N., Professor of New Testament and Early Christianity at Harvard Divinity School, has produced an interesting and wide-ranging volume that attempts to bring together work on Pauline epistles and on Greek and Roman archaeology with contributions from recent feminist and post-colonial theory (see her ‘three conversations’, pp. 11–13). N. writes not to illuminate Paul, but rather ‘the difficult-to-know adelphoi, brothers and sisters, who preceded him, surrounded him, argued against him, sent him money, worshiped alongside him’ (p. 16). Following a chapter on methodological issues, the book offers ‘six stories’ that are oriented around a particular piece of material culture in a particular location (p. 4).
Chapter 1, ‘On Method’, offers a general introduction to the use of archaeology (as ‘material culture’) for biblical studies. In it N. details four major problems (1: trying to ‘prove the Bible’; 2: an entanglement with Orientalism; 3: treating the landscape as numinous or determinative for ancient figures; 4: viewing material culture as objective evidence without need for interpretation), discusses the ongoing necessity for engagement with archaeology, and offers an appreciative critique of historical materialism. For a chapter on ‘method’, however, there is little explanation on how one should interpret material culture (despite the helpful observation that material culture requires a hermeneutic just as much as a literary culture), apart from her argument that doing so is important for ethical scholarship concerned with ‘those marginalized in historiography’ (p. 31).
Chapter 2, ‘On Slaves and Other Things’, focuses on the material evidence for slavery to illuminate Paul's letter to Philemon and passages from First Corinthians. While N. notes that the letter to Philemon lacks clear information about its point of origin or its destination, she situates it in Ephesus as one plausible option that also has useful archaeological material about the Roman slave trade. Working outward from inscriptions preserved in the Tetragonos Agora, N. explores the archaeological evidence for the slave trade in Ephesus. (The concern for local evidence is somewhat stretched by culling further material about the slave trade from Corinth and Delphi.) The realities of slavery, she contends, offer contemporary readers a way to imagine how early readers of and listeners to Paul's letters may have heard such statements as ‘you are bought with a price’ (1 Cor 6:20).
In Chapter 3, ‘On Travel and Hospitality’, N. shifts attention to the region of Galatia, Paul's letter to the Galatians, and the archaeological witnesses to travel in the Roman world. After discussing the impact of the Roman network of roads and outlining problems of travelling religious teachers in relation to Paul's letter to Galatians, she focuses on the Sagalassos inscription (supplemented by evidence from other regions) in which a legate attempts to ameliorate the burdens of the government transportation system on the local population. Setting aside well-known cultural norms and possible benefits of hospitality, its burdens provide fodder for reflecting on the dynamics of power and hospitality at work in the letter to the Galatians, as well as among other travelling early Christian teachers.
The following chapter, ‘On Poverty and Abundance’, takes its start from CIL III 633, a second- or third-century inscription detailing donations to the local cult of Silvanus, to open questions about the relation of economics and theology, particularly in Paul's letter to the Philippians. In addition to offering a general introduction to ancient Roman economics and/in Roman Philippi, N. focuses on the theme of religious donations in relation to a state of relative poverty: as the donations in CIL III 633 appear small relative to other inscriptions from Dyrrhachium or in relation to trans-locally apparent costs for material, so Paul's Philippian community may have also produced a paradoxical abundance through their giving to Paul. This discussion is turned at the end of the chapter towards a critique of neoliberal consumerism.
In turning to the theme of grief in Chapter 5, N. attempts to situate the themes of grief and the practice of ‘baptism for the dead’ within a ‘biography’ of the city of Corinth. She outlines the way in which Corinth was widely associated with grief, even particularly that related to the loss of a child, from the Roman destruction of the city in 146 bce and its 200-year state of near-desolation to its ‘topography of grief’ seen in monuments linked to the story of Medea, Demeter and Kore. In that context, the practice of ‘baptism for the dead’ is treated as a response to the grief of lost loved ones. Further, the city's links with the story of Medea, along with curse tablets discovered in the sanctuary of Demeter and Kore, suggest possible contexts of vulnerability and grief for women and children within which Paul's injunction against weeping, mourning and marriage in 1 Cor 7:29–31 may have been received.
Chapter 6, ‘On Time, Race, and Obelisks’, attempts to read Paul's letter to the Romans in the context of racial tensions between Jews, Egyptians, Romans et al. in Augustan Rome, with its appropriation of an Egyptian obelisk in Augustus’ attempts at showing his control over time, and Benito Mussolini's reconfiguration of his predecessor's mausoleum complex in the twentieth century. Individually, observations about these topics can be interesting avenues to examine Paul's letter to the Romans and contemporary uses of it. Taken together, though, it makes for a difficult chapter to summarise. Perhaps the most surprising part comes at the end, however, when scholars who articulate the distinctions between Pauline and pseudo-Pauline letters are compared with Mussolini in their effort to clear ‘the busy, chaotic, embarrassing, somewhat dilapidated neighborhood of Paul’ (p. 222).
The final chapter, ‘On History and Love’, reflects on the transition from Paul to subsequent appropriations and portraits of Paul, building on Tertullian's famous account of the composition of the Acts of Paul out of love for the apostle. In contrast to previous chapters, there is no particular archaeological find that orients this chapter's consideration of material culture, which includes a smattering of archaeological material covered in relation to the cities of Thessaloniki, Ephesus and Philippi. N.'s main aim is to show that early readers, interpreters and re-writers of Paul are not concerned with documentary historiography, but are working out of a personal stake in, even out of love for, the Apostle. All of this – and the book as a whole – is to help the contemporary historian ‘think about what she writes out of love, and to whom that love is directed’ (p. 255).
N.'s engagement with Pauline letters, archaeology and critical theory is certainly welcome, though its implementation is somewhat uneven across the volume. While the chapters on slavery and finances involve fairly straightforward exegetical pay-off, the chapters on Rome and Galatia offer less in this regard. Similarly, as noted variously above, the presence and centrality of archaeological materials varies across the chapters. The book is occasionally poetic, even homiletic, as in its reflection on the collapse of space and time on p. 223 or the riff on Paul's seeing dimly in a mirror on p. 17. This sometimes obscures things, however, as in the reflection on the value of ‘exceeding truth’ in history on p. 255. Finally, from the perspective of this American expat, the volume itself comes across as particularly American in its concerns and framing: in relation to its definition of ‘material culture’, the discussions of both slavery and race, especially in Chapters 2 and 5, and the concerns articulated about contemporary misuse of archaeology (focusing on people like the Green family and their Museum of the Bible). This is not a criticism as much as an attempt to contextualise the work within its own ‘local’ cultural context.
Taken together, N. offers New Testament scholars a stimulating set of arguments about the value and pay-off of engaging with archaeology. Individual readers will of course take issue with particular arguments, but all should take seriously her call to cast one's net widely – to encompass the variety of material culture – in our attempts to situate and interpret the New Testament.
