Palestine in the Time of Jesus: Social Structures and Social Conflicts, Second Edition
Wonderful book, a ton of information, and easy to read format. Gives a lot of useful info if you're interested in the historical situation in Palestine as it's described in the Bible and other sacred writings. It explains a lot of words and relationships that show up in the Bible as they would have been understood two thousand years ago,words and concepts which may seem meaningless or incomprehensible to us without an understanding of what the society was like when the Romans occupied Palestine.
This is a scholarly and interesting introduction to the social and political world in which Jesus lived and carried out his mission. It certainly increased my understanding of that world; of family relations, power structures and patronage, and political economy. I had not fully grasped the extent to which the “elite” creamed off the surplus produced by the peasants, leaving them at subsistence level or indebtedness.
However, the book leaves us with the impression that the “Jesus Movement” was no more than a movement for social and political reform of the system, a return to the Deuteronomic requirement that debts should be forgiven every seven years and a redistribution of produce to the needy and the many rather than to a small elite. According to Hanson and Oakman, the “Reign of God” is purely economic – it means no more than that God is the ultimate and only patron, believers are his clients and Jesus is broker between God and humanity. Are the authors dismissing the Christianity that arose from the Jesus Movement, from belief in the resurrection of Jesus, as simply false?
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