Sepphoris and First-Century Galilee

chapter 6 Mark 1:39: “And He Went throughout All of Galilee . . .”—Sepphoris and First-Century Galilee

Eric M. Meyers

Approximately twenty-five years ago, after the discovery of the wonderful Dionysos mosaic on the western summit of Sepphoris, a chorus of scholars was proclaiming that the Galilee of Jesus was far more Hellenized and cosmopolitan than previous generations had thought it was.1 The high level of Greco-Roman culture represented by the mosaic floor and peristyle villa in which it was housed demonstrated once and for all that Galilee was not the backwater that it was once believed to be, but a place where Greek philosophi- cal ideas were debated and where theaters offered performances that could well have influenced the language of the Gospels.2 There was even a plan to do a special issue of National Geographic Magazine entitled something like “Jesus at Sepphoris,” with illustrations that revealed the full glory of Antipas’ new capital with a large pagan temple on the western summit and a well-attended theater functioning just a short distance to its north. The problem was that the authors and editors failed to consult all the archaeologists who were in charge, and when a proposed model of the city was shown to me along with some of the illustrations, a formal challenge to the publication plan was com- municated to National Geographic by me, my wife, and Ehud Netzer, who were the licensed archaeologists for most of the areas being featured in the

1 As an example of this sort of treatment, I would cite J.D. Crossan’s Jesus: A Revolutionary Biography (San Francisco: HarperCollins, 1994), in which he understands Jesus as a Jewish Socratic philosopher. In keeping with the more open terms of the “third quest” of Jesus scholarship that was more receptive to social history and archaeology, his co-authored book with J.L. Reed, Excavating Jesus: Beneath the Stones and Behind the Texts (San Francisco: HarperCollins, 2001), takes a more “grounded” approach that is based on facts on the ground. Richard’s Batey’s several articles in New Testament Studies, however, build on the idea that Galilee was already deeply Hellenized in the time of Jesus, and that Jesus was influenced by the theater at Sepphoris and the building boon there in the time of Herod Antipas; see “Is this not the Carpenter,” NTS 30 (1984): 249–58, and “Jesus and the Theater,” NTS 30 (1984): 563–74. 2 See the report of R. Talgam and Z. Weiss, The Mosaics of the House of Dionysos at Sepphoris: Excavated by E.M. Meyers, E. Netzer, and C.L. Meyers (Qedem 44; Jerusalem: The Institute of Archaeology, The Hebrew University of Jerusalem, 2004).

presentation. In this opposition to the publication, we had the support of the Israel Antiquities Authority and ultimately all participants in the international meeting on Galilee that was about to be convened at nearby Kibbutz Hannaton. The upshot of the story is that the article was pulled from National Geographic, the artist fired, and the illustrations wound up in a book published by Baker.3 Lawrence Shiffman’s and my criticisms of the drawings were published in Biblical Archaeologist 55 (1992), 105–7 and focused on their anti- Semitic character and inaccurate and anachronistic representation on the city in the time of Jesus. I mention this story to illustrate how eager a certain kind of New Testament scholar was just a few decades ago to accept the idea of a Galilee that was more Hellenized and cosmopolitan and not as Jewish as we now know it to have been. This is an old story with a large footprint in the history of scholarship and I will not go into it now but it is an important backdrop to the state of Galilean studies today and to the archaeology of both Sepphoris and the Galilee in gen- eral.4 But it is all the more surprising to have occurred in view of the fact that Sepphoris is not mentioned in the New Testament. The question of whether or why Jesus may have avoided Sepphoris or was ever in Sepphoris is certainly relevant to our inquiry. However, we urge caution in assessing this issue since the omission of Sepphoris in the New Testament could be accidental and mainly raises the possibility of Jesus’s avoiding the city. But in pursuing the question we perforce are urged to consider these issues: Could it have been too Hellenized? Might it have been too urban as I have suggested or too Gentile as the illustrations in Batey’s book suggest? Might socio-economic reasons have contributed to a possible avoidance? We now know that there was no major conflict between the urban and rural in the Galilee and that several sites such as Kefar Hananiah, Shikhin, and Gamla provided pottery and other supplies to the Jewish cities that surrounded the Galilee and Golan.5 Moreover, a major

3 See R. Batey, Jesus and the Forgotten City: New Light on Sepphoris and the Urban World of Jesus (Grand Rapids: Baker Book House, 1991). 4 J.L. Reed’s monograph on this subject, Archaeology and the Galilean Jesus: A Re-examination of the Evidence (Harrisburg: Trinity Press International, 2000), is an eminently readable account of recent developments. For a more recent collection of essays on the subject, see J. Zangenberg, H.W. Attridge, and D.B. Martin, eds., Religion, Ethnicity, and Identity in Ancient Galilee (Tübingen: Mohr Siebeck, 2007); David A. Fiensy and James R. Strange, eds., Galilee in the Late Second Temple and Mishnaic Periods, Volume 1: Life, Culture, and Society (Minneapolis: Fortress Press, 2014); and idem, Galilee in the Late Second Temple and Mishnaic Periods, Volume 2: The Archaeological Record from Cities, Towns, and Villages (Minneapolis: Fortress Press, 2015). 5 The pioneering study in the area of trade and pottery is that of D. Adan-Bayewitz, Common Pottery in Roman Galilee: A Study of Local Trade (Ramat-Gan: Bar-Ilan University Press,