[In
the interest of full disclosure, I first became aware of this book because
Scott Korb was my fiancé’s graduate adviser for her Master of Fine Arts in
non-fiction writing. I therefore have not worked directly with Prof. Korb, but
have seen his supportive guidance second hand. I have tried to analyze this
book as I would any other, but being honest with myself and with my readers,
there is always some sense of one’s attitude about the author that colors one’s
interpretation. I hope here that any respect I have for the book is mostly due to the book and not the
author, but such things are hard to divide.]
This book is an engaging analysis about the cultural life of
ordinary life in first century Palestine. This book is not about Jesus (a point
Korb brings up no less than 5 times, so much so that he even makes a joke about
the repetition), instead it is a book about the general tenor of what any
occupant of first century Palestine would experience. This is the book’s
greatest strength and weakness. What Korb does to discuss the first century
context is one of the most readable and most interesting depictions I have
read. He combines wit and study to present a very engaging discussion. However,
because he is not discussing Jesus directly, he was not pushed to go fully into
the absolute mass of Jesus research that has been done in the past 100 years
and as such, there are some points where he does not reveal the dialogue that
has gone on behind his conclusions.
Korb himself is
not an expert in the first century, he has a master’s degree in Theology from
Union, but his focus was not Roman antiquity. He in fact admits this in the
introduction to the book (page 6). What problem that causes is that he has two
primary sources with which he is clearly comfortable (Josephus and the New
Testament). The problem, of course, is that if one is not going to talk much
about Jesus, the New Testament becomes far less valuable. However, on the other
hand, he has used many secondary sources and interviewed scholars in the field.
Korb is primarily a writing teacher who focuses on journalistic and memoir
writing and this comes through very clearly in his book. He is able to make a
book about the “cultural context” of the New Testament engaging for a wide
audience. This is no small feat. What is more, he has made this engaging
without making wild historical claims about Jesus. That is even more
remarkable. The Jesus seminar, for instance, can make waves in the headlines
when it challenges the historicity of miracles, or teases apart pieces of the
gospels. However, when they try to discuss simply the “state of the first
century” very few outside of scholarly circles pay attention (and in the case
of the Jesus seminar, the scholars snarl at them – creating a kind of lose/lose
for the Jesus Seminar to discuss anything aside from the historical Jesus).
Korb has done this. He has found a way to write a book about the culture of
Palestine that is interesting and engaging without resorting to polemics about
the historical Jesus. This is something we should be thankful for and we should
hope John Dominic Crossan, Bart Ehrman, Luke Timothy Johnson, and N.T. Wright
will pay attention.
First, it should be noted how smoothly this book reads.
Korb’s training in writing comes very clearly across and his style uses jokes,
personal anecdotes, and very helpful comparisons to engage the reader in
understanding what is often dry data (e.g. first century economy). In fact,
Korb has used his footnotes as kind of fun asides which are nearly sarcastic as
well as very informative. What makes his writing so good is that it is not only
jokes. Instead, these are used to present very clearly good data that is often
lost.
In content, where Korb is best is when he is discussing the
daily life of average Palestinian Jews in the first century.[1]
For example, he has a chapter on cleanliness where he presents one of the best
descriptions of the challenge of both how amazingly dirty this world was, and
what is more, how to understand a world where such was not a problem. The first
move is not surprising – everyone knows that soap was hard to come by and baths
were rarely taken. The second is far less understood – a society where such
things weren’t expected. It is noteworthy that we don’t hear complaints about
the smell of feces and sewage in our early sources. We do hear complaints about
the smell of the dead, but not so much the standard living practices of
excrement and dirt being caked any/everywhere. To the modern reader, this
sounds disgusting and unthinkable, but to understand the first century, we have
to try and understand a different mindset than our own – they were not 21st
century humans living in a situation without electricity and plumbing, they had
their own worldviews. A corrolary example Korb did not use, but I like to use
in my classes is the world of a 5% literacy rate (and perhaps less in some
areas). Everyone knows that very few people in the ancient world could read,
but very few can get beyond that piece of data and try to fathom a society that
did not require reading. It truly was a thing of leisure that one learned at a
place of leisure (Gk. Scholia). These
are the pieces Korb presents brilliantly covering topics such as sanitation,
economy, housing, marriage/divorce, politics (particularly Herod the Great), and
medicine.
The other very good thing Korb does is explain very well the
distinction and point of Jewish ritual purity. He is able to dispel many common
views of purity rituals. He wants to point out very carefully what the point of
purity is and its subsequent effect on daily life. For example, he notes that
the ritual purity “washings” should never be understood as somehow motivated by
sanitation (just as one should not think of food laws in regard to nutrition).
Instead, he shows clearly that the purpose was entirely different, and instead
was a true preparation for true worship. Any of these modern Christian
apologetic interests in trying to show what it is that these purity laws did
beyond that really make little sense. For example, his discussion of leprosy
shows the way this would not function. For the leper to have to be excluded
from the community was hardly for the sake of the poor leper. Further, it was
not even really for the sake of the community – given that many of the diseases
that were then called “leprosy” were not actually contagious. Instead, it was
done of the spiritual purity of the community. It was not about the sick
person, or the healthy people medically. It instead was about the purity of the community which expressed
itself to its God as being all prepared to worship without ritual blemish.
These figures were ritually excluded (as were a whole host of other features).
We are reminded that purity is not a moral condition but a ritual one. Morality
is based on ethics and is fundamentally separate from purity.
Throughout this study, Korb leans upon John Dominic
Crossan’s research (as well as Jonathan Reed). Crossan’s studies make sense
that Korb would go there seeing how much Crossan is interested in the social
fabric of the world that he believes the historical Jesus overturned in what
Crossan calls “ethical eschatology.” Jesus the social reformer, then, demands a
world that is asking for social reform. In some eventuality, Crossan (and
therefore Korb) can’t be wrong about this. The Jewish war that eventuated
66-70/73 as a revolt against Rome suggests that there was a real desire for
social change. The problem is how monothetically Crossan views this. It is
definitely true that the inhabitants of Roman Palestine had no love for Rome
ever since Pompey came through in 62 BCE. Further, the election of the Idumaean
Roman collaborator Herod was no consolation to them. After Herod, of course,
there was a Praefect and the dream of an independent Israel was fading away.
This surely was leading toward an interest in social change.
The problem with this focus, though, is its narrowness in
scope. Crossan and Korb are right that there was an interest in social and
political change. However, not seriously enough is it seen how that would occur. Crossan is forced to recognize that the
apocalyptic eschatological movement was significant which had the following
narrative – 1. There is an evil in the world keeping the people of God from
achieving the promises God has promised them (foreign rulers), 2. God is going
to once and for all arrive and destroy evil for good, 3. The “kingdom of God”
will therefore be established and Israel will live in harmony in the future.
Note in this progression that it is God who
will make the social change occur, not the revolt of people. Crossan is aware
of this and that is why he coins the term “ethical eschatology” – the idea that
it is not God who will come back and destroy evil, but it is up to humans as
the people of God to destroy evil through social and political reform. The fact
that the war occurred shows that there were many who could be sympathetic with
this view, but we should be careful to place too many too quickly on the front
lines of the battle.
The problem with this approach is not really which kind of
eschatology they might have envisioned, but that it is too often presented as a
recollection of the “very near past.” Most imagine that the Jews were
hearkening back to a former time – in fact they were – the question is which former time. There is too often a
narrative of the domination of the Seleucids leading to the Hasmonean
(Maccabean) revolt where Israel was an independent country, until the arrival
of Pompey and the Roman occupation. That makes the period of the first and
second century BCE recent history that were the promised land years that people
remembered. First, it is unlikely all that many people “remembered” these years.
We ignore the fact that at 66 CE when the revolt against Rome breaks out, it
has been over 120 years since the Romans first came – there are longer people
“remembering.” What is more, it is a full 6 generations – it is not even
traditions passed forward from their parents and grandparents (if indeed anyone
lived long enough to be a grandparent), these are traditions that are in the
distant past for regular lives. Instead, they looked to the past, but not the
past of the Hasmoneans – where, it should be noted that they did have true
independence, they were far more a ‘free-state’ of the Seleucid Empire than
anything else (despite what 1-2 Maccabees may say). Instead, they looked to the
past of David and the actual independent Israel. By 66 CE, that would be almost
a millennium in the past. What is more, after the exile in 586, the majority of
Jews did not live in the land – they were in diaspora all waiting for the final
exile to somehow be completed.
In short, what Korb and Crossan struggle to deal with was
the scope of this political conflict. Korb is right that the Romans brought new
challenges economically and politically – but these challenges were not the real problem. They had
been dealing with the challenges of foreign powers since the seventh century
BCE. What is important is not to set up a narrative with a relatively
prosperous Palestine before Rome and a put down one after it. It was always a
put down area and a put down people. There was a time that people heard of when
they prospered in the land, but it was so long ago that it was a mythos – a narrative
to provide meaning and identity. It was not a living memory – it was instead,
an ideal that they knew they would achieve as the people of God.
All of this is not to dismiss the great value of Korb’s
book. Korb presents the world of the first century Palestine in a more engaging
way than I’ve seen in a long time. The fact that he can present this without
being religiously controversial is amazingly impressive. If I were to teach a “culture
of the New Testament” to laypeople rather than in an academic setting, I very
well might use this book.
[1] It should be
noted that even though the title of the book is Life in Year One, it is not only covering that year, but is
actually the entire first century. “Year One” seems to have been selected
simply because it is a catchier title. In fact, his book covers the period from
the rule of Herod to the great war in 66.
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