(Some of this post is based on material from an SBL paper presented in 2012 in the Postcolonial Studies and Biblical Studies session. I’ve reframed it as I continue to work on my second book project, Itinerancy and Christian Origins.)

Ancient Galilee was fundamentally unstable. Most reconstructions of the region’s agriculture, economy, and travel present a cohesive model for farming practices, crop yields, economic relations between village and city—only to add the proviso, “Often crops would not grow, so life was pretty precarious! The model could break down at any time!” A 2010 article (gate-kept for non-members and off-campus) by Jonathan Reed refreshingly re-frames the question. The piece’s main point is methodological, relying on demographic tables for calculating birth rates, infant mortality, and life expectancy in various types of societies. In rural Mediterranean villages such as those in Galilee, he infers, sheer demographic factors would have resulted in fundamental and ongoing instability. The prevalence of malaria near Lake Tiberias would have exacerbated the situation, as would the introduction of the cities of Sepphoris and Tiberias. Population density in urban areas increased the exchange of germs, and the resulting population drain would have drawn villagers into the cities simply to keep up the necessary levels of human resources.

One take-away from the article is a new starting point for studying Galilean society: instead of positing a model but warning of its possible breakdown, Reed begins with instability as the basic condition of life in the region, an instability only increased by urban development under Antipas.

We can make the obvious observation that Reed’s use of demography applies a modern mode of analysis to an ancient problem, asking our own questions of a group of people who never thought of their world in that way or in that detail. And well he should ask contemporary questions, insofar interpretation of the Bible—as any historical text—is the meeting of two worlds. The situation reminds me of an article by Halvor Moxnes about exorcism accounts in the Gospels. Critics have long asked whether such deeds could have actually occurred, but Moxnes points out that no character in the accounts, nor many of the ancient readers, would have entertained similar doubts. The traditional question over miracles in the New Testament is quite literally (to use what can quickly become a silly word) eisegesis. Just as we will inevitably ask what was really going on when Jesus “drove out a demon” (though we may also want to accept demons as sociological fact in the ancient world as a way of understanding the Gospels’ audiences), we will want to analyze the (in)stability of Galilean society with whatever tools are available to us.

So Reed’s argument is driven not just by tools but questions, some of which may not have corresponded to questions in the minds of the inhabitants of Galilee. Much of Reed’s article, in fact, discusses realities of which ancients would not have been aware—the science and demographic affects of pathology, for example; to what extent did they notice, then, that mortality was higher in urban centers and drew population from the countries to replenish inhabitants and workforce? To what extent were they aware of any increased instability with the founding of Sepphoris and Tiberias? Would any increase in sickness (and, thus, “demon possession”?) be interpreted in light of Antipas’s programs?  How much of the blame would they have cast at the “ruling” elites of the region’s traditional center, Jerusalem? What factors that we today might consider sociological or economic (perhaps even biopolitical) would they have viewed as falling at the intersection of political, ethnic, cultic, and cosmic realities?

Reed’s innovative use of the modern science of demography resonates with other contemporary questions—such as modern theoretical attention to the relationship between government and life. Foucault’s work on the rise of biopolitics also focuses on the role of demography as an apparatus for control of a people. For Foucault, a major shift in the governmental strategies of the West occurred around the transition to the modern period. While the king of earlier periods had power “to kill and to let live” the various individuals under his domain, the modern period saw a shift in the understanding of sovereign power as the process of “making the population live,” with “population” as a new unit of control. Here arose the control of the various aspects of biological life itself: fertility, mortality, public health, discipline and regulation in the workforce—and along with these, demographics as a mode of measuring these processes. “Biopolitics,” the governing strategy that increasingly dominates our global societies, reduces us to our biological functions not simply as a way of ensuring the population’s growth and health but by making the dictates of the state and market seem “natural,” as needed on a fundamental level for the well-being of individuals. Foucault, however, also insisted that biopolitics somewhat paradoxically led to a novel, modern variety of racism; a state could include among the invasive pollutants that threatened “life” (and not merely individuals or communities) certain types of people who fell short of a societal ideal expressed as a set of biological data—facts and figures quantified by public health statistics, mortality rates, and the finer points of demographics.

According to Foucault, the emphasis on biopolitics we experience in the present day does not mean that such techniques were absent from ancient and medieval forms of sovereign power (which understood itself as governing territories) or the disciplinary regimes of the early modern period (which targeted the subject as individual).  Rule by discipline and biopower were not absent from earlier periods.

In recounting the founding of Tiberias, Josephus condescendingly characterizes many of its new inhabitants as “not clearly free” (mē saphōs eleutherous; Ant. 18.38). Jesus has another way of referring to the wandering, desperate crowds that follow him: “sheep without a shepherd” (Mark 6:34). The phrase is so well-known in the biblical tradion as to go almost unnoticed. But the dividing borders between free and slave, Judean and non-Judean, human and non-human, indicate something about the impact of new urban developments in Galilee. More economic and identitarian dividing lines have been instilled among the population. Certain segments are seen as degrading the race, polluting the population, exceeding the limits of the human, wandering outside of the territory of city or town to inhabit a wilderness region. While demographics measure the biopolitics of Galilee using anachronistic tools, we find, once we shift our questions, in the language of our sources attention to how sin and identity were imaginatively construed on the level of population and, indeed, life.

Reed’s article offers a new foundation from which to imagine the social structures the language of the Gospels might have manipulated while also creating a forum for addressing our contemporary concerns. When the Jesus of the gospels passes from household to roadway, village to desert, land to sea, in his itinerant mission, he traverses the new borders in way that renders them visible to critique. By inhabiting instability, he brings it door to door, from age to age, so that our questions are reframed by his life and language.