Chapter 1

Why this book?

Anyone who reads a book wants to get as much out of it as possible. This is true for a reader of the New Testament (hereafter NT) as for no other document. To grow in faith through the reading of the NT requires that we comprehend it to the fullest degree possible. How can we believe something we don't understand? Can we be satisfied with a faith based on books whose meaning we only partially perceive? Christianity has often been called a religion of the book. But if we don't understand the book, we find ourselves in the pre­dicament of the Ethiopian eunuch (Acts 8:26-40). He was trying to puzzle out the meaning of a passage in Isaiah when the apostle Philip ap­proached his chariot and asked, "Do you understand what you are reading?" The Ethiopian replied, "How can I, unless someone guides me?" Then he invited Philip to join him while he trav­eled.

I hope this book will become a valuable companion on your intellectual and spiritual journey, assisting you as you grow in your faith or as you try to understand the NT on a new level. The book is intended as a first step for people who want to know more about the NT but don't know where to turn for information. I be­lieve that, before making faith assertions, we must study the NT as objectively as possible to be certain that we understand what it real­ly means to say and not let cultural baggage __ its or ours __ get in the way. People who do that can experi­ence the vitality of what they read and can carry the very life of the text over into their own lives.

For the sake of clarity, I need to specify what this book is not about as well as what it aims to do. It does not deal with the theo­logical interpreta­tion of the NT text, nor with questions of the au­thorship or canonicity of certain books. It does not attempt to advo­cate or repudiate any particular interpretation of the NT. Its focus is the political and social background against which those books were written, the context which is fundamental to the fullest possible understanding of all aspects of the text.

Text and Context

A crucial part of understanding any written text is knowing something about the historical background of the author and the original audience. To put it in more formal terms, every text has a context. Every written document ­­__ whether a piece of graffiti on a wall or a prize-winning play __ has cer­tain cultural assump­tions built into it. Those assumptions affect an author's choice of theme, vocabulary, images, and every other aspect of one's writing. It is important to emphasize this because authors assume their readers will be familiar with the culture which underlies their writ­ings. Hence, they seldom go into detail explaining their social cus­toms or political institutions. This has always been true. As C. S. Wansink notes, "Ancient authors often did not relate situations with which their readerships were familiar; some things were just `not of sufficient importance' to merit their notice" (1.63:11).

The problem arises when someone from another culture or a later time reads that work. The Ethiopian eunuch was separated from the prophet Isaiah by hundreds of years and hundreds of miles. If a North American from our era were to read a story written in seventeenth-century Japan or eighteenth-centu­ry Germany, that reader would find some of it unintelli­gible because the authors as­sume that the reader knows certain things or shares certain assump­tions arising naturally from the culture. We would wonder, for example, why a Japanese warrior would kill himself rather than face disgrace and why his suicide would be committed according to an elaborate ritual. References to the German nobility would likely baffle us. Why are some of them called Electors? Relations between church and state would appear to be different from our own familiar setting. How could a German ruler order his subjects to be members of the Lutheran or Catholic church?

To some degree, every word we say is culturally conditioned. Even our jokes have a context, and if the reader (or listener) doesn't know that con­text, the joke has no meaning. This is particularly true with humor that involves puns or other forms of word play. For instance, in an "Arlo and Janis" comic strip, Arlo tells his son Gene a positively ancient joke that concludes with a punch line about Dale Evans seeing a cougar near the ranch and saying, "Pardon me, Roy, is that the cat who chewed your new shoes?" Gene looks at Arlo as though he's speaking a foreign language. Arlo tries to help him by adding, "There's this old song . . . ."

Gene could not appreciate the pun __ and some readers of this book may not __ because he did not know the cultural context of the joke. To share his father's laughter, to derive the same meaning as the person communicat­ing the idea to him, he would have to be fa­miliar with Glenn Miller's old song, "Par­don Me, Boy, Is That the Chattanooga Choo-Choo?" (We won't even get into the possible racist overtones of the term `boy'.) Gene would also have to know who Dale Evans and Roy Rogers were. Without that cultural con­text, he could make no sense of the text of his father's joke.

Even when we speak the same language in which a text is writ­ten, we can have difficulty understanding it if we are far enough re­moved in time from the origin of the text. Consider this line from Shakespeare's Othello: "He robs himself that spends a bootless grief." Some phrases from the King James Version of the Bible, written by people who heard and understood Shakespeare, have meaning for us only because we have heard them explained so many times. The meaning of many English words has changed in the four centuries which separate us from Elizabethan England. A good example would be "suffer the little children to come unto me" (Matt. 19:14 KJV). The meaning of `allow' or `let' is only an obscure usage of the word `suf­fer' today.

If it can be that hard to understand an older text written in our own language, how much greater the problem that confronts us when reading books from cultures which use a language different from ours. The Ethiopian eunuch was almost certainly using a Greek translation of Isaiah, putting him at an immediate disadvan­tage (1.15). Like him, we have to rely on a translation (or spend several years learning the original language of the text). If we stop to think about it, we might wonder how accurate is the translation we're us­ing. Translation is an art, not just a matter of looking up a word in a dictionary and finding its equivalent in another language (1.14). Words and idioms have subtle shades of meaning which a nonnative speaker has trouble picking up. Consider the differ­ence be­tween blowing up a photograph, blowing up a balloon, and blowing up a bridge. How would we translate the intent of those phrases into another language? (1.2; 1.5).

To look at the problem from the other side, imagine you were reading a French novel in which the phrase l'esprit de l'escalier ap­peared. Translated literally as "the wit of the stairway," it would mean nothing to modern English-speaking readers. A dictionary and commentary would help us to under­stand that it describes the sensation of thinking of a perfect comeback to someone when it's too late, usually as you're going up the stairs to your room. Then an inspiration hits and you think, "That's what I should have said."

All literature contains such culturally conditioned material. A few marginal notes can't provide readers from outside the culture or from a later time period with all the insight they need to get the full meaning from a document. It is not necessary to understand the culture fully to benefit from reading the document, but having even a degree of insight into the culture can enrich one's reading signifi­cantly and help one guard against erroneous inter­pretations (11).

This claim is not a new one. As long ago as A.D. 200 (on B.C./A.D., see chapter 9), Clement of Alexandria had to deal with criti­cism from those who wanted to read only the Bible: "Some, who pride them­selves on their innate wisdom, will not study phi­losophy or logic and refuse to learn natural science. They insist on faith alone, as if they could immediately harvest fruit without taking care of the vine . . . . I call those truly learned who apply all facets of knowledge to the study of the truth" (Stromata 1.9; see appendix 1 under "Clement"). In the mid-eigh­teenth century, Anglican Bishop Joseph Butler advised his readers that the NT writings "have all a particular refer­ence to the condition and usages of the Christian world at the time they were writ­ten . . . . They can­not be thoroughly understood, unless that condition and those us­ages are known and attended to" (Sermon on Human Nature 1.1). The scholars who today are putting some emphasis on this aspect of the study of various NT books are thus advocating nothing new.

When applied to the NT, this approach is not intended to un­dermine anyone's faith. Some devout Christians seem to fear that reading about the NT, instead of just reading the NT, will have that effect. Billy Graham, in his newspaper column, used to advise people just to read the NT itself and not bother with books about the NT. He is not alone in this opinion. I have in my files a newspaper ad for a new splinter denomination, proclaiming their belief that the Scriptures are "not culturally conditioned." Such a view seems to imply that the world in which the NT writers lived was so like ours, or had so little influence on the NT writers, that the modern reader's under­standing of the texts will be unhin­dered by cultural differences.

Can we truly believe that things have changed so little in two thousand years? Dig out a Time magazine from the late 1960's. If you're under forty, ask your parents to explain that world, that cul­tural context. If you're over forty, try to put hippies, Woodstock, paisley ties, "Laugh-ln," or Vietnam in terms that your children can understand. Another way to experience just how much our culture has changed in a generation is to watch reruns of "Donna Reed" or "Dick Van Dyke." Any­thing written in the 1960's shared that cultur­al background, and unless we know something about that culture, we cannot fully comprehend material written at that time.

Understanding material written in America in the 1960's or Ja­pan in the sixteenth century is an interesting intellectual exercise but not of life-altering importance. Understanding the NT is quite a different matter, isn't it? Christians believe that the NT contains a message which changes people's lives. How important it is, then, to understand as much about the NT as we possibly can so that we can be sure of the validity of our interpreta­tion and communicate the message as fully as possible. We can do this only if we know some­thing about the context of a particular text. This is happening as scholars come to see the impor­tance of studying the background of particu­lar texts (1.6; 1.8; 1.11; 1.13). As B. J. Malina says (1.39:2), "Any ade­quate under­standing of the Bible requires some understand­ing of the social system embod­ied in the words that make up our sacred Scripture" (cf. 1.10). Bruce Metzger concurs by saying that "every serious attempt to understand the Scriptures must be his­torically oriented" (1.9:7).

From the Ivory Tower to the Pew

From teaching adult Sunday school classes in various churches, I have come to realize that people are eager to know such things but intimidated by how much there is to learn. I repeated­ly hear, "How can I find out about these things without going to seminary? . . . Don't you have to be a Ph.D. to understand all this stuff?"

Likewise, more scholars today seem to be aware that the NT cannot be studied as though it were produced in a vacuum. In recent years several books on this subject have appeared, with sociological analyses proving particularly popular (1.24; 1.32; 1.54; earlier ones are reviewed in 1.28; 1.31). But most of them are aimed at audiences on the college and seminary level, not for a general readership. Malina's informative book, for example, is intended for "freshman and sophomore college students as they come to grips with the data presented in introducto­ry New Testament courses" (1.39:v). Stam­baugh and Balch assure us that "students in colleges and seminaries and at more advanced levels" will find their book helpful (1.53:1).

What about the people in the pews? Where can a lay person se­rious about the study of the NT turn for help? Is it necessary to go to seminary or graduate school? This book is intended for such people, to point them to material which presents scholarly informa­tion in a way that non-professional readers can understand, either working on their own or in a group setting.

The professionals who make the study of the NT their life's work do what experts in any area do: they develop a special vocab­ulary for talking about their field, and they share a fund of knowl­edge not readily available to those outside that field. A few seem actually to mistrust the lay public. One scholar has advocated the publication of two separate translations of the New Testament, one for specialists and the other for an untutored public who need a cleaned-up version since they can't comprehend the subtleties of the origi­nal (1.21).

Most scholars, however, don't deliberately try to conceal their knowledge from lay people. Yet it has become almost second nature for many of them to envelope the NT in a layer of arcane scholar­ship, most of which seems to be writ­ten in German. They talk about traditions­geschichte and pericopes and redaction criticism in tones which suggest that they regard the NT as their private preserve, open only to the initiated. Mi­chael Grant, for exam­ple, cautions that "the study of the highly idiosyn­cratic Gospels requires that all the normal tech­niques of the historian should be supple­mented by a mass of other disci­plines, though this is a counsel of perfection which few students, if any, can even begin to meet" (1.29:197).

As if that were not enough intimidation, other scholars suggest that anyone hoping to understand the NT must first master the vo­luminous collection of rabbinic traditions, or the literature written between the Old Testament (hereafter OT) and the NT. Still oth­ers advise the prospec­tive student of the NT to learn something about archeology and coins. On top of all that, Wayne Meeks complains about the "isolation of New Testament study from other kinds of historical scholarship __ not only from secular study of the Roman Empire, but even from church history" (1.41:1). Perhaps even the specialists are guilty of taking too narrow a view of their subject and do not know enough about a variety of re­lated fields. E. A. Judge seems to think so. He accuses scholars inter­ested in this period of being "handicapped by disciplinary boun­daries" (1.35:23). Gasque says that "concentration on one testament or the other is bound to lead to a lack of balance" (1.28:74).

The result of all this specialization has been the creation of a chasm between scholars and the general public. S. J. Patterson de­scribed the situa­tion succinctly (1.49:16):

As scholars, we are not generally encouraged to share our work with a wider public. . . . Rather, we tend to communicate with each other through our own rather arcane media . . . . What has resulted is, on the one hand, a professional guild that rather na­ively assumes that it may confine itself to historical or literary matters without the slightest expectation that anyone would find our work of any great theological or cultural significance and, on the other hand, a general public with little awareness of what scholars are doing.

Parish ministers might seem to be the ideal bridge between scholars and the laity. They've been to seminary, and they have dai­ly contact with lay people. But few ministers become biblical schol­ars in seminary. Their course work emphasizes training for their service in a church. Once they're on the job, the majority of their time is divided among sermon prepara­tion, pastoral care, and church administration. Nor is a twenty-minute sermon the ideal format for presenting this kind of back­ground information. Anyone studying the historical- cul­tural background of the NT needs time to reflect on what is read and absorb it. The minister's primary interest in a text is usually its applicability to the lives of parishioners. When ministers do talk about the background of a biblical text, they may have only limited information from a commen­tary and little time to browse in a library, even if one is nearby.

I once heard a minister describe Paul's imprisonment in Rome during the course of a sermon. The congrega­tion was given a graphic picture of the apostle clanking around in chains in a dank, foul-smell­ing dungeon that would have made the Tower of London look like a luxury hotel. The account was so vivid we could prac­tically hear rats scurrying around in the straw on the floor. It was also totally inaccurate: that's not the way the Romans treated peo­ple in prison. This is an isolated incident, but it illustrates the prob­lem. The minister's misunder­standing of the culture of NT times was affecting his interpretation of the text (Phil. 1). He was reading into it things not there in an effort to make his point about how God helps us bear up under adversity. At the same time, he was missing some of the real meaning of the passage.

My hope is that any lay person seriously wanting to learn something about the NT will find this book useful. I have tried to write in a style that will enable high-school graduates with interests in study­ing the NT to understand the material. I also hope that ministers and other profes­sion­als who want to integrate their knowledge of some part of the ancient world into a larger whole will find the book helpful. It won't answer every question you may have. No single source can. It is intended to provide brief introductions to the major questions which arise when you begin to examine the cul­tural context of the NT.

To help you find more information, it also includes, at the end of each chapter, references to books and articles in English which you can read to explore a particular topic further. The items in the bibliogra­phy are of varying difficulty, but anyone with a desire to learn can profit to some degree from reading any of them. I don't pretend that this is an exhaustive bibliogra­phy, but it should help you take a second step in your quest for under­standing the NT. When items in the bibliography are referred to in parenthe­ses in the text (in bold numbers), this is not meant to imply that the author of the article agrees with the point I'm making, merely that the source says something on the same point. The ancient writers cited most fre­quently are discussed in Appen­dix 1.

Theology and History

Exploring the cultural background of the NT is not the same as studying its theological meaning, but the theological meaning is often influenced by the cultural context of a passage. The cultural context is intimately bound up in the original language of the text. The text which most people read today is a translation, not the original.

Scripture references in this book are from the New Revised Standard Version unless otherwise noted. The very fact that we aren't read­ing the text in the original language removes us one step from a full under­standing even as we open the book. As W. Meeks says, "Even so simple a task as translating a sentence from an ancient language into our own re­quires some sense of the social matrices of both the original utter­ance and ourselves . . . . If we trans­late without that awareness, we are only moving bones from one coffin to another" (1.41:5). Let's study some specific examples of how a clear­er understanding of the social-cultural background of the NT enables us to interpret the text more accurately.

Stone Walls and Prisons

Let's look again at the question of Paul writing from prison. That very phrase, "writing from prison," conjures up in our minds a man in a small cell with no freedom of movement. It may even evoke an image of someone like Dietrich Bonhoeffer writing letters from a Nazi prison. We read that into the passage because it is the cultural baggage (or the "social matrix," to use Meeks's more refined term) which we associate with the concept.

But the Roman social matrix of imprisonment was quite dif­ferent. As the Oxford Classical Dictionary (2nd ed., p. 879) notes, "Roman criminal law did not recognize the imprisonment of free persons as a form of punishment." The Digest, part of the first collection of Roman laws published in A.D. 533 and reflecting much earlier practices, admits that pro­vincial governors sometimes imprisoned people, "but they should not do so, for such penalties are forbid­den; prisons are for holding men for trial, not for punishing them" (48.19). How long an individual might be detained for questioning or until a trial was held could vary. There was no right of habeas corpus or guarantee to a speedy trial. Family or friends, however, were not likely to be denied access to prisoners (1.61). Some magistrates did gain reputations for treating prisoners cruelly, but this was a matter of individual personalities, not of Roman policy (1.63).

Once sentence had been passed, a person might be incarcerated until pun­ishment was inflicted. That usually followed close on the heels of the trial. After conduct­ing a trial of Christians in the province of Bithynia in A.D. 112, Pliny the Younger __ normally a humane person, to judge from his treatment of social inferiors in other situations (1.55) __ ordered those who refused to recant to be taken away and executed (Ep. 10.96).2 The severity of punishment varied according to the guilty person's social status (4.51; 7.51). Fines could be imposed, particularly on wealthier people. Forced labor was a common penalty for the lower classes, but they were not necessarily locked up each night. Pliny discovered several cases of men who had walked away from the mines and quarries to which they had been condemned and who "in their old age, from all reports, are living modestly and quietly" (Ep. 10.31).

Paul's imprison­ment could more accurately be described as house arrest, confine­ment to an ordinary house. An attentive read­ing of the NT makes this clear. Philippians 1 merely refers to Paul's imprison­ment in Rome. Acts 28:16 gives us more informa­tion: "When we came into Rome, Paul was allowed to live by himself, with the soldier who was guarding him." He stayed for two years "at his own expense" (Acts 28:30; cf. 1.58). The NRSV gives "in his own hired dwell­ing" as an alternative rendering of that phrase. During that time people "came to him at his lodging in great num­bers" (Acts 28:23), and he was "pro­claiming the kingdom of God and teaching about the Lord Jesus Christ with all boldness and without hindrance" (Acts 28:30). Being "in prison" in ancient Rome begins to sound more like a minor incon­venience than a fate to be dreaded (though we shouldn't make light of it).

Roman sources reveal more general­ly how prisoners were treated during Paul's lifetime. The biographer Suetonius says that, after the emperor Tiberi­us exiled his niece Agrippina the Elder and her two sons, "whenever he moved them from one place to another, they rode in closed litters, in chains and under guard" (Tib. 64). They were in chains, though, only while being moved. Tiberius was regarded as partic­ularly cruel to his ex-wife Julia because he imprisoned her in a house and would not permit her to have visitors (Tib. 50). If Paul was ever chained, as he claims in Acts 28:20, it would have been during one of his moves or to keep him from escaping when crowds of people came to see him. There is no mention of chains, however, when he was being transported from Palestine to Rome. The accompanying centurion even "treated Paul kindly" (Acts 27:3).

Except for sheds known as ergastula, where slaves were some­times penned up (1.56), there were no facilities for long-term impris­onment in an ancient town. When Paul was arrested in Jerusalem, he was locked up in the sol­diers' bar­racks (Acts 23:16). Even when he was beaten and impris­oned in Philip­pi, the beating, not the im­prisonment, was his punishment. If Paul was kept under house ar­rest in Rome for a long time, it was because his case was slow to re­ceive a hearing. The Roman judicial system could grind almost as slowly as our own if the govern­ment wasn't particu­larly interested in a case.

The closest the Romans came to pun­ishing some­one by lengthy impris­onment was exile to some island or re­mote part of the Em­pire. Exile could be of two types. In one, the person was ordered to keep a cer­tain distance from Rome but could move about as he/she chose. Cicero was sen­tenced to that type of exile; he was required to stay at least four hun­dred miles from Rome. The emotional impact of such a sentence was probably greater than any physical discomfort suffered (1.59; 1.62).

In the other type of exile, the person was con­fined ("rele­gated") to a par­ticular spot. Per­sons in exile would live in a house in some small town where they could be watched, but they were not usually kept under lock and key. Augus­tus relegated the poet Ovid to a small town on the Black Sea, a place that is now an East­ern Eu­ropean version of the Riviera. Ovid com­plained bitterly and made it sound like a living hell, but he learned the native dialect and continued to write po­etry:
An Exile's Anguish

Spare me, father of our country! Don't forget my name and snatch from me the hope that I might someday placate you. I'm not asking to be allowed to come home, although I believe that the great gods have granted greater prayers. If you would give me a milder place of exile, one closer to Rome, a large part of my punishment would be lifted. My suffering couldn't be any worse, cast out into the midst of enemies. No exile is farther away from his homeland. I alone have been sent to the seven-mouthed Danube, whose waters scarcely keep out the crowd of barbarians. Although others have been exiled for more serious reasons, no one has been sent to a more remote spot than I. No place is farther away than this, except for the cold and the enemy and the sea whose waters solidify with the cold . . . . I ask only a safer and somewhat more peaceful place of exile, so that my punishment may be equal to my crime.

Ovid, Tristia 2.179-191, 577-578

Augustus also exiled Archelaus, the de­posed king of Judea, to Gaul. (Spend­ing a few years in a villa in France sounds like the pris­on sentences some white-col­lar crimi­nals receive in our day.)

Exile was a punishment usual­ly re­served for per­sons of some status, a fact which should shed light on our reading of the book of Revelation. Its author, John, was in exile on the island of Patmos (Rev. 1:9). He was not, it seems, some petty criminal in the eyes of the Roman govern­ment. The pages of the historian Taci­tus are filled with people, al­most always aristocrats, exiled to small towns or islands or to one of their country es­tates when the emperor even suspected them of misconduct. They were usually recalled when the next emperor came to power. Caligula once asked a returned exile how the man had spent his time. Trying to flatter the new em­peror, the man replied, "I prayed constantly to the gods for Tibe­rius' death, and for your accession; and my prayer was an­swered." Fearful that the people he had exiled were praying for his own death, Caligula "sent agents around to the islands and had them kill all the exiles" (Suetonius, Calig. 28).

Lower-class criminals could be sent to work in mines in various places around the Mediterra­nean. But it that was John's fate on Patmos, he would not have had writing materials or the privacy necessary to compose his book. He would have been forced to work each day until he dropped. Thus it seems unlikely that he was a prisoner of that class; he was "in exile."

This is just one case where reading ancient source material shows us that a concept __ imprison­ment, in this instance __ which means one thing to us meant something quite different in antiquity. Yet misconcep­tions about this and other background matters per­sist among lay and clerical readers of the NT. Where do they come from?

Many of them have been created by writers and artists who knew nothing of how people actually lived, ate, or died in the first century A.D. They read their own cultural experiences back into the NT. Many of the concepts which underlie today's commentar­ies and Sunday school lessons were formulated in this way by the time of the Reformation. They have been handed down without critical examination since.

The Last Supper

Sometimes all it takes is one picture to fix an image in our minds. Consider our conception of the Last Supper. Few of us, I dare say, can visu­alize that event without thinking of Leonardo da Vinci's painting, completed in 1498. Some churches even stage living tab­leaux with people posing as da Vinci painted the apostles and Jesus. Because of the perva­sive influ­ence of this portrayal, it has become part of our unspo­ken assumption about the Last Supper that every­one present was sitting around a table.3 Most English trans­lations of the Bible use the word "sitting" in this passage, thus reinforcing the image from another side (as in Mark 14:18, KJV).

What do we make, then, of the passage which says that "one of his disci­ples __ the one whom Jesus loved __ was reclining next to him" (John 13:23), "close to the breast of Jesus" (RSV)? Some mis­informed inter­pret­ers have taken this as an indication that there was an intimate relationship between the two. This is one of the passages, along with the friendships of David and Jonathan, Naomi and Ruth, and Paul and Timothy, usually adduced as supporting evidence in discussions of a favorable biblical attitude toward ho­mosexuality (1.64-66; 1.70). Others find a clear condemnation of such practices (1.69), while some emphasize the ambiguity of the passages (1.67-68; see also chapter 8).

Many Christians are uncomfortable with the notion of a homo­sexual Savior. How do they answer the charge? One well-inten­tioned writer tried to argue that Jesus' culture was more open to touching and that Jesus himself "didn't hesitate to let the apostle John rest his head on his bosom nor shake him away because of what people might think" (1.69:1400). That argument is obviously circular. If the society was more open to touching, no one would think any­thing about their posture, and Jesus would not have to be concerned with shaking John away.

The resolution of the question, though slightly different, is cul­turally based. Jesus and his disciples ate the Passover not sitting in chairs around a table but reclining on couches.4 The Greek verbs used in all the Gospels mean "to recline," not "to sit."5 The phrase "to lean (recline) on someone's breast" is an idiom in Greek mean­ing no more than "to sit next to someone" in English. So we find that even a quick insight into the cultural setting of the narrative re­solves what appeared to be a difficulty for interpretation. Argu­ments based on a misreading of the text can be recognized as deceptive.

Images of the Crucifixion

Another small point of confusion arises with regard to the crucifix­ion. Medieval artists have left us with an inaccurate impression about an important facet of how Jesus was crucified. When we read in the Gospels that nails were driven into Jesus' hands, we visualize marks in the palms of his hands. We have probably sung that old hymn, "Place your hands in the nail-scarred hands," and have con­jured up in our minds an image of a man's palms. St. Francis of Assisi even claimed to bear the stigmata, the marks of Christ's cruci­fixion, with scars in his palms.

Instances are known today of devout people who have bled from their palms after periods of intense meditation or prayer. Oc­casionally indi­viduals have themselves crucified as an act of devo­tion, and the nails are always driven into the palms of the hands. An illustration from a newspaper ad shows how pervasive this image has become:

From archeological finds, however, we now know that the Romans drove nails in behind the wrist bone because the fragile bones of the hand would not support the weight of a hu­man body hanging on a cross. The Greek word for hand covers the wrist. The Latin word manus does not. Few artistic represen­tations of the crucifixion were created before A.D. 600. The Roman government out­lawed that form of execution ca. A.D. 400. When medieval artists read their Latin NT __ or, more likely, heard it read to them __ and began painting pictures of the crucifixion, no one living had seen anyone crucified, so they painted what they thought they could deduce from the text. From archeological finds we now know how the hands would have been fastened and that the body would have been positioned on the cross with the legs drawn up and turned to one side so that a single nail could have been driven through both heels (1.80).

In light of the fact that medieval artists did not know where the Romans drove in the nails during a crucifixion, the relic known as the Shroud of Turin, which is alleged to be Jesus' burial shroud (cf. Mark 15:46; John 20:6) presents an interpretive problem. This piece of linen with a faint image of a man on it has been the center of intense study and controver­sy since the late nine­teenth century (1.78; 1.80). No one has yet been able to explain to everyone's satisfaction how the image was put on the cloth. The shroud itself was subjected to carbon-14 testing, which es­tablished a date for the cloth of ca. 1300 AD (1.75; 1.82). Some scholars have expressed doubts about the claims for reli­ability of the date and reservations about the way the tests were done (1.76; 1.79). Most significantly, the image shows a blood stain not in the back of the man's right hand (his hands are crossed over his lower abdomen) but higher up, in his right wrist. No medieval artist ever painted the nail wounds in that position. If this shroud is a fourteenth-cen­tury forg­ery, how did this particular artist know something known by no one else on the face of the earth at that time? (1.74).

The Zero Factor

Sometimes people base important parts of their theology on a mis­under­standing of the cultural background of the NT. Herbert W. Arm­strong, founder of the Worldwide Church of God and Am­bassador College and publisher of the Plain Truth magazine, argued that Jesus could not have been crucified on Friday and resurrected on Sunday because three days won't fit between Friday and Sunday. Any grade-school child can see that his arithmetic makes sense. Given the way we count, from Friday after­noon to Sunday morning is a day and a half, at most. But not if you count like the Jews and Romans did. They lacked a zero in their mathemati­cal systems; the zero was not used as a numer­al until the early seventh century A.D., by an Indian mathematician named Brahmagupta (cf. 1.85:69-72). With­out a zero, the Jews and Romans counted the day on which some­thing occurred as the first day. In Luke 13:32, Jesus counts in exact­ly this fashion: "Listen, I am casting out demons and performing cures today and tomorrow, and on the third day I finish my work."

Furthermore, a portion of a day was counted as a whole day. So, if Jesus spent any part of a day in the tomb, it would count as a full day. He was placed in the tomb before sunset on Friday, and the day began at sunset. Thus, by the counting system in use in NT times, Friday was the first day, Saturday the second, and Sunday __ which began at sundown on Saturday __ was the third, no matter how small a part of each day Jesus was in the tomb.

Conclusion

These are examples of only a few passages in the NT which have been misun­derstood or misinter­preted because people had inade­quate knowledge of the Greco-Roman world in which the NT was written. They illustrate the point that an understanding of the cultural background of the NT can have an impact on one's theologi­cal understanding of it. At the risk of being repetitious, understand­ing the context affects our interpretation of the text. As Allan Janssen put it, "Not only are we indebted to a contextual reading; we cannot escape it. Nor, perhaps, were we ever meant to!" (1.86:24).

What follows is an effort to introduce lay people to the wealth of infor­mation which can enrich their study of the NT. Since the most immediate context of the life of Jesus is Judaism, we will begin by looking at various facets of that religion and culture, then examine the political structure of the Roman Empire before studying certain aspects of Roman culture in more detail.

Notes

1. This strip itself is built on some cultural in-jokes. The title char­acters are named after Arlo Guthrie and Janis Joplin, popular figures of the late 1960's. Gene is the namesake of Senator Eugene McCarthy, popular but unsuccessful Democratic presidential aspirant in 1968. Knowing even that much about the background of the strip enables the reader to enjoy it on a differ­ent level.

2. For fuller discussion of this letter, see chapter 3.

3. It is unlikely, though, that they would all have been sitting on one side of the table, as da Vinci shows them. Not even the people of his own day ate that way. He could not, however, have shown any apostle with his back to the viewer. Similarly, on TV shows and in theatrical productions today people usually don't sit all the way around a table when they eat. Performers want their faces instead of their backs toward the camera or the audience.

4. Dinner customs in the Greco-Roman world will be discussed in detail in chapter 7.

5. The verb "to sit" does occur in the NT, often in connection with the posture which Jesus assumed when teaching, as in Matthew 5:1; 13:1-2; 23:2; Mark 13:3.