On the Ideological Convenience of Q

Having taught on Matthew, Mark and Luke in the autumn, I've been mulling over various issues related to the synoptic problem. One thing that I've been thinking about in particular is the ideological convenience of Q (the hypothesised sayings gospel which the majority of scholars believe was the source for the material shared only by Matthew and Luke).

Precise applications of the Q theory vary widely, but generally speaking it's held to be earlier than (or at the latest contemporary with) Mark, and having its roots in the first recollections of Jesus' words by those that followed him during his ministry.

Whilst New Testament studies is a broad field, there are nonetheless two major camps, though there is considerable divergence within each. On one side we have what we'll call the conservatives. Broadly speaking they hold to the position that the gospels are, if not actually infallible, an historically accurate representation of what occurred in the life of Jesus. On the other hand we have the liberals who reject this position, believing that the best way to access Jesus and his teaching is by historical reconstruction using the gospels as key sources.

Now I should be clear that I am not claiming that those who believe in Q do so purely because it suits their ideological beliefs. Nevertheless, it is interesting that Q theory does suit both groups rather well. For this latter group the presumed antecedence of Q suggests that it is also more historically reliable. As a result the ethical teacher Jesus we would find were a copy of Q ever to be discovered is a supposedly more likely reconstruction than Mark's apocalyptic exorcist and miracle worker. In a context where exorcism and apocalypticism seem 'a bit weird' but the power of words is greatly appreciated, it's not hard to see the appeal of the Q theory.

Conversely were the Farrer-Goulder-Goodacre theory to be correct (i.e. that Matthew used Mark and then Luke used both Matthew and Mark) then this would suggest that the miracle working Jesus we find in Mark is the most historically probable, and that there's an increased chance that the ethical teacher is the invention of the early church.

For the conservatives the appeal is slightly more straightforward. Agreement with Q theory not only gives them a degree of academic credibility - they agree with the scholarly consensus on this crucial issue - but it also bolsters the reliability of the later gospels. The gap in time may remain the same but Q acts as a crucial stepping stone providing reassurance that the Jesus of the gospels really does correspond to Jesus as he actually was.

As I said above, the convenience of the Q theory isn't necessarily the reason why any given scholar believes in the theory. It does mean however that Farrar theorists (and other Q-sceptics) have their work cut out in overturning such a sizeable majority.

Edit: In the comments, Mark Goodacre mentioned something that I meant to say when I originally posted this. It stands to reason, of course, that those who reject Q may also be doing so for ideological reasons, myself, no doubt, included.

Geza Vermes on Radio 4's Sunday

Just caught part of Geza Vermes's interview by Edward Stourton on BBC Radio 4's Sunday programme. You can listen to the interview on the programme's podcast

Reflections on Ratzinger Conference

Last month I mentioned a conference on the Pope's book 'Jesus of Nazareth', and it took place at the end of last week. I had to work on the Thursday so I missed the opening session, but I did get to go for whole day on the Friday. It was the first real academic Biblical Studies conference I've been to, so I thought I'd discuss some of my thoughts about the day. I should add that as I also moved house this weekend, I hadn't had sufficient time to finish reading the book.

As I believe is reasonably standard, most of the sessions followed the same format with two or three speakers reading a paper, followed by some time for questions, clarification and further discussion. Although there were 3 panel discussions in the afternoon (where we had to choose which of three we would attend) they effectively functioned in the same manner only with smaller audiences and marginally shorter papers.

In the run up to the conference the person I had been most excited about hearing was Geza Vermes. Sadly he had to cancel and his presence was missed in more ways than one. Nevertheless there were a number of other speakers I had heard of including Marcus Bockmuehl who featured in the day's opening session with his paper 'Lessons learned from Reading Scripture with Pope Benedict'. But it was the other two papers in that session that had the greater resonances with the paper from Durham's Walter Moberly provoking the most immediate discussion. Moberly was primarily tackling Benedict's use of Exodus and Deuteronomy in the opening chapter. The Pope links the occurrences of the word "like" in Deut 18:15 and 34:10 and treats it as a specifically messianic prediction about Jesus. Moberly was suggesting that it was more likely that the word "like" had slightly different meanings in each context. This was one of the things I had disagreed with when I'd read the book, so I was surprised to see that many there, including John Millbank, strongly disagreeing with Moberly. Someone remarked that this perhaps highlighted the difference between the Theology types and those from Biblical Studies, an observation that I heard at least once more during the day. Olivier-Thomas Venard gave the session's final paper, and whilst there was little immediate discussion of it, it was referenced a few times throughout the day.

The second session featured papers from Simon Oliver, co-organiser Angus Paddison and Henri-Jérôme Gagey. Oliver and Paddison's papers were very much from the systemmatic theology side of things, and so didn't hugely appeal to me. Gagey's paper took a closer look at Ratzinger's attempt to stand in the gap between faith and historical criticism. Gagey was broadly supportive of the Pope's position, and I was surprised (again) that no-one really seemed to challenge it. Whilst Ratzinger is, in my view, broadly correct that it's a mistake to act solely from either extreme, his approach does seem to be very much more towards the faith end of the spectrum. At the time I had thought that one of the later speakers would perhaps offer a robust challenge to this position, and I imagine that this is very much the role that Vermes would have fulfilled had he been in attendance. Unfortunately no really did. Speaking in the afternoon James Crossley admitted that he had a number of quibbles with it, but deferred us to Gerd Ludemann. All this left things feeling somewhat unbalanced. Prior to the conference I had imagined that many of the papers would criticise Ratzinger on precisely this point. For me, it seems Ratzinger wants to have his cake and eat it. I was reminded of Marcus Borg's question to Tom Wright in 'The Meaning of Jesus' along the lines of "which parts of the gospels would you say were invented by the early church"? In a similar vein, it's difficult to see where he considers the results of historical criticism to challenge the orthodox "faith" position. He's fully entitled to take a literal position on the Transfiguration, but surely he should at least acknowledge, or even refute those who question its historicity.

The afternoon featured the aforementioned panel discussions, and I'd been looking forward to the one featuring James Crossley. I've not read much by Crossley, but know of him from his blog (which had also discussed the conference in advance), his dialogue with Tom Wright and his appearance in Channel 4's Secrets of the 12 Disciples at Easter. His main focus was on the way that Ratzinger, like many of the lives of Jesus since Vermes's 'Jesus the Jew' have presented a Jesus who is "Jewish, but not that Jewish". Unfortunately there was almost no time for questions, and those that were raised largely seemed to have misunderstood what was being said. Crossley gave an abrupt response, but then it was time to rush off. Jane Heath's paper in this session was also interesting. (Edit - Incidentally, Crossley has posted his own review of the day).

Once that session had overrun, we had to creep into the back of Roland Deines's paper 'Can the "Real" Jesus be Identified with the Historical Jesus?' This may have covered more of the material I felt was lacking overall, but we missed the start of it, and then spent the next minutes trying to work out where he was on his notes, and by that time it was largely over. Deines was followed by Mona Siddiqui who discussed the book from an Islamic position. I had hoped to ask her whether she felt its historical criticism / faith position could work as an approach to the Qu'ran, but there were too many questions. That left a final coffee break (with some delicious cake) before Fergus Kerr wrapped things up with a final paper on 'Reckoning with the Originality of Jesus: Where Did Christology Come from?'

Unfortunately, it then took me three and a half hours to get home for what is normally a 15 minute train ride. On the bright side it did mean that I got to spend over an hour chatting it all over with my friend Stu who is doing his PhD at Nottingham.

Overall, I very much enjoyed the occasion, but was surprised at how conservative the discussion was in general. Perhaps this is inevitable for a conference based on a book; generally very few people are prepared to invest the time and/or fork out the money to discuss something they hate. That said, it would have been good if one or two such people had turned up just to spice things up a bit.

McKnight on the Quest for the Historical Jesus

I've not got much time to post today, but I did want to draw attention to Scott McKnight's series on the quest for the Historical Jesus. There are three entries so far Reimarus to Schweitzer, Bultmann to the Jesus Seminar, and the Jesus Seminar.

Over at New Testament Gateway (where I first read about McKnight's series) Mark Goodacre raises one objection:

There is one comment I'd like to question:

If the days of Reimarus to Schweitzer were the old quest, the period of Bultmann is the "no" quest.

...Allison points out, many books about the historical Jesus were produced during that period, e.g. most famously by Joachim Jeremias.

The Essential Jesus

This isn't so much of a formal review as a few thoughts on Crossan's Book which I read over the autumn (fall) last year.

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Unlike John Dominic Crossan's previous works "The Essential Jesus" is more of a popular level text, which claims to be "the definitive presentation of Jesus' authentic sayings and teachings". Essentially it's a compilation of what Crossan considers to be the earliest, and authentic, sayings of Jesus alongside some of the earliest examples of Christian art. There's a brief introduction, ("Contexts") before the main section which lays out each saying on a fresh page and intersperses it with images of this early art (largely sculptures on sepulchres). The final two sections contain notes on the images, and then an inventory of images.

Crossan's methodology is very controversial, and he his fair share of ardent admirers and vitriolic critics alike. In terms of the collection of sayings, the raw information displayed here is already present in "The Historical Jesus: A Revolutionary Biography", but by making this collection the core feature of this book, it brings Crossan's reformed gospel into clearer focus. The use of images also contributes to the clarity of image that Crossan lays before his readers.

One the points that I found most interesting is Crossan's theory that two characteristics typified Jesus's Kingdom program - eating and healing. To support this theory he not only relies on the historical texts but also the sheer number of the earliest Christian images which depict meals or healings. Out of 60 typical images, 27 are eating scenes, and 19 are healing scenes. Whilst I'm not convinced that art is any less subject to bias, ideology and removal if deemed offensive, it's certainly an interesting point. Certainly the artistic evidence supports the textual evidence on this point, and it's interesting that this aspect, and particularly it's political implications, tend to be underplayed today. I intend to follow this up at some stage with an examination of the frequency which these two features figure in Jesus biopics. Certainly the miracles are often underplayed. How will the meal scenes fair?

The other point which I found interesting was Crossan's skill in making familiar texts fresh once again. Crossan provides his own translation for each text, based on his own five point process. i - both individual and social, ii - both political and religious, iii - sayings require both interpretation and translation, iv - structural and spatial presentation to return to the original more memorable phrases, v - minimal and poetic, also to reflect the original easy-to-remember format. However, in places, the new translation seems less memorable than the standard canonical versions. Perhaps that simply reflects my own familiarity with these canonical version, but whilst overall Crossan achieves his objective, in places it seems to only make things less easy to remember.

What really breathes fresh life into these texts is the way he asks after certain sayings "but how is the Kingdom of God like that"? It's a incredibly simple question, but pretty soon I realised that in many places I had uncritically accepted the explanation I had been given years ago (at Sunday school probably), and had not really listened to those texts since. Whilst Crossan's "Mediterranean peasant" filter gives him a particular angle on these things, even those who reject the prominence Crossan gives it will find the question helps them look at things anew.

So overall it was an interesting and challenging read. I should be clear that I don't agree with all of Crossan's approach. In places it is overly pessimistic, in others it's more Mediterranean than Jewish. But even despite my misgivings he has a number of fascinating insights which make "The Essential Jesus" well worth a read.

Why is the Historical Jesus Quest so difficult?

Mark Goodacre has an interesting post over at NT Gateway, summarising why the quest(s) for the historical Jesus is so tricky as 7 points

(1) So much data is missing, e.g. there is so little on Jesus’ life before 30.

(2) The data we do have is highly prejudiced, mainly pro-Christian propaganda.

(3) The sources we have are disputed -- different scholars value the sources differently

(4) The sources are sometimes contradictory and difficult to interpret.

(5) Our distance from the data is so great – we read our own prejudices into the texts.

(6) And now there is so much secondary literature available that it is difficult to navigate our way through it all.

(7) Jesus is a figure in whom so many have a stake, and the quest is often controversial.

These points are a mix of those that apply to any historical figure, and those that apply particularly to religious figures, or those whose ideologies remain controversial. However, with numbers 6 (the muddying of the waters by other questers) and 7 (the controversy), although they are not exclusive to Jesus, it's hard to think of a figure for who they could be truer. I'm guessing of course, but I imagine that more books have been written about Jesus than any other figure, and of course each of these has been distorted by these 7 points as well.

I'd also add an eighth - that there seems to be so little agreement. It must be very difficult to know what foundations to start building on, given that whichever foundation you start on will be rejected by more people than accept it. Obviously most people accept Jesus was a first century Jew, but beyond that there is such tremendous diversity.

Mark concludes that he will go on to tell his students that "the news is not all bad. We are actually surprisingly well informed about Jesus compared to many other figures from the ancient world". Which is true, and of course one advantage of his importance through the ages is that we have (relatively speaking) such old documents found and preserved.

One of the reasons that this summary is of interest is because I'm in the middle of a bit of a catch up session on historical Jesus literature at the moment. Having finally read Geza Vermes' "Jesus the Jew" over the summer, I've also recently finished Borg & Wright's "The Meaning of Jesus" (my thoughts on that can be read here), Crossan's "The Essential Jesus" which I hope to make a few rudimentary points on fairly soon. I've also (re-)read a few of the other documents outside the New Testament, such as "Q", Gospels of Thomas, and Mary, and the Infancy Gospel of James. I've also just acquired a copy of Crossan's "The Historical Jesus", and find myself wanting to re-read Wright's "Jesus and the Victory of God", as I've forgotten most of what I liked about it last time (other than what I've read of his elsewhere). Perhaps it's about time I re-read some of Mark's old lecture notes as well.

Was Q a Redactor?

Reading The Lost Gospel, Q at the weekend got me thinking about other possible explanations for the shared material in Matthew and Luke. I started to unpack some of these ideas yesterday, but wanted to do so more fully.

One of the problems I have with the view that Q existed as a deifinitive written source is the fact that no copy of this "lost gospel" has ever been discovered. Of course it can be argued that the same could be said about the Gospel of Thomas until 1945. However, there are to my mind three crucial differences. Firstly, the world has changed a great deal since then. The finds in Egypt and Qumran have greatly increased awareness that there might be other lost documents, and the increase in global communication has made it far more likely that if a copy of this document still exists it would find it's way into circulation.

Secondly, as far as I'm aware the Gospel of Thomas seems to have been the product of a single community, it's possible of course that it was more widely distributed, but I personally know of no evidence for that (please let me know if you know more on this than I do). On the other hand Q would not only be the product of the Q community, but at least two other communities those of Matthew and Luke. (Some scholars see our understanding of the early church as moving away from the community model, but it still seems to be the dominant model for the time being).

This brings me onto the third difference. Whereas the Gospel of Thomas may have been considered heretical, and thus its disappearance until 1945 is most likely explained by a purge by the orthodox church, Q was surely acceptable. It contained no heresy and formed a major part of two of the gospels that would eventually become canonical. Whilst it's certainly possible that it may have fallen into disuse, it is unlikely that it would disappear without trace.

The other problem I have with the existence of a written Q is that not only have we no copy, there seems to be no mention of such a document in early church history. We are aware of a number of texts such as the Assumption of Moses of which we have no copies, but we know about because one of the early church writers referred to them or even quoted from them. But there seems to be no parallel here. Again, given that this document would have been non-heretical it seems strange that its presence is not noted anywhere.

All of which brings me onto thinking that there may still be another explanation. It would be nice to see the Farrer theory explored in greater detail. One or two writers are taking up the challenge, but the overwhelming majority of scholars seem to be sailing on regardless and building very tall theories on, what seems to me at least, a very unstable foundation.

So I'd like to suggest another theory about this shared material. Not because I'm necessarily convinced by it, but perhaps because I find it at least as plausible as the Q theory, and hope that in some way it might cause scholars to look afresh at their assumption. I should state for the record that I don't seriously expect to have uncovered the solution to the synoptic problem (my lack of formal training would make that an incredibly arrogant claim and I am not convinced by this theory particularly myself), but I think there is some mileage in explaining it. And as this is a blog, where the whole point is a level of dialogue then I thought I'd voice it as a theory.

One of the (unverifiable) claims about Q is that is our earliest written gospel. Tom Wright is keen to point out that "gospels" such as Thomas and Q are nothing of the sort, since they contain no announcement about the good news of the kingdom, but that is another issue. The thing is that there is no evidence that Q pre-dates Mark by 10-20 years as Borg suggests. In fact the larger the gap between the composition of Q, and the composition of Mark becomes, the more implausible it becomes that Mark did not know Q.

If, as it seems fair to suppose Mark and Q write independently of one another then it is surely still feasible that Mark was actually written before Q. I started thinking then about the supposed lack of passion narrative in Q. It seems unlikely, to me at least, that the Q community would have embarked on the process which Borg so eloquently describes if he was just a failed wisdom teacher with a couple of miracles to his name. As I suggested yesterday, the fact that Matthew and Luke chose Mark's passion account does not mean that Q was without one. Q's could have been inferior, or, it's at least feasible that if it was written after Mark, that he knew it and used Mark's passion narrative, just as he had collating the other phrases more generally associated with Q?

The following portrait then begins to emerge. Mark wrote his gospel first. Both it's novelty, and it's engaging style meant that it became well known relatively quickly, and would long be beloved, ensuring its existence. Then along comes the author of Q, he has been gathering materials for some time, and weaves together a number of different sources into his account. He, perhaps has already accumulated the three types of material in what we call Q, Q1, Q2, and Q3. He has a good source of material about John the Baptist (looking at the material in an isolated form with a fresh pair of eyes, it is clear that Q consists of a great deal of material about John, perhaps one of Q's sources was one of John's followers). And now he has information about his miracles (to which he strangely only had indirect references save the centurion), and he also had some (and only some) of the material that has come to be known as M and L. He brings this altogether, and forms a new gospel.

Unfortunately Q is not a great writer. Where he incorporates a phrase or saying wholesale it rings true of the original detail, but his structuring, and the way he incorporates the sayings is clumsy. Nevertheless it gains some circulation, and the combination of its strengths and its weaknesses inspire two other writers to try and improve it and produce the gospels known as Matthew and Luke. They are able to do so fairly quickly, as a lot of the work has been done for them. They incorporate some of the oral tradition held in high regard by their communities, and re-work the material to be more in line with the teaching of those communities. Because they are part of larger, more significant, communities, these gospels also quickly circulate occasionally even reaching some places ahead of Q. Because they are better writers most Christians outside of their communities find both Matthew and Luke to be greatly preferable to Q, and so Q drops out of circulation, becomes ignored, and eventually forgotten.

Some of that no doubt sounds a little far fetched, but I find it hard to think of objections that do not also apply to the generally accepted Q theory. However, there are many that are far more learned than I, and can no doubt provide all sorts of objections, some of which would also not apply to Q. I invite them to do so.

The Lost Gospel, Q

I read Marcus Borg's "The Lost Gospel Q: The Original Sayings of Jesus" yesterday. I say Borg's but really his role was to be consulting editor and contribute a preface which, somewhat unusually, comes after Thomas Moore's introduction. However, neither man is responsible for the main section of the book - a collation and translation of the various sayings of Jesus that form the hypothetical source known as Q - This work was completed by Mark Powelson and Ray Riegert.

Whilst I'm not so much of a Q-sceptic as Mark Goodacre, whose two books on the subject are well worth a read, I'm certainly cynical about Q, and the amount of certainty that seems to rest on the hypothesis. So it was with mixed feelings I plucked this book off the shelf. Part of me thought it would be interesting to read all this sayings material in one volume, not to mention reading Borg's preface. On the other hand, bringing all the material into just one volume seems far too confident and final to me.

For the uninitiated, Q is one of the solutions to what has been called the synoptic problem - the fact that the gospels of Matthew, Mark and Luke contain so much similar material to one another. It is generally accepted nowadays that Mark's gospel was written first, and the reason that it shares so much common material with the other two "synoptic" gospels is because the writers of those gospels knew Mark's gospel, and based their gospels on it. (There are, some who maintain that Matthew was also the source for Mark, but I'll put that aside for now).

However, further examination of Matthew and Luke also reveals that there is also a large amount of material that they have in common. Three broad theories have been suggested to explain this phenomenon. Firstly that Luke knew Matthew's gospel, and used phrases from his gospel as well as Luke's as a basis for his gospel. Alternatively, the process could have worked the other way around with Matthew adapting Luke instead. The most popular solution to this theory, however, is that there was a third source, which, (somehow) was lost to such an extent that it wasn't even preserved by being directly referenced in other ancient texts, which both Matthew and Luke used independently, without knowing each other's work. And it is this lost source which has been named Q (after the German word for source "Quelle").

"The Lost Gospel Q", then, is basically a presentation of a reconstructed version of that source, produced for a wider readership than that which usually dips into books on the synoptic problem. No doubt "The Da Vinci Code" has created increased audience interest for such a book. One does not have to read very far into the book before we find an astounding level of confidence in the composition of this lost source, and its purity in contrast to the canonical gospels. The very first page contains this statement by Moore:

...the four gospels are riddled with the interpretations, biases and agendas of their four editors...The Lost Gospel Q, (is) the scholars' best attempt to render the pure voice of the Gospel Jesus

Now perhaps if Moore was pushed on this he would point out the detail in that statement, but when swept across, as much of the targeted readership would do, then it certainly gives the impression that Q represents a pure voice in contrast to the bias of the canonical gospels. In reality, if Q did exist, it would have reflected the biases of the community behind it, just as much as those of the communities of Matthew, Mark and Luke.

I also find the confidence behind this composition astounding. Borg's statement on page 17 that "Q contains no passion narrative" is sheer conjecture. All we know is that if Q existed then both Matthew and Luke chose Mark's version. That may be, as Borg contends, because Q had no passion narrative, but it may be that Mark's version was simply better, or at least more suitable to Matthew and Luke's purposes than that of Q. Secondly, there is an implicit assumption that the material unique to Matthew and Luke, named M and L respectively, was also not by definition part of Q. That is all very well when naming sources to explain the model, but when attempting to reconstruct the model, it is a little too certain. How do we know that Matthew and Luke incorporated everything from Q into their gospels? That is certainly not the way they handled Mark, both authors excluded certain sections. So how do we know that some of the M and L material was not in the Q source, but that the other evangelist chose to leave it out either deliberately, because it did not suit their purpose, or accidentally? And, as noted with the passion narrative, how do we know that there are incidents that both writers excluded. Borg notes that the Gospel of Thomas also excludes the death and resurrection of Jesus, but to assume that Q follows this pattern rather than the pattern of the other 4 known gospels is also a bit of a leap. The evidence from the earliest gospels is 4:1 against, and Thomas may not even be that early. Certainly it is the least Jewish of all the gospels which suggests a certain period of time is likely to have elapsed for the gospel of a Jewish teacher to drift so significantly. It is certainly possible that Q had no passion narrative, but the burden of proof would lie on those who deny it on this basis.

A brief excursus here to return to the staple ground of this blog. Consider the various films about Jesus. Most of them pick and choose biblical episodes as best suits them. Some incidents occur in all, or nearly all films. Others are very prominent in certain films such as the healing of Jairus's daughter in The Miracle Maker, but entirely absent in others such as the Jesus mini-series. Other parts of the gospel, such as the parable of the shrewd manager, are never included (unless the film is a presentation of the entire gospel). Yet all are in the source material. In other places the film-makers clearly prefer one version of an event to another for example where Il Messia locates the clearing of the Temple at the start of the story, as in John, rather than at in Jesus's final week like the synoptics.

Overall, Borg is a little more cautious than Moore, but the presentation of the actual "gospel" leaves no room for doubt, as it consists solely of the material common to Matthew and Luke, but not found in Mark. The juxtaposition of confident assertion over the nature of Q, and a definitively framed collection of sayings suggests a certainty over Q that is just not fitting a hypothetical source. As a result the books falls halfway between two more sensible positions - either a simple collection of the material that is not in Mark but that is common to Matthew and Luke, or some conjecture based around that common material. If the writers wanted to make all sorts of definitive claims about this gospel it would have been better to include an appendix with a few disputed sayings for the record, and accompanying comments (as we have with all of the canonical gospels).

The book itself is nicely laid out with a number interesting comments, and is a good introduction to the authors' positions. The use of red text for the words of Jesus is also useful here, as are the notes on translation, and the chart equating the Q sayings to Matthew and Luke. However, as an introduction to Q itself it is so overconfident that it loses a little of its credibility.

Bible Films and their Social Contexts

Tyler Williams posted an interesting piece whilst I was on holiday last week called The Strange New World of the Bible. The heart of the piece is a summary of Bruce J. Malina and Richard L. Rohrbaugh’s "Social-Science Commentary on the Synoptic Gospels", and Tyler lists a number of differences Malina and Rohrbaugh find between our industrial world and the agrarian world of the Bible.

* In agrarian societies more than 90 percent of the population was rural. In industrial societies more than 90 percent is urban.
* 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.
* In agrarian societies 2-4 percent of the population was literate. In industrial societies 2-4 percent are not.
* 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.
* Life expectancy in the city of Rome in the first century BCE was about twenty years at birth. If the perilous years of infancy were survived, it rose to about forty, one-half our present expectations.
* 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.
* 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.
* 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.
* 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.
* 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.
* 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.
* 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.
* 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.
* 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.
* Productive capacity in industrial societies exceeds that in the most advanced agrarian societies known by more than one hundredfold.
* 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.

Of course this is just the tip of the iceberg, particularly when you consider there was a very different religious and political context which needs to be taken into consideration as well.

I was reminded of Tyler's post last night when reading some of Jesus's parables in Nikos Kazantzakis' "Last Temptation", and in particular the Parable of the ten Virgins from Matt 25:1-13. There are a whole host of strange cultural practices going on here. For example, what is the role of these virgins? Why is the bridegroom not arriving until a lamp is required? Why are the late virgins locked out? Having recently read Geza Vermes' "Jesus the Jew" (the latest version of which coincidentally features a picture from the film of Last Temptation) I also wonder what exactly is meant by virgin in this context.

Anyway, it strikes me that these questions are also the ones that face filmmakers looking to make films based on the bible (whether they choose to confront them or not!). The types of bible films we face can, broadly speaking, be split into two camps: those that attempt to show the events in a setting that is apparently the first century (or whichever period the events happened in), and those that offer a more stylised presentation. In the first group of films the challenges are more straightforward, but the success with which the filmmakers answer them is more obvious to casual viewers. In the latter category, on one level it is easy for the filmmakers to "get away" with not considering these questions, but if they are to take them into account they have a far harder task.

Malina and Rohrbaugh's questions also provide a filter for looking at bible films. For example, simply reading through the bullet points above reminds me of Pasolini's Il Vangelo Secondo Matteo (The Gospel According to St. Matthew - 1964). Pasolini's neo-realist use of non-professional actors taken from agrarian southern Italy feels far more authentic that George Stevens's cast of Hollywood stars (even though both were filmed almost two thousand years after the events they depict).

The point about more than half of all families seeing one or more parent die during the child-bearing and child-rearing years also stuck out. I cannot recall a film which features Jesus's earthly father Joseph as present during his ministry. I assume this is largely because scripture never mentions him outside the birth and childhood stories (other than verses such as John 6:42). That said, there are a couple of Jesus films which actually show Joseph dying, the longer cut of Jesus of Nazareth (1977) and Jesus (1999). Both films use this event as the catalyst for Jesus to start his ministry.