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The Bible For Normal People - Episode 175 Jodi Magness - The Jesus of Archaeology (1)
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Listen to The Bible For Normal People - Episode 175 Jodi Magness - The Jesus of Archaeology (1) by Seunghoon Han MP3 song. The Bible For Normal People - Episode 175 Jodi Magness - The Jesus of Archaeology (1) song from Seunghoon Han is available on Audio.com. The duration of song is 47:07. This high-quality MP3 track has 128 kbps bitrate and was uploaded on 24 Jun 2025. Stream and download The Bible For Normal People - Episode 175 Jodi Magness - The Jesus of Archaeology (1) by Seunghoon Han for free on Audio.com – your ultimate destination for MP3 music.
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The podcast features an interview with archaeologist Jodi Magnus discussing the Jesus of archaeology. They explore the differences between historians and archaeologists in studying the past, focusing on material culture excavation. Jodi shares her journey into archaeology, specializing in the archaeology of Palestine and early Judaism. She explains the significance of the Dead Sea Scrolls found near Qumran, offering insights into ancient Jewish sects. The conversation delves into the history and rediscovery of the scrolls, shedding light on their importance for understanding the time of Jesus. You're listening to the Bible for Normal People, the only God-ordained podcast on the Internet. I'm Pete Enns. And I'm Jared Byas. Welcome, everyone, to another episode of the podcast. Today, we're talking about the Jesus of archaeology, and we're talking about that with Jodi Magnus, who teaches early Judaism at the University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill. Yes, she's an archaeologist, and we had a fascinating discussion. See if you can tell where the conversation took an interesting turn. You have to be listening very, very carefully. You might not catch it. Anyway, we're just smiling here, but it was so fascinating. And if you want to read more, Jodi's published a bunch of books, one of which is The Archaeology of Qumran and the Dead Sea Scrolls. If that means nothing to you, it'll mean something to you by the end. And also a wonderful title, Stone and Dung, Oil and Spit, Jewish Daily Life in the Time of Jesus, which is wonderful areas of expertise. So I had a great time talking with her, and enjoy the episode. Both archaeologists and historians study the past. The difference is the sources of information that we use to derive information about the past. Historians focus on written sources, things people wrote down and left behind. Archaeology is the study of human material culture. Anything that people manufactured and left behind, and then we dig up out of the ground, that's what archaeologists study. How did I get into archaeology? I wanted to be an archaeologist since I was 12 years old. Thanks to a 7th grade history teacher, we learned about the ancient world, and I fell in love with ancient Greece. My interest ever since then was in the classical world. It was at about that time that I was finding fossils of shells at Girl Scout Camp. And anyway, it all came together. And ever since I was 12, I wanted to be an archaeologist. And my interest focused on the classical world, meaning the Greek and Roman world. I ended up doing my bachelor's degree in archaeology at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem. So eventually, I became specialized in the archaeology of Palestine, meaning the archaeology of the area of modern Israel, Jordan, and the Palestinian territories in the Roman, Byzantine, and early Islamic periods. And that's what I do. So that's interesting. You went to Hebrew University as an undergraduate. What made you go over there? Yeah, I don't know how much time you want to spend. We need a whole other section on my personal history. But I actually moved to Israel on my own, not with my family, when I was 16 years old, to finish high school there. And I had been on a summer tour in Israel the summer I was 15 years old, and I fell in love with it, decided I wanted to go back, spent a year persuading my parents to let me do it, and so finished high school there. And then I already knew I wanted to study archaeology. So I applied to some universities in the U.S., but also Hebrew University in Jerusalem, and decided I wanted to stay in Israel and did my bachelor's degree there. And then I ended up living there afterwards for some more years, so I have kind of a long history in Israel, yes. Yeah, that's quite a journey. But then how did you then bring your interest of New Testament or the rise of Christianity, I guess, into that? Is it sort of more a subset for you of Greek and Roman archaeology? Well, yeah, that's really an interesting question. So I ended up eventually, so I did my bachelor's degree, I did a double major in archaeology and history at the Hebrew University, and then I did a Ph.D. in classical archaeology, then Greek and Roman archaeology at the University of Pennsylvania. And then, you know, after that I taught at Tufts University for 10 years, and I taught in the Department of Classics there, I taught classical archaeology. But in 2002 I was offered this wonderful position that I've had since then at UNC Chapel Hill, University of North Carolina, in the Department of Religious Studies. And my position here at UNC is not an archaeology position, it's a position in early Judaism, which means Judaism in the time of Jesus. And when I was interviewing for the job, I was telling my colleagues, I said, you know, I'm not trained in religious studies or in early Judaism, you realize I'm an archaeologist, right? And they're like, no, that's okay, we know what you do, that's fine. So I ended up in the Department of Religious Studies in a position of early Judaism, and I actually had to teach courses in the subject, so I had to become familiar with it. And so one of the consequences of that was that my, you know, as a result of having to become familiar with it and teach it, my research also was impacted by focusing on, basically, what is Judaism in the time of Jesus in the Holy Land? And, in fact, the reason why I was hired into this position is, think sort of biblical archaeology, right? Archaeology, time of Jesus, Holy Land, Dead Sea Scrolls, you know, which I had been doing some work on the site where the scrolls were found, that's actually what happened. And so my original focus was not at all on anything having to do with Jesus or the New Testament or anything like that. So let's back up, because, you know, we're talking, we're throwing out terms, religious studies, archaeology, let's just, what is archaeology? Like, what do archaeologists do? Lay it out for us. Yeah, that's right, because, in fact, when I interviewed for the position here at UNC, and I was in this room with all the, you know, members of the faculty of the department, and one of them, a senior colleague, kept insisting that I was an historian. And I kept saying, no, I'm not an historian, I'm an archaeologist. And he said, no, you're an historian. So from the point of view of somebody in religious studies, anybody who studies the past is an historian by definition. But from the point of view of an archaeologist, they're not the same thing. So both archaeologists and historians study the past. The difference is the sources of information that we use to derive information about the past. So historians focus on written sources, right, things people wrote down and left behind, you know, historical sources. Whereas archaeology is the study of human material culture, by which I mean anything that people manufactured and left behind, and then we dig up out of the ground, that's what archaeologists study. So think buildings, tombs, pottery, you know, tools, whatever we dig up and find that people actually manufactured, we study that to learn about their lifestyles, their beliefs, and so on and so forth. And by the way, so therefore archaeology does not include the study of human or animal bones. Those are separate fields. They're related, but they're separate fields of study. You know, radiocarbon dating, which is, you know, a method that we use to date, that's not technically what archaeologists do. That's done by specialists. So that's what archaeology is. So does it also include, let's say, you know, a slab of stone or clay that has some writing on it? Would that be sort of in the purview of archaeology, or is that more of a textual historian's kind of purview? Yeah, that's actually really interesting. So when I tell people about, you know, so how do archaeologists date what we dig up out of the ground, right, and there are various ways of dating what we dig up. And one way is if you're lucky enough to find an inscription, something that has, you know, writing on it, and so that could fall into either category, right? It could fall into the category of being an archaeological find, but then it has a written text, which, depending on what it is, could be an historical text, right? So, yeah, it's something like, so, for example, the Dead Sea Scrolls were technically, I guess, an archaeological find, but they're actually documents, ancient documents that are studied by specialists in that field. Okay, yeah. So, yeah, you mentioned the Dead Sea Scrolls, and I think that's going to come up, that has to come up when we're talking about the archaeology and the history of, you know, the Judaism of Jesus' day. So can you say a little bit more about what the Dead Sea Scrolls are, just the history of the Dead Sea Scrolls and their rediscovery in the 20th century? And also archaeologically. Yeah. Just the history of the Dead Sea Scrolls. Okay, well. That's all. Oh, yeah, you can't agree with such a thing, because I think that's a concept that maybe people, I'm sure people have heard, but don't know anything about. Absolutely. And you have 30 seconds. You're absolutely right. I mean, I think almost everybody has heard of the Dead Sea Scrolls, but I think a lot of people don't understand exactly what they are. So the Dead Sea Scrolls are ancient documents dating to about the time of Jesus. They're scrolls. They're written on parchment, which means processed animal hide, that were found in caves near an ancient site called Qumran, which is located on the northwest shore of the Dead Sea. Those scrolls were found in 11 different caves surrounding the site of Qumran, and altogether the remains of approximately 1,000 different scrolls were found in those 11 caves. For the most part, what we have are small fragments, surviving from what were originally complete scrolls, because over the course of the centuries they deteriorated. Those scrolls were deposited in the caves by people who lived at the site of Qumran, and most scholars, including myself, identify the people who lived at Qumran as members of a Jewish sect called the Essenes, who are contemporary with the time of Jesus, who had very distinctive beliefs and worldviews and practices, and they're the ones who collected the scrolls. They didn't write them all by any means, but they're the ones who collected the scrolls. Apparently some members of this sect copied some of the scrolls, and eventually deposited those scrolls in the caves surrounding Qumran. And so the Dead Sea Scrolls represent this corpus of literature that belonged to members of this sect and were deposited in the caves, and this corpus of literature is a corpus of Jewish religious works. They're all Jewish religious works of literature, by which I mean copies of books of the Hebrew Bible, or what you might call the Old Testament, works that are related to biblical literature, like commentaries on biblical books or translations of them into Aramaic, and there are also biblical books, or I should say Jewish religious works, that were not included in the Jewish canon of sacred scripture. Some of them may have been included in the Catholic Bible, for example, the Book of Tobit or Ecclesiasticus, which are found also at Qumran among the Dead Sea Scrolls. And there are represented among the Dead Sea Scrolls works that we call sectarian, by which I mean works that were written by members of this sect, not necessarily at Qumran, but works that were written by members of this sect, which describe their distinctive beliefs and practices and worldviews. And those would include works like the Damascus Document, the Community Rule, the War Scroll, maybe the Temple Scroll. So that's the short answer. Yeah, and then maybe can you, because they were, I just think they had an impact when those were discovered. Can you talk about the discovery of this? Sure. So the initial discovery, the very first scrolls were discovered in Cave 1, what we call Cave 1, in the winter spring of 1946-1947. They were discovered by accident when a Bedouin, that is a local nomad, wandered into this cave and discovered a row of tall pottery jars covered with bowl-shaped lids and called other members of his tribe. And they opened up the jars and found that most of them were empty, but at least some of them contained scrolls. And eventually the Bedouin removed seven complete or nearly complete scrolls from this cave, Cave 1 at Qumran, which then eventually, there's a long story, but eventually ended up being purchased legally by the State of Israel. And those are the scrolls that are now on display in the Israel Museum, the Shrine of the Book in the Israel Museum in Jerusalem. And so it wasn't long after that that archaeologists put together an expedition to see if there were any more scrolls in the caves around Qumran. And eventually, after further exploration by archaeologists and the Bedouin who continued to look for scrolls, eventually a corpus of the remains of approximately 1,000 different scrolls came to light, you know, in these 11 caves around Qumran. The initial discovery occurred against the background of the end of the British mandate in Palestine and the partition of Palestine. And by the time this archaeological expedition was organized to Qumran, which was in the early 1950s, Palestine had been partitioned, and Qumran was under the rule of the government of Jordan. The expedition to Qumran, then, was conducted under the auspices of the government of Jordan, and it was led by a French biblical scholar named Roland de Vaux, who was based at the Dominican École Biblique et Archéologique Française de Jerusalem, the French School of Biblical Studies in Archaeology in Jerusalem. And he himself was a priest affiliated with the Dominican Order. And the team of scholars that this archaeologist, Roland de Vaux, put together consisted entirely of white men, who were Protestant or Catholic, and were from Europe, Western Europe primarily, and the United States. And their interest, when these first scrolls were discovered, because, you know, the scrolls they knew already, they determined, dated to about the time of Jesus, their interest was, what do the scrolls tell us about Jesus, right? What light do they shed on Jesus, and on his teachings, and the Gospel accounts? And so, very early on, the emphasis, you know, in terms of the interest in the Dead Sea Scrolls was, what do they tell us about Jesus? And I think that's why, even until today, when people hear Dead Sea Scrolls, there's a lot of public interest, because people think that they have something to do with Jesus. That's actually not the case. They have nothing to do with Jesus directly, and maybe only a little to do indirectly. Well, they purportedly revolutionized our understanding of Jesus, which is, you know, sort of a marketing-based exaggeration. Well, I don't actually think they revolutionized, I don't think it's accurate to say that they revolutionized our understanding of Jesus. What they did do is, in a way, I guess revolutionized is a little bit of a strong word, but, you know, they certainly transformed, or enhanced, or added to, or changed, whatever, our understanding of Judaism in the time of Jesus. Yes, right. By shedding light on a Jewish group that we knew very little about, and only from, you know, indirect or outside sources to this point. Now we have, you know, more direct information on them. And by way of extension, then, tell us about Jesus in His Jewish context. All right. So, yeah, so that gets us into, I think, an important topic, which is, I guess, the limitations of the field of archaeology, and also the information we have about, you know, telling us things about Jesus directly. Right? So talk about those limitations a little bit, because that's really important, because sometimes people quickly think, well, this proves this, or this proves that, or the other thing, and that's really hard to think that way. Right. So the first thing that I think people have to understand is, you know, a lot of people think that archaeology is this science, which archaeology is a science, by the way. I consider myself to be a scientist. It's not an exact science. And the reason why it's not an exact science is because in the exact sciences, or the hard sciences, whatever you want to call them, the point is to conduct an experiment that you can replicate. And in archaeology, you cannot replicate the experiment, because in a hard scientific discipline, you replicate this experiment to get the data to answer your question. In archaeology, the data consists of what we dig up out of the ground. And once you've dug whatever it is you're digging out of the ground, you can never put it back the way it was. You've destroyed the evidence as you dig it out of the ground, which is why archaeologists try to record every single thing that we do as we're digging and then publish it as fully as possible afterwards, because the data are gone once we've conducted the excavation. And so this means that archaeology is not an exact science, and it is filled with interpretation. So people also think that archaeology is objective, right, that it provides objective data. But archaeology does not. Everything that we as archaeologists do is a matter of interpretation. And that's why there are so many disagreements and debates among archaeologists, because it comes down to how you interpret the data. And so I think that this is the first thing that people need to realize about archaeology. And another thing, and this is true also, by the way, of hard sciences. Hard sciences are also interpretive, right? There's a process of interpretation. But also there's, and this is true of hard sciences, archaeology is not equipped to answer every kind of question that we have about the past. It has limitations. It can answer certain types of questions, but it can't answer other types of questions. So just to give you an example, I published in 2019 a trade book on Masada. And what everybody wants to know about Masada, which is this fortress, fortified mountain that was built by Herod the Great in the first century B.C. and then fell to the Romans 70 years later at the time of the first Jewish revolt against the Romans. And we have a source, the Jewish historian Josephus, who tells us that all the Jewish rebels holding out on top of the mountain at the end of the Roman siege committed mass suicide, so they wouldn't be taken alive by the Romans. So what everybody wants to know is whether archaeology confirms that there was a mass suicide or not. And the problem is that that's not a question that archaeology is equipped to answer. Archaeology can tell us that there was a Roman siege, and actually we can see very clearly how the Romans conducted their siege of Masada. But there's no way that archaeology can tell us whether everyone at the end committed mass suicide or not. So archaeology is about, first of all, understanding that it's a matter of interpretation, that there are limitations to what archaeology can tell us about the past, and that means that you have to ask the right questions of archaeology. So this goes back to your point about Jesus. So I think probably a lot of your listeners, and the public in general, they always want to know, what remains do we have associated with Jesus? What do we have? People want to know about, there's always these questions about the Holy Grail, or the Shroud of Turin, or whatever it is. So they want to know. And the problem is that, for the most part, individuals throughout time have not left identifiable archaeological remains. So usually the only kind of individuals who leave traces in the archaeological record that we can identify with a specific individual, usually those are the really, really powerful and rich people, if you think like King Herod the Great, right? So he built all over the country, and we have palaces that he built, and we have an inscription, by the way, an ancient inscription from Caesarea Maritima, which is one of the big cities that Herod built on the coast of the Mediterranean. We have an inscription there that was dedicated by Pontius Pilate, right? So we have an actual physical inscription that says this is a temple, a shrine dedicated to the Emperor Tiberius by Pontius Pilate, who was Prefect of Judea, right? We have that. But for the most part, the vast majority of people were not these very rich, very prominent, very powerful people. They were, you know, much, you know, poorer, and I don't want to say they were destitute, but they were, you know, the lower classes. They were not the elite, and they generally don't leave identifiable traces. I don't want to say identifiable traces in the archaeological record that we can identify with a specific individual, right? So to give you an example, we have Galilean houses. We have ancient houses from the time of Jesus in villages around Galilee, including at Capernaum, which was the base of Jesus' Galilean ministry on the shore of the Sea of Galilee. We have houses in that village from that period. Do we have a house that we can identify as, you know, Jesus slept here, right? Well, we don't. Unless we found an authentic ancient inscription from the time of Jesus that says this is where Jesus slept, there's no way we can determine that. And the same thing, for example, with the Holy Grail, right? The cup that Jesus drank out of. Well, maybe we actually found that cup. How would we know? How would you know that it's that cup and not another, right? Unless there was something that from that time, not that somebody came along later and wrote on it, oh, you know, we think Jesus drank out of this cup, or they claim. So that's why really we have nothing that we can, archaeologically, that we can associate with Jesus as an individual in the archaeological record. Now, we do have things like the site where he is thought to, where his body is thought to have been laid to rest, right, after he died, because that site was venerated later by Christians, and a big church was built around it, the Church of the Holy Sepulchre in Jerusalem. Even there, there's a problem, because it wasn't until 300 years after the time of Jesus that that church was built, so you have to take it as a matter of faith that the Christian community preserved the memory of that authentic spot for the intervening 300 years, right? So, you know, we don't really have the sort of artifacts, you know, the tangible pieces of something that Jesus ate out of, or drank out of, or slept on, or whatever. We don't have that, at least not that we can identify, in the archaeological record. What we do have, and I'm always, you know, television documentary programs, you know, that do this sort of stuff, and they're always, you know, they want to talk about, you know, the Holy Grail, or the Shroud of Turin, or whatever. What I try to explain is, yeah, we don't have those sorts of tangible artifacts, but what we do have, and this is really important and valuable, is a lot of information about the world of Jesus. We know what Galilean villages looked like in his period. We know how the people lived. We know what a house looked like. So, even if we don't have the house, we can't identify the exact house that Jesus slept in. We know what a house like that would have looked like. We know what Jerusalem looked like in the final days of Jesus. We know what the temple in Jerusalem looked like. So, we can reconstruct, with a pretty fair degree of accuracy, the world of Jesus, even if we can't identify a specific artifact associated with him. And that's a very, very important distinction to make, and one that can be lost, I think, very easily. So, what are some things that you sort of get all happy about, talking about, you know, the archaeology of the time that helps us understand something of the backdrop or the world of Jesus, or the things that, you know, would be of interest to people listening, just things we can talk about and point to that help us understand what was it like to be alive during the days of Jesus. So, one of the things, it's really interesting that you say this, I almost was going to go off on it, I'm not going to do it unless you really want me to. One of my, you know, I have a lot of little subfields of interest, and one of them is, you're going to crack up, one of them is ancient toilets. Perfect, that's it. I did not expect that. Go for it. No, no, because everybody can relate, right? Everybody wonders, what did they do back then, right? And that's been one of the things, because there's a connection with Qumran and the Dead Sea Scrolls, and that's kind of how I got there. I've never once thought of how Jesus went to the bathroom, by the way. I probably should have, but I've never thought, I'm too textual. It doesn't say that in the Gospel, so who cares? Right, right, so, you know, this is archaeology, right? You're getting into sort of like the nitty-gritty of everyday life, right? So, what was that world like? So, before maybe, I mean, depending on the time we go off onto toilets, one of the things that I always like to say is that if we could be retrojected back 2,000 years in time, we would be, first of all, we would be overwhelmed by what I call the Odorama. It was gross. I mean, by our standards, right? It was gross. It was filthy, it was dirty, it was smelly, especially in a place like Judea, which is pretty dry, and you don't have, like, lots of running water, you know, and things like that. It was, you know, anyway, we can go into toilet practices if you want to. But that's one thing, and I also like to say that we would all be dead within a week because we would not have immunity to the diseases, right? So, if you survived in that world to adulthood, you would have developed immunity to, you know, to most of the diseases, although even so, there was a very, you know, high rate of mortality even among adults, and, you know, people didn't live much beyond their 30s, right, most people. Even at the highest levels of society, if you think about Augustus, right, the Roman Emperor Augustus was pre-deceased by every single person who he had, who he was supposed to, you know, have succeed him. So, even in the imperial family in Rome, the mortality rate was high because everybody lived in those conditions. And so, I think that's one of the things, and the other thing is, you know, we talk about, there's a lot of debate about, you know, how poor was Jesus' family, right? And this connects also with the whole story about the burial, but, you know, were they really poor or were they not so poor? Were they kind of middle class? And here I think people have to realize that the distinctions that we make today aren't really accurate for that world, that what you had in that world was a very small minority of people who were at a very high level of society, had most of the wealth, and then pretty much everybody else. And pretty much everybody else was living just above the subsistence level. So, they weren't destitute. They had, you know, they had village houses or, you know, houses in towns or villages. They had professions, so either they were craftsmen or they were fishermen or they, you know, they were farmers, but they lived just above the subsistence level, which means they basically got by with just enough to support themselves, but in a period of, let's say, prolonged drought or something like that, they could very easily go under, and then you have underneath that a very, you know, a stratum of people who were really, truly destitute. So, by today's standards, by our modern Western American standards, those vast majority of the population would look poor by our standards, but by the standards of that time, that's the way the majority of the people lived, and I think that's one thing that's really important to understand about Jesus and his context. Well, what about, I mean, things that I think about is, I mean, we're talking about toilets, but things like maybe like food preparation. How did they eat? You know, did they go out? Did they go to Taco Bell? Did they kill things? Did they just make bread or something? I mean, how little things like that that we take for granted, obviously, in our existence, we can't really impose upon these ancient stories, and are there any insights from archaeology about that? Yeah. Oh, yeah, absolutely, and there's tons of, so one of my, so again, you know, we all have fields of specialization, and over my career, I've developed a number of them, but my original field of specialization was ancient pottery. That's what I wrote my dissertation on, and then that relates, because, you know, one of, probably the most common type of artifact that we dig up in archaeological excavations in Israel is pottery, because even if it breaks into pieces, it's virtually indestructible. It survives, whereas a lot of other stuff does not, and, you know, archaeologists use pottery to help us date what we dig up, and there's a complex process involved in how archaeology is used for dating. I won't go into it, but besides being used for dating, pottery is important because it tells us things like trade, about trade, so if you see different pottery types that were manufactured in different areas, you know, and they're found at a distance, it tells us about context between, you know, different peoples or different areas, but also the types of pottery tell us about how people prepared their food and how they served it and how they dined, and if you think for a minute, it's very logical. So, for example, if you go to a Chinese restaurant today, right, their kitchen is going to be equipped with very different kinds of pots and pans than you would find in, let's say, I don't know, my house at least, right, and the table will be set. It will have different kinds of dishes and eating implements, dining implements than, let's say, again, that most of us would use in our homes in North America, right? So, the way that food is prepared and served tells you a lot about what people were eating, right, and how they were eating it, and also were they eating it communally or were they eating it individually, so are they serving it out of big pots that everybody is helping themselves out of, you know, that sort of thing, and so we actually have a lot of information about that, and I published a paper this year talking about a particular kind of cooking vessel. It's like a shallow casserole, so if you think of kind of like a, almost like a frying pan, but instead of having a long handle, it has two little loop handles on either side, something like that. This kind of pan, almost like flat-bottomed, made out of pottery, made out of ceramic, becomes very popular in Galilee, not in Judea, not in Jerusalem, but in Galilee beginning around the time of Jesus, and it's connected with the introduction of a new type of very popular dish in the Galilee that was very popular among the Romans, and that is quiches and frittatas, what are called patinas and patellas in Latin, so basically you beat up an egg mixture and you mix it up with, you pour it into a pan with like chopped up fish or vegetables or wheat or fruit or whatever, and then you either bake it or you cook it over a fire, right? So this becomes very popular in Galilee, ubiquitous, and it remains popular for centuries after the time of Jesus, at Jewish sites around Galilee, which indicates that in the time of Jesus, a lot of Jews started to eat these Roman-style quiches and frittatas. So Jesus apparently probably did too. Yeah, I mean, what do we have to go on textually in the New Testament? Not an awful lot, like basically bread, that's it, right? But this is, you know, he probably ate more than just that, and what were they called again? Quiches and frittatas? Well, quiches and frittatas are not mentioned in this. No, they're not. I wonder what that is. Right, but no, no, I think, I mean, you look, the basic food groups of this part of the world, right, by which I mean, you know, Galilee, Judea, in the time of Jesus, which was the basic food groups for millennia included olive oil, which was used not just for cooking but also for dipping your bread in, right? And you mentioned bread, so that was certainly, and some sort of, you could have bean mixture, lentils, you know, something like that, some sort of a dip or something like that that you would also eat with your bread. And then, if you were lucky, you would add to that, you know, maybe some vegetables or maybe some meat or chicken or fish if you were lucky. But those were really the basic items. And the fact that you begin to find this kind of pottery associated with the preparation of quiches and frittatas suggests that they must have been, these villagers must have also been raising chickens, right? And then taking these very basic food items, whether it's, you know, they could get their hands on some fish or pieces of vegetable or whatever, and chopping that up and mixing it up with the eggs, you know, of the fire or in the oven. I mean, one of the things I really appreciate about a conversation like this, and Pete, you kind of hinted at it around what's in the New Testament, is sometimes, I know, a religious tradition for me growing up, we sort of had this trans-historical view of people during that time. It almost takes on this, like, fairy tale. And it's like, if it's not in the Bible, it didn't exist. So they had this very two-dimensional, flat existence that only included stories like what we find in the Bible. And so I just appreciate the relatability of seeing the broader landscape of everyday life is what's happening. You know, they're using the toilet. They're eating. Things that seem so obvious, but until we talk about it, it sort of breaks down some of these barriers that I think I unintentionally have between what was going on back then and life today. Right, right. And by the way, speaking of, so I just have to say about toilets. You really want to talk about toilets. I do want to talk about toilets. So it's one of my favorite topics. But, you know, again, it's something that everybody can relate to, right? Yeah. Hopefully. You can't relate to it. You're not even going to be, you know. So there were different kinds of toilet facilities in the ancient world. So the most, in a slightly later period, we begin to see what are called Roman luxury latrines, which are these, which are usually attached to bathhouses and consist of a room with water circulating in an underground channel below a row of seats that line the walls of that room. Very sophisticated kind of technology, not relevant if we're talking about the time of Jesus and Galilee in that period, or even Jerusalem in that period. So what you basically have are either something that you might think of as analogous to an outhouse in a way, basically a cesspit that would be dug into the floor of a room and then covered with a stone or wooden seat. And those are usually found only in fairly affluent houses. And I don't know of any like that from the time of Jesus in Galilee. You know, in Pompeii, for example, a lot of the houses have that kind of toilet facility. And so then that leaves the question of, well, what did everybody else do? And so for the most part, people, when they were inside a house that didn't have a built toilet facility, they would use the analogy as a chamber pot, right? They would take a broken jar or something like that, use that like a chamber pot. And then the contents of chamber pots were tossed outside the house onto the streets. So if you're in villages, the streets and alleys tend to be pretty disgusting, by the way. And that was true even in sophisticated cities like Pompeii. But the difference is that in places like Pompeii, they had these fountains with water being brought in by aqueduct that would overflow. The water from the fountains would overflow the fountains and onto the streets and wash the waste away, whereas in villages and most towns, you didn't have that kind of arrangement. And the other thing that I found in doing my research on toilets is that, so what if you're like outside the house and, you know, you're just out and you have to go, right? And what do you do? Apparently, a lot of people just went anywhere. I mean, literally anywhere. And I found examples of shops in Pompeii where the shopkeepers wrote on the outside of the shop, don't go here, basically. And all sorts of Roman laws that legislate, you know, trying to prevent people from going in various public places. I got into this because at Qumran, the community that lived at Qumran, you know, who I think are Essenes, who deposited the scrolls from the nearby caves, they have toilet habits that are a little different from everybody else's at that time. They have a concern with toilet, what we might call toilet privacy. They didn't go in public. They found remote sheltered spots to go and they covered themselves up with a cloak so they couldn't be seen while they were – we're only talking about number two here, not number one, so defecation, not urination. So they have that. And the other thing that makes them different, and here we unfortunately won't have time to go into it, but they're different from everybody else, this group, the Essenes, because unlike everybody else, including other Jews, they believed that defecation was a ritually polluting activity, that it made you ritually impure, whereas other Jews did not believe that. And there's actually this passage in the Gospels where Jesus is responding to critics by saying it's not what goes into your mouth that makes you impure, it's what comes out. And then there's an addition and it says it's not what comes out of you and goes into the sewer. It's not what goes into your stomach and then comes out of you and goes into the sewer that makes you impure. It's evil thoughts and all that other stuff. And, you know, maybe that may be, it's hard to say, right, but maybe that was expressing a position on, you know, because among the different Jewish groups, clearly there was disagreement about whether excrement is impure or not, right, ritually impure. And it may be that in that passage Jesus was expressing an opinion, and his opinion was that it's not ritually impure, if that's the case. Well, first of all, thank you for ruining the Gospels for me, because now I'm going to be reading them wondering when they took a bathroom break and what they did. But, of course, that's all about maturity and spiritual maturity. Anyway, I hesitate to ask, I'm not trying to be funny here, but toilet paper. Ah, no, there was no toilet paper. No, just short hair dry, huh? No, oh yeah, so I don't know how, yeah, if you really want to get into the nitty gritty. Hey, this is a common denominator of all of humanity for all of time. Why not talk about this? Right, so, by the way, so, you know, there are still large parts of the world where, you know, you can see sort of toilet practices that are pretty much the same as they were in antiquity. But anyway, in a Roman luxury latrine, which is not what we're talking about for Jesus in Galilee, but in a Roman luxury latrine, at the base of the seats that lined the room, you would have a channel, and it would have water in it. And what the Romans used to wipe themselves off in that kind of a latrine was a sponge on a stick. And so you would have the sponge on a stick, and you would take, you know, when you sat down on the seat, you would then pick up the sponge on the stick, and you would use it to wipe yourself. And then when you were done, you put it back for the next person to use. Okay, I was going to say, I hope they drop it in a hole, but I guess not. But wait, but that's actually in the best case scenario. Because, you know, for the most part, if you're just out, you know, like, using a chamber pot or, you know, wherever, not kind of a – or, you know, even a built cesspit kind of a toilet in a house or something like that, there is no toilet paper. So, you know, they may have used things like leaves or – actually, there's a reference in rabbinic literature, Jewish rabbinic literature, to using stones to wipe yourself off. But even until today, there are parts of the world where you do not use – like, I've been to India. This is the case. You do not use your left hand for things like making an offering in a temple. Or in the ancient world, you did not eat with your left hand. You only ate with your right hand, and that's because the left hand was used to wipe yourself. You know, this is interesting. It really is. And the next time somebody says to me, I'd love to live in biblical times, I'm going to tell them to listen to this episode, especially the second half, and that will cure you of this. But this is why – this is why I said that, you know, if we could be transported back 2,000 years, we would be bowled over by the Odorama, and we would be dead with, you know, the diseases and the water. I mean, especially in a place like Judea where, you know, that area around Jerusalem, which doesn't get rain, you know, half of the year, the water sources were, you know, would be – I mean, we would be dead from trying to live in that environment. Right? It's the same reason why you go to parts of the world today, and you have to avoid drinking the local water. You have to get immunized with all sorts of, you know, immunizations before you leave. Exactly that same sort of thing. Well, before we end this conversation, I mean, I hate to take a merciful – I hate to take us too far afield from this conversation, but just as we wrap up, you know, what are some – what's maybe one thing or a couple of things that you wish people would know or put into practice based on your experience as an archaeologist here? Yeah, well, thank you for asking. You know, I think that what people have to – people have to realize that anything associated – any archaeological – anything archaeological associated with Jesus is going – any claim is going to be sensational, right? In other words, any archaeological claim that is made in connection with Jesus is going to get a lot of attention. So, what people need to realize is that they have to be careful when they hear claims in the media that, you know, something has been found that verifies or validates or whatever, either, you know, connected with Jesus or connected with somebody in the circle of Jesus, which is not to say that every such claim is necessarily false, but that not all claims are true or not all claims are equally valid. And this goes back to, you know, one of the things, of course, that as a university professor, you know, I'm so concerned to teach, and that is critical thinking. And, you know, one of the great values of the Internet is that it has democratized information, right? It used to be that the only way to get your hands-on information was to walk into a physical library building and look things up, and now, you know, at the click of a mouse, you can just find stuff online. And what I always try to explain to my students is, you know, anybody can put up anything online, and you don't know, you know, who that individual is or where that information is coming from. And so, it's really important, especially if you're interested in learning about, you know, archaeology and the historical Jesus, it's really important to understand and evaluate the trustworthiness of the sources of information and not necessarily, you know, believe every claim that gets publicity, because, again, the most sensational claims are the ones that, by definition, will get the most publicity. And that's not saying that they're all necessarily false, but they're also not necessarily true. Well, the field of archaeology is more sober than sometimes what lands online or in newspapers. It's not Indiana Jones? It's not Indiana Jones. No, and actually, I'm glad you said that, because a lot of people think that archaeologists are treasure hunters, like Indiana Jones, and that we get to keep what we find, and that's not what archaeology is about at all. Archaeology is about learning about the past. We're scientists. We seek to learn about the past by digging up remains of human material culture. And the point is, is to have, just like any science, to have research questions that you hope to answer. So, it's not a treasure hunt. We don't just randomly dig to find things, because you know if you dig, you're going to find things. What you want to do is formulate a series of questions that you hope to answer and find a site that you hope, an archaeological site, that will answer those questions if you conduct an excavation there, right, and dig up the data that you hope will answer your questions. So, we do not get to keep what we find. We're not, you know, random treasure hunters or anything like that. We're scientists. All right. Well, listen, Jodi, thank you so much for taking the time to talk with us and that wonderfully unexpected turn that we took. But it's great, and for helping us understand just, you know, people really lived back then, and they had habits, and they had customs, and that those things don't come across in texts. They have to come across in some other way typically, and I think, you know, we've learned a lot here today. I know our listeners are going to be excited to ponder these things. Thank you. You just made it through another entire episode of The Bible for Normal People. Well done to you, and well done to everyone who supports us by rating the podcast, leaving us a review, or telling others about our show. We are especially grateful for our producer's group who support us over on Patreon. They are the reason we are able to keep bringing podcasts and other content to you. So a big thanks to Chrissy Florence, Eric Haub, Jason Carrickin, Jonathan Lee, Lori Voekel, Mike Cook, Rob Buckingham, Stephen McConnell, Hannah Siegmund, and Carlos Ochoa. If you'd like to help support the podcast, head over to patreon.com slash thebiblefornormalpeople, where for as little as $3 a month, you can receive bonus material, be a part of an online community, get course discounts, and much more. We couldn't do what we do without your support. Our show is produced by Stephanie Speight, audio engineer Dave Gerhart, creative director Tessa Stultz, community champion Ashley Ward, and web developer Nick Striegel. Copyright 2021, The Bible for Normal People, all rights reserved. In other words... No copying or you're in big trouble! For Pete, Jared, and the entire Bible for Normal People team, thanks for listening.
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