Where Would Jesus Live?

by

Henry L. Carrigan, Jr.

 

Was the city of Jericho there for Joshua to destroy so dramatically when he and his army marched around it seven times and blew their horns, causing the walls to collapse? Has Noah’s Ark really been found and Mount Ararat been discovered? Can we really see, if we visit Jerusalem today, the exact place where the Good Samaritan helped out the victim of highway robbery? (That’s a bit of a trick question, of course, since the parable of the Good Samaritan is fiction; no such person ever existed in real life, though of course Jesus was pointing to various types of people in the story he told.) Have we really found the burial box of James, the brother of Jesus as the media and some biblical scholars claimed a few years ago? What about the Gospel of Judas? Hoax or helpful?

These are only a few of the many questions raised for Jews and Christians by archaeology. Since the advent of biblical archaeology in the late nineteenth century, the central questions raised by the results of the work of those in the field are: can archaeology and the Bible go hand-in-hand? Should the archaeologist go to the dig with the Bible in his or her hand, looking merely to confirm the texts? Or, should the archaeologist go out to the dig to find out all that he or she can about an ancient city or an ancient culture? If the findings at the dig challenge the historicity of the texts, do the texts lose their value as documents of faith? What about those critics who use the same evidence to argue for very different positions?

More important, though, how can archaeology contribute to our understanding of an ancient culture whose political, social, and religious structures are so foreign to ours? For example, we know from studying archaeology that Jews imitated their Greek neighbors in their style of dining. Diners consumed communal meals reclined on couches (there is a Greek term that indicates the couches of the wealthy and one that indicates the pallets of the less economically privileged) rather than sitting at tables. Thus, the famous image of Jesus and his followers sitting at a long table during a so-called “last supper” is simply an incorrect depiction of the culinary practices of the time. Excavation of temples and palaces also tells us something important about the relationship between the Roman rulers of the first century and the followers of Jesus who were their subjects.

Leading New Testament archaeologist Jonathan L. Reed, Professor of New Testament at the University of La Verne (California) and a member of the research council of Claremont Graduate University’s Institute for Antiquity and Christianity, where he directs their Galilean Archaeology and the Historical Jesus project, brilliantly answers these and many more questions in his lavishly illustrated and lively new book, The HarperCollins Visual Guide to the New Testament: What Archaeology Reveals About the First Christians (HarperOne, $24.95, paper). There is no better guide to understanding the social and cultural world of the earliest Christians than Reed’s majestic book. For example, he points out that we can understand the New Testament texts in an even fuller way once we understand what archaeology teaches us about the world behind the texts. “It is only after looking at the kinds of houses in which Jesus’s Galilean disciples grew up that we can understand their awe at the Temple in Jerusalem. Only by examining shipwrecks at the bottom of the Mediterranean can we appreciate Paul’s dogged commitment to spread his message. And only by surveying the numerous temples, statues, and inscriptions that proclaimed the Roman caesars to be sons of god can we contemplate the perils of proclaiming Christ the lord.”

Reed contends that archaeology cannot “prove or disprove, for that matter the accuracy of the New Testament, but it teaches us much about the lives and beliefs of those earliest Christians.” He points out, for example, that the ossuary, or bone box, purportedly of James, the brother of Jesus, turned out to be a crafty forgery. The ossuary “served as reminder that none of the main characters of the New Testament left traces in the archaeological record.” Moreover, “nothing has been found from first-century CE Christians. None of the Christian symbols etched in walls or chiseled in stone go back farther than the late second century CE [around 175 CE] . . . and the cross was not commonly used by Christians before the fifth century CE.”

Using sidebars, photographs from his own digs, and numerous illustrations of various buildings and artifacts, Reed compellingly reconstructs life in first century CE Palestine and provides glimpses of the ways that such life affected the followers of Jesus. After fast-paced opening chapters on “archaeology and the New Testament” and “what archaeologists do,” Reed then examines in splendid depth and luscious detail Jewish life among Greek and Romans, “Galilee and the World of Jesus’s Ministry,” “the Archaeology of Jerusalem and Jesus’s Passion,” “Paul and the Cities of the Roman Empire,” “the First Christians and the Jewish Wars,” and “the Christian World After the New Testament.” Appendices include sage advice on “how to read a temple,” “how to read a coin,” “how to read pottery,” and “how to read an inscription.” A thorough glossary of archaeological and architectural terms rounds out Reed’s impressive book.

The HarperCollins Visual Guide to the New Testament is an indispensable guide to the world of the New Testament and early Christianity. No one interested in ancient history, archaeology, or the history of religion should be without this book.


Henry Carrigan dreamed of being a rock ‘n roll star with a life of coast-to-coast tours and wild parties with Van Morrison and Joni Mitchell among others. But books intervened, and instead he went to Emory University to major in Religion and Literature. Later, teaching humanities in college, he took up writing about books—this time to avoid reading students’ papers. Henry soon became Library Journal's religion columnist, then religion book editor for Publishers Weekly. While working as editor-in-chief for Northwestern University Press and editing classic books for Paraclete Press, he still continues to write for LJ and PW, as well as the Washington Post Book World, the Atlanta Journal-Constitution, the Cleveland Plain Dealer, the Charlotte Observer, ForeWord magazine—and now, BiblioBuffet. And he still enjoys playing his guitar. Henry can be reached at This e-mail address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it