structures of their world, they also seem to have imagined that relationships within Jesus-groups would be reframed and redefined equally a consequence of their devotion to an exalted Lord who does things differently. It is not hard to imagine that for some slaves, their association with Jesus-groups might have been one of the best parts of their week.
IP: What did yous virtually enjoy about this project and the writing of the volume?
BL: I enjoyed (and still savour) the way a "big picture" emerges from a multifariousness of close-up snapshots on particular issues. When these explorations of individual issues are bundled together, they form a collage of the identity of early on Christianity as it took shape within the Roman globe.
And another affair that fabricated the production side of things so rewarding is the fantastic job that Baker Bookish did with the book and with the internet teaching resources that have been brought aslope of it. When I was pitching the book to various publishers, it was Bakery Bookish that proposed that the images in the volume should be displayed in color and that the volume should be supported with a total range of internet support cloth for classroom and give-and-take group usage. I think I said something like, "You had me at 'color'!" And at present the book is supported past eSources resources, which includes (1) a chapter-by-chapter depository financial institution of virtually 135 further color photos bachelor to anyone, with explanations every bit to the significance of the photos in relation to the discussions inside the volume, and (2) a chapter-by-chapter banking company of quiz questions and classroom activities, as well as 2 banks of test questions.
This is a helpful way of enabling teachers who may not be experts in the field to operate a successful form from the get-go. So it is really rewarding to think that this book might get on to have a stimulating life amid groups of people who want to explore the main contours of how early Christianity emerged within the Roman world.
Cheers Ian!
IP: Thank you very much Bruce!
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