Archaelogy reveals the world of Jesus

JESUS AND HIS WORLD: The Archaeological Evidence, by Craig A Evans. Westminster John Knox Press. 2012. 208pp. ISBN: 9780664234133

Reviewed by Günther Simmermacher

Few personalities of antiquity are as amply documented as Jesus of Nazareth. And yet, while we take for granted what is told about the life of, say, Alexander the Great, libraries of books are written to dispute the near contemporary literary data of Jesus’ life.
So we have theories asserting that Jesus was an allegorical character based on pagan worship, or a composite of various would-be messiahs, or that he in fact had a wife and son.

The resurrection narrative is explained away by theories suggesting that Jesus wasn’t really dead when he was laid into the tomb (the discredited “swoon theory”), that the post-crucifixion sightings were the result of mass hallucinations, that the Jesus myth was invented by power hungry charlatans (who clearly didn’t mind being killed on their way to dominion), or, one made most recently, that Jesus’ followers didn’t see the risen Christ but his image on his burial cloth, the Shroud of Turin.

In Jesus and His World, Craig A Evans aims to correct a few selected theories by providing archaeological and literary evidence that supports some of what we know of Christ from the New Testament.

Evans, a professor in Bible studies and theology, takes aim at assertions that Jesus was a follower of the Greek Cynics school of thought, that he didn’t teach in synagogues, that he was illiterate, that he wasn’t buried in a tomb, and that the remains of Jesus and his wife and son have been found. The thrust of the book is that archaeology keeps proving wrong those who tend to dispute much of Scripture.

The book is set up as a work of apologetics. Evans refutes some assertions which have very little academic credibility anyhow. But in his introduction he states a more pertinent purpose: to illuminate through archaeological and literary inquest the life and teachings of Jesus.

Evans is at his best, then, when he provides the context of Jesus’ fatal clash with the Temple authorities, without being distracted by doing battle with negligible hypotheses. Drawing from ancient texts and excavated evidence, Evans proposes that the dispute that culminated in the crucifixion was not only theological in nature but also rooted in power, corruption and self-preservation.

Likewise, Evans is excellent when he describes life in first-century Nazareth and how the village related to the city of Sepphoris, which was just an hour’s walk away. The refutation of the idea, based on the proximity to Sepphoris, that Jesus was a Cynic – a Greek movement which one might describe, with a touch of flippancy, as the hippies of antiquity – is hardly necessary. As Evans acknowledges, it has no academic traction. But it works well as a device for framing the story of these two settlements, the village which became world famous and the now largely forgotten big city.

In his chapter on synagogues, Evans addresses the self-evidently unsustainable notion that there were no such structures in Jesus’ time. In fact, nine synagogues that predate the Great Revolt of 66-70AD have been excavated, at least partly, in the Holy Land alone.

The elimination of a half-baked theory seems redundant, but it provides the framework for a discourse on the nature of synagogues before the fall of the Temple (they were religious, educational and community centres rather than places of liturgical worship, and didn’t even need to be buildings). This gives Jesus’ reported activities, such as the incident in Nazareth’s synagogue or the exorcism in Capernaum, a context which many readers of Scripture might be unfamiliar with.

In an appendix, Evans thoroughly demolishes the claim that a tomb found below a house in East Talpiot, south of Jerusalem, contains the tomb of Jesus and his family, including his wife and son. The claim has absolutely no academic support, to put it charitably, yet it has yielded a book and a National Geographic documentary produced by filmmaker James Cameron.

Leaving aside that the names on the ossuary (a stone box in which the bones of deceased people were interred)  were common in the first century, it is unlikely that Jesus’ family would have been buried in an area where all other tombs were reserved for members of Jerusalem’s aristocratic and priestly classes.

Jesus and His World is aimed at the general reader who will acquire new insights into the times in which Jesus lived – and, along the way, also learn about beheading techniques in medieval England.

This book of trenchant archaeological apologetics answers some outlandish claims. It might have worked better, however, if it wasn’t predicated on combat with strawmen and easy targets, but instead take as its principal premise what Evans said he hoped to accomplish in the first place: to show how archaeology supports passages in the New Testament and sheds new light on their meaning.

In meeting that objective, he succeeds.