LIFE IN YEAR ONE

A generally historical, fun look at life during the time of Jesus.

Scholars, Korb (co-author: The Faith Between Us: A Jew and a Catholic Search for the Meaning of God, 2007) fairly notes, have differing theories about first-century Palestine, and he keeps the simmering debates and minutiae within long-winded footnotes. Well-versed in biblical studies—he spouts Josephus and Garry Wills with equal fluency—the author features folksy translations from the Gospels in koine Greek, a kind of “lowest common denominator” of the time that was nothing like Homer’s language but allowed the illiterate peasants to communicate in the agora. The Jewish revolt would gear up by 66 CE, but between Jesus’ birth and mid-first-century CE, when nationalist groups began to agitate against the Roman authorities, life was pretty quiet in Palestine. Korb notes that inhabitants of Palestine were God-fearing Jews and that the tight, humming economy kept tiny villages like Nazareth oriented toward the Roman capital—yet the coins they used were aniconic, or without graven images. The people were observant of Sabbath and religious practices and kept kosher, and most were illiterate. Families valued boys over girls, who were a burden if unmarried; marriages were arranged, and divorces were tolerated. People used ritual baths for purification as part of their godliness, although after 70 CE, with the destruction of the Second Temple, no more baths were built in Palestine. Another intriguing tidbit: Leprosy as we now know it, in its bacterial form, has never been discovered in human bones in Palestine, thus it was probably a catchall in the biblical era for psoriasis or eczema. As for miracles, Korb skirts the issue altogether (“I find the ground rather shaky myself”).

An accessible, light-pedaling survey.