Historical and Cultural Context for the New Testament

Years ago, I read an article about how some Japanese toilets have special built-in features, including electric seat warmers.  I thought this was weird.  I would not want to sit on a warmed toilet seat and I didn't understand why someon else would.  I couldn't explain it further than thinking to myself that different people feel differently about different things.  Many years later, I talked to friend who had returned to the U.S. after spending some months living in Japan.  He told me that the Japanese did not heat their entire homes.  In cold seasons, they would heat the space they were staying in, or just their beds at night.  After learning that, I was able figure out for myself why a Japanese person would want a seat warmer on their toilet.  In an American, climate-controlled house, a room-temperature toilet seat is about 70 degrees Fahrenheit.  A warmed toilet seat would be unpleasantly warm; to me it would feel like someone had just been sitting on the seat.  Though I fully accept that other people use the same toilet seats as me, I don't like to be reminded of the fact.  Now, what if room temperature is 50 degrees?  Suddenly, the toilet seat warmer made sense to me.

So what does this have to do with the Bible?  It shows that context matters.  If you want to understand why people in other cultures do what they do, it helps a lot to understand their circumstances.  This goes doubly when people aren't just separated from you by distance and borders, but also by long stretches of time.  I like to think the Bible mostly speaks for itself, but really there's a lot in it that might not make sense to a modern reader.  In recent years, I've got into reading about the historical and cultural context of the Bible, expecially the New Testament.  It's been so helpful to me in making sense of difficult parts that I think everyone who seriously wants to understand the Bible should do it.  The following are some books that I recommend to anyone who wants to learn about the historical and cultural context of the New Testament.  None are very long and I don't think any require much background apart from the Bible itself and some general knowledge of the Roman empire.

Poet & Peasant and Through Peasant Eyes: A Literary-Cultural Approach to the Parables in Luke  by Kenneth E. Bailey

You may have heard in a sermon that it's important that the father of the Prodigal Son runs to his son when he returns because in traditional Middle Eastern cultures, it's undignified for a grown man to run.  Ok, maybe not, but in my experience those kinds of facts appear in sermons every once in a while.  If you had, you might wonder where that bit of information from came from.   The answer is the late Kenneth E. Bailey.  Bailey wrote several books that interpret parts of the Bible using his knowledge of Middle Eastern culture and customs as well as his knowledge of ancient Middle Eastern Bible translators and commentators.  Poet & Peasant and Through Peasant Eyes are two of the earliest of these books, combined into one volume.  In them, he explains how Jesus' contemporaries would likely have understood several of Jesus' parables.  Not only that, he analyzes the structure of the parables, showing that their sentences are arranged deliberately in known rhetorical forms.  I love these books and consequently I love Kenneth Bailey.  There is so much insight to be had from them. 

Jerusalem in the Time of Jesus by Joachim Jeremias

A wide-ranging book about... Jerusalem in the time of Jesus.  Lots of information about the size, structure and economy of Jerusalem and other interesting things like trades and Jewish marriage customs.  Perhaps most useful for understanding the New Testament are the sections about Jewish religious groups.  They explain who the Pharisees and the Sadducees were, and who those "scribes" were that Jesus was arguing with in the Gospels.

Josephus: Thrones of Blood

This is an abridgement and paraphrase of two of Josephus' books: The Antiquities of the Jews and The Jewish War.  In these books, Josephus writes for a Roman audience, giving an account of the history of the Jewish nation from the times of the Herods to the destruction of Jerusalem in 70 A.D.  The modern language of this paraphrase makes it easier to read than the older English translations, and it's not a long book.  It's good for understanding the political climate that Jesus and his disciples lived in.

Slaves, Citizens, Sons: Legal Metaphors in the Epistles by Francis Lyall

In this book, Lyall explains Roman, Greek and Hebrew law pertaining to slavery, citizenship, sonship, inheritance and adoption.  Dry stuff?  No, because it's useful for understanding what Paul means when he writes about being adopted into God's family, being "sons of God", being a "bondservant of Christ", etc.  It's also interesting to see how some things that so many modern people take for granted, like the fact that laws apply to all individuals in a society, just weren't so in the ancient world, especially Rome.  In Roman law, only free men (usually heads of households) were subject to law.  Everyone else -- women, children, slaves and unemancipated sons -- were considered to be property and therefore considered to be "objects" as far as laws were concerned.

The Old Testament Apocrypha

For most of my life, I never read the Apocrypha or thought much about them.  But then I read N. T. Wright's series, "Christian Origins and the Question of God".  In these books, he references them so often that I had to read them to know what he was talking about.  Most were boring to me.  2 Esdras is strange.  I found Ben Sirach's proverbs to be interesting; some are good, but others are worldly and self-interested.  Some are even contrary to what Jesus taught, which reinforces my Protestant belief that it should be canonical.  Even so, these books were read by Jesus' contemporaries and are likely to represent their worldview.  Also, they fill in some of the gap between Old Testament and New Testament history.