Anthony Keddie investigates the changing dynamics of class and power at a critical place and time in the history of Judaism and Christianity - Palestine during its earliest phases of incorporation into the Roman Empire (63 BCE–70 CE). He identifies institutions pertaining to civic administration, taxation, agricultural tenancy, and the Jerusalem Temple as sources of an unequal distribution of economic, political, and ideological power. Through careful analysis of a wide range of literary, documentary, epigraphic, and archaeological evidence, including the most recent discoveries, Keddie complicates conventional understandings of class relations as either antagonistic or harmonious. He demonstrates how elites facilitated institutional changes that repositioned non-elites within new, and sometimes more precarious, relations with privileged classes, but did not typically worsen their economic conditions. These socioeconomic shifts did, however, instigate changing class dispositions. Judaean elites and non-elites increasingly distinguished themselves from the other, through material culture such as tableware, clothing, and tombs.

Jesus and the Middle Peasant ? Problematizing a Social-Scientific Concept

Class and Power in Roman Palestine: The Socioeconomic Setting of Judaism and Christian Origins

Urban Development and the New Elites

For the land [in Galilee] is everywhere so rich in soil and pasturage and produces such variety of trees, that even the most indolent are tempted by these facilities to devote themselves to agriculture. In fact, every inch of the soil has been culti vated by the inhabitants; there is not a parcel of waste land. The towns, too, are thickly distributed, and even the villages, thanks to fertility of the soil, are all so densely populated that the smallest of them contains above fifteen thousand inhabitants. (Josephus, War 3.42-43, trans. Thackeray, LCL)

Climate, Droughts, Wars, and Famines in Galilee as a Background for Understanding the Historical Jesus

The Q Parables of the Mustard Seed and Leaven: Half-Baked and Garden-Variety Metaphors?

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Jesus and the Middle Peasant ? Problematizing a Social-Scientific Concept

Citations

Class and Power in Roman Palestine: The Socioeconomic Setting of Judaism and Christian Origins

Urban Development and the New Elites

Climate, Droughts, Wars, and Famines in Galilee as a Background for Understanding the Historical Jesus

The Q Parables of the Mustard Seed and Leaven: Half-Baked and Garden-Variety Metaphors?

Economy of the Sacred

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