NT's Sitz im Leben

Now I will turn to the setting of the events and writings of the New Testament, which are hugely important for understanding the collection.

(The synoptic contradictions I have not explored center around the crucifixion and resurrection — the former is the most historically accepted event in the life of Jesus and the latter a matter of faith widely disputed — hence I am abandoning that, for the moment.)

What's more important, before we tackle even a summary on the Fourth Gospel, is to focus on the NT’s Sitz im Leben  (German, setting in life). This phrase has been used in biblical criticism since the 19th century, to speak of its political, social, and cultural setting.

The NT’s people and texts developed within the eastern half of the Roman Empire — Jerusalem to Rome — from about 6 BC to 100 AD. The Empire was a one-man rule of territories from Britain to Spain and from Spain to the Holy Land and Syria. It preserved legal republican forms, such as the Senate, but functioned as a massive military and taxation extortion system serving the Emperor, who at times was regarded as at least a demigod.

The society out of which Jesus and his apostles emerged was a subject Jewish people permitted to practice their religion within certain limits. The Jews were mostly Pharisee, Sadducee, or Essenes. 

The Pharisees were the upstanding and legalistic conventional Jews from whom came the rabbinical tradition after the year 70. Sadducees are most easily remembered as “sad, you see,” because they didn’t believe in life after death. The Essenes were one of several monastic groups that lived in caves near the desert; Jesus and John the Baptist probably lived with them some time in their youths.

In addition, were the Kana’im (or zealots), who eventually led a rebellion against the Romans, from 66 to 70. The civil war led to the siege to starvation of Jerusalem and the razing of the Temple compound, one of whose remaining structures is today called the “Wailing Wall.”

Significantly for the faith and the NT, it also led to the expulsion and  dispersal of Jews throughout the Mediterranean and later Europe. The events of the gospels took place before this earthshaking event; the NT texts were mostly written after.

Jesus was a woodworker, or craftsman, rather than a carpenter in the modern construction sense. The disciples had similar specialized crafts. They likely spoke some koiné, or marketplace Greek, and Aramaic, a Galilean Hebrew dialect — but not biblical Hebrew.

Their people lived in one-room dwellings, traveled no more than 30 miles from their birthplaces in their lifetimes, and lived an average of 30 to 40 years. Perhaps one of the easiest-to-read non-specialist books on the subject is Daily Life in the Time of Jesus by Henri Daniel-Rops.

All of this is to make clear that the New Testament people and authors had no idea of things such as democracy, middle class comforts, nor the particular ethnic diversity of the American continent.