A society both familiar and strange emerges from this absorbing historical study. Korb (The Faith Between Us
) calls his retrospective “a lively romp through the land of Palestine,” circa 5 B.C.E.–70 C.E., but the picture he draws from archeology, ancient historical accounts, and religious texts is anything but lighthearted. For the average Jew, he contends, life was impoverished, taxes crushing, hygiene abysmal, crime outrageous, rulers—Roman and Jewish—rapacious or deranged, and death gruesome. (He details a typical crucifixion as well as Herod the Great’s fatal case of genital worms.) Confronting these harsh realities, he continues, was an all-encompassing religious culture featuring elaborate codes of purity, a sense of ambient holiness emanating from the Temple in Jerusalem, ancient traditions and dynamic new sects, from Pharisees to insurrectionary Zealots. The author tries to distance himself from historical-Jesus controversies, but can’t help gravitating to them (especially in his extensive footnotes, which are as interesting as the main text); he deploys his sources to speculate plausibly about Jesus the man and examine the appeal of Christianity’s response to contemporary social upheavals. Korb’s vivid, breezy prose makes accessible a mountain of scholarship that illuminates the past. (Mar.)
