It was at a conference on Reconciliation in the Tantur Institute, Jerusalem, that I discovered the significance of archaeology to an understanding of New Testament texts. I was captivated by an entry-level introduction to the archaeology of the Holy Land in Peter Walker's study of Luke's Gospel. I went on to read his follow-on volume on Acts.
Walker, Peter. In the Steps of Jesus: An Illustrated Guide to the Places of the Holy Land. Oxford: Lion Hudson, 2007.
Walker, Peter. In the Steps of Saint Paul: An Illustrated Guide to Paul’s Journeys. Oxford: Lion Hudson, 2008.
I then went on to read John Dominic Crossan's collaborations with archaeologist, John Reed, on Jesus and Paul.
That led me to Jonathan Reed's visual guide to the New Testament, an excellent New Testament Atlas.
When I helped lead a pilgrimage to the Holy Land, the Oxford Archaeological guide proved invaluable.
It was as I began my project on Luke-Acts that I discovered Peter Oakes' imagined reconstruction of a house-church in Pompeii and his reading of Romans. Those ideas he popularized with Benedict Kent in a web page that can be used by Bible study groups.
Bruce Longenecker uses the archaeology of Pompeii as a way into the world of the New Testament
An understanding of the social, cultural and political world of the New Testament brings the text alive in ways that are fresh, authentic and that connect with the social, cultural and political world of today. The Context Group has taken that insight further and used social-scientific methods to enter into that world. My introduction to the scope of their work was in a collection of essays:
Neyrey, Jerome H., and Eric C. Stewart, eds. The Social World of the New Testament, Insights and Models. Peabody, Mass.: Hendrickson, 2008.
On the eve of a sabbatical in 2015 when I intended to research ‘the world of the New Testament on our doorstep’, in Roman Britain, I put my proposal to Philip Esler. He encouraged me to focus in detail on a specific set of writings, and suggested the curse tablets of Bath, Uley and elsewhere. He shared a paper he had written shortly before doing something very similar with the Babatha archive beside the Dead Sea.
Reading a paper to a meeting of the Context Group in 2015, I met John Elliott and learned of its roots in the civil rights movement of the 1960s when biblical scholars felt it imperative to make connections between the social world of New Testament times and of today. I found his short introduction invaluable. I coupled with that Bruce Malina’s work on the New Testament World.
Elliott, John H. Social Scientific Criticism of the New Testament. London: SPCK, 1995.
Malina, Bruce J. The New Testament World: Insights from Cultural Anthropology. 3rd edn. Louisville: Westminster John Knox, 2001.
When the Bloomberg tablets were published the following year, Philip Esler invited me to contribute a chapter to the second edition of his collection of essays, The Early Christian World.
Cleaves, Richard. ‘Reading the New Testament in Roman Britain’. In The Early Christian World, 2nd edn, edited by Philip F. Esler, 329–54. Abingdon: Routledge, 2017.
That, and two other of his books, took me further into the world of the New Testament in the eastern Mediterranean.
Esler, Philip F. The First Christians in Their Social Worlds: Social-Scientific Approaches to New Testament Interpretation. London: Routledge, 1994.
Esler, Philip F. Modelling Early Christianity: Social-Scientific Studies of the New Testament in Its Context. London: Routledge, 1995.
Stegemann and Stegemann provide an encyclopaedic approach to the social history of the early years of the Jesus Movement, while John Kloppenborg homes in on one specific area of life in the first century, and finds in it a key to an understanding of the early church.
Stegemann, E.W., and W. Stegemann. The Jesus Movement: A Social History of Its First Century. Translated by O.C. Dean. Minneapolis: Fortress Press, 1999.
Kloppenborg, John S. Christ’s Associations: Connecting and Belonging in the Ancient City. New Haven: Yale University Press, 2019.
Kenneth Bailey’s two books focus on aspects of the culture of the Middle Eastern world as the context for reading the Gospels and Paul.
Bailey, Kenneth E. Jesus Through Middle Eastern Eyes - Cultural Studies in the Gospels. London: SPCK Publishing, 2008.
Bailey, Kenneth E. Paul through Mediterranean Eyes: Cultural Studies in 1 Corinthians. London: Society for Promoting Christian Knowledge, 2011.
By way of introduction to this approach to the New Testament, I have found books by Gerd Theissen, and by K. C. Hanson and Douglas E. Oakman, very accessible. Entry-level introductions are offered by Bruce Malina and Jerome Neyrey.
Theissen, Gerd. The Shadow of the Galilean: The Quest of the Historical Jesus in Narrative Form. Updated edition. Minneapolis, MN: Fortress Press, 2007.
Hanson, K. C., and Douglas E. Oakman. Palestine in the Time of Jesus: Social Structures and Social Conflicts. 2nd edn. Minneapolis: Fortress, 1998.
Malina, Bruce J. Windows on the World of Jesus: Time Travel to Ancient Judea. Louisville: Westminster John Knox Press, 1993.
Neyrey, Jerome H. Imagininng Jesus in His Own Culture: Creating Scenarios of the Gospel for Contemplative Prayer. Eugene, Oregon: Cascade Books, 2018.
The Roman Empire is ever present in any study of the social, cultural and political world of the New Testament. Some, however, focus very much on the Roman empire, arguing that New Testament texts subvert the empire. My introduction to this perspective was in the two books by Crossan and Reed mentioned above. John Dominic Crossan then distilled the two books into one more popular book.
Crossan, John Dominic, and Jonathan L. Reed. Excavating Jesus: Beneath the Stones, Behind the Texts. Revised and Updated. San Francisco: HarperOne, 2001.
Crossan, John Dominic, and Jonathan L. Reed. In Search of Paul. London: SPCK, 2005.
Crossan, John Dominic. God and Empire: Jesus Against Rome, Then and Now. New York: Harper Collins, 2007.
Richard Horsley and Warren Carter are proponents of this point of view.
Horsley, Richard A., ed. Paul and Empire: Religion and Power in Roman Imperial Society. London: Bloomsbury Academic, 1997.
Carter, Warren. The Roman Empire and the New Testament: An Essential Guide. Nashville: Abingdon, 2006.
Carter, Warren. Jesus and the Empire of God: Reading the Gospels in the Roman Empire. Eugene, Oregon: Cascade, 2021.
In the context of Mark’s Gospel, two books argue that the Gospels subvert the notion of empire.
Horsley, Richard. Hearing the Whole Story: The Politics of Plot in Mark’s Gospel. Louisville, Ky: Westminster John Knox Press, 2001.
Myers, Ched. Binding the Strong Man: A Political Reading of Mark’s Story of Jesus. Maryknoll, NY: Orbis, 1988.
Peter Oakes explores the world of the New Testament in the context of the Roman Empire and brings together ten articles that offer a more nuanced approach. Loveday Alexander brings together ten writers with different perspectives on the context of empire in the New Testament.
Oakes, Peter. Rome in the Bible and the Early Church. Carlisle: Paternoster Press, 2002.
Oakes, Peter. Empire, Economics, and the New Testament. Grand Rapids, Michigan: William B. Eerdmans, 2020.
Alexander, Loveday, ed. Images of Empire. Sheffield: Sheffield Academic Press, 2009.