Two Thousand Years Ago: The World at the Time of Jesus

I bought this book a few years ago in because I was interested in what else was going on in the world when the alleged Son of God was also walking around in the small area which comprises the Holy Land. If Jesus' life could be compared to a portrait then this book does a very good job of "completing the picture." Even before the advent of CNN we humans have always been connected in some unseen ways. If Jesus was fully human, which of course he was, then this book helps to give an even broader view of his humanity. Plus, as a history buff, it's just plain good reading.

We live in a world today that is almost completely interconnected and interdependent. The internet is but the latest piece of this kind of communal global culture; we've had airline travel, fast shipping, corporate and government interlocking in different ways across the globe for some time. It hasn't always been this way, but that is not to say that the world hasn't always had some kind of interconnectedness. Another thing that is happening culturally, though we often fail to see it, is that history is selectively whittled down to key places, times, events, and people as if they were the only ones in the past, and as if they had a shared significance. The world has always been larger than our view of it, and this book by Charles Frazee shows that. Particularly in the Western world, when we think of the world two thousand years ago, we default to Palestine almost entirely; we are reminded by these writings that there were things going on beyond in the Roman Empire, and are more vaguely aware of other places. Frazee takes the reader even further afield, showing all the different regions of the world, and the peoples who lived in those area. Frazee demonstrates with ease the interconnections between Roman, Greek and Judaic cultures, and shows their more peripheral but still significant contacts with Parthian, Egyptian and surrounding cultures. Despite the fact that Jesus most likely never travelled more than a hundred miles or so from his place of birth during his youth or ministry, these distant places were brought to him in the the crossroads nature of the ancient Near East. Frazee looks at the different regions of the world beyond these closely connected places, including subsaharan Africa, China, Korea, Japan, India, the Pacific, and the Americas. He even looks at the Arctic and the cultures there. While it is highly unlikely the Arctic peoples had even minor contact with the Greco-Roman world of Jesus, still these peoples were contemporaries of Jesus, and part of the world in which he lived. Frazee looks at the geographic aspects, the political, military and economic isues, and the cultural and social issues. One of the more significant parts of Frazee's exposition is the exploration of the religious and philosophical ideas of the different cultures. He asks the question frequently, how would the teachings of Jesus fit into this society? Missionaries much later would ask the same question (and not always graciously, nor always successfully), but here is an analysis of what each culture already had that might have been compatible or similar, and what would have been different and difficult to accept. As an exercise in looking at the diversity of the world and how Christians fit in it, this is a very interesting text. Frazee writes in a very accessible style. I could easily imagine youth groups as well as adult bible study groups using this text - it is appropriate for high school and undergraduate level audiences, as well