Demography#

It is impossible to know with certainty how many Jews lived in the Roman Empire during New Testament times. Perhaps 2 million to 3 million people lived in Palestine; but we can be fairly sure that more Jews lived in Syria than in Palestine, more in Alexandria, Egypt, than in Jerusalem. Even Rome had a Jewish quarter. On the other hand, a sizable number of Gentiles lived in parts of Palestine, such as Galilee, where Jesus grew up; and they outnumbered Jews in the nearby Decapolis. Gentiles were to be found particularly in major cities.

Languages#

Latin was the legal language of the Roman Empire but was used mainly in the West, though even there Greek was widely used. In the East, generally speaking, Greek predominated. Jews living in Palestine, such as Jesus and his first disciples, spoke not only Greek but also and mostly Aramaic and perhaps some Hebrew. The Jews had picked up Aramaic, a sister language to their traditional Hebrew, during the exile.

Those that depend on modern social anthropological studies often put the rate around 5 to 10 percent, city folk and men toward the high end, country folk and women toward the low end. But the large numbers of ancient graffiti and nonliterary papyri, plus lists of graduates from elementary schools, suggest a higher rate of literacy, perhaps much higher and inclusive of women and slaves. The materials for writing made it hard to learn, so that the ability to read exceeded the ability to write.

Transportation, Commerce, and Communication#

In transportation, commerce, and communication, Palestine was relatively undeveloped. Nevertheless, several main roads deserve mention.

• One led southwest from Jerusalem past Bethlehem through Hebron to Gaza and northeast from Jerusalem past Bethany to Jericho, then north up the Jordan Valley and the west side of the Sea of Galilee toward Capernaum. To avoid Samaria, whose inhabitants the Jews despised, Jews often traveled this road in going between Galilee and Judea.

• Another road led from Jerusalem straight up through Samaria to Capernaum. It was along this road that Jesus talked with a Samaritan woman by Jacob’s well (John 4:1-42).

• Another road branched east from Jericho to Philadelphia, turned north, and went through Gerasa to Damascus. Paul was traveling this road when he received his transforming vision of Christ (Acts 9:1-19).

• Another road went up the Mediterranean coast from Gaza to Tyre. A branch on which the risen Jesus conversed with two disciples went from the southern coast past Emmaus to Jerusalem (Luke 24:13-35).

• Finally, a road led from the northern coast past Nazareth and Capernaum to Damascus.

Although the Palestinian road system was comparatively poor, throughout much of the Roman Empire the roads were justly famous. They were as straight as possible and durably constructed. Early Christian missionaries used them to full advantage, and the imperial post carried governmental dispatches over them. Private businesses had their own couriers to carry messages. People traveled by foot, by donkey, by horse or mule, and by carriage or litter.

Water offered the primary means of commercial transport. Since Egypt served as breadbasket for the Roman Empire, Alexandria provided the main port and outlet for Egyptian grain. Alexandrian ships reached almost 200 feet in length, had sails, and carried oars for emergencies. One large ship could transport several hundred passengers in addition to cargo.

Paul was aboard an Alexandrian ship when he suffered shipwreck, and he finished his voyage on another Alexandrian ship.

Warships were lighter and faster. Galley slaves labored at the oars, of which there were two to five banks, sometimes more. Barges plied the rivers and canals.

Roads, rivers, and the Mediterranean Sea supplied lines of communication. Papyrus, ostraca (broken bits of pottery), and wax tablets were used as writing materials for letters and other documents. For important manuscripts, leather or parchment was used. Most news was spread by word of mouth, by town criers, and by public notices posted on bulletin boards.

Public Conveniences#

Alexandria had a well-developed school system. The city library contained well over half a million volumes. Excavations have shown that the city of Antioch, Syria, had two and one-half miles of streets colonnaded and paved with marble and a complete system of night lighting. Serving major cities of the empire were underground sewage disposal systems. Bathhouses featured large pools and served the general public. The Greeks had invented shower baths long before New Testament times.

Housing#

Most housing was cramped, so that people—especially men—spent the majority of their waking hours out of doors and in workshops and public spaces. Fortunately, the weather was usually mild.

• Houses in the western part of the Roman Empire were built of brick or concrete, at least in cities.

• Poorer sections and rural areas had frame houses or huts.

In the eastern part of the empire, houses usually consisted of stucco and sun-dried brick. Few windows opened onto the street, because cities lacked proper police forces to keep thieves from roaming the streets at night and breaking into houses through windows.

A vestibule led to the door, beyond which lay a large central court called an atrium. Roofs were tile or thatch. In the kitchen an open hearth, or an earthen or stone oven, served for cooking. Oil lamps provided lighting. Plumbing and heating were well developed. A central furnace heated some houses, pipes conveying the warm air to different rooms.

Palestinian towns and houses differed somewhat from their Greco-Roman counterparts and were comparatively backward. One entered a town through a gate in the wall. Inside the gate an open square provided a public place for trade and for social and legal interchange. Jesus must have preached often in these town squares.

The houses were low and flat-roofed, sometimes with a guest chamber perched on top. The building material for these houses consisted of bricks made of mud and straw baked in the sun or of small stones and blocks of basalt. The typical low-class Palestinian had an apartment in a building containing several apartments, all on ground level. Some apartments had only one room, part of which was on a slightly higher level than the rest.

• Beds, chests for clothes, and cooking utensils were located on the higher level.

• Livestock and other domestic animals inhabited the lower level; or, when the animals were outside, children played there.

Branches laid across rafters and plastered with mud formed the flat roofs. Rain caused leakage; so after each rain the mud had to be rolled to seal the holes.

A parapet around the edge of the roof kept people from falling off, and a flight of stairs on the outside of the house led up to the roof. The housetop was used for sleeping in hot weather, drying vegetables, ripening fruit, and, in devout homes, for praying. The floors consisted of the hard earth or, in better houses, of stone. The beds were merely a mat or a coverlet laid on the floor. Only well-to-do homes had bedsteads. People slept in their day garments.

Food#

Romans ate four meals a day. An average diet consisted of bread, porridge, lentil soup, goat’s milk, cheese, vegetables, fruit, olives, bacon, sausage, fish, and diluted wine.

Jews ate only two meals a day, one at noon, another in the late afternoon or evening. The Jewish diet consisted mainly of bread, fruits, and vegetables. Meat, roasted or boiled, was usually reserved for festivals. Since sugar was unknown, raisins, figs, honey, and dates supplied sweetening. Fish, often in the form of a relish, substituted for meat. At formal meals people reclined on cushions; for informal meals they sat.

Clothing and Styles#

Next to their skin men wore tunics, a shirt-like garment extending from the shoulders to the knees. They also wore a longer outer garment. A belt or sash, called a “girdle” in some translations of the New Testament, was worn around the waist, coarse shoes or sandals on the feet, and a hat or a scarf on the head. In cold weather a mantle or heavy cloak gave additional warmth. These garments were usually white.

Women wore a short tunic as an undergarment and a sometimes brightly colored outer garment extending to the feet. The more fashionable used cosmetics lavishly, including lipstick, eye shadow, and eyebrow paint, and for jewelry wore earrings and nose ornaments.

Women’s hairstyles changed constantly. Men wore their hair short and shaved with straight razors. Dandies had their hair curled and used large amounts of hair oil and perfume. Both men and women dyed their hair, often to cover up the gray. False hair added to the coiffure, and both sexes wore wigs.

In Palestine men grew beards and let their hair grow somewhat longer, but still not so long as portrayed in traditional pictures of biblical people. Generally, Palestinian styles leaned toward conservatism for both sexes.

Social Classes#

Classes were sharply stratified in pagan society. Aristocratic landowners, politicians, government contractors, and others lived in luxury. A strong middle class did not exist, because slaves did most of the work. Now dependent on government support, the more or less middle class of previous times had become homeless, foodless mobs in the cities, often worse off than slaves, who at least had job security.

The leveling influence of Judaism tended to reduce stratification in Jewish society; but the religious and political elite, concentrated in Jerusalem, formed an upper class. Farmers, artisans, small-business owners, and their families made up a majority of the population, living mostly in rural villages.

Among the Jews, tax collectors—traditionally called “publicans” - became special objects of class hatred. They collected poll taxes, property taxes, road use taxes, and sales taxes. Other Jews despised the tax collectors because they handled currency with blasphemous pagan inscriptions and iconography and cooperated with Roman overlords. These overlords auctioned the job of collecting taxes to the lowest bidder, that is, to the one who bid the lowest rate of commission for a contract. A collector would gather not only the tax and his commission, but also whatever he could pocket illegally.

Bribery of tax collectors by the rich increased the financial burden on those who were barely scraping by. As a result, the masses deeply resented the collectors. People who could not scrape by resorted to begging or banditry. Lacking the economic support of a husband, widows often sank into destitution; and because they had usually been married off to men older than they were, their number was disproportionately high.

A Paternalistic Society#

There were exceptions and variations from place to place, but as a general rule women—especially Jewish women—lived under severe restrictions. They were largely uneducated. Males dominated them in the home and in religious and political institutions. Similarly, children lived under the almost unlimited authority of their fathers.

Especially in cities, slaves may have numbered nearly as many as free people. Slavery was not racially based. It had been common to condemn criminals, debtors, and prisoners of war to slavery; but by the first century most slaves were born as such. Many of Jesus’ sayings and parables imply that slavery existed in the Jewish culture of his time, though Jews tended not to enslave other Jews; and Paul’s letters reflect the presence of slaves in Christian households.

They found it difficult to make ends meet, while their former masters no longer had to support them. To pay their debts or gain economic security, some people sold themselves into slavery, perhaps for a contractually limited period of time. Masters ranged from kind to cruel and considered their slaves, including young boys and girls, legitimate objects of sexual exploitation. Often they castrated their male slaves.

Originally, slaves who had turned criminal were the only ones to be executed by crucifixion. Later, however, free people who had committed heinous crimes also suffered this fate. During the siege of Jerusalem in A.D. 70, Titus’s soldiers crucified as many as five hundred Jews in a day just outside the city walls, in plain view of the people still inside. Execution by beheading and burning at the stake was also practiced. At other times condemned men were forced to fight as gladiators in the arena. Whole groups might kill one another in staged warfare.

The Family#

As would be expected, the family formed the basic unit of society. Some factors tended to break down the family, however, such as the high number of slaves and the training of children by slaves rather than by parents. On the other hand, nuclear families were not the norm; extended families were. They included not only the husband and wife and their unmarried children, but also their married sons, daughters-in-law, grandchildren, and any slaves belonging to the household. They all lived under the same roof or in nearby dwellings. The most senior male acted as head of the family.

Endogamy, the technical term for marriage between relatives, kept property and other forms of wealth within the clan. Thus marriages were arranged in the economic and other interests of the families involved, so that romance seldom played a part. Brides were purchased, and weddings featured an inhouse ceremony and celebration without religious rite.

Ties of kinship were very strong, then, so strong that marriages to first cousins on the father’s side were most preferred, though not always possible. (The marriage of two people more closely related than cousins fell into the category of incest, prohibited.)

Large families were common in Palestine. The birth of a boy brought joy; that of a girl, disappointment. On the eighth day after birth a Jewish boy was circumcised and named. The naming of a girl could wait a month.

At the death of a person the surviving family performed formal acts of grief, such as rending their garments and fasting, and also hired professional mourners, usually flutists and women skilled at wailing. In addition, the family could enlist the services of a professional undertaker. Skeletal remains from the Roman period in Greece show an adult longevity of about forty years for men, thirty-four years for women.

Citizenship#

Because modern nation-states had not yet arisen, people considered themselves citizens of cities, towns, and regions rather than of nations, as in the Apostle Paul’s declaration, “I am a Jew, from Tarsus in Cilicia, a citizen of no ordinary city” (Acts 21:39).

Honor and Shame#

Marriages were arranged not only for economic reasons, but also to enhance family honor. The concern for honor spread far beyond marriage and family, however, and exceeded the concern for wealth, even for life itself. Shame consisted in concern for one’s honor. To lack such concern was to be shameless. Honor consisted in public recognition of one’s status in society, whatever that status was. Ascribed honor came from the givens of one’s ancestry, gender, locality, and so on. Acquired honor came from one’s benevolence, heroism, athletic victories, political and religious advancements, and various other attainments.

The wealthy financed the construction of public buildings, the laying of pavement, and the holding of sporting events—all to acquire honor. They were rewarded with public accolades in the form of proclamations, inscriptions, and statues of themselves. For recognition, even the giving of charity to the poor was done in the most conspicuous way possible. What others thought of you counted more than what you thought of yourself, so that there resulted what scholars call a dyadic personality, one determined largely by others rather than highly individualistic.

To gain and preserve honor, especially within one’s peer group, boasting was considered normal and appropriate; humility, abnormal and mistaken.

For honor, like all other goods, was thought to be in short, limited supply. What you lost, another gained; and vice versa.

Morals#

In the New Testament Letters, sexual sins usually head a list of prohibited vices. Every conceivable kind of immorality was attributed to the pagan gods and goddesses. Prostitution by both men and women was a well-recognized institution. Slave girls often fell victim to this debauchery. To gain money, some men prostituted their own wives and children. Most of society accepted pederasty and other homosexual behavior.

Divorce was easy, frequent, and acceptable. In fact, divorce documents are among the most numerous of papyrus remains. Murder was common. Gentile parents often “exposed” their infant daughters, that is, abandoned them in the city forum, on a hillside, or in an alley. Many exposed girls were picked up to be reared as prostitutes. In fairness it should be added that despite the prevalence of low morality, decent people were not wholly lacking in the Greco-Roman world.

Entertainment#

Not all entertainment had sunk into sensuality. The Olympic games had long provided sporting pleasure of a wholesome sort. Worthy music and literature uplifted the human spirit. Children amused themselves with toys such as baby rattles, dolls with movable limbs, miniature houses with furniture, balls, swings, and games similar to hopscotch, hide-and-seek, and blindman’s buff.

Chariot races corresponded to modern automobile races. Betting was common. Naturally, the public idolized winning charioteers. But gladiatorial shows provided the most spectacular form of entertainment. Gladiators might be slaves, captives, criminals, or volunteers. Once an entire arena was flooded and a naval battle staged. As many as ten thousand died in a single performance. The sand in the arena became so soaked with blood that it had to be replaced several times during the day.

Business and Labor#

Small businesses dotted the main streets and marketplaces of cities. They were owned by butchers and bakers, grocers and barbers, cobblers, tentmakers, leather workers, carpenters, blacksmiths, launderers, and other shopkeepers. Big industry was virtually unknown, because the transportation of goods to distant places was prohibitively expensive. Besides, caravans were slow and subject to plunder, and shipping on the Mediterranean Sea could take place only during the summer months of calm weather.

Foreshadowing modern labor unions, trade guilds charged dues for membership, had officers and patron deities, followed rules of order in their meetings, engaged in politicking, extended aid to members in distress, gave benefits to widows and orphans of deceased members, and formed one kind of voluntary association.

Other such associations included religious clubs, burial societies, and philosophical schools.

In Palestine they regulated days and hours for working.

In some respects agriculture was surprisingly advanced. Farmers practiced seed selection according to size and quality and soaked grain seeds in chemical mixtures to protect them from insect pests. They also used different kinds of fertilizer and practiced crop rotation.

Private companies carried on banking much as it is done today with borrowing, lending, discounting of notes, exchanging of foreign currency, and issuing of letters of credit. The ordinary interest rate varied from 4 to 12 percent.

Science and Medicine#

Though Jews had little interest in science during the New Testament period, science had already made a beginning. In the third century B.C., for example, Eratosthenes, librarian at Alexandria, taught that the earth is spherical and calculated its size at 24,000 miles in circumference (only 800 miles short of the modern estimate) and the earth’s distance from the sun at 92 million miles (the modern estimate is 93 million miles). He also conjectured the existence of the American continent.

Medicine, or at least surgery, had advanced more than we might have guessed—a relevant bit of information since one of the New Testament writers, Luke, acted as Paul’s private physician. Surgeons performed amputations, operations on the skull, and tracheotomies (incisions into the windpipe). Knowledge and use of anesthetics were limited.

A variety of medical instruments were used, such as lancets, stitching needles, an elevator for lifting up depressed portions of the skull, different kinds of forceps, catheters, spatulas for examining the throat, and ratcheting instruments for dilating passages in the body for internal examination. Dental work included the filling of teeth with gold. False teeth came from the mouths of deceased people or animals. People sometimes used tooth powder for brushing and polishing their teeth.

Summary#

In the first century more Jews lived outside Palestine than inside. Those living inside spoke Aramaic, but also Greek and perhaps some Hebrew.

Though well-constructed roads ran far and wide in the Roman Empire, the road system in Palestine remained relatively poor. Most people traveled overland by foot, but ships provided a fairly advanced means of sea travel and commerce.

The primary writing material was papyrus. Large cities featured public facilities of various sorts. Private homes ran a gamut from the large and luxurious to the cramped and squalid. Diet was mainly meatless, clothing robe-like. Hairstyles and the use of cosmetics resembled modern Western customs. Society lacked a strong, numerous middle class.

Tax collectors formed a small but especially despised class, and slaves were numerous. Roman crucifixion had expanded from a slave’s punishment to a punishment for heinous criminals of other classes too. Family values competed with easy divorce and widespread immorality. Extended families were the rule, and males ruled the roost.

Competition for honor affected interaction between families, between groups, and between individuals. Much entertainment reflected the immorality of society and fed on bloodlust in the gladiatoral games.

Tradesmen organized themselves into voluntary associations, as did others of common interests; but industry was confined to small shops. Methods of agriculture and banking foreshadowed modern methods; and business depended on brokers’ bringing patrons and clients together.

Science and medicine were still in their infancy but already showed signs of what was yet to come.