I often tell my students, âA good historian is just a very nosey person.â By that I mean that a historian wants to know everything about the people of the past. As I indicated in the last chapter, the late twentieth century saw a transformation in the writing of history. No longer were historians only interested in the great men and women, the great battles, and the great nations of the past. They did not simply ask about the emperors, the generals, and the monuments. They began to ask what life was like for the ordinary men and women. What did they do for a living? What did they eat? How did they treat each other? Where did they live? What diseases did they suffer from? How long did they live? What did they think about certain issues? Was their life a misery? What would an ordinary day be like?
In this quest, historians have sought windows into the past in order to understand daily life. They are like security guards who watch people through their security cameras. Sometimes the camera is a papyrus text that describes the family situation of the person composing the document. For example, a text from Egypt dated to 13 BCE records a marriage agreement between bride and groom. The bride brings with her a dowry of two gold earrings and some silver drachmae and promises to fulfill her duties. The husband promises to treat the bride well and to provide for her; otherwise he must forfeit the dowry. With this one text we get a brief look into the family situation of a young couple entering into legal marriage, presumably with all the hope and joy that newly married couples have experienced since time immemorial. But in case it does not work out, the family has protected their daughter with the dowry.
Sometimes the camera is a public building such as a synagogue. The newly discovered synagogue at Magdala on the western shore of the Sea of Galilee in Israel is an example. The viewer can, upon viewing the site, picture the worshipers seated on the benches that ring the walls of the structure. One can imagine the synagogue leader standing behind the stone table that evidently held a stand on which the Torah scroll lay for reading. The visitor to the site can almost hear the voices of those gathered for prayer and study from 2000 years ago.
Or the camera can be a collection of inscriptions (graffiti) from the walls of brothels and even of ordinary houses in which men boast of their sexual exploits and indicate their view of women. They demonstrate the ancient Roman view of machismo, of the control and dominance of females. These few sentences tell us much aboutâgive us a window intoâthe Roman attitudes of sexuality and maleness.
Historians use whatever means are availableâwritten texts such as the papyri and inscriptions, but also archaeological ruinsâto re-create the lives of ancient folk. The same interest is present in New Testament studies. New Testament interpreters now ask about the sort of people who would have listened to Jesus teach and who would have read the New Testament. What did these folk do for a living? What was it like to walk around in their skin? How would they have heard the New Testament?
As a result of asking questions about the ordinary folk, biblical scholars began to use methods and insights from sociology, cultural anthropology, and economics. From the pioneers in this field up to and including its more recent exponents, the goal has been to put a face on the characters of the Hebrew Bible and the New Testament. Scholars ask what it must have been like to live in the world of Palestine/Israel, in the Ancient Near East, or in the Greco-Roman world. What were their values and their perceptions and how might knowing the answers to these questions help in understanding the biblical text of the Hebrew Bible or the New Testament? The rise of the social sciences in biblical interpretation was the result of a perceived need for a âsociological imaginationâ to understand the scenes and scenarios of scripture. These interpreters maintain that merely collecting information is not enough to facilitate interpretation of the Hebrew Bible and New Testament; one must have the means of âenvisioning, investigating, and understanding the interrelation of texts and social contexts. . . .â The goal of the social science movement in interpretation has been to enable the interpreter to get to know the people for whom the texts were originally written.
New Testament scholars have also turned repeatedly to the discoveries in archaeology. And in recent years, even archaeologists of Israel and the Greco-Roman world have begun to change their focus. Now they not only study the architectural features of the cities and the great monuments of antiquity. They also look at the diet and morbidity of the ancient folk by examining really odd things, such as the remains of ancient rubbish heaps and latrines (see chapter 2). As we noted in chapters 2 and 3, archaeoparasitologists can determine that a large number of the people suffered from intestinal parasites since their eggs sho...
