Empire, Economics, and the New Testament. By Peter Oakes (with a forward by Bruce Longenecker)

Abstract

Empire, Economics, and the New Testament is a collection of ten essays representing more than two decades of Peter Oakes’s research into the world inhabited by the New Testament writers and their audiences. His particular investigative interest has been the use of archaeological evidence and socioeconomic models to illuminate the ways in which first-century audiences would have read or heard the New Testament writings. Oakes’s preface lays out the chronological development of his research and the background of chapters 2–10 (all previously published essays). Within Empire, however, the essays are helpfully grouped around three major topics (house church, economics, empire). The two essays in Part I, House Church, represent Oakes’s most recent work, which explores the various physical spaces in which early Christians met and the socioeconomic realities impacting how those worshiping groups would have heard the New Testament message (p. xi). Chapter 1, ‘A House-Church Account of Economics and Empire’, is original to this volume, although it builds upon his earlier Reading Romans in Pompeii (Fortress, 2009); chapter 2, ‘Nine Types of Church in Nine Types of Space in the Insula of the Menander’, was originally published in 2016. In both chapters, Oakes uses the extensive archaeological data available from the excavation of a single block of buildings in Pompeii to consider the various meeting areas that would have been available for Christian groups in that setting, and he argues that the typical gathering was most likely a ‘non-elite house church’. The socioeconomic complexity and, perhaps, precariousness of such groups would have made them the natural recipients of the broad range of New Testament perspectives on economic and empire-related issues (p. 30).