What Life Was Like in the First Century

When Scott Korb set out to study early Palestine for his Life in Year One: What the World Was Like in First-Century Palestine, traveling to the region and interviewing expert archaeologists, he came to a surprising conclusion about what’s known of the time. “The people we’re talking about are Jewish. That’s really all we can say for sure,” said Korb, also the author of The Faith Between Us. The rest, he said, is about “opening up the reader to the possibility of imagining.” Below, he chats with Zócalo about life in the first century – how markets worked, what language was spoken, and what dangers faced – and where Jesus fits in.

Q. You note that this is not a book about Jesus. How did Jesus differ from your average person in first-century Palestine?

Live in Year One, by Scott KorbA. From our perspective he’s different because we have thousands of years of people speculating on who Jesus was. Of course, from one perspective, he is absolutely different because he’s God. On the other hand, people speculate that he was not so different from your average first century Nazarean. He was like them in all the really essential ways. He was Jewish. He was poor, and probably illiterate. But as I say in the book, as soon as you say something like “he was probably illiterate,” suddenly you call into question things that people believe about Jesus – say that he could read the Torah, as the Gospels say. So that becomes a complex question. I wanted to avoid all those big theological questions.

If I had to say one way Jesus comes across in this book as different from the people around him it is that he was a healer. I believe he was a rabbi who taught in that area of the world. He was extremely charismatic. I think he was extremely egalitarian. And he was a healer in the sense that he did not look at sick people in the way other people looked at sick people. He welcomed them instead of excluding them.

Q. What are our expectations – and what were your expectations before you began writing – of life in that time? How did it differ from what you discovered?

A. Most people, especially if they’re coming from a Christian perspective, imagine a very bucolic time, that most people were part of self-sufficient families, that they were fairly independent. I think people carry with them a kind of romantic notion of that time and place. That goes along in some ways with their religious commitments. But in fact, I think, if you look at a place like the Galilee with a historian’s eye, you see people weren’t exactly as independent, and life not as bucolic, as you might imagine. Things were probably dirtier, much more rustic. We should probably imagine dirt huts rather than brick houses. I look at movies like The Passion of the Christ – there’s a scene where Jesus builds the first tall chair, and everything around him, all the buildings, have straight corners. But really, people did what they could with what they had. It’s not to say they didn’t have the capabilities to make big beautiful things – Jerusalem did have amazing architecture – but I think people misunderstand holy cities as only sacred and special when in fact they were at the same time dirty and ordinary. Then – as now – people argued and fought. Toward the end of the century they had to worry about terrorism in a way that people in Jerusalem today are worried about terrorism. I think what gets glossed over is the real mash-up of the profane and the sacred all in one place, which is something you notice today when you visit the holy land, as well.

Q. What was terrorism like then, and how is it different from today?

A. It started, insofar as we know, with small bands of what would now be considered nationalists, who opposed the combined leadership of the Jewish authority and the Roman authority. In Jerusalem the religious authority got all of its power from Rome – it would say all of its power came from God, but it was able to exist because Rome let it exist. So you had these terrorists, people who believed in God before Rome, who wanted their city back, their land back, their Temple back. The group that gets named most specifically in the histories is the Sicarii, they were famous for their little short blades, daggers known as sicae. They would blend in with massive crowds during religious festivals and then, seemingly out of nowhere, they would attack someone. It could be a high priest, or someone with some other religious or political authority. They would kill them and then blend back in. That kind of terrorism ended up fueling in some way the war that would end the Jewish presence in Jerusalem by the end of the century. By 70 CE, Jerusalem was destroyed. It was the power of Rome ultimately trying to quash these rebellious groups.

How is it different from today? At its foundation, it is in some ways the same, in that terrorism was used to inspire fear. But it’s different in that, as we’ve witnessed, the ability to destroy and kill is so much greater today. It can be so much more instantaneous, so much more wide-sweeping, than it was then. Our ability to destroy is so much greater today.

Q. You noted that people have a romantic vision of the time – terrorism certainly dampens that, as does, I would think, commerce. What was the marketplace like then?

A. We often don’t like to think the people we read about in our holy books were also going around spending money and participating in commerce – the same way we don’t like to think of them as doing any other boring real thing. The introduction of money into the world of, say, a typical peasant of Galilee, came with Rome. They had coins from a previous generation that were in some ways more like keepsakes than money. As soon as Rome brought their coins, everyone had to have it, and everyone had to use it. If you didn’t, you had to sell your land. Once you sold your land, you might be forced to be a tenant farmer living on land you once owned. Even though the money was Jewish in so far that it had no images on it, it was introduced by Rome for Roman purposes. This is absolutely not romantic. This is the power of empire. And of course, there were many Jewish people who became part of that system. They were in some ways exploiting their own people.

Q. In the book you mention that there was a language of commerce used – how has the language that tends to be used to describe this time period changed how we see it?

Scott Korb, Photo by Ryan PurdyA. My reading of the New Testament from when I was a kid through today has always been in this really pious, really sanitized version, often the King James version, with the “thees” and the “thous,” or the very basic but standard written English you find in what’s called the New Revised Standard version that I used in grad school. There are translations that get the meaning correct, mainly, but what they miss is the real sound of first-century Greek that was used in Palestine. That is the language of the New Testament, which is, according to a scholar I relied on, Gary Wills, a pidgin language – pieced together, the most common, simple, rugged Greek out there. I start every chapter with what is to many readers a very familiar passage from the New Testament. But I wanted to make the familiar seem fresh and new, and give the sense of a really rustic, choppy, very basic, lowest-common-denominator Greek. I had a Greek scholar I know, Patrick Stayer, do these translations for me.

Q. What was the most surprising thing you discovered?

A. The most surprising thing is the basic problem of the book. We can’t know for certain very much about the first century at all. Archaeologists who know the material culture better than anyone else will say we can only know four things for sure: that people did not eat pork, because there were no pig bones anywhere in that layer of earth; that there were no icons anywhere, even on coins or buildings; that they used stoneware; and that they had ritual baths throughout the entire area, which emphasizes their need to keep ritually pure. It’s a land where you can’t keep physically clean very easily, but you could, and it was more important that you did, keep ritually pure.

What those four things add up to is not at all surprising to me – all of those things are markers of Jewish identity. That’s really all we can say for sure, that the people we’re talking about are Jewish. That fact really surprised me. It was on the one hand frustrating because you go to write a book like this, and you want to say all these things very definitively. But on the other hand, it’s incredibly liberating to go to an archaeologist in Jerusalem and hear him say, “I’m an expert at this, and I don’t know the answers to any of your questions.” I get to say, “This is what we do know, and this is what we’re allowed to imagine.” Opening up a reader to the possibility of imagining – so the reader can play as much a role in understanding this history as the writer does – I hope that is something I was able to do.

*Photo of Scott Korb by Ryan Purdy. Photo of ruins at Bethesda courtesy hoyasmeg.


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