Children in the New Testament World

At the turn of the 20th century, Clarence Herbert Woolston penned the words to the now famous children’s song, “Jesus Loves the Little Children” (published in Gospel Message 1-2-3 Combined, edited by J. Lincoln Hall, Adam Geibel, and C. Austin Miles [Philadelphia: Hall-Mack Company, 1915], p. 355). Woolston’s song is reflective both of the American Sunday School movement of the 19th and 20th centuries and the growing trend in popular biblical studies to read Jesus as a friend of children. However, a few early monographs not excepting, children did not receive sustained attention in New Testament scholarship until the 21st century. This is distinct from studies and application of the metaphorical use of “children” and “child” as rhetorical or metaphorical images in New Testament texts, especially the Epistles, which is considered in a separate entry (“Child Metaphors in the New Testament,” forthcoming). With the advent of the interdisciplinary fields of childhood studies and child theology in the 1980s and 1990s, the stage was set to study more closely both Jesus’s relationship with children as portrayed in the New Testament texts and the child characters, Jesus included, therein. In terms of sheer demographics, children are estimated to have made up roughly two-thirds of ancient agrarian societies, such as the 1st-century Mediterranean. As such, when the feminist principle of reclaiming characters from the “shadows” of the text is employed, the imprint of children can be seen across the New Testament. This widespread presence of children in 1st-century Judea and Galilee has also been confirmed by social science and archaeological investigations. Moreover, such investigations have revealed that the character and nature of childhood, or more properly, childhoods in these contexts, was radically different than many of the 21st-century assumptions. Most notably, the assumptions that the Jesus movement was solely positive for children, or that such positivity was unique, have been called into question. To this end, the study of children in the New Testament seeks to bring to light both the presence and lives of child characters in these texts and the children among their original audiences while avoiding anachronistic and supercessionist assumptions. What has resulted is a more nuanced reading both of the experience and character of childhoods in the 1st-century world and, as a result, of the New Testament texts.

Pontius Pilate

Pontius Pilate was the Roman governor of Judea (26–37 ce) who crucified Jesus. There is little information about his life prior to this governorship. His appointment suggests elite status (equestrian), some notable civic and military service, and some patronage from the emperor Tiberius or from someone in Tiberius’s circle. He was recalled from his office in January 37 ce after protests, but Tiberius died in early 37. Pilate disappears from the historical record. Sources for his governorship include Philo and Josephus, though both have particular agendas. The Gospels focus on his role in crucifying Jesus. Interpretations have often focused on theological matters while neglecting the power dynamics of Roman imperial rule that shape the scenes. Pilate has long captured the imagination of interpreters and he has made regular appearances in various media—literature, dramas, and films.

Faith in the New Testament

Faith language is prevalent in the New Testament (NT; esp. pistis, pisteuō), but only in the early 21st century did this topic become a major subject of scholarship (leaving aside the pistis Christou debate, which has attracted steady interest and scholarship since the middle of the 20th century). Interest in NT faith language intersects with numerous fields and disciples including classics, lexical semantics, Septuagint studies, and vigorous debates in Pauline studies and Pauline theology.

Archaeology and Material Culture of Nabataea and the Nabataeans

The Nabataeans were an Arab people who inhabited northwest Arabia over two thousand years ago. Their center was the city of Petra, located in what today is the southern part of the Hashemite Kingdom of Jordan. They appear in Greek accounts around 312/311 BCE when the armies of Antigonus Monophthalmos attempted to raid the small, but well-defended kingdom of traders in their capital of Petra. They were reportedly a small, but extremely wealthy, Arab people who transported aromatics, frankincense, and myrrh from the Arabian Peninsula to the Mediterranean coast and Egypt. They were skilled stone cutters, a craft developed in the Hellenistic period when they hewed and plastered large cisterns for their exclusive use along desert tracks in the Negev. The Nabataeans became an important element in the geopolitical deposition of the southern Levant at a time when Rome was becoming increasingly involved in the region. They controlled trade routes in the desert regions of the Negev and Sinai Peninsula and extended their rule northward into Syria and southward to the Red Sea coast of Arabia. Their control of the Negev led to the establishment of towns along the main route between Petra and Gaza, called the Incense Road, as well as along other major tracks. By the Roman era they were also master potters, producing exquisite, thin-walled vessels that took the place of glass. In the increasingly competitive markets of the Augustan era, they responded by producing perfumed oils packaged in ceramic unguentaria produced at Petra that they marketed abroad. The increased revenues that they received in an era of high international demand allowed the Nabataeans to indulge in the monumental architecture that can still be viewed with awe today. Nabataea was a client state during the reign of Augustus, and it was ruled by a series of native kings until its annexation by Rome in 106 CE, upon which its territory became the Roman province of Arabia. Loss of self-rule does not seem to have affected the prosperity of the Nabataeans or the production of pottery and aromatics at Petra, and their role in international trade continued until Roman collapse in the region in the 3rd century CE. Nabataean language, culture, and religion continued under Roman rule well into the Late Roman and Early Byzantine periods. In those periods, their written language—Aramaic—was transformational, leading to the development of written Arabic as known today.

The Acts of Peter

The Acts of Peter is one of the five ancient apocryphal Acts that relate the missionary activities of the apostles beyond the canonical account. The primary focus of this narrative is a wonder working contest between Peter and the magician Simon set in the city of Rome. Through a variety of miracles, including a revivified salted fish, a talking dog and baby, and a resurrection competition set in the Forum, Peter demonstrates his (and by extension early Christianity’s) legitimacy. The final chapters relate how Peter’s teaching prompted wives and concubines associated with imperial figures to reject conjugal relations, causing these men to seek fatal retaliation. Peter’s attempt to flee is abandoned upon his encounter with a vision of Jesus in the famous “Quo Vadis” scene where Jesus claims he is going to Rome to be crucified again. Upon his return Peter is arrested and sentenced to death by crucifixion. He is crucified upside down at his own request and delivers a lengthy discourse prior to his death. The text as it is typically published in translation is compiled from a handful of discrete sources, some of which are disputed as being components of an original Greek composition. This original text is commonly held to be composed in the later portion of the 2nd century. The narrative was influential on much subsequent ancient Petrine literature.

Archaeology and Material Culture of Aram and the Arameans

At the end of the 2nd millennium bce, the geographical term Aram appears for the first time in the annals of the Middle Assyrian kings and in connection with the ahlammû or ahlammu Arameans (or Aramaeans). At that time, the ahlammu Arameans were considered nomadic tribes who lived in the area between the Khabur and the Middle Euphrates, where they constituted a serious threat to the cultivated land and the Assyrian state. From the 9th century bce on, when the Aramean tribes had already spread to other parts of Syria as far as to Mount Lebanon, it was more common to refer to the “Land of Aram” as the geographic designation for a large area that included several different ethnolinguistic population groups. The term is used by the Assyrians and in the Hebrew Bible, but only very rarely in local Aramaic written sources. Therefore, it is important to stress that Aram was mostly a foreign-constructed term that local dynasts adopted only in a few cases for political or territorial self-expression. Despite the fact that the Aramaic language, which includes several subdialects, gradually developed from the 9th to the 7th century bce, there is no reason to assume an Aramean political or cultural identity for this period. This is confirmed by the material culture, which definitely shows no distinction between territories and states dominated by Aramaic-speaking population groups and others, such as the so-called Luwian states. Hence, the task to review the archaeology and material culture of Aram and the Arameans in this volume has to be cautious about any ethnic ascriptions. In fact, the Aramean states of the first half of the 1st millennium bce, like Bīt Bahiani/Guzana, Huzirina, Bīt Adīni, Bīt Agusi, Sam’al-Ya’udi, Hamat/Lu’aš, and Damascus-Aram, were individually shaped political units with a strong sense of urban identity. They developed and interacted within the larger Syrian koine that emerged based on common cultural traditions and that continuously transformed its image until it was fully integrated into the Neo-Assyrian state. In this context, it is rather illuminating to investigate the cultural layout of a single state in order to depart from the fallacious idea of a conscious Aramean identity.

Archaeology and Material Culture of Ammon and the Ammonites

The Ammonites (literally, “sons of Ammon”) were a tribal group with a core territory in and around the modern city of Amman, Jordan. This core area could also be referred to as Ammon; the name of the modern city is also derived from this designation. Though they are known best for their role as kin and enemy to Israel in the Bible, archaeological work has revealed much about the indigenous cultural traditions of the region. The earliest possible evidence naming the Ammonites is from the 9th century bce, but there is little doubt that they inhabited the region before that, though how much before that is difficult to say. Regardless of their date of origin, it is helpful to chart their appearance on the stage of history in the Iron Age II by including some chronological depth. Beginning with the Late Bronze Age (c. 1550–1150 bce), the region around Amman was sparsely settled with a few fortified towns and evidence for participation in international trade. New Kingdom Egypt appears to have had at least one garrison on the Plateau, probably to help control trade. The Iron Age I–IIA (c. 1150–850 bce) saw a drop in international trade associated with the disruption of the international order at the end of the Late Bronze Age. At the same time, there was an uptick in the number of sites showing occupation. In addition to bringing the first contemporary textual references to the Ammonites, the Iron Age IIB–IIC (c. 850–500 bce) was an era of increased sociopolitical complexity and economic intensification stimulated by the pressures and opportunities presented by the Neo-Assyrian and Neo-Babylonian empires. These changes are visible in the development of an indigenous tradition of writing, an unparalleled sculptural tradition, an increase in the number and variety of imports, and a significant increase in the number of small agriculturally oriented sites across the landscape. The independent polity of Ammon was turned into a province sometime in the 6th century—probably under Babylonian hegemony. The archaeological remains indicate a continuation of agricultural production and participation in long-distance trade networks, and an eventual replacement of the local system of writing with the Aramaic used by the Persians. Note on transliterations: A variety of systems exist for transliterating ancient and modern place names in Semitic languages. A simplified version of the most common transliterations is used here.

Hellenistic and Roman Egypt

The Greco-Roman period in Egypt started with the conquest of the country by Alexander the Great in 332 bce and marks the end of the Achemenid domination over the area. The period covers a seven-century span of time, including the Ptolemaic rule (323/305–330 bce) and the Roman rule, opened by Octavian-Augustus’s victory over Cleopatra and Mark Anthony, down to the reign of Diocletian (284–305 ce). With this emperor, Egypt entered the Byzantine period, which will not be dealt with in the following bibliography. This long period of time has mostly been studied through the lens of the relationships between Greeks and Hellenized people (among which stand the Jewish communities of Egypt), on the one hand, and Egyptian subjects, with their millenary traditions, on the other. It was the main focus of the pioneering work of Johann Gustav Droysen on the Hellenistic period (Geschichte des Hellenismus, Hamburg, 1836–1843), and remained at the heart of most of the following studies on Greco-Roman Egypt: Hellenization, acculturation, resistance, cultural transfers, and middle-grounds are the most debated concepts for the period. Indeed, culture and literacy were the subject of Arnaldo Momigliano’s masterwork, Alien Wisdoms: The Limits of Hellenization (Cambridge, 1976), and art and religion were also studied through this lens, with major debates on mischkultur and syncretism. For the same reason, ethnicity and individual status were the subject of major studies, together with law systems and taxation patterns. The relationships between the rulers and their subjects, at last, raised major questions, such as: How far can we consider the Egyptian society to be a colonial society during the Hellenistic period? How did the Ptolemies manage the two faces of their kingdom, in terms of privileges, royal ideology, and economy, and what about the diversity of cultures subsumed in the Hellenized category? What can be said of the specific situation of the Jewish people, who were not treated and considered like the Egyptian people and received a status similar to that of Greek people? The question of the governance of the Ptolemaic powers and their relationships with ethnic communities, especially Jewish, remains at the heart of the debate. What were their relationships with the Egyptian traditional elites (and specifically, the clergy) and the common people? Where did they settle? Were Egyptian revolts, which occurred from the 2nd century bce onward, of a nationalistic nature, and directed against the Greeks and the Greek kings, and their allies? At last, how far was this kingdom “Greek”? In a city like Alexandria, the question of cultural interactions between Greek culture and Egyptian traditions and art is a central one, as is the study of the emergence of a Judeo-Greek culture and its role in the adaptation of the Jewish religion to the Greek koine, as manifested by the formation of the Septuagint. For the Roman period, the question of the specific position of the Egyptian “province” within the empire is also crucial, as is that of Roman efficiency in the management of a multicultural society that did not exactly fit the usual imperial pattern. For the Jewish communities, the period witnessed a deep transformation of life conditions, as the abolition of the Ptolemaic army, with its numerous Judean units settled in the Egyptian chôra, disrupted the economic balance of the communities, while Jewish officials and tax collectors were systematically replaced by people of Greek background. Jewish people were now integrated in the new category of Aigyptoi, and lost the fiscal status of Hellenes. The swift economic decline of the Jewish Diaspora in Egypt during the first century ce was accentuated by the revolt of Eastern Judean communities under the reign of Trajan (98–117), which took violent forms in Egypt and led to harsh conflicts between ethnical communities: it was strongly repressed by the Roman troops, and the economic capacity of the Diaspora took decades to recover from the episode. Indeed, in the first centuries of our era, the question of the emergence of Christianity and its connection with Jewish communities is the subject of lively discussions.

Aram

The first genuine reference to Aram is in a 14th-century bce text of Amenhotep III and attests to a region located in north-central Syria. In the 11th-century bce Middle Assyrian texts, Aram appears in connection with Ahlamû (i.e., nomadic) groups and refers to the area between the Khabur and the Euphrates and even beyond, since these Ahlamû of the Land Aram or “Aramaeans” seem to move freely also west of the Euphrates as far as Jebel Bishri, Palmyra, and Mount Lebanon. In the 8th-century bce Aramaic inscription of Sfire there is mention of “All” and “Upper and Lower Aram.” These terms refer most probably to a geographical area which seems to cover roughly the boundaries of modern Syria. In the 8th-century bce Aramaic inscriptions of Breij and Afis, Aram is the name of a south Syrian kingdom the capital of which was Damascus. This latter use of Aram is attested to in the Old Testament, where the term appears associated also with specific geopolitical entities such as the chiefdoms of Aram-Ṣobah and Aram Beth–Rehob. In short, the available written sources indicate that Aram is a geographical term which refers at times to a specific polity, and, at others, to a wider geographical area located within the territory of present-day Syria. Modern scholarship designates as “Aramaean” any of the Iron Age polities of Syria who bore the characteristic appellation Bīt-PN, and/or whose rulers bore Aramaic names and left inscriptions in the West Semitic dialect known as Aramaic. The inhabitants of these states are referred to as Aramaeans. Regarding the etymology of the name Aram, there is no scholarly consensus on the origin and meaning of the word. Among the most commonly accepted suggestions is an etymology derived from a Semitic root rwm (“to be high”). Another suggestion interprets the name as a broken plural meaning “white antelopes” or “wild bulls.”

Minoritized Criticism of the New Testament

Minoritized criticism of the New Testament refers generally to academic and critical interpretations of biblical texts by people of color in the United States of America, where they are often called “minorities.” The word “minoritized” signifies that the issue in question is less about number but more about power, as minoritization is a state-sanctioned and ideologically supported process—including using the Bible for justification—of racialization and marginalization against particular persons or communities because of their race/ethnicity and their migration history. With the civil rights movement and James Cone’s development of black liberation theology in the late 1960s, African American biblical scholars began to protest white supremacy by highlighting racial/ethnic relations and tensions in biblical writings and by making their biblical interpretation explicitly contextual to their communities’ histories, experiences, and concerns. Since then, with the model provided by their black colleagues and the emphasis on “social location” within biblical studies, Asian American and Latinx American scholars have also developed their respective hermeneutics to challenge racial discrimination and address issues of identity, representation, inclusion, exclusion, exploitation, oppression, and resistance, among others, both in the biblical texts that they read and in the contemporary situations that their communities face. Given this criticism’s concern with minoritized communities, practitioners often engage African American studies, Asian American studies, or Latinx American studies to inform their work. Because of minoritization’s connection with migration and its dynamics as a form of internal colonialism, there are also often overlaps between minoritized criticism and postcolonial criticism of the New Testament. While minoritized criticism started with a focus on race/ethnicity, subsequent works, upon acknowledgment that there are other identity factors besides race (such as gender, class, sexuality) and recognition that race and other identity factors are often mutually co-constitutive, have been giving greater emphasis on diversities and keener attention to intersectional realities within each minoritized community. Recently, there is a move to understand minoritized criticism as work that engages across racially/ethically minoritized communities (as opposed to scholarship that works exclusively within a critic’s own minoritized community). This understanding emphasizes the reality that minoritized groups are racialized not in isolation but in relation to one another, and the need to decenter whiteness by prioritizing critics of other minoritized communities as one’s interlocutors. Since minoritization as a result of migration may take place in various countries, minoritized criticism of the New Testament can also be practiced and developed outside of the United States.