yet another

One of the many side effects of growing older is the realization that not only do re-readings of the events of one's youth appear regularly (everything you know is wrong), but re-readings of previous centuries' re-readings. Two separate books on popular science in the Victorian era are on the fall schedule for University of Chicago Press, meaning we must read about how not entirely correct re-readings of the condition of scientific knowledge were presented, not entirely correctly, to a public afflicted with even less correct ideas about the world.

In spite of which it is hard to resist the idea of reading one or both; it's hard to remember that it wasn't Darwin's theory of evolution (as I've cribbed from journal articles recently) but the discovery of dinosaur bones that brought the Book of Genesis (and Bishop Ussher's 4004 B.C. timeline of creation) under scrutiny.

The sense that there is a real, concealed story behind the mainstream story that is thought by many to be incorrect spawns all sorts of bizarre alternatives: I think I have written on more than one occasion about the nineteenth century's hollow earthers. (I had forgotten that Giordano Bruno is presented in The Solitudes as having had a world view identical to Koreshanism before having his picture of the globe flipped inside out, but I will for once resist the digression.)

Yesterday I noticed a couple of new potboilers clearly trying to ride on the diminishing slipstream of The Da Vinci Code and skimmed past the frequent chase scenes and high-tech cliffhanger moments to figure out how they were cooking up some kind of secret on which to hang a plot. All of them were pretty silly, one of them possibly being about the Church covering up knowledge of evolution long before Darwin. (I'm not sure because I didn't want to devote more than three minutes to the project of deciphering an idea the author himself negates in a postscript.)

I don't think anybody has gotten my repeated references to the presence in Atlanta of Poussin's shepherds of Arcady and the ossuaries of Jesus Son of Joseph and Jesus' son. To repeat, these happen to be the key artifacts in two alternative stories about a doubted mainstream story. And both alternatives have been taken remarkably seriously, though the tale of the Talpiot tomb seems to have been recognized very quickly as statistical spuriousness.

What interests me in the case of the "Tomb of Jesus" brouhaha is that prior to the idea of making a TV show about the topic, James Tabor had decided to stake a lifetime's scholarly reputation on the hypothesis, to the point of commissioning archaeologically corrected paintings of first-century Jerusalem. (I have written too much already about Dr. Tabor, and about how Messrs. Baigent and Leigh were distressed to see their improbable chain of associations used to make mega-bucks from a thriller novel. Of course their legal case failed, because if their hypothesis was true, then it was part of the historical record and not copyrightable; if it was fiction, then they had to admit it wasn't true and treat the whole of Holy Blood, Holy Grail as a novel that could be plagiarized.)

In any case, it was my prior interest in the presence of the Hellenistic city of Sepphoris less than five miles from Nazareth that led me to pick up the current issue of Biblical Archaeology Review, not a journal I follow closely. Its cover story on Galilee in Jesus' time indicates that Sepphoris reached its apogee beginning some time after the crucifixion, when Herod Antipas' mega-shekel (or -talent or -denarius) building program had major cultural impact.

So one plausible alternative story turns out to be less plausible regarding the cultural context of first-century Galilee; it really was an ethnically homogenous backwater just beginning to feel the impact of the surrounding sea of romanitas and crosscultural currents sweeping through the Empire.

What is curious is to realize that cultural change could happen as quickly and drastically in the first century as in the twenty-first; just as it would be a mistake to extrapolate to the condition of my hometown in 1957 from what is available there in 2007, it is inapplicable to assume that objects and ideas dating from around C.E. 60 in Galilee would have been commonplace half a century earlier.

out of Ægypt have I called my son

I think the cause of surprise that a half century should make a difference in a place like Galilee is that we are told these days by sophisticates that, except for moments such as the Mongol invasions or erupting volcanoes, historical change was always a long drawn-out affair in the ancient world; everyone looked around one day and realized there were far more Germanic tribes hanging around the Roman Empire than there had been, and they were no longer bothering to pronounce Latin properly.

In fact, any historical event you care to name seemed to require a couple centuries' worth of glacially paced prior alteration until the day, as with global warming, when the pace of glacial change speeded up with a rush. The idea that one king's construction program could actually change the whole ethnic and intellectual composition of a region is contrary to what we have been taught. (In other words, it was as possible to change things dramatically by quickly expanding a rather small provincial city as by burning one down.)

Of course, I've written before about how trade networks and such meant that ideas traveled fast, relatively speaking, among major cities, and some of them were carried forth to smaller places by Roman soldiers. But Galilee was a little ways off the trade networks. One would have thought that provincial folks would still have had to go to Jerusalem (before C.E. 70, that is) to get the latest news. (I have corrected my dates in the previous post to C.E. 60 and C.E. 10, since thereafter there was a little culture-changing contretemps called the Jewish War.)

The other reason we instinctively assume there was no more than modest change in classical antiquity is that the stuff from Rome, or from pre-Hellenic Egypt before it, looks so similar to the untutored eye. We have to be told by the museum wall plaques that no one would have worn a silly-looking hairstyle like that a century earlier or a century later, or that the standing or sitting posture of Isis changed significantly in the wall paintings from one dynasty to the next. We are attuned to what we consider significant difference, and what we consider significant is culturally given. (Without the swoosh, some of us couldn't tell a Nike from a Reebok, and we may even have to look at the logo to tell for sure if somebody is typing on an iBook or a Dell laptop.)