Would anyone be able to point out some resources on what was it like at Jesus’s time?
Especially regarding:
I am trying to gain a better understanding of the Bible in its social context.
Thank you so much for you help.
Try Googling “social life” “Roman Palestine” for starters.
In particular, you might check out The Jewish Roman World of Jesus. The author is apparently a recognized, if not entirely non-controversial, authority on this area, and he seems to offer a good many original source excerpts.
Rent Monty Python’s Life of Brian! 
ccel.org, methinks, has a bunch of stuff by Edersheim (free download, etc…). IIRC, he has “Sketches of Jewish Social Life”, :the “Life and Times of Jesus the Messiah,” and i believe one or two others.
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I once bought The Zondervan Handbook to the Bible to learn the same thing. Check it out.
Not meant to be sarcastic, but:
It depends on how wealthy and how religious you were and where you lived (even inside of Israel). There wasn’t a lot of variety in vegetables- people ate a lot of beans (and lots of garlic) and fish and the like and used olive oil for everything from seasoning to dipping sauce to shampoo to baby oil. How plentiful depended on the year, your wealth, etc…
Here again, there were some Jews who were practically Roman in every way but ancestry (Herod’s family being foremost of course) and others who were as militantly anti-Roman as you could get. Most lived in relative peace though not love to the best of my knowledge- they were overtaxed but they did get a LOT for their tax money (to borrow from Life of Brian, “outside the aqueducts, the roads, rule of law, schools, modern medicine and civilization, what have the Romans ever done for us?”
The bloodiest conflicts between Rome and Jews came after the time of Jesus. A generation after he died they burned the Temple, a century after he died Rome killed half a million Jews and sold hundreds of thousands more into slavery after the bar Kokhba rebellion. Obviously these things were building during the time of Jesus, but not to the fever pitch yet.
Almost too many to list.
Google was the fisrt thing I tried. But there is an insane amount of contradictory infomation on anything related to Jesus. It is just so hard to find what I wanted. Maybe I was just searching with the wrong keyword though.
Thank you, Kimstu, handsomeharry, Hey you! and Sampiro for your help. I will check out the links.
hehehe, maybe I should check this out too.
Anyone else got more information they wanted to add would be appreciated too.
When somebody stubbed their toe and went “Jesus Christ!” he’d be like “what?”.
Start at you local Library. The Librarian will be able to direct you to a broad variety of books on the topic.
Please remember, that this is connected to religion. Thus, many authors will be writing with an ax to grind.
I took graduate courses in this area, and actually taught a course called New Testament from Rabbinic Sources for a bit at the undergrad level many years ago. The literature is immense, and not all it good.
The safest place to begin is the works of Martin Hengel. He is one of most repected NT and early Christianity scholars writing today. Once you start reading Hengel, you can refer to his bibliographies for more direction.
One problem is the area, I have found, is that some authors have expertise in some areas, but not in others. For example, when I took NT in college, my professor was a great scholar of Greek, but knew virtually no Hebrew or Aramaic. Jesus and those around him spoke Aramaic and Hebrew (and probably some Greek).
It is the rare scholar who really has competence in Greco-Roman culture, Jewish culture and texts, including Qumran and Pseudepigraphic texts. Hengel and some others have that competency.
I could list many more names, but you need to start somewhere.
Sampiro and Lynwood Slim give good advice. A few thoughts I’d add:
In this area, you’re more likely to find accurate information in a good university library than through Google.
Read several books, rather than just one. “Everyday life” questions about the ancient world can be very difficult to answer - things that everybody knows, nobody bothers to write down… So competent scholars are often trying to reconstruct the past with key pieces of information missing; don’t take any one reconstruction as being the final word.
Remember that you’re dealing with a continent-wide civilization drawing on vastly varied cultural and economic roots. So any generalized answer to the questions you ask will be false. Judaism, for example, was hardly monolithic; the people who wrote the Dead Sea Scrolls were hardly willing to recognize the people who ran the Temple in Jerusalem as authentic Jews.
Remember also that some of the things we take for granted would not be assumed by people in the ancient world. For example: outside Judaism, it was far from obvious that “religion” had anything to do with either belief or moral behavior. Much religious practice was more a question of the proper and decent rituals, and did not even require “believe” in the gods to whom sacrifice was offered. Though once again; this generalization too is false. There was way more variety in the past than any summary can represent.
Were the people in that part of the world at that time aware of China and India?
And how long did it take for news to travel, say from Rome to Jerusalem?
And a “Hail Mary pass” really was a pass at Mary.
Yes. There was regular trade with India, and if you Google for the “Peutinger Table” you should be able to find a later copy of a Roman-era road map showing the main land routes from Britain to India - with symbols to tell you what kind of housing accomodations to expect!
The connection with China was more tenuous, but there was a regular trade in silk.
There are two questions.
First, what was the speed of travel? That varied considerably, depending on weather, season, prevailing winds, etc. Two round trips a summer by sea between Italy and the Eastern Mediterranean would be a busy schedule for a merchant.
Second, how did news travel? By and large, I’m guessing news didn’t travel much, with the exception of (A) vague rumors, and (B) official propaganda. There were no real news distribution channels, and most people really didn’t much care about what was happening half the world away.
One measure of this is the rather ragged quality of information given by ordinary people referring to historical events. (See commentaries on Luke’s Gospel, and discussion of the accuracy of his dating). We take for granted the availability of vast amounts of information. They didn’t.
On the general topic, two interesting books, both a little old but still good:
Lionel Casson, Travel in the Ancient World.
M. P. Charlesworth, Trade Routes and Commerce of the Roman Empire.
Well, and to some extent, even within Judaism that was true.
Another book you might want to find is Shaye Cohen’s “The Beginnings of Jewishness”, which looks at how both Jews and non-Jews developed a sense of what it meant to be “Jewish”…the way that Judaism came to be socially constructed in that time period.
Thank you all so much again!
I would probably need a while to digest all the information.
I got a few more specific questions that came up through my reading. However, I am not sure if I should start a new thread or ask them here.
But let me put them here first just to be safe.
I have found reference that showed Roman presence. But I have also found archaeological report that indicated no evidence for a non-jewish Roman population in first century.
There was also report of an assault on a “Roman” garrison in Sepphoris by Judas of Galilee in 6 CE. Where would these Legionaries be from? Would they be drafted from local or from some other part of the Empire?
How about local government? Galilee was under the ruling of Herod Antipas at the time. But would there at least be some Roman in the local government?
How about local council for Nazareth? Would there be some kind of local Mayor? How would such person come about? (Anyone care to comment on the population of Nazareth too? I have found estimates ranging from 150-2000.)
Sorry for asking so many questions. Just wondering how much Roman influence there was in Jesus’s childhood.
Rural villages like Nazareth would have been completely Palestinian (which included not only Jewish populations but also others like Arameans and Samaritans) There were Greco-Roman populations in some cities like Sephhoris and the cities of the Decopolis but there would have been more Greeks than Romans. The Greek population was descended from settlers who moved in after Alexander the Great conquered Palestine. Non-native Romans would have been mostly military or political personel sent from Rome.
They would have been from Rome, doing a tour of duty, much like US forces in Iraq.
Not in Galilee, but Antipas was pretty much a Vassel king- subordinate to Rome but sovereign within his own Tetrachy.
Virtually nothing is known about Nazareth. It can’t even really be confirmed that Nazareth existed at all in the 1st Century. The current archaeological site seems to dat from the 2nd Century and Josephus (himself a native Galilean) does not mention it at all even in his book Jewish War which details the Roman destruction of Galilee. Speaking in genralities about typical villages like Nazareth, the population would be a few hundred people. Local authority in a village like that probably would have consisted of a group of Elders.
Culturally, he would have been exposed to far more Greek than Roman influence (even the Romans would have spoken Greek). As far as impact on daily life, though, the Roman occupation would have been all encompassing.
I should add that in the case of some Jewish aristocrats like Antipas, they would have been almost completely Romanized, educated in Rome, fluent in Latin, etc.
Thank you so much Diogenes the Cynic. That gave me a very good overview and helped a lot for my reading.
Thank you all again for your help.