Bringing Social Science to New Testament Studies
by James A. Bacon
Bill Warren had a very simple point to make in his paper, “Literacy and Social Strata in the Roman Empire: Identifications and Locations.” The literacy rate for the Roman Empire as a whole may have been low, around five to 10 percent. But in the cities of the eastern Mediterranean where Christianity took root it was considerably higher, perhaps 15 to 25 percent. The issue was of more than abstract interest to Warren, director of the Center for New Testament Textual Studies at the New Orleans Baptist Theological Seminary, because literacy levels had implications for how written documents like the Gospels and Epistles were written, transmitted and received in the early church.
Little did Warren imagine the lively discussion he’d set off when he presented the paper at the March 2001 conference of the Context Group. Nearly every one of the 30 scholars and graduate students in attendance had pronounced opinions on the subject. Richard L. Rohrbaugh, the Lewis and Clark College professor charged with responding to the paper, set the tone with a lively analysis. He provided an overview of the raging debate over literacy rates in Roman antiquity. Along the way, he commented on the unreliability of population estimates in the Roman world, distinguished between occuliteracy, scribal literacy and numeracy — the abilities to read, write and work with numbers — and posited some thoughts on the likely illiteracy of Jesus. Then he presented a comprehensive bibliography.
As others chimed in, the conversation ranged widely. Some were fascinated by the question of Jesus’ literacy. Citing Luke, who depicted Jesus as reading in the synagogue, they suggested that he might have been occuliterate. Others explored the possibility that the Judeans, whose culture centered on the Torah, might have enjoyed higher levels of literacy than surrounding cultures. That led to a discussion of how illiterate peasant societies transmitted knowledge of epics and sacred texts through memorization and recitation, and inspired comments on the role of writing as an administrative tool of the ruling classes and an instrument of social control. All the while, participants peppered Warren with citations of enough articles and books to keep him immersed in the subject for months.
“The feedback was interesting and helpful,” says Warren. He got insight into related controversies and ideas for developing the topic along other lines. “Hopefully, the discussion will lead to a more solid treatment of the literacy topic in a forthcoming publication in the field of New Testament textual criticism.”
The hour-long exchange of ideas was vintage Context Group. Each year, scholars submit drafts of papers for a round of friendly yet rigorous peer review before seeking publication. The feedback is incredibly valuable, notes K.C. Hanson, a founding member and an editor at Fortress Press. There is none of the grandstanding and personal put-downs he’s witnessed at other conferences. Everyone is there to help one another. Indeed, one of the remarkable features of the Context conferences is the sharing of bibliographies and sources, he says. The environment is collaborative, not competitive, and members frequently wind up working on books and articles together.
The Context Group defines itself as a “working group of international scholars committed to the use of the social sciences in biblical interpretation.” Roughly half come from the United States. The rest hail from Canada, the United Kingdom, Germany, South Africa and Belgium. The group meets annually in the U.S., although it has held additional conferences in Scotland, Spain, Germany and the Czech Republic. Most members deem themselves New Testament scholars, but the group is open to applying social-scientific perspectives to Old Testament research as well.
Though not nearly as large or well known as the famed Jesus Seminar, Context Group scholars arguably have been just as influential in shaping the direction of New Testament and historical Jesus research. While Jesus Seminar findings on the authentic words and deeds of Jesus remain controversial, even divisive, senior Context Group scholars have introduced social-scientific perspectives into biblical studies that are now transforming the vocabulary and analytical framework that others use to discuss the New Testament. The Context Group has no theological agenda as an organization, so its findings have not inspired the hostility and backlash that the liberal-leaning Jesus Seminar has encountered.[1]
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For 200 years, New Testament scholarship consisted overwhelmingly of textual analysis. To be sure, other disciplines such as archaeology were working on the fringes, and the discovery of new documents such as the Nag Hammadi texts and the Dead Sea Scrolls enriched the background of Gnostic and Judean thought. But the great breakthroughs in thinking about the historical Jesus came from new methods of dealing with traditional New Testament sources: source criticism, form criticism, redaction criticism and so on. Generations of scholars pored over the same New Testament verses pericope by pericope, line by line, word by word. Theories rose and fell on the meaning of single phrases. However, this eruption of erudition suffered from one grievous limitation: The meaning of words was determined by the 1st-century social setting of those who spoke and heard them. Until exegetes reconstructed the social context of the texts, they could not fully understand what the words meant to those who used them. Using 19th- and 20th-century categories of thought, scholars frequently missed the mark.
In the 1970s, a new generation began groping for that context. Young scholars ventured into other disciplines in search of tools that might wring fresh insight from the desiccated codices. Jack Elliott was one. A professor of the New Testament at the University of San Francisco, he had written a commentary on one of the neglected letters of the New Testament, 1 Peter. He was the first to decipher the social context of the letter, which he suggested was written by someone in Rome to recent migrants to a city in Asia Minor between 70 and 90 A.D. With a handle on the real-world social situation of the audience, Elliott says, he read the letter as addressing very concrete concerns, not metaphysical ones as previously thought. After he gave an address on the topic in 1979 at a meeting of the Catholic Biblical Association, someone came up to him and said, “We’ve got to get together.” That person was Bruce Malina, who at the time was delving into the literature of cultural anthropology for insights into the New Testament world.
Elliott, Malina and like-minded scholars met regularly throughout the early 1980s. In 1986, Robert Funk, founder of the Westar Institute and the Jesus Seminar, invited them to create the Social Facets group under the auspices of Westar. For the next few years, the “social scientists” gathered twice a year at the same time and place as the Jesus Seminar. “We ate together, we went out together,” recalls Elliott, who chaired the group. A few individuals would attend meetings of both groups, cross-fertilizing ideas. Context Group scholars made lasting friendships with noted Jesus Seminar members like Marcus Borg and John Kloppenborg.
In 1989, however, the Social Facets colleagues parted ways with Funk. Elliott cites differences over the Jesus Seminar’s controversial methodology — voting on the authenticity of Jesus’ sayings — which Funk wanted to apply to Social Facets work. Others describe personality conflicts with Funk, whose goals for Social Facets did not coincide with those of its members. “The blowup was indeed very ugly,” says Richard L. Rohrbaugh, professor of Christian studies at Lewis & Clark College, who had served as the group’s representative on the Westar board.
The problem wasn’t personality conflict, responds Funk, but differing objectives. “The mission of Westar was to arrive at consensus results and convey those results to a broad audience in non-technical language,” he says. “We found that the Social Facets group did not want to adopt a goal-oriented agenda.” There was little helpful interchange between Social Facets and the Jesus Seminar, he adds. Given his limited resources at the time, he concluded that it was ill advised to continue to offering hospitality to a group that had little or no interest in his program.
“I invited them to arrange for their own meetings, under their own auspices,” Funk says. “It was one of the wiser decisions I have made as the director of Westar. From my point of view, the separation was not at all ugly … but actually a release from constant unhealthy and unprofitable conflict.”
The Social Facets group reorganized under the name of the Context Group. At Rohrbaugh’s invitation, the old gang rendezvoused at a Franciscan retreat in Portland, Ore., his hometown. The group functioned, as it always had, as a confederation of scholars that met to share ideas, support one another and enjoy each other’s company. No full-time directors. No ambitious collective goals. The group reconvened every spring until the Franciscans sold the retreat facility. This year, the conclave assembled at Notre Dame University in South Bend, Ind., stomping grounds of Jerome H. Neyrey, another founding member.
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Context Group scholars are unknown to the public, but their collective work is influencing the way other New Testament scholars look at the world of Jesus and Paul. Drawing primarily upon the work of cross-cultural anthropologists, for example, they recognized that the honor/shame complex of values accurately described the value system of the ancient Mediterranean world. Cultures that share this orientation exhibit a strong group consciousness; individuals derive their personal identities and sense of self worth from their status within the group. Individuals are motivated largely by the desire to achieve honor, glory and acclaim from their peers. Accordingly, historical interpretations in which Jesus, Paul and others act like individualistic, 21st-century North Americans and Europeans are gravely flawed.
Another insight was the recognition that modern classifications of society into separate spheres of economics, politics and religion do not apply to the ancient world. Free markets working in accordance with the laws of classical economics defined only a tiny percentage of the economic transactions that took place. Relationships between individuals were defined not by money but by power. Wealth was acquired and distributed according to the principles of patron-client relations in which powerful patrons and weaker clients exchanged money, gifts, influence, favors, support and acclaim. Religious institutions such as the great Temple of Jerusalem and kinship systems did not co-exist in separate spheres: They were embedded in the patron-client system in a way that moderns would find totally unfamiliar. Without understanding the logic of reciprocity in patron-client relations, historians cannot hope to fathom how institutions functioned in the ancient world.
Another breakthrough came from the study of “alternate states of consciousness” (ASCs) such as trances and visions. Ninety percent of the world’s population lives in cultures in which trances are considered normal, notes John Pilch, who first integrated ASC research into biblical studies. Only in contemporary Western Civilization, representing 10 percent of the world’s population, do people not encounter ASCs. New Testament scholars have long noted the similarities of biblical healings, exorcisms and sky journeys to shamanistic experiences in Third World societies, but they have been reluctant to draw any conclusions about behavior 2,000 years ago from contemporary ethnographic data. In recent years, however, studies in neurophysiology have demonstrated that the human body is “hard wired” for ASCs, suggesting that findings from the anthropological literature may indeed be applicable across time and culture.
Those topics, as significant as they are, are only “the tip of the iceberg,” says Rohrbaugh. Members of the group also have imported social-scientific perspectives on purity codes, kinship patterns, pre-industrial cities, healing and health care, redistributive economics, reciprocity patterns, group formation, the evil eye, gender segregation, parenting, dyadic personality, physiognomy, anti-language, gossip networks, liminality, the concept of limited good and status-degradation rituals.
Perhaps the social-scientific perspective that has spread the most broadly is the so-called Lenski-Kautsky model of advanced agrarian societies. Combining the perspectives of sociologists Gerhard Lenski and John Kautsky, this schema describes the economic and social stratification of the Roman Empire along with its dependencies and provinces such as Galilee and Judea. According to this model, society was dominated by elites — rulers, priests, military commanders, wealthy landowners — who lived mainly in cities, towns and large estates. By means of taxes, tithes, rents, and interest on debts, the elites extracted wealth from peasants and laborers dwelling mainly in villages. The system was exploitative: The villagers received very little in return for the wealth they yielded. John Dominic Crossan has popularized the model, citing it in his influential 1998 work, The Birth of Christianity. But he was hardly the only scholar, much less the first, to do so. As part of a presentation last year to a Society of Biblical Literature seminar that included Kautsky himself, Richard Rohrbaugh identified at least 30 scholars who had used the Lenski-Kautsky model. Indeed, he and Context Group colleague Douglas Oakman were the first to introduce the work of Lenski and Kautsky to New Testament studies.
The Context Group has made a significant impact on New Testament studies in a relatively short period of time, especially considering the somnambulant metabolism of academia. The dissemination of ideas is captive to the constraints of the academic calendar and the marginal economics of small, academic presses and journals staffed by volunteers. It typically takes a year or longer to get feedback from book reviews. National biblical conferences, the most important of which is held under the auspices of the Society of Biblical Literature, are held only once a year.
The accomplishments of the Context Group are all the more remarkable considering that many of the senior scholars are employed at small, liberal-arts colleges. Malina, a prolifically published scholar often cited as the “energizer” of the group, teaches at Creighton College in Omaha, Neb. Rohrbaugh works at Lewis and Clark in Portland, Ore., Elliott at San Francisco University. The roll call of smaller institutions includes St. Olaf College, Pacific Lutheran University and Canisius College, among other institutions. The professors at these colleges bear heavy teaching loads, exercise major administrative responsibilities and have few, if any, graduate students to help them. Context members attribute their scholarly productivity in large measure to the professional friendships and collaboration engendered by the group.
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The focus of New Testament studies is tight: a 100-year time frame, an insignificant land mass in the eastern Mediterranean. Thousands of professors and graduate students have picked over the same handful of documents for two centuries, straining for new interpretations and fresh insights upon which to advance their careers. Over the past two centuries, the number of truly revolutionary breakthroughs in the field can be counted on one hand. The application of social-scientific models from other disciplines, arguably, is one — at least if judged by the rich opportunities for research and reinterpretation that have opened up as a result.
The social-science movement within New Testament studies is broad-based, of course, extending far beyond the Context Group. But there is no denying the seminal contributions of this small band of scholars. “We have really created a whole sub-discipline: social-scientific criticism of the New Testament,” says Richard Rohrbaugh. “It is increasingly being recognized by the guild as a major new advance in exegetical methodology.”
Such a statement may sound bold, even boastful today. But in time, it could well seem an understatement.
April 18, 2001