This is excellent stuff.
We here have learned so much to help others from this type of written effort. If you desire to seriously understand God’s Word, this is definitely for you. If not..well…not sure what else to say. Up to you of course.
First and foremost, spend lots of time in God’s Word. But make certain you attempt to fully understand the exegesis (ex-ah-gee-sis) of His Word, i.e. the then-and-there of what the original writer was trying to convey to the readers.
This is a long piece – but worth every word – every time I go back it’s still rich and telling.
More here from our dear brothers Bruce Malina and Richard Rohrbaugh on the “Social Science Commentary on The Synoptic Gospels” from the Introduction:
Book Introduction
The material consequences of the industrial revolution are on ready display, eagerly sought by most people most of the time. Yet in our overcrowded cities and threatened environment we are learning to our dismay that progress has not been an unmixed blessing. In fact, the vast majority of social critics, theologians, poets, philosophers, artists, and even politicians have agonized endlessly over the value of the changes modernity has wrought.
The social and psychological consequences have been controversial as well. The story has both good news and bad. Some critics have seen modernity as the liberation of the human spirit from the shackles of the past. Yet others have decried the aridity and inhumanity we seem to have visited upon ourselves.
The critics therefore have been unable to agree on what precisely has happened to us as human beings. Nonetheless, the vast majority acknowledge that industrialized societies have passed a watershed that has irreversibly changed the landscape of human endeavor and perception.
Our primary interest in writing this book is biblical interpretation, especially the interpretation of the three “Synoptic” Gospels (so-called because Matthew, Mark, and Luke share much in common in their presentations of the story of Jesus). Yet our focus on these ancient writings does not divert attention from interest in many of the features that characterize the modern world.
That is because the simple fact is that the industrial revolution has had great impact upon our ability to read and understand the Bible, and it is with this particular aspect of interpretation that we are fundamentally concerned. For readers of the Bible, this great watershed we have passed-the “Great Transformation,” as it has sometimes been called ~ threatens our ability to hear what the Bible once so clearly said to its earliest readers.
After all, the Bible was written in an agrarian, preindustrial world where things were very different from what we see today. Neither the biblical authors nor their first audiences could ever have anticipated anything like the Great Transformation that has taken place over the last two hundred years.
Vast areas of human experience have been forever changed and with this has come a fundamentally new way of perceiving the world. Moreover, if the outlook of the earlier era was so markedly different from ours today, and our contention is that it was emphatically so, it would hardly be surprising that something equally fundamental has happened to our capacity to read and understand the Bible.
It has become commonplace, of course, to recognize the time-and-place boundedness of the Bible. We know the New Testament to be the product of a small group of people living in the first century of the common era in the eastern Mediterranean region.
But the distance between the world of that group and our own is usually calculated in historical terms, in terms of the flow of events or ideas that might account for what biblical documents ostensibly describe. Much scholarly effort has gone into telling that historical story.
Such accounts are not sufficient, however, for understanding the position of the contemporary reader of the Bible. We must also recognize, as indeed recent social-scientific studies of the New Testament have begun to do, that the distance between ourselves and the Bible is social as well as temporal and conceptual. Such social distance includes radical differences in social structures, social roles, values, and general cultural features.
In fact, it may be that such social distance is the most fundamental distance of all. It may have had a greater impact on our ability to read and understand the Bible than most of what has preoccupied scholarly attention to date.
In order to understand how that might be the case, as well as why it is necessary to address the issue directly, it may be helpful to remind ourselves once again just how revolutionary the Great Transformation really was.
The Great Transformation
Nowadays we read the agrarian New Testament in the context of a modern, industrial world. What actually happens in that process? To sharpen our sensitivities to what occurs, we must be aware, at least in a summary way, of the changes that our society has undergone. A good place to begin is in clarifying the meaning of the terms “agrarian” and “industrial.”
By the term “agrarian” we do not mean “agricultural.” Nowadays less than 5 percent of the U.S. population works the land as farmers. They are agriculturalists. Yet the term “agrarian” does not serve to draw the contrast between these rural farmers and our urban factory workers. Perhaps farmers and factory workers should be distinguished in any common historical or social setting, but our concern is rather with the much broader issue of what life was like before and after the industrial revolution. The fact is that today’s farmer and factory worker are likely to share a common modern outlook in substantial measure and both have far more in common with each other than either would have with an ancient counterpart.
In our usage, then, the term “agrarian” will have a meaning much closer to “preindustrial” than to the term “agricultural.” It is meant to encompass all who lived before the industrial revolution occurred, whether the vast majority who tilled the soil or the tiny minority who lived in towns and the few cities.
In this sense both the first-century rural peasant and the first-century urbanite who never once touched the actual soil were “agrarian.” And similarly, both the modern manufacturer and the modern farmer are “industrialized.” In short, the contrast we wish to draw is between the outlook of the modern, industrial period and the worldview in vogue before the Great Transformation took place.
The Agrarian World
Agrarian societies began to make their appearance in the fertile valleys of the Middle East some five to six thousand years ago. Their presence was marked by the invention of the plow, the wheel, the sail, the discovery of metallurgy, and the domestication of animals. The result was a rapid increase in agricultural production that created a relatively substantial economic surplus for the first time in human history.
These technological innovations had a ripple effect that irrevocably altered many of the patterns of the older horticultural (small-scale farming) societies that dominated the eastern Mediterranean. Agricultural production developed on a previously unknown scale. Alphabetic writing, coinage, and standing armies emerged for the first time. Likewise, the spread of the preindustrial city, the emergence of the city-state empire, and a rapid increase in population all accompanied this shift from the horticultural to agrarian worlds.
As a result of this agrarian technological revolution, by the late Bronze Age simple agrarian societies covered the eastern Mediterranean region.
A second phase of the agrarian revolution is usually identified by macro-scientologists as beginning with the spread of iron. By the eighth century B.C.E., the use of iron began to affect daily life on a wide scale. Large-scale, “advanced” agrarian societies emerged during this period, a period with which students of the Bible are familiar.
Egypt, Persia, Greece, Rome, and other large societies blossomed, made their mark, and vanished in the social flow of history. Yet all of these were as typically agrarian as those later societies that continued to exist right up to the beginning of the industrial revolution itself. Many of their fundamental agrarian characteristics remained unchanged until the modern era.
The ancients who lived and wrote in these agrarian societies of the Mediterranean world, the biblical world, inhabited what modern anthropologists have come to call a “diffusion sphere” -a region sharing a set of common cultural institutions which have persisted over long periods of time. Such a region formed a “culture continent,” as it is sometimes called. This description was first applied by American anthropologists to Native American societies that shared common cultural adaptations to the various ecological regions of North America.
The phrase was soon adopted for study of other culture areas, however, including the circum-Mediterranean, the area of interest to New Testament scholars. In the circum-Mediterranean region, five millennia of common participation in conquest, colonialism, connubium, and trade, along with a mixed, small-scale farming and herding village economy embedded in a series of larger agrarian empires, created a set of common cultural institutions which have likewise persisted over time. The resulting “Mediterranean culture-continent” exists yet today.
What this means for New Testament scholars is that in the Mediterranean region we have available a kind of living laboratory in which to learn about social patterns and dynamics that are often strikingly different from those we know in the United States. Circum-Mediterranean social structures, value sets, statuses, and roles are quite different from those found in northern Europe or North America.
Given the historical fact that the persons depicted in the Bible once lived in this Mediterranean culture-continent, it appears that the circum-Mediterranean could offer a compelling alternative to the set of social scenarios in which ethnocentric U.S. and northern European readings typically place the New Testament.
These social scenarios might even allow us to develop a critical, even if partial and incomplete, social and cultural distance from the North American culture-continent and thereby provide a modest step out of our world and into that of the Bible.
Critics and skeptics of course will quickly recognize two important qualifications that must be made. One is the obvious fact that the ancient Mediterranean culture-continent and the modern Mediterranean culture-continent are not exact equivalents. In two thousand years things have changed.
But two comments might be offered in this regard. The first is that given the persistence of many of the characteristics of culture areas over long periods of time, the modern Mediterranean world is far closer to the world of the Bible than North America has been during any period of its history.
The societies of the present-day circum-Mediterranean area thus offer the closest living analogue we possess to the value sets and social structures that characterized daily human interaction in the Bible. How close the match of ancient and modern might really be must of course be tested in every case.
Yet it is important to say that there is something actual and rather specific to test. Moreover, the best way to carry out such tests is with the careful and discriminating use of models drawn from actual Mediterranean area studies. Models are simplified, abstract representations of more complex real-world interactions. People think with models in order to understand, control, and/or predict.
We shall see the relevance of this more clearly in a moment. But it is important to remember that models are actually cognitive devices to help unearth dimensions of a setting not at once apparent, as well as to develop the ramifications of such dimensions. Models must be tested with actual data, in this case information from biblical documents, and refashioned accordingly.
If they facilitate understanding as they should, fine. If not, they can be discarded in favor of others. Any given model might be inadequate to the set of data we have in the documents or the situation in antiquity might differ too greatly from that for which the model was created. In either case, the model must change.
A second caveat is more difficult. As with the authors of these pages, most New Testament scholars were trained as historians and taught to focus on what is particular and unique about moments in the past.
Thus countless historical books and articles are still at pains to discriminate between the Roman and the Greek, the Egyptian and the Hebrew, even the Judean and the Galilean. We know all of the ways ancient Israelites were atypical and unique, and as historians we resist attempts to lump them together with other groups. We worry over assuming that conditions known to have existed in the second century can be applied to the first, or whether the situation in Syria in the year 90 can be assumed to be the same as it was in the year 80.
The social sciences, by contrast, seek the culturally common and generic. Their focus is not on unique details but on generalizations. Their methods focus on what groups have in common rather than what makes them unique. Instead of that which distinguishes the ancient Egyptian from the ancient Roman, the social scientists want to know what they, as members of an agrarian, Mediterranean world, share in common.
They might even want to know for how long the common features persisted. Unfortunately, however, because historians and social scientists typically inquire after these two different interests, conversation between them often becomes a dialogue of the deaf.
The main reason for the difficulty is that people can think at different levels of abstraction, and various academic disciplines often work at different levels of abstraction. Mathematics, for example, is most abstract since mathematical procedures refer to everything in general yet nothing in particular.
“One plus one equals two” refers to abstract quantities and can be applied in almost any situation. Social science models also work at a comparatively high level of abstraction, and can likewise be applied rather broadly.
For example, at the level such models function there is indeed a broadly generic thing called a “preindustrial city.” This model or mental construct of the preindustrial city consists of common characteristics of all such cities throughout the Mediterranean region over long stretches of human history. At a high level of abstraction it gives us a broad picture of what such cities were like.
Yet at the low level of abstraction at which the historian explicitly works, only unique, particular cities existed, for example, the city of Damascus. At this level, historians often have to think about what is distinctive or different about the classical city on the one hand and the oriental city on the other, or perhaps even two oriental cities like Jerusalem and Damascus. At a lower level of abstraction they were not alike at all. As everyone knows, at the most concrete levels of reality nothing is alike at all, not even two snowflakes.
Yet for all of the unique qualities of particular cities that historians love to uncover, qualities that require data from each particular site under study, at a higher level of abstraction there remains a common set of social patterns that pervaded all of the cities of the Mediterranean culture area, Jerusalem and Damascus included. Such common characteristics are the fare of social scientists and can frequently be very instructive for our reading of the biblical documents.
Commonalities can illuminate. They can provide an understanding of the social context of the Bible in ways the historian’s data cannot. For this reason we have chosen social-science models drawn from the studies of Mediterranean anthropologists, and working at a fairly high level of abstraction, in developing the “Reading Scenarios” and “Notes” that follow in our commentary. They are an attempt to set the Gospels in an agrarian, Mediterranean context more nearly like that out of which they first came.
The Industrial Revolution
If the writing of the New Testament took place in the agrarian, Mediterranean world of antiquity, nonetheless our task is to read it in the modern, industrialized West. The second great social revolution with which we are concerned, therefore, is the one that created the modern era. Late in the nineteenth century, economic historians began to use the term “industrial revolution” to characterize the technological and economic innovations that constituted this second great revolution in human history.
Social historians trace its beginnings to technological innovations in Scotland and England that, between 1760 and 1830, dramatically changed the face of British society. To be sure, technological advance had been accelerating both in Great Britain and on the continent for some time, but during that crucial period at the end of the eighteenth century particular developments led to a rapid and substantial increase in industrial activity.
Best known of these eighteenth-century innovations are those that affected the textile industry: the flying shuttle, the spinning jenny, and the huge weaving machines that were soon converted to newly developed steam power. By 1845, textile production in Great Britain had increased 500 percent beyond the level of a generation earlier.
Other inventions quickly followed that industrialized every sector of British society. In the same period, new production methods increased iron output twenty-four times over and a created a nine fold jump in the output of coal.
A machine-tool industry emerged and with it came the initial efforts at standardization of parts that made machine repair both feasible and inexpensive.
By 1860 the electric dynamo, the transformer, and the oil industry had made their appearance. Each brought ripple effects in turn. By the 1880s, new processes had been found for making steel and as a result railroads spread across both Great Britain and much of the United States. Agriculture was transformed by the invention of reapers, mowers, threshing machines, steam tractors, and steel plows. Most importantly for the development of trade and markets, the new industrialization spread rapidly across both Western Europe and North America and by the end of the nineteenth century the center of change had shifted as Great Britain lost the technological and economic leadership to the United States.
Recounting the later phases of this ongoing revolution is unnecessary to our purposes. We have said enough to indicate that when we speak of industrial societies we mean those societies in which industrialized production fueled economic growth of unprecedented proportions from the mid-eighteenth century until the present. It is a world the New Testament writers could never have imagined; it is therefore a world they did not address.
We have not quite said enough, however, to really evoke an appreciation for the magnitude of what has happened. Most of the time we take it so much for granted that we forget how many areas of life have been affected.
It will be worthwhile, therefore, to highlight a few of the specific changes industrialization has wrought. The following list is by no means exhaustive, but it is illustrative. It is a set of random gleanings from the work of social historians that will serve to remind us how great the transformation really was.
1. In agrarian societies more than 90 percent of the population was rural. In industrial societies more than 90 percent is urban.
2. In agrarian societies 90-95 percent of the population was engaged in what sociologists call the “primary” industries (farming and extracting raw materials). In the United States today it is 4.9 percent.
3. In agrarian societies 2-4 percent of the population was literate. In industrial societies 2-4 percent are not.
4. The birthrate in most agrarian societies was about forty per thousand per year. In the Unites States, as in most industrial societies, it is less than half that. Yet death rates have dropped even more dramatically than birthrates. We thus have the curious phenomenon of far fewer births and rapidly rising population.
5. Life expectancy in the city of Rome in the first century B.C.E. was about twenty years at birth. If the perilous years of infancy were survived, it rose to about forty, one-half our present expectations.
6. In contrast to the huge cities we know today, the largest city in Europe in the fourteenth century, Venice, had a population of 78,000. London had 35,000. Vienna had 3,800. Though population figures for antiquity are notoriously difficult to come by, recent estimates for Jerusalem are about 35,000. For Capernaum, 1,500. For Nazareth about 200.
7. The Department of Labor currently lists in excess of 20,000 occupations in the United States and hundreds more are added to the list annually. By contrast, the tax rolls for Paris (pop. 59,000) in the year 1313 list only 157.
8. Unlike the modern world, in agrarian societies 1-3 percent of the population usually owns one- to two-thirds of the arable land. Since 90 percent or more were peasants, the vast majority owned subsistence plots at best.
9. The size of the federal bureaucracy in the Unites States in 1816 was 5,000 employees. In 1971 it was 2,852,000 and growing rapidly. While there was a political, administrative, and military apparatus in antiquity, nothing remotely comparable to the modern governmental bureaucracy ever existed. Instead, goods and services were mediated by patrons who operated largely outside governmental control.
10. More than one-half of all families in agrarian societies were broken during the childbearing and child-rearing years by the death of one or both parents. In India at the turn of the twentieth century the figure was 71 percent. Thus widows and orphans were everywhere.
11. In agrarian societies the family was the unit of both production and consumption. Since the industrial revolution, family production or enterprise has nearly disappeared and the unit of production has become the individual worker. Nowadays the family is only a unit of consumption.
12. The largest “factories” in Roman antiquity did not exceed fifty workers. In the records of the medieval craft guilds from London, the largest employed eighteen. The industrial corporation, a modern invention, did not exist.
13. In 1850, the “prime movers” in the United States (i.e., steam engines in factories, sailing vessels, work animals, etc.) had a combined capacity of 8.5 million horsepower. By 1970 this had risen to 20 billion.
14. The cost of moving one ton of goods one mile (measured in U.S. dollars in China at the beginning of the industrial revolution) was:
Steamboat 2.4
Wheelbarrow 20.0
Rail 2.7
Pack donkey 24.0
Junk 12.0
Packhorse 30.0
Animal-drawn cart 13.0
Carrying by pole 48.0
Pack mule 17.0
It is little wonder that overland trade at any distance was insubstantial in antiquity.
15. Productive capacity in industrial societies exceeds that in the most advanced agrarian societies known by more than one hundredfold.
16. Given the shock and consternation caused by the assassination of John F. Kennedy and the forced resignation of Richard M. Nixon, we sometimes forget that this sort of internal political upheaval is nothing like it was in the agrarian world. Of the 79 Roman emperors, 31 were murdered, 6 driven to suicide, and 4 were deposed by force. Moreover, such upheavals in antiquity were frequently accompanied by civil war and the enslavement of thousands.
Obviously, our random listing could go on. Yet even in its brevity it may provide a sense of the kind of changes that have occurred as the result of the industrial revolution. It has been a watershed unlike any the world has ever seen.
Should we be surprised if major changes in our perception of the world have occurred as well? And should we be surprised if that in turn has had a fundamental impact on our ability to read and understand the Bible?
Texts: Written and Unwritten
In thinking about the impact of the industrial revolution on our reading of the Bible, we must begin by taking account of what is sometimes called the “unwritten” part of any writing. This “unwritten” part includes the things an author presumes his or her audience knows about how the world works that he or she can leave between the lines of a written document, so to speak, yet which are crucial to its understanding. Conversation partners always share such an implied understanding of the world, just as do authors and readers. But how much is really implied?
It should be self-evident that not everything necessary to a conversation can be written down because a text simply cannot say everything that needs to be known about the topic under discussion. To say everything would be tedious in the extreme. A text, spoken or written, would be cluttered to the point of unreadability and conversation partners would probably cease to interact.
Inevitably, then, there is much that a written document can only sketch in outline, and even more that has to be left to the imagination of the reader. Because this is so, an author inescapably depends upon the general cultural knowledge a reader can supply from his or her own resources to “complete” the text. Successful communication can be carried on in no other way.
A writer in contemporary America, for example, when referring to a “Big Mac” for the first time in a story, has no need to explain that this item is a hamburger. Nor is an explanation required that this hamburger is made by a particular fast-food chain whose logo is the golden arches.
An American reader can be counted upon to understand and provide the necessary visual imagery. Such pictures are not only worth a thousand words, they can save that many and more if they can be supplied by the reader rather than the writer.
In other words, written documents are realized in terms of language and, like language itself, written documents also have a kind of “indeterminacy” without which a reader would remain largely unengaged and probably bored as well. Because the reader must interact with the writing and “complete” it if it is to make sense, every written document invites immediate participation on the part of a reader. Thus writings provide what is necessary, but cannot provide everything.
Reading Scenarios
The primary reason all this works is that reading is in a very fundamental way a social act. Readers and writers always participate in a social system that provides the clues for filling in between the lines. Meanings are embedded in a social system that is shared and understood by all participants in any communication process.
While meanings not rooted in a shared social system can sometimes be communicated, such communication inevitably requires extended explanation because a writer cannot depend upon the reader to conjure up the proper sets of related images or concepts needed to complete the unwritten part of the text.
Such an understanding of the social moorings of the reading process is confirmed by contemporary studies of reading. A “scenario model” drawn from recent research in experimental psychology suggests that we understand a written document as setting forth a succession of implicit or explicit mental pictures consisting of culturally specific scenes or schemes sketched by an author. These is turn evoke corresponding scenes or schemes in the mind of the reader that are drawn from the reader’s own experience in the culture.
With the scenarios suggested by the author as a starting point, the reader then carries out appropriate alterations to the settings or episodes as directed by clues in the written document. In this way an author begins with the familiar and directs the reader to what is new. As a result of this we might say that a kind of “contract” exists between author and reader.
Considerate writers attempt to accommodate their readers by beginning with scenarios those readers would readily understand. With such mutually shared understanding in place, an author can then proceed to the new or unfamiliar.
By such standards, of course, the authors of the Synoptic Gospels “violate” their author-reader contract with modern Americans. They neither begin with what we know about the world nor make any attempt to explain their ancient world in terms we might understand from contemporary American experience. They presume we are first-century, eastern Mediterranean readers and share their social system.
They assume we understand the intricacies of honor and shame, that we are fully aware of what it means to live a preindustrial city and/or village life, that we know how folk healers operate, that we believe in a limited good world assuaged by patrons and brokers, and the like. They do not bother to start with what is familiar to us now. Another way of saying this is simply to remind ourselves that none of the Gospel writers had modern Americans in mind when they wrote.
If we seek to make this author-reader contract work, therefore, at least in the case of reading the New Testament, we will have to make the effort to be considerate readers. To this end, we will have to voluntarily enter the world that they presumed existed when they wrote. We will have to be willing to do what is necessary in order to bring to our reading a set of mental scenarios proper to their time, place, and culture instead of importing ones from modern America.
Of course, making the effort to be considerate readers has not always been a priority of American Bible students. Consciously or unconsciously we have often used mental images or scenarios drawn from modern American experience to fill in the unwritten pictures that complete the biblical text. Thus, when Luke tells us that the family of Jesus could find no room in the inn at Bethlehem, it is not difficult for most Americans to construct the scene.
We do it from our modern experience of overbooked hotels or motels in crowded locations. That such a “scenario” is completely inappropriate, however, never dawns on many American readers. They simply do not know that ancient Bethlehem had no hotels, that advance reservations were an unknown phenomenon, and, more importantly, that room in any village lodging was based on kinship or social rank rather than offered on a first-come-first-served basis.
Such ethnocentric and anachronistic readings of the New Testament are common enough in our society that they underscore our point that reading is a social act. Yet how can contemporary American Bible readers participate in that social act if, for the most part, they have been socialized and shaped by the experience of living in twentieth-century America rather than first-century Palestine?
Will we not continue to conjure up reading scenarios that authors and first readers of the New Testament could never have imagined? If we do, of course, the inevitable result will be misunderstanding. Too often we simply do not bother to fill in between the lines as the first readers would have done because we do not bother to acquire some of the reservoir of ancient experience on which the authors expected their readers to draw. For better or worse, we read ourselves and our world back into the text in ways we do not suspect.
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Your friend and brother in fighting the good fight,
Marc
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Please comment on this post right below. Feel free to write and proclaim your leadings in the Spirit in an honorable fashion.
Marc White, Director, Walk Worthy Ministries, www.WalkWorthy.org
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