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Jesus and His World (Book Review)


Craig Evans. Jesus and His World: The Archaeological Evidence. Louisville, KY: Westminster John Knox, 2012.

Reviewed by Deven K MacDonald

Craig Evans is distinguished professor of New Testament at Acadia Divinity College in Nova Scotia, Canada. In his recent book, Jesus and His World: The Archaeological Evidence, he offers to readers an impressive array of archaeological discoveries from the Ancient World and demonstrates how they confirm and clarify the NT gospels. Throughout the book, Evans shows a remarkable ability to draw from both ancient and modern sources, as well as how to connect them to NT studies.

The book is divided into five major chapters with two appendices and a number of indexes. Chapter topics include the city of Nazareth – Jesus’ hometown – and the role of the synagogue in Jewish life (in opposition to Howard Clark Kee who wrote in the mid-1990s that all references to synagogues in the NT and in Josephus were anachronistic). Other chapter topics include reviewing what we know about literacy in Israel at the time of Jesus, the role of the priest and the temple, and Jewish burial traditions, which, in light of yet another recently debated discovery of the “Jesus’ tomb,” makes the chapter highly relevant.

More than a book on obscure artifacts and potshards, Evans offers readers a vivid picture of life in first century Israel. This picture is rich with examples, and fleshed out with crucial details about the way of life, geography, and religious climate of the day in which Jesus lived. At every turn, Evans brings the archeological data alongside the NT gospels, and this juxtaposition typically proves fruitful. Evans references and connects dozens of passages from the gospels with what we have discovered from the Ancient World. The picture he presents in the end is one in which the gospels, through the sheer amount of verisimilitude, must be taken seriously. Evans demonstrates how at every turn the gospels themselves reflect accurately the times and area in which Jesus lived. In so doing, he not only affirms historic Christianity’s confidence in the veracity of the gospel accounts, but also offers a staunch challenge to skeptics, minimalists, and popular movements which divorce Jesus from his context and ignore the biblical data.

Evans is at his best in his chapter on literacy in first century Israel (chapter 3). Drawing from a legion of examples, inscriptions, papyri, graffiti, and ancient sources, Evans presents an overwhelming case for the reality that Jesus and his early followers were literate, as the gospels contend. This argument is in contention with some modern scholars who argue that Jesus was likely illiterate. In this chapter, Evans makes an interesting point, which has profound apologetic value: he argues that we have greatly misunderstood the longevity of ancient documents, and not appreciated what this longevity means for the transmission of NT documents (75-76). Drawing from the work of George Houston, who demonstrated that manuscripts could have a life-span of up to 500 years, Evans suggests that if this was the case with the gospel autographs  –  and there is no reason to expect that it was not – then for a few hundred years, any copies of the autographs, and copies of those copies, would still be governed, shaped by, and compared to the originals. This argument rebuts the popular “copy of a copy of a copy” notion that suggests that the gospel manuscripts were open to distortions and errors.         

The book is well written and, although it interacts with current scholarship in a number of fields, it still remains accessible not only to scholars, but also to students and pastors.  Anyone looking to better understand the NT gospels and achieve a better understanding of Jesus and his world is recommended to read Jesus and his World.

Read other reviews like this one in the recent issue of Credo Magazine!



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